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Curated Collections highlight previously published articles from our AnthroSource archives that speak to urgent issues in the present, offering insight into current events unfolding around the globe. From movements for racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty to the social implications of climate change, technological transformation, migration, and public health, these contributions demonstrate anthropology’s enduring relevance and responsibilities.
This collection, on elections, was put together at a time when democratic institutions around the world are under growing threat from disinformation, the concentration of corporate and political power, voter suppression, and more. The authors featured here draw on research from the United States to Brazil, India, West Papua, Northern Ireland, and Australia to show that elections are not only procedures for counting votes but social and cultural events through which people imagine citizenship, belonging, and the future. They examine how campaigns mobilize voters, how ballots can be manipulated or used tactically, and how electoral outcomes ripple through classrooms, coalfields, and questions of race and nation. By situating elections within broader systems of power and meaning, these articles challenge simplistic narratives about voting and offer critical perspectives on what democracy means to those who practice it.
Introduction: The 2016 Brexit Referendum and Trump Election
Jeanette Edwards, Angelique Haugerud, Shanti Parikh
Citizens United, Citizens Divided: Democracy and Economy in a Corporate Key
Carol J. Greenhouse
Pig-Feast Democracy: Direct Local Elections and the Making of a Plural Political Order in West Papua
Veronika Kusumaryati
Educational Anthropologists Respond to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Rupture, Continuity, and Resistance
Kysa Nygreen, Katie A. Lazdowski, Steve Bialostok
The Bolsonaro Election, Antiblackness, and Changing Race Relations in Brazil
Antonio José Bacelar da Silva, Erika Robb Larkins
Behind the Ballot: Democracy, Chicanery, and Electoral Technique in Modern India
Michael Collins
Tactical Democracy: Brexit and Voting in Northern Ireland
Neil Nory Kaplan-Kelly
Discarded Candidates: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere)
Tanya Jakimow
The Election
Petra Rethmann
“We’re Not Going to Be a Coal Superpower Anymore”: Political Discourse, Elections, and Everyday Economics in the Coalfields of Southwest Virginia
Julie Shepherd-Powell