Luciana Lang

The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded a numerical conception of age. Many of the targets of proposals to introduce age-specific restrictions are members of the ‘baby boomer’ generation, a generation that is widely recognised as having a youthful approach to ageing. Attending to arguments that baby boomers are a ‘bridging’ generation – i.e. they share cultural orientations with both preceding and succeeding generations – we argue that ‘bridging’ is a dynamic practice. Drawing on repeat interviews with 45 ‘war baby’ and baby boomer women conducted prior to the pandemic and shortly after the first national lockdown, the paper demonstrates how lockdown restrictions brought to light older women's relationships to, and investments in, spatial mobilities. We focus on how they experienced and understood (im)mobilities in three realms: home life, going places and social connection. Pre-pandemic, mobilities in each of these realms had been important to how the women established youthfulness ...

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book provides new insights into the challenges facing older people in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws upon novel qualitative longitudinal research which recorded the experiences of a diverse group of people aged 50+ in Greater Manchester over a 12-month period during the pandemic. The book analyses their lived experiences and those of organisations working to support them, shedding light on the isolating effects of social distancing. Focusing on interviews with 21 organisations, as well as 102 people from four ethnic/identity groups, the authors argue that the pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities in the UK, disproportionately affecting low-income neighbourhoods and minority ethnic communities. The book outlines recommendations in relation to developing a ‘community-centred approach’ in responding to future variants of COVID-19, as well as making suggestions for how to create post-pandemic neighb...

With the signing of the Belfast Agreement, Belfast (Northern Ireland, UK) entered a new phase of urban development. Moving away from notions of division, Belfast City Council envisaged an inclusive and accessible city. Over a 20-year period, there have been significant changes in Belfast’s physical, socio-cultural, and political structure, reframing the city as a post-conflict space. However, there has been limited analysis of the role of parks in this process. This paper examines perceptions of parks, asking whether the promotion of a “shared spaces” policy aligns with local use. Through a mixed-methods approach, park users were surveyed to reflect on the meanings of parks in the city. We argue that although residual interpretations associated with historical socio-cultural divisions remain, parks are predominately multi-community amenities. The analysis illustrates that although destination parks attract greater patronage, there is visible clustering around ‘anchor’ sites at the l...

By tracing the biography of a collection of Ritxoko, the
name given to ceramic dolls made by the Iny Karajá people in the
interior of Brazil, this paper reflects on the potential ramifications of
repatriation. Changes in the making of the Ritxoko are inseparable
from a broader history of contact, the political-ecological
entanglements surrounding the resources that enable that making,
and the effects of its heritagisation process. The relations in this
natural-cultural assemblage are embedded in a moral economy
that produces heritage and commodity. The analysis argues for
repatriation as a method in the endeavour to decolonise museums
and re-signify heritage, including the natural heritage that enables
the making of the Ritxoko. Drawing on the learning of initiatives
developed in collaboration with the Iny Karajá, the proposed
repatriation could bring about more inclusive forms of curatorship
with Ritxoko makers as protagonists, a necessary effort to address
colonial pasts more critically and rethink possible ecological futures.

This paper develops the argument that post-COVID-19 recovery strategies need to focus on building back fairer cities and communities, and that this requires a strong embedding of ‘ age-friendly’ principles to support marginalised groups of older people, especially those living in deprived urban neighbourhoods, trapped in poor quality housing. It shows that older people living in such areas are likely to experience a ‘double lockdown’ as a result of restrictions imposed by social distancing combined with the intensification of social and spatial inequalities. This argument is presented as follows: first, the paper examines the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on older people, highlighting how the pandemic is both creating new and reinforcing existing inequalities in ageing along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race, ability and sexuality. Second, the paper explores the role of spatial inequalities in the context of COVID-19, highlighting how the pandemic is having a disprop...

This paper explores the productive potential of waste and the emergence of environmental subjects in an urban fishing community, which I call The Colony, in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The shift to an environmental form of governance in the 1990s transformed its surrounding mangrove swamp into a product of policies and changed people’s perception of material waste. If on the one hand discarded materials made it almost impossible for traditional fishers to maintain their livelihoods, on the other, undesirable outcomes of development enabled survival in capitalist ruins. Waste is not only a big bone of contention; it is a political stake with social, economic and environmental implications. In the process, waste is re-socialised and discourses are re-clad according to personal, ideological and political interests. I argue that the afterlife of waste is found in its potential productivity, in particular, in its capacity to produce relations.

Purpose: Recent works by organizational anthropologists have identified bureaucracy as a major challenge for unskilled workers in the global economy. Daily encounters with bureaucratic processes only enhance general feelings of inadequacy, frustration and insecurity experienced by social groups who have to rely on precarious work. However, a focus on people's homespun strategies and on the role of the non-profit sector in helping them to navigate bureaucracy is still incipient. Design/methodology/approach: The research, ethnographic in its approach, unveils some of these challenges by drawing on 29 interviews with migrant workers in a third sector organization in Manchester, UK. It explores migrants' work experiences and aspirations, and the strategies used to navigate the bureaucracy embedded in the organization of their lives. Informed by the different roles the researcher performed at the centre and by the inter-disciplinary nature of the projects, the methodology includes interviews, participative observation, analysis of life story narratives and drawings, and participation in community workshops. Findings: While acknowledging that bureaucracy can keep people in liminal spaces and enhance their sense of insecurity, this paper reveals how personal aspirations and the ability to make connections 1 across different social networks provide the much needed drive that enables migrants to acquire language skills, a tool that helps them to learn the ropes of bureaucratic processes, become culturally savvy, and leave the stage of quasi-citizenship. Originality/value: Responses highlight the significance of recent welfare reforms and reveal adaptive mechanisms to deal with resulting uncertainties, which include the use of a variety of social networks, learning hew digital and language skills, and seeking specialized knowledge found in organizations in the third sector. The study also questions the taken-for-granted rationality of bureaucracy, unveiling its messy and ambiguous logic, and the creative strategies it can spawn.

In the 1980s, local mobilization to turn a mangrove swamp, the Manguezal do Jequiá, into an environmentally protected area in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, brought distinct motivations together under one vision: that of regenerating what was once a resource-rich commons for local fishers. However, conflicts emerged when framings ceased to coincide, thereby curtailing the network, and compromising the coexistence of humans, fish, and mangroves. Prompted by the ethnographic category of pelego, or 'scab', used by people from outside the community to explain political disengagement amongst fishers, this paper sheds light on what being political means. Following the tropes of nets and networks, it unveils the tension between adaptation and resistance. At the threshold between traditional ways of living and progress, between continuity and change, adaptation emerges as a means to survive for both the mangroves and the fishers, who are political insofar as they affect the relations that constitute the network.

Drawing on its reputation as the first official fishing colony in Brazil, a community in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro hosts some unique rituals, such as the annual Catholic procession on St. Peter’s day and the anniversary of the colony’s foundation with the presence of the Navy band. After a big fire destroyed most of the mangrove surrounding the colony in 1975, people strived to create spaces of order to offset what was perceived as a loss of the familiar. By forging a conception of the mangrove as heritage and enacting selected replays of the past, residents succeed in granting legitimacy to what would otherwise be a simulacrum of a fishing colony. According to residents, the rituals are performed in order ‘not to let the colony’s identity die’, and to preserve the most important ‘heritage’ in the colony, the mangrove. This paper focuses on people’s readings of history and on the local versions of how the mangrove was sculpted over time. It explores people’s nostalgic perception of land and community after the mangrove became environmentally precarious and started being administered by the municipal Department of Environment. Nostalgia mediates the tension between tradition and progress, refashioning the mangrove as a moral agent and re-negotiating the paradoxical outcomes of development.

This chapter explores three different interventions on public land in Cheetham Hill, an area of north Manchester which is characterised by cultural diversity, high rates of unemployment and often regarded as a place of community disengagement. Amid cuts to public services and austerity measures, the author argues that the ‘commons’ are made as people adjust to new scenarios brought about by historical disruptions, collapse of work opportunities, and breakdown of state support. ‘Commoning’ provides a space for productivity and in the process, people’s sense of belonging emerges as they envisage, realize and retrieve their right to the city.

If I were a Stag explores the anthropological concepts
of Perspectivism through an installation that hopes
to demonstrate how the idea that animals and plants
can also have a soul is not that foreign to the western
worldview. This collaboration between artists and
anthropologists invites you to engage empathetically
with other forms of life on earth through a collage
using natural elements like water, clay, sand and fire,
and human-made objects, images and sounds.

Among unemployed and low-waged migrant workers in Manchester, UK, having access to affordable housing and to food can be a challenging pursuit, and one that makes people experience precarity on an everyday basis. A local food distribution centre and education charity in the north of the city provides an opportunity for people to share their trajectories and ordeals. For many of them, the centre is the only place where they feel they can participate in social life in Britain, but most importantly, some of the activities they engage in while at the centre, such as gardening, socialising and eating together, foster a sense of belonging and create the possibility of intimacy. Food is grown in the garden, cooked in the kitchen, and talked about over a cup of tea, while people’s stories and trajectories get interwoven with recipes from the places they left behind. This paper draws on fieldwork undertaken at the centre and on interviews with some of its regular visitors to argue that the sharing of substances and of activities in a collective space nurtures the common humanity in a challenging post-industrial environment.

In some of the accounts by Jesuit missionaries on Brazilian soil, the indigenous peoples were described as being “inconstant”. In other words, the efforts of the Jesuits in catechizing the autochthonous population would have very short-lived effects, and the latter would soon go back to its original customs. Representations produced in the colonial encounter played a big part in the process of what can be described as ethnogenesis and helped construct the category of the ‘generic Indian’. Representations that convey an idea of a culture that, though permeable to outside influences, grows back to its natural ways abound in the early accounts in the colonial period, and can also be found in more contemporary readings. Nearly five hundred years later, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro refers back to the myrtle metaphor used by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira in 1657 to reflect upon what he describes as an “ideological bulimia” which he associates with the indigenous people in Brazil. The same author has suggested that the origin and essence of Amerindian culture is acculturation since cultural contact implies borrowing, either amicably or violently (Viveiros de Castro, 2004).

Many anthropologists have written on the shift from class to culture (De la Cadena 2005, Wade 2004) which occurred after the 70s, having the Conference of Stockholm as its landmark, and how it paved the way to renewed processes of ethnogenesis across Latin America (Hill 1996, Norman E.Whitten 1996). I shall argue that this recent trend, alongside major political moves such as the inclusion in the Brazilian Constitution of a chapter named “On the Indians”, has served to rekindle a process of ethnogenesis in Brazil and that such a process is most effective when it can rely on representations that have a long duration. In other words, the constitution of indigeneity as an element of the national culture depends on the effectiveness of the narratives that support it and on the persistence of those narratives through time.

Taking those observed facts into consideration this study intends to investigate how a certain configuration of factors, or the dialectical result of a combination of forces, contributed towards a differentiated treatment of the indigenous population in Brazil. By looking at how past representations still echo in people’s imagination, including that of decision makers, this study hopes to critically assess the category ‘Indian’ within the broader context of Indigenism in Brazil, and of ethnicity in general, whilst avoiding ethnic essentialism. This study shall deploy as theoretical references the pioneering work on ethnicity by Max Weber, who sees the formation of an ethnic group as politically oriented, and that of Fredrik Barth, who suggests it is an ongoing phenomenon and that ethnic affiliation happens in the encounter between groups who perceive themselves as different. Finally, it shall address the current phase of ethnogenesis in an attempt to explore possible implications of this contemporary and global trend.