In this chapter, I ask us to consider raciosemiotics – a way of examining signification, or semiosis (producing meaning through signs), that rigorously attends to bodies, feelings, histories – as means for testifying to Black life and death. I offer a raciosemiotics framework as one way to bear witness, or testify, to practices of making meaning through and about Blackness that either hinder or sustain Black life. I cast raciosemiotics to capture past and future work that centers meaning making about and through racialized signs (including the racialized body) and I imagine it as a possible tool in an abolitionist linguistic anthropology, following Savannah Shange’s offerings. The second half of the chapter applies a raciosemiotic lens to testify to multimodal practices that mete out “discursive-material” harm; and a collective practice of publicly censuring acts that threaten Black life and living (i.e., naming whiteness). In this discussion, I also briefly attend to everyday practices of Black expression that refuse or disregard anti-Black epistemes.

This chapter argues that many civil society organisations in rural India have been neoliberalised. Rather than organisations seeking to redistribute power and resources towards labourers, NGOs have become increasingly oriented around securing contracts from local government, while most community-based organisations reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities. The argument is based on detailed analysis of civil society in a particular south Indian district, and focuses on women’s self-help groups, which are the most common form of community-based organisation in rural India.

This chapter focuses on the changing dynamics of exploitation in rural India. It explores different forms of informality and fragmentation, and shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over rural-based labour when it is i) working in agriculture, ii) commuting to nearby cities, and iii) migrating to distant cities primarily to work in the construction sector. Although labour relations in agriculture have become less personalised they continue to be characterised by various ties and forms of unfreedom (bonded labour, neo-bonded debt-tied labour, sharecropping and piece-rate labour are all discussed). Meanwhile, construction capital uses forms of ‘remote control’ over circular migrants - using intermediaries to discipline labour, and ensuring widespread marginalisation from pro-labour state regulations and programmes. The final part of the chapter considers the possibility for pro-labouring class change, and changing socio-political dynamics and how they vary across commuting and circulating labour.

The conclusion provides an overview of the book’s main arguments while looking ahead to the future. In contrast to ‘residual’ and some ‘semi-relational’ approaches to poverty, the book has argued that analysis of class relations is central to understanding the conditions of classes of labour, and the possibilities for pro-labouring class change. Class relations have been analysed primarily in terms of changing forms of exploitation and domination, and the ways they are mediated by forms of collective action and the state. As the bases of classes of labour’s reproduction and patterns of capitalist accumulation are modified, so too are the ways in which labour is controlled and is able to extract concessions from capital and the state. The uneven trajectories of class relations have been illustrated through longitudinal fieldwork material in a number of south Indian villages. Labour relations differ in form between villages with greater and lesser levels of irrigation, between villages that are more or less tightly integrated into non-agricultural labour markets, between those where accumulation remains focused on agriculture or has become more oriented around the state, and between the countryside and the city. While local government institutions and ‘neoliberal’ civil society organisations tend to reinforce the status quo, the interplay of labouring class organisation and pro-labour government policy can produce minor gains for classes of labour. If both can be scaled up, labour’s conditions improve, and the possibilities for more broad-based social change increase.

This chapter focuses on what race is and what race is not by looking at the interplay of race and human variation. It notes that while race is not biologically real, the invention of race as a social construct is real in cultural, social, and economic terms, often with deleterious biological consequences.

Located across a large swath of land in the north of Australia, the Gulf Country has a history encompassing lives where race has featured predominantly. In the context of European colonization from around the mid nineteenth century, relations between people who have become known colloquially as Whitefellas and Blackfellas have been central to the region’s society, cultural mix, and economy. As understood in everyday language, Whitefellas are known to have no Aboriginal ancestry, while Blackfellas are descended from forebears belonging to one or more of the Indigenous language groups connected to traditional lands.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

This chapter assesses the capacity of a social movement of female agricultural labourers to challenge dominant class control of local government institutions, and modify class relations in favour of labour. It also outlines resistance to gender and caste-based forms of oppression. Focusing on three different village-level associations, it analyses why social movement processes play out differently in different locations, and how such forms of organisation might be scaled up. It argues that, despite their limitations, such organisations can provide a significant contribution to pro-labouring class change.

In this chapter, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in Brazil – and the expanding nature of the fundamentally anti-Black economy of violability that explains this country’s astonishing level of homicidal violence against Black and non-Black individuals living in predominantly Black spaces – but instead on the critical role that urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the “war on police” and advancing an insurgent intellectual movement that pushes toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has seen a proliferation of anthropological studies on police violence and police culture within the last few decades. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of ethnography’s techniques – in their attempts to provide “privileged” accounts of police praxis.

Our goal in this chapter is to consider the impact of our “Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition” theoretical proposition and lay out a possible roadmap for future ethnographic research to further develop the concept’s material and social analytical value. We approach this goal in three main substantive sections. The first provides an overview of our 2015 theoretical proposition on “racializing affect,” considering its main contributions and cornerstones. In the second section, we show how this theoretical intervention has influenced scholarship on an array of themes, including and transcending the specific intersection of affect and race in our original 2015 analysis. We do this through a systematic review of selected scholarly engagements with the piece accessed via its citational record available through Current Anthropology and Google scholar. Finally, we engage in a critical reappraisal of how discussions around “racialized affect” have expanded in anthropology and the humanistic social sciences more broadly, particularly in relation to ethnography as methodology.

Contextualised by an outline of Karnataka’s recent political history, this chapter focuses on how the dominant class uses political institutions to maintain and advance its position. It is concerned with the interplay of accumulation, domination and the everyday workings of political institutions. Although primarily focused on dynamics of domination and exploitation at local government level (and in connection with state poverty reduction programmes), it also traces the links between accumulation and domination up to the level of state institutions, and points to the links between political power and agribusiness, mining and real estate. At the level of local government the chapter shows the critical role played by gatekeepers (those who man the interface between state and society) in shaping the material and political outcomes of state policy. More influential gatekeepers, who tend to be from the dominant class and caste, are able to advance their economic position and strengthen their political position by using their role as distributors of public resources to reproduce labouring class dependence. The chapter locates processes of corruption among class relations, and argues that talk of a shift towards ‘post-clientilist’ states is premature and overstated - particularly in areas with relatively steep social hierarchies.

This chapter presents biological anthropology’s contribution to racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the anthropological study of documented skeletal collections. Examples of research before and after the discipline’s turn away from racial typology illustrate that the process did not occur in a linear fashion. The chapter ends with an overview of contemporary approaches to studying the lived experiences of people whose remains are in documented skeletal collections.