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Review of: Thailand's Far South: Engaging the Difficult Realities in a Recurring Conflict. Kee HoweYong. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2024, pp. vii + 259. ISBN 978‐1‐487‐55612‐9 (hbk).
No full textBook Review: Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and Social Reproduction of Capitalism by Inés Valdez Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and Social Reproduction of Capitalism, by ValdezInés, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 238 pp.
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Dreaming of Forests, Planting in Pots: Environmental Being, Care and Commitment in 21st Century Barcelona
Full text linkAll around the city of Barcelona, small huertos (vegetable allotments) are being set up by grassroots actors. This thesis explores the stewards of these (often ‘illegal’) green spaces, charting the environmental being and care of the Barcelonians who commit to these huertos and the struggles they face in this process. In understanding grassroots environmental change through post-humanist ontology, I trace how commitment to these green infrastructures is motivated by emergent forms of environmental being and subjectivity. I call this orientation to the world urban ecocentrism. While ‘ecocentrism’ describes an ontology whereby the health of non-humans and ecological processes are centred in daily experience, the ‘urban’ accounts for the ongoing negotiation of this orientation with the labour rhythms, economic relations and inter-personal dynamics of the city.Tracing the tension between ‘ecocentrism’ and ‘urban’ allows me to reveal the emotional and affective strains that emerge as Barcelonians try to commit to environmental transformation in the city. My fieldwork (12 months) took place in three different huertos across Barcelona, allowing me to compare enactments of urban ecocentrism among three distinct demographic groups: former-peasant farmers, permaculturalists and Latina migrants-turned-plant carers. Through a novel combination of ontological, multi-species and psychological anthropological frameworks, I examine the emergent contradictions as these diverse land stewards publicly rewrote scripts for how urbanites could co-exist with the environment. By attending to the ways in which the three huertos served their distinct groups of stewards as spaces of continuity, transformation and refuge, respectively, I contribute a more nuanced perspective to the literature on environmental care and commitment within environmental anthropology. Through this, I delineate a crucial new arena for anthropological research in the face of impending climate crisis: the ecological discontent experienced in the process of enacting environmental change from deep within an urban context
Bringing Pan-Africanism Back in as an Analytical Category
Full text linkThis article advances Pan-Africanism as an analytical category for understanding African politics and global entanglements. It shows how recurring debates over Pan-Africanism’s existence, critiques of essentialism, and the persistent emphasis on unity have shaped dominant approaches to the concept in public discourse, policy practice, and scholarship. This study argues that approaches which treat Pan-Africanism primarily as a normative ideal or institutional programme foreclose its analytical potential by confining it to evaluative and institutional registers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork and more than 100 interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 in Addis Ababa, Accra, Abuja, Johannesburg, and London, the article redirects analysis toward the conditions under which Pan-Africanism acquires meaning, authority, and political force in specific contexts. It examines Pan-Africanism through the claims, practices, and political reasoning of actors who invoke it across different sites. In so doing, the article proposes an analytical orientation that treats Pan-Africanism as a heuristic for delineating an empirical field, an interpretive framework for examining what such invocations do in practice, and a reflexive stance for tracing Pan-Africanism’s rearticulation over time
Traders, Chanters and Mystics: the Networked Afterlives of North African Torah Scrolls
No full textFor Jews all over the world, the Torah scroll is the height of holiness, framed as the carefully designed and produced word of God. Jews give great attention to the care of Torah scrolls, ensuring they are maintained and protected so that they can be used for ritually chanting the Torah portion regularly. Traders, Chanters, and Mystics: The Networked Afterlives of North African Torah Scrolls is an interdisciplinary ethnography of these ritual objects (or subjects) and their role in embedding neighborly relations into Jewish life over centuries. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, the book foregrounds Torah scrolls not simply as vessels of text but as agents with social lives and affect—as subjects that act within networks of devotion, memory, and migration. In analyzing the scroll's diverse afterlives—how they are celebrated and venerated, how they are chanted from in new surroundings (primarily in France), and how they are collected by Jews and non-Jews—Webster-Kogen offers a new reading of Jewish embeddedness in North African culture and history. Scrolls's afterlives constitute patrimony and restitution, and they can be approached as musical instrument or mystical medium. Anchored in France's Sephardic-majority Jewish communities, this study emphasizes liturgical continuity, offering new insights into ritual, migration, and the entangled afterlives of sacred objects in postcolonial contexts
The Politics of Persistence: China’s Border Government and Aid to the Communist Party of Burma, 1969–1989
Full text linkThis article re-examines China’s support for the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) through the historical perspective of both Chinese governments in the centre and subnational governments in the borderlands. Departing from previous interpretations that prioritise state-to-state dynamics, this study explores why the CPB endured despite the reduction of China’s official aid from the mid-1970s onwards. It highlights a significant temporal disconnect between the Chinese central government’s policies and the actions of its border government, creating ambiguity over whether to sustain, modify, or terminate support for the CPB. Drawing on multiple sources, primarily archival materials from the Yunnan Border Foreign Affairs Office, this research identifies two distinct phases of Chinese aid. From 1969 to the mid-1970s, Yunnan border counties strongly supported the CPB. However, from the mid-1970s to the 1980s, these counties adopted a pragmatic approach, marked by depoliticisation and demilitarisation, integrating CPB issues into a broader framework of border management. In response, the CPB relied on the border economy as a survival channel and leveraged border mobility regulations to maintain access to Yunnan. By examining the nonlinear temporal relationship between the central and border governments, this study reveals how informal borderland networks have historically sustained armed ethnic groups
Resistant Frequencies: Creating Defiant Musicking in Worlds of Learning Disability
No full textThis paper demands a collaborative musical-aesthetic resistance to dominant ways of being and knowing, which currently renders people with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) invisible both in the world and research. It rejects a deficit model of learning disability and questions whether relying on language-based communication narrows our frames of knowing. It argues that through co-creating audiovisual content, an alternative paradigm emerges where sounds, silence and gesture flourish. Using autoethnographic vignettes and illustrations, it explores how disability can be a generative resource calling for theories of diffraction and response-ability which allow an ethical response within entangled situations
Critical Race Theory and the Law of the Sea: Bringing CRT ‘Offshore’
No full textThis article argues for the urgent need to bring critical race theory (CRT) into conversation with the international law of the sea (ILOS). CRT recognises race and law as inextricably linked, interrogating how legal systems create and uphold racial subordination. While CRT scholarship has expanded from its origins in the United States into international law, it has yet to explicitly engage with the sea. Taking literally Penelope Andrews’ 2000 call to ‘take CRT offshore’, this article underscores the importance of bringing CRT and ILOS into dialogue, highlighting three reasons why race, law and the sea must be examined together. First, race distinctly shapes experiences at sea, in ways compounded by, but not reducible to, other forces such as empire and capitalism. Second, in structuring protections and power at sea, ILOS may entrench racial subordination despite appearing neutral. Finally, the sea is a unique physical and legal space, with differences from land that demand critical attention. The article therefore calls for placing race on the agenda of ILOS, and the sea on the agenda of CRT, to expose how the law may uphold racial power offshore
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