"Gentrification," or population displacement due to rapid increases in real estate values, is becoming a major agent of socioeconomic change in many places around the world. We use the recent history of the Pyrenees to discuss the notion of gentrification. Turning our gaze to rural gentrification processes makes it possible to advance the analysis and theorization of gentrification more broadly. Using the Pyrenees as a research context, we identify three types of rural gentrification: slow gentrification (a gradual and dispersed process of change), fast gentrification (due to a sudden change in the local socioeconomic context), and hypergentrification (when a place that is already experiencing fast gentrification becomes the target of global economic pressures). In the Pyrenees, the intensity and pace of the different processes of gentrification have become important markers for understanding how all of them contribute to radically transforming, in different ways, the local socioeconomic networks.
The global microentrepreneurship boom is built on the promise of new material benefits and self-transformation. Drawing on experiences and reflections of microentrepreneurs from urban Chile, we examine the effects of this phenomenon by focusing on the emergence of the ethical entrepreneur as a figure embodying the ideal of individual freedom as much as a new sense of responsibility toward others. While reflecting neoliberal principles of self-accountability and the entrepreneurialization of society, the development of entrepreneurial ethics offers a means for the articulation of solidarity networks in response to economic and affective precariousness. Ethical self-making in microentrepreneurship is an open-ended process that does not exhaust itself with the achievement of an existing ethical objective but rather unfolds through the constant adjustment of ethical and material aspirations. Among microentrepreneurs, the middle class is conceptualized as an ideal existential condition for the development of ethical and material aspirations and their difficult balance.
This article investigates the role of the young, savvy, bilingual, often literate Indigenous Amazonian men who assume broker-like functions in interethnic relations and Indigenous interactions with state agencies. In Brazil, the currently popular term for them is "leaderships." While these figures are increasingly conspicuous, they remain largely undertheorized. We propose that, far from being alien ideas imported into Indigenous politics by state-level forms of governing, the sorts of roles that leaderships fulfill are central to Indigenous Amazonian theories of the person of power and the capacity to mediate between apparently insurmountable poles. In particular, we focus on how Indigenous Amazonian peoples conceive of exceptional individuals, particularly those who display great power, despite their young age, and whose exceptionality is remarkable.
A small liberal arts college provides the context for the proliferation of justice-oriented pedagogy. Yet what exactly is learned through such pedagogical practices? How do students apply their learning about inequality and social change? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with racially marked students, I argue that justice-focused pedagogy responsibilizes these students to adopt an activist identity in pursuit of their own vision of good studenthood. This notion of good studenthood is defined by engaging in publicly legible, justice-focused work, yet it also leads young people to evade critical analysis of the very meaning of politics.
This article explores the informal employment of Chinese tour guides in Morocco, examining their motivations, career dilemmas, and the broader dynamics of transnational informal labor. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, it identifies a central paradox: While guides value the autonomy, flexibility, and cultural adventure of their work, they also view it as unsustainable and illegitimate. I frame this tension as a negotiation between "elsewhereness"-the pursuit of freedom and self-reinvention-and "hereness"-the struggle for socioeconomic security and legitimacy. Integrating Bourdieu's (1977, 1986) practice theory, Graeber's (2001) insights on value, and Dialogical Self Theory, this study moves beyond the state-centric perspective of informality to examine how informal actors navigate social and self-expectations and demonstrate how informality enables identity experimentation, cultural reinvention, and ambivalent self-positioning. This research enriches anthropological debates on job precarity in the global tourism industry, reframing informality as a morally and culturally embedded negotiation of value in a globalizing economy.
