American Anthropologist最新文献

Quitting tends to be overlooked in studies of resistance and labor because of its individual and private character, its ineffectiveness in changing conditions of labor, and the difficulty of studying it, in favor of more organized and public protests and strikes. This paper examines why quitting is so popular among African immigrant home care workers in the United States, arguing that exit was attuned to the diffuse power relations of fissured workplaces in which home care workers care for individual clients through the mediation of brokering agencies. Quitting was not entirely individualized and private, as it became a collective strategy nurtured through circulating stories and a widely shared worldview of anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In exploring the complexity, possibilities, and limitations of quitting, I point to the continuum of modes and degrees of resistance, rather than compartmentalizing some as private and some as public. The variability in the degree of privacy and individuation makes these forms of maneuver in relation to diffuse power adaptive to different degrees of scaling up and organizing. As anthropologists attend to the dynamism of resistance in relation to power, they should not overlook the phenomenon of quitting.

This article analyzes the everyday politics of migrant hospitality in rural Southern France. Drawing on four years of fieldwork alongside benevolent residents hosting unauthorized migrants at their home or volunteering in migrant shelters, I consider how residents attempted to make up for the state's abandonment of migrant lives, the ethical dilemmas which they faced in so doing, and the political solutions they explored. Benevolent residents built infrastructures of solidarity and turned homes and shelters into sanctuaries where unauthorized migrants could stay without risking deportation. But hospitality was never as simple as hosts wanted it to be. Through an analysis of everyday life at residents’ homes, in migrant shelters, and in self-organized squats, I trace the forms of migrant subjectivity that hospitality allowed for; the social distinctions it maintained, and the ambivalent ties it forged between migrants and residents. But hospitality encounters also redefined the relationship that residents entertained with a state which they perceived as deficient, and whose failure to care for migrant lives had left them little choice but to care for migrants themselves. As unwilling hosts, they attempted to carve pockets of hospitality in the margins of border regimes.

Ethnographies of resource-making have shown that the extraction of resource value from objects is premised on obviating the emplaced lifeworlds that surrounded objects before they traveled to consumer markets. Much of this literature looks at such supply-chain disentanglement from the viewpoint of corporate and formal regulatory practices. Lead firms, legal regimes, and downstream industries do the obscuring; disadvantaged people in production sites are being obscured. This article broaches the question of commodification somewhat differently, as it focuses on a gold frontier where variously informalized peoples are playing their own part in enacting politically loaded erasures. In the Colombian Chocó, small-scale mining participants mystify key aspects of gold's sociopolitical life by repurposing state symbols and structures. Through such appropriation, they performatively remove the illicit character of their economic dealings, and concurrently, render the mining and selling of gold perceptible as activities that are fundamentally quotidian and legal.

The creation of critical research spaces, such as ethnography labs, studios, and other collaborative research environments, requires attention and attunement in anthropology to focus on the kinds of imaginative and generative spaces where creative ethnographic research can unfold as scholarship. This article reflects on the recent design, construction, and implementation process of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO), serving as an argument that an ethnography lab is a scholarly apparatus for the experimental, the imaginary, and the relational. While this critical research space situates sensory ethnography as its methodological orientation, as a lab, it also foregrounds how digital and analog tools feature in collaborations with infrastructure and field research through processes of experimentation and prototyping with the lab as an apparatus while attending to policy, people, and the imaginary. This article argues that creating a research lab in anthropology is scholarship.

The evolutionary study of human dispersal is a key topic in biological anthropology. However, recent research has revealed inconsistencies between molecular and anatomical data across different timescales and geographic regions. Despite increased interdisciplinary dialogue, these discordances are rarely analyzed in depth or interpreted for their biological significance. We present two case studies: human diversification in Southeast Asia and the Americas, which highlight persistent conflicts between morphological and genetic interpretations. Drawing on recent calls for extending the conceptual tools of evolutionary theory, we argue for a pluralist explanatory framework that can account for developmental plasticity, environmental responsiveness, and multiple trajectories of inheritance. We show how treating different datasets as epistemically equal—rather than subordinating anatomical data to molecular “controls”—allows for more comprehensive and nuanced explanations of evolutionary phenomena. This approach not only offers new insights into past human variation but also addresses long-standing issues of disciplinary fragmentation.