The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) manages Pakistan's biometric‐based national identity database, one of the largest identification systems of its kind in the world. This article examines bureaucratic practices used during identity registration to record ‘vital events’ in the lives of citizens: birth, marriage, divorce, and death. Through an ethnographic study of NADRA's Identity Registration Centre in Islamabad, it illustrates how Pakistan's identification system uses vital events to create ‘vital relations’ by linking individuals to their next of kin. It argues that the way citizens negotiate vital event registration reveals the dynamic nature of kinship, both lived and datafied, as kin relations are continually reconstructed within the identity database. The system does so by drawing lines of descent from both parents according to a cognatic logic in order to establish individual identity. This cognatic logic represents a shift in longstanding modes of recording kinship by both the Pakistani state and the colonial state that preceded it. This article illuminates the multi‐faceted implications of such a shift, delineating how ordinary citizens navigate their datafied kin networks alongside their lived relations at the Registration Centre.
What does it take to turn a tool into a talking tool and that into an ultimate authority? Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in its diverse forms, such as large language models (LLMs), is celebrated as a useful tool. But LLM‐based conversational agents, or chatbots, the software applications through which ordinary users are likely to engage with LLMs on a regular basis, can seem, for many, to harbour uncanny insights or transcendental knowledge whose sources are inexplicable – resembling what Marshall Sahlins called ‘metahumans’. The temptation to treat chatbots as metahuman is just an extreme case of a more general process. The inferences that chatbot users draw about GenAI's human or superhuman properties arise in part from the apps' role as an interlocutor in social interaction. Their authority draws on the pragmatics and semiotics of speech. Much as a prophet embodies and legitimates the authority of divinity, so chatbots can endow the profit‐seeking strategies of their corporate owners with a supernatural aura. That such effects can seem intuitively real is, in part, because humans and metahumans address one another on semiotically unequal grounds.
This reflection on the themed cluster of articles on linguistic anthropology and AI addresses what social anthropologists might wish to know about the linguistic anthropological analytical toolkit when turning to large language models (LLMs) as objects of analysis. In particular, this afterword discusses what agency might be understood to be when the scholarly attention is focused largely on how people use communicative repertoires to accomplish complex social tasks with others. Building on how linguistic anthropologists understand human semiosis, the article makes apparent how human communicative agency differs from the communicative agency expressed by LLMs.
Russia is consistently a top migration destination. While most migrate to Russia from other post‐Soviet countries, a small but highly visible group of the Russian‐speaking diaspora has returned from Europe and North America. Lauded in Russian media as ‘ideological migrants’, their narratives at first glance echo those of the state as they claim to flee liberalism and seek freedom. Drawing on ethnographic encounters with some of these migrants in Russia and the United States since 2014, this article examines how disillusionment and geopolitical imaginaries intersect with transnational circulations of the far right to motivate migration. Through two case studies of men returning from the West, this article conceptualizes their migration as a form of moral migration, an ethical alignment of where one lives with one's values. Ethnographic attention to moral migration has implications for understanding how individuals weigh factors beyond economic and political calculations to plan their migration and to address growing disillusionment worldwide with cultural and political liberalism.
This short introduction contextualizes the three articles assembled for this special feature on Cuban anthropology by placing them against the backdrop of the precarious political and economic position in which Cuba finds itself at present. This raises questions as to how far and in what ways the kinds of phenomena and analyses put forward in the three articles in this section may serve as the basis for understanding the radical shifts in Cuban society that may lie ahead. The introduction ends with some reflections on the present and future prospects of anthropological institutions within Cuba itself.
