There are editorial projects that publish texts. Others achieve something more difficult: building a place from which different pieces of research can recognise one another, be discussed and gain collective density. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral belongs to this second kind.

The journal’s wager, published by the Network of Anthropology Students of Ibero-America, is simple and far from minor. The research produced in undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programmes does not appear as an incomplete version of some future work, but as situated knowledge capable of intervening in present-day debates. The publication offers open access, blind peer review and an Ibero-American space for works of social and cultural anthropology written from diverse trajectories, languages and problems.

Visit Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral

That gesture matters. Much of academic life is organised by hierarchies that too easily separate what counts as consolidated knowledge from what is still interpreted as learning. Ensamblajes partly inverts that logic. It does not present training as a deficiency, but as a position from which less domesticated questions can be posed, local archives recovered, methods tried out and scales connected that disciplinary divisions tend to keep apart.

Volume 3, issue 1, published on 25 June 2026, makes that vocation clearly visible. The editorial note places the issue under the problem of borders, bodies and belonging. It does not propose a closed thematic monograph. Instead, it brings together a constellation of pieces of research that share the same distrust of hierarchies presented as natural.

The border appears here first of all as a question. Who may occupy a space. Which bodies must be covered. Which music is considered legitimate. Who keeps a place within communal memory. Which origin narratives become arguments for belonging. Which divisions persist even when a war has officially ended.

When taste also classifies

Cristian Pardines Gracia’s article on anti-reggaeton discourse raises a seemingly minor question that, read anthropologically, ceases to be so. When reggaeton is disparaged, is it only a musical form that is being judged?

His answer is clear. Judgements about musical taste also function as markers of social distinction. The problem is not confined to rhythms, lyrics or arrangements. What comes into play are the bodies that dance, the spaces in which that music circulates and the class positions with which it is associated. The rejection of reggaeton thus appears as a form of othering that can reproduce mechanisms of stigmatisation already familiar in the history of other genres, from the blues to flamenco.

Miriam Núñez Velázquez addresses another border inscribed on the body. Her research on the cobijada costume of Vejer de la Frontera follows the transformation of a garment historically linked to modesty and to the regulation of female visibility into an emblem of local identity.

The interest of the text lies in not resolving that transformation complacently. Heritagisation can turn a practice once tied to the control of women’s bodies into a symbol of collective pride, but it does not by itself remove its coercive dimensions. Memory, the tourist market, local institutions and the knowledge of those who made and wore the garment all intervene in that negotiation.

The cobijada is not merely a traditional object. It is a question about who may narrate heritage and which parts of the past end up turned into an agreeable image.

The city as a device of belonging

David Carmona Sánchez-Calderón shifts the debate on the commons in a particularly fertile direction. The common cannot be reduced to the administration of a shared resource. It also depends on the political construction of space.

The city is not a neutral stage. Timetables, fences, housing prices, by-laws, transport systems, surveillance, amenities and access points define who may dwell, circulate, gather and decide. Inequality becomes visible in those infrastructures that distinguish between protected, connected and well-supplied areas, and territories exposed to precarity, expulsion or abandonment.

Urban assembly spaces then appear as living infrastructures of the common. Not as ideal refuges or definitive solutions, but as places where practices of cooperation, care and shared decision-making are tried out under unequal material conditions. The interest of the article lies in recalling that a square, a social centre, an allotment or an assembly are never only places. They are assemblages of people, norms, objects, networks, permits, conflicts and everyday work.

Myths, deaths and borders that persist

Alba Medina García’s study of the Lahu, Wa and Han creation myths in Yunnan allows identity to be thought from another angle. Origin narratives do not appear as closed expressions of a community, but as archives of contact, circulation and re-signification among groups that have shared territories for centuries.

The common mythemes —the separation of sky and earth, divine duality or the creation of humankind— show traces of historical interaction. But that circulation does not erase the differences. The Wa myth of “Coming Out of the Cave”, for example, incorporates other groups into a shared narrative of origin while at the same time placing the Wa in a position of ethnic precedence.

The border does not disappear. It is rewritten within a shared history.

Dionisio Contreras Casado takes the question of belonging to the limit of death. His work on the ecclesiastical management of suicide in Sigüenza shows how exclusion could continue after life, through the separation of consecrated ground from “non-cemeteries”.

These spaces were not mere funerary peripheries. They materialised a moral hierarchy. The cemetery wall functioned as a border that distinguished between bodies worthy of communal memory and bodies subjected to ritual exclusion. The diocesan files further reveal how medical knowledge could become an ambiguous safe-conduct. The presumption of “mental disturbance” could allow ecclesiastical burial, though under restrictive conditions and without full ceremonial integration.

María Zoila Tapia González’s review of Jessie Barton Hronešová’s study of the ethno-national identities of young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina extends this reflection. There, borders do not necessarily present themselves as lines of war, but as everyday sedimentations in names, languages, religions, friendship networks and absences of inter-ethnic contact.

It is a useful warning. The most persistent borders are not always the most visible. They often become more effective when they come to form part of habits, expectations and frames of perception.

A journal for not accepting the given

The value of the issue does not reside solely in the diversity of its themes. It lies in the way it puts them into relation. A song, a garment, a city, a myth, a cemetery and a post-war society seem very different objects. Read together, they show that classifying is never an innocent operation.

To classify is to decide which body becomes visible, which space may be shared, which memory deserves to be preserved and which difference ends up turned into hierarchy.

For AIthropology, this is a particularly fertile lesson. Not because every anthropological piece of research needs to be turned into a direct reflection on artificial intelligence, but because anthropology offers indispensable questions for reading technical systems before assuming them to be inevitable.

Automated systems also classify. They order profiles, prioritise signals, distribute visibility, set access thresholds and turn certain behaviours into risks or priorities. But those operations do not arise from a technical vacuum. They inherit social categories, institutions, territorial inequalities and prior decisions about what should count as evidence.

Ensamblajes recalls something fundamental. No border should be accepted as a natural fact. Before asking what a technology can do, it is worth asking which forms of belonging, exclusion or recognition it is helping to produce.

Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, vol. 3, no. 1, June 2026. ISSN-e 3045-6622.

Sources

  • Editorial note. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 1–3.
  • Medina García, Alba. “Estructuras mitémicas en los mitos de creación chinos: cosmogonía, antropogonía e interacción interétnica”. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 4–15.
  • Contreras Casado, Dionisio. “Cuerpos al margen: antropología de la exclusión post-mortem y la gestión eclesiástica del suicidio en Sigüenza”. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 16–43.
  • Núñez Velázquez, Miriam. “Una mirada al pasado: el traje de cobijada”. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 44–60.
  • Carmona Sánchez-Calderón, David. “Repensar el común desde la noción de la construcción política del espacio”. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 61–81.
  • Pardines Gracia, Cristian. “Desafinados. Un perreo entre la antropología y el discurso antirreggaetonero”. Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 82–102.
  • Tapia González, María Zoila. Review of Jessie Barton Hronešová, Everyday Ethno-National Identities of Young People in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Peter Lang Verlag, 2012). Ensamblajes. Revista de Antropología Predoctoral, 3(1), 103–109.