Anthropology

Drawing on fieldwork experience with anti-racist activists in the UK over the past year, this paper engages with their intervention efforts against racism and wider forms of structural and cultural violence. These intervention strategies target people who are deemed to not be racist but as having absorbed racist beliefs – commonly understood as the ‘I’m not racist but…s’. Such people are seen to differ from other racists, such as National Front or British National Party supporters. Racist views of the former are explained through the cultural violence of racist narratives which exist in a parasitic relationship with ‘legitimate’ suffering. This suffering is deemed by activists to be caused by the injustice of austerity. Racism comes to obfuscate this structural violence through causing people to ‘irrationally’ attribute their suffering to a nebulous migrant other. This corresponds to activists’ conception of a shifting ontology of racism, with physical violence being supplanted by the infiltration of racism within mainstream political institutions and discourse, as exemplified by Farage and Trump.

Underpinned by this logic of racism, activist training is designed to access people’s ‘emotive reasoning’. Activists are taught not to engage in rational debate or offer ‘facts’ which will be rejected through failing to correspond with a person’s feelings. Instead, using ‘Socratic’ questioning of people’s beliefs, which are open and empathetic, they attempt to reveal the raw and suffering human subject. Once suffering is discovered, it is hoped that the potential affective power that suffering offers the sufferer can be redirected either to solidarity with migrants or to organising against structural violence, thus disrupting its relationship with racist views. With similar strategies being used to recruit new activists I argue that this challenges our understanding of political knowledge as being abstract, disembodied and complete.

Storytelling, in the form of performed personal narratives, permeates through various forms of political communication, and has the capacity for mass affective resonance with listeners, moving them to action and organization. While politics through emotion is decried within liberal democratic imaginaries as a tactic of emotional manipulation used by radical political actors, affective mediation and management can be seen to occur in all political arenas. To this effect, here I explore how UK activists qua community organisers have been trained to utilize storytelling in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum as a means of communicating with other political subjectivities. Elaborating upon mutually dependent emotional and imaginative pedagogical logics as they occur within two such advocated forms of stories, I argue that the potential translation of listeners’ affective imaginations allows storytelling to operate as a technology of movement – an intentional communicative tool that mediates the relations of actors with the world as a means of intentionally enrolling them into political projects. Such technologies provide a productive means of thinking about the nature of power and politics that mediates binaries of the material and social, the body and the mind, and feeling and thought.
[stories, affect, imagination, mediation, activism, United Kingdom, Brexit]

Wicca is a contemporary syncretic religion that encompasses both masculine and feminine aspects of deities. This duality emphasizes the importance of balance within everyday life. Based on a year of participant observation and interviews, I have found that accountability, completeness and belonging are reoccurring motifs in participants' understanding of the Wiccan way. These themes combine to create a Wiccan identity. This project explores the religious journeys experienced by a Wiccan group in Calgary Alberta, how the images found in television and other media forms influence and shape identity and, lastly, how an ethnographer's own identity is impacted and shaped when studying their native cultural group.

This article investigates the concept of black food among the Lake Yessei Yakut in Siberia. With reference to two sources, archival records from the Russian Polar North Census of 1926-27 and contemporary fieldwork material, I investigate the local diet based on subsistence fishing and hunting and the food exchanges it entails. The article looks into changes that affected the food habits and concludes with an analysis of the social meaning of the concept of black food.

This article investigates the concept of black food among the Lake Yessei Yakut in Siberia. With reference to two sources, archival records from the Russian Polar North Census of 1926-1927 and contemporary fi eldwork material, I investigate the local diet based on subsistence fi shing and hunting and the food exchanges it entails. The article looks into changes that aff ected the food habits and concludes with an analysis of the social meaning of the concept of black food.

"This article relates to the studies of roads and engages with the experience of driving
in Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia. The article intends to contribute to the broad corpus
of literature on mobility and argues that an alternative perspective on roads
and road-users from a geographical area beyond the West might better inform and
add another dimension to our understanding of roads and movement along them.
The article examines the fluid nature of roads in Siberia and the social significance
the roads carry by focusing on truck drivers and their perception of and engagement
with the so-called winter roads through their sensory experiences. The article
analyses narratives of the truckers who frame their experiences of the road with
close reference to time and money and where notions of agency of the road become
prominent.
Key words: roads • roadlessness • truckers • winter roads • Siberia
"

Recent anthropological literature on NGOs has focused on the agency and creativity of activists. The focus on the subjects of NGOs and agency in this work is an explicit response to scholarship in which actors are eclipsed by formal and technical analyses of organizational structures. This article revisits the concept of organizational structure by att ending to it through the experience of activists of a transnational federation of environmental NGOs, namely Friends of the Earth International (FoEI). On a daily basis FoEI activists encounter and engage with various institutions. In certain situations, such institutions as well as the activists' own organizations are experienced as agentive entities. This article argues that from certain positioned perspectives such entities have material eff ects as supra-personal actors. Informed by Ingold, Latour and Haraway, but also by the FoEI activists themselves, I present the interdependent concepts of vectors, direction of att ention and 'unprotected backs'. This conceptual toolbox is presented as a shared puzzle , and as such is activism itself, that engages in conversation with environmental activists.

Anthropological accounts struggle to incorporate both subjectivity and supra-personal structures. Focus on the shape and type of relations neglects giving attention to the transformations that emerge as a result of relationships. This article proposes a toolbox of concepts that re-specify the notion of relations in a way that takes into account the transformative effect of relationships. The concepts are force fields, vectors, directionof-attention and unprotected backs. These notions incorporate directionality and transformation into the notion of relations and provide three key understandings of i) shifts in personal effectiveness; ii) the limitations of personal power without undermining the subject; and iii) intentionality without undermining the effectiveness of structures. Each of these understandings is illustrated by means of the strivings of environmental activists members of a transnational environmentalist federation. Vectors make it possible to take seriously the subject and inter-subjective sociality and, simultaneously, the effects of history and impersonal structures.

The book The Voices of the Pages, edited by Caroline Gatt, is a collection of experimental pieces incorporating writing, handwriting, drawing, photography, photocopying, marbling and other print technologies. This book is dedicated to making explicit, and explicitly exploring, the different forms of collaborations between the contributors to the book, and to include the composition and sharing of a book within the process of the joint work. Each collaborating team composed a contribution for this book which in some way incorporates the way of knowing proper to their collaborative work. The process involved in making this book was motivated by the desire to shape a particular relationship with the reader, how we want the voices in this book to be heard and engaged with.