Abstract International development policy requires civil society participation, but it can be difficult for governments and donors to identify representative spokespersons. Networks provide an interface, access, and legitimacy for civil society participation. This article explores the case of one such network in Ghana, and how its leadership crafted authority to represent civil society on the Sustainable Development Goals. This ethnographic research shows that the network's external legitimacy hinged on aligning with hegemonic global moral orders calling for partnerships. Among its members, however, the network's authority was contingent on ethical decisions around brokering resources. This research demonstrates that claims to collective authority were only provisional, relying on the leadership's agility in negotiating two moral frames of legitimacy—partnerships and fair resource brokerage.

Abstract In “Anthropology Bright and Dark,” Joel Robbins encourages anthropologists to identify “visions of the good” and to explore whether they enable or inhibit “human flourishing.” Ethnographic work on dependence in southern Africa informs his approach and provides a key example of a “model of the good life” in which patron-client relations are seen as ideal social arrangements. But by locating visions of the good in culture, Robbins's approach obscures questions of history, agency, and political economy. The consequence is a misreading of the economic conditions in Africa under which dependent social relationships are sought. Instead of isolating visions of the good, this reply argues that anthropology must reclaim its original holism—its capacity to create synthetic accounts of history, political economy, and moral thought.

Abstract This article investigates the role of Danish police not as enforcers of sovereign order, but as ambassadors of the welfare state—more specifically an image of the welfare state as a benign, caring, and ‘intimate’ kind of polity. Focusing on a recent police reform, the article shows how the emic Scandinavian concept of nærhed (proximity) works as the ideational basis for the ‘welfarization’ of the police by mobilizing a nostalgic image of small-town sociality as a symbolic reservoir for the welfare state writ large. This political project—while drawing from deeply embedded imaginaries of what constitutes a ‘good state’—also points to ongoing negotiations of the boundaries of the Danish welfare state as an affective community.

Abstract This article investigates queer socializing among elderly working-class queer men in Shanghai through two ethnographic examples. The first concerns the men's parodic redeployment of socialist revolutionary repertoire. By framing it as ‘just for fun’, the men precluded a politics of resistance, but this frame sometimes exceeded itself when play became a critique of the state. The second example focuses on how the ‘just for fun’ frame constrains the men's outlook on queer friendship, which was perceived as volatile and relegated as nothing—just play. However, communal activities such as commensality create a subjunctive world where this constraint could be potentially transgressed. I argue that the ‘just for fun’ frame operates as a form of self-entrapment, deliberately placing constraints on the men's queerness. This article challenges the tendency in queer scholarship, including queer anthropology, to politicize and idealize queer play.

Abstract Recent Arctic warming is a threat to Sámi reindeer herding in the Nordic region as more frequent freeze-thaw episodes temporarily block the reindeers’ access to lichen under the snow. But climate change is only one of the many other contemporary challenges affecting reindeer husbandry, which include the effects of wind turbines and mineral extraction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Sámi reindeer owners in Finnmark, Norway, this article discusses how ‘compound dispossessions’ are mitigated and negotiated in relation to Sámi notions of reindeer-herding practices and colonial legacies. The author argues that Sámi reindeer herders are facing ‘uncommon grounds’ due not only to climate change and infrastructural encroachments, but also to repeated mistranslations that amplify compound dispossession in a region marked by shifting bioethical regimes.

Abstract Concerns about species extinctions have produced efforts to stabilize these losses and to do so on a planetary scale. These conservation efforts call upon the language and politics of the commons, although in often divergent ways. Using ethnographic research that examines efforts to save the California condor, I analyze the moral claims that animate these conservation practices. The specter of the Sixth Extinction has led conservation communities to treat the Earth as a ‘planetary commons’, albeit an apocalyptic one. Yet ‘touching extinction’ produces practices of bioethical care that exist and resist the abstractions of the planetary commons. Lastly, I offer an example of condor reintroduction into the Grand Canyon to illustrate how these commoning practices have the potential to enact ‘uncommon worlds’.

Abstract This article puts archaic Greek perceptions of nature in dialogue with Bruno Latour's work on Gaia. I begin by summarizing Greek narratives of the archaic period that highlighted nature as a vital, wild, and daimonic terrain that existed outside but also penetrated and sustained Greek society and subjectivity. My central argument is that this daimonic realm of nature historically shaped modern understandings of society and culture, and is becoming ever more explicit in the uncertain conditions of the contemporary Anthropocene. The article continues to connect this argument to Latour's conceptual persona of Gaia: by approaching Gaia as an elemental and daimonic force that conditions human subjectivity and social relations, it ultimately seeks to renew our understanding of the complex, cosmic interdependencies that shape modern Anthropocene societies.

Abstract Policing has long been theoretically linked to the power of the state, but the relationship between police and state has more often been assumed than explored. This article contributes to an emerging anthropology of police that gives insight into how state power is enacted through particular processes or events. It focuses on an event of police accountability: the trial of Philip Brailsford for the on-duty shooting of Daniel Shaver. Through an analysis of trial transcripts, I argue that Brailsford's defense reframed both victim and officer to suggest that Brailsford was a ‘reasonable officer’ who was subject to state power, and that Shaver was legitimately subject to police violence as a ‘suspect’.

Abstract Beyond ethnographic portrayals of religious competition as conducive to rupture and separation, this article shows forms of intradenominational competitive coexistence that allow for both the social reproduction of the community of faith and religious change and innovation. In a Spanish village, Catholic congregants compete not only to secure worldly resources such as priestly time or church-owned spaces, but also over the legitimacy of differing understandings of human–divine relationships and of the role of religion in a postsecular society. Here, competition involves forms of epistemic posturing, a denial of the priest's power as arbiter, and the appeal to the state as facilitator. Intradenominational competition between iconoclasts and ‘traditional’ Catholics redefines the community as a complex of competing theologies, even as it courts schism and difference.

Abstract In this article I explore the fundamental tension in the world of Bitcoin between ‘maximalists’, who see Bitcoin as a tool for the promotion of a moral revolution, and ‘traders’, who approach Bitcoin pragmatically as a financial tool. Based on ethnography of a crypto gold rush that took place in the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv, I argue that, despite heuristic distinctions, both of these attitudes advance egalitarian tendencies. While maximalists offer a sense of belonging to a close-knit community of equals, traders promote the nominal equality of all value-making strategies in an open financial environment. I use the terms ‘ideational’ and ‘materialist’ to characterize these two modes of practice, which realize contemporary visions of egalitarian life in different forms.