Some 30 years after the popularization of the ‘social brain hypothesis’, this commentary takes a multispecies lens to highlight the catalytic role that ectoparasites have played in the evolution of grooming and, by extension, potentially in humanly organized multimodal communication. Predators and foraging helped draw our ancestors into groups, but lice and other parasites applied a more intimate pressure, compelling tactile care. If grooming began as a response to parasites, became pleasurable before it became symbolic, and gossip later replaced grooming in larger groups, then the origins of language may be more relational and ecological than previously assumed. This speculative intervention suggests that even our most celebrated capacities may be rooted in interspecies entanglements. A multispecies perspective on human evolution reminds us that the story was never just human, and never just one story. What we know of the human is incomplete if we only know humans.
Industrial expansion in Ethiopia has positioned cement production as central to national development, yet its local environmental and bodily consequences remain under‐explored. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2023‐July 2024) in Kuyu district, this article examines how the Kuyu Cement Factory reshapes everyday life through dust, odours and environmental degradation. Residents describe coughing as part of daily existence, alongside impacts on health, livestock and crop production, while the surrounding landscape is frequently obscured by dust and smoke. Factory workers report prolonged exposure with limited protection. The article argues that industrial pollution is experienced not only as environmental harm but also as a transformation of sensory and embodied life. Crops lose colour, livestock show respiratory distress and visibility declines as emissions spread, while dust and odours reshape spatial orientation. These experiences reveal exposure as a shared atmospheric condition linking humans, animals and environments.
Jonathan Marks reads the committee's report on the humanities as an uncredited rehash of the 1990s science wars, a familiar quarrel with the academic left dressed as a defence of knowledge. Rather than rebut it point by point, he sets out ten propositions about human sameness and difference that anthropology has pressed on the comfortable since the 1870s. Much of what feels natural is a product of history rather than biology. Race marks politically relevant groups misrepresented as natural kinds. Human thought is symbolic and linguistic in a way ape thought is not. And one may be an ape and yet, in reading this, certainly human. Anthropology unsettles every generation, he argues, which is precisely why reactionaries find it threatening.
Writing amid sustained attacks on the academy, from terminated grants and the mandated removal of gender and race content to a commissioned report questioning anthropology's rigour, Agustín Fuentes asks what the discipline should do now. His answer is to do more anthropology, and to do it together. He identifies three avenues. Teaching counters the delegitimation of knowledge. Collaboration counters the isolation and defunding of scholars. And the recognition of new modes of scholarship counters the narrowing of what is allowed to count. Against a politics that drives inequality, oppression and hopelessness, he argues that anthropology offers grounded, evidence‐based hope, and that the discipline should use it more forcefully, intentionally and communally.
Drawing on ethnographic research in a South African care facility, this editorial explores grace as both an analytical concept and practical resource for navigating difficult encounters in end‐of‐life care settings. The author demonstrates how staff and residents use grace — understood as temporary acceptance rather than moral absolution — to manage racial tensions, workplace adversity and ethical uncertainty. Grace functions as a survival strategy that enables coexistence across divides without requiring affection or approval. The piece argues that grace offers anthropologists and care practitioners a framework for understanding how people cope with structural violence and interpersonal conflict in institutional settings.
When Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution, members of his elite network issued public statements disavowing him. Read against the private emails subsequently released, those statements function as what Nicholas Tavuchis terms accounts, dressed in apologetic vocabulary. Drawing on Marcel Mauss, this article argues that the obligations binding elites to Epstein, and Epstein in turn to figures such as Leon Black, made genuine disavowal costly. The article introduces the concept of the ‘brand repair apology’ as a defensive manoeuvre rooted in the contemporary anthropology of branding. Epstein's own attempt at brand repair, through manipulation of search results and Wikipedia entries, was thwarted by an investigative journalist and a community of unpaid volunteer editors determined that a powerful man should not rewrite his own history.
This editorial examines the divergence between American and Chinese artificial intelligence development from an anthropological perspective. It argues that American AI remains trapped in first‐order Cybernetics, treating intelligence as data processing, while Chinese systems such as DeepSeek have moved closer to the second‐order Cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster, which conceived intelligence as generative and meaning‐creating. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of Sinhalese exorcism rituals, the editorial demonstrates the autopoietic character of human intelligence: its emergence through embodied, participatory self‐production. AI systems are allopoietic, producing outputs but not themselves, and this ontological divide cannot be crossed. However, through conversational architectures that couple machine processing to human participation, it can be bridged. Anthropology, present at the founding of cybernetics, offers essential resources for understanding what is at stake as humanity approaches a threshold in its technological self‐invention.
This article offers a real-time ethnographic analysis of why Israel's massive anti-government protest movement has hitherto failed to unseat Netanyahu's coalition despite widespread criticism from his own voters. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among working-class Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent) who ambivalently support Netanyahu, it shows how they condemn government failures - especially following Hamas' 7 October 2023 attack - yet refuse to join the protesters, whom they feel treat them with disdain. Their reflections reveal that opposition efforts do not falter primarily over policy disagreements but over perceived symbolic and social exclusion, the refusal to recognize the political legitimacy of working-class Mizrahim and their sensibilities. Unusually, these supporters offer concrete advice on how - and how not - to challenge right-wing 'populist' politics, guidance that has implications for understanding the conditions sustaining the Gaza war and for opposition movements elsewhere.
As Lahore choked under record smog levels in October-November 2024, the city's third Biennale showcased environmental art addressing, inter alia, air pollution, water scarcity and river degradation. This ethnographic account examines the gap between the Biennale's interventionist ambitions and its limited political agency. Drawing on participant observation, the author analyzes how Biennale artworks created immersive experiences that aligned with Lahore's acute environmental crises through respiratory, aquatic and fluvial themes. Yet this aesthetic engagement coexisted with 'zombie environmentalism' - instances where elite environmentalists and others aestheticized environmental destruction while remaining detached from both the crisis and possibilities for action. The study argues that the Biennale's transformative potential is doubly constrained by art's autonomy as a field and by the classist insularity of its organizers. The study reveals how spectacular environmental art events in the Global South can powerfully engage local crises yet fail to generate deeper political mobilization.
This article examines a significant discrepancy between Clifford Geertz's published account of his fieldwork experience in Bali and his original fieldnotes. The analysis focuses on the famous opening scene of 'Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight', where Geertz describes fleeing from a police raid with villagers - an incident he portrays as transforming him from an ignored outsider into an accepted insider. By comparing previously unavailable fieldnotes from both Clifford and Hildred Geertz with the published narrative, the author reveals substantial contradictions in the timeline, events and their aftermath. The fieldnotes show no evidence of the initial 'awayness' period or subsequent 'euphoric embrace' that Geertz described, suggesting he significantly reimagined the event when writing his essay 14 years later. This discovery raises important questions about ethnographic authority; the relationship between field experiences and published accounts; and the increasingly blurred boundaries between anthropology and literature. The article concludes by reflecting on the ethical implications of Geertz's narrative choices and their influence on contemporary anthropological writing.
This paper examines recent transnational engagements between the Tai Ahom of Assam, India, and the Shan of Myanmar, focusing on efforts to build new affinities between these groups. Drawing on ethnographic research from the First International Tai Youth Festival in January 2025, it traces how Shan participants sought to revive Tai Ahom culture through language instruction, ritual knowledge and performance, positioning themselves as the cultural origin point of the Tai world. This 'civilizing mission' expresses both a desire to restore what they see as lost Tai-ness and to elevate Shan cultural authority within a broader imagined Tai alliance. For the Tai Ahom, such exchanges are part of an 'Ahom looks East' movement, a cultural revival that also challenges Hindu nationalist pressures. By asserting Tai identity over Hinduized assimilation, they construct an alternative belonging based on transnational kinship. These interactions reflect a wider contemporary trend of alliances rooted in affinity & horbar; relationships often described as 'renewed', though more accurately imagined or invented.
As ancient DNA (aDNA) science enters a new phase of computational and institutional power, what should social scientists and humanities scholars focus on? This article identifies questions that examine the relationships between scientists, research participants, communities and publics, and how these groups engage with, appropriate or resist palaeogenomic accounts of the past. We outline four areas for research: the social relations underlying data generation, interpretation and dissemination; community engagement beyond harm-centred ethical frameworks; the diverse publics with stakes in aDNA science; and the politics of constructing genetic pasts, both deep and recent. This agenda is designed to engage with researchers and communities finding new ways to narrate pasts, presents and futures through genetic science.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Katohori, a village in northern Greece, this article explores how religion, healing and well-being practices intersected in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on intergenerational responses to the pandemic crisis and its aftermath, highlighting, on the one hand, how younger villagers adopted conspiracy narratives and merged Orthodox idioms with conspiratorial and anti-secular rhetorics while, on the other hand, older female villagers, usually perceived as spiritually inelastic, engaged in transreligious practices of therapeutic pluralism. Using the symbolic metaphors of candles and microchips to represent the different generations accordingly, the article examines how vernacular forms of religiosity and transreligious epistemologies are shaped, negotiated and transformed. A small northern Greek village emerges as a site of cosmological negotiation that challenges stereotypical representations of rural religiosity in southern Europe, revealing how crisis reshapes religious identity and therapeutic creativity in dynamic, unexpected ways.
This article examines the concept of 'medical Mediterraneanisms' through the case of a chapel-cum-multifaith space featuring artist Michelangelo Pistoletto's m & egrave;tre cube de l'infini in Marseille's Paoli-Calmettes Institute for cancer care. The installation materializes tensions between secularism and pluralistic religious practice in end-of-life settings within France's Republican framework. Drawing on ethnographic observations, testimonies and visitor responses documented in the livre d'or (guestbook), the article argues that this space embodies both compromise and provocation, navigating Marseille's postcolonial demographics while challenging rigid secular-religious binaries. Pistoletto's m & egrave;tre cube, used primarily by Muslims and Catholics, creates an alternative temporal and spatial framework that accommodates religious expression within ostensibly secular medical institutions.
