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AbstractThis article explores the anthropometric survey of 5,000 Tibetans by the ethnographer HRH Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark in the northeast Indian Himalayan town of Kalimpong in the 1950s, as part of the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia. In the context of the crisis created by the Chinese incursion into Tibet in 1950, which pushed thousands of Tibetans into India, stationary field anthropometry, rather than a mobile expedition, became Prince Peter's principal entry into Tibetan worlds. This article explores the scientific paradigms underpinning his anthropometric survey at a time when anthropology had seemingly moved on theoretically and ethically, the historical conditions and contingencies of Prince Peter's research, and the survey's representations of Tibetan peoples and places. We argue that, while Prince Peter's understanding was in essence primordialist, linking particular peoples to particular places, in practice he took a more modernist approach to 'Tibetaness' as contingent upon historical processes. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential significance of this vast and unique collection of historic anthropometric data for Tibetans today.

This article presents the reception of structuralism in linguistics, psychology, social sciences, anthropology, and literature as viewed from the perspective of the most important philosophical journals in Romanian communism, Cercetări filozofice [Philosophical Research] and Revista de filozofie [The Philosophy Magazine] during the period between 1953 and 1967. Following François Dosse's delineation between two phases of the development of structuralism (before and after 1967), Baghiu argues that in Romania – and possibly in Eastern Europe – structuralism was only taken serious as a methodology after the debate on Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault during 1967. Before that, every structuralist figure was criticized as bourgeois and idealistic. While Barthes becomes one of the most important references of French structuralism, Foucault becomes a sort of a public enemy in 1967, after his Les mots et les choses, which is viewed in socialist countries as anti-humanistic thought and thus rejected. This allows Baghiu to describe 1967 as a benchmark in which both structuralism and poststructuralism gain preeminence in philosophical debates in Romania, yet in different manners.

Bronisław Malinowski sought throughout his career to make a scientific contribution to understanding and reforming the international order by making analogies with 'primitive' societies. His ethnographic material was important to Marcel Mauss's internationalist project in The Gift, and can still provide lessons in internationalism. This article examines Malinowski's ethnographic figuration of 'the evolution of primitive international law', and documents a set of intellectual exchanges between him and Mauss. This illuminates an unexpected avenue of Durkheimian influence on British social anthropology and situates Malinowski in contemporary imperial and internationalist debates. Despite Malinowski's early criticism of Émile Durkheim's account of 'collective ideas', his later writing shows the (unacknowledged) influence of Mauss's understandings of obligation and intersocial exchange. Unearthing the terms of this exchange between Malinowski and Mauss helps to recover the central normative lesson of the former's final book and his ethnographic work as a whole – namely, that sovereignty should be dethroned as an organising principle of international order in favour of intersocial exchange and the obligations it produces.

AbstractFollowing the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it goes beyond the conventional interactions that assume a fixed and singular identity for diplomacy. The Discussion aims, on the one hand, to pluralize the notion of diplomatic practice, and, on the other, to reflexively retrieve "theory" from the everyday and alternative practices of diplomacy that are often missed by the radar of practice theory. It thus seeks to reassess practice theory using insights from the very terrain of action it employs to develop its distinctive viewpoint. The Discussion contributes, moreover, to the rapidly changing field of Diplomatic Studies that has recently opened up to cross- and trans-disciplinary conversations with political geography, social anthropology, digital studies, visual studies, and new materialism.

The article is based on the review of the book by Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska Philosophical and Translational Migrations in the Moomin Valley (2019). Interdisciplinary considerations concern the issue of the multi-addressee nature of works intentionally aimed at a young audience, and their basis is the analysis and interpretation of Tove Jansson's series on Moomins, deeply rooted in philosophical contexts. In the interpretation of the saga of the Finnish writer, Dymel-Trzebiatowska refers to various aspects of the theory and practice of reception as well as to selected issues belonging to the area of theory and practice of translation. In interpretative contexts, the researcher also distinguishes psychoanalytical critique, cognitive poetics, existential philosophy, the broadly understood philosophy of ethics and childhood anthropology, thanks to which her book fits perfectly into contemporary discussions on the function, place, role and status of children's literature, its meaning in the wider cultural circuit literary and – potentially – also its presence in the field of Polish studies.

This article explores an emergent assemblage in which material semiotics interacts with legal plurality. It is argued that infrastructural designs constitute specific configurations of such assemblages. While research on infrastructure is proliferating in anthropology and STS, law as a constitutive component in all its forms and manifestations has not yet been sufficiently examined from this perspective. Infrastructures enact the ordering of their constitutive components and develop their own specific legal configurations. They combine components from various legal registers with routinized social practices and the normativity of technologies and materiality. Law in infrastructure is thus in itself inherently plural. The article exemplifies what plural law does to infrastructures and how social and legal relations take on infrastructural properties. These plural technolegal entanglements are examined using a case study of one specific strand within the infrastructure of the multilayered supply chain that brings Moroccan argan oil to the global market. This strand emerged in response to the breakdown of a supply infrastructure that was set up as a model development cooperation project.

AbstractTracing the assumption behind China's nationality identification that the Dan constituted a littoralminzu, this article examines the rise and circulation of "Dan" as a racial entity in writings by Chinese thinkers, reformers, and scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how "Dan" emerged as azu, minzu, zhongzu, andrenzhongin late-Qing political polemics and pedagogical texts, and how this notion was combined with Republican-era scholarship on the Dan within and across the disciplines of popular literature, folklore, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Both Western and imperial Chinese scholarly trends and racialist ideas shaped pre-1949 Dan studies. Modern intellectuals presented the Dan as a non-Han minority based on various nationalist concerns as well as their Han and regional identities. From a historical perspective, this article redraws the geoethnic landscape of modern China by taking transregional littoral fringes into consideration and calling for attention to those identified as non-Han before the nationality investigation in the 1950s but as Han afterward.

Using a social studies course with an interdisciplinary approach and organizing the program in conjunction with this circumstance means that the social studies curriculum can find its place in the real world because interdisciplinary nature enhances its value. The definition of the National Council on Social Studies in the United States in 1992 is also important in emphasizing how comprehensive this course is. According to this definition, social studies collaborate with different sciences such as anthropology, archeology, history, geography, law, economics, philosophy, political science, religion, psychology, and sociology. In addition to citizenship rights and responsibilities, the topics that include human rights, in general, are covered in the social studies course. In this light, social studies can be viewed as a course in which citizenship rights and obligations are taught to raise individuals who are responsive to human rights. In this context, the four main values, feeling valuable, equality, democratic education, and a culture of coexistence, that can be offered within the framework of citizenship and human rights in social studies courses are discussed below.

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

ABSTRACTThe carceral state has been the dominant voice of state governance in the United States over the past forty years. This article takes the archive as a key site of struggle to understand the power dynamics at play with the development of and fight against the carceral state. Utilizing the intervention of the fugitive archival practice, the article analyzes the multifaceted ways in which Black residents and communal institutions of Los Angeles, California, develop strategies and techniques located within past struggles against what I call the carceral state archive. The carceral state archive consists of both the recording mechanisms of state power and the institutions and structures that buttress that power. Built upon a multilayered methodological approach, the framing of the argument includes ethnographic and archival analysis of communal institutions such as the Southern California Library, communal organizations such as the Coalition Against Police Abuse, and the community members who all form the making of the fugitive archival practice. [carceral studies, race, urban anthropology, archives]

This issue brings together 10 anthropologists who investigate the potential of multimodality and the role of sensing, as situated social practice, in the complex working of memory. Through video, images, texts and sound—and through collage, installations, embroidery, and drawing—we invite the audience of Multimodality & Society to consider: What are some of the complex relationships between memory and the senses? How does multimodality help us approach the study of remembering and forgetting? This introduction frames our work into current debates in multimodal and sensory anthropology, discusses our approaches to memory, and draws some of the common themes that connect our contributions. Collectively, we investigate memory as sensate, emplaced, and affective, and existing in a complex relation with temporality and practices of forgetting. We are particularly interested in the links between multi-sensory approaches and the possibilities offered by multimodality. We argue that the latter can help us think of sensate memory, and vice versa, studying remembering and forgetting as multisensory can demonstrate some of the potential of multimodal scholarship.

AbstractPlay and games encourage persons to hold the world at a distance, while occasionally challenging its norms through parody, mimicry, and clowning, too. In this article, I offer new ethnography on drinking games among the Nuosu of Southwest China, who distribute penalty shots by injecting them directly into glasses with a syringe. While this revelry may evoke the recent Nuosu history of heroin (ab)use and HIV/AIDS, syringes are used in drinking games to parody the scientific writ large, which encompasses China's modern nation‐building approach, rationality, technological progress, biomedicine, hygiene, urban life, industry, precise standardized measurements, and even the human sciences, including anthropology, ethnology, and ethno‐history. Offering two case studies in which Nuosu ethno‐historians gesture to the scientific and the para‐ethnographic during drinking games, I show that – like ethnography – their play is meant to encourage everyone to stretch the bounds of the occasion by adopting a reflexive stance towards it.

The article looks at the field of hesitant self-definitions reflecting ambiguities of scientific thinking in a rapidly changing (late) modern world. It concentrates on matters belonging to the domain of political science, bringing to light a fundamental question – how should we understand a current crisis of legitimacy undermining the canons of scientific knowledge, plunged in contradictions, stretched between two opposite poles of technical efficiency and communicative rationality. It advances the conception of a radical revision aimed at counterbalancing the influence of a positivist tradition, celebrating the idea of empirical knowledge, following the demands of a "scientific" method. In expectation to open a new and promising perspective it puts forward a conception of experience concentrating on language (language is looked upon as a spehere of primary and most important experience). In this effort the article brings to focus the questions of understanding and interpretation, putting to the fornt line the notion of heremenutics and considering possible advantages resulting from establishing links between cultural anthropology and political science.

The article is a chronologically systematized review of the sources of the Soviet and modern periods for the study of ethnocultural dynamics in the Republic of Khakassia. A separate block is devoted to studies of modern ethnic processes at the turn of the 20th‑21st centuries. The article presents the specifics of the study of the ethnocultural dynamics of the capital and regional research centers. Attention to ethnic processes in the republic is fixed from the standpoint of history, ethnopsychology, sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. The main problems and trends in the study of ethnic processes in the region are considered. Priority research areas related to the study of ethnic identity and the specifics of its formation are highlighted as the features of modern scientific research within the framework of this issue in the context of modern processes of globalization and transformation. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of interethnic relations and migration processes taking place in the Republic of Khakassia

In higher education institutions (HEI), whose primary functions are oriented to the activities of learning, teaching and research workspace kitchens are disregarded spaces. Yet kitchens do vital but unnoticed work in everyday institutional life. This article develops a post-human, post-disciplinary and post-methodological analytical framing to give kitchens, and the confederation of connections they produce, the attention they deserve. The article draws on a post-qualitative data bricolage of mobile phone snaps, assemblage ethnography, vox pop and memory story to analyze the posthuman matterings within and of HEI kitchens. Theoretically, the article is grounded in a post-disciplinary approach which draws conceptual resources from sociology, human geography, anthropology, material culture and education. It explores the HE workspace kitchen as a productive site for the enactment of a multitude of material, affective and micro-political institutional practices. The article argues that kitchens matter as important liminal spaces for the materialization of institutional rules, values, norms, belonging and community.