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doi: 10.1111/aman.70108pmid: N/A
This article argues that hunting is not a bounded event but a materially redistributed atmosphere that extends beyond the kill and across field, truck, clothing, and home. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with wild boar hunters in Uruguay, I show how mud, odors, blood, and bodily residues carry the sensory, affective, and material force of tracking, waiting, and pursuit into domestic space. Rather than treating this continuity as merely phenomenological or symbolic, I explain how it is materially reproduced through adhesive, persistent, and indexical substances that bind bodies, vehicles, dogs, and households into the hunt's ongoing life. I develop the concept of atmospheric modulation to describe how these substances reorganize relations across spaces and times. In doing so, the article reframes hunting as a pervasive more‐than‐human practice and contributes to anthropological debates on materiality, residues, traces, and the social life of substances.
doi: 10.1111/aman.70099pmid: N/A
Affordable Chinese copies of Western brands are ubiquitous in African markets. Despite democratizing consumer access, these goods appear to cement hegemonic value hierarchies that rank Chinese or local products as inferior to Western goods. To unsettle this implicit geography of fakes and dominant politics of authentication, scholars have proposed a continuum of hybrid identities—from genuine fakes to copied originals—seeking to collapse a simplistic dichotomy between originals and counterfeits. This article argues the opposite: Upholding this dichotomy is crucial for Nigerian entrepreneurs operating in counterfeit economies to stake original claims by means other than being “first” or “from the West,” often impossible production conditions to satisfy. Following a well‐known Spanish brand of soaps and lotions, Idole, and other Western cosmetics brands in Nigerian markets and on e‐commerce platforms, this ethnographic study shows how improving quality, concentrating quantity, and expanding the variety of fakes offer new epistemological possibilities for what makes an original original. Counterfeits become originals when performance distorts primacy and where popularity inverts provenance. Informed by Chinese philosophies on copying, the “mutable original” captures sellers’ and buyers’ paradoxical indifference to copying and investment in originals, along with the commercial and cultural contexts that nurture these seemingly counterintuitive interests.
doi: 10.1111/aman.70105pmid: N/A
In this paper, I draw on black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting to meditate on this moment of crisis in black reproduction and black mothering. Using Jennifer Nash's critique of this crisis framing and its consequences for black feminism, I argue that attending to the “ordinary” in black mothers’ experiences may yield alternative visions of black motherhood that depict them as neither dupes nor revolutionaries. The paper is based on a wider sociological project that involves interviews with 19 black mothers living in the UK and Canada. The project's focus on attachment parenting, a popular but controversial parenting philosophy that rests on both historical and contemporary racialized ideals of good mothering, provides a unique opportunity to generate new perspectives made possible by the diversity of responses the philosophy elicits.
doi: 10.1111/aman.70101pmid: N/A
This article offers a literary ethnography of one of Bogotá’s ollas or drug markets where centuries of violence ripple across the ambiance. It tells the story of the work undertaken by the campaneros, the lookouts who work for criminal governance to protect the olla, and how they cultivate collective attunements for surveilling the place. To perceive, intuit, or forebode threats, the campaneros create a sentineled structure that communicates across corners, while also drawing on drug‐induced states of paranoia, clairvoyance, or necromancy. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork (2012–2018) and methods of fabulation, I propose a necromantic ethnography that, by constellating multiple sources, perspectives, forces, and voices, aims to conjure the resonating and palpable force of history and the dead across the olla.
doi: 10.1111/aman.70110pmid: N/A
What does it mean to live—and therefore die—in a more‐than‐human world? This review essay explores that question through reflections on teaching Political Animals: Species, Class, Race, and Gender, an undergraduate course that introduces students to scholarship on human‐nonhuman relations. Organized around four questions—What are the politics of connections in more‐than‐human worlds? What is health or well‐being when some multispecies relations can cause harm and death? Who counts as human? And how might the human‐animal “divide” be reimagined?—the course investigated how encounters and entanglements between diverse beings, as well as the boundaries between humanity and animality, are shaped by power, hierarchy, and enduring inequalities. Tracing how these debates unfolded in the classroom, I argue that multispecies scholarship, despite critiques that it sidelines social inequalities by supposedly bypassing the human, can instead offer new ways of thinking through race, class, gender, colonialism, and the contested meanings of being human. In doing so, I show how the classroom offers a distinctive vantage point from which to examine how anthropological ideas travel beyond academic debates. Teaching more‐than‐human relations becomes a way of preparing students to grapple with the political and ethical stakes of living—and dying—in a shared world.
doi: 10.1111/aman.70102pmid: N/A
This article demonstrates how aesthetic emotions, such as wonder, awe, grief, and enchantment, transform into practical judgments that guide care and politics in threatened landscapes. Drawing on multiyear ethnographic research conducted at two sites that we place “in dialogue” rather than in strict comparison—the rapidly warming Alps (France, Italy, and Switzerland) and a conservation complex at Empire Ranch in Arizona—we demonstrate how invocations of beauty and ugliness render ecological change tangible and morally significant. In the Alps, mountaineers, guides, and glaciologists observe the “darkening” and retreat of ice, reworking their attachments as they learn to recognize—or reject—new forms of beauty. In Arizona, volunteers, scientists, and neighboring communities actively promote beauty through restoration practices, where scientific metrics and often unspoken aesthetics quietly coproduce decisions about species, histories, and futures. In both locations, aesthetic judgments are not epiphenomenal; they are situated social practices that authorize certain feelings, mute others, and establish particular orders of care. By foregrounding ordinary conversations about beauty, we contribute to anthropologies of the environment, affect, and aesthetics, showing how people experience ecological crises through sensory value, how loss is apprehended and negotiated through aesthetic judgment, and how these values become claims about what must endure.
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