Anthropological Scholarship Research Articles

Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices: Toward a Theory of Conspiratorial Style, Agency, and Politics

This article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces the nascent threads across anthropological scholarship to reach an emic understanding of those narratives and their sociopolitical reverberations and proposes approaching conspiracy theories through their style, agentive implications, and political effects. Conspiratorial style, the article argues, pertains not to the content of the narrative but to its incessant seeking of covert operations beyond readily visible forms as well as a growing flexibility regarding the narrator's belief in the narrative's veracity. The agentivizing dynamic generated through conspiracism differentiates contemporary conspiracism from its predecessors and involves an empowering current. Finally, the article focuses on how contemporary conspiracism is intricately linked to political contestations.

Reincarnation and Identity: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Druze Narratives

The book Druze Reincarnation Narratives: Previous Life Memories Discourses and the Construction of Identities, edited by Gebhard Fartacek, offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the Druze belief in reincarnation (taqammuṣ) and the phenomenon of Nutq, where individuals recall previous lives. Scholars in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields contribute to understanding how these beliefs shape Druze social structures, personal identities, and community cohesion. The forum includes reviews by Maha Natoor, Dmitry Sevruk, and Jens Kreinath. Natoor appreciates the book's accessibility and balanced presentation of Druze reincarnation narratives while raising ethical concerns about anonymity and the use of religious texts. Sevruk commends the clear scientific language and interdisciplinary approach, emphasizing the book's contributions to Druze history and culture and suggesting further exploration of the psychological mechanisms behind reincarnation beliefs. Kreinath praises the detailed ethnographic insights and methodological rigor, noting researchers' challenges in engaging with the Druze community. He also critiques that some contributions focus on broader social, cultural, and political contexts rather than directly addressing reincarnation. Overall, the book provides valuable insights into the resilience and adaptability of the Druze in preserving their unique religious identity amidst broader societal changes.

Renewing an ‘Armenian’ neighbourhood: Recursive dispossession and the history of extractive sovereignty in Turkey

Based on ethnographic research on an urban regeneration project targeting the historically Armenian quarter of a provincial capital in the Kurdish parts of Turkey, the article engages with two related, but separate strands of anthropological scholarship on the ‘fragmented’ nature of sovereignty to think through the relation of sovereignty and extraction. It does so, firstly, in relation to contemporary transformations of statecraft under conditions of financialised neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and secondly, in relation to the historically contingent constellation of property relations, racialisation and violence in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state. The first leads me to argue that ‘fragmentation’ emerges here as a project internal to the practices of statecraft, that is, not primarily driven by market mechanisms, nor as something that extends beyond the nation-state. The historical account is offered as a case that further extends our scholarly archive of modern sovereignty as a global form intimately entangled with extraction and dispossession.

State Categories and Their Afterlives: The Politics of “Tribalisation” in Eastern India

This article examines the afterlives of state classificatory categories in everyday engagements between state and society. It examines how a community of cultivators in eastern and central India, the Kudmi-Mahatos, have reshaped their group identity through categories of the state. They have oscillated between not wanting to be labelled as “tribal” by the colonial state to seeking to be recognised as “Scheduled Tribes” by the post-colonial state. Using ethnographic and historical methods, this article investigates the shifting claims of the Kudmi-Mahatos with respect to “tribal” status. It argues: (i) that communities use state categories of classification to remake their identities vis-à-vis both the state and other communities they live with; and (ii) tribalisation as a strategy of claiming recognition reworks the tribe-caste continuum in India. The article builds on historical and anthropological scholarship that looks at political contestations over classification in modern states.

Religion, Race, and the Limit of Ethics: Historical Considerations

ABSTRACTThis article examines the study of Indigenous religions and ethics in the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries. Over the past few decades, scholars have grappled with the colonial origins of religious studies. This essay focuses on the history of anthropological scholarship on Indigenous religions and the significance of this work for the growth of the academic study of religious and ethical systems. I first consider scholarship on Indigenous ethical systems produced by theologians and comparative religionists. I next consider how anthropological concepts of cultural relativity offered scholars of religion important tools to broaden and deepen understandings of Indigenous cultures. Finally, I address the limits of these anthropological tools. During this era, scholars increasingly argued that Indigenous cultural traditions were worthy of study; however, the prevailing racialized assumptions contributed to assessments of these ethical systems as inferior to Euro‐American religio‐ethical systems.

Dreaming big with little therapy devices: automated therapy from India

This paper examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, I ask, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists’ imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? While automated therapy as instantiated by Wysa provides, I argue, a modest mental health intervention, the scalar aspirations of designers are anything but small. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it turns to designers’ imaginaries of what it means to care for current mental health needs in digitally saturated lifeworlds and how they inscribe them into the app. It identifies nonjudgmental listening, anonymity, acceptance, reframing, and agency as key ideas encoded in Wysa’s sociotechnical algorithms, along with a congruence between entrepreneurial and encoded ethics of care. Second, it situates automated therapy within anthropological scholarship on ‘little’ technical devices in global health to argue that automated therapy devices such as Wysa articulate dreams for minimalist interventions with macro effects. Finally, it explores the new geographies and temporalities of care that automated therapy spurs, tracing the ways the app bridges various spatial and temporal gaps and obstacles of human therapy and upends common global health pathways. This paper contributes to recent scholarship on aspirations, dreams and utopias and on digitization and datafication in global health.

Sociocultural aspects of the medicalisation of infertility: a comparative reading of two illness narratives

This paper is a comparative reading of variations in the medicalisation of infertility caused by sociocultural aspects, in two illness narratives by patients: Elizabeth Katkin’s Conceivability (2018), a story of...

Navigating the emotional terrain of prison reentry: State‐sanctioned gendered violence

AbstractThe emotional experiences of incarceration are directly tied to state‐sanctioned gendered violence. Most incarcerated women have a history of trauma, stemming directly from broader socio‐political and economic forces, which is further rendered throughout the incarceration and reentry process. The carceral system in the United States disrupts family and social support systems, fails to provide accessible and adequate mental health and substance use services, and denies stabilization resources such as housing, employment, and citizenry for women once released from prison, yet their emotional experiences are largely absent in analyses of this gendered violence. Drawing from a larger intimate ethnography project with a woman, LaTasha, recently released from a 25‐year to life prison sentence, this article examines how women negotiate and express emotions within the context of prison reentry contributing to feminist anthropological scholarship on state‐sanctioned gender violence. Through an in‐depth analysis of the challenges LaTasha faces in rebuilding relationships with family, navigating a system in which she has been outcasted, and asserting herself after being systematically disempowered, we gain insight into the ways in which carceral systems have prevented emotional complexity resulting in a form of incipient and largely invisible violence.

The history of the Vienna Protocol on dealing with Holocaust era human remains and its resonance with ethical considerations in African American bioarcheology.

The Vienna Protocol on How to Deal with Holocaust Era Human Remains describes what to do when possibly Jewish human remains are found. Based on Jewish medical ethics, it responds to the 2014-2017 discoveries of human remains stemming from biomedical contexts of the Nazi period. Among the finding sites were the Dahlem campus of the Free University of Berlin, the Medical University of Strasbourg, and Max Planck Institute archives. The Vienna Protocol is unique among similar recommendations on Nazi era human remains in its representation of the voices of those who suffered violence and were targeted as victims by Nazi persecution. In addition to discussing the ethics of dealing with physical human remains, these recommendations address the use of images (i.e., visual data) from the bodies of victims of Nazi violence. This paper presents the historical background of the Vienna Protocol and its impact. It also offers a first analysis as to why, at the time of the protocol's formulation, its authors were unaware of its resonance with ethical considerations from African American bioarcheology and a new ethical culture in bioanthropology. Potential reasons for this disconnect may include the historic marginalization of the voices of black scholars in anthropology within the wider scientific community. However, more detailed studies are needed to analyze similarities and differences between the histories and continuities of antisemitism and racism in Europe and the U.S.A., and their ties with scientific theories and practices of disciplines that gain knowledge from human remains.

Introduction

Abstract For decades now, scholars of quantification have been exposing the rationalist and modernist operations that lend numbers their political qualities. Yet recent anthropological scholarship has begun to show how data's ontological plasticity and messiness are constitutive of alternative political fields. This introduction brings these two streams of literature into productive conversation to rethink the means and meanings of number politics after datafication. We move beyond extant concerns about the governing and stabilising powers of numbers to highlight the moral and affective and the collective and subjective practices out of which data's political effects emerge. Foregrounding the everyday ethical work animating data worlds gives new insights into how numeric infrastructures thrive and fail within emerging socio-cultural and politico-legal milieus.

Uka Omenana (Godian Religion): Bridging Faith and Tradition in Neo-Traditional Igbo Religion

The Uka Omenana movement, also known as the Godian Religion, represents a significant resurgence of neo-traditionalism in Igboland, Nigeria, where indigenous Igbo customs intersect with Christian principles. This research examines how the movement marries traditional elements with contemporary expressions of faith, analyzing the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in the face of globalization, cultural erosion, and the encroachment of foreign ideologies. Through qualitative methodologies, including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, the study sheds light on the Uka Omenana movement's objectives, practices, and impacts within the Igbo community. The findings contribute to scholarship in anthropology, cultural studies, and religious studies by exploring the interplay between tradition and modernity in contemporary African societies and the role of religious revitalization movements in preserving cultural identity. The research reveals how Uka Omenana seeks to infuse age-old Igbo traditions with contemporary relevance and Christian spirituality, bridging ancestral customs with modern religious beliefs to foster cultural continuity. By examining the movement's core beliefs, including its conceptions of the Supreme God, deities, ancestors, the Bible, and the Eucharist, the study illuminates the complex dynamics of syncretism and the movement's efforts to reclaim and revitalize elements of Igbo culture within a religious framework.

‘Even a piece of paper has two sides’: multi‐scalar cosmologies of Japanese New Year cards

AbstractAnnually on 1 January, Japan's efficient postal system circulates 2.5 billion New Year cards to arrive simultaneously in every home in the country. Based on ethnographic fieldwork around Osaka, this article investigates the continued popularity of this exchange of paper forms in an age of smartphones and fast internet connections. Extending recent anthropological scholarship about digital data, I argue that these seemingly trivial cards have transformative potential. They are active, potent participants in the cultivation, accumulation, and ongoing care of multiple networks of social, economic, and spiritual relationships. Through an analysis of the material and aesthetic qualities of the cards, I highlight how their front‐back design embodies co‐existing, but contrasting, dimensions of Japanese relations along a qualification‐quantification and personalization‐standardization axis. The cards also produce depth and scale by linking intimate, domestic concerns with larger political and economic interests, while weaving together multiple temporal dimensions. Ultimately, they exemplify how the manipulation of surfaces can have profound cosmological consequences. These cards possess a spiritual and social potency that generates an all‐encompassing, intimate closeness that yearly rejuvenates society by reconstituting individuals as part of the whole.

Playful images: Visual Holocaust memory, digital media, and the visual walkthrough method

Abstract This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework that focuses on the interactivity, creativity, and variability of Holocaust images in digital media. Our argument unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce the concept of playful images: historical images that undergo recontextualisation, serving memetic, personal, and interactive engagements in and by digital media. Secondly, drawing on pivotal scholarship in digital methods, anthropology, sociology, and visual analysis, we identify a lacuna in contemporary methodologies and provide a rationale for an innovative approach to visual memory analysis in digital media that considers both digital media affordances and the appropriation of visual and historical materials in digital media. For that purpose, we thirdly outline a visual walkthrough method (VWM), a pragmatic performance of our approach tailored for analysing interactive digital experiences featuring playful images. By examining the playful appropriation of historical images in the video game Call of Duty: WWII (2017), we demonstrate how the interactive experience of playful images can be analysed with the help of the VWM. We conclude by discussing the position of our proposed conceptual and methodological framework within media and memory studies in the digital age.

Becoming malleable

AbstractDrawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity‐based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including “the field” and “the anthropology seminar.” Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleability—and its limits—allows us to imagine and produce a more sensitive anthropology. A more sensitive anthropology would expand the discipline's understanding of who counts as an anthropologist and what counts as anthropological praxis.

Why Gerontology Needs Anthropology: Toward an Applied Anthropological Gerontology.

In this essay, we argue that gerontologists should increase their engagement with anthropologists to increase transdisciplinary collaboration, fulfill the interdisciplinary promise of gerontology as a field, and to ensure the work of anthropologists is formed by, and employed in, situations where meaningful engagement with practitioners and policymakers can lead to social change. Anthropology is the study of human societies in historical, biological, and sociocultural context, comprising a holistic field of study that can contribute unique methods, approaches, and theories to the field of gerontology. Although increasing amounts of anthropological scholarship have focused on older adulthood, this critical work of anthropologists still needs to be utilized by those in positions of power to enact change. Furthermore, the work conducted by anthropologists of aging has not consistently been recognized as anthropological scholarship. Therefore, a notable gap exists between the promise of the anthropology of aging and the utilization of the field, its findings, and engagement with the broader gerontological academy. As such, the contributions of anthropology to aging scholarship and the resulting reduction in inequities in the aging experience are not always adequately recognized. By examining the history of anthropology's engagement with aging and the lifecourse, we argue for a more applied anthropological gerontology. We conclude with a call to action to ensure that anthropological gerontology is seen as a fundamental branch of scholarship, both within anthropology and gerontology, which can be used to improve the lived experiences of older adults globally.

Back in Youth: Social Unbecoming in the Study of West African Masculinities

African youth became a central research theme in anthropology and related disciplines in the early 2000s, drawing renewed attention to the lives and aspirations of a segment of the continent's population that, since the independence era, has become increasingly demographically dominant but socially and politically marginalised. Reflecting on an extended case study of male ex-combatants in urban Burkina Faso, this paper offers a critical reading of the anthropological scholarship on African youth, emphasising, first, that much of this literature is most usefully read as studies of diverse (West) African masculinities and, second, that the literature has underplayed the extent to which achievements of social progression tend to be acutely reversible in contexts of precarity or radical social change, throwing the unfortunate, as it were, back in youth.

Of agency, Allah, and authority: the making of a divine trial among Muslims with same‐sex attraction in Indonesia

AbstractThis article delves into the life stories of Indonesian Muslims who struggle with same‐sex attraction (henceforth SSA) and believe that their SSA is divinely foreordained as a test from Allah. I draw on seventeen months of ethnographic research in an online community called Yayasan Peduli Sahabat (henceforth YPS) which prescribes ways to live heterosexually to its members and clients with SSA. In this article, I argue that the members of YPS are exercising their agency when they try to discipline their sexuality and live as heterosexuals. In this way, this study contributes to the existing literature on the agency of illiberal religious subjects by discussing the extent to which agency is practised in the face of one's relations with the divine and human‐mediated religious authority. Drawing on these interrelated themes, this article conjoins anthropological scholarship on self‐cultivation, divine intervention, and religious authority. Instead of understanding Muslims’ lives through the shift from a self‐cultivation paradigm to the paradigm of divine intervention, I suggest that both paradigms are instructive and attending to them could elucidate how Muslims with SSA exercise their agency while continuing to be affected by the divine.

Zainab's traffic: spatial lives of an Islamic ritual across Southwest Asia

AbstractSince the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab – emerging out of a self‐described ‘poverty of mobility’ – demonstrate the utility of a more expansive conceptualization of ritual in anthropology. Instead of taking ritual for a scripturally canonized ‘manual for’ pious self‐cultivation, here I approach ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This approach produces a dynamic and spatial conception of ziyarat as a ritual of mobility. Ethnographic attention to these pilgrims’ politically conditioned and regionally networked spatial practices reveals that their movements are irreducible to ethical projects of cultivating piety alone. What is at stake in Iranian pilgrims’ movements is nothing short of the extra‐religious conditions of religion – those of the economy and the polity. These stakes illuminate how religious practices interarticulate with political and social institutions – including bazaars, borders, and shrines – that remain understudied in recent anthropological scholarship on Islamic piety.

Omenala Ikpu Ozu Akwa n’Agụlụ: N’Oge Gboo na Oge Ugbua

Igbo traditional rites are among the things that distinqush themfrom other nations. These rites are considered as parts of Igbotraditional practices. The elders are expected to be the custodiansof the Igbo valuable traditional practices. Some burial rites andceremonies are exceptional and given special meaning andattention. Covering the corpse with wrapper before it is buried isone of the Igbo traditional burial rites. Most Igbo communitiesincluding Agụlụ perform this rite for their deceased but the modusoperandi is peculiar to each community. Some people see thisburial rite as an inherited tradition but are ignorant of what itentails. The objectives of this study include highlighting thisburial rite “covering the corpse with wrapper” and making thepublic know about it. It also intends to x-ray the rite and knowwhy Agụlụ community cover corpse with wrapper before buryingit. The theoretical framework was anchored on SymbolicInteractionism. Research method used was descriptive and surveymethod. Among the findings of this study is that covering thecorpse with wrapper symbolizes good relationship between thedeceased and those covering it. It also finds out that somedeceased are not entitled to this rite. The study recommends thatIgbo people promote and project their culture rather thanjettisoning their ways of life in quest for foreign cultures. It isequally important that Igbo anthropology scholars persistentlyresearch on the essence of most Igbo traditional practices whichwill aid continuous promotion of Igbo culture.

The Crisis of Movement: Making and Remaking Global Supply Chains in Container Ports

The COVID-19 Pandemic issued a cascading crisis in the transport sector and has signified a wholesale reconfiguration of global supply chains. In studying supply chains, anthropological scholarship has tended to focus on tracking particular commodities as they move from producer to consumer. The central sites of circulation that enable this very movement of goods, however, remain understudied. Container ports in particular are key nodes where the thread of global supply chains gathers. A comparative ethnographic analysis of container ports is put forward in order to ground supply chains and logistics in particular socio-cultural histories, material infrastructures, political ecologies, and the politics of labour. We move from Singapore to Hamburg, through Algeciras up to Rotterdam and back down to Pireaus in order to show potential pathways to study the complex web of interconnections we refer to as the global supply chain, with a specific focus on labour and chokepoints in relation to multi-sited and scaled disruptions.