This article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users’ bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok’s features build an infrastructure for language, heritage, and cultural activism. We analyze YiddishToks as an instantiation of the ways TikTokers embody actual technolinguistic and ventriloquistic interconnections as well as bond with past generations. YiddishTokers interlace times and spaces and recontextualize Yiddish media history. TikTok’s algorithm participates in this reanimation of Yiddish’s past; it is a transparent, audible director that prompts the network off-stage. TikTok is an algorithmic network ventriloquism app that mediates between human and non-human voices.

Despite growing interest in community-level science literacy, most studies focus on communities of interest who come together through particular science, environmental or health-related goals. We examine a pre-existing community—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel—with a particular history and politics vis-à-vis science, technology, and medicine. First, we show how Haredi cosmologies and culture come together to critique science as an epistemology while engaging with science as a technology. Then, we demonstrate how community-based medical experts serve as both science-related knowledge mediators and gatekeepers. Whereas Haredi Jews are constantly critiqued for their low levels of individual secular and science education, these community-based webs of knowledge seemingly position Haredi individuals with knowledge that surpasses the average “secular” Israeli. This case study develops unique analytical tools in the growing field of community-level science literacy, while pushing forward conversations about self-ascribed experts, knowledge gatekeeping, and the socio-political contexts of group critiques of science.

Until recently, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel were mainly examined through the lens of the “isolated enclave model.” Yet the Haredi sector has undergone radical changes in a wide array of social and cultural spheres. Many of the traits that exemplified Israeli yeshiva fundamentalism at its inception, such as uncompromising dedication to Torah study, the exclusion of women from public life, sizeable families, male asceticism, and community-wide segregation, have all been called into question by community members and modified by grassroots forces. In this chapter, we offer an overview of contemporary Haredi Judaism while using three trends of religious revival – fundamentalism, charismatic manifestations and ritualization. Analytically, these trends can be identified globally, among many other religious groups. Like in other countries, Jewish men and women have reacted to monotheistic ideals of religiosity and produced a variety of new religious experiences that fuse paganism, shamanism, aspects of Buddhist spirituality with new-age spiritualties and Judaism. Demonstrating these trends in the Israeli case, we also build on feminist and critical studies to offer a more nuanced look at fundamentalism, charisma and group worship taking gender, race and inner-communal power struggles into account.

Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

This article examines the varying ways religious devotees utilize, negotiate, embrace, and reject religious authorities in their everyday lives. Ethnographically exploring the ways that Orthodox Jews share reproductive decisions with rabbinic authorities, I demonstrate how some sanctify rabbinic rulings, while others dismiss them, or continue to “shop around” until they find a rabbinic opinion that resonates with their personal desires. These negotiations of religious authority and ethical freedom are worked out across a biographical trajectory, opening new possibilities to explore how religious authority fluctuates and changes over the life course. I argue that analysis of engagement with rabbis without attention to the inner diversity of interpretations and practices perpetuates a hegemonic and overly harmonious picture of religious authority. Highlighting these variations, I show how the process of consultation was more significant than mere submission to religious rulings. Religious consultation, in itself, then constitutes a significant node for making an ethical Jewish life. Attending to these aspects of religious authority has great potential to further develop and contextualize the field of ethical freedom while complicating binary models of submission versus resistance. My approach demonstrates the need to broaden our anthropological tools to better understand the ways individuals share everyday decisions with mediators of authoritative knowledge.

This paper explores thumb-typing as a cultural technique stemming from the mutual development of typing interfaces and practices. Focusing on the work of the typing fingers, it examines how the assignment of thumbs to be the primary writing digits is an innovation that correlates—and in some respects causes—textual and social changes that are central to digital culture. It argues that thumb-typing embodies recursive relations between behavioral patterns, technological infrastructure, and textual creation. The analysis shows how the invention of the typewriter keyboard introduced the fingers to typing, and how developments of digital media refined the finger-work in interacting with the device, resulting in thumb-typing. The new functionality of the thumb as an executing rather than supporting finger, promotes a novel equivalency and interchangeability in finger employment to typing. This, I propose, problematizes traditional concepts of textuality, its performance, and authorship.

Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews with faith leaders in the UK (including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism), we examine the diverse ways religious groups reorient religious life during COVID-19. Analysing the shift to virtual and home-based worship, we show the creative ways religious communities altered their customs, rituals, and practices to fit a new virtual reality amidst rigid social distancing guidelines. This study offers a distinctive comparative perspective into religious creativity amidst acute social change, allowing us to showcase notable differences, especially in terms of the possibility to fully perform worship online. We found that whilst all faith communities faced the same challenge of ministering and supporting their communities online, some were able to deliver services and perform worship online but others, for theological reasons, could not offer communal prayer. These differences existed within each religion rather than across religious boundaries, representing intra-faith divergence at the same time as cross-faith convergence. This analysis allows us to go beyond common socio-religious categories of religion, while showcasing the diverse forms of religious life amidst COVID-19. This study also offers a diverse case study of the relationship between religions as well as between religion, state, and society amidst COVID-19.

South African writer Peter Abrahams’s literary mediation of the Harlem Renaissance is often seen as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa. Abrahams’s exilic trajectories have also been widely noted. Despite scholarly interest in Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism however, existing research has not sufficiently addressed the circulation of his work in the Soviet Union, and particularly that of The Path of Thunder (1948). One of the first works by a black South African to reach Soviet readers, the novel circulated on an unprecedented scale beginning with its initial Russian translation in 1949 and was steadily republished in multiple languages until the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. It inspired a film, an opera, several dramatic plays, as well as a ballet adaptation staged to great acclaim in leading Soviet venues. This 1958 adaptation on the part of librettist Yuri Slonimsky; Gara Garaev, a major Azerbaijani composer; and Konstantin Sergeev, an influential choreographer and dancer at the Kirov Ballet; stands at the center of our investigation. The importance of Soviet ballet to the pedagogical aspirations of “the Soviet cultural project” (Ezrahi, 2012, 3–4) renders the production a particularly engaging “site of contest” where processes of ideological appropriation attuned to Cold War geopolitics stand revealed as they augment, downplay, or sometimes fully erase the South African specificity of Peter Abrahams’ original narrative. Moreover, investigating the economy of representation employed in the adaptation along its various dimensions, textual, performative and musicological offers insights into contesting imaginaries of blackness operating in Soviet space.

One of the basic features facilitating communication on the Internet in a variety of languages is Unicode code-layout. It standardizes the representation of most of the world’s writing systems on digital media, thus enabling the process and transmission of information through such technologies. Unicode is a contemporary character code, and this paper traces its evolvement out of previous code-layouts, starting with Morse code in telegraphy. Focusing on the adaptations of character codes to Modern Hebrew, I show how representing languages in technology is intertwined with internal and transnational regional concerns, and argue that from its beginning character code has been a locus of struggle over power and sovereignty: first between colonial regimes and resistance movements, and then between global corporations and local agents.