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Through a restudy of Azande witchcraft, the paper will call for a reevaluation of Evans-Pritchard’s classic. By showing the evolution of oracles in witchcraft trials, EP’s timeless description needs a reconsideration, and the relationship of power and magic must be taken seriously.

Paper long abstract

Hundred years after the original fieldwork, Evans-Pritchard’s ‘Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande’ (WOM) still crucially shapes the way anthropologists think about belief-systems, witchcraft, and cultural relativity. WOM remains one of the most celebrated case studies of modern anthropology. Every undergraduate student learns about the collapse of the Zande granary, and the worldview derived from the explanation of the unfortunate events. Unlike the ‘Nuer’, Zande witchcraft remains without any serious ethnographic revisits. Building on two decades of intermittent fieldwork among the Azande, the paper will show the change in the system of oracles. A new oracle, ‘dabaya’, replaced ‘benge’, the famous chicken poison oracle method vividly described by Evans-Pritchard. ‘Dabaya’ is a similar oracle method deriving answers to questions of witchcraft based on the death of a chicken, however it is fundamentally different in certain key aspects. The evolution of oracles raises important questions of change and adoptative nature of witchcraft, an aspect clearly lacking in Evans-Pritchard’s work. By collecting fragments and hints of the nature of oracles in the past one hundred years, the paper will shed light on the historical oscillation between private and public witchcraft accusations. In times of great calamities witchcraft is a public explanatory method, while in calmer times, it retreats into private realms. The paper will call for methodological ‘tricks’ for the reappraisal of ethnographic classics. One such epistemological trick is the constant balancing act between using the classic ethnography as historical source, while engaging with it on a theoretical level.

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This paper revisits the role of time in Mauss’s theory of the gift through ethnographic analysis of "sarice" gifts Senegalese migrants in France offer relatives in Senegal. These asymmetrical exchanges invite a reappraisal of how giving, receiving, and reciprocity unfold in contexts of inequality.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits the role of time in Mauss’s theory of the gift through ethnographic analysis of sarice gifts that Senegalese migrants in France offer relatives in Senegal. A form of giving in which return gifts are not expected in any immediate or symmetrical sense, migrants’ gifts invite a reappraisal the Maussian triad of giving, receiving, and reciprocating in contexts of inequality. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dakar (since 2005) and with Senegalese in France (Lyon 2022–2025), I first analyze how gender, age, and kinship intersect with global inequalities in migration to structure flows of resources in transnational families. I argue that sarice – and migrants’ remittances more broadly – operate according to economic moralities of rank-based redistribution, in which migrants and non-migrants are understood to be fundamentally unequal. Rather than encouraging the receiver to reciprocate in kind, these gifts establish precedents that shape future expectations and requests (Graeber 2001). The paper then offers a reappraisal of Bourdieu’s (1990) theory on time and the gift, to argue that humiliation and domination result from failure to reciprocate “in time,” only in the context of moral expectations of “balanced” reciprocity (Sahlins 1972). Because the relationship that underpins sarice gifts is unambiguously assumed to be asymmetrical, the meaningful timescale for a return is not subject to calculation or may become relevant on the scale of a lifetime, conditioning individuals’ ability to become adults, migrants, or elders. Revisiting gift exchange through contemporary ethnography, the paper considers how enduring global inequalities reshape reciprocity and obligation.

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Revisits are well suited to study both change and the changing experience of change. The zero-covid policy and real estate crisis have caused obvious transformations. Yet inhabitants of Shenzhen experience stagnation, and their optimism has given way to critiques of the future.

Paper long abstract

In China the effects of the zero-covid policy intersect with the country’s dramatic real estate crisis. These issues have unleashed changes that were striking amid my revisit to the field after years of absence. Changes are manifest in the subdivided administrative layout – smaller governance units bearing new names – and social and material environment – new residential neighbourhoods but also halted construction sites. However, I also encountered critical discourse about these transformations that denies the existence of change. Among the inhabitants of an urbanized village of Shenzhen, the prevailing mood has shifted from optimism during my earlier field work to pessimism, and from muted scepticism to outspoken resentment. This paper reflects on the extent to which their erstwhile optimism influenced my earlier writings on their long-term temporal outlook and resulting scalar strategies, which made participation in top-down imposed urban renewal acceptable. Should this analysis be revised or updated in the light of urbanization’s unfulfilled promises, which generates a sense of break with the future and betrayal by the government? The temporal outlook which now prevails prevents from acting upon the future. People are not only dispossessed of their holdings, they are deprived of hopefulness. They ironize about the fakeness and criticize the defects of urban renewal policies, which the government still presents as the desired future. They feel the plans consist in mere renaming and actually amount to stagnation, even regression. Revisits to the field are well suited to study both change and the changing experience of change.

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In this paper I revisit my long term research in Poland in relation to changes in political economy, regional differences, and shifts in anthropological theory. I focus on how we bring together individual personal narrative and dominant discourses of social change.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I look back at ethnographic research I have conducted since 1977 in Poland, in terms of different registers of change: effects of changing political economy during late socialism, economic restructuring followed by early 'cowboy capitalism' and new (or re-emergent?) forms of social inequality, and finally EU accession and yet another face of political economy. My own research over this period was situated in very diverse regions: the southern highlands (Podhale), the industrial/post industrial city of Łódź, and the eastern Lubelskie region. I concentrate on different contexts of change and sites of re-visitation. First and foremost, how do big processes of social, economic and political change, set into motion at the national and international level, influence the lives of citizens in different kinds of regions, and within specific regions or areas, on citizens of different status, generation, gender and ethnicity? How do these different levels or contexts of change interact with and have impact on each other, generating new processes (both positive and negative) or reproducing and reinforcing existing structures? These questions in turn relate to anthropological methods, theory and imagination. How does the anthropologist, returning and revisiting areas undergoing profound, externally generated, change manage to understand and interpret what is occurring, how do longstanding personal relationships unfold and develop, how does the anthropologist revisit past understandings and perhaps reinterpret them, and how do changes in our discipline's wider theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches influence these ethnographic processes of current, historical, retrospective analysis and interpretation?

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I present my new book manuscript: a wry restudy, 100 years later, of Siegried’s Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses. Blending anthropology and confessional comedy, this behind-the-scenes look at research and academic survival asks what it means to study insecure professionals when you are one of them.

Paper long abstract

Having lived and worked in seven countries and across multiple universities, I have witnessed every corner of academia’s underbelly: the unrelenting pressure to publish or perish, the groveling for funds, the serial rejections. My new book manuscript distills this experience into an academic comedy whose protagonist is not an ivy league professor but the far more common academic foot soldier, fumbling through research and career survival and, in the process, revealing the absurdities of professional life more broadly.

I will read the opening section of my book, which sets the scene. Drawing inspiration from Siegfried Kracauer's classic The Salaried Masses, which documented 1920s Berlin white-collar workers with precarious employment and questionable diversions, the anthropologist turns a spotlight on today's professionals struggling to find value in their work. This romp through Berlin's labor courts, career fairs, and jobseeker workshops, alongside anxiety-inducing conferences, publishing ordeals, and an endless cycle of applications, weaves together critical insight and personal mishap. As the anthropologist repeatedly asks herself, “What would Kracauer do?” and falls short, she chases an awakening “along the lines of Eat Pray Love, only without the food, spirituality, or sex.” Along the way, she learns from similarly struggling professionals that “even shitty jobs gave them something to project onto the world, if only to say that they were more and better than their job descriptions.”

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This paper revisits E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act and discusses the relevance of Thompson’s approach to law for questions and conflicts surrounding contemporary wildlife management.

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This paper revisits E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act and discusses the relevance of the book for questions surrounding contemporary regimes of wildlife management, its attendant forms of enclosure, and the contestations that surround it.

Thompson’s study famously challenged instrumental accounts of law by demonstrating how “the Black Act” during the eighteenth-century enclosure movement in England was deeply imbricated in productive relations, and how law was a complex terrain for social struggles over livelihood, property, and customary rights.

By drawing on ethnographic material from fieldwork in the commercial fisheries in coastal Louisiana, and on historical insights on legislative transformations in fishery governance across the Gulf Coast states, my paper discusses the relevance of Thompson’s work and what it visibilizes in a context shaped by emerging environmentalism, socio-ecological transformations, and ecological volatility.

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This paper revisits Gerald Sider’s Culture and Class in Anthropology and History to examine the class alliances and collusions that constitute right-wing populism. Rather than a rupture, this paper transcends the liberal compact to analyze the evolving relations of working-class politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits Gerald Sider’s Culture and Class in Anthropology and History to analyze right-wing populism in the United States. Drawing on Sider’s concept of culture as the force that makes class dynamic, I analyze right-wing populism’s demarcation of class antagonisms and inter-class alliances. In this way, populism is neither a ‘rupture’ nor the ‘return of the repressed.’ Instead, right-wing populism in the United States provides a window into the evolving organisation of capitalist accumulation. In going beyond the view of class struggle between labor and capital, Sider insists on the subtleties of the internal dynamics of interclass confrontations and collusions. Through terms such as ‘woke capital’ and the ‘liberal elite,’ populism embodies a class politics that focuses class struggle upon consumption and property ownership, which grows from contradictions in the way the US version of social democracy conscripted working class Americans into corporate models that bureaucratized trade unions, transforming working class politics in ways that demobilized militant politics and focused class struggle upon consumption and property ownership, predisposing workers to corporate power and imperialism. At the same time, I will explore right-wing populism's ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism by placing its practices in history and the relations of production, uncovering internal dynamics that produce specific interclass confrontations and collusions that arise from the changes in the material basis and productive activities, which also express the working classes’ changing political and ideological claims.

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The paper traces how Michael Burawoy used revisiting as a technique to account for social change. It rereads his work through the lenses of historical consciousness: his own, his interlocutors', and the one dominating his intellectual field at specific moments.

Paper long abstract

Michael Burawoy’s work is an ode to revisits. He steps in Donald Roy’s footsteps to write his Chicago machine-shop ethnography, in Miklos Haraszti’s to examine labour regimes and ideological work in state socialism, and finally, in his own, to think about ‘the colour of class’ in postcolonial Zambia or about the ‘radiant past’ in postsocialist Hungary. He thinks with what he calls ‘the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit’ (2003) to account for the interlacing trajectories of the researcher, of their interlocutors, of one’s conceptual apparatus, of the place itself, and of the global forces at play in a particular time/space nexus.

One year and a half after his absurd death, the paper traces how Michael Burawoy used revisiting as a technique to account for historical change throughout his career, whether it concerned the labour process, shopfloor solidarity, or the mundanity of ‘manufacturing consent’. Following closely Burawoy’s own reflections on the ways in which ethnography-as-revisit forces researchers to ‘directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study’ (2003), the paper argues that this confrontation takes the form of an encounter between three forms of historical consciousness: the researchers', their interlocutors’, and the one dominating their intellectual field at specific moments. Since neither the past nor the present can be understood in their own terms, the shifts in the stakes and meanings of these encounters give us crucial clues about the mechanisms through which historical process keeps past and present into perpetual unity.