Attunement, Attention, Failure, Falling: Dimensional Skills for Vertical Ecologies

This article attempts to analyse the social interface between formal institutions and local fishing communities along the Pamba‐Achankovil River Basin in Kerala, India. It examines primarily the nature of the relationship between state agencies and traditional fishing communities in the context of (i) enforcing certain formal regulations of resource use and (ii) implementing resource enhancement programmes. The article also analyses the nature of social interfaces that emerge when local level formal organizations, such as cooperatives and gram panchayats, take up resource management or community welfare schemes on behalf of the traditional fisherfolk in the study region. Social interfaces can be understood in terms of social processes, such as cooperation, accommodation and conflicts between various actors involved in fisheries management. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork. Interview guides and focus group discussions were the primary tools of data collection. The findings show that the relationships between formal institutions and traditional riverine fishing communities lack mutual trust. Conflicts between fishing communities and state agencies emerge when the formal institutions threaten or contradict those elements of local culture that sustain livelihood needs. Conflicts and discontent with a particular formal institution can also lead to the modification or violation of coexisting institutional arrangements.

This article develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilize monetary systems can unintentionally produce new forms of fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana between 2020 and 2025, I show how Cuba’s recent reforms – monetary reunification, the expansion of digital financial controls, and the legalization of private microenterprises – have generated a monetary environment in which multiple currencies, digital payment platforms, and informal trust networks intersect in unpredictable ways. I conceptualize monetary disorder as a durable configuration that emerges when official infrastructures of value lose coherence, compelling people to depend on bottom-up infrastructures of trust to conduct transactions, access goods, and preserve savings. My material demonstrates how efforts to formalize and centralize monetary authority can amplify monetary fragmentation, deepen mistrust in formal institutions, and produce new moral distinctions around legitimate and illicit accumulation. By analyzing how people navigate proliferating forms of cash, digital balances, and quasi-monetary instruments, the article advances broader debates in economic anthropology on monetary plurality, informality, and the social life of digital payment systems. Monetary disorder thus provides a comparative framework for understanding contemporary monetary ecologies shaped by unstable currencies, fragmented infrastructures, and everyday practices of improvisation and arbitration.

This article examines the role of the householder religious service provider and the household idiom in the overall field of religious practice in China. First I will look at the emergence of a new label, superstition specialist households (mixin zhuanyehu), in the PRC, and attempt to situate this emergence within the socio-economic and political context of reform-era China. This label shows how the Chinese party-state now conceptualizes ritual specialists such as spirit mediums, yinyang masters, fortune-tellers, and others who make a living in the popular religious realm (including folk musicians and opera performers who perform at temple festivals, temple caretakers, non-monastic Buddhist and Daoist ritualists, votive offering manufacturers, etc.). Though sardonic and condemnatory in tone, this appellation also puts these people in the larger category of getihu (private business households), whose existence is not only legitimate but even celebrated in reform-era China. I then present a couple of vignettes from my ethnographic fieldwork in Shaanbei (north-central China) to illustrate how householder religious service providers typically work (one vignette on a spirit medium; the other on a yinyang master). While operating upon very different principles yinyang masters rely on esoteric knowledge and ritual orthopraxy, whereas spirit mediums rely on deity power and efficacy both kinds of ritual specialist are religious entrepreneurs taking full advantage of the ”household idiom,” in contradistinction to affiliation with formal institutions such as monasteries, temples, or guilds. Next I look at what I call ”ritual jamming,” referring to the ad hoc coming together of householder ritualists to stage larger rituals in response to some clients' more elaborate needs. I also examine the household idiom and see what advantages it has over the corporatist idiom in terms of ritual service provision at the grassroots level, as well as its ability to weather political suppression. I conclude by offering some speculative comments on the probable future of the household idiom in Chinese religious culture.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that influence the perceived value of information in a small-scale marine fishing community in Bangladesh. It investigates the use of information by the community and its function in different purposes of everyday life, such as making decisions for livelihood security, fostering social cohesion and well-being and facilitating access to social benefits. Design/methodology/approach This research utilised an interpretative phenomenological approach. Ethnographic fieldwork was used to conduct focus groups and interviews with community members. Participants were asked about their various information needs, the sources they rely on and their interactions with these sources in daily life. The analysis centred on identifying themes that shape their use of information. Findings The study found that in the daily lives of this fishing community, the perceived value of information is influenced by key factors, including reliable access through formal institutions, accuracy, affordability and ease of access, the capacity to reduce uncertainty and clarify outcomes, societal acceptance, shared benefits and educational relevance. These elements play a pivotal role in shaping the perceived value of information within the community. Originality/value This research is the first to investigate the perceived value of information within a marginalised community in a developing nation. It highlights that information solutions tailored to the unique needs and preferences of such communities can offer sustainable empowerment, providing benefits that extend beyond conventional material-focused interventions.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French‐speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.

Interpersonal networks facilitate business cooperation and socioeconomic exchange. But how can outsiders demonstrate their trustworthiness to join existing networks? Focusing on the puzzling yet common phenomenon of heavy drinking at China’s business banquets, we argue that this costly practice can be a rational strategy intentionally used by entrants to signal trustworthiness to potential business partners. Because drinking alcohol can lower one’s inhibitions and reveal one’s true self, entrants intentionally drink heavily to show that they have nothing to hide and signal their sincere commitment to cooperation. This signaling effect is enhanced if the entrants have low alcohol tolerance, as their physical reactions to alcohol (e.g., red face) make their drunkenness easier to verify. Our theory of heavy social drinking is substantiated by both ethnographic fieldwork and a discrete-choice experiment on Chinese entrepreneurs. This research illuminates how trust can be built absent sufficient support from formal institutions.

Developing mixed–income communities has drawn increased attention from sociologists and other researchers in recent years, generating sharp debates over equitable access, the nature of community, and the role of policy. Debates over social relations and social influence in mixed–income communities have often overlooked what formal institutions—as opposed to race, class, and other predictors of informal neighboring—contribute to social life. This study uses ethnographic fieldwork, document analysis, and semistructured interviews in a mixed–income housing community in Boston to examine the forces shaping relationships within and across social boundaries. the results show how formal structuring of the community dissuaded interaction among neighbors. Buttressed by macrostructural forces, the private management company that ran the development discouraged interaction through rules, social signaling, and explicit communication.

In this paper, we examine the information work that bilingual parent-education liaisons perform to create connections towards assisting immigrant parents in the United States. As part of formal and informal educational institutions, liaisons operate between different social worlds---within and beyond the domain of education---to maximize immigrant parents' engagement in their children's academic lives. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with low-income Latino immigrants and their liaisons, we explore how liaisons leverage technology, content, and people to align these worlds; bringing them closer to mutual understanding. We borrow inspiration from the analytical lens of seams suggested by Vertesi to explore how liaisons manage the "seams'' between worlds. This analysis provides a rich and unique perspective of the work that successfully engages immigrant parents with their children's education, as well as the tensions that challenge that engagement. This understanding of the work that liaisons do with and across seams provides insights to inform design directions for technology that could facilitate and amplify their efforts. Finally, we highlight how exploring the seams that liaisons work with can inform the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) on the role of technology in mediation.

This paper examines the evolution of legal dispute resolution mechanisms within non-litigation channels, focusing on the traditional villages of Blitar and Karangasem in Indonesia from 1984 to 2023. There is a need to understand how local wisdom contributes to effective dispute resolution, particularly in regions where formal legal institutions may be limited. This research analyses how indigenous communities integrate Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) principles with customary (adat) law, fostering a hybrid system that balances cultural values and contemporary legal frameworks. The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with traditional leaders, and case studies of dispute settlements in the selected villages. Historical records and legal documents regarding customary disputer solutions were also examined. The results indicate that the villagers have modified their traditional approaches over the last four decades to deal with contemporary problems such as land disputes, family conflicts, and governance issues. This study also focuses on consensus, reconciliation, and restorative justice, which are considered key factors for social cohesion and dealing with social conflicts. The findings highlight that integrating ADR with adat-based mechanisms strengthens legal pluralism and provides an alternative resolution of issues; this integration is more appropriate than litigation in rural, culturally diverse societies. Moreover, the study suggests that these non-litigation practices are socially cohesive between community members because they ensure that dispute resolution is aligned with the community’s cultural norms and common identity. The study also theorizes that justice and social order can be maintained through a better understanding and empowerment of customary laws. This research provides insight into the wider world of legal pluralism as it explores how traditional modes of dispute resolution remain important within modern legal systems.

ABSTRACTThe present article is part of a broader effort to understand and analyse the relationship between formal and informal norms and institutions in the Balkans. Free and fair elections are a central component of any functioning democracy and, in the case of Albania, an essential element of its EU accession process. Elections can also be affected by political clientelism, which puts their outcomes’ credibility into question. Political clientelism is a principal sector of informal relations and practices and informal and/or illegal funding of electoral campaigns are identified as its key mechanisms. This article addresses a number of issues related to clientelist practices and private funding of electoral campaigns, focusing on the general parliamentary elections of June 2017. The main research question investigates the ways in which private funding of electoral campaigns works in practice. Based on data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, reports on the electoral process, and other secondary sources, we argue that informal clientelist practices permeating private funding of electoral campaigns enable political parties to further and strengthen clientelist relations and to influence the electoral result.

Across rural Punjab, formal state institutions are often experienced as distant, opaque, and unreliable. In this context, intermediaries occupy central roles in the everyday political and social life of villages. This article examines how their authority is built and sustained through dhara bandi (a Punjabi term for factional loyalty and social-political alliances, maintained through everyday acts of mediation, presence, and performance). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bhi Nagar, a pseudonym for a central Punjab village, I show how intermediaries’ practices – hosting gatherings in baithaks, mediating disputes, navigating bureaucracies, and cultivating digital visibility – both bind villagers in durable networks of allegiance and render the state locally intelligible. These actors are not merely brokers who facilitate access to resources; their performative labour enacts authority, sustains factional cohesion, and materializes the state in everyday life. By linking local practices of factionalism to the symbolic authority of national leaders, intermediaries also translate national charisma into tangible forms of engagement that reinforce the perception of state responsiveness. This analysis situates intermediaries at the heart of rural governance in Punjab, contributing to broader debates on hybrid governance, the endurance of weak states, and the everyday production of political order.

The burgeoning literature on welfare migration, or on the likelihood of migrants moving to countries with more generous welfare states, yields mixed results. In this article, we aim to disentangle what kinds of considerations underlie the decisions that migrants and their families make to address their social protection needs when they move to certain places. We explain how Sudanese extended families, with members scattered across multiple countries, draw on formal and informal institutions to meet their needs for social protection. Through a transnational approach, we analyse the mechanisms guiding the access, circulation and coordination of resources to cover different but related social protection domains. We contribute to current debates on transnational social protection by drawing on the life stories of members of a Sudanese transnational family and by expanding on the concept of ‘resource environment’. We based this article on 14 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork with Sudanese migrants and their families in the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan.

This article examines how the commodification of urban space is reshaping popular urbanization in Lima. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbourhoods, I propose the concept of ‘speculative auto‐production of urban space’. This concept captures how vulnerable households meet housing needs while also engaging in speculation as a survival strategy—what I call ‘speculation from below’. The analysis reveals three interrelated dimensions. First, land serves as both a commodity and a form of social insurance. Second, discretionary legality allows for the instrumental use of regulations. Third, everyday practices help legitimize speculative relations. Critically, for‐profit intermediaries exploit households’ needs, operating through both formal and informal institutions. Residents do not resist speculation; instead, they integrate into it because land addresses both labour precarity and state retrenchment. The novel framework, which connects structural factors to lived experiences, informs comparative discussions where informality, commodification and speculation intertwine.

This study explores the interplay of climate vulnerability and social capital in two rural communities: Brajaballavpur, a high-climate-prone village in the Indian Sundarbans characterized by high ecological fragility, recurrent cyclones, and saline water intrusion affecting water access, livelihoods, and infrastructure; and Jemua, a low-climate-prone village in the land-locked district of Paschim Bardhaman, West Bengal, India, with no extreme climate events. A total of 85 participants (44 in Brajaballavpur, 41 in Jemua) were selected through purposive sampling. Using a comparative qualitative research design grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, data were collected through household interviews, Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs), Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), and Key Informant Interviews (KIIs), and analyzed manually using inductive thematic analysis. Findings reveal that bonding and bridging social capital were more prominent in Brajaballavpur, where dense horizontal ties supported collective action during extreme weather events. Conversely, linking social capital was more visible in Jemua, where participants more frequently accessed formal institutions such as the Gram Panchayat, local NGOs, and government functionaries that facilitated grievance redressal and information access, but these networks were concentrated among more politically connected individuals. The study concludes that climate vulnerability shapes the type, strength, and strategic use of social capital in village communities. While bonding and bridging ties are crucial in high-risk contexts, linking capital plays a critical role in enabling long-term social structures in lower-risk settings. The study contributes to both academic literature and policy design by offering a relational and place-based understanding of climate vulnerability and social capital.

This article examines the land-use politics of recreation development in rural China. Extending the lens of spatial informality, it analyzes how the appropriation and acquisition of space by small suburban leisure enterprises have constituted a de facto vehicle for rural spatial reconfiguration amidst land-use constraints. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies, we illuminate emerging scenarios in which inbound businesses burgeoned through the production of informal spaces, which were subsequently formalized or tolerated by local governments geared towards social economic growth. More so, we reveal the potential and limitations of such an informal-to-formal approach for rural spatial reconfiguration by showing how its sustainability and survival depend upon the enterprises’ ability to enter into a tacit alliance of interests with local authorities. This article casts new light on emerging bottom-up processes of spatial reconfiguration, alongside its repercussions for local suburbs, in the development of rural tourism and suburban leisure. It further suggests that, as an analytical approach, a nuanced understanding of rural restructuring under the recent national rural revitalization strategy can benefit from moving beyond the sole emphasis on formal institutions to analyze the role played by ordinary market actors and their spatial practices that shape rural territories and spatial relationships.