1At a time of resurgent nationalisms, xenophobic and racist violence, and increasingly sophisticated propaganda around border securitisation and “remigration”, this issue of Anuac intervenes in contemporary debates on statecraft and statehood. It does so by interrogating how the boundaries of belonging and citizenship are actively produced, managed, and contested, and how certain bodies and knowledge systems are rendered legible or illegible within regimes of normativity and coloniality that govern contemporary social and political life and institutions.

2The thematic section Freaktions. Impolitic bodies as contemporary monsters: Trajectories, representation and the norm edited by Cristiana Panella and Isabella Clough Marinaro, offers an original and critical exploration of how exclusion, marginalisation, and invisibilisation are not exceptional outcomes of governance but constitutive effects of its ordinary functioning. Drawing on classical and contemporary figurations of freaks and monsters, the editors show how those who fall outside the contours of an imagined political community are increasingly framed as distortions of the “ideal” citizen: bodies and lives rendered incompatible with dominant conceptions of belonging, deservingness, and recognisability. In doing so, the section traces how imaginations and representations of monstrosity and abnormality implicitly continue to structure contemporary regimes of inclusion and exclusion, albeit in updated political and administrative forms.

3Across five ethnographic contributions, the thematic section examines how regimes of normativity produce, organise, and administer “impolitic bodies” across a range of institutional and geographical settings. Silvia Antinori and Giacomo Becatti focus on LGBTQI+ communities in Rome, showing how internal aesthetic and moral hierarchies reproduce wider social logics of exclusion. Their analysis introduces the concept of “dis-visibility” to describe shifting regimes of recognition and erasure that structure queer subjectivities, where visibility is always conditional, uneven, and politically charged. Marco Solimene examines the eviction of a Bosnian Roma settlement in Rome, tracing the longue durée processes of illegalisation that have historically structured Roma marginalisation in Italy. He highlights ambivalent forms of agency that emerge in everyday encounters with state authority, where compliance, negotiation, and resistance are often difficult to disentangle. Claudia Ledderucci analyses a (para)military welfare programme in French Polynesia, showing how disciplinary training regimes produce governed youth subjectivities while simultaneously opening constrained but meaningful spaces for autonomy and self-fashioning. Michela Buonvino, instead, examines Moroccan cultural policies through the institutionalisation of Amazigh festivals, showing how heritage performances simultaneously commodify cultural difference and reproduce hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and political power. Finally, Sara Marilungo turns to the Bosnia–Croatia border, where migration governance produces migrants as both victims and threats within a tightly regulated border regime. She shows how humanitarian and security logics intersect to generate forms of controlled precariousness, while undermining the possibility of collective political articulation.

4Taken together, these contributions reveal the extent to which normativity operates through multiple institutional logics – legal, medical, cultural, and disciplinary – while consistently generating unstable zones of inclusion and exclusion. They also show that “impolitic bodies” are not passive recipients of governance, but active sites where the contradictions of normative systems become visible, negotiated, and at times disrupted. These analytical threads are drawn together in Michael Herzfeld’s essay, which reflects on the conceptual coherence of the thematic section and situates its contributions within broader political and cultural anthropology debates. Pietro Vereni’s afterword, in turn, offers a critical reassessment of the “impolitic body”, highlighting both its analytical purchase and its potential limitations. He thus calls for a context-sensitive deployment of the concept, attentive to the uneven and locally-situated forms of agency, constraint, and refusal that characterise marginal lives.

5Beyond the thematic section, the issue includes three additional articles that extend its analytical reach into adjacent fields where labour, technoscience, and humanitarian practice reconfigure subjectivity under conditions of inequality and crisis. Although not formally part of the thematic section, these contributions resonate with its central concerns by examining how alternative regimes of value and practice emerge at the intersections of material production, collective action, and epistemic authority. Zelda Alice Franceschi examines the gendered consequences of mechanisation among Wichí craftswomen in Misión Nueva Pompeya (Argentine Chaco). Her ethnography shows how missionary interventions in the early twentieth century reconfigured weaving practices into forms of paid artisanal labour, while reinforcing their manual character as a marker of ethnic identity. The exclusion of Wichí women from access to machines has come to underpin their recognition as legitimate ethnic craftswomen within local and transnational circuits of production and exchange, reproducing at the same time the belief that women are not suited to using technologically advanced tools and “ethnic” artifacts are technologically simple to produce. Franceschi thus highlights the ambivalent ways in which technological absence can itself become a condition of social visibility and economic incorporation. Tamara Mykhaylyak turns to Ukrainian volunteer networks in Naples in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Through an ethnography of the procurement of medicines, she discusses how humanitarian logistics become embedded in broader practices of solidarity, care, and collective endurance. Medicines emerge not only as therapeutic objects but also as mediators of social and affective life, enabling forms of cohesion that mitigate experiences of displacement, loss, and uncertainty. Maria Sapignoli and Maui Hudson explore Indigenous engagements with artificial intelligence and data science, focusing on how technoscientific infrastructures are reworked through Indigenous epistemologies and political claims. Their analysis shows that Indigenous-led initiatives do not simply seek inclusion within dominant AI frameworks, but actively contest and reconfigure them, opening up alternative trajectories for algorithmic development grounded in relational, situated, and sovereign knowledge systems. In doing so, they point towards emerging “Indigenous algorithmic futures” that challenge the universality of dominant technological paradigms. The issue also includes four book reviews, engaging recent publications that extend and deepen ongoing anthropological debates on ecological crisis and environmental justices, urban and rural transformations, debts and financialization.

6With this issue, we also mark a transition within the Editorial collective. Following our farewell to Antonio Maria Pusceddu in the previous issue, we are pleased to welcome Letizia Bonanno, Carlo Capello, and Francesco Vacchiano. Their diverse disciplinary backgrounds, intellectual trajectories and ethnographic experience will contribute to expanding the journal’s scope and consolidating its international reach. As the collective adjusts to its renewed composition, we continue to reflect on how Anuac might further strengthen its role as a space for rigorous, open, and critically engaged anthropological scholarship.

7In the meantime, we remain committed to multilingual publication, to scholarship emerging from Italy and beyond, and to fostering contributions from early-career researchers alongside established scholars. At a time when academic production is increasingly shaped by pressures of standardisation and acceleration, we reaffirm our commitment to intellectual plurality, ethnographic depth, and conceptual experimentation. We also wish to acknowledge, with gratitude, the work of our associate editors and reviewers. It is thanks in no small part to their dedication that our journal is able to continue publishing, sustaining rigorous scholarly exchange, and keeping anthropology alive, vibrant, and open to renewal. In this sense, further developments are already in preparation, and we look forward to continuing this collective endeavour in the issues to come.