This photovoice study explores women’s connection to marine fisheries in Kalymnos Island, Greece, how they perceive their contributions, and how the legacy of sponge fishing continues to shape contemporary gender roles and social expectations. Participants in the study described a deep, early connection to the sea that transcended gender. Furthermore, although socio-economic changes, have transformed women’s roles, participants felt constrained and that their contributions were overlooked. Our data shows that historically embedded ideals surrounding the resilient Kalymnian woman continue to influence women’s experiences. Hence, while empowering, this identity to some extent has reinforced traditional gender roles, reducing available time, limiting public participation, and weakening cohesion. Discussions further highlighted how gendered norms and moral expectations generate frustration and anger, also challenging the dominant narrative regarding Kalymnian women’s strength. The photovoice method enabled women to reflect on their lived realities while building common ground among women of varied generations and backgrounds.
In this article we introduce and demonstrate the urban pre-tour: a novel future oriented ethnographic method for engaging with the possibilities of everyday life in future cities. In doing so we contribute to a growing body of scholarship which seeks to contest dominant top-down urban futures narratives. We argue that to responsibly and ethically engage with city/urban futures it is vital that we account for the sensory, embodied and affective experiences, expertise and futures imaginaries of real people, as they emerge from their embodied and sensory experiences in everyday interspecies, technological, weather and built urban environments. As such we advance established mobile video-based urban tour and go-along methodologies in what we see as a necessary step towards creating and activating new knowledge about possible ground-up city futures through attention to urban experiences, multispecies lives and infrastructures.
“It’s excellent meat that should be widely available for sale,” argue young Kasaian inhabitants of Lubumbashi, DRC. Some even propose its recognition as cultural heritage. Many non-Kasaian residents, however, express outrage: “they are shedding the blood of dogs in public, saying that soon everyone will be eating dogs like them.” In this context, dogmeat ( Tshibelabela) emerges as a politically charged site through which interethnic tensions, moral boundaries, and competing ontologies are articulated. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how a seemingly mundane food practice becomes a locus of symbolic struggle. Drawing on insights from multispecies and postcolonial scholarship, it argues that the ambiguous status of dogs—as both companions and edible beings—destabilises moral boundaries and exposes competing understandings of human–animal relations. These tensions generate mistrust, surveillance, and rumours, revealing how food and eating practices become arenas of contestation over power, identity, and belonging.
This study reexamines Arai Hakuseki's Nant & omacr;shi (Records of the Southern Islands, 1719) as more than a geographical description of the Ryukyuan Kingdom. It argues that Hakuseki's text constitutes an early form of ethnographic knowledge production within the moral and bureaucratic order of Tokugawa Japan. By situating Nant & omacr;shi at the intersection of anthropology and the history of knowledge, the article explores how Edo-period intellectuals transformed diplomatic encounters-especially the Edo nobori (Ryukyuan embassies to Edo)-into instruments of cultural governance and epistemic subordination. Through a close reading of Hakuseki's specific textual mechanics, including his taxonomic segregation of customs and etymological translation moves, the study demonstrates how the Tokugawa conception of a "Japan-centered world order" (Nihon-gata ka'i chitsujo) shaped representations of the other. Nant & omacr;shi emerges not merely as a descriptive record, but as a foundational, though inherently coercive, form of premodern ethnography, revealing how knowledge, power, and writing intersected to construct Japan's moral geography. The paper further considers the afterlife of Hakuseki's ethnographic imagination in modern Ryukyuan studies and its critical implications for contemporary archive critique and a polycentric history of anthropology.
This paper develops an ethnographically grounded framework for understanding ethnosexual boundaries in post-Soviet Central Asia. Focus group discussions with 100 Fergana Valley students — from Osh State University, Jalal-Abad State University, and Fergana State University — reveal a proximity paradox: 85% preferred marriage with uzoq xorij partners (South Korea, Turkey, Arab Gulf states) over linguistically and religiously proximate neighbors, citing family and national tradition. Interviews with Soviet-era mixed families reveal a second paradox: children of interethnic unions opposing such marriages for their own children. Drawing on empirical work in the Fergana Valley (Author, 2025), the paper theorizes six mechanisms: boundary maintenance through sexual norms; honor-shame systems; violence-induced fortification from the 1990 and 2010 Osh conflicts; Soviet-Islamic hybrid modernities; transnational flows; and the proximity paradox, whereby boundaries rigidify at cultural overlap. The socialization milieu effect reveals boundary orientation depends less on ethnicity than household culture, producing a normative landscape of distinct orientations.
This paper develops the concept of entangled positionality as a way of theorising how researcher positionality is constituted across the multiple connected worlds the ethnographer inhabits. Drawing on Crossley’s relational sociology and building on Desmond’s call for relational ethnography, we extend recent scholarship on relational positionality (Bolade-Ogunfodun et al., 2023; Delfino, 2025; Drujon d’Astros et al., 2024) by applying Crossley’s (2011) network-analytic vocabulary to the question of positionality. Through three vignettes drawn from 20 months of longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in an elite youth football academy, we show how access, disclosure and emotional labour were shaped by sedimented histories of interaction and structural intersections across overlapping small worlds. We argue that positionality is not a property the ethnographer carries into the field, but a configuration of ties produced and sustained across the worlds the ethnographer inhabits. The paper makes three specific contributions. Specifically, it applies Crossley’s (2011) theorising to positionality, it draws analytical attention to the ethnographer’s life beyond the field as structurally connected to the field, and it uses the empirical case of sports coaching research to demonstrate how dense, affective and morally charged occupational worlds make these networked dynamics particularly visible.
With a growing scholarship on post-industrialism, an ethnographic view about industrial mining industry in DR Congo remains largely absent. This article takes the immediate surroundings of an industrial mine, with its blast rhythm and chemical reagents that spill over from its boundaries, as an object of ethnographic attention. It investigates how exuding fumes create an everyday shaped by nervousness and shaping rumors. Drawing from the asymmetries of knowing that arise when living in toxic worlds, this article thinks with extractive landscapes through the notion of a sore. From this vantage point, rumors and accusations not only contextualize extraction, but keep geological sores open by refusing them from being sealed. This article tracks colonial attempts to ridden itself from sores to the cumulative deepening of extractive processes into postcolonial times in which hyper-industries and chemical proliferations are met with suspicions.
Based on an ethnography of a northern Chinese village, this article examines how collective action emerges amid social atomization and state dominance. Focusing on an entrepreneurial Party Secretary who bridged state bureaucracy, market capital, and village society, I analyze how he mobilized resources to break the deadlock of underdevelopment. Yet this process generated a paradoxical “politics of revitalization”: while delivering economic benefits, the model relied on strongman authority and cultivated a “coalition of the capable” that marginalized resource-poor households. I theorize this dynamic as “catalyzed commoning”—a mode of collective resource management engineered from above by local elites rather than emerging organically from below. By situating these dynamics within the broader state-market nexus, I argue that catalyzed commoning, while effective, ultimately reinforces a form of state-guided entrepreneurial governance that prioritizes efficiency over equity, offering critical insights into the paradoxical nature of elite-driven development in China and beyond.
Ethnographic studies of collective trauma often overlook the ways emotion surfaces beyond speech, in silences, atmospheres, and bodily cues. This paper introduces Emotion-as-Method (EAM), a layered ethnographic framework that treats emotion as both evidence and method, functioning simultaneously as an analytic framework for interpreting data and as a research approach practiced throughout fieldwork. EAM specifies six analytic constructs (mood and intensity, collective affect, safety and trust, shame and stigma, agency and disempowerment, and trauma responses) read across three layers: self-report, behavioral-linguistic, and contextual. The unit of analysis is the episode, a bounded moment where shifts in voice, posture, or atmosphere become analytically visible. Triangulating across layers distinguishes convergence and dissonance, revealing how trauma is lived, withheld, or transformed within wider infrastructures of memory and power. By formalizing these practices, EAM offers ethnographers a transferable scaffold that strengthens methodological rigor and expands how qualitative research can witness and interpret collective trauma.
This study examines how an ethnographer of education and biology teachers negotiate roles during collaborative fieldwork on SocioScientific Issues. Drawing on 8 months of classroom observation and co-design of teaching materials with two high school teachers, the study explores the researcher’s shifting positionality from observer to facilitator. Initially confronted with teachers’ requests for feedback, the researcher navigated tensions between observational distance and participants’ desire for professional input. These tensions were channeled into an action-oriented ethnographic approach grounded in relational curiosity—a reciprocal interest in each other’s expertise and development. This reflection shows how teacher-researcher collaboration not only supported the teachers’ self-efficacy but also fostered peer-led professional development. Rather than reproducing deficit models common in science education research, this article highlights collaborative ethnography as a means of enhancing teacher agency, enriching pedagogical reflection, and creating equitable research relationships grounded in trust and mutual learning.
Uneventful ethnography is an attempt to enable fieldworkers to capture social and spatial intentions in seemingly empty fields. Events in anthropology have often been framed through liminality to explain rituals, acts and routines across walks of life, where social order is ultimately restored. A Deleuzian view through actualisation instead points towards a future-oriented outlook, where fieldworkers are concerned with the emergence of new possibilities. Drawing on 5 months of fieldwork across Japan, especially in rural places attempting to attract digital nomads, I present three vignettes examining how cultural imaginaries are negotiated when no events are immediately available during fieldwork. Observations turn towards faint and stifled wishes and desires embedded in spaces, narratives and actions, shaped by external forces and expectations. Uneventful ethnography becomes a methodological tool through which fieldworkers attend to not yet actualised events. Seemingly empty fields remain laden with possibilities not yet materialised, but which may eventually occur.
This article takes Sulcis, a Sardinian ex-mining sub-region, as a case study, and aims to place it in a regional dimension, analyzing local attitudes and opposition to EU energy transition policies against a background of industrial and environmental crises. Here the Green Deal-promoted energy transitions taking place involve a whole industrial system of carbon-dependent and coal-fired steel processing, which is the target of a large national plan to convert it into a regional-scale platform for onshore and offshore wind farms. Focusing on local opposition, the article shows a new kind of case study, a transition still in progress, suggesting that spaces classified as peripheral in anthropological studies on energy are in fact new centers of transition. When discussing energy speculation, local opposition likens the mechanisms of landscape grabbing—or seascape grabbing—to land grabbing. Local opposition to mega wind farms is supported by a deeper political opposition, which questions the very legitimacy of European institutions to govern transitions at the local level. Different local temporalities are intertwined in this process, overlapping experiences of dispossession.
This paper reflects on the methodological challenges of studying uncomfortable otherness - otherness that is in tension with prevailing academic positions or that clashes with disciplinary approaches (by affecting the existence of diversities and minorities) - thus constituting uncommon objects of study in anthropology. In this case, I draw on my experience working with conservative and traditionalist Catholic sectors that participate in public life in various ways. Both my current research with those involved in politics and previous studies allow me to delve deeper into how Anthropology approaches (if indeed it does) uncomfortable otherness. Among other aspects, I expose the importance of reconstructing the interest on these otherness and the inputs and challenges that other researchers represent. This work aims to discuss the implications of this type of research for researchers as well as the necessary distance, the impact, strategies for access and engagement, and other issues involved in studying these objects.
The paper examines the methodological challenges of conducting ethnographic research in complex research settings underpinned by social inequalities and power relations. It analyses how the quests for validity and mutuality were undermined by recurrent doubts that saturated relationships with my interlocutors-displaced communities and individuals occupying positions of power in Delhi. By examining authorial voices and silences, as well as the prevailing fault lines, it highlights the issues of trust, surveillance, and the need to deploy guerrilla research techniques to circumvent authorial sanctions. It offers an understanding of the limits of a single ethnographer who became visible across various interconnected field sites by examining the dialectics of revealing and concealing, and highlights ethnography as an embodied, affectively structured, and uncontrollable experience grounded in chance and contingency, rather than a purely objectivist endeavor. Ethnographic intersubjective encounters unwittingly allow interlocutors to enact their fantasies, thereby deepening our understanding of prevailing social relations and necessitating that we approach ethical concerns in a processual manner in the field sites.
Blending discussion with ethnographic writing, this article examines repeated visits to a residence in Japan that functions as a space for events organized by migrants for migrants. Beyond the visible themes of these gatherings lie subtler processes through which the house becomes meaningful. The house is enlivened through storytelling and interactions with objects, practices that forge relatedness over time. These practices express the migrants' desire to belong with the host society. Yet belonging takes an unexpected form: the original owners with whom kinning unfolds are physically absent but experienced through material traces and imaginative engagement. Frequent references to the owners' affluence reveal another migrant aspiration: to be well off. The article conceptualizes this crafting of relatedness as "kinning-through-the-house," emphasizing its temporal dimension. It contributes to broader debates on kinning and belonging in migrant contexts by foregrounding the role of place in shaping social ties across time.
Images of ecological collapse, starvation, and genocide spill into my phone screen, often causing despair. Yet amid a blanket of destruction, despair, and apathy that fill my social media, I am also aware that people sustain life by caring for one another and initiating repairs of our fractured world. This essay reflects on such practices of care, repair, and world-making by turning to my field site in McLeod Ganj, northern India, where I conduct ethnographic research on multispecies relations. Through attention to local animal caregivers' everyday efforts of feeding, tending, and living with street animals, I argue that they rearticulate our understanding of ourselves, the nonhuman world, and our inevitable entanglements. Written during a time when it became increasingly difficult to separate my fieldwork from global violence and destruction unfolding elsewhere, this essay is an effort to think about and practice care and hope in an interdependent world.
This article examines how heritage is produced through labour at Waterloo Battlefield, Belgium. Drawing on 5 months of ethnography as an 'animator', I analyse how embodied performance and emotional display rules translate props, spaces and scripts into visitor experience. Findings show that animators' affective and physical performances are routinised as work amid seasonal, low-paid employment with limited voice in decision-making, while budget cuts shift costs onto frontline staff. Backstage work-cleaning, resetting and preparation-extends the day and remains largely invisible to visitors and management. To manage emotional dissonance, workers rely on surface acting; over time many experience fatigue, burnout and estrangement from the role. I conclude that heritage at Waterloo is manufactured through alienated emotional and bodily labour; recognising that heritage is made through labour is crucial for understanding how production and practice unfold on the ground in contemporary commodified heritage sites that prioritise visitor experience.
This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022-2024 with families from DR Congo, who have been resettled in Denmark since 2021 through the UNHCR-program. It draws on Sara Ahmed's concept of "orientation" - including disorientation and reorientation - to develop a new approach to conceptualizing and understanding newly arrived refugees' experiences with their new surroundings. In contrast to the deeply problematic concept of integration, we argue that the concept of orientation can illuminate power asymmetries and direct attention to how resettlement involves losing a sense of control with one's body, physical environment, time and space - but also how a new sense of direction and familiarity is gradually reestablished through families' own work of inhabitance. The concept of orientation thus paves the way for reorienting our analytical gaze towards the embodied, experiential, and messy dimensions of resettlement processes.
This article examines the social dynamics of Antarctic expeditions from the perspective of balance and moral debt. Based on 15 months of participant observation during the Dumont d'Urville's TA70 expedition, it shows how cohesion and reciprocity are essential for adaptation in conditions of extreme isolation. Disruptions to the balance, resulting from conflicts or external pressures, cause winterers to adopt compensatory strategies which, although stressful, also promote creativity and resilience. The study contrasts institutional and individual definitions of a "high-performing" crew, highlighting the relative nature of crew success. By analysing informal norms, group dynamics and lived experiences of hierarchy, this anthropological research contributes to interdisciplinary debates on isolated and confined environments. It offers insights into how humans maintain cooperation under duress, providing comparative perspectives that can inform resilience strategies in other extreme contexts.
This article investigates cultural continuity and change among the Mor & eacute; Indigenous people of the Lower Guapor & eacute; River in Bolivian Amazonia. Drawing on 21 months of cyclical fieldwork and immersive participant observation in two Mor & eacute; communities, it asks why core elements of Mor & eacute; sociality persist despite profound transformations in settlement patterns, material culture, and market integration. The study identifies conviviality- shared living and shared commensality creating group cohesion-and alterity-strategic engagement with outsiders-as dual mechanisms through which the Mor & eacute; selectively incorporate innovations while reproducing enduring social forms. Ethnography ilustrates how industrial clothing becomes a technology of social embodiment, how caiman-skin commerce reshapes subsistence while longstanding food taboos remain intact, and how household and kinship structures adapt to sedentarization without losing social force. By integrating Amazonian theories of sociality with attention to emerging cash economies and globalization pressures, this article contributes a nuanced account of indigenous agency in mediating tradition and transformation.
