Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social…[Read more]

How would the anthropology of the 1990’s have been different if anthropologists understood what it meant to be a writing subject describing Others the way that Bakhtin did? These questions are undercurrents in this essay, as I summarize what early Bakhtin has to offer contemporary anthropology so that you, gentle reader, might make a more i…[Read more]

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and misaligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job a…[Read more]

To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate when using multiple channels: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. After demonstrating how these concepts are pertinent to…[Read more]

Online work distribution platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber alter how work tasks are chosen or assigned. Put succinctly, instead of the employer choosing the employee, the worker chooses the task. Responses to these new technological possibilities for distributing tasks are all deeply influenced by the contemporary historical moment,…[Read more]

Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing
digital data. Digital technology is now required for job seekers to research employers,
store resumes, complete applications, and schedule interviews. What is the employment
process for people who are living on the poverty line, without reliable access to…[Read more]

The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an a…[Read more]

In this paper, the author introduces and explores the concept of synesthetic language, a multisensory linguistic system that integrates various sensory experiences into fundamental units called “synesthemes.” The author argues that synesthetic language forms the foundation of our internal thought processes, while communication with others involves…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a tempo- ral figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins techni- cal processes of storing and reproducing sounds and…[Read more]

Forest conservation is a very important concept across the world. It is not only crucial for climate change but also very critical for the survival of humanity. In Africa, forests have always been an important aspect of nature that is regarded with uttermost reverence and
care. Importantly, discussions on health, healthcare, culture, economics…[Read more]