{"title":"Abducted by a Terrestrial Alien: Sensory Distortions, Weird Fungi and Aerial Anomalies in a Decrepit Mountain Cabin","authors":"Aki Hakonen, Oula Seitsonen, Vesa-Pekka Herva","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This account explores how circumstances verging on the other-worldly alter human perception and consciousness in a fieldwork situation. The case study involves an archaeological field survey team stranded for a time on a remote Lapland mountain. By applying the method of weirding, drawing inspiration from the narrative force of weird fiction, we examine how the team interacted with their decrepit shelter—a cabin teeming with fungal life amidst the terrestrial alien entity of the mountain. The experimental paper applies reflexive, autoethnographic writing in conceptualizing the experience of the unusual circumstances, considering what such otherworldly episodes can reveal about human engagement with the unfamiliar.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.70034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147649416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ghosts of Liberty: Notes on the Specters of São Paulo","authors":"Michael Amoruso","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article considers how ghosts and haunting point toward the affective mnemonics of built human space. Drawing on the fieldwork and archival research at Catholic churches in São Paulo's Liberdade neighborhood, I explore how the city is haunted by modernization. I mean this literally; ever since the coffee boom of the late nineteenth century, urban planners and politicians have sought to urbanize São Paulo by erasing its perceived atavisms—especially the material reminders of slavery and Indigeneity. Focusing specifically on the devotion to souls (<i>devoção às almas</i>), a practice with roots in the purgatorial devotionalism aimed at assuaging the suffering dead, I trace the racial dynamics of memory and forgetting that so often underpin spectral presence. In so doing, I draw from the anthropology of religion to offer methodological suggestions for studying living humans' engagement with the empirically evasive spirits of the dead.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147649436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cracks in the Dam: The Quiet Faith of a [CENSORED] Schoolteacher","authors":"Aaron Weiss","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Based on ethnographic research, this paper describes select views and experiences of a Sufi schoolteacher pressured at work into silence about her interpretation of Islam. At Tafsīr Islamic Academy (TIA), unity was broadly construed as achieved through conformity to mainstream Sunni belief and practice. Salihah, one of its teachers and a practicing Sufi, portrayed unity as an all-encompassing quality of Allah, realizable not through the elimination of external diversity but via annihilation of ego. Her pantheism-inflected interpretation of tawhid (God's oneness), positing God as “the only one that exists,” was especially deviant. I frame her mystical beliefs as ideational artifacts that helped tacitly facilitate an altered state of consciousness within the classroom, transforming a potentially fruitless interpersonal conflict into an opportunity for spiritual growth. This supports the more general claim that Salihah was not entirely hindered by silence from practicing her faith at Tafsīr, and may have benefited from it.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147653178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Violence Against Consciousness Creates Spectral Presences That Warp Perception","authors":"Christian Frenopoulo","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147653164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Haunted Care: Engaging Health Hauntology to Understand Health Citizenship in Evolving Welfare States","authors":"Anna Horton","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70017","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper applies a hauntological framework to explore how health citizenship in the UK is shaped by the spectral presence of neoliberal policies, particularly through increased use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is considered a keystone of national identity in the UK on account of its core socialist and humanitarian principles. However, decades of neoliberal policies, and particularly the growing implementation of PPPs, have created increased dissonance between the NHS as ideation and the NHS as a material, place-based health service. I explore how these changes manifest in my father's experiences of a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), considering the <i>spectral significance</i> of the systemic relationships, care pathways, collective imaginaries, and vital functions that are folded into this object, and by extension my father's health citizenship. Assembling hauntological concepts and healthcare experiences, I explore how the CGM mediates between life, care, and industry to illuminate evolving forms of health citizenship in contemporary welfare health systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.70017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147653315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Persistent Monster.” Coronavirus Nightmares and Capitalist Crisis in New York City","authors":"Sergio Palencia Frener","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In March–May 2020, New York City's college students suffered sudden lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a mandatory transition from in-person classes to virtual meetings. Unexpectedly, my introductory course to anthropology transformed into a collective space to share experiences of the city in times of crisis. This article examines in-class conversations on nightmares and the variety of contemporary hauntological experiences in the context of a global pandemic. Through students' conversations and written reports, personal journal entries, and photos, this article discusses COVID-19-related nightmares that depict phantasmagoric spaces, globalized dream narratives, bad omens, media oneiric compositions, and struggles against neighborhood monsters. I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic magnified experiences of fear, isolation, and loneliness in everyday life under capitalism. The article presents oneiric phenomena characterized by a global exchange of COVID-19-related dreams and nightmares. Smartphones allowed international students to exchange dream interpretations with their kinship networks in other continents. While nightmares show the increasing penetration of capitalist relationships and media in students' dreams, this article contends that dream narratives contain anti-capitalist images as well, a subterranean “specter” that potentially questions “capitalist realism”.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147653345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghosts of the Affective Economy: Refusals of Meaning in the Virtual Ethnographic Settings of Vaporwave and the Backrooms","authors":"Robert W. Penner","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70022","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Ethnographic interviews and forms of participant observation that focus narrowly on the verbal and textual expressions of collaborators and community members have real limitations. While recognizing these limitations is not new in anthropology, confronting and mitigating them must be continually rediscovered and renegotiated in new ethnographic contexts. In the marginal online community concerned with producing the virtual world known as <i>The Backrooms</i>, these limitations have appeared starkly in preliminary and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork. Participants in public forums and in private formal interview spaces have been reluctant, or even explicitly refused, to engage verbally or textually with questions of meaning. Within the context of such a digitally mediated and dispersed community, these refusals produce new challenges to ethnographic methodologies. In what follows, I draw upon existing ethnographic literature on the <i>Vaporwave</i> community, itself shaped by the concept of hauntology, to find guidance for studying marginal online communities like <i>The Backrooms</i> and specifically to understand how to sustain the ethnographer's project of ascertaining significance without fetishizing the pursuit of explicitly acknowledged (verbalized or written) meanings.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147626373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epistemic Injustice and Indigenous Epistemology","authors":"V. Hari Narayanan","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The article argues that current discussions on epistemic injustice, centered around the distinction between testimonial and hermeneutic types of injustice, cannot adequately deal with the injustice done to Indigenous epistemology. This happens primarily because of the significant difference in the way phenomena like self, mind, and knowledge are understood in Indigenous life. After discussing the salient features of Indigenous life, the article points out how the understanding of self, mind, and knowledge is interdependent in both Indigenous and Modern ways. Indigenous epistemology is primarily a matter of knowing and oriented towards a process rather than knowledge as a product. Treating knowing rather than knowledge as the basic epistemological category is not something that the Modern consciousness can do easily, given its tendency to find identity and satisfaction in the accumulation of knowledge. Thus, the article attempts to bring out the formidable difficulty in doing justice to the Indigenous ways of knowing by drawing attention to the need to employ a radically different kind of attention and embrace a reality different from the usual one.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147626375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unlocking the Tyranny of Modern Thinking: Keys From Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, and Buddhism","authors":"Barbara Carter","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70023","url":null,"abstract":"<p>One barrier to mental health and a common focus of psychotherapy is the tendency to identify with relentless, often self-critical thinking that searches for faults, becomes easily distracted, and pulls individuals away from the present moment. Identifying with such thinking distances people from each other, the external world, and important aspects of internal experiences that have been pushed out of awareness and relegated to the unconscious. This paper explores some origins of this tendency, drawing on anthropological research of isolated peoples who adopted this way of thinking after being colonized by modern cultures, alongside contemporary psychoanalytic and developmental theories. These sources illuminate the role of trauma and the dependence on language as a filter for reality and a mechanism of repression. Mindfulness meditation is proposed as a method to untangle over-identification with thinking and facilitate a more direct, embodied experience of the present moment. The neuroscience explaining the underlying mechanisms of these effects is also included. Additional support for these concepts is drawn from the author's experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer, clinical psychologist, and meditation instructor, as well as reports from graduate students beginning a meditation practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.70023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147649462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A “Christ-Haunted” Music: Spectral Timbres and Spirituality in Trap Music","authors":"Rachel Bomalaski","doi":"10.1111/anoc.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This interdisciplinary rumination explores the confluence of spectral timbres and spiritual expression in Trap music. As an heir to the Blues with its intrinsic Gothic traits, Trap music employs hauntological elements to create ritualistic spaces that juxtapose the sacred and the uncanny. The multifaceted analysis of four songs, utilizing the concept of metaphysical musical space, unveils a picture of Trap spirituality that is diverse, dynamic, and unorthodox. The songs are read as texts loaded with traces: timbre reveals material spatial cues that create fantastical ritual spaces, while lyrics contain overt or sublimated theological commentaries. In contrast to the ideology of Christian respectability politics that stifles heretical expression, Trap demonstrates the potential to liberate repressed spiritualities and further the work of mourning the South's many ghosts, particularly the revenant presence of religious and racial violence.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147653317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}