Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 3. June 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 3 Front cover PLASTIC POSSIBILITIES The front cover depicts an art installation by South Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, also known as ‘the plastic alchemist’, at the ‘Your Bright Future’ exhibition in Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 2009. For Hwa, plastic is the most artificial material that is at the same time the most common element in today's landscape. Hailed as the quintessential material for design, invention and relentless production, plastic is often associated with post-WWII industrial growth in the Western world. And yet, wading through the ‘plastic islands’ of our oceans, standing knee-deep in landfills, choking on incinerated plastic fumes, the spectacular ‘utopia’ of plastic is beginning to register differently. In this issue, Tridibesh Dey and Mike Michael present the everyday ‘alchemies’, the lived realities assembled with plastic and plastic waste in India. They take us into the household of Dey's parents in Kolkata and familiarize us with the creative repurposing techniques performed on everyday plastic items like bottles, containers, carrier bags, etc., which are supposed to be thrown away after ‘single use’. Like the recycled baskets in Hwa's art installation, the inventive deployment of used plastics here point to the emerging socio-materialities of plastics, which might, in turn, inform and inspire different futures, leading us into collaborative kinship and more-than-human living with plastics. These emergent plastic relations are embedded within more extensive socio-economic, political and ecological relations configured in contemporary India around plastic's production, consumption and waste management. The delicate plastic economies of the poorer urban households are at risk under the recent government reforms in waste management, the neo-liberalization of waste work and the ‘toxic’ externalities produced by large-scale extractive infrastructures. Back cover CONTAINER SHIPPING Above: satellite image of the containership Ever Given from the Evergreen Marine shipping line stuck in the Suez Canal, Egypt, 24 March 2021. Below: the same ship safely moored in the port of Rotterdam, 9 March 2020. The Ever Given, an ultra-large containership, obstructed the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, thereby accruing an estimated loss to the world economy of US $400 million per hour. Getting stuck in the canal on its way from Asia to Rotterdam, the ship not only brought the seemingly smooth flow of maritime transportation via this central waterway to a hold, but also sparked great public interest in the role of the maritime industry – and its ever-growing container vessels – in the functioning of global capitalism today. In ‘Politics of scale’ in this issue, Hege H⊘yer Leivestad and Elisabeth Schober remind us that the Ever Given is only one of many ultra-large ‘box ships’ sailing the world's oceans today. These vessels have, over recent years, undergone a spectacular growth in size. The reasons for this expansion are no longer primarily located in economies of scale, the authors argue, but rather, are enmeshed with complex political processes in far-flung places across the world. Featuring the story of the HMM Algeciras, currently the largest containership in the world in terms of container-carrying capacity, the article takes us from a ship christening at a South Korean shipyard, past the Suez Canal, to the Spanish port town that the ship is named after. Tracing the complex public-private partnership that brought the HMM Algeciras into being, attention is also paid to the mounting social costs of ultra-large container vessels like these, which require massive (and often public) investments in infrastructures at the land-sea interface. Bigger is not always better. In the containership industry, have we arrived at a point where unsustainable false economies of scale are setting in?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 1. February 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 1 ALGORITHMS & GOVERNANCE Detail from Myriad (Tulips) (2018), an installation by the artist and researcher Anna Ridler exhibited at AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre, London, UK (16 May-26 August 2019). Each photograph that Ridler took is carefully affixed and hand-labelled, forming a dataset of unique tulips that could also serve as a training set given to an algorithm from which to learn. It evokes, according to the author, the imperfect and arduous human labour behind machine learning ( http://annaridler.com/myriad-tulips ) Governance by algorithms often includes semi-automatized decisions such as which families obtain resources, which neighbours get policed, or if a person can be released on parole or receive state support. In ‘algorithmic governance’, it is not only the often-opaque algorithmic assemblage that informs decision-making and intervention, but, most importantly, the original dataset and model that are used to train machine learning systems. The accuracy and representativity of these data often mirror existing and past forms of structural discrimination and inequality - and create new ones. From these processes depend the prediction, production of knowledge, and ultimately the reality of the intervention. These systems, while undermining basic social rights, make it ever more difficult to legally challenge adverse decisions. In this issue, Maria Sapignoli offers some reflections on the possible effects that the ‘AI-turn’ of global governance has for human rights practices, particularly in the United Nations. She argues that, beyond the policy and crisis-intervention orientations of AI, we are witnessing the creation of new foundations for human belonging and being. Algorithmic interpretation and computational calculation contribute to the definition of the reality of intervention and to the institutional formation, inclusion and exclusion of ‘data-identities’. All this is taking place through the automatization of decision making in the context of the increased interdependence between private and public sectors. Back cover BARBERS AND COVID-19 On 24 March 2020, the Prime Minister of India announced a nationwide lockdown to arrest the coronavirus's spread. The photo shows Abbas, a member of the Barber caste in a village in the Ernad Taluk of South Malabar, for the first time reopening and cleaning his barbershop on 22 May 2020 after lockdown. Before the lockdown, excepting Tuesdays, Abbas would routinely open his barbershop at 9 in the morning and close at 11 at night. He used to earn nearly 1500 rupees a day. During the lockdown, his earnings stopped entirely for two months. All Barbers of South Malabar were required to close their shops and were not allowed on-site to clean or take any of their equipment. Barbershops were subject to severe restrictions even after lifting lockdown when he could no longer earn 500 rupees a day. In the initial months after the lockdown, Abbas found his regular customers reluctant to visit his shop. In this issue, Muhammed Haneefa argues that Barber misfortunes have been disproportionately affected during this epidemic by the systemic caste discrimination in this region. In South Malabar, 97 per cent of Barbers are compelled to follow endogamous marriage, which has weakened their resilience and has severely compounded their sense of doom, as all relatives work in the same barber trade with little or no employment opportunities elsewhere.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 5. October 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 5 Front cover FOOD STALL AT BRICK LANE MARKET Brick Lane is one of London's most iconic streets. Over the centuries, it has served as a refuge for Huguenots and east European Jews fleeing religious persecution, as well as Irish fleeing the famine. More recently, Bengalis, predominantly from the Sylhet area, moved to the UK because of political and economic instability at the time of Bangladesh's independence in 1971. Many settled along Brick Lane and its surrounding streets. Because of the lane's social, cultural, and economic importance to the Bangladeshi diaspora – it played a pivotal role in the renaming of the neighbourhood as Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2001, for example – some first-generation British Bangladeshis still say, ‘There are three Bengals: west Bengal, east Bengal, and Brick Lane’. Nonetheless, this inner-city area's working-class identity and employment patterns are threatened by super-gentrification in the housing, office development, and hotel and catering sectors. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are amplifying these trends. In this issue, Seán Carey looks at some of the trials and tribulations of the Bangladeshi community in and around Brick Lane. Back cover BANGLADESH IN BRICK LANE Street art on the shutters of a restaurant in Brick Lane.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 4. August 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 4 Front cover TOXIC FLOWS: E-WASTE RECYCLING A worker starts a fire to burn off the insulation from electrical cables to extract copper at an informal e-waste recycling site in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Open fire is one of the methods used here to mine metals from defunct electronics devices and their components. Electronic waste is one of the fastest-growing types of waste worldwide. However, many countries lack the formalized infrastructures necessary to collect and handle e-waste safely. The informal sector has stepped up to fill the gap. E-waste attracts urban dwellers seeking to extract value from these discarded materials while releasing toxic compounds detrimental to health and the environment. In this special issue on toxic flows, Samwel Moses Ntapanta follows Dar es Salaam's informal e-waste recyclers to find out how they understand the toxic nature of their work and what measures they take to minimize exposure. The number of informal e-waste recycling workshops in Dar es Salaam has skyrocketed in recent years. High demand for metals, like copper, offers a stable livelihood for e-waste recycling workers. Scavenging spare parts from the electronic afterlives is primarily driven by a vibrant Tanzanian local market, giving an impetus to repurpose certain materials. During these activities (mining, repurposing, restoring and reusing), workers are exposed to many toxic chemical compounds. With little or no knowledge about these, workers in informal e-waste recycling face unknown risks of exposure as they make a dangerous living in urban environments. Back cover TOXIC FLOWS: GLYPHOSATE Launch of the #StopGlyphosate campaign supported by the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) and 37 European organizations in front of the European Parliament, 8 February 2017. Across the globe, grass-roots movements against glyphosate, the world's most used herbicide, have encouraged regulators to re-examine its safety assessments. In Europe, a drawn-out process is widely expected to conclude that glyphosate is harmful to health and should be banned across all 28 member states. If so, this would likely lead to similar decisions in other markets, representing a blow to the agrochemical industry. More than any other pesticide, efforts to ban glyphosate have become tied up with questions of national sovereignty. From Vietnam and Thailand to Colombia and Mexico, the US government has threatened ‘trade disruption’ should a ban go ahead. The message is clear: chemical regulation is an international, not a domestic, matter. Nevertheless, glyphosate has become a standard for emerging populism. In post-war Sri Lanka, banning glyphosate became a mission of Buddhist nationalist movements seeking to purify the national body. In the UK, Brexit supporters argued an independent UK would have the freedom to stop glyphosate (another ‘Vote Leave’ promise quickly broken). As politics the world over has re-engaged with questions of national identity and autonomy, halting the free flow of glyphosate has become a goal for those on the left and right of the political spectrum.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 2. April 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 2 Front cover THE CAPITOL INSURRECTION Thousands of people marched toward the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. The rally that day was part of an attempt to overturn the outcome of the presidential election. The attempted coup was carried out by multiple means. While the violent attack on the Capitol building that day has captured the world's attention, attempts to undermine democratic processes in the United States have a longer, more insidious history, including multiple forms of voter suppression, some of which are built into the system. The US has never been a direct democracy. In fact, in 2000 and 2016, candidates who lost the popular vote ‘won’ the election. The 2020 presidential election was perhaps outstanding because the unabashed attempts to disenfranchise voters – primarily minority voters – were suddenly on full display. The losing candidate tried to strong-arm state election officials into fraudulently changing the vote count and pressured the vice president to overturn the lawful outcome of the elections – all of which happened in full view of the public. When it became clear that the vice president would not undermine the election result, the losing candidate called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC to demonstrate their belief that the election had been stolen from him and from them. The ensuing violent attack on the Capitol building was a spectacular display of a larger failed attempt at a coup. In this issue, Gregory Starrett and Joyce Dalsheim narrate their eye witness fieldwork accounts of the ‘March to save America’ rally earlier on that fateful day. Back cover THE MYANMAR COUP On 2 March 2021, police shot Kyal Sin, a 19-year-old protester, in the head from behind with live ammunition while she was engaged in peaceful civil disobedience in Mandalay against the Myanmar military, which seized control through a violent coup on 1 February. The artwork depicts Kyal Sin, whose name means ‘pure star’, as one of the martyrs of the democracy movement. Prior to attending the rally, Kyal Sin had posted on Facebook her wish for her organs to be donated should she die during the protest. Since the coup, millions of civilians across Myanmar have taken to the streets in protest. Civil servants, along with the general public, have participated in a nationwide strike. In response, the military have fired weapons into crowds of peaceful protesters, engaged in extrajudicial killings, raided civilian homes and businesses, kidnapped and illegally detained protesters, strikers, political and civil society leaders, tortured detainees and terrorized countless other civilians. In this issue, Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson reviews the history of violence and persecution perpetrated by the Myanmar military against participants in the Burmese democracy movement. The persecution of activists has included repression of their cultural and ritual life. The democracy movement possesses its own list of saints, martyrs (azarni) and heroes (thuyegaung). Between 1988 and 2012, keeping photographs or artistic depictions of these martyrs and heroes constituted an illegal act. During that time, owning or publishing this artwork of Kyal Sin could have resulted in imprisonment and torture. Indeed, even now the Myanmar military is so concerned about her martyrdom that they exhumed her body and filled her grave with cement. When Kyal Sin was shot, she was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words: ‘Everything will be OK’, revealing a youthful hope and innocence. This sense of child-like purity has deepened the poignancy and loss felt by all those who mourn her death. Kyal Sin's nickname was ‘Angel’ and a halo hovers above her head. She holds the Myanmar flag, shredded with bullet holes, in her left hand. Behind her are the outlines of other protesters or perhaps past martyrs of the movement, giving the three-fingered salute, in approval and solidarity.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 6. December 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 6 Front cover LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE Most French towns have at least one street, avenue or square named after the Republic, in a tradition that dates back to the late 19th century. The Place de la République with its monumental statue is a familiar Parisian landmark, yet smaller towns would also adorn their squares, city halls and law courts with symbolic representations of the Republic, such as in this picture. A female allegory is taken to embody the values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Once brandished in the revolutionary struggle against the monarchy, against aristocratic and clerical privileges, these principles have retained their universal appeal. Liberté, égalité, fraternité are the common denominator that French politicians of all hues can agree on, apart from the far‐right Front National which is seen as standing outside this Republican consensus, as its policies would for instance openly deny equal treatment to residents with non‐European backgrounds. EU border policing practices show that the moral and political dilemmata epitomized in French politics have begun to affect the entire continent: How much freedom of movement are Europeans prepared to grant to those who want to partake in our relative wealth and freedom? What are the limits of liberty? How far do our feelings of fraternity extend in times of austerity? In this new Europe, with countries straining under unsustainable debt burdens, and seemingly less willing to share their remaining riches, discursive markers are shifting almost imperceptibly. Claims to freedom and equality may come from unexpected quarters, as Anne Friederike Delouis writes in her article on the French far‐right fringe. Back cover FORTRESS EUROPE Protesting asylum seekers and irregular migrants face police in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta, August 2010. The protest erupted amid migrants’ uncertainty over the length of time they were kept in the enclave before transfer to mainland Spain, enacted here in the protesters’‘shackling’ of each other in front of the cameras. Ceuta and its sister enclave Melilla have been key outposts in the EU's swiftly evolving border regime since 2005, when sub‐Saharan migrants launched what the media called a ‘massive assault’ on the territories’ perimeter fences. The ensuing crackdowns led to a displacement of routes towards the Canary Islands and an unprecedented naval operation in response. Still, migrants kept coming – across the Greek‐Turkish border in 2010 and to Italy in 2011. As a result, the EU is fast‐tracking a ‘European external border surveillance system’ involving further investments. For the border guards and defence contractors involved, clandestine migration has become big business. The high stakes in controlling migration stoke increasing tensions, however – as seen in Ceuta's 2010 protest and the desperate mass entry attempts across Melilla's high‐tech fence in 2012. As Ruben Andersson argues in this issue, such tensions highlight larger contradictions in the EU's border regime, which conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to the external border – while feeding on this very risk. An anthropological lens on this ‘game of risk’ reveals how the business of bordering Europe is a fraught enterprise in which border guards, defence contractors, migrants and smugglers are stuck in a feedback loop, generating ever stranger and more distressing sights at the southern frontiers of Europe.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 29, Number 6. December 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 6 Front cover PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY A satirical political activist known as ‘Ivy League Legacy’ strides across the Great Lawn of New York City's Central Park carrying a ‘Corporations are people too!’ placard, on her way to a ‘Billionaire Croquet Party’. Spending the day on satirical protests with companions such as Phil T. Rich and Iona Bigga Yacht, she would eventually join up with hundreds of thousands of other protesters in a massive march through Manhattan. Ivy League Legacy and fellow satirical protesters – attired in tuxedos and top hats or elegant gowns, tiaras, and satin gloves – waved signs such as ‘Leave no billionaire behind!’. They are part of a national network of satirical street theater protesters who call themselves Billionaires—Billionaires for Bush in 2004, Billionaires for Bailouts during the 2008 financial meltdown, and so on. These ‘billionaires’ aim to disrupt dominant discursive frames by deploying irony and satire. As they simultaneously mimic and mock the ultra‐rich, they spotlight questions about democracy and economic fairness: they are tricksters who call attention to what is shadowy or hidden, taunting the powerful and exposing power's fault lines and contingencies. In this special issue on public anthropology, Angelique Haugerud and Thomas Hylland Eriksen argue that public anthropologists can learn from the spirit of the trickster. They and the other contributors probe the challenges of reaching wider publics without sacrificing informed critique and ethnographic nuance. Back cover PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY & THE LEGACY OF DICTATORSHIPS Anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz carries a plastic box with the remains of one of seven peasants executed by one of Franco's military squads in 1941 in the village of Fontanosas, Ciudad Real, Spain, for allegedly cooperating with the maquis anti‐Franco guerrillas. Exhumed in 2006, these were returned to their community that same year. The remains, once analyzed and identified, were taken from a forensic laboratory in the Basque Country to the village's cultural center for a public memorial ceremony before being reinterred in a communal pantheon within the cemetery. Scientists in charge of the exhumation and the ethnographic and historical research had a major role in this ceremony. In the background, three Civil Guards are on duty to protect the authorities at the civic memorial, to which the Church was not invited. During the Civil War up to Franco's death, the Civil Guard had been complicit and were themselves involved in executions at the time. The local lieutenant initially tried to boycott this particular exhumation. Public anthropology has a role to play in addressing the longstanding legacies of cruel dictatorships and to explore avenues for distributing justice. Vigilant and critical academic analysis plays a crucial part in prising open secrecy. In this case, a public anthropologist is involved in all of the following: in news and policy making, writing judicial expert reports, cooperating with NGOs, facilitating a public voice for victims, lending institutional legitimacy to civic memorial acts and physically presenting boxes of the remains of the disappeared to a remote village of 200 citizens. All these activities can be, and often are, the duties of a public anthropologist. In his article in this issue, Francisco Ferrándiz refers to this work as ‘rapid response ethnography’.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 6. December 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 6 Front cover TOXIC FLOWS This image was taken in the control room of Sweden's iconic Ågesta nuclear power station, essentially unchanged since it was last operated in 1974. The power station was commissioned shortly after the end of World War II when Sweden adopted an ambitious nuclear programme aimed at energy self-sufficiency. A small plant, Ågesta was the first energy-generating nuclear reactor in Sweden. From 1964 to 1974 the pressurized heavy water reactor supplied electricity and district heating to the Stockholm suburb of Farsta. Due to its proximity to this residential area, the reactor was largely built underground, inside a bedrock cavity. The plant operated reliably except for one dramatic incident that occurred in 1969. A technician made an error in a routine change of a valve, releasing 500 tons of water from a cooling tower 30 metres above the reactor building that knocked out the reactor control system. Short circuits resulted in valves opening and closing at random, putting the plant at risk of a meltdown. The public was not notified after officials determined that evacuation of the area at risk could not take place fast enough. However, after a closure of seven months, the plant continued to operate safely until its closure in 1974. Stockholm's fire services subsequently used the decommissioned plant as a training site. There was some interest in preserving the power station as a national heritage site in recognition of its aesthetic, cultural and historical significance. Some expressed national pride in the facility as an impressive technological achievement of its time. However, in December 2019 the decision was taken to demolish the buildings, which would otherwise have required major investments to meet safety standards. In advanced industrial societies some types of toxic exposures, like radiation, are measured extensively, using a variety of technological devices that feed into the calibration of risk. However, as Penny Harvey points out in this issue, the promise of monitoring toxic flows from the new nuclear station under construction at Hinkley Point does not allay everyone's fears. In this special issue on toxic flows, a variety of toxic substances are shown to escape regulation. Their seepage into the environment through waste recycling, dumping and unplanned incidents distributes and potentially continues to displace contamination far from the sites of their production and use. Back cover TOXIC FLOWS: PESTICIDES During her 2019 fieldwork with smallholder farmers in western Kenya, Miriam Waltz observed many instances of the manual application of pesticides through various methods, sometimes involving knapsack sprayers, sometimes handheld sprayers or plastic bottles - as well as various levels of protective equipment. Smallholder farmers increasingly use pesticides to secure their harvests, especially as new pest infestations and changing weather patterns contribute to a sense of precarity around agricultural production as a source of income. Many also share concerns around the potential toxic effects of these substances. Yet, the uncertain status of pesticides as both poison and medicine, combined with divergent temporalities of risk and exposure, meant that decisions around pesticide use at the household level were heavily shaped by economic considerations. While farmers express considerable uncertainty and ambivalence around the application, effects and sourcing of pesticides, they consider these to be increasingly part of modern farming and a legitimate means to secure aspirations for the future as well as shorter-term livelihoods. In this context, it is important to understand how these farmers are simply ‘trying’: trying out new things, unsure of the outcome, in an effort to secure livelihoods, food and good health. The negotiations that arise at a community and household level around the everyday use of toxic agricultural chemicals point to the complicated act of balancing between different kinds of investments associated with agricultural production and the need to secure livelihoods under conditions of climate change, intensifying pest infestations and the increasing trade in synthetic pesticides. Across the globe, industrially produced chemical compounds such as agricultural pesticides are entering into local livelihoods, economies and forms of consumption, where there is little regulation and where risks remain uncalculated. While international conventions seek to regulate the production and use of harmful chemicals, human populations are unequally exposed as local capacities to monitor and regulate differ enormously between industrialized and developing countries.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 6. December 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 6 Front cover WAR TRAUMA IN CONTEXT Lost identity (2018), 50×70 cm, acrylic on canvas by Willarekezi. Rwandan Willy Karekezi's painting reflects on how forcibly displaced people imagine themselves in recollections of home and flight. Their memories become fractured, even unrecognizable, over time. This artwork is part of a collection that was shown in an exhibition called ‘When we return’, in Gulu, Uganda, during July and August 2019. It brought together research and visual outputs from Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artwork was an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Politics of Return Research Programme, curated by Kara Blackmore (an exhibition catalogue is available).¹ Based on the Politics of Return work, as well as long-term research supported by linked Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants, in this issue, Torre et al. argue that the literature underlying the recently published World Health Organization's assessment of mental health in conflict settings is inadequate. It sets aside crucial evidence and promotes misleading responses to suffering. (1). https://issuu.com/lseflca/docs/new_por_catalogue_print_final_sept_2019-digital-is Back cover Detail from Three women on the lake (2018), 245×170 cm, collage on canvas by Kusa Kusa Maski Gael. The figure is located in a dream-like vision of the lake and mountain range between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a complex image, full of nuances and ambiguities, linked to the artist's own memories of flight from the Congo, as well as those of the conflict-affected people he worked with in Uganda. In this issue, Torre et al. warn that conceptualizing war trauma in terms of psychiatric pathologies promotes the symptoms that therapists and aid projects purport to address. Without due consideration for the specificities of lived experiences and cultural contexts, what is actually happening may be largely overlooked, with potentially harmful consequences.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 6. December 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 6 Front cover AI and humanity A statue by Stephen Kettle of Alan Turing, sitting pensively at one of his code‐breaking machines in Bletchley Park. Made up from half a million pieces of Welsh slate, this statue was a landmark feature for the Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition in 2012, which was curated following a public campaign to save the Turing‐Newman Collaboration Collection, a rare collection of his mathematical papers. Members of the Turing family additionally contributed some of the mathematician's personal belongings, including a teddy bear he used to practise his lectures on. Bletchley Park is now a huge heritage attraction, more so since The Imitation Game, a film based on the life of the pioneering computer scientist, came out. Previously known as the UK Government Code and Cypher School, this is now a site for the National Museum of Computing, which ncludes the huts and blocks that hosted a group of codebreakers whose work is said to have helped shorten the war by two years. In this issue, Ting Guo looks at Turing's personal trajectory in life and asks to what extent his search for artificial intelligence was inspired by considerations other than purely technical ones. To design artificial intelligence is to reproduce what is the essential ‘us’, what Pamela McCorduck refers to as an ‘odd form of self‐reproduction’. The desire for such machines, she argues, is a desire equally rooted in fear and allure, which reflects not only the drive for knowledge and human progress, but the discovery of the human self, which is itself driven by fundamental problems of being human. Back cover WORLDS IN MINIATURE Miniature worlds fascinate us. Taking familiar objects, scenes and environments and scaling them down to the minute generates a sense of wonder, forming a special connection between object and audience across which information can flow in subtle and unexpected ways. For centuries, people have used miniaturization to create tiny settlements with streets down which traffic doesn't flow and shops where no purchases are made. In doing so, they generate a fantasy, an idealized portrayal of a world they wish to see, not the one they inhabit. One of the most famous of these miniature communities is Madurodam in the Netherlands. Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year, this park seeks to replicate particular dioramas of Dutch life, employing a dedicated team of professional modellers focusing on specific aspects of Dutch architecture and urban environments to portray a particular, explicitly positive, image of the Netherlands. The choices made at this site, and others like it all over the world, are part of a complex process of representation in miniature, a selection of iconography and design intentionally assembled to create unconscious impressions in visiting tourists, particularly children, about the full‐sized communities they resemble. As such, their representative powers are partial, a carefully curated miniature snapshot of certain aspects of an entire nation designed to act as a cultural and educational ambassador. In this issue, Jack Davy explores how the process of miniaturization, as evidenced by a Lego figurine, can encapsulate and transmit complex and controversial themes in a child‐like, non‐threatening manner. These processes operate subtly and inexplicitly, shaping our understanding of the wider world around us through the affordances of the small.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 6. December 2017

Cover caption, volume 33 issue 6 Front Cover Rescuing tradition from the rubbish, a Jewish man in Israel recovers discarded sacred books. This scene serves as a metaphor for the struggle to hold on to tradition in the modern nation state of Israel. The achievement of political sovereignty is thought to be a form of liberation. It is supposed to bring freedom to the subaltern nations who attain it. But can the modern state create the conditions in which a once persecuted minority can finally flourish? Ethnonational states are always exclusionary. Israel inflicts the conditions that European Jews once suffered onto Palestinians, who have been displaced, disinherited, walled off; and even when they are citizens, they are always second class. But what about those at the center of sovereign citizenship: ‘the people’ themselves? Hannah Arendt reminded us that Jews were never quite at home in Europe. They had to be exceptional to be accepted. They had to be Jews, but not be like Jews, relegating their identity to the private sphere: ‘men in the street and Jews in the synagogue’. But these forces of ‘emancipation’ did not make them citizens like all others. The story of modernity and secularism in Europe is also foundational to nationalism and claims of self‐determination elsewhere. The question is whether or not emancipation has been achieved through political self‐determination, and if so, what such emancipation looks like. Do the forces of assimilation end with political self‐determination? Can a once persecuted people finally be liberated? Who feels free to be Jewish in the modern state of Israel? Whose cultures flourish and whose Jewish traditions can be practised freely? Who finally feels at home? And who, among the sovereign citizens of the ethnonational state, still experience a sense of exile, reflected in the need to rescue traditional texts from being tossed out with the rubbish? Back Cover: MALAGASY JUDAISM Through a warren of alleys in densely packed Antananarivo, capital of the island nation of Madagascar, there is a gated compound. Beyond the gate is a metal door to the entrance of the house within the compound. Emblazoned on it are a seven‐branched menorah and the Hebrew letter ? (shin, for Shaddai, God). Down the corridor, to the left, is a door with Hebrew writing affixed to it; behind it is a prayer room. Instead of pews or chairs, there are rugs, as one might expect to see in a mosque. This is Madagascar's synagogue, in the home of Tubiyya, the self‐taught Malagasy hazzan (Hebrew: cantor). Tubiyya stands next to his wife Miriam and their children. As with the man pictured on the front cover of this issue, Tubiyya sports payos – long strands of hair, sidelocks, that ultra‐Orthodox Jewish men grow on the sides of their faces, to obey the Old Testament commandment from the book of Leviticus 19: 7: ‘Ye shall not round off the edge‐growth of your heads, neither shalt thou diminish the corner edge‐growth of thy beard’. Most observant Jewish men do not follow this particular commandment. In this sense, the Malagasy Tubiyya and the Ashkenazi Haredim in Jerusalem (see front cover) represent small but visible minorities within the greater Jewish world. But they are outliers – both globally and locally – in a deeper, theopolitical sense: both are anti‐Zionist Haredim, rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish State on religious grounds. The Messiah has not yet come to ‘ingather the exiles’. In the meantime, Israeli society is too secular for them. And yet, would the hawker on the front cover accept Tubiyya as a fellow Jew? Race and Jewish genealogy set them apart. This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY bookends antipodes of Jewry, where inclusion and exclusion are in constant tension.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 6. Decemver 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 6 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGY IN CHINA China has its own anthropology ancestors, revered today well beyond the discipline. In this photograph, former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Gu Xiulian and former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng jointly unveil a statue built to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong, China's most celebrated anthropologist. Official sources declared that the statue was intended to highlight the academic achievements of this nationally celebrated anthropologist. The Wujiang Municipal Party Committee and the Wujiang municipal government also dedicated a ‘Cultural Garden’ to ‘further expand the popularity’ and ‘enhance the influence’ of Kaixiangong village, the village in which Fei did most of his fieldwork. The Culture Garden is made up of an Exhibition Hall of the History and Culture of the Village, built in memory of Fei Xiaotong's sister, Fei Dasheng, and the Fei Xiaotong Museum. The museum explores the anthropologist's extraordinary life, highlighting in particular Fei's 26 visits to Kaixiangong. However, many Kaixiangong residents, and some government officials, were not enamoured of the commemorative statue that was erected on 23 October 2010. In his official standing pose, Fei Xiaotong was deemed ‘too distant’, and unlikely to ‘find repose’. Wu Weishan who had carried out the original official commission (and whose 31‐foot statue of Confucius was inexplicably removed from Tiananmen Square earlier this year), then visited Kaixiangong village and consulted its residents, after which he sculpted free of charge what was generally felt to be a more fitting replacement. The new statue depicts Fei relaxed and smiling in an armchair, echoing the Chinese ‘big‐tummy Maitreya Buddha’. Villagers believe this statue to be a more apt tribute to Fei's memory, and have expressed the hope that it will bring happiness to their village. Back cover BACK TO ‘CIVILIZATION’? Civilization is the name of a successful series of computer games (more than nine million units sold globally: see http://www.civilization.com ). Over the past two decades, the games have become increasingly sophisticated, not only in terms of programming, but also with respect to the background history, sociology and economics. For example, irrigation can increase food production, and granaries enable surpluses to be stored and populations to increase. The moods of the citizens matter too: ‘If a city has more happy citizens than content ones, and no unhappy ones, the city will throw a celebration for the ruler called “We Love the King Day”, and economic benefits ensue.’ Featured civilizations range from the Aztecs to the Zulu. It is not known whether Sid Meier (‘the father of computer gaming’) and his fellow game designers have ever studied anthropology. Even if they had, it is unlikely, as Chris Hann points out in his editorial in this issue, that the concept of civilization would have figured prominently in their curriculum. Civilizational analysis is a lively subfield of sociology and has never really gone away in archaeology, but it largely disappeared from anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. Hann discusses some of the reasons for this, and lends his support to recent efforts to revive anthropologists’ interest in the concept. For all its variation, Sid Meier's addictive gameplay exemplifies the fiercely competitive, often violent ethos of today's capitalist civilization. The aim of each game is to rule the world in the name of just one civilization. Hann sees affinities with recent popular books engaging with world history, which rely heavily on contemporary readers’ familiarity with IT. The big question is whether ‘killer apps’ (Niall Ferguson) and the rise of silicon intelligence at the expense of carbon (Ian Morris) will eventually eliminate civilizational pluralism.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 29, Number 4. August 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 4 Front cover Khat to be banned in the UK Yemeni man chewing khat. Khat is a herbal stimulant that has been chewed recreationally in the Arabian peninsula and in East Africa for centuries, but khat has recently become an object of concern in the UK after ‘khat pubs’, popular with Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian immigrants, have sprung up across the country. Against the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the UK government is following countries such as the USA, Canada, and Germany by banning khat. Later this year, the UK will treat khat as a class C drug, making it illegal to supply or possess. This July, the UK home secretary said ‘The decision to bring khat under control is finely balanced and takes into account the expert scientific advice and these broader concerns’. But in response to the government's announcement, Professor David Nutt (chair of the ACMD) retorted, saying ‘Banning khat shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’, specifically citing khat's ‘relatively low harms’ in his remonstration. In this issue, Ian McGonigle looks at the broader socio‐cultural background of khat in Africa and the Middle East, and analyzes the global khat controversy as a complex anthropological problem entangling development economics, public health management, domestic fears of terrorism, and khat‐mediated democratic formations. Back cover Scapegoating in Burma A 2013 calendar widely on sale inside Burma in the wake of Aung San Suu Kyi's landmark meeting with Barrack Obama in Rangoon, November 2012. Although the military retain majority control in parliament, media laws have been relaxed and limited reforms include a parliamentary role for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. Major violence erupted in May 2012 against the Rohingya, which was to spread to Muslims more generally by the time the two leaders met. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi remained mostly silent on the issue. Is this ‘hermit state’, the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia, situated at the intersection between Muslim and Buddhist Asia, and a gateway to India and China, succumbing to irrational fears enflamed by the US‐led war on terror? In this issue, Elliott Prasse‐Freeman argues that the Rohingya have become scapegoats for an ill‐defined sense of national identity. True, the Burmese army has also attacked many of the ethnic minorities wishing to retain autonomy, including major offensives against the Kachin and the Shan. But the kind of violence against Muslims is of a different kind. In anticipation of the last free elections in 1960 the army published Dhamma in danger (dhammantaraya) asserting the communist threat to Buddhism, hoping to win the elections. Today, such dangers are projected as coming from Muslim populations interpreted as not rightfully Burmese (the laws require proof of ancestor residence before wholesale immigration began with British conquest in 1823, yet written reference to ‘Rooinga’ occurred as early as 1799). In a country where fears reign, and with a monastic order not hierarchically controlled, many have fallen for this discourse in a way that the country will come to regret. Whither the saffron revolution and Aung San Suu Kyi's revolution of the spirit?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 4. August 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 4 Front Cover: INNOVATION IN A MEXICAN VILLAGE When Mexico's largest telecom companies refused to provide mobile phone service to the remote Zapotec mountain village of Talea de Castro, Oaxaca, residents responded with astonishing creativity: in March 2013, they built the world's first autonomous mobile phone network. The community‐owned network uses open‐source software to link mobile phones globally over the Internet using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It was developed in collaboration with a non‐profit organization, hackers and sympathetic activists committed to the idea of mobile access as a human right. Centuries‐old practices, including tequio (communal work party) and the asamblea (citizens' ‘assembly’ or town hall meeting), played a central role in enabling Zapotec citizens to give life to the network. Today residents of nearly 20 Zapotec, Mixtec and Mixe villages throughout Oaxaca can send and receive calls and texts within their communities for free, while long‐distance and international calls cost a small fraction of what commercial companies charge throughout the country. The network has provided villagers with an affordable and reliable system for maintaining family relationships and cultural continuity across national borders. However, Talea de Castro's community‐owned network is now under threat because Movistar, a giant telecom corporation based in Spain, has aggressively moved into the community. The case of Talea de Castro raises important questions about the roots of innovation, creative problem‐solving and the existential threats facing autonomous technological systems. Image source: DANIELA PARRA/REDES AC Back Cover: NORTH KOREA North Korean students against the backdrop of a statue of Kim Il‐sung (1912–1994) in Mansudae, central Pyongyang, 2007. Kim was the founding leader of North Korea and commanded the country's People's Army during the Korean War (1950–1953). For a decade after the war, his charismatic leadership contributed to turning the war‐torn society into a strong industrial economy. The importance of the last legacy is strongly propagated by the country's current leadership. In his guest editorial in this issue, Heonik Kwon considers the possibilities of a rapprochment between North Korea and the USA. Image source: (STEPHAN) / CC BY‐SA 2.0C     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 1. February 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 1 Front cover ALTERNATIVE FACTS In response to discourses of alternative facts, denials of climate science and the undermining of science in the public sphere, on 22 April 2017, protestors marched for science in cities across the United States. In this image of the San Francisco march, a protestor holds a sign proclaiming ‘science is universal’. While some protestors' slogans assumed the objectivity of science and facts, others asserted the importance of diversity, equality and inclusion in science. Scholars of science and technology studies have long deconstructed claims of universality, but recently some have argued that the authority of science and facts must be reclaimed. Bruno Latour emphasizes that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive. Analyses of human rights and political violence disclose how narratives and propaganda shape not just individual attitudes but also the functioning of institutions. Contexts of gaslighting, repetition, distraction and undermining facts require different strategies for understanding how institutions and societies are perpetrating and perpetuating injustices. In this issue, Drexler's article develops a framework of multidimensional and intersectional justice for analyzing the layered, compounded, dynamic forms of power and inequality that contribute to particular injustices. Understanding justice as multidimensional and intersectional is part of a struggle from which new forms of knowledge and truth can emerge. Back cover ‘NEW SCHISM’ IN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY? A supplicatory prayer service (Moleben) to Saint Emperor Nikolay II in an Orthodox church in the Russian Federation. On the commemoration day of his death, believers line up to venerate large icons of the tsar installed in the church, as in many other churches of the ‘Russian world’. When kissing the holy icons and listening to the words of prayer, they participate in a theopolitical performance of belonging to a community of co-believers and compatriots, of people who share the same faith and the same nation, an enactment of the model ‘one state, one church’ prevalent in Eastern Orthodoxy. What happens, however, when state borders change, when new sovereign states emerge or become stronger? Is it possible for Orthodox Christians to practise their faith outside the national-territorial logic? Since the summer of 2018, Jeanne Kormina and Vlad Naumescu have been observing a rapidly developing cold war within Orthodox Christianity. This war between different claims for sovereignty and jurisdiction over ‘canonical territories’ has followed clear logics of religious nationalism and imperialism. In this conflict, the less privileged — ordinary believers and local religious communities — have suffered most. In this issue, Kormina and Naumescu analyze the recent ‘schism’ in Eastern Orthodoxy to show how religion and politics are strongly intertwined in disputes over territory and sovereignty. Drawing a parallel between the post-socialist revival of religion in Ukraine and the current mobilization on the ground, they show how the theopolitics of ‘communion’ and ‘canonical territory’ shape the fate of people, churches and states.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 2. April 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 2 Front cover CHARLIE HEBDO SHOOTING On 11 January 2015, in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo's offices and in a kosher supermarket, 4 million people took to the streets in France, including an estimated 1.5 million in Paris, many of them carrying the sign ‘Je suis Charlie’. The heart of the march in the capital was the Place de la République, where demonstrators climbed on the monument erected to Marianne, the national symbol of the Republic. In this issue, Didier Fassin discusses this unprecedented mobilization in defence of the ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity – as inscribed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – and more recently, laïcité, the French version of secularism inherited from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. He shows that this unanimity was, however, soon disrupted, as some, particularly those from low‐income neighbourhoods, questioned the double standard in the implementation of these principles – a contestation that was harshly repressed within the education and justice systems. To account for such dissonance, the article analyzes the discrepancy between the principles of the Republic and their applications in France. Laïcité, long implemented in a flexible and pragmatic manner, only became more strictly enforced in relation to Islam. Liberty, notably free speech, has recently been subjected to various legal and practical limitations. Equality, which exists under the law, is seriously undermined by social disparities and racial discrimination. Fraternity, which translates into solidarity and welfare, is increasingly weakened by discourses which stigmatize minorities. These discrepancies affect with particular intensity, immigrants from North and sub‐Saharan Africa and their descendants, most of them Muslims – a legacy of France's colonial past. Although they might seem untimely in such moments of unity, these meditations call for a critical reflection on the contradictions of contemporary democracies. Back cover AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL MANIFESTO Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa, the dominant ruling chief of the Fijian island of Bau 1829–1832 and 1837–1852, prior to the commencement of British colonial rule in 1874. Drawing by Alfred Thomas Agate. This is one of the earliest depictions of the rare black‐lipped pearl‐shell breast plates, civa. On Ratu Tanoa's head is the turban‐like bark cloth (masi) head scarf, i‐vauvau. It is said to have concealed the scar from a wound inflicted by a brother who was a rival for the title of Vunivalu, the war king of Bau: the active ruler in a diarchy whose counterpart was the sacerdotal king, the Roko Tui Bau. With Adi Savusavu, one of his nine wives, Ratu Tanoa was the father of Ratu Seru Cakobau, who succeeded in unifying most of Fiji into a single kingdom. In his anthropological manifesto in this issue, Marshall Sahlins argues that our main theories of ‘economic determinism’ represent a self‐consciousness of modern capitalist societies masquerading as the science of others. In the great majority of societies known to anthropology and history, power consists in the direct control of people, from which comes the ability to accumulate wealth, rather than control of their means of livelihood, of capital wealth, from which comes the control of people. Indeed in many cases the notion of ‘production’ itself would be inappropriate insofar as the ancestors or the gods are the creative agents, the fundamental sources of human subsistence – which people thus receive rather than make simply by their own labour. It follows that the principal political beneficiaries of economic prosperity are shamans, priests, garden magicians, chiefs, divine kings, and the like by virtue of their mediation of the spiritual origins of people's livelihoods. All this is not mere ‘false consciousness’ but the way these societies are organized: their own constituted anthropology, from which we must develop ours.