Based on ethnographic work conducted between 2015 and 2022 at the periphery of Fortaleza, in Northeast Brazil, this article analyzes the work of community activists as a form of subversive care. Women activists, many of whom work for the local public clinics, as social workers with local NGOs, or as schoolteachers, challenge dominant narratives presented in the media and political discourses about their neighborhood as being poor and therefore violent. By establishing relationships of mutual trust with gang members and humanizing them, women activists "challenge the logic of fear" and maintain presence in areas controlled by the gangs to direct the economically vulnerable toward existing public resources. Activists' understanding of urban violence is informed by participation in collective action and living together with gang members and their families. These experiences lead activists to see urban violence as the symptom of systemic inequalities that require systemic changes.

While Cuba was in a COVID-19-induced lockdown, , women who wait in hours-long (lines) to purchase scarce goods to resell, emerged in online state media as "folk devils" responsible for the acute shortages of basic goods. Using an intersection lens, we combine fieldwork in lines and content analysis of online media to examine the creation and policing of the threat during the summer of 2020. were framed as immoral subjects, gendered and racialized, and often depicted as a virus that threatened the nation's health. The moral panic attempted to obscure class, race, and gender inequalities and structures that have made certain citizens vulnerable in the aftermath of successive waves of Cuban economic reforms. Understanding this moral panic allows us to appreciate the material scarcities and indignities to which poor Black women have been subjected, and widespread concerns about the state's failure to protect society's most vulnerable.

The resale of Brazilian fuel on the Venezuela-Brazil border is an emerging event that facilitates a renewed sociopolitical understanding of local survival strategies beyond notions of societal resilience and informality in times of crisis. This economic activity rather belongs to a mercurial way of life that occurs in these cross-border spaces where gold is the locus of a commercial chain that links various underground economies. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, in this article we show that the resale of fuel occurs with even greater virulence in times of multiple crises and closed borders, which has exacerbated by the current Covid-19 pandemic turning prevailing underground economies into "flammable economies." By this, we refer to an informal economy in times of crisis that is extremely volatile and contagious, whose effects proliferate fueled by the legal ambivalence that is becoming more extensive everyday.

How do revolutions form persons? Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana (2015-17), this article takes as its point of departure the trajectory of a middle-aged woman's involvement with state structures and institutions during the course of constructing the house in which she lives. Describing ethnographically the ways in which these state involvements intertwine with other areas of her life, I suggest that this woman's sense of having been "formed in the revolution" is owed partly to the way in which the revolutionary process penetrates (or "flows") deep into the minutiae of her life. Contrasting this manner of subjectivation with Che Guevara's conception of and the formation of a "New Man," I suggest that the immanence of this process of infrastructural penetration may enable us to articulate an alternative way of understanding how revolutionary subjects are formed. [Cuba, housing, infrastructure, revolution, state, subjectivity].

This article is an analysis of trade among the Trio (Suriname), and their relationship with objects and persons in their quest for manufactured goods. Based on data mostly collected in the Trio village of Tëpu in southern Suriname, it discusses trade from the point of view of Amerindian sociality, with regard to the nature of the interpersonal relations involved. I examine trade through the prism of an Amerindian understanding of personhood, the body and materiality, and show how these relationships tend to be fabricated over a lifetime, eventually becoming an integral and material part of the actors involved. This is manifested in the way Trio social space is constructed and inhabited as an extension of the body, and how objects acquired through trade come to elicit narratives of past exploits and travels to distant spheres of alterity. [Brazil, Guyana, indigenous people, social anthropology, Surinam].

This article compares migrants and adoptees of Peruvian origin residing in Europe by focusing on their respective movements out of and return to the sending country of Peru. First, it analyzes family-based reunifications by drawing on a framework from studies of adoption and kinship. Juxtaposing the experiences of adoptees with those of migrants reveals how migration, too, may be steeped in concerns about kin ties. Next, it analyzes returns of adult adoptees using a template modeled on migrant returns, focusing on the centrality of the notion of contribution. The article shows how migrants and adoptees contest the constraints of European nation-state definitions of kinship intended to limit migration. It is based on recent research with Peruvian migrants and adoptees in Spain, as well as longer-term research in Peru on migration and adoption.