A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues). Constitutional Court of South Africa, Johannesburg.
Photo by Laura McTighe. A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues). Constitutional Court of South Africa, Johannesburg.

In recent years, the concept of the otherwise has been tracking across anthropology to frame political potentialities that are emerging, often drawing on phenomenological and continental theoretical lineages. However, in other fields, especially those founded in social movements, such as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, postcolonial, queer, and gender studies, the otherwise has been understood to enjoin scholars to an enduring struggle for liberation. Within these fields, the otherwise summons the forms of life that have persisted despite constant and lethal surveillance; it brings forth the possibility for, even the necessity of, abolishing the current order and radically transforming our worlds. These liberatory commitments can (and already do) have palpable and challenging effects when smuggled into the space of ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, that is the point. The contributors to this collection are women, femmes, and nonbinary people; Black, Indigenous, people of color, and white accomplices. As junior scholars, we have aligned ourselves with emancipatory, decriminalizing, life-affirming social projects that have unapologetically transformative demands. For the last four years, we have been asking one another and our co-thinkers on the ground: What kind of anthropology can contribute to this deep and enduring practice of otherwise world building? Together, we call for a move from the anthropological study of the otherwise to an Otherwise Anthropology.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: An Otherwise Anthropology

Introduction: An Otherwise Anthropology

The otherwise in all its plentitude vibrates afar off and near, here but also, and, there. —Ashon T. Crawley, “Stayed | Freedom | Hallelujah” In recent years, t... More

Unremarkable Stakes

Unremarkable Stakes

Anthropologists working to look beyond the grim circumstances of our present have attuned their ethnographic sense to the ways people, often marginalized in var... More

Insurgent Cartography

Insurgent Cartography

Where is the otherwise? And how do we get there? In 2015, my comrades at Women With A Vision (WWAV) and I affirmed: “We believe in the revolutionary things that... More

Framing the Otherwise Underground

Framing the Otherwise Underground

There exists an otherwise underground. It is a space in which, through exchanges of performance, praise, and validation, Black and Brown youth dancers come up a... More

Together in the Flesh

Together in the Flesh

Otherwise names the subjectivity in the commons, an asubjectivity that is not about the enclosed self but the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism. —... More

The Way In Is through the Breath

The Way In Is through the Breath

There are many ways of knowing and understanding our world. Otherwise anthropology calls for us to reposition ourselves. In this repositioning, we realize there... More

To Let Oneself Be Moved

To Let Oneself Be Moved

What does the otherwise sound like? What flights of the imagination resonate in and through sound? How do we capture the political significance of aesthetic exp... More

Of Other Times

Of Other Times

We were all together in a past life, doing this work. —Shi... More

Solidarity-as-Debt: Fugitive Publics and the Ethics of Multiracial Coalition

Solidarity-as-Debt: Fugitive Publics and the Ethics of Multiracial Coalition

Over the past few years, we have been engaged in a messy collaborative process, theorizing what we have been calling “thick solidarity,” a mode of cross-racial ... More