Front and Back Covers, Volume 41, Number 4. August 2025

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 4

Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 4

MORALLY INSCRIBING FRACTURED TIMES

President Donald Trump bangs a gavel gifted by Speaker Mike Johnson after signing the ‘big, beautiful bill’ on Friday (AP) This image exemplifies what Nicholas Lackenby calls moral inscription into fractured times. Supporters celebrate Trump's bill as historic progress, critics condemn it as dangerous regression, yet both claim history's ultimate vindication. Lackenby shows how such rhetoric intensifies precisely when people feel that ‘material, political and economic factors are wholly beyond their control’. In an era of deep political division, how do we understand the passionate certainty that characterises all sides? Lackenby's anthropological perspective in this issue reveals why claims to being on the ‘right side of history’ (and denouncing others as being on the wrong side) resonate so powerfully across Euro-America. From Serbian cafés to American politics, people invoke history's moral arc to anchor their positions amid uncertainty. Rather than dismissing claims about history's ‘right side’ as political delusion or a poor understanding of how history works, an anthropological approach reveals ‘sideism’ to be a culturally specific, post-Judeo-Christian form of historical consciousness and conscientiousness. Lackenby's work helps us see our turbulent moment through a broader lens, showing how people navigate chaos by reaching for the fixity of history's sides and inscribing themselves into time's passage.

Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 4

HOW PAYING BECAME A PRODUCT

Digital payments have transformed simple transactions into complex performances laden with emotion, meaning, and social significance. In this issue, Camilla Carabini and Joy Malala demonstrate how paying has evolved into a choreographed experience embedded in feelings, rituals, and power relations. The method of payment itself has become commodified—a branded experience engineered to evoke specific responses of trust, desire, efficiency, or anxiety. When a digital wallet opens, it unleashes more than purchasing power; it transmits carefully crafted symbols of belonging and aspiration. This marks what the authors term an ‘affective commodity’: the transformation of emotional and sensory elements of payment into profit-generating mechanisms. Every payment gesture carries cultural weight. The confident tap of a phone, the satisfying beep of a card reader, the furtive glance at an ATM—these seemingly mundane acts embed broader histories of surveillance, inequality, and resistance. Drawing on ethnographic work in Kenya and Jamaica, Carabini and Malala reveal how payment infrastructures mediate not merely economic exchange, but emotional and political life itself. Their research uncovers nationalist symbolism woven into M-Pesa's corporate identity and eschatological anxieties surrounding Jamaica's Central Bank Digital Currency among religious communities who interpret it through biblical prophecy. Legal and economic frameworks alone cannot capture these complexities. Anthropology—with its sensitivity to ritual, embodiment, and cultural specificity—provides essential tools for understanding how payments are interpreted, adapted, and contested. This perspective finds resonance in Natalie Smolenski's call for renewed dialogue between anthropology and economics through her examination of Bitcoin as an unprecedented monetary institution. As payment technologies reshape global capitalism, anthropology helps us ask: Who performs the payment? Who watches? What cultural work does each transaction accomplish? The answers lie not in ledgers, but in lived experiences.