Asking how being 'international' relates to privilege, I analyse a role-play game, the Students' League of Nations, where pupils and teachers from select international schools simulate the UN General Assembly in Geneva. I document distinctive practices of selection and visions of excellence as talent, using Bourdieu's notion of 'institutional rite'. I combine insider ethnography and quantitative analyses of the host school with a historical account of its' elitism to bridge the gap between macro- and micro-analyses of 'everyday nationalism'. I show how this game draws a symbolic boundary between 'international' and 'local' high schools by separating students who are considered worthy of transgressing their national identity from all others.

In this article, I examine how scales are produced, stabilized, and challenged through communicative practices, and how these scales organize (since colonial times) the racial groups that form Santomean society. I argue that the historical distinctive status of the Forros and the prestigious status of the Portuguese language are influenced by different scaling practices that are intertwined and interrelated. I demonstrate that it is the Forros' imagined and historical proximity to whiteness that bestow them racial privilege, and that allows them to maintain their position of social and political power in the country. In other words, their power results from proximity to Whiteness.

Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethnography. In the following account, the authors present details of the design, development and application of 'team ethnography visual maps' and the collaborative reflexivity that took place within 'team ethnography data sessions' that were each embedded within a mixed methods study of frontline services located in six different National Health Service Trusts throughout England (UK). After a presentation of the ethnographic methods and analyses that occurred as part of team ethnography, they are then discussed in terms of their applied and academic value from a methodological perspective.

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the 'dangerous class' of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using 'communities' in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis á vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.

The intersection of race and the criminal justice system has been a longstanding topic of activism, public debate and research in the US context. In recent years, European countries have also seen a growing social and academic debate about the way racialized minorities are policed. Based on ethnographic research in Amsterdam, this article argues that in order to understand such racialized policing, we have to go beyond a narrow focus on the police itself, and instead examine the broader institutional landscape tasked with security. This institutional landscape is made up of penal and welfare actors who together enact what I call diffuse policing. Such diffuse policing envelops targeted persons and spaces in a dense web of surveillance, and disciplinary and reform interventions that are hard to escape or challenge. This article explores the cumulative effects of this dense security landscape, and argues that it produces significant inequalities among youths in Amsterdam.

Anthropologists are increasingly required to account for the data on which they base their interpretations and to make it available for public scrutiny and re-analysis. While this may seem straightforward (why not place our data in online repositories?), it is not. Ethnographic 'data' may consist of everything from verbatim transcripts ('hard data') to memories and impressions ('soft data'). Hard data can be archived and re-analysed; soft data cannot. The focus on hard 'objective' data contributes to the delegitimizing of the soft data that are essential for ethnographic understanding, and without which hard data cannot be properly interpreted. However, the credibility of ethnographic interpretation requires the possibility of verification. This could be achieved by obligatory, standardised forms of personal storage with the option for audit if required, and by being more explicit in publications about the nature and status of the data and the process of interpretation.

Events (remarkable, disruptive happenings) are important subjects of study for understanding processes of change. In this essay, I reflect upon the issue of what the ethnographic method has to offer for the analysis of this social phenomenon. To do so, I review three recently published ethnographic studies of events. My conclusion is that it is indeed a very useful method for understanding the feelings and ideas of people who are experiencing eventful situations, for instance around protests or natural disasters. However, using this method also brings about practical difficulties, such as the 'luck' that an event occurs at the ethnographic fieldwork site. Next, as transformative responses to events are not bound by the place or time of the happening, other methods (interviews, discourse analysis, surveys) that make it easier to follow them in varying locations and periods might be more suitable for getting a comprehensive picture of their meaning-making dynamics.

Ten years of participant-observation fieldwork and photography among a multi-ethnic social network of homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers in California reveal hierarchical interpersonal relations between African Americans, whites and Latinos despite the fact that they all share a physical addiction to heroin and live in indigent poverty in the same encampments. Focusing on tensions between blacks and whites, we develop the concept of 'ethnicized habitus' to understand how divisions drawn on the basis of skin color are enforced through everyday interaction to produce 'intimate apartheid' in the context of physical proximity and shared destitution. Specifically, we examine how two components of ethnic habitus are generated. One is a simple technique of the body, a preference for intravenous versus intramuscular or subcutaneous heroin injection. The second revolves around income-generation strategies and is more obviously related to external power constraints. Both these components fit into a larger constellation of ethnic distinction rooted in historically entrenched political, economic and ideological forces. An understanding of the generative forces of the ethnic dimensions of habitus allows us to recognize how macro-power relations produce intimate desires and ways of being that become inscribed on individual bodies and routinized in behavior. These distinctions are, for the most part, interpreted as natural attributes of genetics and culture by many people in the United States, justifying a racialized moral hierarchy.