For more than a century, coal was central to the configuration of political relationships between citizens and the state in Asturias, Spain. However, since the 2010s, EU-wide energy transition policies have brought about the end of what was once a strategic coal enclave in northern Spain’s mining basins. Coal’s end has devalued the product and producers of coal and weakened tightly embedded networks of unions, political parties, and workers. Yet, while policy shifts have destroyed Spanish coal production, they have also repurposed coal infrastructure for the distribution of imported coal. This article analyzes the shifting claims, demands, and responsibilities that coal gave rise to and shows how the demise of coal citizenship has led to gendered, generational, and xenophobic fractures. It argues that, as the transition advances, mining ruins and discarded workforces are resignified within novel projects of political belonging, thus giving rise to new forms of energy citizenship.
Abstract This article examines humor in the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and its immediate aftermath to understand its role in sustaining and shaping protest and its possibilities. It argues that protest humor operates in three interconnected ways: as a means of creating and sustaining communitas through days of struggle; as a reflection of the ambivalences of sustaining protest and of being invested in systems one is also protesting; and as a means to resolve those ambivalences by focusing communitas on one goal. Through an analysis of satire, parody, and invective, it suggests that protest humor creates solidarities but also places limits on what can be included in the revolutionary process and how long it will last. It also can be co-opted and used against the revolution.
Abstract In recent attempts to decolonize the anthropological curriculum, anthropologists have returned to Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya (1938). This article contextualizes Kenyatta's book and his political person within the Kenyan colonial period and contemporary struggles for land and freedom. It warns anthropologists against romanticizing Kenyatta by grasping his fundamental conservatism in relation to the politics of his day and his oligarchic government after independence. The article also argues that ongoing (de)colonial histories of struggle ought to be at the core of attempts to decolonize anthropology. Beyond epistemological and ontological decentering, this means taking stock of the material and political legacies of (post)colonialism and the contemporary ongoing struggles to which they give rise.
This article examines the competing attitudes toward labor that emerge from the interplay between formal and informal labor systems in Shenzhen, China. Drawing on ethnographic research at the Sanhe labor market, I argue that the privatization of labor markets and state-led efforts to formalize employment relations have paradoxically reinforced precarious informal labor, deepening labor fragmentation while sustaining low wages and high profits. While many migrant workers strategically navigate these precarious conditions to combine income streams, others—such as the so-called “Sanhe Gods”—embrace their marginality, rejecting conventional labor norms. Their anti-economic stance not only challenges dominant narratives of work and productivity but also complicates conventional understandings of class identity and consciousness within China’s evolving labor landscape.
While the most obvious targets of anti-immigration mobilizations in the global north are migrants themselves, this article examines a less visible conflict inherent to such mobilizations, not structured along the ethnic divide of “us” vs. “them.” Focusing on the Italian border town of Ventimiglia—an emblematic space of the EU’s “refugee crisis”—it analyzes the resentment, suspicion, and anger among residents of a white working-class neighborhood toward the local “welcome culture”—volunteers, activists, liberal church groups, and NGO professionals supporting migrants in transit. This resentment, it argues, must be read in relation to autochthonous workers’ experiences of devaluation, dispossession, and disorganization in the absence of a language of class, offering critical questions and filling a gap in ethnographic research on the social bases of neo-nationalist movements.
