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This article builds on data and field work notes from two ethnographic studies conducted in two cities: Istanbul and Trabzon, Turkey. It examines the socio-political dynamics behind the prevalence and impact of conspiratorial narratives. We explore the emergence, circulation, and effects of these narratives and how they shape political orientations and mobilisation. We raise methodological questions about these narratives and propose researchers closely scrutinise them rather than dismissing them as illogical or incoherent. Our research reveals three novel relational and methodological insights derived from conspiratorial narratives. First, these narratives serve as sense-making tools during times of uncertainty. They provide accessible explanations for abrupt changes, and they rely and draw upon 'cultural repertoires'. Second, by challenging the mainstream narratives, they shape subjectivities; empowering narrators to act as agents. Third, how conspiratorial narratives circulate has implications for the dynamics of state-public relationships, often following the neoliberal logic, they portray political leaders as central figures in navigating complex decision-making processes. Our case studies demonstrate that actors, even in less powerful positions, may not necessarily antagonise the state. We underscore the methodological significance of these narratives for researchers, to examine actors' agency, group dynamics, and responses to everyday injustices.

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Poor mental health among U.S. adolescents has reach epidemic proportions, with those from the Middle East and North African region exhibiting increased risk for distress and suicide ideation. This mixed-methods study analyzes quantitative data from first- and second-generation Arab adolescents (n = 171) and qualitative data from a participatory study conducted with 11 adolescents of the same population to understand the role of cultural resources in coping. Drawing on the Intersectional Theory of Cultural Repertoires in Health, we show that: 1) cultural resources underlie meaning-making throughout coping; 2) coping strategies are inseparable from the influence of peer and familial relationships, as dictated through the social norms and other cultural resources; 3) collectively held repertoires of coping can promote belonging, affirm identity, and protect against discrimination; and 4) the outcomes of coping strategies, and the culturally informed meaning individuals make of these outcomes, influence their future coping behaviors.

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Elaborating on salient contextual factors, such as historical conditions, national history, militarised masculinity, and language, this study looks at how repertoires of everyday nationhood are deployed in relation to boundary-drawing in the context of the recent refugee influx in Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with ordinary Turkish citizens in Adana, this paper sheds light on the complexities of everyday understandings of citizenship and nationhood with regards to the emergence of 'insider versus outsiders' notions. Results suggest that ordinary citizens evoke various notions of nationhood in everyday life in drawing boundaries against 'outsiders' (i.e., refugees) by deploying historically rooted national identity constructions (militaristic, unitary) and symbols (language, flag). This article, therefore, reveals a national identity boundary-drawing mechanism involving widespread adherence to a militarised sense of nationhood, related more to other ideas of belonging than ethnicity. It further indicates that ordinary citizens, in their narratives, link such constructions and symbols with historical and current political contexts (e.g., the conflict between Turks and Arabs during WW1, or; current military operations in Syria).

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Public health scholars and practitioners have increasingly distanced themselves from the term "culture," which has been used to essentialize and blame marginalized "others." However, leading health theories inevitably entail the study of culture; omitting the term may sever vital connections to useful social theory. Instead, we propose the Intersectional Theory of Cultural Repertoires in Health (RiH), integrating social norms and intersectionality with repertoire theory, which has been highly influential in cultural sociology. We outline an approach to investigating relationships between cultural resources and health behaviors and illustrate the theory's application with two qualitative case studies. The cases demonstrate how RiH theory can elucidate the roles of cultural resources in influencing health outcomes, such as gender-equitable behavior in Nigeria and coping strategies in Haiti. Building on conventional normative explanations of health, we theorize how schemas, narratives, boundaries, and other cultural resources shape behavior and demonstrate how norms constrain the use of repertoires. We detail how this theory can deepen our understanding of health phenomena and identify future research priorities.

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Using data from organ transplant medicine in Germany, we propose a method for understanding the content of unwritten rules supportive of violations of written rules in light of the "German Organ Transplant Scandal". Grounded in the sociology of organizational crime, we reconstruct the cultural repertoires of medical professionals working with organ allocation when confronted with the applicable guidelines using collective mindset analysis. Four dimensions of cognitive and normative rules of interpretation were identified and discussed as a an occupational-professional form of deviance. Apart from not relying on data from the alleged perpetrators and still gazing at the latent structures of meaning behind misconduct, our approach offers a more general methodological framework for empirical studies of the unwritten rules at work in an organizational field where wrongdoing has been reported.

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Why do some happenings become incentives for cultural or political transformation (that is: turn into events), whereas others remain ordinary occurrences? The theoretical perspectives of cultural repertoires, cleavage structures, and discursive opportunities are prominent and fruitful approaches for explaining cultural or political behavior and attitudes, yet they do not have a satisfactory answer to this question. To fill in this gap, I introduce a typology that indicates how certain happenings merely reproduce existing trends, whereas other ones turn into motives to change them. This can be either because they are "focus events," which confirm dominant cultural or political patterns, or because they are "shock events," which form a break from them. I illustrate this typology by investigating the distinct meanings that 9/11 were accorded in the American and Dutch public spheres. This analysis shows that this happening became a "shock event" on the issue of safety in the American case, as it broke with the cultural repertoire of viewing the United States as a safe, militarily impenetrable nation. In contrast, 9/11 turned into a "focus event" concerning the issue of Islam in the Dutch case because it confirmed the discursive opportunities to problematize Muslims, which public actors in the Netherlands had already developed in the years leading up to 2001.

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This paper explores how Burundian adolescents in the Nakivale refugee settlement, Uganda, experience umwidegemvyo, loosely translated as "freedom", with regard to their sexuality. We draw on ethnographic research conducted between August and November 2017 with adolescents aged 13-19 years. Our research included in-depth individual interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation. We present a context-sensitive appreciation of "freedom" and its social implications for adolescents' sexual and love relationships. We show how adolescents attribute their sexual experiences and practices, including experimental sex, stress-relief sex and transactional sex, to the freedom experienced in the refugee context. Yet they also view this freedom with ambivalence: while some degree of freedom is desirable, too much is referred to in terms of kutitabwaho n'ababyeyi, loosely translated as "parental neglect", implying a lack of parental involvement, care and provisioning.

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For humans we implicitly assume that the way we do things is the product of social learning and thus cultural. For animals, this conclusion requires proof. Here, we first review the most commonly used procedure for documenting animal culture: the method of exclusion, which charts geographic behavioral variation between populations as evidence for culture. Using published data, we show that, whereas it is an adequate proof of principle, the method of exclusion has major deficiencies when capturing cultural diversity and complexity. Therefore, we propose a new method, namely the direct counting of socially learned skills, which we apply to previously collected data on wild orangutans. This method reveals a far greater cultural repertoire among orangutans, and a different distribution of cultural elements among behavioral domains than found by the method of exclusion, as well as clear ecological correlates for most cultural elements. The widespread occurrence of social learning ability throughout the animal kingdom suggests that these conclusions also apply to many other species. Culture is most likely more widespread and pervasive than commonly thought and an important avenue to local adaptation. The complex and normative dimensions of culture seem unique to our species, but were most likely built upon a very broad, pre-existing cultural capacity that we inherited from our ancestors.