Note from the Editors Anthropology “Otherwise” and Ways of Coping with Difficult Times Note de la rédaction L’anthropologie « autrement » et les moyens de faire face aux moments difficiles

Times are somber as we write these Notes from the Editors and reflect on the world around us, a period marked by the gravity of the question of what constitutes sufficient social and political action. Is the Pope’s apology to the Métis, Inuit, and First Nations delegation in the Vatican adequate for meaningful reconciliation? What of the democratic world’s role when the second unthinkable month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine takes its toll on Ukraine citizenry? Caribbean island nations demand the end of the monarchy amidst the surreal pageantry of the young royals’ appearances in Jamaica, Belize, and the Bahamas. Residents in rural BC are expected to brace themselves for the coming summer’s wildfires when their communities have not yet been rebuilt from last year’s floods and fires. What constitutes the right action when the “sixth wave” of the COVID19 pandemic is rolling across provinces in Canada in the context of governments curtailing public health regulations? These are all areas where an anthropology of possibility and hope, an anthropology done differently that might generate and be part of a collaborative “otherwise” are likely to spring up—during times that otherwise seem over-determined by large, abstract forces such as war, pandemics, climate disasters, financial crises, monarchy. In this bleak time, then, we are encouraged by the anthropologists whose work and writing in this issue offer such thoughtful and nuanced ways forward. We begin this issue with the Thematic Section “Otherwise: Ethnography, Form and Change,” guest-edited by Petra Rethmann. Together, the four papers address the overarching question of how ethnographic writing can utilize form to engage in politically-oriented anthropology to “make palpable, relate, or describe” experiences that are otherwise challenging (Rethmann, this issue). More specifically, in different ways, the articles show both the ethnographic and the real-life possibilities for change that might arise when the aesthetic, affective, and political are entangled rather than kept separate. A protest photograph, workers’ solidarity graphics, and a political art exhibit are the images from which each anthropologist brings forth different writing forms intended to move, disrupt, and affect readers, and thereby appeal for political action of some kind. Tomov’s piece on the affective forces of a photograph taken by Bulgarian photographer Stefanov during the 2013 mass protests in Sofia, Bulgaria, is eerily germane. For Tomov, the viral photo of “Dessi and Ivan,” protester and policeman respectively, an instant of tactile and proximate “humanity” amidst violent chaos, invoked multiple imaginations and possibilities, including a sense of hope and transformation, as it circulated across myriad terrains. Through their discussion of the multiple uses of photography in the health domain in Brazil, Rougeon and colleagues make visible the presence of marginalized and vulnerable people. In discussing recent experiments with photography involving research action with young Black people from Salvador, the authors show that considering a more sensible use of photography can lead to other ways of imagining and transforming the role of research in anthropology. Gilbert and Kurtovic’s piece demonstrates the possibilities for a different kind of political anthropology through a “thickly” collaborative graphic ethnography of the unprecedented victory of Bosnian workers in keeping a soap factory open in a post-socialist era. Against an extractive mode of anthropology that extracts data and never returns it to Bosnia, Gilbert and Kurtovic’s multimodal scholarship instead strategically advances the political struggles of their Bosnian interlocutors, using historically-significant sequential art to help them do anthropology differently. Rethmann’s article centers on the chto delat collective’s monuments in Mexico City to ask how such art might rouse and galvanize political action of the left rather than keep it buried in a mournful past of failed …