Social Anthropology

This special issue, entitled “Ethnographic Encounters with Absurdity”, highlights contradictions and nonsensicalities found in power structures, mostly in state bureaucratic contexts and, in some articles, in their intertwinement with market logics. “Absurdity”, as Mirco Göpfert argues in the afterword, “often helps us glimpse at something essential about how power operates today”, including in our everyday lives as academics and as active citizens. For this reason, it becomes not “simply something [good] to think with”, but “something we must learn to fight.”

This special issue begins from the premise that structures of power are riddled with contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities. We examine how their effects are apprehended and responded to across diverse ethnographic contexts by people whose livelihoods are bound up with such formations. To do this, we use the term ‘absurdity’ as a broad heuristic, paying careful attention not only to local terms used to express dissonances between longed for moral social orders and actual experiences, but also to multisensory apprehensions of a world that is out of kilter, opaque or simply inscrutable. Responses to such absurdities range from a pervasive sense of futility, speculative reasoning and quiet endurance to despair, satire or the fabrication of fake or absurd documents to navigate impossible demands. We suggest that staying with experiences of absurdity can reveal the moral and material contours of ordinary worlds that have been affronted or disabled.

Rural public servants in Ethiopia are responsible for enacting policies that are subject to competing and contradictory demands, and that often do not accord with people's existing priorities. Referring to the riddling Amharic language game of enkokilish, government workers described their work as like a game: repetitive, unproductive and not grounded in reality. This article will look at how initiatives to improve sanitation under the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front government, in concert with international development actors, resulted in different registers of absurdity, from attempts at fomenting humiliation among rural populations to the fake latrines that studded the landscape of North Shewa to the production of invented statistics. These performances of compliance from both local people and government workers are not merely spectacle but affected how the state is experienced by those who work for it, and how it is perceived by its citizens.

In a health system shaped by decades of imposed austerity, operating with scarce resources and catering for citizens living in economic precarity and poverty, young doctors in a Kenyan public hospital found their everyday work frustrating and at times futile. Here I attend to situations that engulf a sense of personal integrity and morality, where opportunities, options and choices to develop other forms of meaningful practice remain limited. I explore how doctors encountered, interpreted and navigated these situations and how they refused and protested them, through improvisation, wry humour, solidarity and civility, as well as indifference and cynicism, anger and outrage. Their attempts to locate the absurd in their experiences of failure allowed them, at times, to distance themselves from failure and to refuse such endings. However, experiencing repeated failures also led to exhaustion and sense of moral defeat, and many hoped to leave public service despite their commitments to patients.

How do people make life meaningful amid institutions that have ceased to function? This article examines how railway workers in Mali navigate the paradox of working for a company the state declared had never legally existed. Amid halted trains, irregular wages and opaque governance, workers experienced a profound sense of absurdity shaped by the decaying infrastructure of the Dakar-Bamako railway and broken promises of renovation. Such uncertain grounds fuelled speculative practices, ranging from conspiratorial narratives to horse betting and the repurposing of old skills, through which workers responded to precarious circumstances. These practices critiqued hollow government assurances while foregrounding temporal entanglements, as uncertain futures spilled into the present and the colonial past resurfaced. Framing speculation as a means of forging solidarity and reclaiming agency, the article shows how workers rendered disorienting conditions liveable through gambling, gossip and reinvention.

In Cuba, the government inspires fear among citizens because of its capacity to discipline and punish, but also laughter for its tendency to make ridiculous declarations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana, this article examines the political origins of two types of experiences of absurdity in Cuba: perplexing statements from official leaders and legal regulations that are so opaque that people struggle to understand them. Both kinds of absurdity emerge from people's inability to read commonsense logic into state actions. Although government decisions and declarations may blatantly contradict popular understanding, they are rarely criticised openly in the official public domain. Rather, critique is reserved for the confines of people's homes, or in semi-private online spaces. But while fear may suppress public debate, laughter is never far away. The restricted nature of Cuban political discourse creates fertile ground for comedy to expose the absurdity at its core.

This article describes the migratory experience of Merule, an undocumented Nigerian citizen living at the centre of two different but complementary rules regulating migration to Italy. He entered the country legally but fell into irregularity three years later. In 2020, he enrolled in a state-led regularisation programme. Merule's situation uncovers some paradoxical effects of the Italian migration regime, which appear absurd to those stuck in it. First, the path to legal status demands informal or illegal practices and false declarations about one's condition. Second, bureaucracy works as governance at a distance, exacerbating applicants’ suffering and anxiety. Third, a legal pathway designed to last only a few months results in a years-long wait, which places applicants in legal limbo with reduced space for individual agency.

This article examines the repeated encounters young civil society activists in the city of Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, have with a public hi-fi system playing music for an empty traffic intersection and their choice to describe this roundabout as absurd. I read these claims as symptomatic of uncanny dynamics in Kuchingite urbanity. Deploying the language of absurdity helps my interlocutors evade political risk by constructing strategic ambiguities. Through a Derridean analytic of speech acts I articulate how these ambiguities serve pragmatic ends. My interlocutors’ use of absurdity manipulates subtle overlaps of satirising play and power appeasing elisions of critique. Through this playful tension the exploitative logics embedded in Kuching's capital-centric urbanity may be productively managed by careful instrumentalisation of the ambiguities of Kuching's urban uncanny.

This afterword joins the special issue in thinking with absurdity rather than making sense of it. Across fake latrines, ghost railway jobs, suspended migrants, futile hospital care, techno roundabouts and Cuban ostriches, absurdity emerges less as a concept than a condition: trap, tactic, performance, survival. It compels engagement where bullshit thrives on indifference, showing how power governs not despite absurdity but through it. Rather than only analysing absurdity, the afterword also argues for resisting it: letting it expose the limits of governance while refusing to be captured by its logic.

This review provides an overview of significant themes that have emerged in English-speaking European anthropology in 2024. Methodologically, theoretically and thematically diverse, anthropological scholarship cannot be comprehensively captured without compromising ethnographic complexity and intellectual vibrancy. Nevertheless, this review loosely groups works under three prevailing themes. The first concerns endemic and existential doubt, the second looks at intimate relations and the third focuses on the environment and more-than-human others. Throughout 2024, significant thematic focus has pivoted on pervasive doubt and distrust, which amplifies atmospheres of confusion and intercedes in intimate relations. We find individuals struggling with racial, gender or state-based violence, orthodox and emerging patterns of power that have lasting repercussions on intimate relations and empathetic or coercive expressions of care. Against this background, individuals, institutions, families and communities are re-evaluating alliances with human and more-than-human others and establishing novel avenues for agency and critique.

Balkan, Osman. 2023. Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 235 pp. eBook: US$39.99. ISBN: 9781009288569.

Fiks, Eva. 2024. State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care, and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India. New York: Berghahn Books. 242pp. Hb.: US$135.00, ISBN: 9781805394648.

Yang, Mayfair (ed.) 2024. Anthropology of ascendant China: histories, attainments, and tribulations. New York: Routledge. 333 pp. Pb.: €37.59, ISBN: 9781032416106.

Holmes, Seth M. 2023. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 328 pp. Pb.: US$29.95/£25.00, ISBN: 9780520398634.

Van Roekel, Eva & Murphy, Fiona (eds.). 2024. A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. 323 pp. Paperback: 49.49€, ISBN: 978-3-031-55107-9.

Marchand, Trevor. 2024. The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 391 pp. Pb.: £36.00, ISBN: 978-1-80539-313-9.

Ivancheva, Mariya. 2023. The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 216 pp. Hardback: $75, ISBN: 9781503634749.

Sansi, Roger and Jonas Tinius. 2025. The Trouble with Art: An Anthropology Beyond Philistinism. New York: Routledge. 210 pp. Hb.: €128.00, ISBN: 9781032223919.

Scott-Smith, Tom. 2024. Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 229 pp. Hb. US$110.00. ISBN: 978-1-5036-3978-2.