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Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

This paper discusses the development of public anthropology in the United States and Indonesia. Drawing on literature reviews and archive studies, this article argues that public anthropology needs to be considered as a pragmatic strategy to elevate the position of anthropology in the public realm, and make it relevant to society. As a scholarly concept, public anthropology in Indonesia is not as popular as in the United States relative to applied anthropology. However, its individual and institutional practices have been flourishing in the last decade, including collaborative works and community engagement, publishing scholarship beyond conventional academic forms, active involvement in contemporary human problems, and efforts to influence public policies. To foster Indonesian public anthropology, an academic promotion system that gives more appreciation to public scholarship should be encouraged. Academic anthropologists may also take the initiative to include public anthropology in the anthropology curriculum. Moreover, the Indonesian Anthropological Association (AAI) can facilitate and promote public anthropology in broader public debates, and maintain its active role in defending humanity. 

Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a \"social debt\" to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a \"moral debt\" to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.

This article discusses the importance of commercial exhibitions of Indigenous people in the development of anthropological practices in South America between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it examines the intrinsic links between commercial ventures based on the exhibition of Indigenous people and anthropological practices. These spaces of scientific popularisation allowed the anthropologists to economise the time, economic, material and human resources involved in an excursion to the field in the classic sense. The article then presents and examines the anthropometric, linguistic, photographic and musicological investigations that the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872–1938) conducted between 1898 and 1904 on Selk'nam, Qom and Tehuelche groups exhibited in local and international commercial enterprises. Finally, through Lehmann-Nitsche's research, I explore of how European anthropologists profited from these commercial ventures for the study of indigenous people, the use of urban spaces for ‘fieldwork’ and their transformation into anthropological ‘laboratories’.

In Seattle, Washington, people dedicated to street outreach services and changing arrest patterns among low-level drug offenders and commercial sex workers are involved in an exciting program: Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD). LEAD represents a collaborative project of the United States Department of Corrections, Seattle Police Department, King County Crisis Diversion Facility, the Defender Association Racial Disparity Project, and ACLU of Washington State. The authors initiated qualitative assessment of the program in the summer of 2012; along with other fieldwork activities, interview guides were developed for interviews with LEAD participants, case managers, and police officers to assess the effectiveness of harm reduction features of the program. The research found that LEAD mediated between two opposing perspectives: community members (neighbors, business owners) who seek an intensification of police surveillance and more arrests versus law enforcement officers and officials who contend that no more arrests can be made because of dwindling criminal justice resources. This article explores contestation over urban space and how LEAD can function beyond its immediate goal of channeling clients away from prosecution and incarceration to include bridging divides that threaten to destabilize neighborhood-police relations.

A rapid ethnographic assessment conducted in 2016 engaged fishermen, their communities, and fisheries along the Gulf of Mexico coast five years after the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010. Interviews with fishermen in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana elicited information on individual and collective experiences with the disaster, including their perceptions of the lingering consequences of BP’s “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” strategy—their attempts to sink the oil with dispersants. Focusing on clean-up efforts, this article reports that no community visited was completely spared the effects of the spill, although its impacts were clearly uneven based on proximity to the spill and political economic responses to it. Findings indicate that coastal fishing communities in Louisiana appear to have suffered the most in terms of enduring adverse impacts and have yet to fully recover.

The overall framing for this collaborative article is American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropologist Association, the author's experiences as editor over five years, and the experiences of the associate editors. Adapted from the source document.

Six Rapid Rural Appraisal tools were tested by exploring four questions about gender and forests in two communities in the State of Washington. Tools selected include: Who Counts Matrix, Pebble Sorts (2), Participatory Mapping, Visioning, and an Interview Guide. The resulting data were supplemented by a questionnaire and ethnographic methods. The four questions asked whether men and women think differently about the forest, engage with the forest differently, go to different natural places, and have different visions of the future of the forest and their community. The results showed surprisingly comparable engagement with the forest by men and women and similarities in their visions of the future. In contrast, differences were found in the ways women and men think about the forest and the places they visit. The significant demographic shift toward an older population was also of interest. The use of Rapid Rural Appraisal tools in this setting was instructive, and further application is warranted, particularly when considering collaborative forest management.