For several decades, social and cultural anthropology has been enmeshed in an antiformalist mood—a shared sensibility that valorizes disruption, emergence, and complexity over stability and pattern; celebrates flexible concepts resistant to systematization; and treats theoretical frameworks with suspicion. Initially revolutionary, this antiformalism has long since become mainstream, settling into recognizable conventions. This article traces antiformalism’s manifestations across diverse theoretical moments, from post-structuralism and practice theory through material and ontological turns, showing how form nevertheless persisted—often disavowed but relied upon—within ostensibly antiformalist approaches. We argue that the alternation between formalism and antiformalism constitutes something like the beating theoretical heart of anthropology, operating both at the macro level of half-century disciplinary shifts and at the microlevel of individual arguments where formal and anti-formal moves remain necessarily interwoven. Against this background, we detect an emergent tonal shift: a rising enthusiasm for form manifest in renewed attention to social and cultural regularities as puzzles worthy of explanation, and in a different valuation of conceptual work that emphasizes robustness, sharp edges, and shareability. We map this new formalist sensibility and identify its characteristic epistemic virtues—coherence, corrigibility, and collaboration—which distinguish it from both earlier structuralisms and recent antiformalist approaches, positioning anthropology as a diverse yet collective comparative endeavor.

This article examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival as a site of religious transformation among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, offering a lens through which to theorize how migration, memory, and marginality reshape ritual life. While the festival originated in Qing-era China, it was reconfigured across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through colonial labor migration, local ritual innovation, and the institutional life of overseas Chinese organizations. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we trace the shifting identities of the Nine Emperors, also known in the diaspora as the Nine Emperor Gods, and their mother, the Dipper Matriarch, alongside the transformation of the festival’s ritual structure. We propose the concept of diasporic religious ecology to theorize how Southeast Asian Chinese communities reconstituted religious authority outside East Asia. These communities invoked China as a cultural origin while simultaneously rejecting its political legitimacy. The Nine Emperor Gods, often recognized as exiles, martyrs, or liminal figures, mediated these tensions: their ritual features became metaphors for the diaspora’s tenuous but enduring relationship with China. By treating the festival not as evidence of survival but as a method of reckoning with displacement, this study positions religious transformation as a medium through which exile, rupture, and authority are not merely remembered but actively reconceptualized.

The paper reinterprets the East India Company’s state-building effort in late eighteenth‑century Bengal by foregrounding the intertwined evolution of fiscal capacity and institutional reform. It argues that the Permanent Settlement of 1793 emerged not from a desire to follow Indian or English precedent, but from the Company’s struggle to concentrate fiscal powers. A debate on the need to obtain information on taxpayers, which delayed the reform, reveals this struggle. Repeated failures in data collection pushed the state to anchor the reform in an expanding judicial system capable of producing actionable information. The Settlement strengthened revenue flows, enabling the financing of a centrally controlled army and contributing to Britain’s wider imperial expansion. However, its long-term rigidity limited fiscal flexibility and impeded broader developmental outcomes.

The rise of “circular economy” discourse in the extractive industries has altered how researchers, laborers, activists, and consumers conceptualize movements of materials. To proponents, building a circular economy around rare earth elements (REE) production will “close the loop” around extraction, processing, design, manufacturing, and disposal practices to minimize and eventually eliminate all “waste” produced through technology development. Articulated through utopian imaginaries projecting environmental and technological futures far beyond mining, however, these conceptualizations of movement also carry far-ranging entailments for the movements of specific groups of people, including their place in future social and political orders and their capacity to plan for multi-generational futures. This article follows activists and university researchers brought into conflict through a REE processing facility in Malaysia, where research on commercial applications for post-processing wastes has been treated alternately as pathways to economic diversification and as threats to minoritized communities’ welfare and senses of national belonging. Both groups correlate “responsible” waste management to mismanaged flows of people: prospective experts drawn overseas for more sophisticated work; children emigrating for university education or middle-class jobs after struggling to find positions in Malaysia. While explicitly offering future stability and a broadened ethics of responsible attention, the visions of circularity undergirding these debates effectively collapse the many forms of movement at stake in industrial transition into a promise of transcendence, obscuring the racialized patterns of exclusion and migration that invariably accompany the extractive industries.

This paper compares the experiences and conclusions of two imperial investigations into diasporic Chinese communities of the Asia-Pacific in the 1880s. These were the official investigations undertaken by the specially appointed Qing Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, and the unofficial mission carried out by the British translator, orientalist, and diplomat Edward Harper Parker. At a crucial moment in the history of Chinese immigration, these two parties undertook almost simultaneous expeditions to investigate the conditions of the vast Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Both missions engaged with some of the most contentious issues surrounding Chinese migration of the era. In particular, I focus on their documentation of the brutal exploitation of trafficked Chinese workers on the tobacco plantations of Deli, in the Dutch East Indies, as well as the rising tide of white supremacist efforts to exclude Chinese migrants from British Australia. Arguing for bold new approaches to imperial engagement with Chinese diaspora, both parties faced significant resistance to their work. Using Chinese, British, Dutch, and Australian sources, this paper traces these journeys to reveal unexpected commonalities between two very different imperial systems, demonstrating the surprisingly global reach of the late Qing state. Moreover, it uses the materials created by these missions to paint in-depth portraits of two Chinese communities and situate the period’s “Chinese Question” of migration to white settler colonies in its broader diasporic context.

Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups—both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate—sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.

This essay explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire’s demise in 1945. Through legal, historical, and ethnographic analyses of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims seeking apologies and monetary compensation from the Japanese government and corporations involved in enslavement, I explore how the lawsuits exposed a politics of abandonment that left victims of imperial violence unredressable for decades. This evasion of imperial accountability, I argue, was etched into the legal, economic, and diplomatic structures of what I call the unmaking of empire—the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonization. The move from empire to nation-state thus produced transitional injustice which calls for post-imperial reckoning: a double task of accounting for both the original imperial violence and the politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations. I show how new legal and moral landscapes for imperial reckoning are expanding the scope and agency of accountability, challenging accepted models of redress and raising the stakes for current generations to reckon with unaccounted-for pasts.

This article brings together two stories of 1970s Mexico that are often narrated separately: the story of the PRI’s attempts to reform itself, specifically through the right to know, and the story of activists’ mobilizations against disappearances. Epistemic struggles surrounding the right to know and disappearances created a shared discursive arena in which activists and state officials contested the nature of information, the authority to produce it, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between evidence and the state’s recognition of wrongdoing. Debates in the legislative and activist realms often occurred in parallel without necessarily intersecting. Nonetheless, they engaged similar questions: What would it mean to entrust the public and media with sensitive information? What strategies could move state actors to produce information and what effects would doing so have on public life? This article contends that the struggle over information and recognition became the central battlefield for negotiating state violence and opening in Mexico.

This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical past remained relevant to defining a possible political future? It looks at the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform (ıslahat). As part of this effort, he also historicized the interruption of his own speech, identifying the traces of his own frailty of voice in the stenographic records from prior parliamentary sessions. Attention to noise requires a careful unpacking of seemingly contingent moments of communicative misfire, places where denotational discourse is disrupted and therefore unheard, or what speech act theorists have referred to as infelicities. I offer a critical reimagining of the concept of infelicity, attentive to Emmanouilidis’ own preoccupation with the historical weight assumed by the fact of being persistently drowned out by his colleagues. I contend that Emmanouilidis was challenging regnant assumptions about the historical unfolding of freedom in Ottoman political life. The essay argues for the importance of interrogating the labile and contested character of historical temporality at the end of empire.

This essay considers how the rural and tribal have been obscured from prevailing scholarly accounts of unrest and protest in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012, and what this might mean for wider scholarly theorizations of protest and revolution. It draws on fieldwork in central Jordan, especially with Hirak Dhiban, where historical circumstances render visible dynamics also significant elsewhere. It takes as a heuristic binary two broad discursive modalities of seemingly dissimilar collective action that in fact reference and relate to each other in various revealing ways: on the one hand the politically populist and self-consciously leftist Hirak protest movements, prominent in the waves of protest since 2011, and on the other hosha—"tribal clashes.” It considers how contestations over the legitimacy, revolutionary potential, and moral valence of protests often hinge on discursive claims that, in a sense, Hirak is hosha, or hosha, Hirak. It engages with anthropological theories to interpret protest as a generative and affective process, rooted in local histories and imaginaries, even while responding to wider events. It calls for a broader reappraisal of where revolutionary potential is located and how it is recognized in anthropological and historical scholarship.