With the reflexive turn in the social sciences, emotional engagement is an inevitable and crucial part of data-gathering and analysis. However, there is a glaring gap in methodological discussions to this end. Presenting ethnographic research into end of life with people living at home in England with heart failure, we argue for a methodological blend of engagement and detachment that shifts throughout the research process, and that sensory experience is a core part of engagement. We offer ethnographic examples which present and explore some alternatives to emotional engagement and objective detachment: (1) moving with participants to facilitate engagement during fieldwork through shared sensory experience; (2) detachment as a different way of relating when exiting the field and drawing participant relationships to a close; and (3) ethnographic closeness as the interplay of engagement and detachment in participant debriefing and data analysis. Based on well-established anthropological concepts, and taking both engagement and detachment as embodied and relational, we develop a notion of ethnographic closeness in which detachment is a necessary part. Our detailed methodological discussion thus offers theoretically grounded possibilities and alternatives for approaching and managing the core tension of 'how close is too close?' in ethnographic practice. Further contributions supporting researchers in navigating ethnographic research are needed.

How might urban relocation unfold as a time of social reproduction? Taking the case of Zhongxin Village in Taipei, a military settlement that was relocated in 2016, I show in this article that while mainland Chinese veterans experienced the move with reluctance, their Taiwanese wives readily stepped up to bridge family histories. Offering new ethnography on 'family repair' and the arranging of ancestral altars, I suggest that loss is often not the only force at play when moving home. The Taiwanese wives of Zhongxin Village recount family stories that are elicited through their engagement with 'biographical objects'. They transmit family lore through daily acts of care even as they project aspirations for the futures of their descendants onto the furnishing of new flats. This marriage of materiality, aspiration, repair, and affect shows that relocation can encourage the social reproduction of the family and, for some, a move from remembrance to aspiration.

This article argues that a population of relatively affluent retired people in a small Irish town have employed the possibilities of grandparenting to resolve many of the tensions of contemporary kinship. This includes the tension between the obligations of prescriptive relationships as against the voluntarism of friendship. This is considered against a background shift in kinship studies towards a distinction between kinship as a category and kinship as experience. Kinship as experience often now comprises a series of deep fluctuations during the life course. Experience is also extended by the growth in life expectancy. This makes it still more important that the legacy of an individual's prior experiences of kinship may be partially resolved through the experience of grandparenting. The profound consequences of grandparenting lie not in the relationship to the grandchildren but in the possibilities that grandparenting offers to recalibrate all other kinship relations. These include the relationship with one's own children, the relationship with partners, the legacy of one's prior experience of being a parent, and even the memory of the way one was parented when a child.

This article engages critically with concepts of 'skill', 'expertise', and 'capacity' as they operate as markers of distinction and domination and shape migratory labour relations among road construction workers from across South Asia in the Maldives archipelago. The article examines roadwork at three levels: the professional biographies leading to 'flexible specialization' rather than technical expertise amongst Maldivian managers; the technical expertise and social incorporation of 'skilled' Sri Lankan supervisors; and the key material expertise of 'non-skilled' Bangladeshi labourers in precarious employment. Whilst discussions of South Asian labour migration have been dominated by caste and class, this article argues that it is important to consider how the cultural production and understanding of concepts such as 'expertise', 'capacity', and 'exposure' at worksites can (also) become distinguishing factors in (hierarchical) migratory labour relations.

This article describes relations between humans, animals, artefacts, and pathogens in simulations of disasters, taking bird diseases in three Chinese sentinel posts as ethnographic cases. Drawing on distinctions between simulation, ritual, and play, it shows that the engagement of actors in the imaginary of simulations, which they describe as 'realism', reflectively reverses the oppositions between humans and nonhumans, active and passive, fiction and reality that shape ordinary life. Borrowing from the anthropology of hunting societies, it argues that simulations of bird diseases, considered as signs of future species extinction, rely on cynegetic techniques of power, in which humans and animals symmetrically shift perspectives, and not only on pastoralist techniques, in which humans are above the population they monitor and sometimes sacrifice.

HIV/AIDS has devastated families in rural Lesotho, leaving many children orphaned. Families have adapted to the increase in the number of orphans and HIV-positive children in ways that provide children with the best possible care. Though local ideas about kinship and care are firmly rooted in patrilineal social organization, in practice, maternal caregivers, often grandmothers, are increasingly caring for orphaned children. Negotiations between affinal kin capitalize on flexible kinship practices in order to legitimate new patterns of care, which have shifted towards a model that often favours matrilocal practices of care in the context of idealized patrilineality.

Early writings on male cults in the highlands of Papua New Guinea tended to stress the exclusion of women and the collective agency of men. Looking at a subset of these cults from the Western and Southern Highlands Provinces, centering on Female Spirit figures, the authors argue that in these cases the cults are better understood as expressions of a collaborative model, in which gendered cooperation, both in practice and in terms of ritual symbolism, is activated in order to produce fertility and wealth. Positive collaboration is involved as well as structural complementarity. The collaborative model is therefore suggested as an alternative to the model of "male exclusivity" in the analysis of certain cult practices in these parts of the New Guinea highlands region.

"This article considers ethnographic data collected among divorcing men and women in Britain and adopts a Maussian view of exchange in order to understand the cultural dimensions of divorce in more depth. I argue that divorcing men and women express discontinuities and continuities in their relationships by means of particular kinds of exchanges. What is of particular interest is the way that former husbands and wives place discrepant and conflicting constructions on the transfer of money and material goods between them and between themselves and their children. The article illustrates these points by examining the conflicts between fathers, mothers and their children over the emotional and economic significance of particular transactions."