{"title":"ON CHAINSAWS AND ACOUSTIC VIOLENCE: Sound and Deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, Mexico","authors":"ANDREW J. GREEN","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores distinct practices of sounding and listening that have emerged in a context of severe deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, a region south of Mexico City. It applies the concept of acoustic violence to this setting, as part of wider attempts to build constructive responses to climate breakdown through sound and music scholarship. As the first indication of occurring logging, the sound of chainsaws proves vital in attempts by forest guards and police to detect and halt deforestation. Equally, attentiveness to acoustic violence allows us to cut through sensationalist media presentations of the problem of deforestation, to perceive how local populations—often blamed for complicity with loggers—are in fact direct victims of environmental loss. The concept of acoustic violence can also illuminate how, in a context not just of environmental loss but of dispossession, modalities of listening may become simplified, instrumentalized, or lost.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"1-26"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717207","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":"HOW TO SUSTAIN A STRIKE: Rules, Routines, and the Essential in Kashmir","authors":"NISHITA TRISAL","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the 2016–2017 general strike <i>(hartal</i> or <i>bandh</i>) in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the site of a nearly eighty-year struggle for self-determination. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) conducted in the capital city of Srinagar amid and in the aftermath of the indefinite strike, I show how the strike and the suspension of daily life it entailed was sustained through novel spatiotemporal techniques that coordinated and routinized the actions of the Kashmiri public. Yet sustaining the strike was not only defined by routine and self-restraint. Instead, as the article demonstrates, certain forms of financial labor, too, prolonged the strike—but they did so, counterintuitively, by breaking it. I focus in particular on Kashmiri bank employees, who were at times seen as betraying the strike, but who described their continued work during strike hours as essential for keeping the economy and hence society running. By emphasizing bank employees' liminal position of breaking the strike while supporting the cause of Kashmiri self-determination, I highlight the labor, sacrifice, and ambivalence that sustain—and threaten to unravel—political mobilizations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"162-190"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717277","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":"GOOD DIGESTION: The Metabolic Politics of Dutch Dairy Farming","authors":"ELSE VOGEL","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the Netherlands, what dairy cows eat, produce, and excrete is meticulously recorded and controlled. While farmers optimize cows' diets for production, the side effects of this industrial metabolism have recently become problematized in new and strikingly public ways. Since 2019, the country has faced a so-called nitrogen crisis, a set of ecological, legal, and political challenges posed by nitrogen pollution from industrial activities, predominantly livestock farming. This article offers the concept of metabolic politics as a theoretical lens for understanding contestations over the power to organize more-than-human eating and feeding relations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with veterinarians and farmers, I contrast governmental interventions in cows' digestive processes with how bovine digestion is cared for on dairy farms. This reveals key features of metabolic politics: struggles over the forms of life that comprise the metabolic polis; clashing ways of valuing the health of organisms and ecosystems; and diverging styles of governing metabolic collectives.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"55-81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717209","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":"RELIGIOUS AFTERLIVES OF A REVOLUTION","authors":"AMIRA MITTERMAIER","doi":"10.14506/ca40.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When do revolutions end? How do revolutions live on in embodied affects, relationships, and horizons of aspiration? This article describes the remaking of religion among upper-middle-class Egyptians who participated in the 2011 uprising. It traces a widespread turn to Sufism, yoga, and meditation, along with the search for a personal connection to God. My interlocutors' spiritual bricolage could easily be read as an effect of political defeat, neoliberal self-care, or part of a global trend of declaring oneself “spiritual-but-not-religious.” Yet such contextualizing moves fail to grasp the sense of newness, surprise, and experimentation that pervades my interlocutors' narratives. I suggest that the revolution's indeterminacy is kept alive through the ethos of experimentation. Post-revolutionary spiritual bricolage results in seemingly apolitical practices like Sufi yoga, but from these practices a revolutionary spark can re-emerge.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"27-54"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.1.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143717208","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":"RESISTING ALTERNATIVE IMAGES: An Ethnography of Visual Disinformation in Brazil","authors":"MIHAI ANDREI LEAHA, ROGER CANALS","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The battle against disinformation played a key role during the Brazilian presidential elections of 2022. Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro—and, to a much lesser extent, of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—generated and disseminated deceptive and false “informative content” to influence public opinion. To counter the spread of fake news, different initiatives emerged. Based on a multimodal and hybrid ethnography, this essay discusses different modes of resistance to what we call “alternative images.” This term refers to intentionally misleading images with a deceptive referential value that are presented as accounts or reliable metaphors of reality. We describe three modes of countering these misleading images visually: public demonstrations, artistic interventions, and fact-checking agencies. Each one has its own modes of visual assessment and political intervention. The article argues for the importance of carrying out ethnographies of disinformation, capable of contributing to actual efforts against disinformation and alternative facts, along the lines of public and engaged critical anthropology.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"533-563"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764261","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":"DISSONANCE: Cartooning in Iran, Humor, and the Study of Things That Don't Match","authors":"MIRCO GÖPFERT","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay, drawing on research with cartoonists in Iran, explores cartooning as a distinctive mode of engaged knowing through drawing and humor. By unraveling the cartoonists' capacity to perceive, compose, and amplify dissonance, the study reveals a practice that intertwines perceptive sensitivity, analytical skill, and moral commitment. Embracing dissonance through cartooning and humor not only provides new perspectives on the political present in Iran and beyond but also offers a peculiar mode of knowing the uncomfortable—studying things that don't match. Unlike cartooning, anthropology seldom embraces humor, yet both share a capacity for navigating dissonance. Humor as an aesthetic and ethical practice can open unconventional paths for research and commitment, providing a means and audacity to understand the unknowable—all with a spirit of humility and critique.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"645-666"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764266","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":"THE WRESTLER AND HIS WORLD: Precarious Workers, Post-Truth Politics, and Inauthentic Activism","authors":"GREGORY HOLLIN","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, I explore attempts to organize a precarious workforce in a setting that is always-already post-truth: professional wrestling. I focus in particular on a nascent, bottom-up unionization effort in the UK that foregrounds the rights of wrestlers who perform for low wages, in unsafe environments, and in the absence of both the state and traditional trade unions. I show that while many wrestlers agree with this movement's diagnosis of problematic working conditions, there is also widespread skepticism about activists' motivations, with many wrestlers suggesting that the organization may be telling a self-interested story about work, rather than engaging in a form of work. I argue that wrestlers' permanent questioning emerges at the intersection of the self-appreciating, entrepreneurial subject and the post-truth, zany situation and conclude that wrestling affords insight into labor organization under employment conditions emblematic of a contemporary post-truth neoliberalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"485-506"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764006","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":"REMEMBERING PLACE: The Temporality of Trauma in Rudraprayag after the 2013 Flash Floods","authors":"GIDEON THOMAS MATHSON","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The 2013 flash floods reproduced an everyday that was textural, the returning past of the event combined with gestures from within the everyday, to disorient survivors of the event. I attempt in this essay to analyze the return of the event as producing psycho-spatial affects, drawn from the psyche's own propensity to return while repressing the event that causes the return, described within psycho-analytic literature as “afterwardsness.” Such afterwardsness is conditioned by the sheer incomprehensibility of environmental change that took place in just three days in the Mandakini Valley between June 15 and June 17, 2013. Following the flood, delays with the recovery process, and particularly with the process of compensation, exacerbate this trauma, leading to an extension of the temporality of trauma infinitely forward.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"592-615"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764264","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":"THE AFTERLIFE OF SACRIFICE IN THE KURDISH MOVEMENT","authors":"ESIN DÜZEL","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>What happens when sacrifice is imagined in terms of a debt that can be repaid? In the ongoing conflict begun in 1984 between the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Turkish state, Kurdish revolutionary discourse has characterized death as the required price for liberation. After 2002, a shift away from revolutionary violence and an increase in civil politics with more diverse actors allowed for public recognition of sacrifice other than death. This ethnography in Diyarbakır conceptualizes “the afterlives of revolutionary sacrifice” to unearth the multiple temporalities of revolutionary struggle. Rather than viewing sacrifice through the lens of the revolutionary sacred, the article rethinks revolution through the vulnerabilities, relationships of care, and hopes that such temporalities entail. It highlights the afterlives of sacrifice to complicate the traditional narratives of heroism and martyrdom, sheds light on everyday struggles, affects, and relationships, and questions how we value sacrifice for political change.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"507-532"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764008","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":"“TOO MUCH” SAND, NOT WATER: A Geostory of Himalayan Riverine Sediments as “Problem”","authors":"SAUMYA PANDEY","doi":"10.14506/ca39.4.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.04","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how a future about surplus sand entered river-engineering vocabulary as an obstruction to the free flow of Himalayan river systems. It is a historical and ethnographic analysis of sand's conceptualization as a catastrophic material that caused rivers to spill over, which became conducive to its removal from rivers for economic endeavors. Sand holds a unique place in society, it's the foundation on which roads, bridges, and buildings are built. Today, a shortage of these sediment particles has been described as a moment of economic and environmental crisis. Against the grain of sand's desirability and shortage as a resource material, I pay close attention to the destructive articulations of the Himalayan earthly forces that made the political economy of extracting excess sand possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"39 4","pages":"564-591"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca39.4.04","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142764262","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}