Jaina Mendicant Paraphernalia Warehouses

Providing for small groups of mendicants roaming in the villages is relatively easy. However, the large entourages accompanying the ācāryas often pose challenges not only regarding the supply of food and drink but also items for daily use. These challenges are even more pronounced in major cities and at the pilgrimage centres of the mūrtipūjaka tradition. Monastic rules, which prohibit mendicants from requesting specific gifts or accepting specially produced items, further complicate the task of ensuring adequate provision. Additionally, from the perspective of householders, the spiraling cost of fulfilling these needs may become a concern. One solution was to permit the preparation of food for mendicants in general, who can visit dedicated places on their daily alms round. A similar approach was taken for providing access to sources of knowledge, such as manuscripts and books, which were made available through the creation of Jaina libraries either within upāśrayas or separately. Another key administrative innovation of recent decades, promoted by the mūrtipūjaka laity, is the creation of charities to fund central storehouses that supply essential paraphernalia free of charge for all (Śvetāmbara) Jaina mendicants. This report is about a new type of Jaina bhaṇḍāra – a storage facility or warehouse that is not used for commercial goods, or manuscripts, but for storing articles of daily use, utensils, clothes, etc., for Śvetāmbara mendicants. These institutions are relatively unknown and unexplored in academic scholarship

Engines of Rebellion: Bosozoku and the Global Language of Youth Subculture

How biker subcultures from Tokyo to Marseille reveal the global struggle over identity, conformity, and freedo

How to Confront No Ordinary Danger

This essay examines the debate over whether states can legitimately use emergency powers to address climate change. The author challenges Lazar and Wallace's arguments against climate authoritarianism, arguing that climate change constitutes a genuine emergency requiring urgent action. While rejecting both purely authoritarian approaches and the status quo of Western liberal democracy, the essay proposes a third way: empowering citizens through targeted activism and climate assemblies. This solution may paradoxically require both more democratic and more authoritarian elements. The author contends that current evidence does not support claims of democratic superiority in climate action, and suggests that radical but principled reform is necessary

GVCs meet robots: smiling, smirking or flattening? The case of the automotive value chain

The paper contributes to the fast-growing literature on the structural dynamics of digitalization with a focus on robotization, and its heterogeneous diffusion and impact along and within global value chains. Specifically, building on an innovative granular analysis of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) dataset, we provide new empirical evidence of the disproportional distribution of robotization across countries, sectors and along different stages and production functions of global value chains (GVCs). Moreover, with specific reference to the automotive sector, we identify some features that characterize industrial robots’ adoption across different applications and along different stages of the automotive value chain. Such characteristics are also assessed through a sectoral case study analysis based on primary data collection conducted in the automotive sector in South Africa

From online to offline: Getting ready for in-person fieldwork through social media ethnography

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork

Introduction to ‘Islamic politics and the imaginative: intangibility and critique’

This introduction examines the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying imaginative elements in Islamic politics while proposing new frameworks for understanding intangible realms in political formation. Moving beyond traditional approaches that either dismiss imagination as irrational or reduce Islamic politics to textual analysis, we argue for engaging with imagination as a critical interface between material and metaphysical domains. Drawing on recent anthropological scholarship on affect, dreams, and aspirations, alongside classical Islamic concepts like takhayyul, this special issue offers novel approaches to studying Islamic political formations. The collected papers demonstrate how imagination operates as both a realm of critique and a space for political becoming while challenging established disciplinary boundaries between history and anthropology. By engaging with diverse forms of knowledge production – from classical Islamic scholarship to contemporary political movements – this issue contributes to broader discussions about decolonizing academic knowledge while avoiding the trap of reifying new canons. Our intervention suggests ways to understand Islamic politics beyond Eurocentric preoccupations with liberalism and secularism while maintaining critical perspectives on power relations within Islamic traditions themselves

Competing visions of international order: responses to US power in a fracturing world

The ‘liberal international order’ that has been predominant, if often controversial, since 1945 is being challenged as never before. This reflects factors both long-standing and recent: the rise of China; the frustrations and ambitions of countries – including many in the Global South – that associate the US-led liberal international order with deep hypocrisy; inequality within liberal democracies that has given rise to populism; Russian revanchism; and perhaps above all, the US’s more nationalist outlook and disruptive foreign policy since Donald Trump took office for the second time in early 2025. This paper takes stock of these developments, examines the US’s changing role and ambitions as a global power, and explores how 11 other key states are adapting to, positioning themselves, or seeking to disrupt or even undermine the existing order in this more fractured world. The paper, based originally on research for the US National Intelligence Council but revised and updated in this public version, considers how adversaries of the US seek to exploit what they see as the US’s declining global power, or to promote alternative visions. It also examines the challenges for US allies such as France, Germany and Japan, which have long been pillars of cooperative multilateralism but need to develop new ways to protect their interests and project power. And it explores how rising or middle powers, from Brazil to Saudi Arabia to India, are pursuing visions of international order that include strategies of non-alignment, strategic autonomy, and selective or transactional cooperation with the current order