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In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the appropriation of marriage by a rural Namibian elite as a case study, the book tells the entwined stories of class formation and marriage decline in post-apartheid Namibia.

In this essay, I reflect on my experiences in teaching ethnographic writing to graduate anthropology students over the last decade. After years of experimenting with different course formats and ethnographic exercises, the anthropology department in Hamburg now offers two courses on ethnographic writing before fieldwork and one course after students have returned from the field. The first course, taken before students conduct their master's fieldwork, focuses on reading ethnographies. It draws on John van Maanen's (1988 [2011]) Tales of the Field to explore different writing styles and guides students to imitate these styles in different writing exercises. The second preparatory course introduces students to ethnographic writing through the observation of everyday interactions. Students observe, take notes, and write ethnographic narratives about visits to a playground, an elevator ride, or lunchtime in the university cafeteria. When students return from their master's fieldwork, they finally participate in the 'Ethnographic Writing Workshop'. Here students write and revise key ethnographic scenes, dialogues, and portraits derived from their fieldwork. This set of ethnographic writing courses encourages students to read (more) ethnographies, reflect on writing styles, and work on their own writing in groups and by themselves. With this essay, I want to initiate a dialogue about different approaches to teaching ethnographic writing.

Ethnography, as text, is the main outcome of fieldwork. It is also the most important way in which anthropologists communicate and share their findings. As a consequence, despite substantial critique by postmodern anthropology on how ethnographic texts in the past have represented the reality and life-worlds of others, ethnographic writing remains at the centre of the anthropological enterprise. But how to write? The so-called Writing Culture debate, together with feminist and postcolonial approaches, has stimulated new ways to do and write ethnography. But where much has been published on how to master fieldwork, it is still hard to find advice on how to go 'from notes to narratives' (Ghodsee 2016) and write a convincing ethnography. This special issue brings together a diverse range of contributions on how to write ethnography. Contributors reflect on ethical challenges, including issues of confidentiality and questions of representation. Writing is discussed as a way to construct and deconstruct truth(s). Temporalities of ethnographic writing are scrutinised and different writing styles, like vignettes and portraits, are introduced. Engagement with other modes of representation and storytelling, like film-making and photography, pushes beyond the written medium. The special issue concludes with two contributions on how to teach and learn ethnographic writing.

In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the appropriation of marriage by a rural Namibian elite as a case study, the book tells the entwined stories of class formation and marriage decline in post-apartheid Namibia.

The vacant retirement house has become a central feature of many areas of the Global South. Over the years, migrants' savings are invested in the building of conspicuous houses for retirement in their areas of origin. But despite these substantial efforts, a number of migrants postpone their return or do not return at all. Their houses remain empty, their purposes shifting as their owners reach old age. This stretching of time does not only affect the migrants' livelihoods and ideas of home. Furthermore, kin-scripts as conceptualized by Stack and Burton (1993) are being reconfigured substantially. This goes hand-in-hand with the reframing of culturally prescribed responsibilities, meanings, and social roles attached to certain stages of the migrants' lives. Based on long-term and multi-local ethnographic fieldwork in rural Mexico and urban Chicago since the 1990s, we analyze how remittance houses are tied and untied with their owners' life courses in the later stages of life. Furthermore, we examine how kin groups on both sides of the border deal with the new challenges this entails.

Cyberguerilleros do not fight alone. Networks and rallying in the Zapatist uprising.
Social unrest, uprisings and asymmetrical wars recruit activitists through social networks. This article examines the virtual network which formed around the Zapatist uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The main issue examined here is the structure of the network and the way in which it contributed to rallying the people. The study shows that the Internet site network examined (N= 72) is cohesive and connected up by direct links. However, the participating virtual players come from very different origins, institutional positions and social backgrounds. The combination of two characteristics – cohesion and heterogeneity – sets up the optimum conditions for rallying round the public on a large scale.