During the COVID-19 emergency, people around the world are debating concepts like physical distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. The ethical significance of proximity-that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (Strathern 2020)-is thus being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships. Through five case studies from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, contributors to this Colloquy shed light on what the hype of the pandemic often conceals: the forms of ethical reflection, reasoning, and conduct fashioned during the pandemic.

Citizens do not merely respond to states of emergency; in democratic societies, they help constitute them. This essay analyzes New Zealanders' engagements in ethical reasoning during the country's first COVID-19 lockdown. Specifically, I examine how we can understand a variety of public responses to emergency measures-including breaching regulations, threatening rule-breakers, sealing off neighborhoods, and recasting citizen-returnees as "strangers"-as negotiations of ethical proximities focused on keeping appropriately close that which is thought should be near, and keeping distanced that deemed best held afar.

When pathogens and their movement between people cannot be seen, we imagine them. That imagined menagerie--of infection then becomes associated with marginal others whose bodies and actions become popularly conflated with disease and its transmission. This essay explores how methods of imagining and managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia echoed historical scripts for policing borders and containing the bodies of outsiders deemed threats to the national body.

Anthropologists have used Michel Foucault's thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. Yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. The arrests, killings of unarmed Blacks by police, COVID-19 racial health inequities, and the January 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats Black bodies as expendable. By critiquing the facile overuse of biopolitics and biopower, this article also speaks to what COVID-19 uncovered within the academy.

In South Africa, lockdown and its excesses have opened up questions on the limits of an ethics of care, whose ethics are privileged, how care is delivered, and what care means. We show how an ethics of proxemics and its operationalization as distance highlight everyday inequalities and limit the provision of care. Constraints on physical distancing in line with public health measures intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus echo the controls enforced under apartheid, showing how inequality is both embodied and legally entrenched.

Through examining childbearing in California's Silicon Valley, this article describes how seeking "self-actualization" has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. This approach undermines distinctions between "technological" and "natural" approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce "self-knowledge" and enact new feminist ways of doing embodiment. Based on fieldwork conducted as a doula, this article describes new rituals, anxieties, and aspirations that draw from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that self-realization is enabled by a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design. In this community, the way reproduction comes to matter has less to do with realizing gendered expectations and kinship relations than with creative self-optimization. This approach facilitates women's self-determination, while simultaneously introducing new forms of pressure and advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about structural conditions and mutual accountability. [childbearing; birth; doula; United States; Silicon Valley; neoliberal subject; nature/culture; selfhood; rite of passage].

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a NIH-NHGRI-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled "Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research." At the heart of this research is one central exchange-blood samples donated for genetic research-that draws both the Indian community and a community of researchers into an encounter with bioethics. I consider the meanings that come to be associated with blood donation as it passes through various hands, agendas, and associated ethical filters on its way to the lab bench: how and why blood is solicited, how the giving and taking of blood is rationalized, how blood as material substance is alienated, processed, documented, and made available for the promised ends of basic science research. Examining corporeal substances and asking what sorts of gifts and problems these represent, I argue, sheds some light on two imbricated tensions expressed by a community of Indians, on the one hand, and of geneticists and basic science researchers, on the other hand: that gifts ought to be free (but are not), and that science ought to be pure (but is not). In this article, I explore how experiences of bioethics are variously shaped by the histories and habits of Indic giving, prior sample collection controversies, commitments to "good science" and the common "good of humanity," and negotiations of the sites where research findings circulate.

This essay examines inmate "crucifixion protests" in Ecuador's largest prison during 2003-04. It shows how the preventively incarcerated-of whom there are thousands-managed to effectively denounce their extralegal confinement by embodying the violence of the Christian crucifixion story. This form of protest, I argue, simultaneously clarified and obscured the multiple layers of sovereign power that pressed down on urban crime suspects, who found themselves persecuted and forsaken both outside and within the space of the prison. Police enacting zero-tolerance policies in urban neighborhoods are thus a key part of the penal state, as are the politically threatened family members of the indicted, the sensationalized local media, distrustful neighbors, prison guards, and incarcerated mafia. The essay shows how the politico-theological performance of self-crucifixion responded to these internested forms of sovereign violence, and were briefly effective. The inmates' cross intervention hence provides a window into the way sovereignty works in the Ecuadorean penal state, drawing out how incarceration trends and new urban security measures interlink, and produce an array of victims.

In this article, I explore the synergy and disjunctures of the consumer credit system and care for the mentally ill and addicted in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile. In Chile, the expansion of the credit system has had a double-edged effect on the poor. Although it produces perpetual indebtedness, it also is a resource amid unstable labor. Following an extended family over several years, this article examines how women take up credit through a wider field of domestic relations and institutions to care for kin with mental illness and addiction within the home. Such gestures of care enact a temporality of waiting, allowing different, but unpredictable, aspects of others to emerge. Through longitudinal ethnographic research with this family, I demonstrate both how possibility is actualized within the home as symptoms of illness and forms of domestic violence, and how a wider network of dependencies—from neighbors to lending institutions—shapes the temporality of relations within the home. Such a study of care in relation to the credit economy may offer other analytic perspectives on discourses of individualism, consumerism, and cost-effectiveness accompanying the expansion of consumer credit as they are absorbed into the everyday.

This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's “suicide capital” of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impulsively suicidal children. Experiences of accelerated time through consumption in “modern” Kerala parenting practice reflect ideas about the threats of globalization that are informed both by national economic shifts and by nostalgia for the state's communist and developmentalist histories, suggesting that late capitalism's time–space compression is not a universalist phenomenon so much as one that is unevenly experienced through regionally specific renderings of the past. I demonstrate how experts position the Malayali child as uniquely vulnerable to the fatal dangers of immediate gratification, and thus exhort parents to retemporalize children through didactic games built around the deferral of desires for everyday consumer items. Teaching children how to wait as a pleasurable and explicitly antisuicidal way of being reveals anxieties, contestations, and contradictions concerning what ought to constitute “quality” investment in children as temporal subjects of late capitalism. The article concludes by bringing efforts to save elite lives into conversation with suicide prevention among migrants to draw out the ways distinct vulnerabilities and conditions of precarity situate waiting subjects in radically different ways against the prospect of self-destruction.

This article focuses ethnographically on Americans and technologies of drinking water, as tokens of and vehicles for health, agency, and surprising kinds of community. Journalists and water scholars have argued that bottled water is a material concomitant of privatization and alienation in U.S. society. But, engaging Latour, this research shows that water technologies and the groups they assemble, are plural. Attention to everyday entwining of workplace lives with drinking fountains, single-serve bottles, and spring water coolers shows us several different quests, some individualized, some alienated, but some seeking health via public, collective care, acknowledgment of stakeholding, and community organizing. Focused on water practices on a college campus, in the roaring 1990s and increasingly sober 2000s in the context of earlier U.S. water histories of inclusion and exclusion, I draw on ethnographic research from the two years that led up to the recession and the presidential election of 2008. I argue for understanding of water value through attention to water use, focusing both on the social construction of water and the use of water for social construction.

This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so-called "urban villages"(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export-driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co-opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban-rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen.

Cuban-Kongo praise of the dead in Havana turns insistently around complex agglomerations of materials called "prendas,""ngangas," and "enquisos." This article addresses the ontological status of "prendas-ngangas-enquisos," which practitioners of Cuban-Kongo affliction practices care for as entities that determine the very possibility of their healing and harming craft. Cuban-Kongo societies of affliction, in Havana collectively referred to as "Palo," stake their claim to influence others in and through these entities. In this essay I seek to position the influence generated in prendas-ngangas-enquisos as a problem for Euro-American materialism, to be addressed not through symbolic or representational solutions but, rather, by refocusing the problem itself via alternate distributions of its epistemological, historical, and ethnographic elements. Contextualized within ethnographic description, I first propose that prendas-ngangas-enquisos do not conform to dialectical logic, and should thus be positioned conceptually as something other than "objects" or "fetishes." From there, I consider Creole turns on the term prenda and explore scholarly accounts of 19th-century Cuban slavery and manumission, which I place alongside what is known about pawn slavery among BaKongo people prior to and during the Atlantic slave trade. Having established a basic series of conceptual and historiographic coordinates, I then suggest ethnographically how prendas-ngangas-enquisos come to command others, thereby guaranteeing Cuban-Kongo healing and harming sovereignty in Cuba today.

The classical immunological paradigm is predicated on the body's ability to recognize and eliminate “nonself.” However, the “self–nonself” model has yet to facilitate any resolution of the field's major concerns, and may thus prove to be of limited use. Merely discarding it is no solution, as the juxtaposition of “self” and “nonself” persists in research, in clinical settings, and in everyday practice despite the best efforts of theoretical immunologists. Instead, the very conception of “selfhood” may prove to be key. Replacing immunology's prior and persistent “self” with less static concepts derived from non-Western contexts not only resolves immunology's famous paradoxes but also offers a new and more accurate model that allows immunology to reframe what may become an outmoded Enlightenment construct of “self.” In such a new paradigm, immunology's well-known system of protection and defense is replaced with a view in which nonself becomes less the body's enemy than its primary mechanism for the creative assimilation of difference. This incorporative model—in which the “immune system” functions more as a search engine than as an expeller of difference—both resolves outstanding paradoxes, and complies more accurately with contemporary knowledge and research practice.

Favored by neoliberal agrarian policies, the production of fresh crops for international markets has become a common strategy for economic development in Mexico and other Latin American countries. But as some scholars have argued, the global fresh produce industry in developing countries in which fresh crops are produced for consumer markets in affluent nations implies “virtual water flows,” the transfer of high volumes of water embedded in these crops across international borders. This article examines the local effects of the production of fresh produce in the San Quintín Valley in northwestern Mexico for markets in the United States. Although export agriculture has fostered economic growth and employment opportunities for indigenous farm laborers, it has also led to the overexploitation of underground finite water resources, and an alarming decline of the quantity and quality of water available for residents’ domestic use. I discuss how neoliberal water policies have further contributed to water inequalities along class and ethnic lines, the hardships settlers endure to secure access to water for their basic needs, and the political protests and social tensions water scarcity has triggered in the region. Although the production of fresh crops for international markets is promoted by organizations such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank as a model for economic development, I argue that it often produces water insecurity for the poorest, threatening the UN goal of ensuring access to clean water as a universal human right.

In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on “time” and with “pressure.” Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city's infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers' efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state's neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.