As anthropologists have long recognized, a share is not a gift. Shares belong to owners. Only someone acknowledged to be the owner of a share of valued goods is entitled to demand the portion that properly belongs to them. This insight invites further ethnographic research and theorizing. What kind of person is acknowledged to be the proper owner of a share? What are the conditions under which demands based on ownership are recognized or disallowed? Where acknowledgement is lacking, how can it be achieved? To address these questions, I draw on my ethnographic research in Indonesia. Indigenous highlanders I encountered in Sulawesi in the 1990s grounded ownership in an individual's labour. Contra popular assumptions about the naturally communitarian nature of Indigenous people, social membership in a kin group or community furnished scant grounds for sharing valued goods such as labour or food. Research I conducted with Pujo Semedi in 2010–2015 in Kalimantan's oil palm zone indicated that villagers whose land had been occupied by plantation corporations were convinced they were rightful owners of a share of plantation wealth. Yet, racial tropes inherited from the colonial era together with the plantations’ social, juridical and spatial arrangements impeded acknowledgement. Plantation corporations and their government allies saw no grounds on which to compensate villagers for their losses, include them in benefits or involve them in plantation affairs. Drawing upon these ethnographic sources and comparative material, I further theorize why there can be no sharing without acknowledgement.

Parallels between person-to-person sharing and centrally institutionalized forms of redistribution have been noted repeatedly but also need to be assessed critically. When sharing is defined as the allocation of economic goods without calculating returns we may ask whether this also includes redistributive large-scale institutions such as forms of public pooling, crowd-based digital platforms or taxation. Can sharing be upscaled to institutional settings at larger scales or is it tied to intimate contexts of face-to-face interaction? This contribution discusses this question by giving particular attention to the way in which the presence of social agents is shaped in sharing and how it is altered when it is upscaled institutionally. On the basis of comparisons between ethnographic observations in small and large settings, processes of recognizing, mediating, virtualizing and temporalizing presence are identified. Finally, some lessons from research on sharing in intimate settings are being drawn for assessing the role that sharing may play to counter inequalities in larger institutional settings.

How do we offer critiques of social marginalization and the politics surrounding it without reducing people to mere victims or, at the least, “tokens of a type”? Phenomenology offers a useful way to address this problem. Focusing on the concept of stigma, this article proposes an errant phenomenology informed by Arendt's concern to “defrost” canonical moral and political concepts and Glissant's errant poetics of opacity. Centering upon an African American mother raising a child diagnosed with autism, it argues that an errant version of critical phenomenology can both illuminate the workings of stigma in this child's life and, at the same time, provide resistance to any simplistic classification of his social identity. But the article also makes a more radical claim by addressing the meta problem of concept reification in critical social theory. It offers an avenue for disturbing category thinking itself in generative ways, enriching how we envision social critique and deepening our critical capacity.

Victor Turner's concept of communitas has been used in and beyond anthropology for years in a variety of ways. It is an effective concept for understanding one form of collective human experience, particularly the transcendent emotional experiences in liminal contexts that may stimulate the emergence of a sense of connection and co-humanity. There is immense contemporary value in the concept, however, many key elements are often overlooked and the complexities of ‘communitas’ ignored. This can lead to surface-level or misleading applications which threaten to undermine the utility of the concept. As such, I explore Turner's theoretical understandings and reflections, before considering the diverse ways other scholars have used communitas. I advocate a more nuanced understanding of communitas and investigate how this would benefit our understandings of communitas in contemporary social contexts. I engage with the work of Turner and others to contribute to theoretical discussions of communitas, while also reflecting on the value of concepts and the benefits of both ambiguity and clarity in communicating anthropological knowledge through such concepts.

This article argues that compassionate helping has radical political potentials. Observing practices of assistance to and collaboration between newly arrived refugees and established citizens in what has been called the long summer of migration, I argue that hegemonic norms of in-group sharing gave way to cosmopolitan solidarity: When, in the face of the legal sources of inequity, inequality was re-politicised, claims to prerogative on the grounds of membership and merit were de-naturalised. This provided room for a novel understanding of rights to a share on the grounds of ‘presence’. While at first relying on actual physical presence, in the political theory I take from those practices, ‘presence’ means ‘connection’, constituted by the historical making of our respective life situations, and our contemporary implicated-ness in near and distant others’ lives. Such a political theory of sharing that arose from learning to help, while remaining a potentiality, pointed to the possibility of institutions of sharing adequate for the entangled nature of the contemporary world.

Migrant populations globally are often subjected to explicit forms of housing discrimination based on their race, nationality, migration status, and social class. In Chile, due to the dramatic increase in rent prices and a worsening housing crisis, migrants have turned to autoconstructing their own houses in campamentos (squatter settlements) in recent years. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, we show that the campamentos autoconstructed by immigrants have turned into new spaces of sociality, inclusion, and the emergence of new forms of citizenship. Unlike most of the anthropological literature on autoconstruction processes, we do not focus on how the symbolic and material production of the city frame poor people's involvement in social movements for housing. Rather, we show how, by self-building their houses and neighborhoods, immigrants produce a specific form of political subjectivity based on an ethics of civility and individual accommodation. Furthermore, we highlight the paradoxes that emerge between, on the one hand, their discursive emphasis on individual strategies to achieve legitimate citizenship and urban social inclusion and, on the other hand, their actual participation in collective life in the settlement, as well as a sense of shared norms and common morality. In doing so, we argue that this tension emerges from the need to defend their right to urban social inclusion as inhabitants who see themselves as embodying and enacting stigmatized forms of city-making and urban incorporation.

This article proposes a theory of distributive conditionality in the context of migration; it outlines the modalities under which redistributive effects materialize as a consequence of migration from the Global South to the Global North. Tendayi Achiume (2019) argues that migration contributes to the redistribution of political equality throughout the globe. However, there is a need to better distinguish between accessing territories of the Global North and the redistributive processes migration puts in motion. Migration is a bottom-up strategy of appropriation within the global context of failed post-colonial processes, which are marked by the exclusion and exploitation of Third World citizens. People’s determination to access the territories from which they have been historically and legally excluded enables further claims for participation and inclusion to emerge. It is these that then allow for distributive effects. Within common spaces of appearance and communities of presence that include citizens and non-citizens and that have been established by access of migrants to these territories, negotiations surrounding the varying needs and resources of those present can emerge, depending on how this presence manifests. To substantiate this claim, I outline three such modalities in which distributive effects can be observed: communities of work, urban citizenship, and remittances.

In resource extraction regions, nation-states tend to be depicted as the legal authority sanctioning profitable mining operations in close collaboration with corporate actors in their domestic territories. Especially in post-colonial contexts, corporate sovereignty is the term deployed by anthropologists to depict the acts of power by legally sanctioned corporate actors within a space of negotiation authorised by the state. A problem arises with this framing of sovereignty in contexts where the international norms of liberal democracy and development are violated due to constraints on the domestic authority of the state. In this scenario, the international order imposes itself to restore the authority of the state by governmentalising the security, territory, and market access of the state. Through ethnographic and field survey research in south Kivu of eastern Congo, I argue that the restoration and extension of state authority is a grant given to the state on condition of the responsible exercise of norms and practices of international markets. The tin, tantalum and tungsten (3T) mineral supply chain in south Kivu are an example of such a grant extended by international market actors and their related resource policy regimes to strengthen the state by franchising its apparatuses through practical mechanisms and discourse aimed at implementing traceability of so-called conflict minerals. Here, sovereignty is a position that is made by international market rule delivered through infrastructure in the form of 3T-mineral supply chains that franchise the state with the aim of optimising its fiscal reach and penetration among upstream mineral producers in south Kivu.

The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissal of the camp's—by some analyses of the politics of capital's operations, and problematizes the very notion of the paradigm. Elaborating on previous reflections concerning contemporary agro-industrial zones in Italy, the article rethinks camps against state-centric and exceptionalist readings that consider them purely as sites of exclusion. At the same time, it retains a stress on the symbolic dimension of forms of containment and extraction, going beyond a narrow political-economic approach. The zone and the camp, it is argued, are mutually imbricated “infrastructure spaces” of present-day agro-capital's operations, which, however, result from the sedimentation of spatialized techniques for labor disciplining, reproduction, and containment that have developed alongside capitalist forms of agriculture throughout the contemporary period. The camp is thus defined as a function of the political, sovereign dimensions of extraction, that may operate within but also beyond the state. Furthermore, it is underlain by differential attributions of humanness, and therefore by a specific biopolitical anthropology. Engaging in a genealogy of the (humanitarian and/as labor) camps that today proliferate in agro-industrial zones, I argue that to understand the spatial formations emerging from and sustaining the politics of contemporary capital operations a recursive analytics is necessary, that thus questions the purchase of paradigms on the grounds of their atemporality and complicates the positing of mere historical continuities.