Anthropology and humanism 

Abstract: SUMMARY This essay tells the story of the hot, brooding summer that preceded Russia’s “special military operation” attack on Ukraine: an attack that could not legally be called a war and that many people in Russia supported even while they neither trusted the media nor cared to talk about politics. Rallying support for this undeclared war, Russian state rhetoric drew on images of WWII fascism, NATO expansion, and morally rotten transnational elites: themes resonant with long‐standing feelings of hurt national pride and personal abandonment in the face of spiraling social stratification. To many of its supporters, “the war seemed a relief after many years of stagnation,” wrote the Moscow‐based journalist Shura Burtin (2022). “Like a fire in prison: at least there’ll be some commotion.” This essay describes a high point of this pregnant stagnation. Written in August 2021, it draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in North‐Western Russia to examine the idea that a “Golden Billion” of the world’s most powerful people governs to exterminate the rest of us—at a moment when this idea seemed eminently reasonable.

Abstract: This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitutes a genre like science fiction. Instead, we focus on how science fiction emerges in diverse contexts. Science fiction gives us pleasure; it has insurgent qualities which are not yet captured. Our appreciation of it grows from its engagement with the ordinary and the quotidian. It may engage time in ways other than the past-present-future, making us realize the impossibilities we have internalized and naturalized in our account of things. We need to generate new ways of telling stories to forge new impossibilities. Ultimately, the collective realization of the authors in this section is that science fictionality is a fugitive element in the world. We need it for fabulation, to generate new ways of telling stories to forge new impossibilities. [science fiction; anthropology of time; anthropology and literature; the ordinary; fabulation]

Abstract: Immigrant rights activism in rural Western New York involves collaboration between im/migrant farmworkers and their non-immigrant supporters, aliados (allies). Ally ride-giving in particular plays a crucial role in mobilization. Because allyship is a cornerstone of contemporary US social movements and a role to which ethnographers are likely to be assigned when working in activist settings, I approach the constructs of allyship and rides as objects of critical inquiry and in relation to conversations about complicity in ethnographic practice. Using experiences from my fieldwork as an aliada (ally) and volunteer raitera (driver), I unpack how rides become more than a mechanical means to a transportation end. When racialization and illegality constrain people’s use of roads and cars, I posit that rides can constitute a collaborative means of resistance and an intervention in the politics of mobility. For engaged scholars, this political aspect of rides should not be divorced from considerations of rides as an intimate space-time shared between drivers and passengers and that exceeds their instrumentalization as a political tool. This theorization of rides as simultaneously political and intimate is generative in imagining modes of praxis for ethnographers acting as accomplices in shared struggles for justice. [activism, allyship, complicity, migration, mobility]

Abstract: Through (auto)ethnographic research in the Amga and Megino-Khangalas uluses (districts) in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), in this article, we discuss the intrinsic importance of paying close attention to Indigenous languages when exploring Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Here, language refers not only to vocabulary but also to the kinds of communicative practices or speech acts used to transmit or talk about TEK, especially those that reveal the indivisibility of the physical and spiritual elements in many Indigenous ontologies. Through the presentation of narratives of two researchers—one ethnically Sakha, one not—we highlight the centrality of language to maintaining the integrity of TEK and other Indigenous knowledge. We argue that not only must language be centered and documented to reflect the importance of language choice, but terminology should be situated within stories or narratives to best reveal connections of language to ontology, highlighting the interconnectedness of language and knowledge. [Sakha Republic (Yakutia), autoethnography, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Sakha language, language usage]