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AbstractThe concept of transparency is now an unescapable reference in public, professional, and private life. As transparency‐making has recently transmuted from a progressive instrument to counter corruption into a new universal ideological formation, it is time to problematize the concept of transparency and its uses. In this article, I consider transparency not as a moral principle or static ideology but as a terrain of political struggle over its meaning and practices. An emerging literature in anthropology highlights how transparency has become a form of governance that leads to a sense of deprofessionalization in working life. Based on ethnographic research with activist networks and small‐scale farmers in Italy, I investigate experiments with horizontal and inclusive forms of alternative transparency‐making in food processing. I consider three interrelated emblematic frictions within these experiments: informal versus formal, top‐down versus horizontal, and not‐for‐profit versus commercial. While these experimental forms of transparency‐making allow small‐scale farmers to reappropriate a sense of autonomy and professionalism, the frictions indicate that conventional and alternative transparency‐making are not diametrically opposed. Frictions in emancipatory transparency‐making repoliticize decision‐making processes in ways that are unknown in contemporary concepts of transparency. Ultimately, the concept of emancipatory transparency‐making calls for engagement in open dialogical processes.

What and how we eat have once again become prominent in debates on the fight for global justice. Proponents of alterglobalism consider experiments with food sovereignty a prefigurative practice that anticipates broader ecocultural change. Critics, however, remain skeptical about its capacity to enhance social change. In social movement research, the practical implications of these prefigurative politics have rarely been investigated empirically. Based on an ethnographic analysis, this article illustrates the multifaceted dynamics of a continuously evolving experiment with Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) in a neorural microeconomic network, a cornerstone of food sovereignty activism. An ethnographic perspective can grasp the shifting terrain of the political mobilization, frictions and unintended consequences of these types of politics. The article demonstrates the importance of understanding the complexities of prefiguration as not a simple linear, coherent process. Also, the case study allows a critique of re-emerging neorural populism.

AbstractIn academic and public discourse on the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, there still prevails a 'methodological nationalism' based on a separatist imagination overshadowing the existence and role of Israeli–Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyses micro‐political practices that cross existing frontiers, both within Israel and between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of 'acts', I read these ethnographic episodes in their intentional and performative dimension. What is the role of these 'acts'? What are their effects, both on participants and the wider public? Through two interconnected cases, different functions of acts are explored. The first case relates to encounters between Israelis and Palestinians in the embattled city of Hebron in the occupied Palestinian territories; the second investigates moments during a Gandhi‐inspired peace march at the 'internal' frontier of the Israeli Negev desert. The ethnographic perspective reveals what lies behind and beneath the acts, going beyond the conflict's obvious structures of power. Acts function primarily as a valve of catharsis for the participants themselves, both overcoming and reproducing hegemonic discursive elements of the conflict. Paradoxically, acts of solidarity are often crucial in shaping public knowledge about the conflict in more sectarian terms.

What implies the conversion to fundamentalist Islam? What are the repercussions and implications of 'political Islam' in specific contexts? The relation between Islam, democracy and violence is often represented in a reductive or simplistic way. In order to contribute to a reasoned debate on these pressing questions, this essay covers some key dynamics stemming from long-term ethnographic observation regarding the conversion to neo Salafism among Arab Bedouin citizens in southern Israel, placing them in the context of contemporary developments of Islamic political thought. The ethnographic sensitivity, combined with the voices of some eminent Islamic intellectuals, allows to go beyond both the rhetoric of cultural complexity and the common-sense view that Islamic terrorism would be a kind of 'anti imperialism of the losers', arguments employed often to contest emerging neo-orientalist discourses. In this sense, the essay states the need to shed light on coordinates and interpretative categories that are not placed in an essentially different but in often unexpected ways.

A widely diffused, engaged approach understands human rights as an opportunity to enhance moral progress. Less visible has a critical realm of research that reveals the often ambiguous social life of human rights discourses. This article draws on a specific case study from the intricate issue of how activism for Arab-Palestinian Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel engages with the global human rights discourse. It follows the implications of mobilization, focusing on events related to a campaign against house demolitions in informal,unrecognised settlements. The case shows how human rights discourses tend to silence the agency of political subjects, victimizing and patronizing those who seek emancipation. The ethnographic insights emphasize the role of a range of carnivalesque and spontaneous acts ofresistance, which subvert the patronizing implications of the human rights language.

Quand les insurrections et les émeutes sont analysées comme des pratiques discursives, qui forment, produisent et réifient des catégories de la réalité, les cadres des politiques normatives explosent laissant apparaître un espace contenant des ambiguïtés, des dysharmonies et des zones se chevauchant. Le plus souvent, dans la littérature habituelle consacrée aux émeutes et à la résistance populaire, le soulèvement populaire est considéré comme un effet naturel d'une réalité donnée. Le plus souvent de telles analyses restent prisonnières des catégories dichotomiques d'État et de peuple, parfois présentées comme des entités monolithiques. Dans cet article, j'essaie de montrer que les émeutes et la protestation ne sont pas simplement articulées sur des catégories interprétatives mais sont également capables de les "produire". Ce que j'illustre à travers le cas de la "construction de la révolte" dans le désert israélien du Néguev, une forme spécifique de protestation qui peut conduire à des émeutes et de la violence.

AbstractIn the conflict betweenBedouin representatives and government authorities in the southernIsraeliNegev, the term 'insurgent building' refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by theIsraeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contestedBedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent building relies on the ability of media and advocacy organizations to mobilize behind the issue. Most of the relevant scholarship takes the interpretative categories advanced by these actors at face value. Following anthropological debates regarding objectification and categorization, I examine the context of a specific case of insurgent building. Emerging political actors who employ insurgent building often rely on predefined ethnic categories and clear‐cut people–state polarities. This case demonstrates the need for a more differentiated understanding of multilayered local dynamics than the one offered by mainstream linear interpretations. At a more abstract level, political actors contribute to the reproduction of the very categories against which they mobilize.

If knowledge is considered as incorporated in activities and events, a monolithic reality is no longer waiting to be uncovered, but multiple realities are coming into being through different sets of practices. In the Israeli negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished nearly ten times in one year by the Israeli police, but each time they have been reconstructed with the help of human rights activists. Surprisingly, and in contrast to nearly all circulating discourses, nobody ever lived in the demolished buildings - what at one level becomes a humanitarian catastrophe, at another becomes a "ghost village."
Drawing on recent reflections on global ethnography, this article seeks to follow "zones of friction" and connections among people, money, discourses, and emotions that developed around this specific case: relations that range from solidarity activities to the discursive practices of journalists and dislocated officials of international organizations. On a more abstract level, the emerging contradictions between these levels reveal the implications of an uncritically reproduced idea of "local community." I claim that by following such connections, we gain important insights into how transnational power relations are shaping multiple realities around a political conflict.

In this introduction to a Special Section, we outline three recent interrelated research tendencies with regard to how to understand the practices and politics of 'nature': 1) a major attention towards non-anthropocentric environmental ideologies; 2) more complex analyses of environmental movements; and finally, 3) attention to unconventional every-day practices of environmental justice. In all three tendencies, we argue, a renewed attention to socio-economic power relations of the wider context becomes crucial for a better understanding of environmental dynamics. Ethnographically engaged studies from the European context offer examples of how it becomes possible to assess the impact of new grass-root practices, to pay attention to good micropractices, and understand the unexpected outcomes of the engagement with nature.Key words: Environmentalism, social movements, power, conflict.

In this introduction to a Special Section, we outline three recent interrelated research tendencies with regard to how to understand the practices and politics of 'nature': 1) a major attention towards non-anthropocentric environmental ideologies; 2) more complex analyses of environmental movements; and finally, 3) attention to unconventional every-day practices of environmental justice. In all three tendencies, we argue, a renewed attention to socio-economic power relations of the wider context becomes crucial for a better understanding of environmental dynamics. Ethnographically engaged studies from the European context offer examples of how it becomes possible to assess the impact of new grass-root practices, to pay attention to good micropractices, and understand the unexpected outcomes of the engagement with nature.Key words: Environmentalism, social movements, power, conflict.