Abstract This article looks at how political violence in Rwanda, that of the genocide against Tutsi in 1994 and beyond, is remembered, narrated, and embedded in everyday sociality. It makes two related arguments. Taking the aftermath of Rwanda's Gacaca courts (a transitional justice mechanism implemented between 2005 and 2012) as my point of entry, I argue first that violence, though narrated as past in these courts, is imagined as returning in the future, and the present is the space to prepare for this inevitable return. This structuring temporal logic, or genocide‐time, undergirds everyday social relations between the protagonists of Gacaca courts years after their official end. Second, both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide claim forms of racialized victimhood, a legacy of European imperial categorizations of Rwandans into Hutus and Tutsis. Genocide‐time signals a temporal moment in which ethnic categories, crucial for colonial management, become racialized and deeply entangled with political violence. Shared claims to racialized victimhood today, I argue, index this longer history.

Abstract The story often told about HIV in South Africa is a celebratory one that foregrounds the relationship between seropositive citizens and health‐care institutions. In the last 20 years, the government has invested heavily in rolling out life‐sustaining antiretroviral medicines to all who need them, making HIV a firm ground upon which many residents claim protections from the state. This article explores the role of medicine in buttressing the carceral state. I propose biocarceral citizenship to characterize the way health‐care entitlements produce new relationships to the criminal legal system, not through active state surveillance but by extending the responsibilization expected of patients to the penal sphere. Drawing from 22 months of ethnographic research carried out in clinics and courtrooms in the town of Thohoyandou between 2014 and 2018, I apply this concept to both those who have experienced rape, for whom reporting to the (carceral) state is a condition of accessing HIV prophylaxis, and to those who are charged with rape, for whom adherence to antiretroviral medicines is used as evidence of weaponizing sickness. In parallel ways, therapeutic responsibilization exposes both groups to state violence. The article takes HIV‐related entitlements as a cipher for theorizing punishment beyond a critique of neoliberalism.

In her recent book, Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation, Sarah E. Vaughn provides a vital contribution to our understanding of the impact of climate change on the infrastructures that underpin collective life. The book is based on fieldwork conducted in Guyana between 2009 and 2019 among engineers, civil defense planners, NGO workers, farmers, and others faced with the problem of severe climate vulnerability as the sea level rises and storm surges intensify. The setting of the ethnography is framed by the aftermath of a devastating 2005 flood that has led to a range of technical efforts to estimate and mitigate the projected effects of future storms. In the book, these engineering solutions enter into a complex social and political terrain in which the history of settler colonialism, the postcolonial politics of development, and contemporary ethno-racial tensions shape Guyanese understandings of the stakes involved in climate adaptation initiatives. Vaughn's approach to this terrain builds on work in the anthropology of infrastructure and the environment, science and technology studies, and the new materialism. Engineering Vulnerability is characterized by careful attention to the material practices of hydrology experts as they seek to understand and manage a large-scale infrastructural system of water storage and flood protection. In reading the book, we learn about the difficulties of performing soil studies, about the precarity of pegasse (peat) as a dam construction material, and about competing devices for measuring water levels as part of planning infrastructure development. Beyond these technical practices, we encounter the subjective understandings and experiences that experts—including lay experts—bring to their task of mitigating climate risk. As she navigates the complex system of canals, dams, and sloughs that has been painstakingly constructed over the last century, and the neighboring enclaves whose viability relies on the system's capacity to contain hydrological flows, Vaughn is especially concerned to trace how the dynamics of racialized politics in Guyana have shaped the country's distinctive experience of climate adaptation. The key historical term here is apaan jat, or “vote for your own kind,” a term that indexes a long history of actual and perceived tensions between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese ethnic communities and political coalitions. Through its ethnographic encounters, the book holds out hope that the uncertain and precarious experience of adapting to climate change may unsettle these all-too-familiar identities and modes of political ordering. Engineering Vulnerability is thus a book that defies expectations about the relation between race, history, and the environment. It seeks to recognize, and advocate for, a novel “racial counter-knowledge” that emerges from her informants’ diverse experiences of climate adaptation. The book contributes to a growing body of work that looks at the sociotechnical implications of climate change in the Global South. This work tends to focus on the material experience of infrastructural transformation. Vaughn's analysis of Guyanese engineers’ efforts to adapt the East Demerara Water Conservancy—a vast, critical, and fragile reservoir—to an uncertain water future can be put into conversation with important recent anthropological work such as Nikhil Anand's (2017) research on water infrastructure management in Mumbai, Ashley Carse's (2014) investigation of the reengineering of the Panama Canal, and Jason Cons's (2021) analysis of climate adaptation in the southwest delta region of Bangladesh. What makes Vaughn's project distinctive in this field is its simultaneous engagement with posthumanist ethics to develop a form of counter-racial knowledge whose contours, she argues, can be detected in her informants’ engagement with the risks and uncertainties of climate change. Engineering Vulnerability will be of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies, as well as for those generally interested in the problem of climate change vulnerability in the Global South.

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg (Russia) between 2015 and 2016, this article weaves together gift exchange and affect theory to analyze how low‐income Muslim women cultivated sisterly intimacies, a materially mediated and affect‐laden form of attachment. Sustained through the practices of giving clothing, food, and other spiritually significant items to one another, sisterly intimacies illuminates not only how the women survived and thrived on the margins of Russian society amid socioeconomic crises and political volatility but also how their material exchanges facilitated their ability to remain continuously oriented toward their community and God while striving for an ethical Muslim life and a favorable afterlife. Sisterly intimacies as a cultural formation also offers a broader glimpse into the affective landscapes of Russia, where indignation about socioeconomic injustices and authoritarianism coexist with a desire for (religious) connectivity, ethical living, and collective world‐making. Sisterly intimacies as a mode of relationality and self‐making highlights the agentive capacity of intimacy to create worlds for those who struggle to live in ways that they consider meaningful.

Alongside its engagement with scholarship in the anthropology of migration, extractivism, politics, and humanitarianism, Asylum and Extraction finds resonance with, and complements, a number of other landmark works in fields consonant to the discipline.The framing of refugees as subjects of commodification, for instance, brings to mind Kathryn Yusoff's (2019) invitation to rethink mining and Anthropocenic processes as anchored in the extraction of geological resources and the geologization/dehumanization of Black laboring bodies.Similarly, the colonial logics that govern human worth and value in the context of migration and refugeeism offer important insights into what Michelle Murphy (2017, 7) terms the "economization of life," or the calculative, capitalistic practices that designate "valuable and unvaluable human lives: lives worth living, lives worth not dying, lives worthy of investment, and lives not worth being born."As one might read in the parting words of Morris's interlocutor Trudy, ("We probably won't see you again, you guys always leave once you've done your work and mostly never come back") (p.258), Asylum and Extraction's convincing critique of colonial logics may also-and importantlyhit closer to home for some readers.Specifically, this critique may bring to surface other kinds of equally troubling parallels-or in Morris's terms, continuities-with the extraction of conceptual and intellectual value from the lives and worlds of those who make anthropologists' careers and capital possible.I offer this final reflection not as a criticism of Morris's work but rather as a powerful subtext rippling throughout a work that, in my view, exemplifies in powerful and engaged ways what anthropology can achieve in calling out the subterfuges of colonial violence in all its diverse and unexpected manifestations, and in doing so, rendering the unseen seen.

This essay follows the parenthetical opening of the fieldwork confessional into the parenthetical spaces within our fieldwork archives, in order to consider the nature of those parentheses and of their complex claims on our writing and relating. Noticing an echo of address across several fieldsites and their material traces, this essay follows a thread I find winding through an archive of narratives I've made with Uitoto interlocutors over 15 years of being folded into the ambivalent relations of adoptive kinship that have framed my fieldwork with migrant and displaced Uitoto families in Colombia. That archive includes recordings and images, notes and transcriptions-the recognizable traces of field research-that assemble narratives of migration and childbirth, illness and displacement, and curing. It contains traces of pages and images that are stowed in numbered boxes on shelves in Iquitos and London, these differently potent bundles that constitute the historical record of the colonization of Uitoto worlds by rubber traders, narcotraffickers, and armed counter/insurgents over the past century. It also contains traces that are only legible, like the embossed verso of a text on an apparently blank page, to an oblique gaze (Desjarlais and Habrih, 2021) . Within the space of adoptive kin-making that has been the container of my engagement with that history, and in the terms of the Uitoto people who have made me kin, the shared archive we have made also includes tenacious memory and tenuous ties, and the substantial traces of those ties in my person, in our entanglement as persons. In Uitoto kin-making praxis, substances (including ancestral plant foods and medicines, tears, sweat, smoke, etc.) shared over time are needed to make people kin, and processes of gradually coming to matter together have been an essential part of our capacity to build archives of shared memory with and in each other. Not only a factual record, the building up of an archive of colonization, displacement, and world-curing work has meant learning to carry stories that can hold together a world or undo it. It has meant learning to be addressed in particular ways. It has also raised a perpetual question of the conditions and consequences of those forms of address, and of one particular form of address that is as recurrent as it is insoluble. The thread this essay follows is the tangle of ties named by the address of love. This parenthetical hailing is a form of address by which I have found myself called in by my Uitoto interlocutors as a witness and a carrier of stories that were precious (because potent or curative), dangerous (because traumatic or volatile), or fragile, because they were being told in the context of a world in which they were hard to keep present or lively. This form of address is recognizable as the opening of a fieldwork confessional because of the way it both compels and conditions fieldwork intimacies-the way it both enables a scene of ethnographic knowledge-making and exceeds our habitual ethical gestures in the face of ethnographic disclosure. This form of address-as the parenthetical opening of a fieldwork confessional-both tells us we're on the inside of something, and gives us something that exceeds the inscriptive powers of ethnographic representation as containment. Being addressed in this way implied being called in to carry something that was not mine, that might be hurtful to touch, for both the person who was sharing it and the person who might hold it for them. The stories that followed this address were sometimes kin-curing ones, the kind that are told to help someone find their way back into the right fold of sociality, back into the right world. Those were stories that belong to Uitoto people and that travel along kin lines. They are about the beginning of human life and illness and curing-the beginnings that are revisited with every life and every illness and every cure. Uitoto curing practices are both perpetual and punctuated; they take the form of continuous labor to make and remake distributed bodies whose shared substance resonates with shared susceptibility, as well as punctuated narrative and ceremonial practices to make This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

I was writing at my desk in Reykjavk on a still December evening, settled into a dark that had descended at 3 p.m., when my phone rang-already an unwelcome occurrence in 2014, and all the more so for a language learner like me.I answered, hesitantly, in Icelandic, and the caller barked back, "Who is this?" Expecting a wrong number, I returned his question.But rather than answer, the caller said, this time in English, "Yes.I'll call you from another line."When he did call back a few minutes later, I asked again who was calling; he said I could call him "Einarsson.""Einarsson," in Iceland, is a transparently fake name.Icelandic surnames are patronymic, and thus not used for identification.To be called "Einarsson" simply means your father is called "Einar," as quite a lot of fathers are, so even public figures in Iceland are called by first names only, situated as needed by context clues.Einarsson, then, wasn't telling me his name; he was telling me he wouldn't be telling me that.It was a practice of secrecy that pointed back at itself, obviously.It was a habit he would repeat over the course of our conversation-or, rather, my attempts to follow his provocative