Should Uyghurs be considered an Indigenous people?
Should Uyghurs be considered an Indigenous people? This article asks whether Uyghurs should be considered an Indigenous people. In doing so, it highlights the contested issues this question raises and…
Eliminate all illegal births: Negative eugenics and Uyghur women as objects of contestation
Eliminate all illegal births: Negative eugenics and Uyghur women as objects of contestation In 2021 state statistics demonstrated that for the first time in modern history the Uyghur population itself…
What does genocide feel like? An autoethnography of visual affect
What does genocide feel like? An autoethnography of visual affect This article reflects on relations between individual and cultural experience to illuminate how anthropologists and political scientists approach Uyghur narratives…
Tabula rasa: Han settler colonialism and frontier genocide in “re-educated” Xinjiang
Tabula rasa: Han settler colonialism and frontier genocide in “re-educated” Xinjiang In his analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero…
Uyghur suffering, uncertainty, and academic interpretation
Uyghur suffering, uncertainty, and academic interpretation Scholars of life in Xinjiang have faced unprecedented stakes and uncertainty in recent years. Access to the region and its people is curtailed, and…
Identity, violence, and the uncomfortable necessity of categorization
Identity, violence, and the uncomfortable necessity of categorization Go to Source
When “the state” is the absence of a sour red date: Memory, materiality, and agency
When “the state” is the absence of a sour red date: Memory, materiality, and agency Go to Source
Place, materiality, and gender in subaltern memories of long lives in a poor Beijing neighborhood
Place, materiality, and gender in subaltern memories of long lives in a poor Beijing neighborhood Go to Source
Scales of knowing
Scales of knowing Go to Source
The illusions of “magical thinking”: Whose chimera, ours or theirs?
The illusions of “magical thinking”: Whose chimera, ours or theirs? Go to Source
How to do things with worlds: A reply to responses
How to do things with worlds: A reply to responses Go to Source
Burning translations
Burning translations This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to…
“Where it was, I must come into being”
“Where it was, I must come into being” This article considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept,…
Life in old Beijing
Life in old Beijing Go to Source
The death of urban China: Reflections on Harriet Evans’s Beijing from below
The death of urban China: Reflections on Harriet Evans’s Beijing from below Go to Source
Comparative urbanism and collective methodologies: Restoration projects in West Bengal and South East London
Comparative urbanism and collective methodologies: Restoration projects in West Bengal and South East London Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison…
The conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture: A reply to Philip Swift
The conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture: A reply to Philip Swift This piece is a response to Philip Swift’s article in this issue, where he critiques issues concerning…
Heathen hermeneutics: Or, radical “radical interpretation”
Heathen hermeneutics: Or, radical “radical interpretation” Translation—both multi- and intra-lingual—is vital to anthropological method. Drawing a distinction between two opposing modes of translation (“domesticating” versus “foreignizing”), this paper considers the…
Reality remodeled: Practical fictions for a more-than-empirical world
Reality remodeled: Practical fictions for a more-than-empirical world Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate…
The psychedelic ritual as a technique of the self: Identity reconfiguration and narrative reframing in the therapeutic efficacy of ayahuasca
The psychedelic ritual as a technique of the self: Identity reconfiguration and narrative reframing in the therapeutic efficacy of ayahuasca Although so-called “psychedelic” substances have recently experienced a revival of…