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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.

AbstractHumans, and other mammals, require specific interactions between two adults in order to procreate. The importance of these encounters for the genes has turned sex into an exceedingly varied and complicated form of behavior. Human sexual behavior is largely guided and motivated by feelings, and has a considerable impact on both individual well-being and the fabric of society. It is therefore important to assess how this aspect of life functions in industrialized societies. The present analysis uses the perspective of evolutionary biology but is based on research in sexuality, anthropology, animal behavior, positive psychology, and gender differences. Given that society should aim for maximizing the well-being of its members, the present situation does not appear to be optimal. The social environment of modern societies is likely to cause an increase in the prevalence of sex-related suffering and a reduction in the harvest of positive feelings. A relevant question is whether the situation regarding sex should be referred to as a 'disease of modernity.'

While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts drawn from digital and design anthropology available to the profession to help it make sense of these developments. While policy responses downgraded digital practices to at best a last resort, we argue that the digital is now an inevitable and necessary element of social work practice, which must be understood as a hybrid practice that integrates digital practices such as video calls and face-to-face interactions. Moving forward, hybrid digital social work should be a future-ready element of practice, designed to accommodate uncertainties as they arise and sensitive to the improvisatory practice of social workers.

Review: Kockel, Ullrich; Clopot, Cristina; Tjarve, Baiba; and Nic Craith, Máiréad (2020) Heritage and Festivals in Europe. Performing Identities. London: Routledge. 213 pp. ISBN: 978-0-367-18676-0.Máiréad Nic Craith, (2020) The Vanishing World of The Islandman. Narrative
and Nostalgia, London, Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology.Martínez, Francisco and Patrick Laviolette (2019) Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses. Oxon & New York. Berghahn Books. 340 pp., 69 illus., bibliog., index, ISBN 978-1-78920-331-8, $135.00 /  99.00 HbAnu Lounela, Eeva Berglund and Timo Kallinen (eds) (2019) Dwelling in Political Landscapes: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. Studia Fennica Anthropologica 4 (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society), 293 pp., ISBN 978-951-858-087-7Michał Buchowski (ed) (2019) Twilight Zone Anthropology. Voices from Poland. RAI/Sean Kingston Publishing. Vol. 2 of the RAI Country Series (series editor David Shankland)Tom Scott-Smith (2020) On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 268 pp., Hardcover $35.00, ISBN: 9781501748653.

The article that is presented next analyse discursively the perception that men have about their advantage situation or privilege (the patriarchal dividends in words of Raewyn Connell, 1995) as a man and in a domination system such as patriarchy (in its current times). It is thought from the theory and from an empiric approach how privilege is denied or recognised using different mechanisms of social research through that can emerge some form of recognition of it. In other words, how we can tackle the complexity of this object from a technic-methodologic point of view and what kind of tools is offering us socio-anthropology, such as the biographic interviews for instance, as this technique facilitate the generation of a communicative situation where particular implicit forms of privilege recognition could appear discursively. The analysis also focuses in how it could facilitate a breaking principle with the traditional model of masculinity characteristic of hegemonic ideological representations of gender, facilitating in this way the construction of alternative masculinities more equalitarian

This article delineates the lay perceptions of COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh. More specifically, it discusses how people interpret the origin and transmission of COVID-19. Like the other countries of the world, this virus appeared as a new phenomenon in Bangladesh and is now known as coronarog. The transmission of this virus added new terms such as lockdown, quarantine, isolation, et cetera, to the popular discourse and produced a new experience. The high rates of infection and death caused by the virus have percolated fear and anxiety among people. Excessive fear about the disease has led to the stigmatisation of the disease and the infected. Drawing on observation, media reports and qualitative interviews, this article argues that laypeople use either a personalistic or a naturalistic explanation to make sense of the disease. Their explanations are associated with their access to different types of capital. This article contributes to medical anthropology literature on health and illness by explaining the cultural model of illness classification related to COVID-19.