How does one write an article that reviews a year's worth of articles published across various anthropological journals? While I was certain that it began with reading most of the articles, I quickly wondered how I could possibly bring sets of thematically varied, theoretically diverse and sometimes methodologically novel ideas into conversation with each other. For a while, I tinkered with arrangements based on conceptual similarities between the articles, never feeling entirely satisfied with what I came up with, but slowly noticing in parallel how I found myself pointing colleagues to certain articles or special issues when engaging with their work – work that was quite often distant from my own areas of interest. Be it letting a visiting scholar who was writing about the contemporary activities of ‘philosophical practitioners’ in western Europe know about a fascinating special issue in Social Analysis that focused on how ethical dilemmas posed in thought experiments or ‘trolley problems’, common to philosophy and philosophical practice, featured in anthropological research and debates (Heywood and Reed 2023), or just telling friends and colleagues working on a range of topics, from climate change to international ocean freight, about the special issue in Ethnos on ‘chokepoints’ or ‘sites that constrict or choke the flows of resources, information, and bodies on which contemporary life depends’ (Carse et al 2023, 194), I found myself eagerly, sometimes excitedly and sometimes to the annoyance of others, filled with what I believed were useful references. ‘Where do you get the time to read so much?’, a colleague of mine once commented. ‘Get tasked with writing an annual review piece’, I should have said, instead feeling partly amused and partly delighted that someone thought I was well read.
Consequently, the structure of this annual review article finds inspiration from the workings of a literature review. The reader is encouraged to approach this article as a way to jot down, carve up and route themselves towards articles and special issues that might be of interest to them. While I have liberally classified a majority of the publications in the main English-language European anthropology journals1 under three large (but loose) subheadings, I have tried my best to group articles within subsections or within paragraphs, attempting to bring out the conceptual, contextual and/or theoretical potentials of reading them side by side. The first large section in this article brings together articles and special issues that can be grouped together under the broad research field of environmental anthropology. Ranging from research on state-sponsored cattle-breeding schemes in Venezuela to special issues on waste infrastructures and technologies, and the analytical outcomes of thinking with ‘volatility’ as a term to engage a world increasingly defined by ecological transformation, 2023 offered an exciting assortment of anthropological insights for those interested in topics related to climate change, environmental activism and climate capital.
In the second section of this article, I round up articles and essays that broadly focused on questions of labour, social mobility and class formations across the world. It might be interesting to some to note that the majority of scholarship that I reviewed from the journals that were selected fell within this broad theme. Publications ranged from ethnographic insights into the gendered configurations of labour in Europe's depopulated landscapes, to the shopfloors of heavy industries in Southeast Asia. Some brought to the fore aspirations of middle-class families in China and many sharpened our understandings of the relationship between migration and precarity among people who habitually navigate the violence and uncertainties brought about by neoliberal policies and disruptive capital accumulation.
The last section in this article is a quick round-up of the articles that can be classified as falling within the field of anthropology of religion. It is followed by a small guide to the remainder of the special issues that hadn't been mentioned in the previous sections, before calling the year to a close with a short conclusion.
Carbon Credits, Warming Seas and Climate Strategies: Environmental Anthropology in 2023
The year 2023 was no stranger to environmental crisis and climate disasters. Across the world, and across the year, there was news of floods, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes and cyclones as a result of drastic shifts in global climatic conditions. It was also the year of the 28th annual United Nations (UN) climate meeting, or COP28. Governments, activists and other stakeholders from across different fields worked towards formulating another pact that would mitigate and prepare the world for a future with climate change, despite all being cooped up, somewhat controversially, in a large summit hall in Dubai. Prior to the event, there were reports suggesting that the United Arab Emirates were using their role as hosts of the summit to privately negotiate oil deals (Rowlatt 2023), while many climate activists were also distressed by the fact that the summit opened its doors to a record number of delegates linked to fossil-fuel producers. Therefore, it came as no surprise to them when the final version of the declaration stated a ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ as opposed to their phasing out (Carrington 2023), leaving room for governments and large companies to explore new opportunities to trade in and extract oil, gas and coal, releasing more if not the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere.
Questioning how some of these climate mitigatory actions and carbon emission policies play out in Indigenous lands in Australia, Timothy Neale (2023) in his article suggests that there is considerable work put in, predominantly by non-indigenous white professionals, to formulate and maintain the ‘right story’ of carbon. Tracing the lineage of the carbon credits systems, an emission-based trading policy that aimed at limiting global carbon emissions after the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (a predecessor to the COP28), Neale's shows how such climate mitigatory logics helped present savannah wildfire management by indigenous peoples as the ‘premium carbon product’. Packaged as both an emission offset programme and a carbon sink – given the prevention of wildfires helps protect grasslands that act as natural sinks – and labelled as a programme that contributed to the preservation of indigenous heritage, Neale's suggestion that following the ways in which organisations and individuals maintain such niche configurations amid other efforts to mitigate emissions not only brings to the fore the ‘contingencies and contradictions produced by tradeable carbon’ but also brings the ‘future of combustible landscapes into sharper focus’. It is perhaps not too far a stretch to suggest that the COP28 decision to prioritise the transition away from fossil fuels as opposed to its phasing out might support newer configurations and economies of tradeable carbon that would demand our immediate attention.
In a similar vein, focusing on fracking infrastructures in Poland and the United Kingdom, Anna Szolucha (2023) uncovers how the future is experienced as both ‘predetermined’ and ‘undetermined’ for the communities who live in spaces marked as potential sites for shale gas exploration. Drawing on the experiences of local farmers, residents, protestors and councillors who mediate the indeterminate futures of hydrocarbon resource extraction – for example, experiencing them as both a site of potential employment and a conduit for industrial disaster – Szolucha petitions a shift away from asking how industry and other powerful actors impact the prospects of extractions, and instead narrows focus on how ‘noncorporate actors’ reconcile the disparate temporal rhythms of extraction, revealing the ‘alienating effects’ that arise as a result.
For the white expatriate oil workers at an offshore drill site on the coast of Ghana, Pauline Destrée's (2023) suggests that while they acknowledge the fact that oil extraction threatened the environmental futures of their kin, offshore labour was seen to offer them the possibility of achieving the kinds of parental and family life they aspired to. Even if more often than not their aspirations failed to materialise because of the conditions of offshore work, Destrée shows how tuning into the ‘affective world of extraction reveals global capitalism as a site of fantasy and ruination, rather than an economic project’ (2023: 38). Unmasking the labour regime of extractive industries as a mode of ‘being and making kin’, workers’ aspirations for a ‘good life’ shaped the workings of offshore oil extraction and Destrée suggests we must also turn towards understanding how such affective forces shape and sustain the workings of petro-capitalism.
All of the articles discussed so far reveal how the quest for hydrocarbon extraction continues to sit with various logics that posit decarbonisation as a necessary and urgent objective for the world. Be it through provisions made in the fine details of climate mitigation policies, the temporal discrepancies that carbon (-free) futures bring on for communities at sites of extraction or through the affective influence of steady employment in the oil industry, the authors all open up pathways by which we might better understand a world deeply tied to the pulls hydrocarbon capital. Elsewhere, certain scholars have dug deeper to expose how the extremities of climate change have strained relationships of labour and impacted social relations. Not too far off the coast of Ghana for example, in the commercially overfished waters of Sierra Leone, Jennifer Diggins (2023) uncovers how concealment, mistrust and deceit overwhelmingly marked social interactions among rural fisherfolk. Straining their senses both underwater in search of shoaling fish and onshore to keep track of the movements and actions of rival fisherfolk, Diggins writes that the fishermen navigated their precarious and uncertain livelihoods – brought about both by a warming sea and a history of illegal trawler fishing – by readily channelling accusations of witchcraft, trickery and deception at their closest social and economic relationships. In this heightened world of precarity and anxiety, Diggins writes, an ‘emphasis on constant watchfulness erodes an already fragile sense of trust in the dependability of social life’ (2023: 607).
Adding to the expanding scholarship looking at coastal ecologies, Kyrstin Mallon Andrews (2023) writes that dive fishermen in the Dominican Republic make sense of their shifting seascape by paying attention to the colour of the sea. In other words, the colour of seawater was not just indicative of the fishermen's chances at dive fishing, but also illuminated ‘broader entanglements with the sea that are conditioned by changing ocean environments, shifting regional politics, and deeply felt affective ties’ (2023: 549). Amid climate conservation strategies that tend to focus on the fishing practices of coastal communities as a way to preserve vulnerable ocean ecologies, Andrew insists we must pay attention to the ways in which those communities, who are on the frontlines of changing global climates, experience and narrativise climate change.
In a similar vein, other scholars have also discussed the ways in which global environmental governance programmes and nature conservation strategies tend to complicate and problematise the lives of local peoples and communities. In Suau, Papua New Guinea, Sophie Pascoe and Monica Minnegal (2023) argue that local residents’ conceptions of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ differed greatly from the ways in which environmental governance organisations tended to frame them on the island. Ute Dieckmann (2023) makes a similar argument by tracing histories of dispossession and resettlement that the Hailom (former hunter-gatherers) in Namibia's Etosha National Park encountered. Dieckmann reveals two consistent threads through a reading of the Hailom's experiences. While the overarching agenda of resettlement after the 1950s was modelled around the goal of nature conservation, Dieckmann suggests that conservation practices skirted around the ways in which the Hailom's lived with and knew their land or what she terms as their ‘onto-epistemology’. This division in conservation strategies not only economically marginalised but also socially deprived the Hailom. Reading Dieckmann's article together with Mallon Andrew's and Pascoe and Minnegal's work, it becomes increasingly clear that the ways in which global conservation strategies and environmental policies skirt around localised epistemic practices, that tend to know and engage with natural land and seascapes differently, continues to destabilise and create conflictual situations for communities who have historically called those land and seascapes their homes.
Not all interventions are policy based, however. Even the biology of animals becomes the site of development interventions. Studying a state-run cattle-breeding project in Venezuela, which was designed with the goal of improving food security and rural livelihoods by creating a new breed of cattle suited for local conditions, Aaron Kappeler (2023) reveals how the design of biotechnological solutions by the Venezuelan state incorporates a host of cultural and economic assumptions that inherently subvert the successful application of the programme's agenda. In other places, where the absence of state infrastructures and interventions is experienced more keenly, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) tend to formulate similar solutions. In Peru, Chakad Ojani's (2023) work with a local NGO reveals how the rhetoric of ‘smallness’ was used to present ‘fog catchers’ – a water infrastructure device that trapped moisture from clouds – as a small-scale solution that countered the state's inability to provide water infrastructures. Ojani argues in his article that the aggrandising claims that the NGO derived from using the rhetoric of smallness, a tendency he suggests anthropologists are also culpable of undertaking, provokes the question as to ‘how smallness is sometimes mobilised in pursuits of scalability’, given fog-catchers were simultaneously being presented as a scalable solution for a large array of socioeconomic issues. Both Kappeler and Ojani's articles add fascinating insights on the ways in which various technological solutions are devised to facilitate interactions between environment and society.
In 2023, there was no shortage of special issues that emerged from or contributed to the field of environmental anthropology. Those interested in questions of sustainability and small-scale projects that aim to foster sustainable living practices (Kuppinger 2023a) might find an issue published in Critique of Anthropology a useful read. Presenting ethnographic accounts about fairtrade coffee production in the Honduras (Tucker and Zelaya 2023), a village bank run by and based on the ethical and ecological beliefs of the indigenous Lisu people in China (Wu and Cheng 2023) and the sustainable practices that are enabled by thrift store workers in Germany (Kuppinger 2023b), the collection of articles sheds lights on small-scale efforts that task themselves with tackling larger social and ecological issues.
Scholars studying waste and waste infrastructures have made a fine contribution by examining the ‘technologies of deflection’ that obfuscate and depoliticise ways of ‘knowing’ waste (Alexander and O'Hare 2023). Within the special issue aptly titled ‘Waste and its Disguises’, readers can find articles about how defining and limiting waste features centrally in the American military's weapons manufacturing programmes (Reno 2023a) or how the reclamation of a former Soviet nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan produces a ‘chronotope of expansion’ that posits a post-Soviet nuclear future (Alexander 2023a). Other articles within the collection look at how carbon markets disrupted farmer livelihoods in Madagascar by categorising fallows as waste (Peña Valderrama 2023), how the trope of ‘recovery’ features heavily amid workers at a recycling cooperative in Argentina (O'Hare 2023) or how different ways of knowing and setting value to waste in Lahore, for example between waste-pickers and private waste management firms, comes soaked with political significance (Butt 2023).
Volatility refers to uncertain and potentially rapid transformations with palpable implications for social and ecological life. Thinking about and through volatility speaks against defining it narrowly, but we can delineate it against a number of similar terms that it is not. Unlike ‘crisis’, which describes a bounded period with a beginning and end, volatility is a permanent condition or potentiality. Unlike ‘chronic crisis’ (Vigh 2008), it has no reference to a normality from which crisis deviates. Unlike ‘variability’, it is not restricted to fluctuation between upper and lower limits. Unlike ‘change’, it does not implicitly refer to a stable baseline. Unlike ‘dynamics’, it cannot be forecasted and modelled. Finally, unlike ‘resilience’, it does not refer to a system in equilibrium that is being restored after external disturbance. (2023: 2)
Scholars in the issue use volatility to describe socio-ecological relations in delta landscapes in Canada (Krause 2023), Senegal (Simon 2023), Australia (Strang 2023a), Bangladesh (Cullen 2023) and India (Mukherjee et al 2023). Others have conceptually unpacked volatility to write about infrastructure projects in ecologically vulnerable areas (Eriksen 2023), instabilities in pastoral economies (Scoones 2023) and structural inequalities in Jakarta's informal coastal settlements (Keller 2023). As the authors of the introduction aptly sum it up, in all the contributions volatility emerges as ‘a shorthand for the uncertain and potentially radical social, economic, material and ecological shifts that may or may not induce fear, cause crises and result in catastrophe, depending on societies’ relations to a world ultimately beyond their control’ (Krause and Eriksen 2023: 10).
Similarly, and while not entirely emerging from questions of environmental concern, a team of scholars have extensively developed ‘chokepoints’ or ‘sites that constrict or “choke” the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends’ as a useful and expansive analytic that can open us to thinking more about the intersection of constriction and flow in the contemporary world (Carse et al 2023: 194). While chokepoints can be a site, concept and analytic, all the contributors begin with the premise that they are zones of spatiotemporal paradoxes where (a) motives for increased connectivity actually slows things down, (b) where marginal actors become powerful and (c) where localised effects have global ramifications. Scholars within the special issue convincingly unearth the spatiotemporal qualities of chokepoints with rich ethnographic accounts about territorial bottlenecks in the northeast of India (Middleton 2023), peninsular constrictions between the Arabian Peninsula and the horn of Africa (Dua 2023), geopolitical control of the Roki tunnel in the Caucuses (Dunn 2023) and navigational requirements required of pilots because of the expansion of the Panama Canal (Carse 2023). With a focus on hydrocarbon capital, Gabriella Valdivia (2023) reveals how everyday life in the Ecuadorian city of Esmeraldas, which houses the country's largest oil refinery, constitutes and maintains the flow of oil as much as global capital. Writing about the Sundarbans mangrove forests in Bangladesh, Jason Cons (2023) pays attention to the disparate temporal rhythms and imaginaries of the future that are funnelled into delta landscapes. Emerging as both sites vulnerable to climate change and key zones of economic development, Cons suggests the deltas might be best understood as chokepoints of the Anthropocene or zones where ‘future oriented projects are choked in ways that eliminate some possible outcomes and may, indeed, threaten all’ (2023:6).
Both ‘chokepoints’ and ‘volatility’ offer substantial analytical fodder for scholars to take forward and build on. The wide-standing analytical potentials of both concepts, in thinking through the spatiotemporal, material, economic and/or ecological facets of shifting environments and infrastructures projects, make both chokepoints and volatility easily deployable and more importantly, excitingly expandable. In summary, 2023 offered rich ethnographic accounts and new conceptual and analytical tools that anthropologists (and scholars from other disciplines) can learn from, work with and expand on. While a notable absence on a thematic level was scholarship that engaged with environmental pollution and chemical toxicity, that most likely is a result of the limited scope of reading undertaken for this review.
Social Mobility, Labour and Class Politics: A Review of Economic and Political Anthropology in 2023
Throughout 2023, scholars have also made significant contributions to discussions about labour relations, social mobility and class formations across the world. Broadly, one could classify the contributions into three thematic subsections: precarity, gender and migration. I briefly expand on each of them below.
Precarity
Scholars across disciplines have elaborately documented how conditions of precarity have only intensified with the force of late capitalism. While this is most certainly a global condition, Sian Lazar and Andrew Sanchez (2019) have nevertheless revealed how experiences of precarity might be different depending on where one might be in the world. For example, amid a situation of rising economic insecurity in South Africa, Hannah Dawson (2023) illustrates how marginalised young black men ‘fake’ consumption and wealth to make sense of the precarity and lack of opportunities in their lives. Be it in the display of desirable clothes, cars or phones, the preoccupation of whether such possessions were real or fake among the largely unemployed young men Dawson interviewed were not competitive or jealous in nature. Instead, it indexed ‘a host of anxieties about the precarious nature of social mobility and status as well as contestations around the meaning of success and progress’ (2023: 158) for those navigating the depths of economic insecurity. In the highly stratified societies of peri-urban Kenya, Peter Lockwood (2023) makes a similar argument by revealing how poorer families conceal hardship and economic precarity from their wealthy employers in a bid to keep relations of material support open. The need for poorer members to conceal precarity or present as financially stable stems from a phenomenon Lockwood calls ‘class closure’, where the upwardly mobile retain the bulk of wealth and opportunity and in the process distance themselves from social obligations towards poorer kith and kin. In turn, knowing that wealthy individuals often celebrated an ethic of hard work that they reasoned helped them achieve their financial independence, poorer members strategically navigated such exclusionary logics by performing similar codes of ‘civility’ in the hope of receiving some economic assistance and achieving their aspirations for middle-class lives.
In the tea plantations of Kerala (India), Jayaseelan Raj (2023) points to how precarious life is normalised through intimate and hierarchical forms of kinship among the workers themselves. Developing what he calls ‘intimate precarity’ that exposes how care, intimacy and kinship relations among workers interlocked in ways that sustained racialised and caste-based hierarchies of plantation capitalism, Raj suggests anthropologists also study the ways by which non-capitalist classes reproduce the conditions of precarity. In a similar vein, emerging from ethnographic accounts of precariously employed retail workers in New Delhi, Garima Jaji (2023) argues that the bickering and politicking among workers on the shopfloor not only produced ethical musing about precarious work as always being drenched in dirty politics, but also the belief that all forms of power and politics beyond the work floor are in essence corrupt and dirty. In Jaju's own words (2023: 816), her article speaks to ‘how the ethic of utilitarian individualism framing the experience of precarious work in the neoliberal economy sanctions wider conclusions about the impossibility of collective action or “good” politics’ by positing the notion that the messy and tense forms of social life on the work floor are in essence representative of larger democratic and political institutions.
For low-income Muslim women in St Petersburg (Russia), Tatiana Rabinovich (2023) writes that the precariousness and uncertainties of life in Russia were embraced by her interlocutors through an ethics of care for non-human others, particularly stray dogs. Bringing together scholarship on precarity, Islamic ethics and interspecies relations, Rabinovich illuminates ‘embracing precarity’ as a politically salient response to unstable life in postsocialist Russia. In other words, embracing precarity showcases how minority women navigate precarious and uncertain lives through an engagement with religious ethics and, more importantly, by building meaningful multispecies relationships.
Elsewhere, scholars have written about the ways in which the dominant ethic of work in late capitalism are challenged by digital nomads (Kesküla 2023) and how histories of uneven socioeconomic development in the rust belt of the United States are propelling a diverse set of non-waged labourers to organise and act collectively (Kasmir 2023). Of interest to readers here might be a special issue that was published in Focaal that theoretically intervenes in the scholarship about surplus populations or those who are excluded from capitalism's formalised labour markets. Tom Cowan, Stephen Campbell and Don Kalb use the term ‘peripheral labour’ to rethink surplus populations and argue that such forms of labour are not only integral to the extraction of value under capitalist economies but also draw ‘particular attention to the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalist labor arrangements and to associated patterns of ideological devaluation’ (2023: 8). Other articles in the thematic collection bring to the fore examples of how dispossessed communities, after the 2007–2008 global economic crisis, are drawn into the frays of capitalist exploitation in Ghana (Ayelazuno 2023), exploitive relationships between landlords and tenant shopkeepers in South Korea's real estate market (Lee 2023), the ways Indian brick kiln workers are drawn into extractive labour relationships even during periods when brick work is suspended (Mishra 2023) and how the racialisation of the Roma people excludes them from both wage-labour and housing in capitalist Eastern Europe. As Harvey Bernstein (2023) asks in his theoretical piece within the collection, a question that in one way or the other animates a bulk of the articles in the issue, who makes up a population that is surplus to capital's requirements and how might their exclusion relate to and expand processes of capital accumulation? This question, I suspect, will continue to inform anthropological enquiry for years to come.
Gender
In parallel, there has been considerable engagement from scholars about the ways in which class aspirations and labour opportunities have either maintained, challenged or transformed gender relations. In rural China, for example, Xiang Zou (2023) writes that the socioeconomic challenges that have been brought up by rapid urbanisation have contributed to ‘contradictory emotions of gendered labor’ in relation to elderly care and filial responsibilities. While rural families increasingly expected daughters to make sacrifices to take on caregiving responsibilities, their labour tended to be less appreciated given a traditional patrilineal focus that foregrounded sons – often those who migrated to nearby and distant cities in search of work – as principal caregivers. Heightened in a context where the demand for elderly care is high, and where social care infrastructures are only limited, daughters tended to take on the weight of what Zou suggests is a contradictory situation: where demand for and indifference towards elderly care work appear in tandem.
Simultaneously, male rural returnees in China facing the constraints of a shift in national economic focus from industrial manufacturing to information technology services are engaging in what Suvi Rautio (2023) calls ‘self-reliant masculinities’. Emerging from fieldwork conducted with Dong ethnic minority residents in a village in Southwest China, Rautio traces how histories of rural to urban migration are confronted by male returnees through a harnessing of new masculine subjectivities, combining the self-reliant ethos of neoliberalism and the valorisation of rural life and honest labour. ‘This gendered productivist role’, Rautio (2023: 91) argues, ‘provides men at the rural, ethnic margins with new subjectivities disjointed from the prejudice imposed on them in cities’ and, more importantly, turns attention towards the state's responsibilities at deepening insecurities and precarity among rural men who are otherwise spoken of as contributing to a ‘masculine crisis’ in the country.
Elsewhere, there were other ways in which men performed and fashioned masculine subjectivities. For the rural working-class men on Portugal's São Jorge Island for example, the saddening experience of local depopulation was met with overstated and often violent performances of masculinity (Burger 2023). Faced with the prospect of falling short on the demands of cultivation work, given a sizeable reduction in the available labour force on the island, men recharged their sense of masculine dexterity by deriding and slaughtering goats. The often vile and performative function of slaughtering goats, infused with slanderous, sexual and abusive gestures and language, not only offered men the space to assuage their fears of their depleting manhood but also presented them the ‘collective’ opportunity to come together as men, shedding insight into how men perform as masculine subjects in depopulated agrarian landscapes.
The experiences of agrarian communities in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, as Nikita Simpson (2023) reveals, were entirely different. She shows how the pulls and pressures of aspiring for a middle-class life manifested on the bodies of Gaddi women, who were tasked with taking on the demands of domestic work, especially after having to withdraw from waged work, which was historically essential to the former agro- pastoralist community. Tracing how the project of domesticity intersected with narratives of upward mobility for women in India, Simpson suggests that Gaddi women used the idiom ghar ki tension (household tension) to signal the difficulties of achieving middle-class domesticity and keeping precarity at bay. As an emic term, Simpson proposes ghar ki tension as a gateway into not only thinking about how ambivalence and distress feature in the lives of those who aspire to achieve middle-class status, but also how they particularly somaticise on the bodies of women mediating the project of domesticity brought upon them.
Helle Rydstrom (2023) also contributes to the scholarship on gender and labour through a focus on white and blue collared women workers employed in heavy industries in Vietnam. By engaging with different technologies brought about through the introduction of global heavy industry, Rydstrom writes that blue- and white-collar workers in Vietnam ‘inevitably come to challenge conventional heteronormative binary images of femaleness and maleness and, in doing so, open spaces for counter-images of femininity and masculinity’ (2023: 177), even if some of these counter images only reinforce gender stereotypes and class-based hierarchies and inequalities. A consistent, and perhaps important, observation that all the articles reveal is that while men take on the labour of fashioning themselves as masculine subjects, more often than not women continue to mediate enforced gender subjectivities, attesting to the ways in which patriarchal structures of power manifest through late capitalism.
Migration
In this subsection, while I round up the scholarship that has focused on labour and migration, I also pull in ethnographic contributions that specifically looked at migrants and migrant labour. Given that the primary questions from where most of the articles emerge from either a focus on the ways in which the want for work or certain lifestyles make people move or the ways in which the need for cheap labour move people, I choose to present such scholarship together. Richard Fraser's (2023) article on rural–urban migration in Mongolia is perhaps the perfect entry point. Fraser's ethnography reveals how while herders migrating to the city of Ulaanbaatar transpose herding skills and learn other skills to adapt to their new urban contexts, they also face experiences where their skills are devalued and thereby confront an erosion of their pastoral and gender identities. Fraser takes a ‘polydirectional approach’ to Tim Ingold's (2000) concept of ‘enskilment’ to show how a focus on the transformation of everyday skills can reveal the complexities of experiencing major life events like forced relocation or migration. While Fraser's concept of enskilment and deskilment primarily emerges from herders moving to (and back from) the city, Sara Friedman's (2023) article interrogates the ‘lifestyle choices’ that lead middle-class Chinese residents to move to the rural southwest. Identifying a stratified and generational middle-class emerging in China as a result of three decades of state-led capitalism, Friedman's interlocutors differ from the newer entrants to the middle-class that participate in leadership and business programmes in a desire for some kind of radical self-transformation (see Fengjiang and Steinmüller 2023). Instead, the families Friedman speaks of make up the first generation of China's middle class who, disillusioned by the overwhelming pursuit of economic growth, environmental degradation and the rigid presence of an authoritarian political regime in Chinese cities, migrate to the countryside with the goal of achieving what they conceptualise as familial happiness and the good life. In other words, these families opt out of the stresses of what is otherwise considered a successful life in contemporary China by prioritising ‘the quality of parent–child relationships and nuclear family happiness in the here and now’, relocating to the southwest countryside to do so.
Scholars writing about migrants living in other countries have also focused on the ways in which many take on projects of self-transformation. For example, for Venezuelan migrants in Chile, who make up the largest immigrant diaspora in the country, their path towards Chilean citizenship involves a mediation of their migrant identities – expressed in public spaces in their residential neighbourhoods – and their identities as prospective citizens – bolstered at homes through notions of civility and compliance with bureaucratic requirements (Pérez and Palma 2023). This mediation of identities, it must be understood, was brought about by Chile's openness to taking in Venezuelan migrants, who were experiencing a prolonged socioeconomic crisis in their country. Yet, elsewhere, ‘the grammar of identity’ attached to people claiming asylum creates what Mikkel Rytter (2023) terms the ‘exogenous other’. Writing about Denmark's shift in refugee policy that moved away from the goal of ‘integration’ to one that favoured ‘deportation’, Rytter argues that the language of such policies always excludes ethnic minorities from being identified as being a part of Danish society, in tandem cementing ideas of what makes up the Danish welfare state and who belongs in it. Such exclusionary logics permeate borders across Europe, especially pushing unauthorised migrants to travel ‘silently’ through even riskier routes (Eschenbrenner 2023) given that their perceptibility, increasingly, risks the chance of exclusion and deportation.
Faith Dorms, Whispering Ghosts and an Android Bodhisattva: The Anthropology of Religion in 2023
Those interested in the anthropology of religion also have plenty to look into from 2023. To make things easier for the reader, I have largely grouped articles that focus on a specific religion within paragraphs, moving away on occasion to draw in other articles that share thematic or conceptual grounds. To begin, I round up three articles that all examined Christian faith practices in the United States. Writing about faith-dorm prisoners inside a maximum-security prison in Alabama, Timothy Thornton (2023) describes imprisonment as ‘Christo-carceral’ life. In other words, Thornton suggests that faith-dorm prisoners draw on Christian theology and the penal strictures of prison life to manifest themselves as rule-bearing religious and penal subjects. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Thornton writes that prison rules are ‘how prisoners-as-disciples recognize and forge a theological intimacy with both Christ and one another’ (2023: 68), and thereby opens us up to readings of carceral spaces as also being dynamic theological spaces in tandem.
In Utah, Erin Stiles (2023) writes that spirit visits among Latter-day Saints (Mormons) become interactions where one receives ethical and spiritual tutelage. Be it the spirits of the deceased or yet to be born children, their interactions with those who are living, Stiles mainly argues, are examples of how spirits and mortals work together towards the path of salvation within the Mormon cosmological tradition. In Colorado, Sophie Bjork-James (2023) writes that there appears to be schism emerging among evangelical Christians and their conceptions of salvation at the end of the world. For many older evangelicals, the temporal end to the world appears in the form of an apocalypse with God saving true believers by taking them to the pristine lands of heaven. In this imagination, earth and heaven appear as distinct entities and thus the threat of climate catastrophe and the need to protect the environment feature as insignificant or is rejected outright. Younger evangelicals, however, believe that God would turn earth into heaven at the end and thus merge ideas and practices of environmental conservation within ideas of what made up an ethical and moral path towards salvation. Bjork-James's article offers keen insight into how concerns for the environment feature among practising evangelicals in the United States.
Scholarship emerging from the eastern Mediterranean has focused on conceptions of magic and evil among Cypriot Christians (Kyriakides 2023) and how changing rituals among Palestinian Christians, who follow the orthodox tradition, also become a way of preserving and creating kinships between families, ancestors and saints (Goodgame 2023). Elsewhere, writing about Christian nationalism in Zambia, Naomi Haynes (2023) argues that church leaders propagated a covenant model of nationalism that presented the country as analogical to biblical Israel, as per the Old Testament. Haynes, working through the political effects of such iconic representations, points out that while this forged alliances between church leaders and the state, the covenantal model also presented religious leaders as having prophetic qualities and thereby more authority, opening the door to criticism of the ruling government. Haynes's article, as she writes, expands on what Christian nationalism looks like in non-western and postcolonial settings that are otherwise underrepresented in the field of anthropology.
Readers interested in Islamic traditions and practices might find Johan Rasanayagam's (2023) article in Social Analysis a useful starting point. Asking how post- secular anthropology can contribute to discussions on religious practices and traditions, Rasanayagam works through his interactions with Moroccan Muslims who have experienced possessions by jinn spirits to uncover the possibilities of taking their encounters seriously, while also signalling the limits of understanding such personal experiences. ‘A post-secular anthropology’, he says, ‘would be a relational mode of knowing that is oriented to self-transformation and critique through recognition of the other and that does not insist on ontological coherence or agreement’ (2023: 38), opening up, in his case, to reflections on the wider Islamic traditions that spirits and experiences of possession interact with and emerge from.
In separate articles, Younes Saramifar (2023) and Farzad Amoozegar (2023) have both written about knowing loss and death in relation to Islamic traditions. Writing about Iran's revolutionary guards, Saramifar argues that the young men he interacted with spoke of life, duty and martyrdom as being revealed to them through the ‘ghostly whispers’ of martyrs. Arguing against readings that suggest that the young men, those who were implicated in acts of political violence, knew death and the dead through Quranic or Islamic traditions about sacrifice and martyrdom, he explains that the guards readily absorbed state-driven propaganda and disbelieved narratives and histories that countered the state's claims. Amoozegar, conversely, speaks about how a young Syrian refugee living in New York works through her experience of death and loss in her home country through knowledge accumulated in vernacular Islamic traditions, and that which is kept alive through interactions with family members abroad. For Jamila, the young girl featured in Amoozegar's articles, death appears as ‘familiar- strange’: an explorative and creative space that offers Jamila the opportunity to both reckon with and question ‘Islamic principles where it is prescribed that the dead are granted a pious position in the afterlife’.
In respect to the scholarship focusing on other religions, some might be interested in reading about the ways in which technologies of artificial intelligence are shaping Buddhist practices in Japan. Daniel White and Hirofumi Katsuno have examined an android bodhisattva designed to deliver teachings and impact visitors’ feelings to reveal ‘how emerging AI technologies can engender social change at the level of affect through evocative depictions of machine emotions’ (2023: 103). In another article, Ben Kasstan (2023) writes about how orthodox Jewish communities in England ‘arm- wrestle’ with state education policies that advocate liberal values of tolerance and equality. This is especially evident when minority religious members support the right to protection of their religious practices offered to them by the state, but publicly challenge similar safeguards offered to sexual minorities. As Kasstan writes, his article reflects on ‘the discursive flexing of moral positions held by custodians of muscular liberalism and religious conservativism midst steadfast assurances of protection’, thereby shining ‘a spotlight on what is otherwise obscured in the exhibition of public disputes’ (2023: 403). And lastly, turning the gaze on the discipline of anthropology itself, Casper Jacobsen (2023) has traced how Mexican anthropological scholarship, that which has historically emerged in parallel with state-sponsored secularism, has embedded narratives about indigenous peoples within studies on religious practice. Arguing that such narratives persist even today, bolstering the state's conception and economisation of a national indigenous heritage, Jacobsen exposes how indigenous people in Mexico contend with the racialised and dispossessive narratives that were propagated by anthropological historiography. Jacobsen's article works as a stark reminder as to how anthropological writing and research can (un)intentionally stigmatise already vulnerable peoples, shedding perspective on some of the consistent work that is required by institutes and scholars aspiring to decolonise the discipline.
Thematic Collections and other Special Issues in 2023
There were many interesting special issues that have thus far escaped mention in this article, given they took on thematic or concept building exercises that did not fit in to the already categories mentioned. Nevertheless, I round them up in this section and route the reader to specific articles on certain occasions.
Scholars and readers interested in kinship studies might be excited to check out two packed special issues published in 2023. The first was an issue in Critique of Anthropology that brought together case studies examining the ways kinship relations and actions, emerging from a range of experiences triggered by contemporary capitalism, charged and reformulated the political sphere. As Henrike Donner and Victoria Goddard write about the contributions in the special issue, they collectively ‘demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political field and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public dis- courses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship’ (2023: 331). For example, writing about a rise in private schools in north Benin, Erdmute Alber (2023) reveals how parents navigate a ‘neoliberal eduscape’ by premising the upward mobilities and enhanced sociocultural capital of their children as the primary goal. Importantly, many parents incorporate the risk of failure in their approach to navigating the neoliberal eduscape, attributing failure to their lack of experience about the workings of the neoliberal education system, thereby entangling their children and themselves in a future of uncertainty. Other articles focus on how the desire for the state to support parental, kinship and maternal relations in Tanzania takes shape for those who are ineligible for welfare benefits (Haberland 2023); how young women in India route responsibilities towards kin and community into labour and welfare schemes that seek to embolden women as autonomous neoliberal subjects who are to overcome the weight and responsibility of tradition (Donner 2023); the ways in which Australian grandmothers use the language of kinship to support the intake of migrants and protest against the government's asylum regime (Stivens 2023); and a deep reflection into the possibilities a focus on kinship can have for understanding more than human relations (Strang 2023b). The final two contributions in the special issue focus on the long-lasting consequences of sexual violence in Bangladesh (Mookherjee 2023) and Rwanda (Loning 2023) to ask what forms of relationships find passage after periods of extreme violence.
The other special issue from the year focused on how kinship relations are made and remade through ‘passing on’ practices and traditions that involve material property. Published in Social Anthropology, the editors of the special issue write that they take a ‘comparative approach to the making and remaking of kinship relations’ by mobilising ‘kinning and dekinning as analytical entry points, and incorporate temporalities and materialities in the changing expression of deeply felt emotions that extend between people and between people and material things’ (Abram and Lien 2023: 1). Within the issue, readers can find articles that focus on inheritance practices among ‘blended families’ in Denmark (Selmer 2023) and about the building of or passing on of property, be it second homes or hytte in Norway (Lien and Abram 2023); rural burial homes or dala in Kenya (Smith 2023a); courthouses or siheyuan in China (Luo 2023); and in collective housing sites in England (Blandy 2023). Lastly, one can also read about the ways in which climate change and a surge in material wealth among atoll societies in Tokelau affect traditional inheritance practices that did not involve land (Hoëm 2023). Collectively, with a focus on inheritance, kinship and property, the special issue sheds new insights on an otherwise classic subject within the discipline.
Though thematically different, readers might profit from engaging with the following three special issues in interchangeable ways. The first of them, published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ethnographically approaches ‘failure’ and follows its socio-material effects. As Catherine Alexander writes in the introduction to the issue, the articles in the collection make ‘three principal interventions for thinking through failures and their aftermaths: the forms of knowledge production at play in crafting objects of failure; what kinds of temporalities are at stake in making and responding to failure; and, finally, how, as ethnographers, we can engage with this mobile and mobilizing trope’ (2023b: 15). In the issue, reader can find a fascinating and diverse collection of articles that range from the failures of the post welfare state in New York when it comes caregiver labour and welfare management for people with intellectual disabilities (Reno 2023b) to how failure for an American start-up attempting to make a single HIV diagnostic device emerged from the task of mapping their humanitarian objectives with the logics of financial capital (Street 2023).2 Other contributions delve into how the Osh event of 2010 indexed different kinds of failure for migrant Uzbek and Kyrgyz workers in Moscow (Reeves 2023); the moral quality of acknowledging failure by independent journalists as a way to criticise other journalists bankrolled by oligarchs in pre-invasion Ukraine (Fedirko 2023); and the ways in which the systemic failure of the global financial crisis in 2009 was experienced by communities in Macedonia (Mattioli 2023). Other contributions in the special issue look at the failures of an international nuclear fusion experiment (Alexander 2023c); the spinning of environmental failures into opportunities by the Chinese state through carbon market policies (Bruckermann 2023); the means by which failure – be it political, material and legal – is made to appear by residents of London's Grenfell Tower, in the aftermath of the fire that tragically cost the lives of many (Smith 2023b); and how anthropologists, through the exercise of writing, might ride with the failed material objects of their study, in this case the material remains of a century-old scientific laboratory in Tanzania (Geissler 2023).
The other two special issues, titled ‘The End and After’ (see Daugbjerg and Vaisamn 2023) and ‘The Politics of Emptiness’, were published in Ethnos and Focaal respectively. In the first issue, it is argued that anthropologists have overwhelmingly focused on processes of becoming, be it in forms of emergence or through acts of resilience and resistance, and ends and endings have escaped our attention. In the collection, readers can find articles about the Inughuit in Greenland and how they confront the ‘end of nature’ by engaging with shifting land, water and ice with the warming Arctic (Hastrup 2023) and how indigenous Shua in the Ecuadorian Amazon confront their economic hardships by ‘desiring death’ and joking about the end of the world (Cova 2023). Other articles reveal how encounters with the end are staged in Japan after the Tsunami in 2011, be it through museum exhibits or activist work petitioning one to be better prepared for ecological disasters (Fisch 2023); how endings feature in the stories of asylum seekers filing for refuge in Denmark (Olwig 2023); and how those seeking justice for mass human rights violations in Argentina encounter different temporalities through the legal system and the ends that are sought after (Vaisman 2023).
The second issue, ‘The Politics of Emptiness’, moves away from the conceptual centrality of the previous issues for a more context-driven approach. Suggesting that the post-socialist world is best described as undergoing a process of ‘emptiness’ – be it infrastructures, sociality or services – it simultaneously engulfs people with a sense of loss and opportunity. The site between loss and opportunity is political (Dzenovska et al 2023) and scholars within the collection build from this starting point to bring forward examples from an emptying northwestern industrial settlement in Russia (Varfolomeeva 2023) to the ways in which Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed residents to confront Soviet legacies in Mariupol (Balazs 2023) and Donbas (Ryabchuk 2023). The other two contributions in the issue focus on Serbia and reveal how extractivism and tourism are put forward as solutions to draw socioeconomic life to depopulated landscapes (Đunda 2023) and how men from urban settlements contest such proposals in a bid to preserve the pristine ecologies of the empty Balkan Mountains (Rajković 2023).
Lastly, coming back full circle to a special issue I referenced in this article's opening vignette, readers will find the issue in Social Analysis on the role of social experiments and stylised ethical dilemmas in anthropological writing and methods a fascinating reflection on the discipline. Loaded with captivating articles, from the ethics of counterfactual arguments (Lillehammer 2023) to the ways pub goers use productive decontextualisation and abstraction to think through big questions over pints (Venkatesan 2023), or even to the way animal rights activists in Scotland use stylised ethical dilemmas to rally their arguments for more animal welfare (Reed 2023), the special issue brings together philosophical traditions and anthropological analysis in unique ways that confront anthropology's overstated aversion to stylised ethical dilemmas. I, for one, found the issue a delightful read.
Conclusion: The Joy of Reading
In drawing inspiration from the genre of a literature review, my intention with this year's annual review article was to guide readers to a wide range of articles from across the year. While choosing this format most certainly eased some of the pressures that come with writing a reflective piece on where the discipline lies, or speculates on what might possibly be ahead, I thought it would be best to reinforce what numerous authors reviewed for this piece would most certainly want: for more readers to engage with their ideas, and for scholars of all levels to build on and learn from them. Nevertheless, among the many takeaways I took from the process of writing this article, I choose to conclude with one that came as a timely reminder for me. Over the past few years as an early career scholar, I've circled around the scholarship that has primarily engaged with topics of environmental pollution and chemical toxicity; in other words, scholarship that mostly reflects my own research interests. While this might be the case for many early career scholars like me – who feel the pressures of having to get their work published swiftly, who are riddled with anxieties about accessing some form of employment in the near or distant future, who are always a step away from calling it quits on an academic career – the joys of reading widely, pleasurably and thematically different work come by rather rarely. Working on this piece unearthed some of that joy for me, opening me up to a wide array of fascinating research that scholars across the world are producing, thereby refreshing my commitments to how I'd like to read anthropology going forward. If some of you are convinced to partake in that spirit, even fleetingly, as a result of coming across articles mentioned here – knowing very well the struggles that the discipline, and scholars within it, find themselves in institutes and universities across the world – this article would go a long way in serving its purpose.
Notes
I have continued with Julia Vorhölter's (2023) selection of journals for her annual review article from 2022, which was also published in this journal. In no particular order, the journals are Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Social Analysis, Ethnos, Social Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology and Focaal.
Those interested in other anthropological work on humanitarianism might find the special issue published in Social Anthropology titled ‘Vernacular Humanitarianisms’ (Brković 2023) of particular interest.
References
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