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Showing papers in "Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2012"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a comparative study of the combinations made possible by the conjunction of a mode of identification and a relational schema is presented, showing that a well made experiment is enough to demonstrate a law.
Abstract: Between identification  , a means of specifying the properties of existing beings, and relations, a means of specifying the general form of the links between those beings, two kinds of connection are possible. Either the plasticity of a relational schema makes it possible for it to structure interactions in a variety of ontologies, which will then present a family likeness despite the heterogeneity of their essential principles; or, alternatively, one of the modes of identification is able to accommodate several distinct relational schemas and this introduces into an ontological configuration widely distributed in space (a cultural region, for example) the kind of concrete diversity of customs and norms from which ethnologists and historians love to draw their material. The second case is what we shall now be considering. However, the combinations made possible by the conjunction of a mode of identification and a relational mode are too numerous for us to consider them all in a systematic and detailed fashion, especially since some of them turn out not to be possible for reasons of logical incompatibility, as we shall soon see. So let us limit ourselves to considering the variations of ethos that various relational schemas imprint upon one particular mode of identification: this will be animism. The demonstration will certainly not be complete, but it will at least provide the beginnings of a proof that anthropology can always hope to find when it enters into some detail in a comparative study of a number of cases. As Mauss, mobilizing John Stuart Mill in his support, declared, ―a well made experiment is enough to demonstrate a law‖ (Mauss 1950: 391).

521 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Turner as mentioned in this paper presents a cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, with a focus on the social skin and the social hierarchy of the human body, which he called social work alone.
Abstract: This is a reprint of Terence S. Turner, 1980. “The Social Skin.” In Not work alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival , edited by Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, 112–140. London: Temple Smith.

183 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.

136 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In an essay entitled The Odyssean suitors and the host-guest relationship as mentioned in this paper, Levy discussed the final scene of the Odyssey and took issue with those authors who find it out of character with the spirit of the work as a whole, arguing that the apparent anomaly introduced by the unmerciful slaughter of the suitors whose faults went hardly beyond a certain absence of decorum explained by the hypothesis of an earlier folk-tale in the peasant tradition which is evident elsewhere in the poem, he says.
Abstract: In an essay entitled The Odyssean suitors and the host-guest relationship 1 Professor Harry L. Levy discussed the final scene of the Odyssey and took issue with those authors who find it out of character with the spirit of the work as a whole. The apparent anomaly introduced by the unmerciful slaughter of the suitors whose faults went hardly beyond a certain absence of decorum he explained by the hypothesis of an earlier folk-tale in the peasant tradition which is evident elsewhere in the poem, he says. This is intertwined with the courtly tradition of the warrior princes which dominates the greater part. The ideal of courtly largesse is contrasted with the more material concerns of frugal farmers whose customs of hospitality contain a provision forbidding the guest to overstay his welcome and impoverish his host. Leaving to c1assical scholars the task of unravelling the origin of its elements, the anthropologist is entitled to take the story as it stands and attempt to relate it to what he can discover of the law of hospitality in general and of the code of hospitality of ancient Greece in particular. It appears to me that, regardless of any historical disparities in the sources from which it originated, the tale of the home-coming of Odysseus may take its place among those exemplary epics which provide us with a key to the principles of social conduct. Indeed the whole work may be viewed as a study in the law of hospitality, in other words, the problem of how to deal with strangers.

115 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the political correlates of Amazonian perspectival ontologies, from a Taulipang mythical narrative about the origin of the anus (as transcribed by Koch-Grunberg) to a Nambikwara explanation of Brazilian I.D. cards.
Abstract: This article proposes to explore the political correlates of Amazonian perspectival ontologies. From a Taulipang mythical narrative about the origin of the anus (as transcribed by Koch-Grunberg) to a Nambikwara explanation of Brazilian I.D. cards (as reported by Joana Miller), Amazonian ethnography allows us to perceive how “bodily” affects and “spiritual” encounters conspire to project a particular conception of power, sociality and truth.

81 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines Yanesha notions of beinghood and people-making practices from a constructional standpoint, focusing on the composition of persons/bodies as a phenomenological process rather than on the nature of the processes by which persons/body are socially fabricated.
Abstract: This article examines Yanesha notions of beinghood and people-making practices from a constructional standpoint. By focusing on the composition of persons/bodies as a phenomenological process rather than on the nature of the processes by which persons/bodies are socially fabricated, it seeks to reveal the extent to which Yanesha conceptions of personhood differ from those in the Western tradition. Shaped by the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, this tradition conceives of persons as individual, singular, and self-contained beings, both ontologically complete and incommunicable. In contrast, Yanesha regard persons as composites, resulting from the creational, generative, and socializing contributions of a variety of human and nonhuman entities and, therefore, as possessing compound anatomies and subjectivities. The article discusses the contrasts between constructional and perspectival understandings of beinghood, body, and subjectivity in native Amazonia. It proposes that, rather than conflicting theoretical models, these approaches are an artifact of focusing on different levels of social interaction. In other words, they are the result of diverging points of view. This, however, suggests that the richness of Amazonianist theory lies precisely in it being une theorie faite de regards.

72 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In 1969 and 1972, I conducted fieldwork in rural North-West France, protecting it from media curiosity by vaguely referring to it as the Western French Bocage [Hedgerow region] as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Between 1969 and 1972, I conducted fieldwork in rural North-West France, protecting it from media curiosity by vaguely referring to it as the ―Western French Bocage [Hedgerow region].‖ I gathered two types of material from this research: a field journal in which I recounted daily events in great detail, and a typed account of some thirty dewitching seances that I had tape-recorded. Two books were drafted from the material in my field journal: Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1977), and Corps pour corps. Enquete sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1988).

50 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the grounds and paradoxes of cooperative interaction in a reindeer herding system in Southern Siberia and show how, despite a lack of a clearly shared plans of action, herders are able to induce reindeers to come back spontaneously to the camps through nonverbal communication.
Abstract: This study explores the grounds and paradoxes of cooperative interaction in a reindeer herding system in Southern Siberia. While the majority of human activities are joint activities where goals or actions of participants require transparency and common knowledge, this article asks to what extent is it possible to build a cooperative interaction with minimal shared knowledge and poor means of communication. The article shows how, despite a lack of a clearly shared plans of action, herders are able to induce reindeer to come back spontaneously to the camps through nonverbal communication, even though reindeer graze freely and autonomously most of the time. Herders come to rely on reindeer’s cognitive skills and desires and, more generally, on animal autonomy in order to keep their herd engaged with them. Paradoxically, humans can domesticate reindeer only if they keep them wild. Yet, in spite of a relation marked by communicational opacity and radical asymmetry, reindeer and men are able to maintain an ongoing cooperative context that allows them to carry out extremely complex joint activities, such as riding.

44 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a series of rumors of penis snatchers, of killer mobile phone numbers, and of deadly alms constitute a transnational genre that is characteristic of Africa's occult modernity.
Abstract: This article deals with a series of rumors that spread across West and Central Africa during the last two decades. These rumors of penis snatchers, of killer mobile phone numbers, and of deadly alms constitute a transnational genre that is characteristic of Africa’s occult modernity. While the literature on the modernity of witchcraft has been criticized for its macrosociological orientation, the article strives to counterbalance this bias by drawing on microsociology in order to explore the interactional repertoires in which these new forms of the occult are grounded. It shows that they exploit anxieties born out of mundane situations: shaking hands with strangers, receiving unidentified phone calls, or accepting anonymous gifts. New forms of the occult thus focus on the dangers of anonymity and point to the risk of being forced into opaque interactions with unknown others. They draw on two different situations of anonymity, which can be connected to two distinctive repertoires of modernity. Face-to-face encounters with strangers are typical of—but not exclusive to—urban modernity, while mediated interactions with distant and often invisible agents are part and parcel of technological modernity. Therefore, insofar as modernity has extended the scope of human sociality in unprecedented ways, it has extended as well the scope of the occult. This article casts new light on witchcraft and the occult in contemporary Africa, and suggests new ways of tying together micro and macro levels of analysis, by grounding the wide-ranging dynamics of modernity in the minutiae of human interaction.

41 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Wang Mingming1
TL;DR: The authors examines historical transformations of the Chinese concept of tianxia (all under heaven) in pre-modern periods and examines the diverse ways tianxia has been buil...
Abstract: This essay examines historical transformations of the Chinese concept of tianxia (“all under heaven”1) in pre-modern periods. More specifically, it attends to the diverse ways tianxia has been buil...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Usen Barok culture is very much a matter of thinking and feeling in images as mentioned in this paper, and it can be seen as a way of expressing the power of synthesis: it condenses whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations and allows complex relationships to be perceived and grasped.
Abstract: What is the relation of art,  of thinking and feeling in images, to the form and being of a human culture? We in the modern Western cultures often say that our greatest art transcends the age and cultural surroundings in which it was created. But of course Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Mozart were very much persons of their own times and cultures, and their art, however transcendent, must manifest a significant part of the creativity of the age and culture. My experience in studying the Usen Barok people of Central New Ireland has convinced me that their culture is very much a matter of thinking and feeling in images. This means that the conception and motivation behind the malagan and other New Ireland art styles manifests something very basic in the cultures of this remarkable island. The fact that the Barok do not participate in the malagan tradition may serve, through the examples I present, to give the reader a broader and more varied sense of the possibility of a culture organized around art principles — around thinking and feeling in images. Let me first clarify an important point. By ―image‖ I do not simply mean ―visual image,‖ though New Irelanders often show a predilection for the visual. A cultural image can be verbal, as in the tropes, conceits, and other word pictures that carry much of the force of Shakespeare’s expression; it can be expressed in the nonrepresentational forms of music; or it can be kinesthetic or architectural, as it often is in New Ireland. An image has the power of synthesis: it condenses whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations and allows complex relationships to be perceived and grasped in an instant. I shall illustrate this by using a common Barok verbal image as an example. Like other New Irelanders, Barok trace clan membership through the mother’s

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that favors persist because they enable actors to enhance a sense of self-worth within relevant social circles; they are sources of esteem for "normal heroes" in such life-worlds.
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the expression “economy of favors” that became popular in the literature about postsocialist societies as shorthand for a variety of illicit practices such as bribery, kickbacks, nepotism, etc. It argues that favors can be singled out and considered in their own right from an anthropological point of view. Favors are carried out in economies that are mainly conducted in other ways—ways that are not favors at all. The paper suggests, based on materials from Russia and Mongolia, that favors are different from transactional exchanges. They are defined by their quality of gratuitousness and by the fact that they require the recipients to be personally chosen. Because neither of these are features of market economic practice, favors tend to be described in the literature as informal, corrupt, etc., but the suggestion here is that favors persist because they enable actors to enhance a sense of self-worth within relevant social circles; they are sources of esteem for “normal heroes” in such life-worlds. Analyzing favors in the sphere of higher education, the paper also suggests that practical operation of favors in an increasingly commercialized and power-differentiated environment is also helpful for understanding how social networks are formed.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere and demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language.
Abstract: This paper seeks to employ rural Mapuche ideas about language to cast new light on the nature of agency and authority in lowland South America and elsewhere. Through ethnographic analysis, I demonstrate the need to account for the roles of priest, chief, and shaman—all present in the Mapuche ngillatun fertility ritual—from the perspective of their differential modes of relating through language. For language, as understood by rural Mapuche, emerges not solely from the intentions of individual speakers, but equally from the force— newen —constitutive of all being. Priests, chiefs, and shamans all seek to align themselves through speech to this force which instantiates itself through them. Such an observation forms the basis of a critique of both Clastres’ understanding of the relationship between chiefs and language, and of the recent post-humanist rejection of the so-called “linguistic turn.”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore situations of interactional uncertainty, namely contexts in which the grounds of an interaction cannot be taken for granted, and stress the productivity of uncertainty at the heart of human sociality.
Abstract: This themed section explores situations of interactional uncertainty, namely contexts in which the grounds of an interaction cannot be taken for granted. How to be sure, for instance, that a barbed comment is only intended to tease and is not really meant to be offensive? In the same vein, how are we to deal with “white lies” and other strategic dissimulations in flirtatious relationships? And how can we ever be sure that a benign handshake does not in fact hide malevolent intentions? These are some of the issues the contributors address in this volume. . . . All the essays gathered here deal with opaque situations that generate uncertainty from the participants’ points of view. . . . First, several authors show that interactional uncertainty is not always reducible to accidental misunderstandings, but can also be a constitutive or “built-in” element of various social settings. Second, many contributions refuse to consider uncertainty exclusively as a problem to be faced and solved. They show not only how social agents navigate through opaque interactions, but also how they deal with opacity as a social resource enabling them to negotiate or even create relationships. In brief, they stress the productivity of uncertainty at the heart of human sociality. -Excerpt from the preface

Journal ArticleDOI
Miho Ishii1
TL;DR: In this paper, a new view of the formation of divine worlds as the actualization of virtual, vital relations between persons and things that emerge only through their contingent coactions is presented.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate how divine worlds can be created, vitalized, and lived by people. Focusing not on cognition and operating through things but on bodily action with things, this paper examines the actuality of these actions, which occur prior to the cognitive articulation of the event and create novel experiences of the world. It reconsiders Alfred Gell’s theory of idolatry through the ideas of Bin Kimura and Hideo Kawamoto. Exploring the making of spirits in Ghana and spirit possession rituals in South India, this paper presents a fresh view of the formation of divine worlds as the actualization of virtual, vital relations between persons and things that emerge only through their contingent coactions.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the late 1980s, American independent film broke out of the tiny "art houses" (specialty theaters) of a few major American cities and became a much stronger presence in American public culture as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In the late 1980s, American independent film broke out of the tiny “art houses” (specialty theaters) of a few major American cities and became a much stronger presence in American public culture. Independent filmmakers see themselves as challenging the hegemony of Hollywood, eschewing entertainment —fantasy, pleasure, happy endings—and offering instead harsh and “edgy” stories about life in contemporary society. The present article draws on interviews, panel discussions, filmmaker Q & As, and other contexts in which independent film people talk about what they are trying to do: to make what one indie producer called “movies that matter.”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a translation of de Martino's "Crisi della presenza e reintegrazione religiosa" is presented, which originally appeared in Aut Aut 31 (1956).
Abstract: This article is a translation of Ernesto de Martino’s “Crisi della presenza e reintegrazione religiosa,” which originally appeared in Aut Aut 31 (1956). De Martino’s publications combine social scientific methods and interrogatives with deep humanistic learning in philosophy, history, and literature. Drawing on materials from Greek tragedy, the Icelandic Poetic Edda , and ethnographic reports from Australia, this article illuminates one of de Martino’s most central and enduring ideas: the “crisis of presence,” a momentary failure of the Hegelian synthesis according to which the givens of the past and the present should become something novel in the future. Philosophically robust and ethnographically informed, this newly translated text will inspire a new generation of anthropologists in the English-speaking world and help initiate a new appreciation for the work of Ernesto de Martino.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw attention to a picture of the lives of Iraqis as caught not merely in the forms and structures of tribal obligations and sectarianism, but also in the rough ground of mundane affairs and encounters.
Abstract: Beyond the stories of collapse, devastation, and moral uncertainty in Iraq’s recent history there are tales of connections, relations, and the entanglements of lives which are named in forms such as friendship and family, and modes of comporting to others such as care, attention, and even love, which have yet to become part of how one thinks and writes about life after the invasion. In this article the authors draw attention to a picture of the lives of Iraqis as caught not merely in the forms and structures of tribal obligations and sectarianism, and the violence and destruction of terror, but also in the rough ground of mundane affairs and encounters. We argue that in the overlappings and relations of lives and intentionalities resides an intercorporeal ethics of the rough ground of the everyday. An ethics of the rough ground of the everyday is one understood not only in terms of the ways in which life is open to the pain, suffering, joy, and ennui of others, but in terms of how in the entanglements and relations of lives with other lives in the everyday, lines of care and concern emerge, are fostered, and also frayed.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal.
Abstract: What value does death acquire when body organs are pledged for transplantation? Deaths may be made public by a stated desire to donate, and a matter of public debate precisely because the desire is denied. This essay explores two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. One of these attempts was idealized and exalted, the other thwarted; both gave rise to considerable public conversation. We treat the public nature of these deathbed wishes as moral dramas, for at the heart of each is a quite wrenching contest over the donor’s soul—or its this-worldly equivalent, his legacy—that serves equally as an opportunity to reignite projects of social reform and (re)educate different social constituencies. We thus focus on the didactic functions of donation, where the principal issue at stake is the intention of the dying person to gift his or her organs. We ask, what does organ donation mean at the point of death? We argue that there is more at stake than just the possibilities of saving lives. Rather, these unfolding moral dramas become opportunities for, among other things, Brahminism to be rejected, superstition to be transcended, the values of a modernizing state to be reaffirmed, and a broad spectrum of civic virtues to be inculcated. Pledging one’s body when death is imminent and inevitable becomes the final chance to rewrite the course of a life, to make a worthy biographical statement, and to turn the intimately personal into something of public value. How does the dying donor speak? As murderer, Marxist—or more?

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the relationship between textuality, territory, and ontology among Amazonian cultures, and specifically the Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador, and analyzed the Aycha Yura or "Tree of Flesh" myth and its underlying aesthetic, geographic and ontological qualities.
Abstract: Drawing on narratives and images related to mythology, I explore the relationships between textuality, territory, and ontology among Amazonian cultures, and specifically the Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador. My argument is that the Napo Runa, as well as other indigenous peoples in the Americas, have developed their own complex theories of textuality in which cosmology is inscribed within the body, the social, and the surrounding territorial world. Drawing on the theory of Amazonian perspectivism, I analyze the Aycha Yura or “Tree of Flesh” myth and its underlying aesthetic, geographic, and ontological qualities. This macro-myth intersects with local mythologies of particular trees, species, and spirits, forming a complex shared narrative world of local differentiation, self and other transformations, and experiences of territoriality. An engagement with the ethnographic realities of so-called oral cultures shows the untranslatable ontological contours of their textual worlds, worlds that are distorted and reified by Western notions of orality and literacy. (With supplementary sound files)

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors describe documents as an opaque medium of interaction whose meaning is far from being shared, and which also create doubts as to the identity of the people involved, suggesting that such uncertainty is integral to the Warao's involvement in asymmetrical relations with outsiders, which are inextricably political, economic, and moral.
Abstract: This article, which focuses on relations between Warao Amerindians and nonnative agents, describes documents as an opaque medium of interaction whose meaning is far from being shared, and which also create doubts as to the identity of the people involved. It suggests that such uncertainty is integral to the Warao’s involvement in asymmetrical relations with outsiders, which are inextricably political, economic, and moral. The current situation largely results from past administration by Spanish Catholic missionaries, and from the later involvement of Venezuela’s native population in national politics. Nowadays, documents are used by the Warao to switch between appeals to personal compassion and claims to administrative rights, and bureaucratic dealings are primarily articulated around the performative nature of writing. This also accounts for the mix of hope and anxiety that pervades the Warao’s interactions with nonnatives, when they use the latter’s own technology to impinge on them.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd and proposed a motile conceptualization, which posits truth as an event in which trajectories of divinatory meanings collide.
Abstract: This article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of Ifa divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by Ifa practitioners’ claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, I argue that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographic instance. In particular, it is argued that in order to credit the assumption of divinatory indubitability, representational notions of truth must be discarded in favour of what I call a “motile” conceptualization, which posits truth as an event in which trajectories of divinatory meanings (called “paths” by diviners) collide. In advancing such an analysis, the article exemplifies what I call an “ontographic” approach, dedicated to mapping the ontological premises of native discourse through the production of concepts which, while not the native concepts themselves, comprise their close equivalents. Elaborated in greater detail elsewhere (Holbraad 2012), this is put forward as my take on what the editors of Hau call “ethnographic theory.”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored the shapes taken by joking among the Trumai Indians and other groups of the Xinguan Indigenous Park (Mato Grosso, Brazil) and explored what it is like to be part of such a play where the opposition between the failure and success of an interaction becomes blurred.
Abstract: This article explores the shapes taken by joking among the Trumai Indians and other groups of the Xinguan Indigenous Park (Mato Grosso, Brazil). This social practice often opposes persons who are in open-ended relationships, and can thus be defined as the default mode of relation: while it occurs prototypically between male cross-cousins, it is also common with Indian or non-Indian outsiders. Contrarily, one demonstrates both shame and respect toward real affines. Identifying this system of attitudes gives no account, however, of either the pragmatic properties of joking, nor its specific social efficacy. Joking, in particular, is remarkable by its inescapable ambivalence, both moral and functional. This characteristic is closely linked to the frame of interaction that joking is built upon, which manages, in the same time, to both follow highly conventional patterns and produce deep destabilization. This paper thus tries to explain the paradox of what could be called a predictable uncertainty and convey, partly from my own experience, what it is like to be part of such a play where the opposition between the failure and success of an interaction becomes blurred.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors discuss the historical and political anthropology of outcasts and outlaws, slaves, and barbarians, what is obscured by homo sacer, and what this "limit figure" can bring to light.
Abstract: Agamben’s political philosophy of state power as founded on the expulsion of outcasts, who are embraced as key components of the system precisely by virtue of their potential exclusion, strangely omits such cardinal and long-familiar figures of sociopolitical inequality as the slave and the barbarian. These are neglected despite how they, together, stare us in the face from the very same pages in Aristotle from which Agamben derives his theory of bare life, and despite their key historical role in imperial state ideology and in the formation of empires. Agamben instead resurrects the obscure figure of homo sacer , an ancient Roman form of outlaw interpreted as bare life, mainly for the purpose of rethinking and debating citizenship, exclusion, and the ruse of the “rule of law” in the modern Western state form. As a transhistorical-paradigmatic figure it leaves aside not only its obvious counterparts—slaves and barbarians (whose real-life referents, like homo sacer, are also both historical and contemporary)—but also the pre-state and pre-law excommunication of outcasts. In this article I discuss the historical and political anthropology of outcasts and outlaws, slaves, and barbarians, what is obscured by homo sacer, and what this “limit figure” can bring to light.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors advocate the development of Open Access for anthropological books and journals and critique the way we have ceded control of dissemination to inappropriate commercial concerns that come to stand for what should have been academic criteria.
Abstract: This article consists of three arguments. The first advocates the development of Open Access for anthropological books and journals and critiques the way we have ceded control of dissemination to inappropriate commercial concerns that come to stand for what should have been academic criteria. The second argues that this is best accomplished while being conservative about the process of review, selection, and the canons of scholarship. Third, the article address the emergence of Digital Anthropology, suggesting this has considerable significance for the very conceptualization of anthropology and its future, and suggesting that it can be given definition. But, this should not be confused with the issues of Open Access and review. This is followed by ten helpful and critical comments. In the concluding discussion I respond to these and argue how these points can be taken into account in creating the conditions for a shift to Open Access while defending the concept of Digital Anthropology.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign as discussed by the authors, and this myth of a figurative language composed by icons has deeply influenced Western tradition.
Abstract: For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons—that form the opposite figure of writing—has deeply influenced Western tradition. In this article, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus ) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language—to use Giambattista Vico’s phrase—that would characterize the Native American arts of memory. In this perspective, techniques of memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artifacts.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku ( Anthropology as critique of reality ) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga as discussed by the authors represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the ontological turn in Euro-American anthropology.
Abstract: The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku ( Anthropology as critique of reality ) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the “the ontological turn” in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in “ontological matters,” and it offers an entry point for understanding Japanese interpretations of, and responses to, this set of issues and concerns. The forum comprises an introductory piece by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, outlining the histories within Japanese anthropology that led to Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku , an interview conducted by Jensen with Professor Kasuga on his intellectual genealogy in the context of Japanese anthropology, and a translated and edited chapter from Anthropology as critique of reality , Miho Ishii’s “Acting with things: Self-poiesis, actuality, and contingency in the formation of divine worlds.” These pieces are followed by commentaries from Marilyn Strathern, whose work provides a key source of inspiration for the Japanese turn to ontology, and Annelise Riles, who has had long-standing relations with Japanese anthropology, including Professor Kasuga.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a lecture of reflections on the alterity of power (and vice versa) inspired by Raymond Firth's extraordinarily rich ethnographic corpus on Tikopia is presented.
Abstract: This is a lecture of reflections on the alterity of power (and vice versa) inspired by Raymond Firth's extraordinarily rich ethnographic corpus on Tikopia–an inexhaustible anthropological treasure. The dangerous overseas voyaging (or traveling about the skies, as Tikopians deemed it), the powers ascribed to missionaries and other foreigners, the overseas origins of leading chiefs: these and other such attractions and assimilations of the foreign testify to the potency of transcendent realms and beings. The like can be documented for other Austronesian societies. Indeed, as summarily indicated here, the Austronesians figure in a world wide distribution of stranger-kingship. Moreover, the same notions of the powers inherent in alterity help account for the veneration accorded to colonial figures such as Sir James Brooke in Sarawak or Captain Cook in Hawai'i, although the different fates of the two–the rajadom of Brooke and the martyrdom of Cook–also indicate that a similar structure can underwrite quite different contingent outcomes.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first version of On not understanding symbols, half of which is found only in a hand written form, was never published but nonetheless is an important precursor for much of Keesing's later critiques on the anthropology of meaning and work on Kwaio religion.
Abstract: Roger Keesing wrote the first drafts of On not understanding symbols in 1978. After several versions of the manuscript circulated among his colleagues, Keesing decided to revise his analysis extensively. He eventually included snippets of the paper’s ethnographic material in some of his later ethnography on Kwaio religion (1982). His final version of On not understanding symbols , half of which is found only in a hand written form, was never published but nonetheless is an important precursor for much of Keesing’s later critiques on the “anthropology of meaning," and work on Kwaio religion. Keesing’s final version of the manuscript, from which this paper is based, is found in Roger Keesing’s Papers (MSS 0427) in the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. Jordan Haug transcribed and edited the manuscript. Minor modifications to the text were made to point the reader to relevant supporting material. Citations for references published after 1978 have been added in the editing process to give a broader sense of where this particular paper lies in Keesing’s oeuvre and the broader ethnographic literature on the Kwaio. David Akin provided critical comments and inspiration in the editing process.