Based on a study of more than twenty thousand reports on drug experiences from the online drug education portal Erowid, this article argues that the integration of ethnographic methods with computational methods and digital data analysis, including so-called big data, is not only possible but highly rewarding. The analysis of ‘natively’ digital data from sites like Facebook, message boards, and web archives can offer glimpses into worlds of practice and meaning, introduce anthropologists to user-based semantics, provide greater context, help to re-evaluate hypotheses, facilitate access to difficult fields, and point to new research questions. This case study generated important insights into the social and political entanglements of drug consumption, drug phenomenology, and harm reduction. We argue here that deep ethnographic knowledge, what we term ‘field groundedness’, is indispensable for thoroughly making sense of the resulting visualizations, and we advocate for seeing ethnography and digital data analysis in a symbiotic relationship.

This article discusses the Mauritian offshore islet and nature reserve Ile aux Aigrettes as an example of how the tension between isolation and connectivity of small islands plays out in the context of nature conservation. Combining approaches from island studies, anthropology, and geography, and based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the article enquires into how 'pristine' nature on Ile aux Aigrettes is produced. It shows how the selective mobility of humans, animals, and plants is part and parcel in producing a seemingly isolated island, e.g. in the case of visiting scientists, species translocation, and invasive species. This shows how the production of the isolated 'pristine' island is dependent on global connections and flows. Isolation and connectivity of islands, I argue here, depend on each other, and are significantly co-constituted by nonhuman mobilities. Nature conservation on Ile aux Aigrettes will be looked at as a reference towards an ideal past or a utopian future, protected as signifiers for a world in socio-ecological balance.

Based on an ethnographic field study in Cologne, this article discusses the connection between memory practices and emotion ideologies in Holocaust education, using Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies. Moral goals, political demands, and educators’ care for their students lead to tensions in the education process. Two case studies illustrate how educators and learners express different, often contradictory concepts of emotion. In these studies, emotions are selectively opposed to rationality. In some contexts, emotions are considered inferior to facts and obstacles to the learning process; in others, they are superior to facts because they can communicate moral messages reliably.

The Holocaust, a significant moral principle for contemporary Germany, is embedded in a politically and emotionally charged discourse of remembering and forgetting. German politicians and young German adults often perceive the Holocaust as a threat associated with guilt, and call it Totschlag‐Argument, killer‐phrase, or Keule, bludgeon. This paper analyses how the Holocaust is endowed with agency, and how demands to control its powers are aligned with this. Some young German adults used this narrative practice to position themselves in the German memory discourse, while others criticised it. This paper argues that agency attribution contributes to the mechanisms of forgetting by reducing the complexities of social and historical entanglements.

Based on an ethnographic field study in a museum and an evening high school in Cologne, this paper discusses experiences of young German adults in everyday encounters with the Holocaust, which are oft en accompanied by feelings of discomfort. Considering the Holocaust as an uncanny, strange matter contributes to understanding that distance and proximity are key factors in creating uncomfortable encounters. Distance from the Holocaust reduces discomfort, but where distance cannot be created, other strategies have to be put to work. This article underlines the significance of experience in an individual’s personal relation to the past for gaining an improved understanding of Holocaust memorial culture in Germany.