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 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.

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 Mustafa Abi, a Kurdish resident and shopkeeper in Istanbul's Tarlabaşı neighborhood, opened his shop next to a state‐led urban transformation project that seeks to displace him and his neighbors, right when the construction started and when rumors of its expansion were swirling. When asked why, he replied, “I knew there was something here,” sensing potential futures diverging from those the urban transformation project proposed. Following that “something,” I ask: What propels marginalized people like Mustafa Abi to stay with future possibilities in places that threaten to displace them? The answer lies in what I call cultivating potentialities : future‐making, not despite, but through indeterminacy, steeped in structural inequalities. Cultivating potentialities offers a lens into what marginalized people do with potentialities, moving beyond conceptions that frame potentiality as strategic, haphazard, or out of reach for them. Instead, racialized and marginalized people embrace that the futures they seek may or may not be realized, to whatever extent, placing potentiality somewhere between actualization and non‐actualization in practice. Unburdened by fixed goals, cultivating potentialities is thus open‐ended yet not boundless, still intimately shaped by the unequal ground in which cultivations take root.

ABSTRACT Peer‐reviewed publications remain the most accepted form of knowledge production and distribution in academia today. But such formal publications are often deeply exclusionary, especially for undergraduate and early graduate students as well as scholars tackling highly stigmatized subjects. This essay highlights the value of zines—do‐it‐yourself booklets that mix art and text in an eclectic assemblage—as an alternative. Drawing from my personal DIY experiments as well as those of other anthropologists, I make the case that zines offer several advantages when compared to peer‐reviewed publications. First, they are pedagogical tools that invite playful engagement with disciplinary knowledge and theory while also familiarizing early scholars with basic publication processes. Second, they serve to expand and diversify anthropological scholarship by encouraging experimentation with both text and image while also challenging disciplinary norms and conventions. Third, zines are a form of knowledge sharing that generates intimacy through their materiality and tactility—forging connections between the reader and text but also the reader and author. Finally, because zines are self‐published, creators exert considerable control over the production and distribution of the work that is shared, offering specific benefits from the standpoint of the political economy of knowledge production.

ABSTRACT Ambivalence is a crucial framework for understanding the lived realities of ethnographic research participants in a wide variety of sociopolitical contexts. Using research at a high school in Belgrade, Serbia, as a case study, this paper proposes a linguistic anthropology of ambivalence. Drawing and expanding upon recent discussions of ambivalence in anthropology, the paper analyzes multiple types of ambivalent discourse, considers common themes across such discourses, and suggests some implications of centering ambivalence for core linguistic anthropological concepts.