Can orangutans speak?Conjuring the ghosts of human evolution science 2In this essay I conjure a ghost.For long I doubted whether I was summoning or conjuring and whether my doing mattered to the ghostly apparition at all.The Cambridge Dictionary posits the difference as follows.

Parallels between person-to-person sharing and centrally institutionalized forms of redistribution have been noted repeatedly but also need to be assessed critically. When sharing is defined as the allocation of economic goods without calculating returns we may ask whether this also includes redistributive large-scale institutions such as forms of public pooling, crowd-based digital platforms or taxation. Can sharing be upscaled to institutional settings at larger scales or is it tied to intimate contexts of face-to-face interaction? This contribution discusses this question by giving particular attention to the way in which the presence of social agents is shaped in sharing and how it is altered when it is upscaled institutionally. On the basis of comparisons between ethnographic observations in small and large settings, processes of recognizing, mediating, virtualizing and temporalizing presence are identified. Finally, some lessons from research on sharing in intimate settings are being drawn for assessing the role that sharing may play to counter inequalities in larger institutional settings.

This essay examines the recent anthropological literature on white supremacy. We argue that this ethnographic literature presents innovative approaches for a theory of race, power, and capitalist modernity applicable to anthropology as a whole. To highlight this literature's analytical contributions, we pursue a close but not exhaustive review of recent studies of white supremacy, showing how ethnographers have expanded an influential theoretical foundation by braiding together or “epistemically stitching” their work on white supremacy to a variety of other theoretical conversations in anthropology. We suggest this epistemic stitching—an important form of theory-building in anthropology that creatively ties together theoretical conversations and leaves evidence of that labor—provides important insights into the workings of white supremacy by drawing together critical theories of race with several different theoretical influences, from new materialism and critical anthrohistory to studies of empire.

This article engages Mahmood Mamdani's arguments in Neither Settler nor Native from the perspective of the question of Palestine. Sympathetic with his call to “decolonize the political” by severing nation from state, I, nevertheless, query his proposal to abandon, a priori, binaries such as “settler/native” and “perpetrator/victim” in order to achieve a decolonized state and polity. The unifying concept of the “survivor” that he proposes—that we are all survivors of the ravages of political modernity, I argue, has its own history and grammar of injury, victimhood, and identity that is not easily abandoned and certainly not in the context of Palestine. How might one achieve justice—redistributive justice, that is, rather than mere reconciliation—if political demands cannot be made in the name of the collectives (in this instance, Palestinians) who have suffered the displacement and violence of settler-colonialism? We might need to hold onto such binaries—even if only for a time and even as we recognize that what it means to be a “settler” does not remain stable over time—in order to decolonize the political in substantive rather than merely formal terms.

Building upon ethnographic research conducted among participants in UK-based initiatives in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, the paper contributes to anthropological literature on the essentialising nature of state-sponsored constructions of minoritised groups. More specifically, I put forward two sets of arguments. Firstly, I suggest a concept of simultaneity that challenges colonially inflected conceptualisations of the relationship between communities and their respective traditions. Activists of Jewish-Muslim inter-community work subvert dominant conceptualisations of intergroup commonalities and divergencies by developing a theorisation of Jewish-Muslim relations that acknowledges group similarities and differences as overlapping categories. Secondly, I contribute to John Jackson's (2005) theorisation of racial sincerity, a notion offering a conceptual challenge to the notion of authenticity. I argue that the complexity of my interlocutors’ thematisations of Jewish-Muslim relations underpinned by the diversity of the sources of knowledge that they rely on could be best understood as an example of this analytic. On a broader theoretical plane, the paper proposes a framework that underscores the agentive power of minority communities and pays close attention to the way they define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and each other in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations.

Over the past decade-plus, there has been a surge in anthropological writing on decolonisation. Yet, whereas mid-twentieth century anticolonial revolutionaries fought to uproot imperialism's extractive political economy, certain contemporary decolonial tendencies give primacy, instead, to asserting cultural/epistemological difference. This shift has motivated pertinent critiques, such as that of Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, of atavistic conceptions of decolonisation. Táíwò's dismissal, however, of the neocolonialism thesis and his conceptual uncoupling of imperialism's material and symbolic dimensions results in a one-dimensional polemic. What gets lost is the much-needed role of decolonisation as an ideological struggle in mobilising populations against an entrenched neocolonial political economy. With this debate as framing, I propose revisiting Talal Asad's 1973 volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, published at the height of anthropology's disciplinary anti-imperialism. The book's contributors detail how, amid intensifying anticolonial agitation, interwar anthropologists anxious about cultural change among colonised populations advocated a shift to indirect colonial rule through native elites, rather than an abolition of imperialism per se. While spurning colonialism's earlier assimilationist agenda, anthropological calls to institutionalise cultural differences among colonised populations resonated with an imperialist project of incorporating while subverting anticolonial demands. Amid present-day anthropological discussions around decolonisation, these insights remain relevant. This is because contemporary neocolonial relations operate in a manner akin to indirect colonial rule.

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.

The article traces the political economy and labour relations in East Thuringia, a ‘post-growth region’ in East Germany with a structurally weak periphery and a declining populace. We argue that the regional decline results from a process of peripheralization which has led to economic stagnation and a shrinking population, and also has fostered political discontent. By drawing on a regional survey, an intensive case study at a manufacturing site and qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, works council members and employees, we analyse how peripheralization has impacted labour relations and politics in a shrinking region. We discuss our findings by referring to current political sociology debates on the rise of right-wing populism and the scientific discussion on post-growth, as well as recent approaches of critical geography and development sociology. We show how feelings of injustice such as anger about low wages and the democratic void at work interlink with pessimistic assessments concerning the region’s future and feelings of deprivation. We conclude that the economic model based on labour-intensive exports in the internal periphery of East German capitalism is eroding and is contributing to a crisis of hegemony and political instability.