ABSTRACT The elements are all around us, all the time. They create our context in the disposition of weather. But they also compose us, giving us our bodily form through structures such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Elements are also, historically and into the present, objects and processes that comprise and transform the world: earth and wood, air and water, fire and ether, space and metal, cloud and fog. Given all that the elements are, all that they make, and all that they make possible, this essay asks: What might an elemental ethnography offer to us?

ABSTRACT Humanity lives amid the sedimented remains of two centuries of industrial waste. This is the so‐called “Anthropocene,” an age in which every inch of the globe has been transformed by an industrial capitalist system that demands accelerating production, endless frontiers of extraction, and the constant disposal of waste. While “disposed of” from the perspective of capital, persistent waste retains biophysical capacities that transform landscapes and the lives of adjacent communities. Waste accumulates unevenly; its presence is often hidden—a deliberate murkiness built into its disposal. In some cases, waste's persistence provides novel opportunities; in many, it distributes serious harms. Drawing on archaeological studies of two marginalized communities living in waste‐filled landscapes in the 1930s, this paper argues that waste's murky latency mediates how communities reproduce their everyday lives. Rather than seeing the social effects of living with waste as simply an extension of uneven capitalist logics, the excavated histories of these two sites show how waste landscapes are the terrain for much more contingent relationships that emerge out of the affordances of latent waste as simultaneously a frontier of unexpected value, a vector of unseen harms, and a source of affectively potent uncertainties.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the racialized historical trajectories through which current health inequities are sustained in South Africa's health system. While current discussions recognize these inequalities, few have recognized a missing element—disaggregated data based on racial demographic indicators—that is critical to better understanding why these inequalities persist. Drawing on maternal health data, the paper highlights how race is both ontologically and practically invisibilized in demographic health records, undermining targeted health care interventions. The absence of disaggregated statistical data that indicate racial difference regarding health outcomes hinders any meaningful gains in transforming the maternal health landscape in South Africa. By situating maternal health inequalities within a broader framework of historic violence and racialized power structures, this paper calls for a critical reckoning with how race continues to shape access to and experiences of maternal health care in South Africa.

ABSTRACT Farm labor intermediaries in Turkey have been at the heart of maintaining a precarious and low‐wage migrant labor force for capitalist agriculture since the 19th century. This labor force has been predominantly comprised of Kurds, a people racialized as “savage,” “racially impure,” and “traitors of the Turkish nation” since the beginning of the 20th century. The war between Kurdish guerillas and the Turkish state in the 1990s introduced the portrayal of Kurds as “potential terrorists” into the discourses that racialize them. This change significantly impacted the role, prevalence, and definition of the institution of the labor intermediary. Drawing on 20 months of fieldwork with Kurdish farmworkers and labor intermediaries, this article examines how intermediaries, typically responsible for enforcing labor control and discipline as agents of exploitation, are paradoxically compelled to protect workers who face threats of racial hostility and state violence in order to facilitate their exploitation. This paradoxical task of social and political protection, which enables economic exploitation, suggests a need to examine institutions of labor management not only with reference to their function in capitalist labor processes but also in light of context‐specific historical and political dynamics of racialization and political violence.

ABSTRACT As anthropologists increasingly take up refusal, opacity, and other forms of resistance to surveillance and subjugation, this paper questions what implications this has for the discipline in practice. Considering anthropology's enduring centrality in defining what it means to be human, including the various ways that this category has been used to exclude, enslave, oppress, dispossess, and dehumanize, I ask in what ways the ethnographic will to know reproduces anti‐Black and colonial ontologies. In particular, I analyze the many occasions on which, during research, my methodologies, ensnared in legacies of orientalism, necropolitics, and confessional language ideologies, ran up against my interest in how the people I worked with engaged with the unknown, unknowability, and not knowing. Building on these experiences, I outline the ways that refusal draws our attention to an aporia in anthropology's construction of the human.

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, a growing number of activists, scholars, writers, and visual artists have engaged with futurism as a framework for representing the lives of Indigenous peoples. Inspired by this hopeful reframing of the past‐present‐future, contributions to this special section of American Anthropologist address the question: How can anthropologists use our unique disciplinary tool kit to craft empowering narratives grounded in Indigenous worldviews and futures? In this introduction to the section, we provide an overview of the concepts of “futurism” and “futurity.” Like their Afrofuturist interlocutors, scholars engaging with Indigenous futurisms challenge a taken‐for‐granted white settler future. Replacing colonial narratives with thriving Indigenous cultures replete with emergent technologies, geographies, and ontologies. Drawing particularly on the work of Grace Dillon, we then outline how the themes of contact, science, slipstream, and apocalypse have been used by contributors to this edited series to re‐narrate the past and project new visions of Native personhood. In drawing together case studies across temporal registers and geographies, this compilation of essays affirms the dynamic pasts, present, and future of Indigenous peoples and contributes to dismantling disciplinary practices grounded in colonial power structures and narratives.