Abstract Big data analytics have radically transformed data collection protocols in population censuses. Yet despite the unprecedented degree of automation these technologies afford, much of the critical work that goes into making data ‘actionable’ still hinges on the ethical labour of data operators in these novel human–machine settings. By following training activities and conducting interviews with technologists who worked on Brazil's 2022 population census, this article traces the workings of a fraud-detecting system designed to reduce costs and improve data quality and collection. Our ethnography identifies two competing modes of truth-making, which we term ‘probabilistic’ and ‘performative’, whereby numbers and census-takers ‘tame’ each other. Tracking human–machine data entanglements on the fringes of calculation centres helps unpack how futurities are affectively negotiated and woven into the political fabric of these political technologies.

Moisés Kopper

Ulisses Corrêa Duarte

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Crafting Good Indicators

Abstract Since March 2020, a huge quantity of data, rankings, charts and tables has been informing the ways we speak and act in the pandemic. This article focusses on the centrality of numbers in a major national controversy: the quantification of avoidable deaths by COVID-19. Launched by scientists who first addressed the omissions of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the management of the pandemic, estimations of avoidable deaths rapidly transitioned into the political arena with the installation of a parliamentary enquiry committee on the coronavirus crisis. The article examines the emergence and development of these estimates, as well as the role they have played and continue to play in constructing the pandemic as passed as they vie for a place in the memory of the COVID-19 crisis in the present.

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

Eugênia Motta

Avoidable Deaths in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract Over the past decade, data-driven systems have transformed how UK public services engage with the population. This ethnographic study, conducted in one of the United Kingdom's poorest boroughs, investigates the implementation of a machine learning data system for identifying at-risk children in need of safeguarding. It examines the concept of a ‘data consensus’ amongst council workers pursuing the ‘public good’. Within this consensus, the article explores contrasting stances on data's potential, namely that of data scientists, who use it as a tool to predict human behaviour and prevent harm, and social workers, who resist the notion that a person is predictable and therefore incapable of change. This reveals the political implications of these opaque algorithmic systems as various groups harness data in the name of public benefit.

Jennifer Cearns

Hannah Knox

Safeguarding Data

Scott Cook, Exploring Commodities. An Anthropologist on the Trails of Malinowski and Traven in Mexico. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 246. 2021. Stephen Gudeman, Enlightening Encounters. The Journeys of an Anthropologist. New York: Berghahn, pp. 144. 2022. Keith Hart, Self in the World. Connecting Life's Extremes. New York: Berghahn, pp. 314. 2022.

Chris Hann

Review Essay

Abstract The evolution of information infrastructures has shaped nature conservation related to wild species, landscapes and collections of biological diversity, efforts that are germane to nation-building and many other political projects. Extensive practices of quantification are now embedded in environmental monitoring, biodiversity protection and the banking of plant genetic resources. This suggests a kaleidoscope of human intentions and institutional mandates that are embodied within fluidly changing information systems. These technologies have come to condense cultural assumptions, values, and orientations to the Anthropocene. The conservation of biodiversity must continually generate not only spectacles of nature, but also spectacles of expert knowledge and management. Information itself is the new frontier of green capitalism, affirming a paradigm of perpetual growth.

Tracey Heatherington

With Endless Articulations

Abstract Data infrastructures are the scaffolding of the present. This afterword centres on this claim by broadening the question that animates the special issue – what does lived data politics look like? – to the question of ‘where’ it is taking place today. It extends the gaze to the systemic transformation subtending contemporary data production, which I term ‘governance by data infrastructure.’ This pervasive form of number politics represents the most recent rearrangement in matters of governance of the social. It centers regulatory data infrastructures as the preferred mode of managing complexity, bringing the industry to the kernel of the state. Furthermore, the article asks what it means to think from an anthropological vantage point considering these developments, and what fruitful methodological avenues for research this may open.

Stefania Milan

Afterword: From Number Politics to Infrastructure Politics

Reassuringly (or otherwise), the above paragraph reads more like the contents of a junk mailbox than an accurate depiction of our first special issue of 2024. Even so, there are uncanny glimpses of plausibility – ‘in the era of’; ‘wield unprecedented influence’; ‘intricate role in shaping narratives, policies, and individual experiences’; ‘the evolving dynamics between’. These rest less on their content than on their lexical, performative familiarity: they look and sound like the sort of thing you would find in academic journals. Put differently, these phrases seem plausible not because of what they say, but because of how they are strung together, evaluated and recognised.

Liana Chua

Natalia Buitron

Timothy Cooper

Editorial

Nora Wuttke's Hospital Echoes Installation, Lady David Gallery, SOAS, University of London (13 April–2 May 2023 Moreshin Allahyari, dir. 2020. She Who Knows the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness. Virtual Reality/Digital. Nazlı Dinçel, dir. 2019. Instructions on How to Make a Film. 16 mm.

Laura Haapio-Kirk

Nat Nesvaderani

Widening the Frame

Abstract In 2019, the National Health Commission of China announced a nation-wide plan to incorporate blood donation into the country's emerging informational infrastructure: the social credit system (SCS). Through analysis of comments from Weibo, one of China's largest social media sites, alongside news articles and official government announcements from the time, we follow the figure of the basket, which we regard as vernacular critique. By analysing the formation of trust indicators, contestations over their commensurability, and the prospect of converting between moral deeds and financial advantage, we aim to augment understandings of the ways that quantification practices are, and become, moral projects.

Qiuyu Jiang

Rachel Douglas-Jones

‘Credit Is a Basket’

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.

Introduction

Abstract What is trust, and how is it established in humanitarian operations? Why do humanitarians consider trust a vital resource in their work? Building on the International Committee of the Red Cross’ response to urban violence and the anthropological literature that conceives trust both as a modern social virtue and a technology of power, I examine the ways in which trust is enacted and practiced in humanitarian settings. While the organisation's legalistic logic has traditionally led to a conceptualisation of trust as the end result of a ‘moral contract’ rooted in the Geneva Conventions and operationalised through ‘confidential dialogue’ and face-to-face interactions, more recent concerns for accountability have surprisingly led to the establishment of technocratic procedures where trustworthiness is achieved through the emptying out of social relations.

Julie Billaud

Humanitarian technologies of trust

Abstract What is the relationship between life and trust? This article traces how trust is cultivated at Al Ma'wa, a wild animal sanctuary in northern Jordan, where dozens of animals rescued from regional warzone zoos are rehabilitated. At Al Ma'wa, trust is vital , in the sense that it is inextricably linked to what it means for the animals to live a good, ‘natural’, and fully animal life. Yet this vital trust is also bound up in the material conditions of the animals’ enduring captivity, which is said to foster feelings of security and comfort for them. I argue that vital trust upends normative associations between trust and freedom while also exposing how refuge produces differential meanings of trust, care, and life for animals and humans.

Kate McClellan

Refuge

Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 440 pp., 1986. Rosemary Harris, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster: A Study of Neighbours and ‘Strangers’ in a Border Community. Manchester: University Press, 234 pp., 1972. Allan D. Coult, Psychedelic Anthropology: The Study of Man Through the Manifestation of the Mind. Philadelphia: Dorrance &amp; Company, 296 pp., 1977. Eirini Papadaki, The Politics of Kinship: Adoption in Contemporary Greece. Athens: Alexandria Publications, 196 pp, 2021. Christos Lynteris, Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2022. 322 pp., 6 × 9 in, 44 figures.

Tom Scott-Smith

Matthew A. L. Gault

Joshua Falcon

Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki

Bilal Nadeem

Book Reviews

Abstract Digital technologies used to make pharmaceuticals trustworthy promise to displace historical relations, offering instead transparency through data. This article draws from research with manufacturers, importers, and distributors moving medicines between factories and markets to explore trust-making and trustworthiness in pharmaceutical sales. It shows how practices of selling and regulating pharmaceuticals rely on narratives and technologies of safety, risk, trust, and essentialised notions of industrial origin. Following the medicines shows how, rather than displacing social knowledge with data, technologies of trust rely on situated knowledge of institutions and social relations that are the source of both trust and suspicion. Ultimately, both narratives and pharmaceuticals are stabilised through notions of trust as linked to identity in ways that implicate ethnographic as well as industrial practices.

Ramah McKay

Essentialising medicines

Abstract What is trust to a mining company? This article interrogates the effects of conceptualising trust as essential infrastructure for large-scale extractive operations. Although sentiments like trust are typically imagined to fall outside the firm's purview, mining companies actively blur distinctions between economic-material and social-emotional realms when they draw on intimate social forms like kin networks and communal authority to mould trust into an expendable factor of mineral production. But rather than transforming trust into a discrete, predictable input, firms have unexpectedly manufactured its opposite: desconfianza , or distrust. My study shows how residents affected by mining navigate this distrust by attempting to construct clear boundaries between themselves and the mine. In the process, they reveal the unruly sentiments underlying the operations of extractive capitalism.

Adela Zhang

Trust as affective infrastructure

Abstract This article considers how concerns about trust in global health infrastructures—and the surveillance tools they justify—emerge from suspicions anchored in imaginaries of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’. Amid anxieties about corruption in global health circles, I consider how debates about providing per diems to African participants in international projects are articulated in racial terms. Drawing on examples from Malawi, I analyse the top-down push to make such disbursements more transparent via mobile money. Troubling celebratory framings of this technology, I demonstrate how a tool meant to increase transparency instead gives rise to mistrust and strained relations by casting African partners as suspects. While much of the scholarship on trust probes its interpersonal dimensions, this article addresses how bureaucratic infrastructures are constituted by assumptions about whom or what can be trusted. The impersonal and technical characteristics of transparency tools common to global health obscures their underpinning colonial and racial logics.

Cal Biruk

When partners are suspect(s)

Abstract What do we mean when we talk about trust? Contemporary discourses figure trust variously as a problem, an aspiration, an object of intervention, and something to be dispensed with all together. While the current moment demands new ways of thinking about trust, so too does scholarly work on trust demand similar renewal and reconsideration. To accomplish this, we depart from approaches that engage trust as a diagnostic for analysing other phenomena or objects of study, often with an emphasis on its instrumental importance. Our special issue instead approaches trust as something that itself needs to be problematised. The individual articles demonstrate the theoretical and methodological possibilities afforded through ethnographic study of the practices, technologies, and infrastructures that are often claimed as necessary to produce or sustain it.

Anna Weichselbraun

Shaila Seshia Galvin

Abstract This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relations between captivity and trust, and a renewed awareness of how mistrust shapes expectations when promises are evanescent and interests difficult to discern.

Andrea Ballestero

Afterword

This issue of CJA—Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust—is guest edited by Anna Weichselbraun, Shaila Seshia Galvin and Ramah McKay, and features articles by Kate McClellan, Julie Billaud, Cal Biruk, Adela Zhang and Ramah McKay, plus an Afterword by Andrea Ballestero.

Marilyn Strathern

Abstract This article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, it investigates secrecy practices, focussing on how such practices amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a variety of ways, secrecy is utilised as a resource in foreign relations and diplomacy; it is a means to leverage status and influence. Although outwardly striving for transparency, think tanks use secrecy practices in their effort to establish themselves as actors of consequence in foreign relations and diplomatic circles. The practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the power games such organisations play, in which all participants learn and master what to discuss and what to keep silent about. These practices, however, pose a clear challenge to matters of accountability and transparency.

Christina Garsten

Adrienne Sörbom

Discreet Diplomacy

Abstract In this article, I track a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India, to redevelop slums ( in situ ) into two-bedroom apartments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what I call ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.

Indivar Jonnalagadda

Waiting for Dignity Housing

Welcome to the first CJA issue of 2023 and the first to be produced by the new editorial team of Liana Chua (Editor), Natalia Buitron (Editor from October 2023) and Timothy Cooper (Reviews Editor). We have learnt a lot while sliding into our new roles, and we are immensely grateful to Andrew Sanchez and Tom White for leaving the journal in such excellent shape, Claudia Luna for her editorial assistance, and Janine Latham, Sascha Berghahn and the rest of the Berghahn team for their cheerful support and patience.

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gracias a Dios, an urban informal settlement in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, this article examines the mechanisms by which investments in Sandinista partisan politics are reproduced even as promises of redistribution made by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front are chronically deferred. Populist governance emerges as the administration of aspirations in the gap between the populist promise and its failure. The residents of Gracias a Dios, who are presumed to be invested in Sandinista politics either by ideological interpellation or pragmatic self-interest, are revealed to be neither deceived nor blindly hopeful. This article argues that the populist promise opens an ambivalent space that animates aspirations and preserves possibility even when experience suggests otherwise. The regime's capacity to foster possibility in lieu of probability is dependent on punctuating everyday life with irregularly timed interventions and on transforming partisan belonging into a stopgap between promise and outcome.

Luciana Chamorro

Subjects of Aspirations

Abstract This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with managers, politicians and political activists in the English public healthcare system. Rather than a dominance of financial accountability, I found a mish-mash of accountabilities, in which the duty to ‘balance the books’ was a key driver but one that relied on other forms of coercion. Campaigners mobilised the concept of political accountability against cuts and privatisation. While bureaucrats were often sympathetic to activists’ point of view, they felt constrained by ‘the reality’ of limited funds. Their conceptualisations of what was possible were enclosed . Debate regarding those limits was foreclosed . I sketch these limits on bureaucrats’ ethical imagination, theorising them as ideological closure . But at times, managers did imagine alternative possibilities. Mostly, they kept quiet regarding alternatives due to a fear of losing their jobs. Thus, corporate accountability – to one's employer – enforced service retrenchment in the name of financial accountability.

Piyush Pushkar

Accountabilities in the NHS

Adriana Petryna, Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 224, 2022 Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul , Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 339, 2021

Rebecca Carlson

Erol Saglam

Abstract The Bharatiya Janata Party won the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, popularising the slogan ‘ Achhe din aane wale hai ’ (‘Good days are coming’). Even as the good days remained elusive, in 2019, the party won the popular vote again, with an additional promise of culling out putative ‘infiltrators’ from India by announcing ‘NRC aane wala hai ’ (‘NRC is coming’). Drawing on ethnographic research carried out between 2016 and 2019 in a largely Muslim working-class neighbourhood next to one of Asia's largest garbage dumps in Mumbai, this article attempts to grasp the force of the state through its affective deferral by examining this aane wala hai form of governance – the forever-deferred, the always-arriving, the ready-to-strike – that is predicated upon weaponising deferral into a tactic of governance.

Syantani Chatterjee

Aane Wala Hai

Abstract Inspired by key concerns of this collective project, this afterword article highlights two main aspects in the discussion of governance through suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of ‘indeterminacy’ (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become, soliciting analyses of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect relates to the politics of punctuated time in light of changes happening in our current culture of temporality. These two aspects integrate my interest in rethinking the classic concept of the (sovereign) decision conceived as separation from towards that of incision as cut through , particularly in light of rising expressions of authoritarian populism, globally, across regimes.

Maria José de Abreu

Abstract Promises of incorporation, threats of punishment, and fragile, revocable entitlements mark the signature of a modality of governance dedicated to the production of subjects who are neither included nor excluded from political or economic orders, but who are provisionally appended to them as though hanging by a thread. A wide array of political regimes renders these subjects simultaneously indispensable and expendable. The authors examine promise, threat and revocability as modalities of governance appearing across liberal and illiberal registers as a means to displace the costs, risks and responsibilities of political and economic projects onto the indeterminate subjects they simultaneously produce. The authors ask what subjects do as they are held in suspense, by studying the collectivities, social orders, and forms of political organisation that emerge amongst subjects as they anticipate the authorisations and the censures, the arrival and the forfeiture of governance.

Fernando Montero

Held in Suspense

Abstract As growing numbers of migrants wait in Morocco to continue their journeys northwards, the social consequences of this time spent ‘en route’ should be further considered. This time spent waiting fosters new claims to belonging and political identity as would-be migrants to Europe become immigrants to Morocco. This article recounts ethnographically how forms of community emerge amongst im/migrants in Tangier through forms of shared difference and labours. In these borderlands, immigrants use terms such as ‘making boza ’ and ‘crossing al - barzakh ’ to describe the temporal stance of waiting. In Islam, al-barzakh refers to the firmament separating life and death. This article brings these concepts into discussion with anthropological conceptualisations of liminality to query how forms of being-in-common emerge alongside promises of inclusion and threats of exclusion.

A. George Bajalia

Doing Barzakh, Making Boza

With the affective turn, scholars pay increased attention to the emotional dimensions of everyday life. This special issue builds on this work through an explicit focus on bureaucracies to show what a more sustained attention to affects and emotions can bring to the study of the state, both as an apparatus and as an image. Contributions highlight the importance of ethnographically studying the affective relations and emotional engagements of public servants to understand how representations and practices of the state are brought together in often intangible, sometimes unspoken, but nonetheless powerful ways. In this Introduction we situate our wider contribution and the individual articles in debates about the social lives of the state and the daily practices of public servants. We postulate how affective intensities give rise to particular political imaginations and subjectivities, and we reflect on ethnography’s unique position within the study of emotions and affects in political anthropology.

Sophie Andreetta

Luisa Enria

Pauline Jarroux

Susanne Verheul

States of Feeling

In recent debates about climate change, a transmission model of ecological inheritance has apportioned responsibility for ecological damage to generations portrayed as locked in conflict, while depicting Earth as a worldly possession capable of being assigned to a set of heirs. With a focus on North America, this article examines assumptions about ownership, possession, dispositional authority, and succession embedded in the trope of bequeathing an ecologically compromised world to a receiving generation that worries it might be the last. Many of these assumptions create exclusions for those who already apprehend themselves as dispossessed. Indigenous conceptions of responsibility, temporality, and place suggest ways to begin to decolonise the rhetoric of ecological inheritance, allowing humans to inhabit the everyday under signs other than extinction, regardless of how things turn out.

Kath Weston

Bequeathing a World

I started editing the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology at the end of 2017. It seemed like a good opportunity to learn a lot. So I accepted the invitation, with the proviso that I would do it for about three years . But you know how it is when you get attached to something…. When I started the job, I defined my role as taking the journal further out of Cambridge. I also wanted the journal to assess all work without regard to an author’s politics, reputation, or professional connections. I think we have stuck to these principles. Now, after about five years, I have decided to hand the editing of the journal over to my colleague Liana Chua. Liana is an amazing anthropologist with the type of care and academic enthusiasm that makes a good editor. It’s her job to figure out the next stage for the journal.

Andrew Sanchez

Studies of bureaucrats and bureaucracy have contributed to our understanding of the social production of indifference (Herzfeld 1992). However, in this article, I argue that this focus obscures the centrality of feelings, affect and emotions in their everyday functioning. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi with civil servants of the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, I show empirically how they did not—nor did they strive to—appear indifferent. Rather, feelings, affect and emotions shaped the ways in which they allocated assistance and instantiated the state in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai. Despite its general material constraints, these relief interventions enabled the Malawi state to be present and provide resources to some of its citizens, constituting (it as) a state of relief.

Tanja D. Hendriks

A State of Relief

This article aims at investigating how fear shapes everyday interactions between teachers and their ‘chiefs’ (primary school inspectors and pedagogical advisers) in Benin. Drawing on a fifteen-month ethnography in two school districts of the country, the article largely focuses on class visits and inspections, considered as critical events for the study of ‘fear at work’. These moments constitute contexts for immediate encounters between hierarchical authority and teachers and have been the subject of multiple transformations and normative recodifications partly led by international actors, particularly requiring important emotional work from the chiefs. Through a look back at the history of relations between teachers and their chiefs since independence, I suggest that fear works as an operating tool, enabling us to investigate notions of legitimacy and authority through which the state is spoken and performed.

Fear at Work

Darren Byler, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City . Durham, NC: Duke University, pp. 269, 2022. Jamon Alex Halvaksz, Gardens of Gold: Place-Making in Papua New Guinea . Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 224, 2020.

Rune Steenberg

Raphael Deberdt

The project of ontological anthropology expounded by Philippe Descola has unexplored merits for a critical and secular anthropology of Christian conversion in indigenous societies. Drawing on Shuar descriptions of their healing practice in a context of medical pluralism in southeast Ecuador, this article argues that for animist peoples, Protestant Evangelicalism constitutes a step toward philosophical materialism or ‘naturalism’. While Shuar healing reserves a central place for hallucinogenic plant-induced visions for personal empowerment and shamanic healing, Shuar Evangelicals express a preference for engaging only the material qualities of medicinal plants. This is not, however, the consequence of adopting a disenchanted material cosmology but of a submissive mode of relating to the immaterial aspects of reality normally engaged in ancestral Shuar ontology. The article thereby extends the ontological turn’s emphasis on what is known to a consideration of modes of relation to ontological content.

Christian Tym

Christian Modernisation in Amazonia

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare bureaucracies, this article explores the place of emotions in the administrative treatment of cases—particularly those involving migrants, whose welfare rights are increasingly limited. Welfare offices are responsible for granting social assistance—in the form of medical treatment, material help, or financial benefits—in order to guarantee that those residing in Belgium live in dignified conditions. This article delves into civil servants’ emotional engagement, discourses, and relationship to ‘the state’ and into the way they decide on specific cases based on feelings, administrative guidelines, and instructions from above. It challenges the assumption that street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and daily practices often effectively restrict citizens’ access to public services and shows instead how emotions, professional ethics and values contribute to assessing deservingness, and to the way civil servants ‘do the state’ on a daily basis.

Granting ‘Human Dignity’

In July 2017, local leaders interrupted their conversations after a long working day at the sight of a cloud that looked like Fidel Castro. This fleeting vision plunged them into a genuine and lasting joy, far from the hypocrisy and cynicism attributed to revolutionary elites since the crisis of the 1990s. Following the role of affects and emotions in the daily work of bureaucrats and in their interactions with farmers, I argue that affects play a pivotal role in producing what Timothy Mitchell calls the ‘state effect’ by fueling the boundary work that sustains the distinction between state and society in Cuba. I show how affects articulate registers of self-sacrifice and reciprocity which have been mediating relationships with El Estado since the beginning of the revolution.

Marie Aureille

Seeing Fidel in the Sky

This article considers how the image of a caring state is both performed and contested by the actual workings of Zimbabwe’s volunteer community case workers (CCWs). According to their policy mandate, the volunteers’ commitment to registering ‘the vulnerable’ and mobilising them for different welfare project purposes is based on an assumed affective closeness to their communities. Ethnographic investigation also identifies community-level care work as an affectively and economically charged field, where the CCWs navigate conflicting expectations and utilise their connectedness to other welfare providers to sustain life. As diversely situated, community-level, caring bureaucrats, they also assist their ‘cases’ to construct claims of vulnerability that fit the narrow categories of welfare organisations, recognising and addressing forms of vulnerability that go beyond such definitions from the outside. In such processes, the credibility of both welfare institutions and CCWs is challenged and reproduced.

Saana Hansen

Reaching ‘the Vulnerable’ by Working from the Heart?

Based on ethnographic research conducted in a number of Orthodox parishes in Bucharest, this article discusses different conceptions of har among Bucharest Orthodox believers, practitioners, and clerics. Har stands for ‘grace’, ‘charisma’ or ‘gift’ depending on the context. An ethnographically grounded analysis of this emic concept, I argue, is essential for two main reasons. First, understanding grace through gratuity allows us to grasp diverse forms of religious change, such as committed church attendance and the detachment from communal religious life, in contemporary Romania. Second, seeing through the looking glass of Orthodox practice allows for unexplored insights into the workings of charismatic authority. The article ends with a seeming paradox: grace is ‘something extra’, an addition which is best grasped apophatically, that is, through subtraction.

Giuseppe Tateo

The Orthodox Charismatic Gift

Why is hierarchy often surrounded by ambivalence? This article contributes to current debates about the goods and the ills of social hierarchy by drawing attention to the double-edged role of grace in hierarchical relations. Taking the Aari of southern Ethiopia as my example, I show how a conception of seniors as founts of grace entails a social life marked both by intense love and frequent conflict. Conversion to Christianity flattens social hierarchies by relocating the source of grace from seniors to God. As humility replaces seniors’ demands to be honoured for dispensing grace, social life becomes less conflictual but also less engaging and affectionate. This shows that different conceptions of grace entail different forms of sociality and that grace can help explain the ambivalence of hierarchy.

Julian Sommerschuh

The Grace in Hierarchy

Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists, life histories, and a reading of a postcolonial archive of contextually grounded liberation theology, I explore the theopolitics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of Sri Lanka’s ecumenical left. Pluralistic and indigenised forms of Christianity emerged in the era of decolonisation and nationalisation and were emboldened by Vatican II. Distinguishing ecumenical Christian pluralism from evangelical Christian expansion in the region, this article historicises Cold War religiosity, drawing out ‘bi-polar’ contrasts of politically left and right forms of Christian grace. In doing so, I situate religious pluralism within the convulsive era of class and ethnic-based insurrections in Sri Lanka. Analysing the ‘catholicity’, civic nationalism, and post-nationalist self-conceptions held by Sri Lanka’s Christian left, I argue that the ‘something extra’ of grace can be fruitfully understood as the cultural accretions and theo-political formations that accrue through localised emplacements of global Christianity.

Neena Mahadev

The Charism of the Christian Left

Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be understood as reincarnations of mythical ‘men of prowess’ or as the representatives of the peripheral situation. However, both interpretations fundamentally misread the semantics of grace in Wa and neighbouring languages: a kind of cunning and strength that is so radical that it cannot be measured or mediated. Grace, here, is neither a ‘mediative concept’ (as Pitt-Rivers suggested), nor is it the consequence of Christian conversion. Instead, grace is the incommensurability that emerges at the margin of a world that is being measured.

Hans Steinmüller

Grace Is Incommensurability in Commensuration

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 368. 2020 Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 288. 2019. James Carrier (ed.) After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath. London: Routledge, pp. 212. 2016.

Juan M. del Nido

On one hand, the excess marked by grace is unquantifiable, challenging the order of the world and opening to the new. On the other hand, grace and its promise are used by the powers that be to naturalise themselves and manage dissent. Black American discourse around racism illustrates this tension, with elected leaders like Barack Obama using grace in the service of power, social movement leaders suspicious of performances tied to grace, and scholars navigating our instinct to be critical and our instinct to use critique as its own form of grace. Meditating on these questions opens lines of inquiry where theology and anthropology connect, including around the aesthetics of grace, the morality of grace, the relationship between trauma and grace, and the authorship of grace.

Vincent Lloyd

What does a consideration of the place of grace in the therapeutic relationship have to add to our understanding of the healing process? This article explores the experience of bereavement and healing in the aftermath of loss among members of a Catholic Charismatic community in Rwanda. Considering cases in which divine healing is experienced as either having succeeded or having failed, I argue that the healing process involves acts of sacrifice and gifting, taking place between the mourner, God, and social others, and that the central sacrificial gesture constituting this process is the sacrifice of the self as lived prior to loss. I suggest that in order to understand gifting and sacrifice’s therapeutic potential, we must read them as acts anchored in grace or gratuity.

Nofit Itzhak

An Unaccountable Love

What does it take to experience grace? I argue that for followers of the Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, in China, Taiwan, and the United States, grace is experienced as an intended gift with a missing motivating intention. For a group in which God’s intentions are rigorously mapped out, experiencing God’s grace is thus no simple feat. In particular, I show how the experience of grace occurs in moments of apparent wrongdoing when reward is least comprehensible. As this wrongdoing becomes institutionalised as an ideal mode of grace, however, it paradoxically becomes less graceful in practice. Therefore, grace here is an inherently transgressive, destabilising, contradictory phenomenon. Extrapolating beyond Nee and Lee’s followers, I suggest that at a time of gratitudinous secularism, of givenness without a Giver, blessedness without a Blesser, grace is more abundant than ever. But that with this grace comes gratitude, an emotion often resistant to social change.

Gareth Breen

Always Something Missing

This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology entitled ‘Always Something Extra’: Ethnographies of Grace is guest edited by Michael Edwards and Méadhbh McIvor.

This introduction calls for an ‘anthropology of grace’, arguing that an ethnographically informed theory of grace will offer valuable interpretive tools not only to scholars of religion but also to anthropologists of law, economics, and power. Focusing on four interlinked dimensions of grace—its Christianity, sociality, temporality, and potentiality—we highlight the relevance of this concept to local and global politics, particularly in encounters across difference. Building on analyses of what has been called ‘the Christianity of anthropology’, we suggest not only that Euro-Christian scholarship is indebted to the idea of grace but that its explicit invocation can propel emerging debates on time, sociality, and progressive politics. An interrogation of this theo-political concept reveals submerged conceptual assumptions and sheds new light on anthropology’s decades-old investment in reciprocity (and its discontents).

Michael Edwards

Méadhbh McIvor

The sensory turn and the affective turn in contemporary scholarship both crystalised at roughly the same time but then diverged. This special issue reintegrates them. Conjointly, these twin approaches direct attention to the multiplicity, agency, and interactivity of the full spectrum of human faculties (i.e., how the senses and affects intersect with and may also disrupt the rule of reason) in addition to highlighting the extent to which ‘the perceptual is political.’ The resulting paradigm has precipitated a shift from the study of communities as ‘imagined’ to how they are sensed and/or felt, and from a focus on ‘the human condition’ to the intensive investigation of the multiple ‘national post-revolutionary conditions’ that define the current conjuncture. By foregrounding the aesthetics of politics, and tracking the eruption of dis-sensus (laughter, graffiti, dissent) within the con-sensus that states seek to foster in their citizenry, this special issue sounds a much-needed wake-up call.

短名
Journal Impact	0.98
国际分区	ANTHROPOLOGY(Q3)

涉及主题	社会学政治学历史哲学法学地理经济认识论考古心理学生物政治艺术计算机科学
出版信息	出版商: Berghahn Books，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: ，原创研究文献占比: 92.86%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 94.29%
平均审稿周期	网友分享经验：12 Weeks

ISSN	0305-7674, 2047-7716
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