The Limits to Capital

The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Bradd Shore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 428 pp.

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning

A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and elucidates its emergence as a distinct theoretical orientation over the past few decades, showing how it has emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Viveiros de Castro, as well a number of younger scholars. Distinguishing this trajectory of thinking from related attempts to put questions of ontology at the heart of anthropological research, the book articulates critically the key methodological and theoretical tenets of the ontological turn, its prime epistemological and political implications, and locates it in the broader intellectual landscape of contemporary social theory.

The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition

This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a new imaginary space of national belonging.

Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic, Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person: Formations of Fear and Anger in Vanuatu

Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the analysis of Melanesian societies.

The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

This article considers the social circumstances of making a marriage diagram, on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu. It offers a reconsideration of the rather famous case of the ‘six-section marriage system’ as demonstrated by Cambridge anthropologist Bernard Deacon. It relates this idea of a system to the indigenous practice of making figurative drawings in the sand. The argument is that the marriage diagram drawn for Bernard Deacon was merely an instance of Vanuatu people's institutionalized capability of totalizing social flows and making them into aesthetic shapes.

Discussions around a sand‐drawing: creations of agency and society in melanesia

Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Hierarchy and Its Alternatives: An Introduction to Movements of Totalization and Detotalization Knut M. Rio and Olaf H. Smedal Chapter 2. Conversion, Hierarchy, and Cultural Change: Value and Syncretism in the Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity Joel Robbins Chapter 3. Gender and Value: Conceptualizing Social Forms on Ambrym, Vanuatu Annelin Eriksen Chapter 4. Can a Hierarchical Religion Survive without Its Center? Caodaism, Colonialism, and Exile Janet Hoskins Chapter 5. The Headless State in Inner Asia: Reconsidering Kinship Society and the Discourse of Tribalism David Sneath Chapter 6. The Perfect Sovereign: The Sacralized Power of the Ottoman Sultan Kjetil Fosshagen Chapter 7. Marriage, Rank, and Politics in Hawaii Valerio Valeri Chapter 8. Polynesian Conceptions of Sociality: A Dynamic Field of Hierarchical Encompassment Ingjerd HoA"m Chapter 9. On the Value of the Beast or the Limit of Money: Notes on the Meaning of Marriage Prestations among the Ngadha, Central Flores (Indonesia) Olaf H. Smedal Chapter 10. Hierarchy Is not Inequality-in Polynesia, for Instance Serge Tcherkezoff Chapter 11. Hierarchy and Power: A Comparative Attempt under Asymmetrical Lines Andre Iteanu Afterword: On Dumont's Relentless Comparativism Frederick H. Damon Notes on Contributors Index

Knut Rio

Papers

Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic, Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person: Formations of Fear and Anger in Vanuatu

The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

Discussions around a sand‐drawing: creations of agency and society in melanesia

Hierarchy : persistence and transformation in social formations