This article places the concept of disaster in critical dialogue with that of the Anthropocene, which introduces new imaginaries that negatively affect the governance of crises like nuclear accidents. I argue that tropes surrounding the Anthropocene can depict certain events as apocalyptic calamities while also portraying other events as mere "incidents" that do not warrant such labeling. I explore how specific narratives around the Anthropocene legitimize some forms of environmental harm as more important than other threats. This process creates a hierarchization of catastrophes and normalizes certain hazards as less important than others. More specifically, I claim that the very concept of a nuclear catastrophe is at risk of "disappearing" within the Anthropocene. Using ethnographic data based on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which happened in Japan, I focus on three popular tropes associated with the Anthropocene that normalize the consequences of nuclear accidents: the figure of the global threat, the disappearance of the idea of pristine nature, and the promotion of resilience and adaptation to new realities. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of how Anthropocene discourse shapes which disasters matter and which are relegated to the status of distant, forgettable accidents.
In the gold-mining town of Kwekwe, central Zimbabwe, injury and death are a constant presence. Collapsing shafts, sudden explosions, gang fights, and neglected health infrastructure characterize the everyday lives of the town's impoverished residents. This article, based on ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 in Zimbabwe's artisanal and small-scale mining regions, examines how young miners, their families, and township communities navigate a landscape where untimely deaths and near misses shape political subjectivity and reveal broader modes of state power. By examining how the state and its local enforcers respond to devastation in impoverished communities-and how these communities endure and interpret such recurring losses-the article shows that negligence is not just an absence but an active political repertoire. It contributes to anthropological debates on crisis, necropolitics, and state sovereignty in mineral-extraction frontiers by showing how authority persists less through outright domination than through calibrated neglect: a mode of rule in which timely intervention is withheld, and the state reemerges selectively during moments of injury, death, or mourning to absorb loss as a political occasion.
This essay is about the harm that is committed in the name of care. More specifically, it is about student requests for support during the ongoing genocide in Palestine and an anthropology department's use and weaponization of the language of "care" to do the exact opposite: to cause harm. I examine how the language of care for students and the exception of Palestine are weaponized by administrators-including anthropologists-to silence and shut down conversations about, and support for, Palestine. I demonstrate how the "permission to narrate" stems from certain methods of attention that speak to the university's alignment with settler colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Palestinian racism, even as the university officially acknowledges settler land relations and shares statements about "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" (DEI). Indeed, such acts of care are often based on the condition that settler-colonial and capitalist relations remain unchanged-that colonial whiteness remains unchanged-and any attempts to unsettle these liberal, institutional-settler relations will be met with purposeful occlusion and harm.
In Himachal Pradesh, India, village deities act as political figures who play an active role in communal affairs, especially during periods of social change. Bakhan , an annual divination ritual in which these deities speak through human mediums, is a public event that offers forecasts and instructions. I argue that the bakhan is a social arena in which divine authority is publicly enacted and made answerable to communal judgment. Drawing on ethnographic research, I develop the concept of “performative accountability” to show how prophetic claims gain force through a process in which they are voiced, interpreted, increasingly questioned, and measured against subsequent events. Divine authority, I argue, does not rest on revelation alone but takes shape through ongoing relations of recognition and response between gods and villagers. The bakhan reveals a form of authority sustained through public scrutiny rather than being insulated from it.
