{"title":"SOLO MOTHERS AND NEW FORMATIONS OF COLLECTIVE LIFE IN SÃO PAULO'S PERIPHERIES","authors":"TERESA P. R. CALDEIRA","doi":"10.14506/ca41.1.07","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca41.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2010 in the city of São Paulo, 37 percent of mothers were solo mothers, compared to 16 percent in 1960. This meant that more than 1 million women in 2010 were raising their children without a partner. The increase in solo motherhood is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of deep transformations that have reshuffled entrenched formations of gender hierarchies, family arrangements, class inequalities, and racial discrimination in São Paulo. In recent decades, many young women found possibilities to shape their lives in ways that not only differed from their mothers' but that also significantly challenged the previously dominant model of the heteronormative nuclear family organized around a breadwinner and a housemaker. Analyzing the lives of solo mothers, this article identifies an emergent formation of collective life in which the nuclear family emerges as a minoritarian arrangement (around 40 percent) and in which women feel empowered to simply lead other lives.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"163-187"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca41.1.07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564355","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":"TOXIC SYNERGY: The Precarious Grasp of Human-Snake Entanglements in a Thai Venom Facility","authors":"ERIN MCCONKEY","doi":"10.14506/ca41.1.02","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca41.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Venomous snakes offer unique insight into core topics of anthropological inquiry because they are both the cause of a disease, snakebite envenoming, and the source of the cure. At a Thai facility dedicated to venomous snake husbandry for the production of antivenom, the biological pharmaceutical used in the treatment of this disease, a team of staff manages a captive population of the snakes most likely to cause a medically significant bite. Here, both snakes and snake handlers face a significant risk of bodily harm. Drawing on twelve months of multisited ethnographic research, this essay shows how everyday acts of husbandry in service of antivenom production reconstitute the temporal processes of life through the interplay of biological necessity, lived experience, and economic limitation. Overall, I find that snakes and those who handle them with bare hands, caught in a two-way “precarious grasp,” are maimed in pursuit of treatment for speculative patients.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"30-56"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca41.1.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564409","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":"SENSING BIMBIA: Ancestry Reconnection in an Anti-Crisis Atmosphere","authors":"VICTORIA M. MASSIE","doi":"10.14506/ca41.1.05","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca41.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the disappearance of the Bimbia slavery memorial from ancestry reconnection programming activities in 2018 as a reflection of an emerging effect of the “Anglophone” crisis in 2018: an anti-crisis atmosphere. Building on growing literature that treats atmosphere as a mode of sensorial attunement, this article puts ethnographic focus on how changes in postcolonial sovereignty against the “Anglophone” crisis became unobservable but were consistently on the precipice of being felt. By drawing on the affective conditions of ancestral knowledge production, including a simple curiosity to care precipitating initial public access to Bimbia, Cameroonians cannot only use the genetic diaspora's return to neutralize the impact of atmospheric violence by the postcolonial state. Managing and sustaining the genetic diaspora's return also signifies a chronic paradoxical struggle to create and maintain a reparative line of flight from the processes of racialization within and beyond the postcolony as “home.”</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"107-133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca41.1.05","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564452","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":"ON EXILE AND POSTCOLONIAL NATIONHOOD IN RWANDA AND BURUNDI","authors":"NATACHA NSABIMANA","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.06","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.3.06","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I argue, first, that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement constitute central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. Second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"519-542"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.06","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146711","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":"GREEN INVOLUTION: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory","authors":"LYLE FEARNLEY, CHEN SUN","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.03","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.3.03","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Mao-era development of hybrid rice—known as China's Green Revolution—is one of China's best-known scientific achievements. For young rice scientists in contemporary China, however, this heroic past contrasts sharply with their struggles to keep pace in increasingly competitive scientific professions. Engaging with the anthropology of time, we argue against treating their experience as an inevitable response to the global acceleration of academic work. Instead, young rice scientists struggle to synchronize the divergent tempos of the contemporary scientific career with experiments set to the rhythms of the rice plant. Drawing on a current Chinese buzzword, we argue that young scientists are experiencing <i>neijuan</i> (involution), a pattern of growing intensity and complexity of work that yields diminishing returns. Philosophers have issued manifestos for “slow science,” but anthropological inquiry illuminates the locally specific patterns of temporal mediation that are pulling scientists out of sync.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"435-462"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146899","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":"WASTE DONATIONS: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving","authors":"KEVIN YILDIRIM","doi":"10.14506/ca40.3.01","DOIUrl":"10.14506/ca40.3.01","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Istanbul, shopkeepers frequently dispose of their paper and plastic waste by giving it to select migrant waste pickers. This article examines these waste donations as a novel form of hospitable giving in Turkey, a country that has hosted millions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers since 2011. By analyzing the mutual obligations these donations create and the diverse ways that shopkeepers justify helping migrants, the article argues that waste donations occur primarily when they enable shopkeepers to reproduce their moral authority over migrant waste pickers. In doing so, it explores two related issues: the consequences of the state's retreat from providing universal welfare opportunities to irregular migrants; and the embedding of migrant hospitality within service relations in a precarious urban economy. The article concludes by rethinking informal waste labor and host-guest dynamics through the lens of dependent relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":51423,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Anthropology","volume":"40 3","pages":"383-409"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.14506/ca40.3.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145146708","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}