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Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts as a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conflicts as a possibility, one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one single reality “out there.” This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, because ontological conflicts pose the challenge of how to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality “out there” being described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes sense.

Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in ( a ) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, ( b ) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and ( c ) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time.

This article addresses the challenges a neoliberal conception of agency poses to anthropologists. I first discuss the kind of self that a neoliberal agency presupposes, in particular a self that is a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business. I then explore the dilemmas this neoliberal agency poses to different scholarly imaginations. I conclude by proposing that a neoliberal agency creates relationships that are morally lacking and overlooks differences in scale, deficiencies that an anthropological imagination would be able to critique effectively.

Although language can always be analyzed as a commodity, its salience as a resource with exchange value has increased with the growing importance of language in the globalized new economy under the political economic conditions of late capitalism. This review summarizes how and in which ways those conditions have a commodifying effect on language and focuses on contemporary tensions between ideologies and practices of language in the shift from modernity to late modernity. It describes some of these tensions in key sites: tourism, marketing, language teaching, translation, communications (especially call centers), and performance art.

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.

In this introduction, I argue that in spite of recent discussions of global and neoliberal time, the anthropology of modern time remains under‐explored. Modern time here is understood to be a complex historical product. At its centre is the time‐reckoning of capitalism, which acts as a universal measure of value, but which always comes into conflict with concrete experiences of time. Its social disciplines emerge from Christian practice, but the ethics of these routines are marked as secular and universal. Its politics is founded on representations of the natural connections of communities through a homogeneous historical time. Its science and technology tightly link social, human time to external non‐human rhythms. It is important for anthropologists to reflect on modern time because our discipline has been profoundly influenced by the discoveries of its depth, secularity, and relativity. The controversies that emerged in relation to Darwin's and Einstein's insights still provide the framework for many of our theories, especially when we draw on phenomenological philosophy. In this introduction, I suggest that the key resources for overcoming this significant absence in anthropology lie in a rapprochement between Alfred Gell's epistemology of time and the approaches of Marxist political philosophers. This combination, along with an emphasis on the labour in/of time, gives rise to new questions and reveals new aspects of modern time in the present.

Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what people do rather than what people posses, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized as the latter. Across its many domains, expertise is both inherently interactional, involving the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge, and inescapably ideological, implicated in the evolving hierarchies of value that legitimate particular ways of knowing as \"expert.\" This review focuses on the semiotics of expertise, highlighting four constitutive processes: socialization practices through which people establish intimacy with classes of cultural objects and learn to communicate that familiarity; evaluation, or the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects; institutionalization, wherein ways of knowing are organized and authorized; and naturalization, or the essentialization of expert enactments as bodies of knowledge.

This essay investigates the relation between becoming knowledgeable, walking along, and the experience of weather. It begins by exploring the meaning of ground. Far from being uniform, homogeneous, and pre-prepared, the ground is variegated, composite, and undergoes continuous generation. Moreover, it is apprehended in movement rather than from fixed points. Making their way along the ground, people create paths and tracks. These are made, however, through the impression of footprints rather than gestural inscription. As footprints are made in soft ground rather than stamped on a hard surface, their temporality is bound to the dynamics of its formation. These dynamics are a function of the weather, and of reactions across the interface between earth and air. Breathing with every step they take, wayfarers walk at once in the air and on the ground. This walking is itself a process of thinking and knowing. Thus knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world. Le présent essai étudie la relation entre l'acquisition de connaissances, la déambulation et la perception du temps qu'il fait. Pour commencer, il explore la signification du sol. Loin d'être uniforme, homogène et préparé, le sol est divers, composite et en recréation constante. Il est en outre appréhendé en mouvement plutôt qu'à partir de points fixes. En marchant sur le sol, les gens créent des pistes et des chemins. Ceux-ci sont produits par des traces de pas plutôt que par un geste d'inscription. Dès lors que ces empreintes s'inscrivent dans un sol meuble au lieu d'être imprimées sur une surface dure, leur temporalité est liée à la dynamique de leur formation, qui dépend elle-même du temps qu'il fait et des réactions à l'interface entre la terre et l'air. En respirant à chaque pas, les marcheurs déambulent à la fois dans l'air et sur terre. Marcher est donc en soi un processus de réflexion et de connaissance. C'est ainsi que le savoir naît le long des chemins de déplacement traversant le monde des éléments.

Whereas the anthropology of morality and ethics has been mostly focused on values and actions oriented toward the good and the right, and has generally assumed that its object could be separated from the political, the purpose of this article is to apprehend reactive attitudes in response to an injury or an injustice, therefore displacing these common presumptions. A distinction based on ethnographical findings is proposed between two such attitudes. On the one hand, ressentiment, in the Nietzschean lineage, corresponds to a condition related to a past of oppression and domination: it is exemplified through the South African blacks in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the AIDS controversies. On the other hand, resentment, in the Smithian tradition, amounts to a situation in which a social position generates frustration and acrimony: it is illustrated via the French policing of poor neighborhoods and immigrant populations in the context of the 2005 riots. Ressentiment as historical alienation and resentment as ideological alienation characterize two forms of moral sentiments and modes of political subjectivation. Their study, in reference to Jean Amery's work on survivors of the Nazi regime, contributes to an anthropology of what Primo Levi called \"grey zones.\". Adapted from the source document.

Whether concerned with kinship or with kula, anthropology's interest in credit and debt goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline. Nevertheless, this review dedicates itself primarily to more recent research trends into credit and debt's powerful nature and effects. Following Mauss, credit and debt are treated as an indissoluble dyad that contributes to diverse regulatory mechanisms of sociality, time, space, and the body. Anthropology's overarching contribution to this field of inquiry rotates around its refusal to segregate the moral from the material, seeing the ubiquitous moral debates surrounding credit and debt in various ethnographic settings as coconstitutive of their material effects.