Repairpdf

Introduction

In recent years, ‘repair’ has emerged as a resonant and capacious concept across anthropology and adjacent disciplines. From infrastructure and technology to environmental recovery, post-conflict justice, and emotional healing, repair has become a powerful frame for how people intervene in things, relations, histories, and societies. On a more general level, the notion of repair allows us to understand how people live in—and live with—brokenness. Studying repair invites us to ask: What happens after things break? Who does the work of mending, who feels entitled or obliged to do so, and who does it with what claims, hopes, or disillusionments? It also urges us to think more critically: What exactly is being ‘repaired’, and what remains unrepaired or irreparable?

The contemporary prominence of repair as an analytic framework mirrors a historical moment marked by compounding crises. Infrastructures buckle under the weight of climate disasters, political violence leaves lingering social wounds, and technological systems age into obsolescence as quickly as they are introduced. In these contexts, repair is increasingly framed not only as a material practice but also as a moral and political imperative—an act of consideration, responsibility, care, and response (Drotbohm 2022). Whether in the hands of informal mechanics in Nigeria (Larkin 2008), cell phone repair shops in Washington (Bell et al. 2018), genocide suspects and their neighbours in Rwanda (Doughty 2015), environmental commissions formed in the wake of dam collapses in Brazil (Zhouri et al. 2017), or displaced Syrian families seeking to keep their relationships amid forced separation (Shapiro and Montgomery 2020), repair emerges as a site where technological improvisation, political negotiation, ecological response, and affective labour converge.

Taken together, these cases illustrate that repair is not a universal remedy, but a situated, often fraught process. Environmental recovery, for example after a dam collapse, is shaped by contested narratives of responsibility and unequal access to compensation. Social repair after conflict, as in Rwanda, may be ritualised or state-driven, but remains marked by ambivalence regarding the actual possibility of repair. Technological repair, whether in phone shops in Washington or roadside workshops in Lagos, often involves improvisation under precarious and unquestioned labour conditions. Affective repair, such as consoling people following displacement or loss, may remain partial or merely symbolic. These examples point to the diversity of repair’s domains—technological, political, environmental, affective—as well as to the unequal conditions under which repair becomes necessary, possible, or denied. Amid a growing conceptual enthusiasm, a set of critical questions has begun to surface: What does it mean to take repair seriously not just as a practice, but as an anthropological object of study? What assumptions, values, and temporal logics underlie the call to repair? What is at stake—socially, ethically, politically—in celebrating repair as a response to systemic failure?

This entry draws on ethnographic and theoretical literatures across multiple domains, to foreground the ambivalence and incompleteness of repair. Repair may stabilise systems, whereby it may also perpetuate them. It may be caring or coercive, generative or extractive. Its temporality may be rushed or slow, one-off or continuous, enabling or disabling. While repair has become a flexible and evocative concept, it gains much of its analytical force through grounded ethnographic attention to the specific domains in which it appears. After situating repair in its conceptual and disciplinary genealogies, this entry explores four such domains where the anthropology of repair has produced insightful—and sometimes ambivalent—perspectives: Technological and infrastructural; social and political; environmental and ecological; affective and relational. Each domain offers different understandings of what is broken, who is responsible for fixing it, and what it means to ‘repair’ in the first place. Finally, the temporal politics of repair will be addressed, highlighting how institutional responses often impose short timelines that obscure the enduring and systemic nature of many instabilities.

Situating repair: Conceptual and disciplinary genealogies

In anthropological terms, repair occupies a middle ground between breakdown and renewal, a series of acts that both acknowledge damage and assert the possibility of continuity. Repair tends to be reactive and targeted at specific disruptions. Thereby it differs from its proxemic concepts, such as ‘maintenance’, which sustains before failure; ‘reparation’, which prioritises financial losses and moral injustices; ‘restoration’, which seeks fidelity to an original state; and ‘renovation’, which pursues improvement beyond mere return. Repair is also unlike ‘resilience’, which emphasises adaptive endurance and is often abstracted from the material and political labour of recovery. Instead, repair highlights the situated practices and uneven temporalities through which what is considered broken is reassembled. While ‘care’ emphasises ongoing interdependence, repair becomes salient at moments of rupture—when systems or relations fail and must be reconstituted.

As a capacious diagnostic of the political, repair also sits alongside concepts such as ‘refusal’, ‘resistance’, and ‘recovery’, each of which marks different orientations toward harm and its aftermath. Refusal denotes the withholding of engagement, often as a sovereign stance against imposed orders of repair; resistance signals oppositional action that may itself be reparative; and recovery implies a process of healing adaptation. While not synonymous at all, this array of concepts forms a critical constellation through which repair can be understood—not only as mending, but as negotiating the terms under which the thing, the relation, or life itself is sustained, reconfigured, transformed, or withheld. In its temporal orientation, repair typically leads toward the near past and immediate present, while its implications often project into a desired future, resisting disposability and asserting the value of endurance.

The intellectual lineage of ‘repair’ as an analytic concept in anthropology is both long and diverse. While the term itself has only recently gained widespread traction, many of the underlying concerns—about breakdown, maintenance, continuity, and survival—have long shaped anthropological inquiry. Philosophically, one key precursor to the anthropology of repair is the phenomenology of tools and brokenness. In Being and time, Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1996) famously distinguished between tools that are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and almost invisible given that they function normally, and those that become ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden) when they break. It is precisely when tools fail to function that their existence and meaning becomes apparent along with the world of relations in which they are embedded. This idea of breakdown as revelatory has shaped anthropological studies of technology and infrastructure, though Heidegger’s focus on ontological disclosure contrasts with today’s interest in repair’s social and political stakes.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) literatures have also long examined repair, often implicitly, by highlighting how infrastructural breakdown renders social relations visible. Usually, infrastructure is made invisible to us. While buildings, roads, and electrical grids function, we rarely think about the complicated interplay of building standards, materials, and technological systems that make them work. Yet when they cease to function, their material and social complexities come to the fore (Star and Bowker 1999). Such moments of breakdown expose how the ‘politics of repair’ operate unevenly across scales and settings. For example, major power outages have long been considered a fact of life in many cities in the Global South. In the Global North, on the other hand, they may constitute formal states of emergency, and lead to intense efforts by citizens, firms, and political authorities to minimise their scope and frequency (Graham and Thrift 2007).

Likewise, feminist work on care ethics can be seen as a precursor to repair (De la Bellacasa 2017). Care ethics thinks of care as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40). It emphasises the political and ethical labour of repairing worlds, especially under conditions of precarity. In many settings, this work falls on the shoulders of women who are expected to maintain and repair their surroundings, regardless of how little they may have to work with. At the same time, scholars have challenged techno-optimistic and progressivist theories of innovation and modernisation. For example, Steven J. Jackson thinks of repair as ‘subtle acts of care’ (2014, 222) emphasising that repair is worthy of our wonder and admiration, even if it all too often remains in the background of social life and technological progress. Seen this way, focusing on repair points to histories of inequality, constant decay, and improvisation that mark our socio-technical lives (Jackson 2014).

Anthropology, for its part, has long been concerned with how people make life possible amid constraint—through practices of bricolage, maintenance, and social reproduction. It developed the notion of the bricoleur, for instance, a person who fixes things with whatever means are available. This idea highlights the creative reassembly of available materials to make meaning or ensure the functioning of people’s private and social lives (Lévi-Strauss 1962). Unlike the engineer or scientist, who approaches the world through abstract, universal principles, the bricoleur works with what is at hand—repurposing found materials, ideas, or symbols to solve problems in creative, contingent ways. This concept introduces a key epistemological orientation: One that values improvisation, relationality, and situated knowledge over linear causality or formal systems. At the same time, bricolage as a form of making is not necessarily about imposing form on inert matter, but about adapting to the existing materials' affordances and tendencies (Ingold 2013). Repair may thus be seen as part of an ongoing flow of making, where things are continually adjusted, mended, and re-formed in relation to changing contexts, rather than being fixed once and for all.

Earlier still, feminist anthropologists contributed to a broader understanding of repair, beyond its physical or technical aspects. They thought of it as a social, cultural, and relational process—often linked to memory, narrative, caregiving, and the sustenance of social worlds. In Barbara Myerhoff’s Number our days (1978), for instance, elderly Jewish immigrants in California use religious practices, storytelling, and everyday acts to navigate bodily decline and social invisibility. Through shared rituals and mutual support, they creatively repair fraying identities and relationships, maneuvering within uncertain social and institutional landscapes. In comparable ways, Annette Weiner’s (1992) study of wealth creation in the Trobriand Islands during the second half of the twentieth century shows that women throughout the South Pacific often created and cared for people’s most prized possessions. Historically, women kept and repaired valuable kinds of cloth that affirmed the strength of their families, distinguished their families from others, and ensured some permanence in a world marked by change, loss, and decay. The examples mentioned so far show that the idea of repair spans across multiple overlapping traditions and intellectual lineages.

What distinguishes the current moment, the ‘reparative conjuncture’ or ‘Age of Repair’ (Lewis 2024), is a renewed, explicit focus on repair as a global condition—a response to overlapping crises that demand both analytical attention and political urgency. Anthropologists are turning to repair not just as an empirical object but as a conceptual lens through which to view systemic breakdowns: Ecological degradation, infrastructural collapse, postcolonial violence, and technological dispossession. This extended focus reflects what might be called a post-normal condition, in which the contemporary form of damage is no longer exceptional but ambient—a permanent backdrop against which everyday life unfolds. In such a context, repair becomes a critical keyword for understanding not only how things are fixed, but how social life persists through various acts of making-do, holding together, and moving on.

In sum, the anthropology of repair draws from—and contributes to—a wide range of intellectual traditions. It challenges us to move beyond heroic accounts of rupture and revolution, and to reckon instead with the more subtle, persistent, and ambivalent work of maintenance, mending, and care. The next sections take this lineage forward by exploring how repair plays out across different domains of social life, and how reparative practice invites critical reflection on temporality, politics, and the ethics of trying to fix what has been broken.

Technological and infrastructural repair

Bridges, mobile phones, elevators—technologies break down, sometimes spectacularly but more often in mundane and piecemeal ways. The anthropology of infrastructure has long noted that failure, rather than being an exception, is a constitutive part of technological life. Repair, as an ‘activity that aims to restore order retrospectively’ (Schabacher 2021, 68) in this context becomes a social practice that holds an infrastructural or technological system together, often barely, and through informal or improvised means. Multiple ethnographies of repair work have accompanied the practical reasoning of mechanics, tinkerers, technicians, caretakers, fixers, and users, who reveal their procedural knowledge and technical inquiries in unfolding situations. For instance, when doctors and nurses are confronted with the non-functioning of a certain tool in their daily routine work, they tend to bypass high-standard functionalities and solve their material troubles in pragmatic ways (Sormani, Bovet and Strebel 2019, Schubert 2019).

Mundane and practical as they may appear, these work situations should not be understood as apolitical (Martínez 2019). Technological and infrastructural repair often takes place in a political setting marked by particular understandings of material provision and control (Henke 2019, 266). This complexity provides key moments for renegotiating power. For instance, the (non-)functioning of elevators in post-Soviet Georgia and their repetitive repair can be understood as a ‘marker of transition from socialism to the brave new world of market economics’ (Khalvashi 2019, 93), as the elevator repair in aging apartment blocks becomes a terrain of civic engagement and contestation. Residents organise collectively to fix elevators abandoned by the state, but the act of repair also reanimates memories of socialist-era infrastructures and their uneven collapse. Repair, in this case, is a marker of political change, constituting a form of temporal stitching—holding together the ruins of past regimes with the threads of uncertain futures.

Similarly, an examination of motorcycle repair shops in Romania reveals that the work of mechanics was highly influenced by the technical conditions of each historical phase. In the 1970s and 80s, for instance, when motors were simple and spare parts lacking, the division between mechanics and bikers got blurred, with everybody contributing to the gradual perception of failure and contributing to the assembling of bikes. When the political conditions for technical innovation changed, so did the collectives coming together through repair practices (Jderu 2023). In this sense, a repair shop is not only a place of technical work, but of sociality, gender performance, and aesthetic judgment.

A third example is found in Mexico City’s hydraulic infrastructure, where water network workers continuously need to adapt to political and economic conditions, such as structural austerity. They react to the absence of appropriate materials through ‘patching’, i.e. repurposing discarded pieces of materials and tools. This ‘patchwork’ (De Coss-Corzo 2021) entails speculative and anticipatory thinking, constantly responding to the unplanned yet certainly unavoidable. In all these contexts, repair is improvisational and incremental, that is, ‘broken-world thinking’, understood as the act of taking erosion and decay as the starting point for thinking about what is normal (Jackson 2014).

While the ‘craft of repair’ is often celebrated as adaptive and innovative, it can also reflect a ‘commodity fetishism’, or a sense that the object that needs to be repaired does not require any labour to exist. This is true for phone repair, for example, as part of the repair process is often concealed in order to support the customers’ disavowal of the phone’s material existence (Bell et al. 2018). Thereby repair responds to a conservative desire to preserve the present—or to restore a perceived sense of wholeness associated with certain commodities, as much as home, nation, and identity. Seen in this light, the choice to repair an object, rather than consider it as waste and replace it (Reno 2015), may also express an attachment to continuity, stability, or inherited value. Such attachments often carry political weight, distinguishing generational or ideological commitments through practices of preservation (Errázuriz 2019). In some cases, repair reflects a valuation of preciousness or luxury, as seen in the meticulous restoration of high-status objects like Swiss watches. Here, repair becomes less about necessity and more about curating social continuity, such as when people have watches repaired that have been passed down to them from previous generations of family members. In these instances, the repair of a particularly precious watch can be perceived as a material politics of care, national memory, and generational belonging (Munz 2019). Technological repair thereby renders kin relations visible, in that it involves considerations and decisions to invest care, material, and ideas into the process of fixing.

Of course, informal repair economies also thrive in conditions of infrastructural breakdown or decay. In Lagos, for instance, technicians repair radios and televisions using a makeshift of local and imported parts, often with no access to manuals or original tools (Larkin 2008). The result is not a restored original, but a reconfigured object—‘good enough’ to work, if only temporarily. In an era of environmental and economic crises, these informal practices of reuse, recycle, and repair can be understood as part of a ‘circular economy’ that revalues consumer alternatives situated in larger political and economic structures of capitalist accumulation and abandonment (Isenhour and Reno 2019). All in all, these practices challenge dominant assumptions about repair as conservation and restoration to an ideal state; instead, they underscore a logic of adaptation and survival in the face of systemic neglect.

Social and political repair

Repair is also invoked in the realm of post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice. Here, the stakes are particularly high, as repair is aimed at damaged social fabrics, hurt subjectivities, and fractured polities. Unlike mechanical repairs, social and political repair is rarely complete or unambiguous. It is fraught with asymmetries of power, divergent memories, and unresolved grievances. Black, Indigenous, and queer scholars in particular have critically examined how states and international institutions deploy repair logics to frame reconciliation efforts, particularly as there remain significant deficiencies in delivering reparations on the ground to those affected (Lewis 2024). Consider, for example, the situation in post-apartheid South Africa, where the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has long been a touchstone for discussions of political transition. Here, the verbalisation of painful memory and its public acknowledgement in speech were assumed to be liberatory and reconciling. However, those affected by a painful past can chose other modes of engagement for articulating suffering. While the TRC offered a space for public testimony and moral recognition, anthropologists have noted that many survivors felt that harm was acknowledged but not healed, especially when only certain types of violence and only certain types of victims were acknowledged and hence, many of those affected, women in particular, chose to abstain from conventional witnessing practices (Ross 2003). Something comparable was observed in East Timor, where politics of transitional justice are based on assumptions about the liberatory power of speech. However, those seeking to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation often refrained from participating in these public attempts to repair the past and rather continue in mundane practices to restore meaningful social relations. In this sense, silences can function as a pragmatic tactic that supports individual and relational forms of reconciliation (Kent 2016).

Certainly, political repair need not be driven by state actors ‘from above’. Community-based initiatives often generate alternative forms of reconciliation and coexistence that operate beyond the frameworks of formal transitional justice. In post-conflicts settings like Bosnia or Rwanda, for instance, building consensus was impossible due to the heterogeneity of experiences, and criminal trials reached their limits early (Fletcher and Weinstein 2002, Doughty 2015). Examining how victims and civil societies deal with suffering in the absence of or delay in reparations, anthropologists have accompanied informal measures of ‘self-repair’, that is, of finding one’s own way of living with the past (Gilmore and Moffett 2021). In the Peruvian Andes, since the 1970s collectives affected by the violence of the Guerilla organisation Sendero Luminoso developed local forms of reconciliation through communal labour, ritual practices, and everyday acts of coexistence among former neighbors and kin (Theidon 2013). Here, repair is not about returning to a status quo but about creating conditions for a shared future despite unresolved histories of harm.

At the same time, the assumption that the past can be ‘settled’—or repaired—may itself be problematic, particularly in settings where continuous violence characterises everyday life. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, amid pervasive violence and structural neglect, people navigate clinics, hospitals, and social networks to mend injured women whose suffering is attributed either to wartime rape or to the chronic failures of maternal care. Repair here reconfigures relational, moral, and political terrains, fostering forms of activism, artistic expression, and collective experimentation through which people insist that other futures remain possible despite chronic violence and political abandonment (Niehuus 2024).

Taken together, these cases expose a critical tension within reparative projects: The expectation that past violence can be contained, resolved, or rendered governable through acts of recognition, apology, or institutional closure. In settings marked by chronic or structural harm, repair may instead take the form of rupture—an interruption of dominant temporalities and a refusal of premature reconciliation. This is shown by members of the Indigenous Kahnawà:ke community, a Mohawk Indian reserve located in present-day Canada with ties to the Iroquois Confederacy whose territories interrupt the current settler-colonial nation-state border. In this case, Kahnawà:ke refuse Canadian forms of identification of contemporary Canada, disrupting state-defined solutions and symbolic gestures by insisting on the integrity and continuity of their own governance and political life (Simpson 2014). This refusal itself can be read as a powerful response to injury and loss—one that demands ongoing recognition of harm, and insists on Indigenous agency in envisioning justice and future. In other settings, reparative processes may also not be neutral or benevolent. In Jamaica, for instance, state-led apologies and commemorative events may gesture toward healing in the aftermath of anti-Black violence, but they often sidestep the material and structural continuities of colonial violence, racism, and exclusion. Repair, in this sense, risks becoming a rhetorical technology of closure, enabling the state to ‘move on’ while leaving underlying injustices intact (Thomas 2024).

Especially in postcolonial contexts, these debates have increasingly shifted from questions of recognition toward questions of redistribution. Here, repair is increasingly understood not simply as compensation for historical wrongs, but as interventions into the unequal distributions of wealth, resources, and opportunities that colonialism and racial domination continue to produce. From this perspective, repair diverges from the past and becomes a future-oriented project of worldmaking, rather than merely one of redress (Táíwò 2022). At the same time, critics caution that reparative frameworks cannot by themselves address all forms of contemporary injustice. While reparations may confront the enduring effects of historical violence, ongoing structures of exploitation, extraction, and inequality often require more fundamental transformations that exceed the logic of repair itself (Mascat 2024). Recent interventions from Black studies push this critique further by questioning whether repair must remain tethered to injury at all. Rather than endlessly rehearsing harm, scholars have called for a suspension of injury (Lewis 2021, 6) as the primary analytic through which Black life is rendered intelligible. They note that moral recognition has long been conceded to Black Americans over the harms of slavery, while material reparations are persistently deferred as ‘impracticable’. From this perspective, repair does not (only) lie in ever more refined calculative accounts of damage, but in affirming reparative futures and Black social life beyond injury. Here repair might involve practices of relation, care, pleasure, and collective satisfaction that exceed reactive frameworks of resistance or redress. Such an orientation reframes repair not as response to violence alone, but as a generative mode of sustaining life otherwise.

Environmental and ecological repair

As ecosystems collapse under the weight of industrial extraction, climate change, and environmental degradation, repair has become a powerful idiom of ecological response. From forest regeneration to biodiversity conservation and climate remediation, repair now structures a wide range of scientific, policy, and activist interventions aimed at mitigating environmental harm. However, such interventions often operate within political and epistemic regimes that reproduce the very extractive logics they claim to undo. In this context, conservation itself becomes ambivalent. Practices such as reforestation, species protection, or habitat restoration may claim to ‘repair’ the environment, while they are also frequently entangled with histories of displacement, forced resettlement, or market-driven ‘green’ development (West et al. 2006). For instance, wildlife protection measures in southern Africa produce forms of ‘green violence’, as biodiversity protection is pursued through militarised patrols, surveillance technologies, and restrictions on local livelihoods. Here, environmental care becomes inseparable from questions of exclusion, coercion, and unequal access to land and resources (Duffy 2022). In Colombia, conservation projects on Indigenous territories have been promoted as climate solutions while simultaneously creating new forms of enclosure, restricting customary land uses, and transforming forest carbon into a marketable commodity. What appears as environmental repair may therefore operate as a subtle form of ‘green grabbing’, reproducing extractive relations in the name of sustainability (Rizzi 2025). In doing so, these projects delay genuine decarbonisation, obscure accountability, and create new forms of dispossession. Such initiatives often function as ‘green extractivism’, commodifying environmental crises in the name of ‘sustainability’, and ultimately contributing to ongoing cycles of extraction and exploitation (Dunlap, Verweijen and Tornel 2024, Jerez et a. 2021).

At the same time, repair is not only an elite or institutional practice. In many settings, people enact ecological repair on their own terms, often in response to state neglect or ongoing environmental violence. In coastal Louisiana, for example, Black communities engaged in wetland restoration do more than rebuild ecologies—they reclaim land, cultural continuity, and justice in the wake of extractive dispossession. When they face relocation in the name of wetland restoration, they insist on staying put, as they know about their ancestors’ long and difficult history of obtaining land in the first place. To them restoration is oriented towards ecology as well as ancestry (Barra 2024). Similar observations have been made in the French Pyrenees, where efforts to restore alpine grasslands after ski resort construction relied on collaboration among conservation experts, seed producers, farmers, and local land users. Participatory approaches revealed competing understandings of which species should be restored and helped align ecological goals with local practices and values (Gonzalo-Turpin, Couix, and Hazard 2008). Here, ‘productive complicities’ can arise between scientists, residents, and stakeholders, suggesting that repair can also be an epistemic and political experiment: A form of reflexive partnership in times of uncertainty (Singleton et al. 2021).

A different approach comes from Indigenous scholars and activists, who have been at the forefront of rethinking environmental repair as a cosmo-political and relational project. Rather than viewing damaged landscapes as inert or broken objects in need of restoration, Indigenous approaches often engage with land as sentient, agentive, and embedded in reciprocal relationships. In this sense, repair is not about returning to a prior ‘natural’ state, but about maintaining balance and sustaining collective life. For instance, in northern Peru, Indigenous communities engage with landscapes as active agents in the repair process, combining ritual, storytelling, and cosmological knowledge (Bacigalupo 2024). Similarly, Indigenous Sámi in northern Europe—struggling with the social outcome of several generations facing physical destruction of their territories, eco-social alienation, and the enduring displacement of their collectives—foreground everyday relational approaches to health, survival, and ecological renewal, such as the cultivation of their language, which had already been almost lost, and reviving relationships to their more-than-human others (Herranen-Tabibi 2024). Such practices challenge dominant ecological sciences that reduce nature to resources and repair to technique.

Disaster studies offer yet another perspective. As the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Adams 2013) and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti (Schuller 2012) have shown, disaster recovery programs can reinscribe inequalities and displace local knowledge. They are prompting impacted collectives to develop their own vernacular strategies of recovery. In these contexts, repair again is not a linear process of rebuilding, but a fragmented and contested terrain, shaped by political memory and structural exclusion. In Kashmir, India, for example, monsoon floodings and earthquakes happen amid the longue durée of colonialism, militarisation, and political abandonment (Aijazi 2024). Rather than centring trauma or rupture, repair is foregrounded as a relational and affective practice, animated by spiritual labour, ethical improvisation, and the forging of new socialities under conditions of ongoing catastrophes.

Approaches such as these expand the notion of disaster itself—as slow and atmospheric rather than sudden and eventful. In this framework, repair is not merely a response to breakdown, but a mode of living that refuses analytic closure, decentres Euro-American understandings of the world, and also reimagines scholarly practice as a form of care (Simpson 2014). This includes a shift in how anthropologists relate to fieldwork, narration, and academic form. Many of them attempt to resist extractive knowledge production that simply speaks about people’s lives as ‘data’ without including their own practices of interpretation, and instead embrace speculative and situated modes of engagement, such as experimental forms of writing, attentive practices of listening, and methodological approaches that foreground the cultivation of alternative social imaginaries.

Taken together, these approaches push the anthropology of ecological repair to move beyond a binary of brokenness and restoration. By foregrounding ambivalences—the capacity to heal and harm, to reproduce inequality or to foster justice—environmental repair is not simply about fixing nature. It is about negotiating damaged worlds in ways that make certain futures possible and others foreclosed.

Affective and relational repair

Finally, repair is deeply embedded in the emotional and relational dimensions of human life. Families fracture and reconcile; friends fall out and make amends; communities strive to restore trust after betrayal. These everyday acts of repair are no less complex than their technological or political counterparts—and are often more fraught. Anthropologists studying care and intimacy have shown how relational repair, that is, the effort to sustain or reweave social bonds strained by violence, separation, betrayal, or loss, is shaped by broader structures of inequality (Drotbohm 2022, del la Bellacasa 2017). Frequently, everyday acts of harm and healing are shaped by kinship obligations, as much as medical hierarchies, and state-mediated forms of care. This is the case in India, for example, where women frequently suffer from domestic violence. One remedy used to help them is to pay them ‘maintenance money’ that allows them to exit from abusive marriages (Jaju 2025). In recent years, several anthropological studies have called for attending to how people repair life after violence not through dramatic transformation but through the slow, recursive work of making things liveable again. This ‘descent into the ordinary’ (Das 2007) shows that repair may be less of an achievement, and more a mode of endurance. Repair here is not a moment of restoration, but a chronic condition—a way of living with pain, rather than eliminating it.

Even the idea of apology—often seen as a simple act of interpersonal repair—has been critically examined, and anthropologists have pointed out that apologies can simultaneously recognise harm and reassert authority (Mookherjee et al. 2009). Apologies can heal or reopen wounds, depending on their context and sincerity. They are relational and their affective effects depend on longer histories of trust, betrayal, and the often-fragile hope of reconciliation. A particularly innovative approach to repair draws from Cherokee thought and Indigenous queer theory studied in contemporary Oklahoma. Through art, storytelling, and everyday practices of relation-making, Cherokee and other Indigenous actors cultivate forms of kinship and belonging that exceed colonial categories and past-related expectations (Pierce 2025). This perspective shifts attention away from apology as a retrospective acknowledgment of harm toward repair as a future-oriented practice of sustaining relations and creating conditions for Indigenous thriving. What matters here is not only whether harm is recognised, but whether other worlds can continue to be lived.

Such relational and affective work is also common in migratory, exile, diasporic, and post-migration contexts. Displaced and moving peoples are known to work hard to sustain or reweave social ties across rupture, absence, and displacement (Shapiro and Montgomery 2020). When migrants must tolerate long physical separations, delays in reunification, or legal non-recognition of kin ties, care for one another becomes a mode of resistance and continuity (Coe 2013). For example, Syrian migrants in Turkey and Germany studied during the late 2000s repaired the rupture of separation through daily communication, remittances, practical support, and emotional care at a distance, such as helping relatives with administrative tasks or shielding them from one’s own hardships (Alkan 2022). Similarly, transnational families must continually mend and reshape their relations over the life course, as migration regimes and structural uncertainties, such as changing citizenship regimes and conditions for deportation, reshape the conditions for maintaining kinship ties (Boehm et al. 2011). They must contend with legal and bureaucratic definitions of intimacy, navigate family law and immigration contexts that stand in tension with lived experiences of care, and bear loss of contact, assumptions of disappearances, and experiences of abandonment (Drotbohm 2023). Rather than offering closure, such reparative practices often express endurance and unfinished forms of attachment through attempts to re-establish contact, maintain memories of absent kin, interpret uncertain silences, and preserve relations despite prolonged absence and ambiguity.

Together, the four main domains of repair mentioned so far illustrate the concept’s plurality. Repair is not only a set of practices, but as a contested field of meaning. Whether addressing broken machines, fractured histories, damaged ecosystems, or wounded relationships, repair operates through different scales, moral logics, and temporal rhythms. Although this entry suggests distinct domains, in practice these dimensions are deeply entangled, highlighting that repair is not a discrete event, but a complex, ongoing process situated at the intersection of bodily, economic, and relational survival (Cousins 2023).

Temporalities of repair

Repair is not only an act of fixing but is also a negotiation over and about time. In anthropological work, attention to temporalities of repair reveals how different narratives of harm—their onset, duration, and resolution—shape both recognition and redress. Institutional forms of repair, for example, often rely on a linear temporality: Harm is framed as a bounded event, followed by intervention and closure. This event-based logic privileges acute ruptures—natural disasters, moments of intense political violence, or infrastructural collapse—and renders reparable those harms that can be isolated in time (Drotbohm and Winters 2020, Verlin 2021). At the same time, such framing risks silencing the enduring and systemic character of many injuries, particularly those produced by extractive economies, racial capitalism, or settler colonialism. In contrast, anthropologists have emphasised ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011), where damage unfolds gradually: Toxic exposure, environmental degradation, dislocation, or bureaucratic neglect. These forms of harm elude visibility because they lack a clear onset or climax. Their temporal scale makes them difficult to narrate, and nearly impossible to ‘repair’ in institutional terms. Here, ‘temporal triage’ (Davidov and Nelson 2016) occurs—that is, people in power may prioritise recent, measurable harm, while structural or historical injuries are deferred or erased. This unevenness is not accidental. Temporal frameworks themselves are political instruments. For instance, in the context of gold mining, certain collectives are deemed reparable only when their suffering is legible to donors and state agencies—often requiring a specific event, date, or perpetrator (d’Avignon 2022). This creates an economy of eligibility, in which time becomes a filter for recognition. A certain territory poisoned slowly by extractive industries may be excluded from aid, while a similar territory affected by a pipeline rupture is fast-tracked for compensation (Zhouri et al. 2017). In this way, temporal boundaries govern reparative legitimacy.

At the same time, temporal framings also affect the tone and ethics of ethnographic engagement. What anthropologists can document—and how—depends on how harm and repair unfold over time. In many cases, repair is not a single act but a drawn-out, non-linear process: It may be partial, stalled, or actively refused. ‘But what happens when there is no fix?’ (Thieme 2021, 1094) is an experimental reflection on understandings of repair across different sites and domains. Methodologically, this calls for attentiveness not only to what is said or done in the name of repair, but also to what remains silent, slow, or unfinished. Consequently, much of the anthropology of repair must be conducted in the register of the incomplete, and ethnographers must learn to listen beyond articulation, to trace how people live with injury rather than seeking narrative closure. This also requires ethical restraint: Refusing the compulsion to decode every silence or resolve every ambiguity. The notion of a right to opacity is particularly useful here (Glissant 1997). Individuals and groups may choose not to disclose, explain, or repair in ways that align with external expectations. Refusing closure may itself be a form of sovereignty, a mode of keeping harm visible and justice unfulfilled. Such refusals—of speech, compensation, or reconciliation—are not breakdowns, but deliberate breaks from imposed timelines. Refusal can be generative, affiliative, wilful and hence, reparative, especially when dominant temporalities demand forgetting, forgiveness, or submission (McGranahan 2016, 323; Simpson 2014).

Temporal clashes are especially vivid in the case of historical injustices. Debates about reparations for slavery, genocide, or colonialism often revolve around temporal legitimacy: Is it too late to repair? Opponents invoke the passage of time to deny accountability, framing harm as past. Activist advocates, however, insist that colonial violence endures, materially and affectively, in institutions, landscapes, and bodies. The argument for reparations, then, is also an argument about time: History does not end, and repair must engage with the unfinished present. For instance, the refusal of state reparations by Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s, stemmed from concerns that financial compensation would individualise and depoliticise the disappearance of their children, transforming an ongoing collective injustice into a settled past. As Claire Moon (2012) argues, such refusals highlight the political meaning of repair and expose internal tensions within dominant scholarly and professional understandings of reparations. A similar dissonance can be observed in state-led repair initiatives, such as truth commissions or compensation schemes. These often work on bureaucratic timelines, prioritising speed, documentation, and demonstrable outcomes. But for survivors or victims, the pace and form of healing may differ. Ethnographers have shown how such programs can produce a form of temporal violence by imposing not only undefined waiting (Jacobsen 2020), but also premature closure or demanding a linear narrative of suffering and recovery. In these moments, repair risks becoming a performance of accountability rather than leading to substantive change.

In sum, repair is always entangled in the politics of time. It is not only about what is done but when, and how harm is acknowledged, remembered, or forgotten. Competing understandings of time structure access to resources, shape moral claims, and govern legitimacy. By integrating ethical and methodological sensitivity into the analysis of temporalities of relational care, anthropology can offer a more nuanced and grounded account of what repair is—and what it demands of us.

Conclusion: Toward a situated and speculative understanding of repair

Repair is not only a practice but a proposition—a way of staying with damage while imagining futures that are not guaranteed. Across broken infrastructures, social fractures, ecological collapse, and affective loss, repair has emerged as a powerful analytic for tracing how people navigate endurance, survival, and transformation. As this entry has shown, repair is never merely technical or restorative. It is an ambivalent and often fraught engagement with harm, shaped by unequal capacities, contested values, and the persistent question of what—and who—is worth being kept. Rather than a neutral response to rupture, repair involves dynamics of power, memory, and imagination.

By tracing repair across technological, political, environmental, and relational domains, this entry has foregrounded its multiplicity and its manifold stakes. Infrastructural repair may reproduce hierarchies while appearing to restore order. Political gestures of repair may offer recognition while leaving material injustice untouched. Ecological repair can either reenact extractivism or generate new formations of collective life. Affective repair may remain invisible and unpaid, or emerge as quiet resistance in contexts of abandonment. Across these domains, temporalities of repair are central: Some harms are immediately visible, while others are too slow, diffuse, or inconvenient to count as damage. The anthropology of repair must thus remain attuned to the temporality of harm, asking whose injuries are legible, and which broken worlds are permitted to persist.

Crucially, repair also opens space for reimagining. Across Indigenous, Black, feminist, and decolonial traditions, repair increasingly emerges as a practice of reparative future-making: Not the restoration of a damaged past, but the cultivation of relations, capacities, and forms of life through which other futures become imaginable. Such approaches shift attention from repair as recovery to repair as an ongoing ethical and political labor of living otherwise. These practices compel us to be open to the fact that repair may remain opaque, incomplete, and speculative. It may not fix all that is broken, but may be part of how people live differently with past harm. At the same time, the anthropology of repair emphasises that some harm remains irreparable. Some forms of loss, violence, and historical dispossession cannot be restored or redeemed, but must be lived with, remembered, and politically reckoned with. Anthropological engagements with repair may thus need to move beyond a descriptive critique to accompany the provisional, experimental, and often exhausting work of creating a better world. In an era marked by compounded crisis, the appeal of engaging in repair is undeniable. But it must be approached not as a cure, but as a site of shared struggle, care, and reparative future-making.

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Note on contributor

Heike Drotbohm is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her research, conducted in transatlantic social fields, concentrated on spiritual belonging (Haiti, Canada) as well as on the intersection between im/mobility, kinship, and care (Cape Verde). More recently, she followed migrant trajectories across urban and cross-border spaces (in Brazil and Central America), and explored configurations of care and control in solidarity and humanitarian settings.

Prof. Dr. Heike Drotbohm, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Forum 6, 55099 Mainz. email: drotbohm@uni-mainz.de, ORCID: 0000-0002-9436-9137