Anthropologica

L’ethnologie nationale allemande. Autopsie d’une discipline, par Jean-Louis Georget

2025-08-19T12:59:36-07:00

Les jeux de la fête, par Albert Piette

2025-03-29T01:57:54-07:00

Le désir d’autorité, par Jan Spurk

2025-11-12T23:51:49-08:00

Enfances inégales. Classe, race et vie de famille, par Annette Lareau

2025-11-12T23:51:12-08:00

Pouvoir et emprise du sport: Pour une histoire croisée du tourisme et du sport depuis le XIXe siècle, par Gil Mayencourt, Sébastien Cala, Anna Amacher Hoppler et Claude Hausser (dir.)

2025-11-12T23:51:31-08:00

Devenir travailleuse domestique. Perspectives philippines, par Julien Debonneville

2025-11-12T23:51:21-08:00

Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia, by Tania Lizarazo

2025-03-03T07:47:50-08:00

Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa: Gender, Personhood, and the Crisis of Meaning, by Kathleen Rice

2025-05-05T03:18:17-07:00

Introduction: Narratives and Temporalities of Infrastructure in Canada

2025-11-12T23:50:36-08:00

Introduction : Récits et temporalités des infrastructures au Canada

2025-11-12T23:50:27-08:00

Contested Waters: Political Ontologies of Water and the Production of Risk in First Nations Water Systems

2025-11-12T23:52:26-08:00

Indigenous communities in Canada are disproportionately affected by unsafe and insecure water systems. While inadequate federal funding and regulatory gaps have been identified as key barriers to the provision of safe drinking water on reserves, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which water quality risks are defined and managed by state actors, and the consequences of these rationalities and technologies of regulation for Indigenous peoples. Renewed ethnographic attention to infrastructure has called attention to the ways in which infrastructures are critical sites through which narratives, technological assemblages, ideologies, political rationalities, aesthetics, and sensory experiences are produced, encountered, and contested. Infrastructures and their administration are also deeply biopolitical projects that facilitate discipline and control. In this article, we show how water infrastructures are closely tied to ongoing colonial processes that serve to subjugate and, at times, blame Indigenous people for insecure water quality on reserves. In doing so, we interrogate the normative practices and techniques through which the Canadian state assesses water quality risks in Indigenous communities and the associated consequences for water governance.

What does Permafrost mean to you? Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Knowledge Holders’ Perceptions of a Thawing Relation

2025-11-12T23:52:58-08:00

While climate scholarship has detailed the biophysical impacts of Arctic permafrost thaw, less attention has been paid to how permafrost is perceived and lived with. Drawing on community-based research with Inuvialuit and Gwich’in knowledge holders in the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Settlement Regions of the Western Canadian Arctic, we argue that permafrost is more than frozen ground: it sustains mobility, subsistence, and cultural continuity; and its degradation threatens these life-giving relations. Analyzing Indigenous land users’ narratives through the lenses of perception studies and infrastructure theory—and foregrounding critical Indigenous scholarship—we propose that permafrost can be understood as critical and alimentary infrastructure in a decolonial sense: an essential system and web of relations vital to societal functioning and a good life on the land. By exploring the meanings attributed to permafrost as a material, and how Indigenous land users engage with the ever-changing landscape and the acceleration of change in the Mackenzie Delta, our study highlights how permafrost thaw impacts perpetuate power imbalances of settler colonialism, as well as how Indigenous perspectives draw attention to permafrost as inseparable from land, kinship, and sustenance. This engagement expands infrastructural analysis through Indigenous epistemologies, producing new understandings of both infrastructure and environment in Arctic contexts.

Planning Development, Promising a Better Future Through Infrastructures: The Cases of Fort St. John, Prince Rupert, and Kitimat in British Columbia

2025-11-12T23:52:49-08:00

The lure of development, intertwined with promises of creating endless growth, well-being and socio-economic opportunities, has been used in British Columbia to shape a specific narrative around resource exploitation while justifying the continued approval of development projects. Pipelines such as the Coastal Gas Link (CGL) or LNG liquefaction facilities in Kitimat have been approved and praised as infrastructures that can bring prosperity to locals while fostering the global green transition by shipping “clean” gas and resources to Asia, by using the two deep-water, ice-free ports of Kitimat and Prince Rupert, located in Northwestern British Columbia. Often presented as the shortest routes to link North America to Asia; the former provides the fastest and most cost-effective route for LNG export through the Douglas channel, while the latter is believed to offer the best options for shipping goods into North America while exporting raw materials and resources to growing Asian markets.

The discourse around the necessity of such infrastructures has revamped since Donald Trump took office as the 47th president of the United States on 20 January 2025. The recent tariffs imposed by the US on Canadian goods and the ongoing threat to Canadian sovereignty provide industries and financial actors with a strong argument to foster the discourse around the necessity of such infrastructure, with politicians using it to shape Canada’s 2025 federal election campaign. Combining all these elements, by engaging with the literature on infrastructure and drawing on my fieldwork experience, this contribution explores how infrastructures have been used to shape and strengthen the narrative around the perpetual need for further development while highlighting the impact infrastructure development has had on people’s daily lives and their ability to envision the future.

Narratives of Renewable Energy in Rural Alberta: Exploring the (In)Visibility of New Infrastructures

2025-11-12T23:53:26-08:00

Over the years, Alberta has seen a rapid growth in the construction and expansion of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly in solar and wind energy projects. This transition promises to bring new financial advantages such as lease payments, property taxes, and community support to smaller rural localities. However, they also come with challenges. Large- scale projects, often built by foreign companies, reshape familiar landscapes with transmission lines, steel towers, and fields of solar panels. The visibility of these initiatives significantly influences local perceptions, as large wind farms and solar installations often face scrutiny from residents. Concerns about aesthetics, land use, and potential impacts on agriculture lead to resistance among communities who feel their livelihoods are threatened. The hidden nature of fossil fuel infrastructures masks significant power dynamics and long-term costs of relying on oil and gas..

This paper explores how people in rural Alberta interpret and respond to these visible changes in their surroundings. Drawing on ethnographic research, it examines the tensions and possibilities that emerge when renewable energy goals intersect with questions of place and justice. By listening to diverse voices and experiences, the paper puts in the foreground the social dimension of the energy transition. Understanding this dimension is crucial in navigating the obstacles and injustices encountered as we move forward.

Exploring Narratives of Energy Reliability in Iqaluit, Nunavut

2025-11-12T23:53:17-08:00

Reliability is an important feature of energy infrastructure. In Nunavut, reliability is impacted by the remote, isolated, and independent nature of the energy infrastructure. For Iqaluit, community members view energy reliability through numerous lenses, contexts, and narratives. Perceptions of reliability are examined from the perspective of relative reliability and the contrasting perspective of unreliability. This article explores these narratives to better understand how Iqalummiut view reliability. Respondents were drawn from recent and long-term residents of Iqaluit. Furthermore, this article begins a discussion about how this might be important for both the present and future of the city’s energy infrastructure.

Flying into Frictioned Futures: Development of Canada’s Northernmost Runways

2025-11-12T23:53:08-08:00

In Nunavut, Canada’s largest, youngest, and northernmost territory, gravel, asphalt, and concrete determine much of daily life. Airport runways’ materialities dictate the types of aircraft that can land in each of the 25 fly-in communities and with them the cargo-carrying capacity, passenger mobility, and frequency of intercommunity connections. The last jet capable of landing on gravel was recently phased out of commercial service in Nunavut, a move that further limits access to communities and works counter to desires voiced by residents to increase jet access. Temporality, an immaterial concept, becomes intimately articulated through the physical realities of transport infrastructure in Nunavut. I examine the interplay of residents’ imagined futures for their communities and the on-the-ground reality of developing, operating, and maintaining gravel and paved runways in Nunavut as points of friction, following Anna Tsing. I argue that the divergent development of communities can be partially attributed to the accessibility of transport infrastructure in each location. In conclusion, I question the idea of infrastructure as a promise of a “future perfect” (Hetherington 2016) and attempt to refocus the processes of Nunavut’s transport infrastructure development onto Nunavummi-centred solutions.

Infrastructural Disruption, Entanglement and Change in Northern Manitoba

2025-11-12T23:52:36-08:00

Situated at the junction of boreal forest, Subarctic tundra, and Hudson Bay, the town of Churchill in northern Manitoba is unique for its transport infrastructure. With no road access, this community of 870 people hosts the only deep-water port on the Arctic Ocean connected to the North American rail network. Its airport, a legacy of military presence, supports a growing tourism economy. Churchill exists because of these infrastructures—and has changed alongside them. This entanglement becomes especially visible when infrastructure is disrupted. In 2017, flooding destroyed sections of the Hudson Bay Railway, cutting off land access for eighteen months. The disruption triggered shifts in ownership, control, and governance, resulting in one of the few cases worldwide where Indigenous and northern communities collectively own and manage a major Subarctic transport corridor. Ethnographic fieldwork and future scenario workshops reveal how residents of Churchill engage with infrastructure—living with, adapting to, and reimagining it in everyday life. Infrastructure is approached not only as a technical system but as a site of political, affective, and future-oriented engagement. As such, it offers a powerful lens for understanding broader dynamics of change and continuity in (sub)Arctic regions shaped by climate pressures and colonial legacies.

Commentaire : Infrastructures du futur: Un espoir de gouvernance

2025-11-06T09:52:05-08:00

Note from the Editors

2025-11-06T09:46:07-08:00

Note de la rédaction

2025-11-11T11:24:49-08:00

Les cultures animales au temps de l’homogénocène : Convergences inattendues entre deux ontologies de la boréalie (Québec)

2025-11-12T23:52:07-08:00

On the one hand, the Innu Elders of the community of Unamen Shipu have noticed that the animals in their territory are increasingly controlled by colonial institutions, such as caribou, who, they say, think more and more like non-natives. On the other hand, the Quebecois from the Lac Saint-Jean region, influenced by US popular culture surrounding sport fishing, illegally introduced an invasive species, smallmouth bass, which could have a dramatic impact on local species. What links these two contexts? A reduction in diversity, best described by the concept of the Homogenocene, which refers to the trend toward cultural and biological homogenization that our world has been experiencing since the contact between the Old and the New World. From an anthropological and philosophical perspectivism, the discussion is based on two case studies on the concept of Homogenocene. It demonstrates how our current era is marked by a double bind that is embodied in both the erosion of the shared world’s diversity and the decreased ability of specific viewpoints to express differences.

Beyond Pathways to Care: Exploring the Role of Boundaries in Mental Health

2025-03-27T21:53:46-07:00

The Pathways to Care model is an increasingly popular method of healthcare delivery in institutional settings like higher education. Pathways are taken for granted as linear trajectories of care that are intuitive to navigate. However, care is often messy, diverse, and counterintuitive in practice. Set within the context of a Canadian university, students fill gaps generated by inadequate institutional Pathways to Care through self-care. Namely, students take up boundary-making as a generative and relational form of self-caring. Methods include social cartography and narrative accounting of care pathways by students supplemented by interviews with campus mental health stakeholders and providers. Results demonstrate that both pathways and boundaries can be limiting and potentiating in people’s search for support. Boundaries mediate emotional proximity and distance—or emotional emplacement—and in doing so generate new forms of intimacy, support, and healing. I advance theoretical conversations on the emplaced nature of care by documenting the role of self-care in people’s care journeys. I also forward social cartography as a fruitful avenue through which to understand the complexities of subjective experiences with care. These contributions amplify the voices of lived experience in understanding mental well-being in Canada.

Displacement and Resistance Strategies of the Pastoralists Afar in Ethiopia

2024-03-14T14:01:21-07:00

This paper examines the resistance strategies of the displaced pastoralist Afar people in Northeast Ethiopia, focusing on the Lubakubo clan of the Dobi area. The Afar have historically practiced transhumant pastoralism, sustaining their livelihoods through the herding of livestock across arid and semi-arid landscapes. In 2004, a local “big man,” backed by the Ethiopian government and private investors, forcibly displaced members of the Lubakubo clan to facilitate commercial salt mining in Dobi, disrupting their socio-economic systems, cultural ties to the land, and traditional pastoral routes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this paper documents how the Afar mobilized lineage members, customary institutions, and strategic alliances to counter and contest the dispossession. These resistance strategies ranged from legal petitions and engagement with Afar traditional governance and conflict resolution structures to confrontation and symbolic acts reinforcing territorial claims. By situating these strategies within the broader political economy of resource extraction and displacement in the Horn of Africa, the paper contributes to scholarly debates on Indigenous resistance, land rights, and state–local power dynamics. The findings highlight the agency of displaced pastoralists in asserting their rights against state-backed commercial interests, while underscoring the resilience and adaptability of pastoralist systems under conditions of protracted displacement.

De la territorialisation à la globalisation: La pratique du tag en mouvement

2025-11-12T23:53:36-08:00

The image we have of tags seems never to have been updated since they first appeared on the streets of New York. However, the practice behind these tags, which dates at least 50 years, has crossed territorial borders and exceeded temporal expectations. Its omnipresence in our day-to-day does not fail to remind us of its power. In fact, the followers have multiplied and proliferated beyond the megacities where their presence is trivialized. The objective of this article is to define the connections between this last assertion and the evolution of the social-spatial structure of taggers. Based on interviews and accounts from participant observation over two years (from 2018 to 2020) within a group of taggers in Paris and elsewhere in metropolitan France, two forms of relationships emerge: the relationship between taggers and the territory, and the relationship between the territory and the phenomena of globalization. The results obtained support the idea that globalized regional mutations reconfigure the social space of taggers. Accordingly, by admitting that taggers remained confined within their original structure, in which an “imagined community” is forged, an updated form of community is revealed.