From connection to contagion

This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever-shifting reaggregations, and micro-targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re-tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti-liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?     

Catching the pulse: money and circulation in a Sri Lankan marketplace

This article traces the movement, management, and generation of money in a Sri Lankan wholesale vegetable market, pulling into focus certain local economic and moral logics. What traders do with cash is revealing. I argue that how traders use money – the way it is handled, risked, spent, and lent – exhibits skill, implies hierarchy, and cultivates social connections. Exploring idioms of economic activity such as ‘catching the pulse’ and ‘rolling the money’, the article examines relations between different kinds of trader. Moving money through businesses permits participation in the complex communication network of the market. This is central to existing in the social world of the trader. I argue that following money notes – rather than commodities – as they travel around the marketplace and between the hands of transactors renders ethnographically observable the formations of personhood and long‐term relations that take place in the market.     

Selfish altruism,fierce cooperation and the predator*

This paper suggests a new way to think about a famous question: what explains cooperation in nature and in particular in humans? I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two ‘teammates’ in the presence of a predator (passing and shooting in two-on-one situations) is one of the fundamental conceptual building-blocks for understanding these phenomena because in such a situation the fact that life is packaged in many distinct enclosures (and not in one big monolithic blob) can unfold its comparative advantage. I show how, in the presence of a predator, cooperative equilibria emerge among entirely selfish teammates if we infinitesimally bias the lead player in the selfish direction or assign a computational burden on the predator due to the presence of a teammate. I argue that ‘predators’ are common in the biological jungle but also in everyday human settings. Intuitively, this paper builds on the simple idea – a familiar one to a biologist observing the natural world but perhaps less so to social scientists – that everybody has enemies.     

Making environmental DNA count

The arc of reception for a new technology or method – like the reception of new information itself – can pass through predictable stages, with audiences’ responses evolving from ‘I don't believe it’, through ‘well, maybe’ to ‘yes, everyone knows that’ to, finally, ‘old news’. The idea that one can sample a volume of water, sequence DNA out of it, and report what species are living nearby has experienced roughly this series of responses among biologists, beginning with the microbial biologists who developed genetic techniques to reveal the unseen microbiome. ‘Macrobial’ biologists and ecologists – those accustomed to dealing with species they can see and count – have been slower to adopt such molecular survey techniques, in part because of the uncertain relationship between the number of recovered DNA sequences and the abundance of whole organisms in the sampled environment. In this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, Evans et al. ( 2015 ) quantify this relationship for a suite of nine vertebrate species consisting of eight fish and one amphibian. Having detected all of the species present with a molecular toolbox of six primer sets, they consistently find DNA abundances are associated with species’ biomasses. The strength and slope of this association vary for each species and each primer set – further evidence that there is no universal parameter linking recovered DNA to species abundance – but Evans and colleagues take a significant step towards being able to answer the next question audiences tend to ask: ‘Yes, but how many are there?’     

Performing Place: Staging Identity with the Kuranda Amphitheatre

This paper is part of a wider study exploring the politics of place and identity in Kuranda, the small North Queensland town in which my extended family has been settled for the past 25 years. I focus on activities associated with the Kuranda amphitheatre as an attempt by people in Kuranda to define their place and their community in the context of a shire in which they felt ‘out of place’. The amphitheatre is for Kuranda people more than just a venue for the performing arts. It is a place where ideas of ‘community’ get played out and contested, where place is performed, and where experiences of ‘the difference within’ are produced. I argue that, whether they be on the stage or off it, performances are not the mere reflection, nor even a representation, of given structurally and/or cognitively encoded identities. Rather, they are generative phenomena, experientially constitutive of such identities.     

Enskillment inhibited: ‘industrial gardening’ in Britain

Horticulture – like many other traditional crafts in Britain – is said to suffer from a ‘skills problem’. A recent survey suggests that one of the reasons for this is increased outsourcing of horticultural work from public employers to private contractors. While anthropologists have generally acknowledged the politics of learning, they have had little to say about enskillment in work contexts which have been reconfigured in a way that leaves hardly any room for institutionalized methods of learning. Private gardening contractors are an example of such a work context, and in this article I scrutinize their practices to show the various ways in which enskillment is inhibited. Rather than referring to the concept of ‘deskilling’ – usually evoked in discussions of skills problems – I employ the notion of an inhibition of enskillment in order to emphasize that every feature that fosters skill also has a ‘shadow side’ to it which bears a potential to inhibit skill. Implicit in this argument is a critique of neoliberal work practices which shape enskillment as well as the natural environment.     

The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or,rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’

This article revisits well‐travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire – that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category ‘family’ cross‐culturally. In any of its variations, the ‘family’ exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize – to bring into being – social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the ‘real world’, despite the fact that patriliny as ‘instituted fantasy’ downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re‐purposes ‘the symbolic’ and ‘imaginaries’, categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators.     

‘Hip to be Irish’: ethnicity and Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’

A ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity surfaced in the 1980s – according to a number of scholars and journalists – and is comprised of what some consider to be more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Irish cultural attributes. Defining authentic and traditional Irishness is complicated, however, by the recent influx and highly visible forms of economic capital and media attention stemming from the Celtic Tiger – the surge of economic prosperity that began in Ireland in the 1990s – and the commercializing of Irish music and dance – such as Riverdance. In this paper, I propose, through my study involving Irish language enthusiasts, that this ‘new’ form of Irish ethnicity is more the result of rather than the reason for this surge in popularity. I use Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’ in questioning the ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity, arguing instead that a deeply seated, less-visible reservoir of cultural and social capital form the basis for this perceived contemporary ethnicity.     

Metamorphic protein folding as evolutionary adaptation

Metamorphic proteins switch reversibly between multiple distinct, stable structures, often with different functions. It was previously hypothesized that metamorphic proteins arose as intermediates in the evolution of a new fold – rare and transient exceptions to the ‘one sequence, one fold’ paradigm. However, as described herein, mounting evidence suggests that metamorphic folding is an adaptive feature, preserved and optimized over evolutionary time as exemplified by the NusG family and the chemokine XCL1. Analysis of extant protein families and resurrected protein ancestors demonstrates that large regions of sequence space are compatible with metamorphic folding. As a category that enhances biological fitness, metamorphic proteins are likely to employ fold switching to perform important biological functions and may be more common than previously thought.     

Emancipating ethics: an autonomist reading of Islamic forms of life in Russia

This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation – in this case, ‘halal living’ – are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist theory (a) is helpful in conceptualizing the friction between ethical projects (however quietist) and dominant moral/political orders; (b) has the potential to broaden anthropological conversations on virtue beyond existing fault lines (notably between what I call ‘traditionist’ and ‘liberal’ theoretical families) as well as conceptual silos (‘religion', ‘secularity’); and (c) can help us envision a radical, politically engaged anthropology of ethics.     

Cephalopod Cognition in an Evolutionary Context: Implications for Ethology

What is the distribution of cognitive ability within the animal kingdom? It would be egalitarian to assume that variation in intelligence is everywhere clinal, but examining trends among major phylogenetic groups, it becomes easy to distinguish high-performing ‘generalists’ – whose behavior exhibits domain-flexibility – from ‘specialists’ whose range of behavior is limited and ecologically specific. These generalists include mammals, birds, and, intriguingly, cephalopods. The apparent intelligence of coleoid cephalopods (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish) is surprising – and philosophically relevant – because of our independent evolutionary lineages: the most recent common ancestor between vertebrates and cephalopods would have been a small wormlike organism, without any major organizational structure to its nervous system. By identifying the cognitive similarities between these organisms and vertebrates, we can begin to derive some general principles of intelligence as a biological phenomenon. Here, I discuss trends in cephalopod behavior and surrounding theory, and suggest their significance for our understanding of domain-general cognition and its evolution.     

Biodiversity and environmental values: in search of a universal earth ethic

While biodiversity protection has become a widely accepted goal of environmental protectionists, no such agreement exists regarding why it is important. Two, competing theories of natural value – here called ‘Economism’ and ‘Intrinsic Value Theory’ – are often cited to support the goal. Environmentalists, who have recently proposed the articulation of a universal ‘Earth Charter’ to express the shared values humans derive from nature, have cited both of these theories as support for biodivesity protection. Unfortunately these theories, which are expressed as polar opposites, do not work well together and the question arises: is there a shared value that humans place on nature? It is argued that these two value theories share four questionable assumptions: (1) a sharp distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ value; (2) an entity orientation; (3) moral monism; and (4) placeless evaluation. If these four assumptions are denied, an alternative value system emerges which recognizes a continuum of ways humans value nature, values processes rather than only entities, is pluralistic, and values biodiversity in place. An alternative theory of value, which emphasizes protecting processes rather than protecting objects, and which values nature for the creativity of its processes, is proposed as a more attractive theory for expressing the universal values of nature that should motivate an Earth Charter and the goal of biodiversity protection.     

Founders,ancestors, and enemies: memory,family, time,and space in the Pernambuco sertão

This article concerns the use of narrative and genealogical frameworks among sertanejos, the inhabitants of the hinterlands (sertão) of Pernambuco in the Northeast of Brazil, in the process of grouping and differentiating families. It explores how accounts produced by different people are linked by shared memories of past conflicts – such as cangaço and questões de família (lit. ‘family issues’). Through conceived and lived relationships among relatives and the correlated concepts of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ current in this social formation, I look to identify the different meanings attributed to time and space, inscribed in the collective memory, and implicated in the moving configurations of ‘family’ in a cognatic universe.     

The racialised and classed constitution of English village life

This article explores ethnographically the ‘village’ as a stage for the enactment and reproduction of a racialised set of white middle-class social and moral values. To do this I draw upon interview material with middle-class whites who live in a suburban ‘village’ on the border of rural Leicestershire and urban Leicester in England. I explore the way in which my co-conversationalists reflexively and imaginatively defend their area's ‘village’ identity through a discourse that ‘others’ its wealthy Asian residents. Although these raced others have achieved economic parity with the more affluent wealthy white middle-class residents, they are imagined to lack the ‘proper’ middle-class values of respectability and decorum, which are associated with the traditional white rhythms of English village life.     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene

This article explores how ecological change transforms children and child-rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim ' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.     

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

The seventh macronutrient: how sodium shortfall ramifies through populations,food webs and ecosystems

Of the 25 elements required to build most organisms, sodium has a unique set of characteristics that ramify through terrestrial ecology. In plants, sodium is found in low concentrations and has little metabolic function; in plant consumers, particularly animals, sodium is essential to running costly Na‐K ATPases. Here I synthesise a diverse literature from physiology, agronomy and ecology, towards identifying sodium’s place as the ‘7th macronutrient’, one whose shortfall targets two trophic levels – herbivores and detritivores. I propose that sodium also plays a central, though unheralded role in herbivore digestion, via its importance to maintaining microbiomes and denaturing tannins. I highlight how sodium availability is a key determinant of consumer abundance and the geography of herbivory and detritivory. And I propose a re‐appraisal of the assumption that, because sodium is metabolically unimportant to most plants, it is of little use. Instead, I suggest that sodium’s critical role in limiting herbivore performance makes it a commodity used by plants to manipulate their herbivores and mutualists, and by consumers like bison and elephants to generate grazing lawns: dependable sources of sodium.