By centering attention on how students feel after casual sex, studies of the college social scene miss an extremely important phenomenon—namely, how hookups get started. This article argues that it is in the negotiation of contact during hookups that college students creatively navigate their sexual identity. Using a mixed methodology, this research reveals that the cell phone, as both an object of communication and consumption, is essential to the formation of self, and, as such, it provides the means by which men and women can play with gender boundaries. And yet, the male dominated fraternity system at college restricts the ability of women to realize full agency within the hookup scene.

In this article, I analyze patriarchy through the lens of emotional discourse in and beyond death rituals among Mountain Jews in northeastern Azerbaijan. I argue that the time‐bound nature of female lamentation and the recent development of a popular narrative conceptualizing this genre as the custom defining Mountain Jewish identity in the Caucasus ultimately work to disempower women, reaffirming gender roles through narratives of suffering. Even though they use lamentations to address grievances within a context of increased outward migration, Mountain Jewish women cannot easily escape the conservative force that sorrow plays in their daily and ritual lives. [Mountain Jews, Azerbaijan, death, feminist ethnography, emotion, women, mourning]

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In this article, I propose that anthropologists of Christianity broaden their understanding of emotion to include intense attachments to home and kin as central to cultivating faith. I use examples from my research with African Americans who continue to live on land purchased by their emancipated ancestors and attend a United Methodist church established by those same ancestors in rural Western Virginia. I suggest that theoretical attention to this worldly home, as well as to God, is key to understanding the process of belief. It opens up the possibility of seeing emotional connection as a catalyst for political awareness and change, and it also brings gender and generational relations into sharp focus. Ultimately, I argue that the maintenance of such African American religious and secular homeplaces works to challenge the legacies of racism in the rural South.

In this article I investigate ritual life at the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the largest and longest running Orthodox synagogue in the Russian capital. Unlike many Eastern European synagogues, this synagogue is a thriving prayer community due to its unique congregation of Russian, Georgian, Bukharan, Mountain, and visiting Western Jews. I focus on a fistfight that took place between an Israeli and a Georgian Jew during prayer. I detail how Russian and Georgian Jews interpreted the incident to be a result of their different ethnicities, Russian and Georgian respectively. The fight elucidates how ritual in post-Soviet society provides the means for the production of ethnicity and Jewish identity. Arguing for localism within Judaism's transnational ideology, I suggest that Jewish identity, like ritual, is performative and contextual. I also show how the shifting power relations in post-Soviet society have reshaped ethnicity, making state-endorsed market reform a reference point of ethnic differentiation.