Lowest Rated Papers

In de regio Den Haag zijn 7201 mensen dakloos, zo blijkt uit de eerste ETHOS-telling. Die werd gedaan op 7 op 8 april van dit jaar. Het Straat Consulaat, een van de organisaties die meedeed aan de telling, telde ook bijna duizend dakloze kinderen.

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The Uses of Butterflies

Hugh Raffles

American Ethnologist·2001

In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science.

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Ethnographies of Encounter

Lieba Faier, Lisa Rofel

Annual Review of Anthropology·2014·118 citations

Ethnographies of encounter are one response to calls to decolonize anthropology. These ethnographies explore how culture making occurs through unequal relationships involving two or more groups of people and things that appear to exist in culturally distinct worlds. The term encounter refers to everyday engagements across difference. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They consider how such engagements bring discrepant stakes and histories together in ways that produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities. This article examines a transection of the discipline that shares this methodology. We focus on encounter approaches to (a) transnational capitalism, (b) space and place, and (c) human-nonhuman relations. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as contextual frameworks, these ethnographies demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.

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Ecodependence: The Intrinsic Connection between Living and Killing

Katharina Hoppe

Theory, Culture & Society·2025

This article fleshes out the concept of ecodependence, situating it in discussions about more-than-human relationality and biopolitics. In ecofeminist discourses, ecodependence emphasizes human dependency on natural resources, whereas the notion of interdependence focuses on interpersonal relationships. The article critiques a distinction between these types of dependency and opposes the related tendency to romanticize more-than-human relationality. In contrast, it develops an understanding of ecodependence that foregrounds the ambivalent and destructive qualities of relationality. Through an analysis of Maria Mies’ ecofeminist framework, the article identifies two dimensions of ecodependence: one structural and one ontological. Ecofeminist accounts incline toward idealizing dependency in the latter sense. By engaging with the works of Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida, the article proposes a conceptualization of ecodependence that acknowledges the destructive character of relationality not only structurally but also on an ontological level. It points out the intrinsic connection between living and killing, leading to a perspective of affirmative thanatopolitics.

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Learning to Love Rats: A Postwar Ecology in a Cambodian Minefield

Darcie DeAngelo

American Anthropologist·2025

ABSTRACT This paper follows the implementation of landmine detection rats in Cambodia. Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork with the team for the landmine detection rat technique training in Cambodia, I saw that the way the human landmine detectors (a.k.a. deminers) learned to love the rats also changed how they also learned to live and work with each other. Deminers themselves were usually former soldiers, many of whom had fought on opposite sides during Cambodia's civil wars. Their labor in the minefield was inherently aspirational, and rats were employed in this future imaginary. They worked with former soldiers who, as Theravada Buddhists, would sometimes use the religious word “metta” for the love they felt for their rats, which they defined as “pity‐love.” Metta is a love, I was told, “that can make a cruel person kind.” This expression had a particular valence for deminers who had to work with former combatants, where the stigma of past violence made it uncomfortable to directly address such former enmities. Loving the rats sublimated the minefield's potential violence into potential pity‐love for and with colleagues, mediating a violent past to work together toward a previously unimaginable future: a postwar ecology.

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