Abstract This special issue examines the popular TV series The White Lotus as a site for anthropological provocation to examine contemporary systems of privilege. The introduction analyses how power, desire and inequalities are orchestrated. It points to the show's attempt to criticise commodity capitalism while reproducing the commercialised relations it criticises. This parallels the storylines of the show: every attempt to escape or critique the current system, whether through moral posturing or romantic, social or spiritual seekings, becomes reabsorbed into it, often resulting in reproducing privilege itself. The issue's contributions reflect the multifaceted infrastructures – material, affective and economic – through which privilege in luxury tourism and wellness industries operates.

As the new editors of Anthropology in Action , we join a growing community of sociocultural anthropologists who seek not only theoretical analysis but also practical engagement with some of the world's most pressing challenges, such as socioeconomic inequality, ethics and technological advancements, intensifying political instability and violence, resurgent authoritarianism, accelerating climate breakdown, and the enduring, often violent, legacies of colonialism are not isolated crises. Anthropology in Action emerged as a journal of applied anthropology to address these pressing questions and challenges. Yet, applied anthropology, both in past relation to this journal and in a broader understanding, has been typically understood through the lens of making anthropologists employable in non-university settings. This is either considered laudable, especially in the current moment of academic defunding and under-enrolment in anthropology courses, or it is viewed as a weakness for not persisting within the very academic structures that have caused this predicament. This binary thinking divides the field into academic anthropology and applied practice as if they were separate domains. The founding debates in applied anthropology have overwhelmingly focused on the need to place anthropologists into professional positions, given the limited academic career paths universities can offer (see Pink and Fardon 2004).

This special issue of Anthropology in Action focuses on the intersection of two equally important, and yet unequally researched, areas of anthropological inquiry: migration and childhood. In recent years, the mediatic attention to migration has led to an increased visibility of children and youth moving through transnational contexts, often with limited access to social and economic resources. Undoubtedly, the transnational movement of young people is far from a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, historically these individuals had more chances to successfully travel long distances in search of a more fulfilled life than their older counterparts. Migration – a movement of people, associated with hopes and prospects for a better life, but also driven by fears of violence and poverty – has always had a young face.

Abstract The digitisation of agriculture is underway—with advocates highlighting its potential to improve resource efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of agriculture, and critics suggesting that emerging technology will exacerbate inequalities in the food system. Drawing on five years of collaboration within an interdisciplinary sustainable agriculture project, I critically consider the limitations of on-farm research as a strategy for rendering ‘real-world’ farm practice into data for digital tools to guide farmer decision-making. In engagements with data science, anthropologists must use our seat at the table to practice what Helen Verran (2001) called ‘generative critique’ in support of responsible research and innovation. Our training in engaged yet critical participant observation, and our experience building long-term relationships within communities, makes anthropologists particularly well-suited for this role.

Abstract This work intends to describe the humanitarian response to the cholera epidemic carried out by the international health non-governmental organisation Doctors with Africa CUAMM in the provinces of Zambezia, Sofala and Tete in Mozambique. The knowledge and practices of applied medical anthropology have proved to be fundamental in the management of prevention and monitoring activities in homes where cases of cholera have been identified and confirmed. The collection and management of data relating to the epidemiological curve has represented a challenge in the field and pose considerable theoretical problems with respect to the representation, public discourse and policies of local government and large international donors in response to health emergencies caused by the ecological crisis-climate, especially in Africa and Mozambique.

This special issue discusses forms of possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields. While we may say that all scientists work with data, this special issue focuses on data that are collected and/or processed by digital means. In addition, attention will be paid to computation as anthropologists have recently turned to the study of data, AI and algorithms, offering critical insights about their production and implementation. They have addressed the effects of algorithmic automation (e.g. increasing surveillance, inequality exacerbation, new forms of discrimination) and conducted fieldwork among data scientists in order to bring the socio-cultural dimensions of their work to the forefront. In this introduction, we will illustrate what motivated this special issue and will introduce the articles by positioning them critically within the current debate about computation, big data and AI.

Abstract In China, when people have a meal together, it is certainly possible for individuals to order a personal dish that is not for sharing with others. But it is far more common for food to be exchanged directly between hands, between hands-and-mouths and, as I will describe shortly, effectively between mouths. This describes the circumstance when consumers directly eat food from a shared dish, with the effect that they encounter each other's saliva. This mode of consumption is called gong can. On the face of it, it seems foolhardy to continue to eat together in such a way during a pandemic that travels between bodies through connecting droplets, like saliva, especially when other forms of eating together are available. Why is such a mode preferred during the COVID-19 pandemic? What makes it safe?

Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable Eviatar Zerubavel. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0-691-17736-6. 160 pp. £16.99.Civil–Military Entanglements: Anthropological Perspectives Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds.), Oxford: Berghahn, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-78920-195-6, 324 pp., Hb £99.00. Motor Vehicles, The Environment, and the Human Condition: Driving to Extinction Hans A. Baer, La nham: Lexington, 2019, ISBN 978-1-7936-0488-0, 258 pp., Hb: £65.00.Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards, Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-5202-990-47, 230 pp., Pb. £25Tourism and Brexit: Travel, Borders and Identity Hazel Andrews (ed.), Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-84541-790-1. 244 pp.

Amidst massive economic damage tension between the needs to save lives and save jobs has become the basis of a key political fault-line and a matter of daily on-the-ground management during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article we consider four especially salient changes to work-life wrought by the pandemic: (1) new workplace praxes pertaining to matters of touch; (2) erosion and degrading of the quality of erstwhile intimate relations in certain workplaces; (3) changes to senses of belonging and homeliness in workplaces; (4) and, reflecting on the particular type of work that we do, how the pandemic (and pandemic lockdown especially) is impacting our pedagogical and research practices. Throughout we reveal how the intimacies experienced within workplaces are being transformed – not always eroded or degraded, but also sometimes adapted, sustained in new ways (especially via new communications technologies), and even enhanced.

In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic situation, physical interaction and public performances became difficult, while use of digital media for public and private purposes was extended and intensified. This affected citizens’ right of assembly and led to new forms of collective sociality. This article analyses how social intimacy was re-arranged during lockdown through a thick description of mediated performances circulating on Italy’s Day of Liberation from Nazi fascism. It examines how a politicised commemoration of resistance echoed fears and desires relating to the virus and enabled the production of subjectivities in a transnational techno-social environment. Combining Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics with theories of media, social movements, mediation and national identity, it offers an analytical framework detailing three layers of social intimacy: spatial/corporeal materiality, biography and mediation.