As complex institutions extend into and govern greater spheres of social life, ethnographers
contend with policy in an ever-widening range of fieldsites. This review examines …

Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen
as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and …

Western history of thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought. Yet
people often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use …

Following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 2011 many concerned
citizens—particularly mothers—were unconvinced by the Japanese government's …

The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise
intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the …

The study of ignorance, or agnotology, has many similarities with studies of absence. This
paper outlines a framework for agnotology which is shaped by interdisciplinary studies of …

In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages
in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and …

An exploration of what we can know about what we don't know: why ignorance is more than
simply a lack of knowledge. Ignorance is trending. Politicians boast,“I'm not a scientist.” …

This book opens the discussion of what anthropologists do before they write their texts: they
learn to engage with other people's cultural ecologies. In the wake of the new materialism …

The introduction to this special issue starts with a brief thematisation of the key theoretical
interventions in the anthropology of waste in order to situate our own contribution. We follow …