{"title":"OFFICER SAFETY TIME: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First","authors":"JESSICA KATZENSTEIN","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>U.S. police reform advocates often press police departments to replace “fear-based” survival trainings with scenario or “reality-based” trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as effecting an arrest. Temporality is a key facet of these exercises: by decelerating and replaying stressful situations, scenarios promise to allay the impulsive fear presumed to drive racialized police violence. Drawing on ethnography with officers in Maryland, I argue that scenarios instead translate fear through what I call “officer safety time.” This hegemonic temporal regime encourages police to “think threat first,” read danger in the subjunctive mood, and inhabit a hetero-masculine habitus of state power. While presumptively color-blind, officer safety time seals anti-Black violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. I argue that scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in police—while immunizing them against substantive reform.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"493-518"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“DO THEY DO OUR THOZHIL?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai","authors":"RISHABH RAGHAVAN","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article shows how acts of refusal mediated different experiences of uncertainty among the artisanal fishermen who lived and worked in Ennore's (Chennai, India) polluted landscape. In uncovering how some of these uncertainties were experienced as a result of histories of urban segregation that rendered peripheral locations like Ennore seemingly appropriate to house polluting industries, and thereafter sustained through the bodily demands of <i>thozhil</i> (the profession of artisanal fishing) in a contaminated river, the article posits acts of partial, processual, and contradictory forms of refusal as ways in which different fishermen reconciled some of their experiences of living with Ennore's petrochemical pollution. In critically engaging emic terms like area and <i>thozhil</i> that the fishermen used to flag their stances of refusal, and also showing how collective assemblies became instrumental in challenging Ennore's polluting industries, the article argues that refusal not only helped the fishermen forge lives and make claims in places that were becoming more industrial and toxic but also mediated their relationship to a place they knew as, and desired to continue calling, their home.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"543-569"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MORALLY IMMUNIZING DEBTS: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin","authors":"FERDA NUR DEMİRCİ","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the role of readily available credit in shaping new masculine ideals among underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey's North Aegean region. The availability of easy credit forges a new approach to self and intimate others in this coal basin, allowing miners to navigate intimate relationships through consumer loans and financial obligations. By concomitantly examining the intergenerational aspiration of “taking control of life” that long accompanied insecure coal mining in the Soma basin and the evolving of national credit access, I show the emergence of a new masculine imperative via indebtedness, “moral immunity,” serving as a means to measure one's masculinity and morality. Through the coupling of easy access to credit and increased investments in nuclear-family intimacy in today's Turkey, moral immunity endows indebtedness with a moral transactional potential in intimate relations and enables extracting financial value from empathic, moral dispositions among miners.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"410-434"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"TOUCHED BY DEEP TIME: Earthquake Sickness in Mexico City","authors":"LACHLAN SUMMERS","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Mexico City, earthquakes are so frightening that they make residents sick. Sometimes referred to as being <i>tocado</i> (touched), the illness might be considered part of the “culture-bound syndrome” known as <i>susto</i> throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, where acute experiences of shock—such as being trapped in a shaking building—induce chronic physiological outcomes. Instead of explaining the illness as an idiom of social distress or a cultural interpretation of a biomedical affliction, I suggest we might better understand <i>tocado'</i>s symptomology by following the fright itself. People who are <i>tocado</i> fearfully attune their senses to the signs of seismic risk—puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures, building subsidence, cracks in apartment walls—and develop an embodied apprehension of the ongoing geophysicality of their worlds. We might thus understand being <i>tocado</i> as being sick with the everyday presence of deep time.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"463-492"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DELIVERING THE STATE: State-Making through Maternal Health “Care” in Bangladeshi Public Maternal Health Spaces","authors":"JANET E. PERKINS","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.06","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Within anthropology, care operates as contested theoretical territory, with much debate residing in the space between what we think care ought to look like in health service delivery settings juxtaposed with what care looks like in the ethnographic encounter. In Bangladesh, public health service providers are often represented as not caring in health encounters. Based on ethnographic data generated in maternal health settings in Kushtia District, this article nuances conceptualizations of care in government health settings, centering the concepts of <i>sheba</i> (service), which is rooted in clinical care, and <i>jotno</i> (care), intimate, hands-on care that constitutes kinship. Through the enactment of embodied performances, government health service providers and staff enact boundary work around <i>sheba</i> and <i>jotno</i>, which serves to constitute the state during and beyond health service encounters, crystallizing within a broader constellation of imaginaries of the state and one's relationship to it.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"328-353"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"REACTIVE REGULATION: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations","authors":"INDIVAR JONNALAGADDA","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.01","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As social and environmental crises multiply and compound each other in the urban Global South, I ethnographically illustrate the micro-scale, obscured, but constitutive modes of governance that shape megacities. Through an account of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of Hyderabad, India, I show how macro-scale urban transformations form an aggregate outcome of micro-political bureaucratic processes that enlist the participation of bureaucrats, city-dwellers, and intermediary brokers. I argue that in lieu of regulatory processes that direct actions toward future goals, governance takes the form of reactive regulation, wherein the objectives are to render the city as property and re-assert the state's authority. On the one hand, these constitute deeply political processes, ones that incrementally transform urban environments. On the other hand, these processes exclusively frame urban space, time, social relations, and ecology in reductive terms of property, forestalling transformations toward sustainability or social justice.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"192-220"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BORDERLANDS AS BARRACKS: Constructing a National Geography of Security in India","authors":"SAHANA GHOSH","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.02","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What does militarism in the timespace of war-preparedness look like in the majority world? Drawing on ongoing research on soldiering in postcolonial India, focused on the Border Security Force, I examine everyday life and labor within security institutions: soldiers' routines in barracks, prohibited friendships, hardships, and longings. Bringing feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes into conversation with a materialist approach to space, this article argues that borderland barracks prove key to the expansionist logic and durability of what I term “constructive security.” The ethnographic study of barracks reveals this logic, i.e., the spatial and social inscriptions by which disparate locales across the country come to be reconstituted as places of work and dwelling for soldiers, privileging and provisioning their social reproduction through violence and care, and stitching together a national security geography. Such a view shows that postcolonial militarism cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"221-248"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DISCARDED CANDIDATES: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere)","authors":"TANYA JAKIMOW","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.04","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Elections produce legitimacy, relations between representative and represented, and consent to rule. They are also systems of discarding. Representative democracies require a surplus of candidates who engage in practices and rituals of elections, the majority of which are discarded at the ballot box. Candidates (over)invest in their campaigns, resulting in wasted time, money, and materials. Unsuccessful candidates offer a particular vantage point to view the processes of valuing and devaluing in elections, as they transition from the elevated position of candidate to the abject condition of discarded representative. Through orienting lenses of discard studies and the anthropology of waste, I re-examine campaign practices in 2021 local government elections in New South Wales, Australia, and shed light on the experience of being made surplus to representative democracy. Anthropological approaches to care, repair, (Martínez 2017) and “discarding well” (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022) provide alternative ways to re-value so-viewed surplus candidates after election day.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"276-300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FRACKING AND HISTORICIZING: On Deepened Time in West Texas","authors":"CAMERON HU","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.07","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article draws on ethnographic research in the oil fields of West Texas to reflect on the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize—to explicate more and more of the world in terms of contingent, indeterminate historical process. A century ago, petroleum drilling turned West Texas into a vast extractive zone and simultaneously historicized the desert plain as a former reef. Today, I show, fracking moves to shape and accelerate the region's geological processes on the logic that the Earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. This confluence of events highlights a common moral-political undertow shared across the “deep” historiography of the Earth and the “shallow” historiography of the human. Conceptually and concretely, both historiographic operations reorder their objects as open-ended processes that modern powers may adjust and modulate. From West Texas, the question arises: Does modernity wreck the planet by historicizing it?</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"354-382"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"GETTING YOUR DUCKS IN A ROW: Marriage, Protection, and Love without Regret in Virginia","authors":"SIOBHAN MAGEE","doi":"10.14506/ca40.2.05","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Marriage, as a topic of ethnographic and historical exploration, ties together kinship, politics, economics, and faith in complex and significant ways. In the United States, federal and state governments have used legal marriage to create insiders and outsiders along lines of “race,” sexuality, and religion. Those who have not been allowed to marry a consenting partner of their choice have been cast as dangerous, and as threats to the nation. Drawing on fieldwork in the Virginia city of Charlottesville, I argue that protection is a key idiom through which to understand marriage and kinship in the United States. The research took place at the time of the 2017 white nationalist attack on Charlottesville, and discussions of marriage and kinship resonated with wider political questions about what it means to be safe, and how kinship often means loving against and caring against—protecting against—dangers that threaten those closest to us.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 2","pages":"301-327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.2.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144367255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}