Doing time in prison is a common experience for many young people from Portugal's economically disadvantaged urban peripheries. Prison conditions are harsh and sentences are long, particularly for drug and property offences. This article discusses the simultaneously individual and collective nature of prison life, and how inmates cope with a hostile environment that threatens their emotional and physical integrity. Traditional models of prison culture are inadequate to describe Portuguese prison society: it is only to a limited extent the result of prisoners adapting to the deprivations experienced inside, and it has little to do with supposed criminal subcultures imported from the outside. Instead, prison in Portugal has become just another venue for the ongoing struggle of marginalised citizens who seek to maintain a modicum of personal agency under adverse circumstances. The article argues that inmate culture in Portugal converges with a generalised culture of marginality, spawned by the late-liberal segregation of undesirable identities in suburban socioscapes spurned by dominant society.
In recent years, Coptic Orthodox youth in Mississauga, Canada, have been increasingly privileging SoundCloud over other digital platforms for recording, sharing, creating and curating Coptic devotional sound. This paper will argue that SoundCloud has enabled Coptic youth to more readily occupy the dual position of listener and creator, constitutive of their aesthetic formation in Mississauga, wherein the processes of forming are evident in their listening and creative practices of Coptic devotional sound, and in turn, contour how Orthodox sensibilities and public piety are cultivated in unique ways. In particular, Coptic youth's listening and creative practices cannot be easily disentangled from each other, and collectively shape the 'sonorous worlds' of their Coptic community. Beyond this, Coptic youth's creative practices embody a creativity that emulates 'the everyday', emphasises improvisation and gestures towards creative continuity within tradition rather than rupture, particularly within Orthodox Christian worlds.
This article uses an assemblage approach to anthropological studies of land dispossession caused by extractive operations. It shows how the Bismarck-Ramu group (BRG), an Indigenous non-governmental organisation (NGO), opposed a Chinese mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by organising a campaign known as 'graun i laip' ('land is life'). This article, inspired by Tania Li's theory of an assemblage study on racialised land politics in Indonesia, demonstrates how BRG's campaign reflects an assemblage through six stages, including forging alliances, challenging the corporate and government development discourses based on racial extractivism, empowering Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty through storytelling, rendering political by demonstrating ontological conflicts, overcoming oppositions and threats, and reassembling. This article adds to Li's theory of assemblage by illustrating how BRG's campaign reflects its objectives of rendering land dispossession political, in contrast to the Chinese state capital's tendency to depoliticise environmental destruction and render it technical.
This article examines how Bitcoin circulates in Kenya not primarily as a speculative asset, but as a technology of imagination embedded in everyday socio-economic and political struggles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Bitcoin educators, and activists in Nairobi, the article traces how cryptocurrencies become meaningful through practices of teaching, rituals, and political protests. It shows how Kenyan Bitcoiners enter the crypto space through experiences of scams and loss, yet reframe these encounters as moments of learning and political awakening. Situating these practices within broader debates on sociotechnical imaginaries and the social life of money, the article argues that Bitcoin's significance lies in its indeterminacy, its capacity to be translated into ideas of autonomy, repair, and decolonisation.
This article explores the conditions of scaling in maritime shipping based on ethnographic research in Mersin (Turkey) - host to a privatised, Singaporean-administered port. Mersin is a historical confluence for small-scale logistics providers, who connect hinterland industrialists to the port, while absorbing the occasional shocks to trade on their clients' behalf. In that, they draw on a diverse repertoire of resources, from family connections to language skills to equipment access, all of which the locals broadly refer to as the city's 'logistics culture'. Exploring this emic concept ethnographically, I argue that these providers' small size, transient nature, and lack of collective voice allow the port, the regional custodian of shipping, to receive an outsized and growing share of the city's overall revenue from maritime shipping. For anthropologists, there is a renewed opportunity in this interpretation of culture to better grasp how the small make way for the big in contemporary capitalism.
This article explores the implications of Circular Economy (CE) waste management transitions on a Guarani community in the Bolivian Chaco, entangled in the urban waste system through the emplacement of the urban landfill on its territory. While CE transitions promote inclusive and ecologically respectful economic models, with potential to amend Indigenous lifeways, livelihoods and lands, the Guarani ethnography reveals that their apolitical, technocratic, and Western-centric implementation may deepen conditions of vulnerability and disposability. Drawing on the concept of predatory care, the article argues that the enactment of precarious, disposable Otherness - long central to the reproduction of settler centres in Amerindian contexts - persists in CE efforts, which unevenly and conveniently distribute waste-related burdens and opportunities. The article contributes to critical waste studies by offering an integrated view on how community waste practices, waste workers, and the living environment are shaped by CE transition efforts operating within enduring relational asymmetries.
This article examines the experiences with and consequences of online misogyny towards members of the disruptive climate justice movement 'Letzte Generation', foregrounding data collection through online and in-person co-constructed 'in-depth' conversations with activists based in Germany and Austria. Firstly, the analysis focuses on the role of ritualised organisational training practices. I conceptualise these as 'emotive institutions' whose socially organised practices cultivate shared emotional dispositions. These dispositions, understood as learned capacities to reinterpret violent encounters and to distance oneself from certain emotions, travel with activists into their digital encounters and shape how they interpret and respond to online misogyny. Secondly, I propose that some activists, against the background of the organisational training, reinterpret online misogyny as value, transforming it into feminist counter tactics for their activist cause. I conceptualise these as 'tactics of support' and 'tactics of validation' where online spaces provided by misogynists are utilised and infiltrated by activists.
In Thessaloniki's municipal food provision services, frontline workers were often dismissive to beneficiaries, denying them help in an openly contemptuous manner. The anthropological literature on deservingness analyses such contentious affects as the result of frontline workers' position as gatekeepers who must arbitrate access to scarce resources. I complement these insights, showing how frontline workers' contempt is also shaped by their complex employment relation to the Greek state. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how state promises of employment security and upward social mobility get them stuck in precarious jobs. Exploring how they navigate material impoverishment and taxing working conditions, I draw attention to their socioeconomic proximity to beneficiaries. Considering this disconcerting closeness, frontline workers' contemptuous attitudes can be interpreted as a mechanism to assuage the anxieties elicited by proximity. Reframing frontline workers as precarious state employees, this article contributes to a better understanding of state-citizen relations.
In Southeast Asia, Indigenous worlds have long been shaped through entanglements with outsiders. But how do such relations intersect with shamanic, place-making, and mythopoetic practices? This paper explores how the cosmopolitical engagements of the Batek of Malaysia unsettle colonial mappings of land, history, and identity, while creating space to contest environmental degradation, economic marginalisation, and political exclusion. It traces how origin myths are tied to land claims, how animist imaginations echo pre-colonial and colonial encounters, and how cosmopolitical practices appropriate foreign imagery and transform traumatic histories. Rather than viewing Indigenous actors as locked in the past - or cosmopolitics as a clash between incompatible worlds - I show how the Batek navigate multiple ontological frameworks, interweaving pasts, presents, and futures to challenge linear, state-imposed temporalities. Southeast Asian cosmopolitics thus emerge within a transtemporal zone, where shamans mediate relationships with diverse human and nonhuman actors, forging new forms of alliance and agency.
Refugee-led grassroots organisations supporting recent refugees struggle with paradoxical and internally contradictory funding arrangements produced by the European trend of generic policy categories. The erasure of discursive and lived inequalities in policies that must apply to all residents reconfigures a depoliticised white universalism in the Dutch welfare landscape. A logic of whiteness becomes apparent in constructions of who/what is 'generic' and who/what is 'diverse'. Long-term fieldwork in Rotterdam reveals how grassroots organisers 'dance' with policies to navigate affective disorientation - which is produced not only by whiteness but also by efforts to contest and recalibrate it. Zooming in on a grassroots organisation that supports Eritrean refugees is a case in point to unfold these broader dynamics. The two Black women who run this organisation try to broaden their focus to seem more 'generic' and thereby more fundable. The local administration, however, considers their target group as too diverse and not diverse enough.
Through an ethnographic account of the various forms of ruination experienced by Syrians displaced to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, the article investigates the stakes of Syrians' attempts to forge worthwhile lives and futures in refuge. Against perspectives that centre the biographical or political in critiques of humanitarianism's exclusive focus on the biological and survival, it argues that recovering the viable parts of one's previous existence in a context of ongoing social, economic and legal dispossession is exactly the challenge and amounts to a form of ruination. As Syrians attempted to reconcile the standards they had established in Syria with the realities of life in displacement during conflict, hesitations and doubts about what was worth salvaging and at what price were at the forefront of their contemplations. Hence, for my interlocutors, the biographical and political were questions rather than answers regarding the issue of forging a life and a future.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in West Africa, North Africa and Europe, this article ethnographically traces smuggling trajectories to shed light on how impoverished segments of the Guinea-Bissauan population seek to create socially meaningful lives under conditions of constraint. It examines the ways in which people attempt to reposition themselves and craft socially acceptable existences through migration and shows how, for those with few resources, engagement in the cocaine trade that transits Guinea-Bissau en route to Europe may be seen to constitute a possibility of doing so. The ethnography, thus, highlights a movement out of the country that is directed towards a future that leads back home. It clarifies how involvement in cocaine smuggling and dealing is driven by efforts to attain the social value, recognition and relational worth that is seen as inaccessible in Bissau. For the urban poor, the trade potentially affords a meaningful and qualified continuance of life.
This afterword reflects on the paradox of 'viable futures' in contexts where displacement, crisis and structural inequality unsettle the grounds from which futures can be imagined. Viability emerges not as a promise of flourishing but as a threshold condition: the effort to orient toward a future when the subject who hopes, decides and endures is itself unsettled. Drawing on ethnographic, literary and infrastructural examples, the essay explores the fragile, uneven and often costly labour involved in keeping life directed toward a future at all.
Based on fieldwork with Egyptian workers in the Dubai metropolitan area, I seek to understand the tension between a search for moral and economic stability and processes of growth and mobility that destabilise the foundations and shape of a viable life. In conversation with a welder who articulated to me his idea of proper Islamic economy based on charity, divine blessing and organic growth, I argue that there is a productive tension between the idea of non-destructive thriving expressed in the Islamic concept of baraka (divine blessing) and hydrocarbon-based capitalist growth. Both require the miraculous possibility of an exception from the second law of thermodynamics. This calls for a critical rethinking of whether growth-based economies can have the sustaining and sustainable capacity that a Muslim economic cosmology associates with the baraka based on lawful income. Capitalism may not be divinely blessed, but divine blessing today materialises through capitalism.
