François C. Romijn, Emma Kowal, Catherine J. Frieman, Anna Källén, Sarah Abel, Shumon Hussain, Sabina Cveček, Francisco Vergara-Silva
{"title":"Engaging with palaeogenomics beyond the lab","authors":"François C. Romijn, Emma Kowal, Catherine J. Frieman, Anna Källén, Sarah Abel, Shumon Hussain, Sabina Cveček, Francisco Vergara-Silva","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70072","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As ancient DNA (aDNA) science enters a new phase of computational and institutional power, what should social scientists and humanities scholars focus on? This article identifies questions that examine the relationships between scientists, research participants, communities and publics, and how these groups engage with, appropriate or resist palaeogenomic accounts of the past. We outline four areas for research: the social relations underlying data generation, interpretation and dissemination; community engagement beyond harm-centred ethical frameworks; the diverse publics with stakes in aDNA science; and the politics of constructing genetic pasts, both deep and recent. This agenda is designed to engage with researchers and communities finding new ways to narrate pasts, presents and futures through genetic science.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":"7-10"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70072","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174516","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":"Comment: Keith Hart in conversation","authors":"Gillian Tett","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174514","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":"Comment: Keith Hart in conversation","authors":"Joanna Lewis","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174515","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":"Zombie environmentalism at the Lahore Biennale: Art, crisis and the limits of spectacular engagement","authors":"Asif Mehmood","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70077","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As Lahore choked under record smog levels in October–November 2024, the city's third Biennale showcased environmental art addressing, <i>inter alia</i>, air pollution, water scarcity and river degradation. This ethnographic account examines the gap between the Biennale's interventionist ambitions and its limited political agency. Drawing on participant observation, the author analyzes how Biennale artworks created immersive experiences that aligned with Lahore's acute environmental crises through respiratory, aquatic and fluvial themes. Yet this aesthetic engagement coexisted with ‘zombie environmentalism’ – instances where elite environmentalists and others aestheticized environmental destruction while remaining detached from both the crisis and possibilities for action. The study argues that the Biennale's transformative potential is doubly constrained by art's autonomy as a field and by the classist insularity of its organizers. The study reveals how spectacular environmental art events in the Global South can powerfully engage local crises yet fail to generate deeper political mobilization.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":"15-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174518","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":"Comment: Keith Hart in conversation","authors":"Ato Quayson","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70083","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174513","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":"Of candles and microchips: Transreligiosity, crisis and everyday religion in Greece","authors":"Eugenia Roussou","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70073","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Katohori, a village in northern Greece, this article explores how religion, healing and well-being practices intersected in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on intergenerational responses to the pandemic crisis and its aftermath, highlighting, on the one hand, how younger villagers adopted conspiracy narratives and merged Orthodox idioms with conspiratorial and anti-secular rhetorics while, on the other hand, older female villagers, usually perceived as spiritually inelastic, engaged in transreligious practices of therapeutic pluralism. Using the symbolic metaphors of candles and microchips to represent the different generations accordingly, the article examines how vernacular forms of religiosity and transreligious epistemologies are shaped, negotiated and transformed. A small northern Greek village emerges as a site of cosmological negotiation that challenges stereotypical representations of rural religiosity in southern Europe, revealing how crisis reshapes religious identity and therapeutic creativity in dynamic, unexpected ways.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":"11-14"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70073","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174517","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":"Jeffrey Epstein: Apologies and brand repair","authors":"Hugh Gusterson","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution, members of his elite network issued public statements disavowing him. Read against the private emails subsequently released, those statements function as what Nicholas Tavuchis terms accounts, dressed in apologetic vocabulary. Drawing on Marcel Mauss, this article argues that the obligations binding elites to Epstein, and Epstein in turn to figures such as Leon Black, made genuine disavowal costly. The article introduces the concept of the ‘brand repair apology’ as a defensive manoeuvre rooted in the contemporary anthropology of branding. Epstein's own attempt at brand repair, through manipulation of search results and Wikipedia entries, was thwarted by an investigative journalist and a community of unpaid volunteer editors determined that a powerful man should not rewrite his own history.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 3","pages":"1-3"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174519","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":"Medical Mediterraneanisms? End-of-life care and the mètre cube in Marseille","authors":"Samuel Sami Everett","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70062","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8322.70062","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the concept of ‘medical Mediterraneanisms’ through the case of a chapel-cum-multifaith space featuring artist Michelangelo Pistoletto's <i>mètre cube de l'infini</i> in Marseille's Paoli-Calmettes Institute for cancer care. The installation materializes tensions between secularism and pluralistic religious practice in end-of-life settings within France's Republican framework. Drawing on ethnographic observations, testimonies and visitor responses documented in the <i>livre d'or</i> (guestbook), the article argues that this space embodies both compromise and provocation, navigating Marseille's postcolonial demographics while challenging rigid secular-religious binaries. Pistoletto's <i>mètre cube</i>, used primarily by Muslims and Catholics, creates an alternative temporal and spatial framework that accommodates religious expression within ostensibly secular medical institutions.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 2","pages":"15-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70062","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147668072","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}