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This study aims to examine how healthcare professionals (HCPs) understand the impact prostate cancer treatment can have on patients’ sense of masculinity, sexuality, and intimate life, and how they describe such issues are communicated with patients. Theoretically, HCP narratives are interpreted as part of a reflective process in which notions of hegemonic masculinity are communicated, and sometimes rethought and redefined, within the rehabilitation process. The study showed that HCPs sometimes felt unqualified to deal with issues concerning masculinity and sexuality as such topics were understood to be partially outside the medical domain of their professions. Nonetheless, HCPs engaged in such conversations with patients and described how they tried to support them in reorientating their sense of masculinity. The article concludes that, whereas HCPs tended to describe their patients’ responses to rehabilitation from an embodied and psychological perspective, their own professional and personal views on masculinity usually departed from a sociocultural level (focusing on what it means to be a man in contemporary Swedish society, suggesting that penetrative sex is overrated), where ongoing configurations of hegemonic masculinity were more evident.

Abstract

This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relations between captivity and trust, and a renewed awareness of how mistrust shapes expectations when promises are evanescent and interests difficult to discern.

Nucho, Joanne R. 2016. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 192 pp. Ebook: US$29.95. ISBN: 9781400883004.

Schorch, Philipp, Martin Saxer and Marlen Elders (eds.). 2020. Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond. London: UCL Press. 282 pp. Pb.: £20.00. ISBN: 9781787357495.

Cvajner, Martina. 2019. Soviet Signoras. Personal and Collective Transformations in East European Migration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 279 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-0226662398.

McGonigle, Ian. 2021. Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 220 pp. Pb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780262542944.

Sax, William and Claudia Lang. 2021. The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 346 pp. Hb.: €129.00. ISBN: 9789463721622.

Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 440 pp., 1986.

Rosemary Harris, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster: A Study of Neighbours and ‘Strangers’ in a Border Community. Manchester: University Press, 234 pp., 1972.

Allan D. Coult, Psychedelic Anthropology: The Study of Man Through the Manifestation of the Mind. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 296 pp., 1977.

Eirini Papadaki, The Politics of Kinship: Adoption in Contemporary Greece. Athens: Alexandria Publications, 196 pp, 2021.

Christos Lynteris, Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2022. 322 pp., 6 × 9 in, 44 figures.

Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, eds. 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478018896.

Ranganathan, Malini, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi. 2023. Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1501768750.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 196 pp. ISBN: 978-1478014133.

Hoag, Colin. 2022. The Fluvial Imagination on Lesotho's Water-Export Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520386358 ebook.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478005681.

Ameli, Katharina. 2022. Multispecies Ethnography: Methodology of a Holistic Research Approach of Humans, Animals, Nature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 149 pp. ISBN 978-1666911923.

Zee, Jerry C. 2021. Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 311 pp. ISBN 9780520384088.

Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2021. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-509-54624-4.

Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1456-0.

Hathaway, Michael J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0691225883.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2019. From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stoetzer, Bettina. 2022. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 328 pp. ISBN 9781478018605.

Turner, James Morton, 2022. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 234 pp. ISBN 9780295750248.

Abstract

This article examines the narratives and practices of return experienced by long-term Nairobi-based Luo seeking to make a home in rural western Kenya. Building a rural home, and being buried there, remain crucial to many urban Luo understandings of a successful life. This is a project full of contingency: it relies on resources gained in the city, as well as access to land and the cultivation of rural kin relations. Although ‘home’ and ‘return’ were often spoken of in idealised terms, desires to return were as much focused on living towards the future as on a nostalgic sense of a lost past. Practices of building a rural home grapple with expectations of rural and urban kin, the challenges of doing things properly, and responsibilities of caring for home and landscapes in a way that can ensure future generations’ capacity to dwell on the same land. This desire to belong to the future is at the heart of Nairobi Luo dreams of ‘return’.

Abstract

Divorce, remarriage and new partnerships create blended families with complex configurations of emotional and financial engagements. The latest reform of the Danish Inheritance Act in 2008 was an attempt to cope with the legal challenges posed by blended families with regard to inheritance. The solution was to grant the surviving spouse greater rights as well as a greater share of the estate, thus favouring the horizontal conjugal bond between current spouses. Since the surviving spouse is often not the parent of all the deceased's children, the vertical transfer of assets and heirlooms between generations is challenged. This has consequences for the way material things can generate continuities and act to reproduce kinship over time, as a way of kinning former and coming generations. This article addresses the role of inheritance and heirlooms in processes of kinning and de-kinning.

Abstract

Focusing on the collective memories and life stories of local people regarding their courtyard house siheyuan in the old town of Beijing, this article examines how the dramatically shifting state discourses influence inheritance practices and perceptions of kinship over time in modern China. Narratives of the siheyuan constructed by the elderly residents feature extended family vis-à-vis a ‘Confucian state’, favouring male heirs during pre-revolutionary times. Siheyuan were nationalised during the following period of high socialism, when men and women were granted equal rights in property. After being returned to their former owners in the post-Mao reform era, the dilapidated siheyuan were confronted by neoliberal privatisation and commercialisation. Despite the physical survival of the siheyuan, it is now common for siheyuan siblings to turn against each other, as people struggle over shares of their suddenly valuable but neglected ancestral home. Departing from Freedman's lineage theories and Lévi-Strauss's house society, this article explores house and relatedness in the sense of ‘de-kinning’ as part of China's modernising process. While drawing attention to the subtle continuities and the emergence of new forms of relatedness, it also suggests that the siheyuan dwellers have demonstrated high degrees of resilience and adaptability when coping with the vicissitudes of life.

Abstract

Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California's Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes, this empirically grounded review article expands our understanding of grids. Extant scholarship presents the grid as a networked infrastructure mediating access to energy and one's relationship to a collective and the state. We extend this analysis by highlighting the diverse and unevenly distributed forms of risk entangled with the electric grid, focusing on those related to fire and smoke. We conclude by considering alternative infrastructural arrangements entailing different relationships to the grid with potential for more just futures in the context of climate change.

This issue of CJA—Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust—is guest edited by Anna Weichselbraun, Shaila Seshia Galvin and Ramah McKay, and features articles by Kate McClellan, Julie Billaud, Cal Biruk, Adela Zhang and Ramah McKay, plus an Afterword by Andrea Ballestero.