ABSTRACT: This article advances ecological violence as a theory to describe multiple forms of violence along the Rio Grande in the El Paso, Texas-Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua borderlands. Ecological violence denotes a modality of violence entangling people, more-than-human beings, and the enlivened places they co-produce. This concept complements other theories of violence applied in the US-Mexico border context while insisting that structural harm tethers to land-and-water relations, discursive erasures, and white settler colonialism. I ground these claims in ethnographic research conducted along the Rio Grande in 2024. Fieldwork included multiple longform interviews with a key interlocutor at Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo—a tribe whose ceremonial relationships with the river have been obstructed by the border wall and other infrastructures of exclusion and surveillance—as well as participant engagement with first responders and migrant advocacy groups. In 2024, the El Paso Sector became the deadliest zone for migrants along the entire US-Mexico border, with drowning a leading cause of deaths. These drownings occur as the US has hardened the border, drawing the Rio Grande's waters into a series of lethal, moat-like canals. This article thus argues that building the border entails a gradual killing of the river, as well as the disruption of Indigenous lifeways and systematized migrant deaths—all of which illustrate ecological violence's presence in the borderlands.
ABSTRACT: "Kashmiri militant" has been a historically opaque, shape-shifting figure in the Indian nationalist imagination. Represented as a threatening symbolic impurity within the national body politic, the Kashmiri militant is seen variously as dangerously nihilistic, nonpolitical, and incomprehensibly violent; impressionable yet uncompromisingly death-deserving; and embodying an unassimilable Muslim masculinity (in contrast to a desirable Kashmiri femininity). In the visual culture of the Indian occupation in Kashmir, police and military photographers circulate pictures of dead Kashmiri militants, disheveled and bloodied with torn clothes and limbs out of joint, presenting them as wild, hunted felons. For Kashmiris, however, who mourn and memorialize their death, the Kashmiri militant is a polyvalent personhood narrated as bridegroom, child, lover, saint, warrior, and martyr. Based on visual counterculture centered on and inaugurated by Burhan Wani, a young militant whose death led to weeks-long protests in 2016, this article examines the political lives and afterlives of the figure of the "militant" in Kashmir. Situating Wani's images within the broader history of violence against Kashmiri bodies, the article argues that the "Kashmiri militant," as a spectral presence in the Indian colonial-nationalist imagination and as an embodiment of moral resistance to Indian control in Kashmiri memory, defies a neat conceptualization of which bodies deserve humanistic consideration. I argue that the militant body as death-deserving is the effect of how the Indian state symbolically and violently polices the borders of nationalism and humanity, as well as of the liberal calculus of innocence and guilt.
ABSTRACT: There has been a major change in anthropology and related disciplines that has curiously received little attention. Until about 1960, many of the best anthropology books and articles had no bibliography. Today, a single journal article might cite one hundred references. The academics who think citation is a problem generally argue for citing more, especially by taking into consideration the authors' identities. But citation-centric writing changes how we think. It makes us insular and afraid; it speeds the decline of empirical truth and the rise of theory-as-truth; and it prevents us from experiencing the joy and discovery that have been among our field's hallmark contributions. RÉSUMÉ: Un changement majeur s'est opéré en anthropologie et dans les disciplines connexes, lequel a, curieusement, suscité peu d'attention. Jusqu'aux environs de 1960, bon nombre des meilleurs ouvrages et articles d'anthropologie ne comportaient aucune bibliographie. Aujourd'hui, un simple article de revue peut citer une centaine de références. Les universitaires qui perçoivent la pratique de la citation comme un problème plaident généralement pour une citation plus abondante, en veillant tout particulièrement à prendre en compte l'identité des auteurs. Or, une écriture centrée sur la citation modifie notre façon de penser. Elle nous rend insulaires et craintifs; elle accélère le déclin de la vérité empirique au profit de la « théorie érigée en vérité »; et elle nous prive de cette joie et de ce sentiment de découverte qui figurent parmi les contributions emblématiques de notre discipline.
ABSTRACT: Based on long-term ethnographic research among Roma/Gitano Pentecostal communities in Madrid, Spain, this article examines how Pentecostal Gitano men articulate their moral engagement and struggles within the urban context. It provides an ethnographic account of how rhetoric, archetypes, and references to storytelling—including biblical Christian gendered principles and prevailing heteronormative notions of manliness in barrios—shape the construction of urban Gitano masculinities. The article contributes to the expanding literature on the intersection of masculinity and Christianity, specifically investigating how public expressions of masculine piety and virtue relate to urban experiences, ethics, and reflexivity. Rather than merely documenting behavioral changes, the analysis centers on how Spanish Pentecostal Gitano men narrate profound transformations in their relationships with other Gitano men, their inner emotional lives, and the urban environments they inhabit, following spiritually transformative encounters with the Holy Spirit. A substantial portion of Pentecostal Gitano narratives concerning moral cultivation and masculine moral behavior is articulated through holistic Christian concepts such as los frutos del Espiritu Santo (the fruits of the Holy Spirit). Specific fruits, including amor (love), docilidad (gentleness or docility), and dominio propio (self-control), serve as key idioms that render moral cultivation intelligible, meaningful, and valued within communitarian and institutional Gitano contexts. This article advances scholarship on urban religious masculinities by analyzing how dominant cultural stereotypes inform the construction of Christian public personae in settings characterized by asymmetric cultural power relations, and by linking the emergence of masculine moral and redemptive themes to Christian moral apologetic traditions that emphasize Christianity's potential to reconstitute social orders and generate societal benefits through the proliferation of Christian churches.
ABSTRACT: This article explores the tension between mystical prayer and immutable, ritual speech. The tension derives from the fact that mysticism resists linguistic formulation. In the context of embodied, psychosomatic prayer, long-term fieldwork shows what brings about the efficacy of such petition. "Felt" intimacy with God is a slow process and is aided by "sincerity" and "embodying the word"; "sincerity" comes about through the pointedness of the intentionality conveyed by the words. As a public-private practice, the Jesus Prayer keeps crossing boundaries between ritual, everyday socialization, and hesychastic isolation. It is this permeability which makes it such a compelling ethnographic study. Such research clarifies the relationship between repetitive, conventionalized acts of piety and its effects on the supplicant because it shows that language is not diminished by formalization or repetition as has previously been implied.
