After Lemba South Africans participated in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their ancient links to contemporary Jewish populations, American Jews began to visit the Lemba to connect with them on the basis of an assumed shared Judaism. Some Lemba people welcomed and endorsed these visits, but they also maintained their own ideas about the meaning of their “genetic Jewishness” and the terms of their new diasporic relationships, which often contradicted the understandings of visiting Jews. This article privileges the perspectives of Lemba South Africans, and the historical and ethnographic contexts through which Lemba genetic data emerged and circulated, to offer an alternative reading of the social and political significance of DNA. It poses the question: How do divergent genomic knowledges articulate with the politics of belonging and the pursuit of citizenship in South Africa and transnationally? I argue that DNA and diaspora converge to create new sites of political belonging, ones marked by precarious connections that balance on the production of knowledge and its refusal. I introduce the concept of genetic diaspora to theorize how these connections, marked by inequality, are tenuously forged through national, racial, and religious difference that is imagined to be the same. Genetic diaspora offers Lemba South Africans the possibility to produce and circulate their own new knowledge about Jewish history and genetic belonging. This article demonstrates that those implicated in genetic studies transform DNA into a resource that authorizes their own histories and politics of race and religion.

Curated and Introduced by Kristina Lyons, Juno Parreñas and Noah Tamarkin

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address past injustices. In this article, the author traces the South African political histories of one self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively experienced when the apartheid state did not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to address all past injustices, including the injustice of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known internationally for their participation in DNA tests that indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses, their racialization as black Jews has obscured their racialization as black South Africans: they are presented as seeking solely to become recognized as Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic group from the South African state consistently since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of South African multicultural democracy in addition to being part of the apartheid past. The author argues that the racialization of religion that positions the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughout 2017. It asks: What makes an anthropological inquiry timely, what sorts of relationalities command anthropological attention, and to what end? Noting our ongoing methodological commitment to long-term ethnography alongside increasingly important online forums for reaching broader publics and responding quickly to emerging issues, it expands the range of work surveyed to include some online-only short essays alongside the larger collection of traditionally published research articles. Characterized by empathic inquiry, frequently drawing on years of ethnographic and personal experience with the places, people, and other entities that we write about, and often attentive to histories at multiple scales, cultural anthropology of this moment, however published, grapples with dark times while it also offers ways of imagining other, better futures and ways of being in relation to others. Two thematic clusters organize this essay: the first considers temporality alongside mobility and sovereignty, and the second considers relationality alongside subjectivity and mediation. Together, all of these concerns-that are both of the moment and long standing-build a varied body of work that grapples with the interrelationalities that constitute power, place, and possibility. I argue that what makes an anthropological inquiry timely is the extent to which it is relationally informed and attuned to care for worlds that we inhabit and imagine, together. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, temporality, mobility, sovereignty, relationality, subjectivity, mediation] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa el trabajo producido en publicaciones de antropología cultural predominantemente estadounidenses durante 2017. Pregunta: ¿Qué hace la investigación antropológica oportuna, y qué tipos de relacionalidades comandan la atención antropológica, y con qué fin? Notando nuestro compromiso metodológico continuo con una etnografía de largo plazo junto a foros en línea cada vez más importantes para llegar a públicos más amplios y respondiendo rápidamente a cuestiones emergentes, expande el rango del trabajo evaluado para incluir algunos ensayos cortos sólo en línea junto a la mayor colección de artículos de investigación publicados tradicionalmente. Caracterizada por una investigación empática, frecuentemente extrayendo de años de experiencia etnográfica y personal con los lugares, la gente, y otras entidades sobre las que escribimos, y a menudo atentos a historias a escalas múltiples, la antropología cultural de este momento, independientemente de cómo sea publicada, lucha contra tiempos oscuros mientras ofrece maneras de imaginar otros, mejores futuros y formas de estar en relación con otros. Dos grupos temáticos organizan este ensayo: el primero considera temporalidad junto a movilidad y soberanía, y el segundo considera relacionalidad junto a subjetividad y mediación. Juntas, todas estas preocupaciones-que son tanto del momento como de larga d...

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