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\"This co-authored book explores the relationship between race and class in America in the years following the 2008 Recession. The authors argue that this period of financial precarity has changed how race shapes political and economic identity, relative to the preceding decades of the post-WWII era\"-- Provided by publisher.

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.

Dependence on others has often figured, in liberal thought, as the opposite of freedom. But the political anthropology of southern Africa has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike. Reflecting on a long regional history of dependence 'as a mode of action' allows a new perspective on certain contemporary practices that appear to what we may call 'the emancipatory liberal mind' simply as lamentable manifestations of a reactionary and retrograde yearning for paternalism and inequality. Instead, this article argues that such practices are an entirely contemporary response to the historically novel emergence of a social world where people, long understood (under both pre-capitalist and early capitalist social systems) as scarce and valuable, have instead become seen as lacking value, and in surplus. Implications are drawn for contemporary politics and policy, in a world where both labour and forms of social membership based upon it are of diminishing value, and where social assistance and the various cash transfers associated with it are of increasing significance. Dans la pensée libérale, la dépendance vis-à-vis d'autrui est souvent considérée comme l'opposé de la liberté. Pourtant, en Afrique australe, l'anthropologie politique reconnaît depuis longtemps les relations de dépendance sociale comme la base même de la cité comme de la personne. La réflexion sur cette longue histoire régionale de la dépendance comme « mode d'action » ouvre une perspective nouvelle sur certaines pratiques contemporaines que la « pensée libérale émancipatrice », comme nous pourrions l'appeler, fait apparaître comme de pitoyables manifestations d'une nostalgie du paternalisme et de l'inégalité. Loin de cela, l'article fait valoir que ces pratiques constituent une réponse tout à fait contemporaine à la récente émergence d'un univers social dans lequel les gens, longtemps considérés (dans les systèmes sociaux précapitalistes et les premiers temps du capitalisme) comme rares et précieux, ont perdu leur valeur et sont considérés comme surnuméraires. L'auteur en pointe les implications pour la politique et l'action publique contemporaine, dans une monde où la main-d'oeuvre et les formes d'appartenance sociale qui lui sont liées se dévaluent et où l'assistance sociale et la circulation d'argent associée sont de plus en plus importantes.

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant. Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border post in southeast Romania, from where she began to cover the human cost of Russian aggression. Her first-hand, vivid reporting brought the war home to readers in Scotland as she reported from front lines and cities across Ukraine. Stories from the night trains, birthday parties, military hospitals and bunkers: stories from the ground, from a writer with a deep sense of empathy, always seeking to understand the bigger picture, the big questions of identity, history, hopes and fears in this war in Europe.

In this article, I explore the politics of infrastructure in South Africa by focusing on the \"travels\" of a small technical device. Since the end of apartheid, prepaid meters have been widely deployed in South Africa's townships to curb the nonpayment of service charges. Yet many residents have bypassed their meters, enabling them to illicitly access electricity or water. I track the micro-political battle between residents tinkering with the technology and engineers trying to secure it, arguing that infrastructure itself becomes a political terrain for the negotiation of central ethical and political questions concerning civic virtue and the shape of citizenship. To investigate this techno-political terrain, I trace a genealogy of the meter from Victorian Britain, when it was invented as a tool of working-class \"moral improvement,\"to the late-apartheid period, when it was reassembled as a device of counterinsurgency against the anti-apartheid \"rent boycotts.\" In each moment, I suggest, the meter was harnessed to distinct ethical regimes and political projects. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with engineers in contemporary South Africa, I explore the semiotic-material work required to make the device functional in the post-apartheid moment. Tracing the travels of a small technical device across time and space, I argue, opens up conceptual space to rethink the relationship between ethics, politics, and technics.

A modest proposal for solving the 150-year-old problem of what kinship is, its specific quality, viz. mutuality of being: persons who are members of one another, who participate intrinsically in each other's existence. `Mutuality of being' applies as well to the constitution of kinship by social construction as by procreation, even as it accounts for `the mysterious effectiveness of relationality' (Viveiros de Castro), how it is that relatives live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. Involving such transpersonal relations of being and experience, kinship takes its place in the same ontological regime as magic, gift exchange, sorcery, and witchcraft. Une modeste proposition pour résoudre l'équation, vieille de 150 ans, de ce qu'est la parenté, sa spécificité, à savoir la mutualité d'existence: des personnes qui sont membres les unes des autres, qui participent à l'existence les unes des autres. La « mutualité d'existence » vaut aussi pour la constitution de lien de parenté par la construction sociale et la procréation, bien qu'elle tienne compte de « la mystérieuse efficacité de la relationalité » (Viveiros de Castro), de la manière dont les parents vivent les vies et meurent les morts des uns et des autres. La parenté, en mettant en jeu ces relations transpersonnelles d'existence et d'expérience, s'inscrit dans le même ordre ontologique que la magie, l'échange de cadeaux, la sorcellerie et la magie noire.

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality. In Cairo, \"phatic labor\" creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptian women via finance made these communicative channels visible as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit. A social infrastructure that had functioned as a kind of semiotic commons became visible as a resource that could be privatized or formatted as a public good. [Egypt political economy, empowerment, semiotics, social theory, infrastructure, women]

The demographic success of humans compared with other closely related species can be attributed to the relatively rapid pace of reproduction and improved chances of survival. The assistance that mothers receive from others to help raise children is a common theme in explaining this gain in surviving fertility. Cooperative breeding in its broad definition describes such a social system in which nonmaternal helpers support offspring who are not their own. In traditional societies, kin and nonkin of different ages and sex contribute both to child care and to provisioning older children. This review discusses empirical evidence for human cooperative breeding and its demographic significance and highlights the ways in which humans are similar to and different from other cooperative breeders. An emphasis is placed on cross-cultural comparison and variability in allocare strategies. Because helping in humans occurs within a subsistence pattern of food sharing and labor cooperation, both kin selection and mutualism may explain why children are often raised with nonmaternal help. Cooperative breeding is relevant to debates in anthropology concerning the evolution of human life history, sociality, and psychology and has implications for demographic patterns in today's world as well as in the past.

Over the past three decades, scholars have paid greater attention to the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes. Anthropological studies of cross-border marriages, migrant domestic workers, and sex workers have burgeoned, demonstrating growing scholarly interest in how social relations have become evermore geographically dispersed, impersonal, mediated by and implicated in broader political-economic or capitalist processes. At the same time, intimate and personal relations—especially those linked to households and domestic units, the primary units associated with reproductive labor—have become more explicitly commodified, linked to commodities and to commodified global processes (i.e., bought or sold; packaged and advertised; fetishized, commercialized, or objectified; consumed; assigned values and prices) and linked in many cases to transnational mobility and migration, presenting new ethnographic challenges and opportunities. This review highlights contemporary anthropological and ethnographic studies of the transnational commodification of intimacy and intimate relations, related debates, themes, and ethnographic challenges.