American Ethnologist is a quarterly journal concerned with social and cultural anthropology in the broadest sense of the term. The journal’s articles combine ethnographic specificity with original theoretical thinking, conveying the relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.

As a flagship journal for social and cultural anthropology, American Ethnologist aims to disseminate work that roams across a wide variety of theoretical approaches, methods, and points of view. The editor encourages the submission of manuscripts that reflect the discipline’s intellectual and geographic diversity.

American Ethnologist is published on behalf of the American Ethnological Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association, by Wiley-Blackwell, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA.

Latest Issue, 52.1

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Improperty: Black land stewardship and the paradox of liberation on stolen land
Myles Lennon

The fraudulent family: US refugee admissions, moral economies of kinship, and DNA testing in Africa
Sophia Balakian

Cement and displacement: Material life in the wake of extractive war
Kali Rubaii

FORUM: I WAS WRONG

Editors’ note: I was wrong
L. L. Wynn,  Susanna Trnka,  Jesse Hession Grayman

“What even the cowherds and women know”: Everyday life and its promise
Veena Das

I was wrong when I studied Russian nuclear weapons scientists
Hugh Gusterson

Cliché anthropologists and the interactive probing of aspirations under market expansion
Gil Hizi

I was wrong about theory
Carole McGranahan

A vicarious scar: Secondary trauma and ethnographic care in fieldwork
Erin Routon

Reflections on unheroic fieldwork: My kidnapping, vulnerability, and privilege in Dar es Salaam
Meredith G. Marten

On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories
Laura A. Meek

BOOK REVIEWS

Hailing the state: Indian democracy between elections By Lisa Mitchell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 320 pp.
Zaheer Baber

Digital unsettling: Decoloniality and dispossession in the age of social media By Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 264 pp.
Maitrayee Basu

The mother, the politician, and the guerrilla: Women’s political imagination in the Kurdish movement By Nazan Üstündağ. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.
Hasret Cetinkaya

Zainab’s traffic: Moving saints, selves, and others across borders By Emrah Yıldız. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. 191 pp.
Sana Chavoshian

Passport island: The market for EU citizenship in Cyprus By Theodoros Rakopoulos. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 262 pp.
Nicole Constable

Eating besides ourselves: Thresholds of foods and bodies By Heather Paxson and Marianne Elisabeth Lien, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 248 pp.
Amy Cox Hall

Terror trials: Life and law in Delhi’s courts By Mayur R. Suresh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.
Thomas Blom Hansen

Religion and transnational citizenship in the African diaspora: Akan London By Mattia Fumanti. London: Routledge, 2023. 195 pp.
Antonio Montañés Jimenez

Afterlives of revolution: Everyday counterhistories in southern Oman By Alice Wilson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 336 pp.
Matan Kaminer

The indebted woman: Kinship, sexuality, and capitalism By Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 248 pp.
Sohini Kar

Probing arts and emergent forms of life By Michael M. J. Fischer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 336 pp.
Pamela Karimi

Imagistic care: Growing old in a precarious world Edited by Cheryl Mattingly and Lone Grøn. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. 272 pp.
Sarah Lamb

Disability worlds By Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 271 pp.
Timothy Y. Loh

Unsettled borders: The militarized science of surveillance on sacred Indigenous lands By Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 207 pp.
Raquel Madrigal

Enduring polygamy: Plural marriage and social change in an African metropolis By Bruce Whitehouse. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 221 pp.
Julia Pauli

The composition of worlds: Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier By Philippe Descola. Cambridge: Polity, 2024. 200 pp.
Laura Rival

The violence of recognition: Adivasi indigeneity and anti-Dalitness in India By Pinky Hota. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 230 pp.
Svati Shah

Working musicians: Labor and creativity in film and television production By Timothy Taylor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 264 pp.
Michael L. Siciliano

Nullius: The anthropology of ownership, sovereignty, and the law in India By Kriti Kapila. Chicago: Hau Books, 2022. 207 pp.
David Singh

A tyranny against itself: Intimate partner violence on the margins of Bogotá By John I. B. Bhadra-Heintz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 258 pp.
Signe Svallfors