ABSTRACT This article addresses fracking and subsurface Indigenous cultural heritage protection in northern Australia. Drawing on 1260 public submissions made to the Scientific Inquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory, we think through the implications of the Inquiry’s recommendation that the Aboriginal Sacred Sites (Northern Territory) Act be amended to ensure all subsurface features of Aboriginal sacred sites are protected from future fracking activities. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the Inquiry sought to make cultural alterity legible within the confines of the political order. The subsurface takes us literally and figuratively into unchartered territory, bringing a sense of incommensurability to the legislative delineation of chthonic imaginaries and their oneiric and rhizomatic qualities. While the Indigenous expression ‘this thing moves underground’ captures the ambiguous, dynamic and relatively diffuse components of Indigenous chthonic imaginaries in northern Australia, the protection of circumscribed sacred sites may also have an atrophying effect that impacts this very subsurface movement.

ABSTRACT The literature on vertical and voluminous spaces analyzes primarily the lithosphere and the biosphere as spaces of extraction. However, ethnographies of cloud seeding can introduce a new perspective on extraction from the sky. In the UAE, the state exerts its vertical sovereignty by extracting from below, through its well-known oil industry, and, in recent decades, from above, through a thriving cloud-seeding program, the UAE Rain Enhancement Program. Using three years of ethnographic data, as a UAE-based anthropologist, I argue that ethnographies of cloud seeding engage concepts of obliqueness, voluminous remains, vertical state control, and territorial referentiality. The logic of rain enhancement presents clouds as a reserve of water, referencing water security, and by extension, national security. This enables territorial claim over atmospheric depth, making verticality a tool for state control. Rain enhancement actors in governance, science, and the industry frame the atmosphere not as inert space, but as voluminous, resource-rich matter, integrated within capitalist circuits.

ABSTRACT Beginning as a comparative science, interested in myriad aspects of human experience, anthropology has in recent decades become the subject of intense political praxis, examined for its complicity in projects of power. These and other such provocations have cluttered my own relationship with the discipline for several years. So too has a fatigue traced to the evidenced dismissal of anthropology’s legitimacy in academic spaces; specifically, institutions of higher education. On balance, it would seem we need to reconsider where the discipline is headed and the conventions of anthropology as practice. Through a discussion of convention and its limits, this paper articulates optimism around a post-conventional anthropology. There are five tenets to a post-conventional anthropology: praxis, ethics, diplomacy, reflexivity, and creativity. These are not new for anthropologists yet identifying their specificity and constitutive parts, as reworked for an expanding field of practice in anthropology, as well as how they combine to become the entire infrastructure of anthropological practice across a broad field of situational contexts is crucial to thinking more flexibly about how they shape our working lives in new ways. Post-conventionality is presented as a practical rewiring that acknowledges inherited foundations while reorienting the discipline toward emergent social, workforce, legal, ethical, and economic conditions. By clarifying the limits of convention and specifying what counts as post-conventional practice, the paper argues for renewed optimism about anthropology’s relevance.

ABSTRACT In this article, we describe doing co-creative, filmic anthropology and its novel trajectories as we continued our collaborations beyond fieldwork. We reflect on different situations in which we sought to speak with our interlocutors, rather than about them, which we argue encourages a more outward-facing anthropological practice, one that also remains fundamentally committed to our interlocutors in the research moment. Rather than only an internal contract in which anthropologists speak only to other anthropologists after fieldwork, a broader contract creates opportunities for researchers and the researched beyond fieldwork. We show how we did this in our own projects by using a method of filmic research-creation Epp calls the ‘ethnographic B movie [Epp 2023. ‘The Ethnographic B movie: Centering the uncertain, absurd and low quality in collaborative filmmaking’. DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society 2(1): 75–93]. The ethnographic B movie prioritizes the co-creative process over professional aesthetic, requiring us to set aside our own ethnographic motivations and priorities to leave room for the creativity and desires of our interlocutors. In doing so, the filmic outputs became less our own and something to which our interlocutors could also lay claim. From this, collaboration with our interlocutors extended beyond the temporal frame of ‘fieldwork’—this has included co-writing a peer-reviewed article, guest lecturing and co-presenting a webinar. Opening space for co-expression and interlocutor driven content challenges traditional fieldwork relations. From this unconventional anthropological method, a new social contract emerges between us and our interlocutors, in which accountability to them matters as much, if not more, than the internal contract of disciplinary expectations.

ABSTRACT This study contextualizes Beryl de Zoete’s approach to dance inscription by examining three historical forms: dance notation, visual diagrams, and ethnographic film. De Zoete diverged from these methods during her fieldwork in Bali, and this analysis argues that her conceptualization of dance-as-movement was the key reason for this departure. The first reference, found in her book Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), explains her rejection of notation. The second appears in her 1900 sketchbook, where she developed a diagrammatic drawing segmenting the dancer’s body into polyhedral divisions. The third emerges in her mapping of Legong choreography through floorplans, noted in her fieldwork records, though she ultimately chose not to advance this diagrammatic approach further. The text also addresses conceptual convergences with contemporaries Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the use of film for anthropological research. While Mead and Bateson employed film as a tool for visual documentation, De Zoete perceived film as mediating the experience of movement rather than simply depicting it. To further explore her conceptualization, the discussion examines her aim to create a relational model connecting the observer’s perspective to the dancer’s embodied movement. This approach underscores her contribution to visual anthropology, understanding dance as a dynamic, living art form. Ultimately, a distinction is established in De Zoete’s work between notation as inscription and film as a tool for experiencing dance in a relational context.

ABSTRACT This article examines how Kinh Vietnamese engage with ancestors, spirits and ghosts as a form of pragmatic ontology grounded in the axiom trần sao âm vậy (as this world, so the otherworld). Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse domestic ancestor worship, the Mother Worship (Thờ Mẫu) and rituals for wandering souls (cô hồn) as complementary domains through which the unseen is maintained as a social presence. The analysis develops two interconnected arguments. First, engagement with the unseen operates across distinct registers—embodied, identity, explanatory and professional, each with its own logic, criteria for success, and distribution across individuals and contexts. Second, what might be called belief is better understood as sincerity modulating a deictic spectrum of revealed and unrevealed presence of the unseen and actualised through interpretive habit. The framework draws on Descola’s analogism, Austin’s speech act theory, Luhrmann’s concept of kindling and Sahlins’s idea of mutuality of being to move beyond both belief-centered models of religion and existing versions of the ontological turn. By shifting attention from what people believe to how they inhabit a shared world, the article explains the resilience of these practices in contemporary Vietnam and offers a model for analysing how ontologies are lived differentially across populations.

ABSTRACT Colombia enacted a new domestic violence law in August 2021, to protect women from intimate partner violence. Major portions of the new law can be directly traced to a research and advocacy campaign using, from its inception, engaged research. The campaign included advocacy at the United Nations and with high-level Colombian government officials. The new law strengthens the Office of the Family Commissioner, the judicial provider charged with issuing protection orders to victims of violence, providing them better access to justice and protection, making the Ministry of Justice the governing body, removing responsibilities unconnected to domestic violence, and dramatically increasing the number of offices according to the population, violence rates and service demand. The aims of this paper are to describe this successful engaged research project with its strategy and methods of public engaged research, and the specific method of an adapted rapid assessment process to evaluate legal, institutional and cultural barriers, facilitators, and needs of providing public services to women subjected to violence in their homes. As a case, the study exemplifies a successful post-conventional approach using multidisciplinary approaches and local ontologies necessary for social justice.

ABSTRACT Food waste represents a defining paradox of contemporary consumption: UK households discard approximately 6.4 million tonnes of food annually, of which 73% is edible, while an estimated 7.5 million people experience food insecurity. This paradox intensifies in North East England, where rates of food insecurity are substantially above the national average despite the region generating the highest per capita household waste in England. Yet little is known about how food waste patterns vary across socioeconomic contexts within the region. This mixed-methods study combines observational garbology, consumption diaries, and qualitative interviews to examine food waste across affluent and deprived Newcastle upon Tyne neighbourhoods. Contrary to the expectation that affluent households generate substantially more waste, we find that both groups produce avoidable food waste, through different mechanisms: abundance-driven over-purchasing in affluent households, and unplanned purchasing and poor stock management alongside genuine resourcefulness in deprived ones. Crucially, informal disposal practices common in deprived neighbourhoods, including fly-tipping, fall outside formal collection streams and are invisible to standard garbology methods, meaning conventional approaches likely underestimate waste generation in low-income contexts. This methodological insight constitutes a core contribution, with significant implications for how comparative urban waste research is designed and interpreted. Findings inform community-driven interventions requiring differentiated strategies that acknowledge socioeconomic realities rather than imposing universal behaviour-change campaigns.

ABSTRACT This article explores skilled movement as a key mechanism through which people seek to attune to, or couple themselves with, the complex dimensionality of the ecological world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among climbing practitioners in Colorado and Wyoming, it traces a movement practice once tethered to conquest and male bravado into a contemporary moment in which the sport is being inherited and reimagined by a diverse cohort of young practitioners. It explores how vertical competence nudges these athletes into ‘exposure scenarios’ in which they experience attention, failure and humility by moving skilfully with rock and against gravity. While much of the literature on vertical and volumetric spatiality is about institutional (and especially military) forms of knowledge, this article explores the volumetric through intimate somatic encounters.