Since the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey, more than 215,000 people have been investigated for allegedly using ByLock, an encrypted‐message app. According to government officials and courts, the app was used exclusively by Fethullah Gülen's network, which the Turkish state classifies as a terrorist organization. Legal experts transformed ByLock data into vehicles of suspicion that could “testify” to

In 2018 and 2019, the Bureau of the Royal Household sponsored a festival in Bangkok called Love and Warmth at Winter's End. Framed as a gift to the Thai people from the then uncrowned King Vajiralongkorn, the free event immersed visitors in vintage imagery and experiences sympathetic to royal absolutism, recruiting visitors to experience as pleasant a past era in which the Thai king's power was absolute

From the 1990s to 2020, human rights activism in Moroccan‐occupied Western Sahara emerged through a process of familiarization before serving a new purpose: as a nonviolent instrument in the broader struggle for Sahrawi self‐determination. Over the last decade, this practice has intensified with the rise of digital video as a means of documenting street protests. In the process, human rights activism

Depopulation has become a landmark transformation across different rural areas, one that is often accompanied by collective experiences of abandonment, crisis, and deprivation. On the Azores archipelago, Portugal, people encounter demographic decline as a disorienting loss of familiarity with their environment and especially their horticultural plots. Azorean depopulation, then, is best framed as a

Materiality tends to play only a marginal role in mainstream theorizations of populism. In Ecuador, however, where populism has been described as the norm rather than the exception, obras (public works) are a crucial element of politics. They are framed as the gifts of leaders to the people, shaping people's lifeworlds and embedding leaders in physical landscapes. Populism thereby becomes inherently

In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive

This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head‐switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly

In 2012 the US government began requiring DNA testing in its Refugee Family Reunification Program, which was primarily used by refugees from African countries. The policy was established to allay concerns that refugees were committing “family‐composition fraud,” or including people outside their families in their resettlement and reunification cases. In humanitarian contexts “fraud” has often been

The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or

Having successfully completed fieldwork in a US nuclear weapons community, I went to Russia to interview a handful of the country's nuclear weapons scientists. Epistemologically, I made the mistake of viewing them more as variant weapons designers rather than as Russians. More seriously, I failed to think through in advance the risks to myself and to my human subjects of interviewing important national

More than a decade ago, at the beginning of my doctoral fieldwork, I was kidnapped and robbed one morning in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As I negotiated the logistical and emotional aftermath of this traumatic event, I took refuge in elite, privileged spaces. In doing so, I grappled with difficult problems: my privilege, my fear and feelings of vulnerability, and my broader moral concerns about Tanzania's

In this commentary I interrogate the implicit picture of anthropological knowledge as vulnerable to errors because its primary scene is taken to be an encounter with an alien society. Using a method of autobiographically inflected ethnographic writing, I ask how the philosophical fantasy of “the logical alien,” which Wittgenstein untangles, finds another version in the anthropologist's imagination

Displaced people have not escaped war and do not live apart from it. This is evident in the material life of internally displaced Iraqi farmers seeking refuge in a concrete construction site, downstream from a cement‐processing plant in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, one family has repeatedly tried to build a traditional tannour (bread oven) out of unworkable, cement‐infused materials in their environment

Difficult challenges are an unavoidable aspect of doing ethnographic fieldwork in sensitive spaces or on sensitive subjects. A less commonly discussed problem, however, is the impact that vicarious or secondary traumas can have on researchers. Here, I discuss my experience of secondary trauma in conducting research with legal advocates in family‐detention facilities in the US. Even in work in which

Theory occupies a central, if curious place in contemporary anthropology. It is needed and valuable, enabling the articulation and use of insights from field research. But it is also feared at times as hard, and also used in exclusionary ways. In this commentary, I review how my understanding of and relationship to theory have changed over time, primarily through an understanding of ethnography as