Front and Back Covers, Volume 41, Number 1. February 2025

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 1

INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND THE FOURTH RUSSELL TRIBUNAL

A poster announcing the Fourth Russell Tribunal on the Rights of the Indians of North, Central and South America. Rotterdam, 24–30 November 1980.

This landmark event provided the first international platform for Indigenous peoples of the Americas to speak on their own behalf, marking a crucial moment for Indigenous women's advocacy.

The tribunal heard the testimonies from Tukanoan women from the Upper Rio Negro of Brazil who had been trafficked from their communities and placed in domestic servitude in Manaus. Through spokesperson Álvaro Sampaio, the women's testimonies exposed how mission boarding schools had facilitated their exploitation, denying them contact with their families and communities.

The tribunal's findings brought significant change. Within a year, the first Indigenous boarding school was dismantled, followed by others in the region. The Tukanoan women went on to establish AMARN (Associação de Mulheres Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro/Numia-Kurá), Brazil's first Indigenous women's organization.

Still active today, AMARN pioneered a movement that expanded Indigenous women's activism throughout Brazil. Janet Chernela's article in this issue examines this watershed moment in Indigenous rights and its enduring legacy for anthropological understandings of subaltern agency.

Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 1

CAPTIVATING DEATH

This giraffe's fur pattern dissolves into Copenhagen's urban skyline. It illustrates Mc Loughlin's article in this issue, which analyzes the tensions between scientific detachment and emotional attachment in modern zoo practice. It examines how Copenhagen Zoo cultivates ‘fascination’ as a particular form of attachment that enables rather than prevents detachment. The story of the culling and subsequent dissection of Marius, the giraffe, became a touchstone for debates about zoo management practices in which conservation science and public sentiment interplay.

The blending of wild animal and city architecture reflects the zoo's position as a space where nature is simultaneously preserved and engineered. Zoos shape contemporary multispecies relations through careful orchestration of both connection and disconnection. The zoo aspires to transparency in managing captive populations – a stance that makes explicit the scientific rationale behind practices like culling, while engaging and disciplining public emotion through practices such as public dissections.

Mc Loughlin describes the zoo's attempt to present an ‘authentic’ nature beyond Disney-like portrayals of animals, where authenticity is carefully constructed through ethically and affectively sticky practices that combine scientific protocols with emotional engagement. Much as the image combines natural and urban elements, conservation institutions must navigate the rationale of scientific management and the affective demands of public attachment.