Wiley-Online-Library: Anthropology and Humanism: Table of Contents

A poetic‐ethnographic reflection from Medellín

Penny Travlou — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:22:05 -0700

Abstract

Nos Vemos and Amphibian City are two poems born from a decade of ethnographic engagement in Medellín, Colombia, where poetic expression became a method of inquiry and relation. These poems reflect a practice of listening-with the city, its waters, memories, communities, and more-than-human rhythms, offering a situated, affective account of place and co-becoming. Drawing from decolonial and feminist frameworks, they resist extractivist modes of representation and instead flow with lived experience, memory, and collective care. Nos Vemos speaks to the temporalities of parting and return in long-term fieldwork, weaving together stories of solidarity, trauma, and hope. Amphibian City traces the submerged and resurfacing presences of River Medellín and the nearby Santa Elena creek within the city's social, ecological, and political life. These poems emerge from practices of co-labor and Buen Vivir as lived and adapted by Medellín's communities, without claiming to appropriate their cosmologies. Through poetic ethnography, the work seeks to create space for relational knowledge that is unfinished, plural, and transformative. The poems invite readers to listen, to feel, and to imagine otherwise through water, memory, and rhythm as paths toward collective healing and more just, amphibian futures.

sheer volume

John F. Sherry Jr — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:39:51 -0700

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

My (post‐)post‐socialism: A personal photo essay

Oana Borlea‐Stăncioi — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:23:36 -0700

Abstract

The paper is a multi-modal, autoethnographic exploration of the visual remnants of lived post-communism in a typical block of flats neighborhood of a Romanian city. By using film and digital photography, alongside narrative reflection, the author summons memories and blends observed and lived reality with creative non-fiction to build an affective photo-scape. The work is a meditation on visual emotional memory triggers and a cathartic rendering of lingering past(s) in present experiences.

Disability disrupts state violence at Broadview protest

Alana Ackerman — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Abstract

On Friday, October 3, 2025, the state produced a war zone with militarized technology and the deployment of armed police officers, who attacked a group of protesters outside Broadview Detention Center, Illinois. Interactions between the police and two d/Disabled protesters reveal the embodied vulnerability of disability, as well as the potential of disability to disrupt police protocol and state power.

Kimmy and Jules: Animal welfare, pets, and the violence of care

Neha Vora — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:35:38 -0700

Abstract

When I started a research project on stray cat care in the United Arab Emirates and moved here with my three cats soon after, I did not expect my experiences to create a moral conflict around animal welfare practices and being a pet parent. Here, I explore—through my experiences of participating in TNR (Trap, Neuter, and Return) and adopting cats from my university campus—how both animal welfare and pet ownership are infused with violence and inequality, even as they are sites of care and love. My experiences conducting this more-than-human ethnography have thoroughly challenged my ethics and my understanding of what constitutes “humane” relationships with nonhumans.

The cloud reader's dilemma

Mark Nichter — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:58:13 -0700

Abstract

Set in rural South India, this short story explores the ethical and emotional responsibility that accompanies acts of intuition, divination, and diagnosis. It follows a young man, Babu, who inherits his grandfather's gift of cloud reading. Babu struggles with the weight of foreseeing future events randomly revealed to him and the dilemma of when to share or withhold this knowledge. A story of how his grandfather faced a similar dilemma long ago and ongoing dialogue with an Ayurvedic medical practitioner about the burden of treatment entangling healers in the karmic web of patients' lives provides deep insights into a rarely discussed dimension of Indian culture. Though rooted in a specific cultural landscape, the story's questions about fate, responsibility, and the transmission of knowledge resonate across cultures.

Vardo: On keeping our journeys safe

Stephen A. Linstead — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:14:07 -0700

Abstract

This poem is a personal response to Romany culture and history, including consideration of the legacy of the holocaust or Porraijmos (devouring) and the socioeconomic diversity of contemporary Roma classes. It does, however, draw on anthropological and sociological theory that supports the significance of the lyric approach to the representation of affect in culture and its virtues over the typical narrative approach. It is set at the annual horse fair of Appleby-in-Westmorland in the North-West of England, between the Pennine Hills and the Cumbrian Lake District. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork and archive research using primary and secondary data, and extensive conversations with key informants, it unfolds over the course of a single day, beginning and ending in a vardo, the iconic “bow-top” caravan, and teases the metaphor of the journey which is core to Roma culture. It is partly written in Romany language, or cant, to convey the importance of rhythm and music in the culture, its style inspired by Tony Gatlif's 1993 film Latcho Drom (Safe Journey) which implies that the historical Roma journey, though often joyful, has been and remains anything but safe.

Doctoring Dobbs: Erasure art as anthropological practice

Risa Cromer — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:33:46 -0700

Abstract

This essay examines erasure art as an anthropological practice through Doctoring Dobbs, a multimodal project responding to the US Supreme Court's overturning of federal abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In creative practice, erasure removes material from an existing source to reveal something new. Drawing on autoethnographic notes from the process of “doctoring” Dobbs, I show how erasure art makes core anthropological commitments of reflexivity, accountability, multiplicity, and citation visible on the page. I further argue that erasure art extends anthropological craft by modeling knowledge-making as connective, able to hold multiple interpretations at once, and collaborative. Situating these claims within feminist scholarship, multimodal anthropology, and reproductive justice advocacy, the essay argues that erasure art reflects anthropological method as well as intervenes in abortion politics by challenging the authority of legal language and bringing reproductive justice visions into view.

Forensics: Multiple choice and exposure histories

Kali Rubaii — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:15:28 -0700

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Greyhound, or an ethnography of lost souls

David Farrow — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Abstract

The Greyhound bus synthesizes mobility and stuckedness. In the play of travel and breakdown, I find a way to understand how the mobility of capital meets the stuckedness of people. In the process of being gutted by venture capitalists, the Greyhound company is an increasingly fragile place for travelers with few options to make their way through the United States. At the same time, the instability of this travel option makes it a voyeuristic portal into wandering souls. I draw from my experiences riding the Greyhound to understand how a soul wanders and waits, searching for home and finding itself free and alone.

The YouTuber

Kimberly Hassel — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:54:58 -0700

Abstract

In the age of digital content curation and creation, what happens when the ethnographer unwittingly becomes an internet celebrity? This piece of creative nonfiction follows an anthropologist's fateful meeting with a YouTuber during her fieldwork on digital sociality in Tokyo. The YouTuber agrees to participate in an interview for her dissertation with a catch: she must appear on his YouTube channel, which features foreigners eating Japanese cuisine. What seems to be an innocuous exchange turns into an anxious array of musings, as the anthropologist underestimates the popularity of the YouTuber's channel and finds herself garnering more attention than she had anticipated. “The YouTuber” highlights the shifting terrain of ethnographic encounters and digital hybridity, including the potential nature of “exchange relationships” with interlocutors who engage in digital content creation. This piece contemplates the parameters of “doing” an ethnography of the digital in contemporary Japan, which can be extended to the digital in other contexts. The characters, locations, and encounters are based on the author's ethnographic fieldwork on digital sociality in Japan, which took place in Tokyo between August 2019 and August 2020, and remotely between August 2020 and October 2021.

The Right

Zoe Charlotte Stewart — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:21:18 -0800

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Dream is an offshore flame: Notes on archaeology and belonging

Orlan Yuan Syshui — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:29:57 -0800

Abstract

Set within an archaeology lab in Dunedin, Aotearoa, this creative non-fiction piece traces the search for dwelling through the meticulous, repetitive labor of everyday practice. The narrative finds belonging not as a static identity, but as a continuous, tactile engagement with the material world. By drifting between winters in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, the story weaves together the sorting of ancient middens with a memory of London's contested urban spaces—where a graffiti-covered bridge and a tented sanctuary challenge the boundaries between public architecture and private survival. Through this grounding of sensory reflections in the physical act of sorting, the work unfolds the broader human struggle to find permanence in a transient world, and suggests how the act of creating order from debris might serve as a universal strategy for re-rooting oneself within the river of time. Ultimately, the narrative transforms the intimate labor of an individual into a lens for exploring the ways we might find and inhabit a sense of belonging amidst the displacement and chilly isolation of modern life.

Held in a story: Relatability across plates and places

Anna Notsu — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:23:41 -0800

Abstract

This piece explores the power and ambivalence of storytelling through a dinner with Jemimah, a counseling psychologist and a trained educator with a keen interest in using storytelling as pedagogy in Northeast India. As the evening unfolds in her dining room, stories and memories are exchanged, revealing how relatability is not inherent but actively constructed by both teller and listener. Through reflexive visits to my ethnographic moments, the essay reflects on how shared recognition can spark connection but also carries risks of assimilation, particularly within anthropology's colonial legacy.

Your father bought me for 8000 yuan

Noël Um‐Lo — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:24:50 -0800

Abstract

I wondered how many other North Korean girls were bought by Chinese men in this same parking lot, along this same reproductive labor corridor, its spiny tendrils burrowing into villages in Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Shandong provinces. Maybe your nainai mentioned you were born of an “unconventional marriage.” But our type of marriage was quite common. No one explained to me why, but eventually I found out: In the 1970s, Korean women fled farms for cities, leaving South Korea's rural men stranded. South Korea's solution was to import Joseonjok women from China. Busloads of rural Korean bachelors shopped for Joseonjok brides from matchmakers who peddled girls like produce at market. By the time I crossed the Tumen, those Chinese provinces had their own crisis. The men who had lost their women to rural Koreans needed wives of their own. And like a pathetic answer to prayers, we appeared.

Family album

Deniz Yonucu — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:40:35 -0800

Abstract

Family Album follows a young university student assisting a journalist in documenting a glass workers' strike in Istanbul's Paşabahçe neighborhood during the summer of 1999. Immersed in the atmosphere of solidarity and collective struggle, she accompanies the journalist to interview Murat, a key strike organizer, in his shanty house overlooking the Bosporus. What begins as a celebration of working-class resistance takes an unexpected turn when Murat shares his family album. Through this intimate domestic encounter, the narrative explores the complex intersections of class solidarity, state violence, and necropolitics in Turkey. The story examines the ethical dilemmas faced by those who document social movements when confronted with contradictions that challenge simplistic narratives of working-class struggle.

Creative Nonfiction: The Christian Dior woman

Abir Hamdar — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

This work of creative nonfiction emerges from ethnographic research on Arab women's testimonies of their cancer experience conducted in 2016–2018. It focuses on the account of one Lebanese woman diagnosed with breast cancer and highlights her feelings, thoughts, and perceptions from the time of the initial medical examination through to final diagnosis. The woman's monologic voice dramatizes the fact that her experience of cancer diagnosis takes the form of an alienation of the self from everything around it. In this sense, what is central to this piece are a series of questions around the unhomeliness of being in the world. What happens, phenomenologically, to the patient upon cancer diagnosis? How is the existential dislocation of their world following a cancer diagnosis registered and experienced? What is the place of language and particularly the place of one's native language and second language in the articulation of this sense of foreignness? Finally, how are familial encounters and relations disrupted, othered, and distanced?

504–907: A multimodal comparison of Louisiana and Alaska

Miles B. Jordan — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:29:21 -0800

Abstract

504–907 is a comparative visual ethnography linking Louisiana and Alaska through the shared experiences of oil, disaster, and waste. While these regions are often imagined as opposites—subtropical versus Arctic—they are bound together by the same wasting relationships that Marco Armiero identifies as the Wasteocene: processes that produce wasted people and wasted places. Drawing on my own experiences growing up in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon spill, and subsequent fieldwork in both Louisiana and Alaska, I approach these landscapes through walking, photographing, and pairing. At the core of 504–907 are photographic diptychs organized into three categories: building portraits, people, and things seen on walks. These pairings juxtapose structures like grocery stores and bars, moments of kinship from crawfish boils to basketball games, and everyday details like mismatched chairs and patched storefronts. Rather than contrasting differences for its own sake, the diptychs highlight how ordinary materials, practices, and rituals register disaster and survival. Following Jerome Krase's notion of “urban vernacular landscapes,” I argue for a visual semiotics of the Wasteocene, one that makes visible how waste materializes in peeling paint, improvised repairs, and the persistence of community events. This project demonstrates how comparative photography can serve as both an ethnographic method and a theoretical intervention. By treating the ordinary as archive, 504–907 reframes Louisiana and Alaska not as extremes, but as resonant sites of endurance. The diptychs reveal how resilience emerges in the face of collapse, offering a visual vocabulary for the everyday labor of survival in the Wasteocene.

Sky

Atreyee Majumder — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:29:37 -0800

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods. Edited by Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer, Véronique Servais, Catrien Notermans, Natasha Fijn (Eds.), Winwick, Cambridgeshire, UK: The White Horse Press. 2025. pp. 210. £30.00 (softcover)

Debanjali Biswas — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:20:41 -0800

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Autoethnography of mothering

Gemma M. Carney — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:14:32 -0800

Abstract

These are four poems from a collection that burst out of me around the time of my 50th birthday. I am a social and cultural gerontologist and so 50 is a particularly significant age—it is the marker of having finally qualified as an older person, at least in physiological terms. It also signifies menopause and the end of the reproductive stage of life. That significant birthday coincided with my eldest son reaching adulthood. This confluence of life events caused me to reflect on how I have spent my adult life. The past 20 years have been dedicated to academic life, but always within the context and confines of raising a family. The pressure to perform both roles, daily and to a high standard is, perhaps, the most striking message from these poems.

Managing death in exile

Sealing Cheng — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:46:30 -0800

Abstract

Managing Death in Exile is a theatrical performance that draws on ethnographic research with long-term asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa in Hong Kong since 2012. The performance told the story of Denise (pseudonym), who had to manage the illness, funeral, cremation, and repatriation of ashes of her good friend, Rosie (pseudonym). Dying in exile means locating one's dead body in a transnational web of conflicting cosmologies, temporalities, kinship structures, and national imagination. What legal and moral strictures does death re-introduce a body into? How does a politically, financially, and socially marginalized diasporic community get mobilized and divided in managing a co-national's death? Denise had to manage all these issues while dealing with her own grief over the passing of a dear friend. The unconventional choice of using ethnographic theater for academic presentation came from my yearning to activate sensorial ways of knowing not available through the written word, to incite embodied responses that resemble those a fieldworker experiences in the field. Performance ethnography as a field has largely developed in North America. In the Asian context, it is uncertain how this form of “anthropology otherwise” could fit into the fierce pursuit of universities' ranking. Hopefully, Managing Death in Exile could be a start.

Can I dance over the bodies of the dead? On the impossibility of participant observation

Sarah Hamdar — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:45:39 -0800

Abstract

This article is an autoethnographic essay on the challenges of conducting participant observation in times of crises, both on a personal and on a national level. To summarize, I trace the evolution of my own personal research itinerary, which focuses on Beirut's leisure and clubbing scene during the internal political turmoil in Lebanon and, later on, the 2024 war with Israel. Finally, I examine the impact of these events on my very ability to conduct research, how they affected my relationship to the field and, ultimately, the decisions I needed to make. In conclusion, this essay adds to a growing body of research on ethnography in dangerous times and places: what becomes of research when research becomes impossible?

Five poems

John F. Sherry Jr. — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:10:27 -0800

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Issue Information

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:46:34 -0800

Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 51, Issue 1, June 2026.

Minor epic: Notes toward a different “Anthropoetry”

Stuart McLean — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:41:02 -0800

Abstract

Anthropologists have often turned to poetry as a means of accessing emotional registers of which conventional academic prose is unable to avail. In doing so, they have tacitly conflated poetry with lyric poetry, today probably the most widely practiced poetic genre, associated in particular with the expression of inner feelings and subjectival states. Lyric, however, is not the only kind of poetry. Epic is arguably the most ancient form of poetry, extending back beyond the advent of writing and taking as its subject matter not just the actions of gods, rulers, and heroes, but also in some cases the origins of the cosmos. Epic poetry, British poet Alice Oswald has suggested, propels us “beyond the voice, beyond the mind, out in the pure, unsupervised space.” Since the nineteenth century, the epic form has sometimes been appropriated for nationalist political ends, to provide an immemorial ground for a political community often envisioned in narrowly exclusionary terms. Yet epic also provides a potential challenge to such narrowness. Part manifesto and part collage of my own and others' words and images, this essay proposes and enacts a mode that I call “minor epic” as an alternative to both ethnonationalist triumphalism and lyric introspection.