ABSTRACT This article argues that hunting is not a bounded event but a materially redistributed atmosphere that extends beyond the kill and across field, truck, clothing, and home. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with wild boar hunters in Uruguay, I show how mud, odors, blood, and bodily residues carry the sensory, affective, and material force of tracking, waiting, and pursuit into domestic space. Rather than treating this continuity as merely phenomenological or symbolic, I explain how it is materially reproduced through adhesive, persistent, and indexical substances that bind bodies, vehicles, dogs, and households into the hunt's ongoing life. I develop the concept of atmospheric modulation to describe how these substances reorganize relations across spaces and times. In doing so, the article reframes hunting as a pervasive more‐than‐human practice and contributes to anthropological debates on materiality, residues, traces, and the social life of substances.
ABSTRACT This article theorizes weaving as an epistemological orientation and methodological practice for collaborative anthropology and Indigenous‐led conservation. Based on nearly two decades of partnership in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, between an Indigenous fisheries scientist and a settler anthropologist, we examine how biocultural revitalization is produced through embodied relational labor rather than technocratic governance. Focusing on the revitalization of Vala , an ancestral socio‐spiritual marine practice, alongside stone fish traps, community schools, and biocultural protocols, we argue that Indigenous conservation constitutes a form of sovereignty grounded in kinship, ritual authority, and multispecies relations. Weaving, we suggest, is not merely metaphorical but analytic: It names the labor through which knowledge, power, accountability, and care are interlaced over time, including moments of friction, unraveling, and repair. This perspective challenges dominant models of coproduction that presume consensus, scalability, or extractive research design. Instead, we conceptualize collaboration as kin making and ethical world building within landscapes shaped by colonial dispossession, environmental precarity, and legal pluralism. The article contributes to debates in political ecology, the anthropology of knowledge, and decolonial methodology by demonstrating how biocultural futures are not implemented but woven through enduring relations with land, sea, and ancestors.
ABSTRACT Place‐names in Indigenous languages have long been researched as indices of multidimensional layers of knowledge in, and connections to, Indigenous territories. This paper discusses new research on the place‐names of La̱xg̱a̱ltsˈa̱p, a sacred watershed of the Gitḵˈaˈata (Gitgaˈat First Nation), a Smˈalgya̱x‐speaking people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. These names are best understood when seen through an Indigenous lens by people with lived knowledge of the culture and landscape to which these names belong. We look closely at the literal meanings and linguistic patterns of these names in Smˈalgya̱x, and how they align with familiar semantic categories described in the long tradition of place‐name research. Furthermore, with an emphasis on the first author's lived experience as a Gitḵˈaˈata person, we also foreground the limits of these categories and the value of extending ethnographic analysis to include firsthand cultural knowledge. We describe how place‐names can be understood as part of an intergenerational conversation between the landscape and its human inhabitants. Smˈalgya̱x place‐names fit into the broader structure of ancestral knowledge, and this knowledge is a social tool for navigating cultural context in physical and temporal dimensions. Incorporating Indigenous methodologies brings rigor and strength to ethnographic research on place‐names while ensuring that the research benefits community goals alongside academic purposes.
Following the launch of my new book on Pierre Bourdieu's anthropological theory, someone asked me how I had it in me to devote time to writing a theoretical work amid the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In this essay, I reflect on this question by looking back at the tensions and reflections that animated me as I was finishing my book.
Quitting tends to be overlooked in studies of resistance and labor because of its individual and private character, its ineffectiveness in changing conditions of labor, and the difficulty of studying it, in favor of more organized and public protests and strikes. This paper examines why quitting is so popular among African immigrant home care workers in the United States, arguing that exit was attuned to the diffuse power relations of fissured workplaces in which home care workers care for individual clients through the mediation of brokering agencies. Quitting was not entirely individualized and private, as it became a collective strategy nurtured through circulating stories and a widely shared worldview of anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In exploring the complexity, possibilities, and limitations of quitting, I point to the continuum of modes and degrees of resistance, rather than compartmentalizing some as private and some as public. The variability in the degree of privacy and individuation makes these forms of maneuver in relation to diffuse power adaptive to different degrees of scaling up and organizing. As anthropologists attend to the dynamism of resistance in relation to power, they should not overlook the phenomenon of quitting.
"Evocations" are frequently mentioned in anthropological accounts of art and artistic production, but the particular efficacy of the term for anthropological inquiry has not been considered in significant depth. This article argues that a theory of "evocations" has the potential to enrich not just anthropological considerations of art, but examinations of aesthetics and sensory perception as well. It offers a conception of evocations as contextually specific resonances between the sensuous texture of things and the socially produced sense-memories that are felt by those things' perceivers. Such a conception allows for encultured understandings of aesthetic perception that extend beyond those most prevalent in "Western" thought while still offering a framework for the generalized analysis, through close ethnographic investigation, of such resonances and their political significances. This article highlights the efficacy of both evocations and their close examination by documenting some of the many ways that rugby performances in South Africa have evoked the country's political history. By focusing on rugby in this way, this article demonstrates how "evocation" invites a recognition of the aesthetic politics entailed in domains of social life-like sports-that are richly evocative but are not conventionally analyzed in conjunction with conceptions of art.
ABSTRACT This special section emerges from the first European conference on race and reproduction, held in Paris in 2023. It examines how colonial legacies, racial hierarchies, and racism shape maternal and reproductive health outcomes for Black populations across Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. Moving beyond the dominant US‐centric framework in the literature, the collection draws on theoretical analysis and ethnographic research to document racial disparities in pregnancy, childbirth, fertility care, and reproductive rights in contexts including the United Kingdom, Portugal, South Africa, Cape Verde, Brazil, and Canada. Key theoretical contributions include the concepts of “uneven reproduction,” “obstetric racism,” and an intersectional framework of agency that resists portraying Black birthing people as passive victims. Together, the essays advance a decolonial approach to medical anthropology that situates reproductive injustice within broader histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and population governance.
The creation of critical research spaces, such as ethnography labs, studios, and other collaborative research environments, requires attention and attunement in anthropology to focus on the kinds of imaginative and generative spaces where creative ethnographic research can unfold as scholarship. This article reflects on the recent design, construction, and implementation process of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO), serving as an argument that an ethnography lab is a scholarly apparatus for the experimental, the imaginary, and the relational. While this critical research space situates sensory ethnography as its methodological orientation, as a lab, it also foregrounds how digital and analog tools feature in collaborations with infrastructure and field research through processes of experimentation and prototyping with the lab as an apparatus while attending to policy, people, and the imaginary. This article argues that creating a research lab in anthropology is scholarship.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the recent deployment of sheep and grazing practices by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The wave of herding outposts that has swept through the West Bank recently involves the use of Jewish-owned sheep to undermine and dispossess Palestinians and to re-indigenize the settlers in their place. The sheep have thus become potent yet clandestine agents of control as well as animated technologies for producing, instilling, and normalizing biblical and spiritual imaginaries of the landscape and of the Jewish people as authentically belonging to it. Backed by the state, the settlers' mundane shepherding activities have already enabled the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. My article contemplates this new "shepherding revolution," as the settlers call it, situating it amid sheep-related practices in other settler colonial contexts and vis-a-vis shepherding in the state's early years. Ultimately, I argue that studying Jewish shepherds in the West Bank expands our understanding of settler colonialism and illuminates how sheepwashing practices that position settlers as ecopastoralists are used to justify violence in the eyes of the occupying regime, exacerbating the problematic settler ecologies practiced here.
