What does it mean when Chinese elders address welfare agents as representatives of guojia (state-family) or denounce them as impostors, while expressing mixed feelings such as gratitude and bitterness, or entitlement and resentment? Drawing on an emergent age-based welfare program in southeastern China, this article shows that affect functions as a generative force that animates particular versions of the state through boundary-making. I introduce the concept of ‘affective boundary work’ to theorize this process. Against the backdrop of welfare pluralization, recipients and agents (mis)read one another through historically layered state paternalism, producing shifting boundaries between themselves and other political actors. Two versions of paternalistic guojia come into being situationally: a Confucian-socialist guardian obligated to attend to the vulnerable, and a party-parent authority expected to offer preferential recompense for political devotion and military sacrifice.
How can anthropologists analyze contemporary China as it strives to surpass ‘the West’ and claim its own ‘universal’ status? This article argues that the dilemmas confronting China anthropology expose both the limits and possibilities of reflexive anthropology. Its limit lies in the lingering presumption of the West’s theoretical supremacy, while its potential lies in enabling critical engagement with ‘universal China’ in tension with ‘hegemonic China’—made visible through ongoing efforts to provincialize the West. I propose conceiving China as an open-ended assemblage to move beyond the entrenched West–China binary.
Abstract In their search for better lives, migrants encounter numerous hardships. Structural violence, inequality, and precarity have long been central to migration research, but an exclusive focus on these dimensions risks narrowing the anthropological imagination and overlooking the reasons why many move in the first place. The contributions to this special issue examine how migrants navigate moral dilemmas and pursue meaningful lives by reflecting on value and well-being, through the lens of humor and irony, and by improvisation. Taken together, the articles propose a reorientation of migration studies that foregrounds ethnographic attention to moral experience and ordinary ethical life while remaining attuned to the structural conditions that shape mobility and immobility.
This article attends to spectral experiences surrounding 5G infrastructure and risks associated with electromagnetic fields through ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and the UK, exploring them in their specificity as a spectral manner of being. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's figuring of the specter as a 'structural opening' and Isabelle Stengers's concept of 'disclosure', we trace three spectral moments-attunements to an equivocal spectrum, dis/possessed bodies, and a ghosted public-that disturb modern ontologies and epistemologies, disclosing an Otherworld within. The article, moreover, contributes to anthropological discussions on unstable ontologies in the context of climate change. It argues that spectrality is a useful analytic for tending to ontological uncertainties, sensitizing us to exposures that are imperceptible within the logics of technoscientific knowledge.
Individualism among the Aents Chicham of today's northern Peru and eastern Ecuador is defined as singularity through exemplarity. Adult men achieve such uniqueness in agonistic relationships. Major advances in the studies of Aents Chicham and Amazonian anthropology make it possible to clarify the contours of this 'wild' form of individual-ism, in contrast with our own (Euro-American) brand of individualism. These differences go some way in explaining the misunderstandings that arise when Chicham people engage with White and Mestizo outsiders.
