I stumbled when I saw: Fieldwork, fallibility, and the politics of being wrong

Conditions, ecologies, and plateaus: unmade by books

ABSTRACT The invitation to reflect on the ‘books that made me’ indulges in a necessary albeit seductive fiction, namely, that reading unfolds causally, that intellectual life can be traced through a stable sequence of influences, and that books play into the creation of coherent subjects. This essay proceeds from a somewhat different proposition. Working through and alighting from four texts, namely, Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I consider reading as a practice of interruption and of undoing. Rather than recounting a genealogy of intellectual formation, the essay explores how books participate in a processual deterritorialisation of thought and in a concomitant unsettling of geographical sensibilities. What emerges is less a narrative of influence than an indeterminate cartography of encounters, misreadings, and affects through which theory becomes immanent to life.

What Is It That I Have Become? Some Fragments [Acquired Wisdom Essay]

There are many ways to write oneself. Most popular is the story—a life lived, experiences accumulated, lessons learned, wisdom acquired, triumph or tragedy—a coherent and linear self. I do not want to do that. That is a fiction. Rather, I offer some fragments, some discontinuities, and some tensions and paradoxes that make up what might be called my biography. I want to think about “what it is I have become.” And I will do that against the backdrop of the epistemic shift that has framed and forged my intellectual career—the shift from a welfare state to a neoliberal state, from one form of domination to another, an intensification. I will try to make sense of myself as a social subject, as produced contingently and historically across that shift, and allude to some struggles and resistance to not being governed thus—another kind of fiction perhaps. This will encompass both my experience of education, very briefly at school and at university and the evolution and reorientations of my intellectual preoccupations as a researcher and “scholar.” There is a class, social class, sub-text to some of this; but I will not dwell on that. I have written about it before. Let us try this. As I say, I want to write myself as a social subject, or rather two contrasting and incoherent subjects, two historically contingent, unstable subjects, and the foreshadow of a third. One was an Enlightenment subject, produced in a world defined epistemologically by rationality and progress; the other is a Neoliberal subject produced by self-interest, competition, and profit as individual dispositions and as the solution to social problems of any kind. The latter did not erase the former but overlaid, colonised, and distorted. The third is ill-defined, a struggle in process and it will continue so. So, this is an account of discomforts, misalignments, and a long circular journey from school and back again; from loving and then hating school; from wanting to “save” it, to wanting to erase it. It is also an account in which my singularity is exaggerated far too much. The opportunities I have had, the things I have thought and written, and the wisdom I have acquired, such as it is, have been a collective effort. I have been supported, encouraged, facilitated, stimulated, criticised, informed by, and learned from a long list of teachers, colleagues, and collaborators, and my life-partner, Trinidad. I would have been able to think much less well without them. It is difficult to find the right words to express how grateful I am.

PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RIGOR AND INSTINCT STUDIES

AI and Business Anthropology: Introduction to the Themed Essays

When we put out the call for this themed issue, we placed a single question at its center: Does contemporary AI represent a fundamental shift for business anthropology – or not? More specifically, we asked whether AI marks a genuine break from the digital turn already underway in the field, or whether it is better understood as a cumulative extension of it. This introduction traces what nine essays found: a field mid-conversation, not mid-consensus. The essays, largely from a United States vantage point, approach the question from genuinely different positions – as interpreters, critics, builders, designers, and practitioners whose working lives are already shaped by AI in ways they cannot set aside. Rather than advancing a single argument, the collection offers a conversation in which contributors disagree about the nature of the shift AI represents, about whether the discipline’s primary obligation is interpretive or productive, and about the mood with which practitioners are navigating a moment of genuine uncertainty. With these questions unresolved, the introduction closes by asking: what if? If those who believe that AI is already reshaping the conditions of anthropological work prove correct, the implications may extend beyond methodology to something more fundamental: a transformation in what it means to know anthropologically and, ultimately, in what it means to be an anthropologist.

Gathering Thorns (Some Types of Ambivalence)

Abstract:Emily Hunt's long poem "Company" (2019) transcribes in autopsical focus the hasty skilling, drudgery, waste, precarity, and hard-pressed intimacies that gave shape, day after day, to the poet's stint as an employee of BloomThat, an app-based flower delivery start-up. Turning inside-out the timeworn analogy of poetry to flowers, "Company" is a superbly wry meditation on waged labor in a platform economy. More specifically, Hunt applies the hyperrealist grip of her verse to the task of registering a particular feeling endemic to the Global North: the infrastructural creep of the platform as a dominant mode of capitalization. Integrating two different critical approaches to infrastructure, this essay demonstrates how "Company" takes a scene of high decadence—the traffic in flowers in San Francisco, the seat of digital capitalism—and uses it to plumb a set of ambivalent feelings about the social world that many readers will recognize as the very air they breathe.

The Practice of Everyday War

This essay examines how art and visual culture participate in what it terms “the practice of everyday war”—the routinization of political violence across ordinary spaces and times, rather than its confinement to discrete battles or events. Taking Barton Gellman's 2022 Atlantic essay “January 6 Was Practice” as a point of departure, the author argues that the Capitol riot functioned less as an isolated event than as rehearsal for an ongoing authoritarian project, one whose consequences have deepened by 2026. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategy (spatial, top-down) and tactics (temporal, opportunistic) and Carl von Clausewitz's writings on “small war,” the essay traces how paramilitary violence—historically associated with irregulars and the “weak”—has been appropriated as a tool of state and reactionary power. The argument moves through three case studies. First, it analyzes photographs from January 6 taken inside the Capitol rotunda, where rioters clash beneath John Trumbull's monumental Revolutionary War paintings, arguing that the juxtaposition collapses supposedly discrete historical registers into a single continuum of “everyday war.” Second, it turns to Trumbull himself, reading his decades-long practice of picturing “1776”—and his fraught encounter with the French Revolution of 1789—as an early instance of art mobilizing history as ideological material. Third, the essay examines photographer An-My Lê's work, particularly Small Wars and 29 Palms, as counter-practices that expose the recursive, non-linear temporality binding past wars (Vietnam, the Civil War) to present and future militarism, without recourse to conventional antiwar rhetoric. Ultimately, the essay contends that art's engagement with war's imagery—whether complicit, critical, or ambiguous—reveals history itself as a kind of ideological arsenal, one weaponized anew amid the contemporary erosion of democratic norms.