This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, entitled ‘Envy and Greed: Ugly Emotions and the Politics of Accusation’, is guest edited by Geoffrey Hughes, Megnaa Mehtta, Chiara Bresciani and Stuart Strange.
Articles published in this journal should say something that is of conceptual significance to a broad audience. However, the journal also aspires for its output not to be mired in distant intellectualism. The collection that you are reading excels in fulfilling the journal's aims. The articles in this issue speak to core (and in some instances ‘classic’) areas of anthropological debate, such as community, kinship and witchcraft. The collection also engages with philosophically inclined debates in the anthropology of ethics, affect and emotion. However, the authors engage these fields through timely studies of human experiences that demand imminent, political economic attention: social inequality, migration, refugee camps, precarity and economic crisis. The issue says something that is of hopefully longstanding significance to social anthropology, while also engaging the most current issues of the real world in which we actually live.
The special issue is made up of an introduction by the Guest Editors, and articles by Teodor Zidaru-Bărbulescu, Sophie Nakueira, Valentina Zagaria, Susan MacDougall and Kari Dahlgren. The issue ends with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi's review essay of Appel, Anand and Gupta's The Promise of Infrastructure, Strebel, Bovet and Sormani's Repair Work Ethnographies and Hetherington's Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene.
I hope that you find the issue interesting.
Andrew Sanchez