Anthropology in Action

Informal justice refers to those legal practices that are traditionally outside the purview of formal law and legal systems. Since the advent of widespread social critique in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, informal justice models have become increasingly popular and implemented in communities and within the legal system itself. The existence of informal justice mechanisms alongside and within formal justice systems in the US raises a number of questions for applied anthropologists interested in legal anthropology. In this article, I leverage four years of ethnographic fieldwork in the US to argue for the capacity of applied anthropologists to effectively work in grey juridical spaces that are beside and between the law, activism, and emerging bureaucratic regimes.

Community health workers (CHWs) participate in advocacy as a crucial means to empower clients in overcoming health disparities and to improve the health and social well-being of their communities. Building on previous studies, this article proposes a new framework for conceptualising CHW advocacy, depending on the intended impact level of CHW advocacy. CHWs participate in three ‘levels’ of advocacy, the micro, the macro, and the professional. This article also details the challenges they face at each level. As steps are taken to institutionalise these workers throughout the United States and abroad, there is a danger that their participation in advocacy will diminish. As advocacy serves as a primary conduit through which to empower clients, enshrining this role in steps to integrate these workers is essential. Finally, this article provides justification for the impacts of CHWs in addressing the social determinants of health and in helping their communities strive towards health equity.

This article explores the efforts of an indigenous non-governmental organisation (NGO) to solve two related problems in San Miguel Totonicapán: the lack of clean drinking water and deforestation. Drawing on participant observation conducted during field stays over 10 years and survey data collected over 18 months, the article examines the affordability of bio-sand drinking water filters and high-efficiency wood cooking stoves. It considers whether savings over typical current practices for the procurement of drinking water and cooking fuel offset the purchase price of new sustainable technologies. The article also outlines data-driven recommendations offered to the NGO. While there are significant obstacles to market distribution, the acquisition of a bio-sand water filter or an improved wood stove makes good economic sense for households that presently purchase drinking water or firewood.

When people move country, they experience new social, infrastructural, and ambient contingencies, which enables them to imagine otherwise unknowable possible futures ‘at home’. In this article, we mobilise a design anthropological approach to show how collaboration with temporary migrants can generate understandings that generate insights regarding future sustainable products in emerging economies. We draw on research with temporary Indonesian student migrants in Australia, which explored how they envisioned their possible domestic futures through their changing laundry practices.

Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy Anna Tuckett. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9781503606494, 192 pp., Pb. $25

Living before Dying: Imagining and Remembering Home Janette Davies. New York: Berghahn, 2018, ISBN: 978-1-78920-130-7, 158 pp., Pb. $27.95/£19.00.

Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming João Biehl and Peter Locke (eds), Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-8223-6945-5, 400 pp., Pb. $29.95.

Anthropology in Action is always happy to hear from potential reviewers at all stages in their academic careers, for books, films or other media. We currently have a number of books and video resources awaiting review. If you are interested in reviewing anything on the list below, please contact the reviews editor David Orr (d.orr@sussex.ac.uk).