The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology [[Enhanced Credo edition].] 9781784025168, 178402516X

Table of contents :
Part 4 Futures / Edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand. Introduction --
Anthropologies to Come / Trevor H.J. Marchand --
4.1 Neo-Darwinism, Biology and the Brain Sciences --
4.1.1 Anthropology and Neo-Darwinism / Robin I.M. Dunbar --
4.1.2 Cognition, Evolution and the Future of Social Anthropology / Harvey Whitehouse --
4.1.3 Neuroanthropology / Greg Downey --
4.1.4 Knowledge in Hand: Explorations of Brain, Hand and Tool / Trevor H.J. Marchand --
4.2 After Development / Environment, Food, Energy, Disaster --
4.2.1 Environment and Society: Political Ecologies and Moral Futures / James Fairhead and Melissa Leach --
4.2.2 Anthropological Encounters with Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation / Laura M. Rival --
4.2.3 New Directions in the Anthropology of Food / Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West --
4.2.4 Water, Land and Territory / Veronica Strang --
4.2.5 The Anthropology of Disaster Aftermath / Edward Simpson --
4.3 Demographics, Health and the Transforming Body --
4.3.1 Demographies in Flux / Sophie Day --
4.3.2 New Medical Anthropology / Helen Lambert --
4.3.3 The Anthropology of Drugs / Axel Klein --
4.3.4 Transforming Bodies: The Embodiment of Sexual and Gender Difference / Andrea Cornwall --
4.4 New Technologies and Materialities --
4.4.1 New Materials and New Technologies: Science, Design and the Challenge to Anthropology / Susanne Küchler --
4.4.2 Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Science, Subject and Symbiosis / Ron Eglash --
4.4.3 From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation / Dominic Boyer --
4.4.4 Anthropology in the New Millennium / Christopher Pinney --
Afterword: A Last Word on Futures- Marilyn Strathern (Life President of the ASA). Part 3 Methods / Edited by the late Olivia Harris and Veronica Strang. Introduction --
Issues of Method- Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang --
3.1 Fieldwork Since the 1980s: Total Immersion and its Discontents / Janet Carsten --
3.2 Between Routine and Rupture: The Archive as Field Event / Tristan Platt --
3.3 The Role of Language in Ethnographic Method / Susan Gal --
3.4 The Ethnographic Interview in an Age of Globalization / Joshua Barker --
3.5 Interpreting Texts and Performances / Karin Barber --
3.6 Blurred Visions: Reflecting Visual Anthropology / Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright --
3.7 Artefacts in Anthropology / Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond --
3.8 Knowledge and Experimental Practice: A Dialogue between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies / Penelope Harvey --
3.9a Twenty-first Century Ethics for Audited Anthropologists / Nayanika Mookherjee --
3.9b Ethics Out of the Ordinary / Michael Lambek --
3.10 Researching Zones of Conflict and War / Paul Richards --
3.11 Conflicts and Compromises? Experiences of Doing Anthropology at the Interface of Public Policy / Tim Allen and Melissa Parker --
3.12 From Participant-Observation to Participant-Collaboration: Some Observations on Participatory-cum-Collaborative Approaches / Paul Sillitoe --
3.13 Comparative Methods in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Today / Andre Gingrich. Part 2 Places / Edited by Mark Nuttall. Introduction --
Place, Region, Culture, History: From Area Studies to a Globalized World / Mark Nuttall --
2.1 The Circumpolar North: Locating the Arctic and Sub-Arctic / Mark Nuttall --
2.2 Replacing Europe / Sarah Green --
2.3 Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology / David Pratten --
2.4 Refiguring the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa / Glenn Bowman --
2.5 Southwest and Central Asia: Comparison, Integration or Beyond? / Magnus Marsden --
2.6 South Asia: Intimacy and Identities, Politics and Poverty / Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery --
2.7 Modernization and its Aftermath: The Anthropology of Japan / D.P. Martinez --
2.8 The Emerging Socio-Cultural Anthropology of Emerging China / J.S. Eades --
2.9 Archipelagic Southeast Asia / Roy Ellen --
2.10 Australasian Contrasts / Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry --
Australia / Nicolas Peterson --
Melanesia / Don Gardner --
New Zealand/Aotearoa / James Urry --
2.11 Two Indigenous Americas / Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong --
North America / Pauline Turner Strong --
South America / Kathleen Lowrey --
2.12 North and Latin American National Societies from a Continental Perspective / John Gledhill and Peter Wade --
2.13 Migration and other Forms of Movement / Vered Amit --
2.14 The Cosmopolitan World / Nigel Rapport --
2.15 The Indigenous World / Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli. Preface: The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth / John Gledhill (Chair of the ASA 2005-2009) and James Fairhead (Chair of the ASA 2009-2013) --
Foreword: Thinking Anthropologically, about British Social Anthropology / John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff --
Introduction --
Flying Theory, Grounded Method / Richard Fardon (Chair of the ASA 2001-2005) --
Part 1 Interfaces / Edited by Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson. Introduction / Anthropology's Interdisciplinary Connections / Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson --
1.1 Anthropology and Linguistics / Alessandro Duranti --
1.2 Anthropology and Psychology / Christina Toren --
1.3 Anthropology of Biomedicine and Bioscience / Sarah Franklin --
1.4 Anthropology and Art / Arnd Schneider --
1.5 Anthropology, Media and Cultural Studies / Kevin Latham --
1.6 Anthropology and Public Policy / Cris Shore --
1.7 Anthropology and Law / Sally Engle Merry --
1.8 Anthropology and History / Jane K. Cowan --
1.9 Anthropology and Archaeology / Julian Thomas --
1.10 Anthropology, Economics and Development Studies / Keith Hart --
1.11 Anthropology and the Political / Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer --
1.12 Anthropology and Religious Studies / Martin Mills --
1.13 Anthropology and Museums / Brian Durrans --
1.14 Anthropology and Gender Studies / Henrietta L. Moore --
1.15 Anthropology and the Postcolonial / Richard Werbner --
1.16 Anthropology and Literature / C.W. Watson.

Citation preview

The SAGE Handbook of

Social Anthropology

Volume 1

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The SAGE Handbook of

Social Anthropology

Volume 1

Edited by

Richard Fardon, Olivia Harris, Trevor H. J. Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang and Richard A. Wilson Published with the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth

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SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura RoadA New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Editor: Robert Rojek Editorial assistant: Alana Clogan Production editor: Katherine Haw Copyeditor: Cenveo Publisher Services Proofreader: Cenveo Publisher Services Marketing manager: Michael Ainsley Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by: Cenveo Publisher Services Printed by: Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, India

VOLUME 1 Preface © John Gledhill and James Fairhead 2012 Foreword © John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff 2012 Introduction © Richard Fardon 2012 Part 1 Introduction © Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson 2012 Chapter 1.1 © Alessandro Duranti 2012 Chapter 1.2 © Christina Toren 2012 Chapter 1.3 © Sarah Franklin 2012 Chapter 1.4 © Arnd Schneider 2012 Chapter 1.5 © Kevin Latham 2012 Chapter 1.6 © Cris Shore 2012 Chapter 1.7 © Sally Engle Merry 2012 Chapter 1.8 © Jane K. Cowan 2012 Chapter 1.9 © Julian Thomas 2012 Chapter 1.10 © Keith Hart 2012 Chapter 1.11 © Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer 2012 Chapter 1.12 © Martin Mills 2012 Chapter 1.13 © Brian Durrans 2012 Chapter 1.14 © Henrietta L. Moore 2012 Chapter 1.15 © Richard Werbner 2012 Chapter 1.16 © C.W. Watson 2012 Part 2 Introduction and Chapter 2.1 © Mark Nuttall 2012 Chapter 2.2 © Sarah Green 2012 Chapter 2.3 © David Pratten 2012 Chapter 2.4 © Glenn Bowman 2012 Chapter 2.5 © Magnus Marsden 2012 Chapter 2.6 © Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery 2012 Chapter 2.7 © D.P. Martinez 2012 Chapter 2.8 © J.S. Eades 2012 Chapter 2.9 © Roy Ellen 2012 Chapter 2.10 © Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry 2012 Chapter 2.11 © Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong 2012 Chapter 2.12 © John Gledhill and Peter Wade 2012 Chapter 2.13 © Vered Amit 2012 Chapter 2.14 © Nigel Rapport 2012 Chapter 2.15 © Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli 2012 VOLUME 2 Part 3 Introduction © Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang 2012 Chapter 3.1 © Janet Carsten 2012 Chapter 3.2 © Tristan Platt 2012 Chapter 3.3 © Susan Gal 2012 Chapter 3.4 © Joshua Barker 2012 Chapter 3.5 © Karin Barber 2012 Chapter 3.6 © Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright 2012 Chapter 3.7 © Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond 2012 Chapter 3.8 © Penelope Harvey 2012 Chapter 3.9a © Nayanika Mookherjee 2012 Chapter 3.9b © Michael Lambek 2012 Chapter 3.10 © Paul Richards 2012 Chapter 3.11 © Tim Allen and Melissa Parker 2012 Chapter 3.12 © Paul Sillitoe 2012 Chapter 3.13 © Andre Gingrich 2012 Part 4 Introduction © Trevor H.J. Marchand 2012 Chapter 4.1.1 © Robin I.M. Dunbar 2012 Chapter 4.1.2 © Harvey Whitehouse 2012 Chapter 4.1.3 © Greg Downey 2012 Chapter 4.1.4 © Trevor H.J. Marchand 2012 Chapter 4.2.1 © James Fairhead and Melissa Leach 2012 Chapter 4.2.2 © Laura M. Rival 2012 Chapter 4.2.3 © Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West 2012 Chapter 4.2.4 © Veronica Strang 2012 Chapter 4.2.5 © Edward Simpson 2012 Chapter 4.3.1 © Sophie Day 2012 Chapter 4.3.2 © Helen Lambert 2012 Chapter 4.3.3 © Axel Klein 2012 Chapter 4.3.4 © Andrea Cornwall 2012 Chapter 4.4.1 © Susanne Küchler 2012 Chapter 4.4.2 © Ron Eglash 2012 Chapter 4.4.3 © Dominic Boyer 2012 Chapter 4.4.4 © Christopher Pinney 2012 Afterword © Marilyn Strathern 2012 First published 2012 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937785 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84787-547-1

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Contents

VOLUME 1 Notes on Contributors Preface: The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth John Gledhill (Chair of the ASA 2005–2009) and James Fairhead (Chair of the ASA 2009–2013) Foreword: Thinking Anthropologically, About British Social Anthropology John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff Introduction − Flying Theory, Grounded Method Richard Fardon (Chair of the ASA 2001−2005) PART 1 INTERFACES Edited by Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson Introduction − Anthropology’s Interdisciplinary Connections Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson

xi xxv

xxviii

1

7

9

1.1

Anthropology and Linguistics Alessandro Duranti

12

1.2

Anthropology and Psychology Christina Toren

27

1.3

Anthropology of Biomedicine and Bioscience Sarah Franklin

42

1.4

Anthropology and Art Arnd Schneider

56

1.5

Anthropology, Media and Cultural Studies Kevin Latham

72

1.6

Anthropology and Public Policy Cris Shore

89

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vi

CONTENTS

1.7

Anthropology and Law Sally Engle Merry

105

1.8

Anthropology and History Jane K. Cowan

121

1.9

Anthropology and Archaeology Julian Thomas

138

1.10 Anthropology, Economics and Development Studies Keith Hart

154

1.11 Anthropology and the Political Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer

168

1.12 Anthropology and Religious Studies Martin Mills

183

1.13 Anthropology and Museums Brian Durrans

197

1.14 Anthropology and Gender Studies Henrietta L. Moore

212

1.15 Anthropology and the Postcolonial Richard Werbner

227

1.16 Anthropology and Literature C.W. Watson

248

PART 2 PLACES Edited by Mark Nuttall

263

Introduction − Place, Region, Culture, History: From Area Studies to a Globalized World Mark Nuttall

265

2.1 The Circumpolar North: Locating the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Mark Nuttall

270

2.2 Replacing Europe Sarah Green

286

2.3 Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology David Pratten

308

2.4 Refiguring the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Glenn Bowman

324

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CONTENTS

vii

2.5

Southwest and Central Asia: Comparison, Integration or Beyond? Magnus Marsden

340

2.6

South Asia: Intimacy and Identities, Politics and Poverty Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery

366

2.7

Modernization and its Aftermath: The Anthropology of Japan D.P. Martinez

388

2.8

The Emerging Socio-Cultural Anthropology of Emerging China J.S. Eades

405

2.9

Archipelagic Southeast Asia Roy Ellen

422

2.10 Australasian Contrasts Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry

443

Australia Nicolas Peterson

443

Melanesia Don Gardner

448

New Zealand/Aotearoa James Urry

453

2.11 Two Indigenous Americas Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong

465

North America Pauline Turner Strong

465

South America Kathleen Lowrey

472

2.12 North and Latin American National Societies from a Continental Perspective John Gledhill and Peter Wade

487

2.13 Migration and Other Forms of Movement Vered Amit

511

2.14 The Cosmopolitan World Nigel Rapport

523

2.15 The Indigenous World Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli

538

Name Index Subject Index

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547 577

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viii

CONTENTS

VOLUME 2 PART 3 METHODS Edited by the late Olivia Harris and Veronica Strang

1

Introduction − Issues of Method Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang

3

3.1

Fieldwork Since the 1980s: Total Immersion and its Discontents Janet Carsten

7

3.2

Between Routine and Rupture: The Archive as Field Event Tristan Platt

21

3.3

The Role of Language in Ethnographic Method Susan Gal

38

3.4

The Ethnographic Interview in an Age of Globalization Joshua Barker

54

3.5

Interpreting Texts and Performances Karin Barber

69

3.6

Blurred Visions: Reflecting Visual Anthropology Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright

84

3.7

Artefacts in Anthropology Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond

3.8

Knowledge and Experimental Practice: A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies Penelope Harvey

101

115

3.9a Twenty-first Century Ethics for Audited Anthropologists Nayanika Mookherjee

130

3.9b Ethics Out of the Ordinary Michael Lambek

141

3.10 Researching Zones of Conflict and War Paul Richards

153

3.11 Conflicts and Compromises? Experiences of Doing Anthropology at the Interface of Public Policy Tim Allen and Melissa Parker

168

3.12 From Participant-Observation to Participant-Collaboration: Some Observations on Participatory-cum-Collaborative Approaches Paul Sillitoe

183

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3.13 Comparative Methods in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Today Andre Gingrich

201

PART 4 FUTURES Edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand

215

Introduction – Anthropologies to Come Trevor H.J. Marchand Section 4.1

Neo-Darwinism, Biology and the Brain Sciences

217

223

4.1.1 Anthropology and Neo-Darwinism Robin I.M. Dunbar

225

4.1.2 Cognition, Evolution and the Future of Social Anthropology Harvey Whitehouse

234

4.1.3 Neuroanthropology Greg Downey

243

4.1.4 Knowledge in Hand: Explorations of Brain, Hand and Tool Trevor H.J. Marchand

261

Section 4.2 After Development − Environment, Food, Energy, Disaster

273

4.2.1 Environment and Society: Political Ecologies and Moral Futures James Fairhead and Melissa Leach

275

4.2.2 Anthropological Encounters with Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation Laura M. Rival

286

4.2.3 New Directions in the Anthropology of Food Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West

299

4.2.4 Water, Land and Territory Veronica Strang

312

4.2.5 The Anthropology of Disaster Aftermath Edward Simpson

329

Section 4.3

339

Demographics, Health and the Transforming Body

4.3.1 Demographies in Flux Sophie Day

341

4.3.2 New Medical Anthropology Helen Lambert

353

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CONTENTS

4.3.3 The Anthropology of Drugs Axel Klein

365

4.3.4 Transforming Bodies: The Embodiment of Sexual and Gender Difference Andrea Cornwall

377

Section 4.4

389

New Technologies and Materialities

4.4.1 New Materials and New Technologies: Science, Design and the Challenge to Anthropology Susanne Küchler

391

4.4.2 Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Science, Subject and Symbiosis Ron Eglash

400

4.4.3 From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation Dominic Boyer

411

4.4.4 Anthropology in the New Millennium Christopher Pinney

423

Afterword: A Last Word on Futures Marilyn Strathern (Life President of the ASA)

431

Name Index Subject Index

437 467

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Notes on Contributors

Tim Allen is Professor in Development Anthropology at the Department of International Development, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has carried out long-term field research in Sudan and Uganda and has also researched in Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. His books include Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army (2006); Culture and Global Change (1999, edited with Tracey Skelton) and Poverty and Development (2000, 2nd edition, edited with Alan Thomas). Vered Amit is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University. She has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Canada and the Cayman Islands. Much of her research has featured an ongoing preoccupation with the workings of and intersections between different forms of transnational mobility. Recent publications include Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Migration (edited 2006) as well as Young Men in Uncertain Times (2011, edited with Noel Dyck). Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She specializes in the anthropology of verbal arts and popular culture, focusing on the Yoruba-speaking area of western Nigeria. Among her more recent books are The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000) and The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (2007). Joshua Barker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include urban anthropology and the social anthropology of new media. His earlier research focused on policing and vigilantism in the city of Bandung, Indonesia. More recently he has published several articles focusing on new media and the making of Indonesian urban imaginaries. Glenn Bowman has researched in Jerusalem, between 1983 and 1985, and since then in the mixed Christian−Muslim town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. He taught at University College London, before moving to Kent in 1991 where he is Senior Lecturer, and convenes the MA in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity. Bowman is past editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and serves on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory and Focaal.

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Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He has written widely on intersections of media and knowledge, including Understanding Media (2007). His next book, The Life Informatic, concerns the transformation of news journalism in the era of digital information. He is currently researching the politics of energy transition in Latin America and Europe. Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997), and After Kinship (2004), and editor of Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000) and Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (2007). Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. Her research interests include religious conversion, ethnic citizenship, materiality, and human−environment relations in Malaysian Borneo. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship and the Matter of Religion in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (2012), and is currently co-editing, with Mark Elliott, a volume on Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Their current research in postapartheid South Africa is on crime, policing, and the workings of the state, on democracy and difference, and on the nature of postcolonial politics. Their recent co-authored books include Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), Zombies et frontières à l’ère néolibérale. Le cas de l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid (2010), and Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011). Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex where she works mainly on the anthropology of democracy, sexualities, rights and gender. Recent publications include Development With a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development (2009, edited with Sonia Corrêa and Susie Jolly) and Men and Development: Politicising Masculinity (2011, edited with Jerker Edström and Alan Greig). Jane K. Cowan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (2000), and Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (2001, edited with Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson). Her research interests include gender, embodiment and performance, culture and rights, and histories of transnational engagements around minority and human rights, from activism to international monitoring, with a current focus on petitions to the League of Nations. Rupert Cox is a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at Manchester University whose interests revolve around the relationships between technology, the senses, and media practices, both as

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subjects of study in themselves and as the means to link artwork with anthropological enquiry. In Japan, he researches into such areas as the representation and practice of the Zen arts, the cultural history of the idea of copying, and the political ecology of aircraft noise. His latest publication is Beyond Text: Critical Practice and Sensory Anthropology (forthcoming, edited with Christopher Wright and Andrew Irving). Jennifer Curtis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles based on her doctoral research in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which traced relationships among grassroots activism and transnational norms regarding human rights and conflict resolution. She is currently writing a monograph on Northern Ireland’s transformation into a model for peace-making, incorporating prior research and her current work on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activism. Sophie Day is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has conducted research in both South Asia (Ladakh) and Europe (mostly London). She is author of On the Game: Women and Sex Work (2007), and co-editor of Lilies of the Field (1999, with Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Michael Stewart), and Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe (2004, with Helen Ward). Greg Downey is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. His research has focused on martial arts and rugby in Brazil, the United States, Australia and Oceania, focusing especially on biological, behavioural, perceptual and neurological adaptations to diverse training regimens. He is author of Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (2005) and editor of the forthcoming volume, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (with Daniel D. Lende). Robin (R.I.M) Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and co-Director of the British Academy’s Centenary Research Project whose focus is on what makes us human and how we came to be that way. His broader research interests lie in the evolution of sociality in mammals (with particular reference to ungulates, primates and humans). Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and in the United States, where he studied political discourse, verbal performance, and human universals such as greetings. He has written on intentionality, agency, linguistic relativity, and, more recently, the role of improvisation in jazz and everyday interaction. He is a past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Brian Durrans was until 2007 senior curator of Asian ethnography in the British Museum. He has curated many exhibitions, most recently Posing Questions: Being & Image in Asia & Europe (Brunei Gallery, the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS], 2010), part of a major Asia-Europe museum initiative which he co-led with a Japanese colleague. His writings have ranged over museology, collecting, representations and Asian material culture. He is

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

currently pursuing further research on portraiture, and leads a long-term collaborative project on the anthropology of time capsules. Jerry (J. S.) Eades is Professor and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent. His current research interests include migration, urbanization, tourism and the environment in the Asia Pacific region. Ron Eglash received his BS in Cybernetics, his MS in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. A Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship enabled his field research on African ethnomathematics, published as African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (1999). His later work, funded by the NSF, used computational simulations of cultural practices in African American, Native American and Latino communities for STEM education. He is now a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Roy (R.F.) Ellen is Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at the University of Kent. He has written extensively in the fields of environmental anthropology, cultural cognition and ethnobiology, as well as having conducted fieldwork in various parts of island Southeast Asia. He was editor of the inaugural volume of the ASA Research Methods Series, Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (1984), and Honorary Secretary of the ASA (1982−85). Recent books include On the Edge of the Banda Zone (2003), The Categorical Impulse (2006), and two edited volumes: Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies (2007) and Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind (2006, Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute). He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2007 to 2011. James Fairhead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex and current Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2009−2013). His research has considered agricultural and environmental knowledge and practices in West and Central Africa and their encounters with the world of science, international development and conservation. A trilogy of books from this includes Misreading the African Landscape (1996, with Melissa Leach). More recently he has expanded in taking an ethnographic approach to the conduct of medical science, published as Vaccine Anxieties (2007, with Melissa Leach). Richard Fardon, Professor of West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2001−2005). His recent books have been about art and ritual in Cameroon and Nigeria, where he has researched − via fieldwork, archives and museum/art collections − since the mid-1970s: Column to Volume (2005, with Christine Stelzig), Lela in Bali (2006), Fusions (2007) and Central Nigeria Unmasked (2011, with Marla C. Berns and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir). Sarah Franklin is the Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and the author of numerous publications concerning kinship and new reproductive technologies. Her most recent book is Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007). With Margaret Lock she

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co-edited Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of Biomedicine (2003). Her current work concerns the history of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer and is forthcoming with Duke University Press under the title Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship. Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Language Shift (1979), co-author of The Politics of Gender After Socialism (2000), and editor of Gender and Circulation a Special Issue of Eastern European Politics and Societies (2006). As co-editor of Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (2001), and in numerous articles, she has written about the political economy of language. Her continuing ethnographic work in Europe explores the relationship between linguistic practices, semiotic processes and the construction of social life. Don Gardner recently retired from the Australian National University and teaches part-time at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He has conducted fieldwork among Mian people, of central New Guinea, since 1975. His interests focus on social theory and the naturalistic analysis of socio-historical change. His most recent publication is ‘The scope of “meaning” and the avoidance of sylleptical reason: a plea for some modest distinctions’, Ethnos, 75 (2010). Andre Gingrich directs the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) and has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago and at the Santa Fe School for Advanced Research. He co-authored One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology (2005, with F. Barth, R. Parkin, and S. Silverman). His field research in Southwestern Arabia and Central Europe led to Anthropology, by Comparison (2002, edited with R. G. Fox) and recently, to ‘Warriors of Honor, Warriors of Faith’, in Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss (eds), Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach (2011). John Gledhill, Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2005−2009). His extensive fieldwork in Mexico and Brazil is currently focused on security issues. Publications include Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo (1991); Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty (1995); Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics (2nd edition, 2000); and Cultura y Desafío en Ostula: Cuatro Siglos de Autonomía Indígena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Michoacán (2004). Sarah Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has studied location, borders and spatial relations throughout her career. She has carried out research in various parts of Europe, including the Balkan region, particularly the borders of Greece, and has also researched issues in London and Manchester. She is author of Notes from the Balkans (2005) and Urban Amazons (1997). Olivia Harris was Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she moved from Goldsmiths, University of London. Following fieldwork in Bolivia, she wrote on gender, the family, exchange, labour and temporalities. She published To Make the Earth Bear Fruit (2000) and many articles. With Tristan Platt and

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Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne she authored Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas (2006). Future research would have included the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is Co-Director of the Human Economy Group, University of Pretoria; Hon. Professor of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban; and Founder, Open Anthropology Cooperative (http://openanthcoop.ning.com). His recent books include Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (2009, edited with C. Hann), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010, edited with J-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani) and Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique (2011, with C. Hann). Penelope Harvey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester and co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Her ethnographic research in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom has focused on engineering practice, state formation, information technologies and the politics of language. With Jeanette Edwards and Peter Wade she edited Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies (2010) and Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice (2007, ASA Monograph 43). Robert K. Hitchcock is an anthropologist and a faculty member in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University. He is also an adjunct professor of Anthropology at MSU and at the University of New Mexico, and a board member of the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF). His work focuses on human rights and development among indigenous peoples in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. His most recent book is The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa (2011, with Megan Biesele). Patricia Jeffery, Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, has held several visiting positions in Delhi, including at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the University of Delhi. She has been conducting fieldwork in north India and Pakistan since 1970. She is a member of the British Association for South Asian Studies Council and of the British Academy South Asia Panel. Her recent publications include Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (2005, edited with Radhika Chopra) and Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility and Women’s Status in India (2006, with Roger Jeffery). Roger Jeffery, Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also Dean for India, has held visiting positions at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Institute for Economic Growth, in New Delhi. He has carried out fieldwork in rural north India several times since 1982. He is President of the European Association for South Asian Studies. His most recent books are Change and Diversity: Economics, Politics and Society in Contemporary India (2010, edited with Anthony Heath) and Degrees Without Freedom (2008, with Craig Jeffrey and Patricia Jeffery). Axel Klein is a Lecturer in Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Kent, and has particular interest in the social role of ‘peculiar substances’. He has studied the regulation, celebration

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and condemnation of drugs in different countries and contexts. He has worked at the interface of academia, policy and practice, and with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, UN and EU agencies. He is the author of Drugs and the World (2008), the editor of Drugs and Alcohol Today, and he has written on cannabis and cocaine in the Caribbean, the globalization of khat, and diverse policy issues. Jakob A. Klein is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has carried out fieldwork in the southern Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Kunming, and has published journal articles and book chapters on Chinese regional cuisines, food consumption and food activism. He is the editor, with Kevin Latham and Stuart Thompson, of Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China (2006). Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. She has worked on issues of material culture since her doctoral research on the Malanggan sculptures of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and published widely on art, memory and political economies of knowledge. Her research during the last decade, which originated within a comparative project on the uptake of cloth and clothing across the Pacific, has extended to Euro-American knowledge, specifically of new materials and new technologies, and their impact on concepts of innovation and of the future in society. Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto and previously professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of three ethnographic monographs of the Western Indian Ocean, including The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (2002) and editor of several collections, including From Method to Modesty (a special section of Culture, 1991); Illness and Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture (2004, with Paul Antze) and Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (2010). Helen Lambert is Reader in Medical Anthropology at Bristol University. Her current research focuses on the pasts, presents and futures of medical formations in India and on public health issues, including HIV and suicide. She has also worked on kinship, gender and corporeality and on notions of ‘evidence’ in medicine and anthropology. Her most recent book-length publication is Social Bodies (2009, edited with Maryon McDonald). Kevin Latham is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has researched extensively on Chinese media, consumption and popular culture, most recently focusing on new media and communications technologies, as well as newspaper and television journalism in Guangzhou and Beijing. He is the author of Pop Culture China! Media, Arts and Lifestyle (2007). His earlier research was on Chinese theatre and its audiences in Hong Kong. Melissa Leach is a social anthropologist and a Professorial Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, where she directs the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to

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Sustainability) Centre. Her research focuses on knowledge, power and policy in relation to environmental and health issues, especially in West Africa. Recent books include Vaccine Anxieties (2007, with James Fairhead); Epidemics: Science, Governance and Social Justice (2010, edited with Sarah Dry), and Dynamic Sustainabilities (2010, with Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling). Kathleen Lowrey is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Since 1997 she has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia and Paraguay with Guaraní-speaking communities of the Gran Chaco region. Her previous publications, based on that research, are concerned with ethnohistory, political and economic anthropology and the anthropology of science. At present she is at work on a book manuscript, Native Science Fictions: Experimental Anthropology in the North and South American Heartlands. Trevor H. J. Marchand is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Previously a practising architect, he has undertaken fieldwork with masons in South Arabia and West Africa, and most recently with woodworkers and furniture makers in London. He is the author of Minaret Building & Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001), The Masons of Djenné (2009) and The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (forthcoming), the editor of Making Knowledge (2010), and co-producer of the documentary film Future of Mud. He was Publications Officer of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2004−2008). Magnus Marsden is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has conducted fieldwork in northern Pakistan, and, more recently, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. His recent publications include Living Islam (2005) and Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (2011, with Benjamin Hopkins). Dolores (D.P.) Martinez, Reader in Anthropology with Reference to Japan at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, has written on such diverse topics as religion, gender, tourism, sports, popular culture and film. Her recent publications include Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema (2009), Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village (2004), Documenting the Beijing Olympics (2010, edited with Kevin Latham), and Football: From England to the World (2008, edited with Projit Mukharji). Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology at New York University and President-elect of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai’i (2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (2009) and The Practice of Human Rights (2007, edited with Mark Goodale). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai’i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to socio-legal scholarship in 2007, and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. Martin Mills is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. His interests include the institutional and ceremonial life of monasticism and state in Tibet and the Himalaya, with a particular

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focus on the constitution of personhood. He is author of Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism (2003). Nayanika Mookherjee is Reader in Social Anthropology at Durham University, and the Ethics Officer (2007−2012) of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA). She has published extensively on the anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics, including The Aesthetics of Nation (2011, edited with Chris Pinney, Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) and The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War (forthcoming). Henrietta L. Moore holds the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is a leading theorist of gender in social anthropology and has developed a distinctive approach to the analysis of the interrelations of material and symbolic gender systems, embodiment and performance, and identity and sexuality. Her long-term research programme with Africa has focused on gender, livelihood strategies, social transformation and symbolic systems. She was Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) from 1991 to 1994. Mark Nuttall is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has carried out extensive fieldwork and research in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Scotland and Finland. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of the Arctic (2005), co-editor of Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (2009), and author of Pipeline Dreams: People, Environment, and the Arctic Energy Frontier (2010). Melissa Parker is Director of the Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. She has undertaken anthropological research in Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana and the UK on a wide range of global health issues including HIV/AIDS, tropical diseases, female circumcision, and health and healing in the aftermath of war. Her publications include Learning from HIV/AIDS (2003, edited with George Ellison and Cathy Campbell) and The Anthropology of Public Health (2006, edited with Ian Harper, Special Issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science). Nicolas Peterson is Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He has a long-standing interest in Australian Aboriginal anthropology, land and sea tenure, economic anthropology, Fourth World people and the state and the history of the discipline in Australia. His most recent book is The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (2008, edited with Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby). Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. He has been conducting ethnographic research in central India intermittently since 1982. His most recent book is Photography and Anthropology (2011). Tristan Platt is Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of St Andrews. He has written on State, mining and rural society in the Andes, and present uses of the Andean

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past. With Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and Olivia Harris he authored Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas (2006). Recent research topics include Bolivian negotiations with nineteenth-century globalization as represented by the Rothschilds’ quicksilver monopoly. Johan Pottier is Professor of African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He specializes in the social dynamics of food security; media representations of conflict; and humanitarian intervention. Book-length publications include Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late 20th Century (2002), and Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security (1999). His current research addresses aspects of urban food security in Lilongwe (Malawi) and Kampala (Uganda). David Pratten is Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Africa; and Fellow of St Antony’s College. He is the author of The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (2007) and is current co-editor of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies; he has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He served as Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists (1994−1998), and as President of the Anthropology and Archaeology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2001−2002). His most recent books are Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (2008), and the edited volumes Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification (2010), and Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place (2010, with Solrun Williksen). Paul Richards is an Emeritus Professor of Wageningen University. In 2011 he was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Formerly he was Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has carried out extensive field research in Sierra Leone, and is author of Fighting for the Rain Forest (1996). His current research on the origins of civil wars in Upper West Africa is trans-boundary and inter-disciplinary in character. Laura M. Rival, University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Nature, Society and Development at Oxford University, pursues research interests in Amerindian conceptualizations of nature and society, historical and political ecology, indigenous peoples, development, and environmental and conservation policies. Her writings include Trekking through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (2002), Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière (2001, edited) and The Social Life of Trees. Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (1998, edited). She is preparing a book on Latin American food systems. Amiria Salmond is a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland and International Co-Investigator on the Artefacts of Encounter project at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. A former curator at the Museum, she has written

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books and articles on artefact-oriented theory and methods in anthropology, including Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (2005), and was co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (2007). Maria Sapignoli is an Italian anthropologist who is finalizing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on indigenous peoples, identity, and the politics of indigenous organizations at the local and global level, with particular reference to the San and Bakgalagadi of the Central Kalahari, Botswana. She is the author of ‘Indigeneity and the expert: negotiating identity in the case of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve’, Law and Anthropology (2009). Arnd Schneider is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His books include Futures Lost: Identity and Nostalgia Among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (2000), Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (2006), and as editor (with Chris Wright) Contemporary Art and Anthropology (2006) and Between Art and Anthropology (2010). He co-organized the international conferences Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology (2003, Tate Modern) and Performance, Art and Anthropology (2009, Musée du Quai Branly). Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His research interests include political anthropology, the European Union, and the anthropology of policy and organizations. He is author and editor of numerous books including Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000), Elite Cultures (ASA Monographs 38, 2004, edited with Stephen Nugent), Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (2005, edited with Dieter Haller) and Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Power (2011, edited with Susan Wright and Davide Pero). His current project is a study of university reform, neoliberalism and globalization. Paul Sillitoe is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University and Shell Chair of Sustainable Development at Qatar University. A champion of social anthropology in development, he seeks to further its incorporation into programmes, particularly focusing on environmental issues in the context of sustainable livelihood initiatives and appropriate technologies, and has experience of working with several international development agencies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Pacific region and is involved in projects in South Asia, and is currently working in the Gulf region on sustainable development initiatives. Edward Simpson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research interests are in politics, natural disasters and social change in western India. He is the author of Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean (2006), editor with Kai Kresse of Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (2008) and with Aparna Kapadia of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (2010). Jonathan Spencer is Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of many articles on politics, nationalism, religion and history,

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especially in Sri Lanka where he has carried out research since the early 1980s. His most recent book is Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia (2007). Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Specializing in human−environmental relations, she has written extensively on water, land and resource issues in Australia and the United Kingdom. Her publications include The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water (2009); and Ownership and Appropriation (ASA Monographs 47, 2011, edited with Mark Busse). Marilyn Strathern, DBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, is Life President of the ASA. Her interests have long been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. Projects over the last two decades are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, and intellectual and cultural property rights, while ‘critique of good practice’ has been the umbrella under which she has written about audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity. Some of these themes are brought together in the volume Kinship, Law and the Unexpected (2005). Pauline Turner Strong is Director of the Humanities Institute and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on historical and contemporary representations of American Indians in popular culture, policy debates, and social movements as well as scholarship. Her books include Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (1999), American Indians and the American Imaginary (2012), and a co-edited volume, New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations (2006). Julian Thomas is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester. His principal research interests are in the Neolithic of Britain and Europe, the theory and philosophy of archaeology, and the relationship between archaeology and anthropology. He is a Vice President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His recent authored books are Understanding the Neolithic (1999), Archaeology and Modernity (2004), and Place and Memory: Excavations at the Pict’s Knowe, Holywood and Holm Farm (2007). Christina Toren is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is trained in both psychology and anthropology, does her fieldwork in Fiji, and has published widely on many aspects of contemporary Fijian life, including ethnographic studies of ontogeny. Her recent work includes What is Happening to Epistemology? (2009, edited with João de Pina Cabral, Special Issue of Social Analysis) and Culture Wars. Contexts, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts (2010, edited with Deborah James and Evie Plaice). James Urry is a Senior Research Associate and previously Reader in Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His interests include the history of anthropology and Mennonite society. His books include None But Saints: The Transformation of

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Mennonite Life in Russia 1789−1889 (1989, 2007), Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British Anthropology (1993) and Mennonites, Politics and Peoplehood. Europe – Russia – Canada 1525−1980 (2006). Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His more recent publications include Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Pluto Press, 2002), Race and Sex in Latin America (2009), and Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (2nd edition, 2010). His current research focuses on issues of race and new genomic technologies. He is directing an ESRC-funded project on ‘Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparative approach’. Bill (C.W.) Watson, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of the University of Kent, currently teaches at the School of Business and Management of the Bandung Institute of Technology. He has carried out fieldwork extensively in Indonesia, particularly Kerinci in Sumatra, and has written about Islam, politics and modern Indonesian literature. He is the author of Multiculturalism (2000), and, most recently, Of Self and Injustice. Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia (2006). Richard Werbner, Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology and Honorary Research, Professor in Visual Anthropology (University of Manchester) and research fellow (National Humanities Center), is a long-term ethnographer of séances, charismatics and faith-healing in Botswana. His most recent films, Holy Hustlers (2009), Counterpoint One (2011), Counterpoint Two (2011), and Counterpoint Botswana (2011) accompany his monograph, Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy (2011). As series co-editor of Zed’s Postcolonial Encounters Series, he published Postcolonial Identities in Africa (1996, co-edited), Memory and the Postcolony (1998, edited), and Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (2002, edited). Harry G. West is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is author of Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (2005) and Ethnographic Sorcery (2007), and co-editor of several collections, including Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (2003, edited with Todd Sanders) and Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa (2005, edited with Tracy Luedke). Harvey Whitehouse studies the causes and consequences of religion and ritual. His recent books have included Arguments and Icons (2000) and Modes of Religiosity (2004). He was founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology of Mind. He currently holds a Chair in Social Anthropology at Oxford University and a Professorial Fellowship at Magdalen College. From 2006 to 2009 he served as Head of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Richard A. Wilson is Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology and Law, and Director of the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute, which he founded in 2003. He taught previously at the universities of Essex and Sussex in the UK. His work focuses

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on international human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals. Writing History in International Criminal Trials (2011) was completed during a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is current Chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Christopher Wright teaches visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written on the creative possibilities for collaborations between artists and anthropologists, most recently Between Art and Anthropology (2010), and on the connections between anthropology and photography. He has pursued fieldwork in the South Pacific and is currently involved in research on the connections between First Nation/Aboriginal communities and digital media in Canada.

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Preface: The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth John Gledhill (ASA Chair 2005−2009) and James Fairhead (ASA Chair 2009−2013)

The foundation of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) in 1946, a development originally led by Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown, with the support of Max Gluckman and Meyer Fortes, reflected the ambition of a group of British scholars to develop social anthropology as an autonomous discipline by expanding the number of social anthropology departments in British universities.1 The Association was both an intellectual project, reflecting a significant degree of consensus within the founding generation about the goals, priorities and scope of the subject, and also a professionalization project, for ASA membership was by invitation and restricted to ‘teachers and research workers in social anthropology’. In this latter respect the ASA contrasted with the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), the organization that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of promoting anthropology in the British public sphere. RAI has always welcomed ‘anyone with an interest in the subject’ as ordinary members, and its Council also elects ‘serious amateurs’ to its fellowship category alongside people with ‘an academic or professional engagement with the social sciences’.2 The intellectual focus on social anthropology also differentiated the ASA from the RAI, which paid equal attention to promoting teaching and research in areas such as biological anthropology and archaeology. Another reason why social anthropologists with university teaching posts deemed a professional association independent of the RAI essential was because they wanted to steer research funding away from researchers working directly for colonial government towards their institutions. The schism was neither profound nor notably acrimonious, since many of the ASA notables continued to play central roles in the RAI as well. Yet it has proved enduring despite the multiplication of forms of collaboration between RAI and ASA and greater interest on the part of some social anthropologists in crossing the boundaries that traditionally separated our disciplinary subfields, because the difference in membership base continues to be significant when it comes to speaking in the name of anthropologists as professionals. Most readers of this book are unlikely to be interested in the parochial question of how the representation and promotion of anthropology is organized in the UK, and if they are, there are plenty of perceptive publications already available to guide them towards a deeper understanding of the historical particularities of British anthropology. As far as Adam Kuper (1996: 176) was concerned, writing the conclusion to the third edition of his classic history of the Modern

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British School, British social anthropology only constituted a distinct intellectual movement at the international level between 1920 and the start of the 1970s. This is something that Kuper sees as a good thing. On the one hand, British scholars became less insular, opening up to productive new influences from both the United States and Europe, in particular France, while, on the other hand, the core ideas of British-style ethnography-based social anthropology had now diffused to practitioners of anthropology throughout the world. Others, notably Jonathan Spencer, dissent from Kuper’s view that there is no longer any means of distinguishing ‘British’ anthropology from other national anthropological traditions, but Spencer concedes ‘in true British spirit’ that if British social anthropology has succeeded in maintaining a distinct identity, as a ‘relatively small and coherent group of intellectual practitioners’, this is not on the basis of continuity in intellectual or empirical focus or theoretical orientation, or, to put it another way, a matter of ‘culture’, but a matter of institutions, practices and shared rituals (Spencer, 2000: 2−3). If that is true, then we can at least conclude that the ASA, its annual and decennial conferences, and the publications arising from them, are a central part of the story. But it is a story of continuity through radical transformation. In his introduction to this volume, Richard Fardon charts the evolution of the ASA Monographs Series and the changing intellectual trends that these and other ASA-sponsored volumes reflected, including the trend towards an interdisciplinarity in which anthropologists continue to insist that we have something distinctive and important to bring to debates throughout the humanities, social sciences and even the natural sciences. Yet it is also significant that the ordinary annual meetings of the ASA, as distinct from the decennial conferences, which were always larger and more international in scope, have tended to cease to be intimate conversations between a relatively small group of people in permanent plenary session and become events with multiple simultaneous panels that attract participants from many countries and involve much greater participation by graduate students. These trends are driven by many different factors, including pragmatic issues of funding and fulfilling the ASA’s duty to promote the career development of the next generation under increasingly tough conditions, but they do also speak of a certain democratization and opening of doors. The ASA made a third change to its name by adding ‘of the UK and’ to the earlier addition of ‘of the Commonwealth’, in recognition of the fact that independent associations had been created in several Commonwealth countries, and ASA is equally welcoming to members from non-Commonwealth countries. But the Association now regularly holds its conferences outside the UK, meeting in Zimbabwe in 1997, Tanzania in 2002, Auckland, in partnership with both its Australian and New Zealand sister associations, in 2008, and New Delhi in 2012. Although the majority of its members are UK-based, ASA is now a much larger and more international organization than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. It is also more inclusive, no longer interested in the kind of sub-disciplinary boundary maintenance that provoked debate about whether any US anthropologists should be admitted to membership, and welcoming to anthropologists who deploy their professional skills in non-academic practitioner roles in the public and private sectors. Yet the expansion within the university system that anthropology has achieved since the 1960s is now threatened with reverse in Britain and the European Union.3 At an historical moment in which efforts to reduce public expenditure have also put the future size and scope of our teaching and research under review in other regions of the world, it seems particularly necessary to launch a publication that demonstrates what cutting-edge work in social anthropology can contribute to understanding the human condition in a changing and more multi-centric world, and which also reflects both the vastly increased range of topics and problems now subject to anthropological enquiry. The ASA today is still concerned with promoting teaching and research in British universities, and in a climate of constant audit and evaluation that UK-based social anthropologists

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managed to turn into an opportunity for some remarkable critical analysis.4 But many of the Association’s contributions, including its extensive work on ethical issues, are aimed more than ever before at the international development of anthropology,5 and this book is another contribution towards this cause. We hope that readers will find little that will offend them as parochially British in a text that has an international authorship, but that they will agree that this volume shows that social anthropology is continuing to move forward towards new horizons and achievements, and for that very reason, still justifies the principles that motivated the founding of our association. We also wish to thank Richard Fardon, Trevor Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang and Richard Wilson for their wonderful and selfless work as editors, and remember Olivia Harris, who joined the editorial team, but tragically did not live to see the project completed. Lastly, our profound thanks go to all the contributors to this book for donating their royalties to enable the ASA to continue to provide small grants to support the development of the next generation of social anthropologists.

NOTES 1 Other key founding figures included the New Zealander Raymond Firth, who remained an active and dedicated President of the Association from 1973 virtually up until the moment of his death, aged 100, in 2002. A more detailed but short history of the ASA, written by David Mills, is available on the ASA website at http:// www.theasa.org/. For further discussion of the respective histories of, and relations between, the ASA and the Royal Anthropological Institute, see Mills (2003). 2 See http://www.therai.org.uk/joining/types-of-affiliation/ for further details. 3 UK resident anthropologists were also the largest single group in the European Association of Social Anthropologists at the end of 2009, with more than double the numbers of any other country apart from Germany. See http://www.easaonline.org/about/stat.htm for details. 4 See, for example, Strathern (2000). 5 The ASA has, for example, been an active member of the World Council of Anthropological Associations since Richard Fardon attended its founding meeting in Recife, Brazil, in 2004.

REFERENCES Kuper, Adam. 1996. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge. Mills, David. 2003. Professionalising or Popularising Anthropology? Anthropology Today 19(5): 8−13. Spencer, Jonathan. 2000. British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:1−24. Strathern, Marilyn (ed.) 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.

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Foreword: Thinking Anthropologically, About British Social Anthropology John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation ... with ruthless determination. (Zadie Smith, 2000: 238)

It may seem odd to begin the Foreword to this monumental new Handbook with the claim, made much of recently, that there is no longer anything distinctive about British social anthropology. Arguably, of course, the more critical issue is how distinguished are its accomplishments. Distinction, to be sure, denotes not just difference, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has reminded us; it also refers to the qualities embodied in that difference, a point to which we shall return. But the question remains. As Jonathan Spencer (2000: 1) puts it: Does British social anthropology remain distinctively British? Is it distinctively social? And is it distinctively anthropology? Some would answer all three in the negative. Thus, for example, Henrietta Moore (1999: 1) argued, over a decade ago, that there has been a retreat in the UK not just from the effort to write anything that looks particularly like anthropological theory, but, more fundamentally, ‘from the project of anthropology itself’ (see Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 157). How the world has changed. In the early 1970s, Adam Kuper (1973: 227) could still speak of British social anthropology as a quite specific ‘intellectual tradition’.1 Few would have disagreed; Foucauldians, Fanonists, Marxist and Postcolonial theorists might have preferred ‘discipline’ to ‘tradition’, given its alleged role in disciplining colonial knowledge of racially marked, ‘primitive’ others, but that is another matter. Not twenty years later, Kuper (1991: 307) would lament that it had become unclear ‘what was “specifically British” about social anthropology in Britain’ (Spencer 2000: 2). ‘The Revolution’ effected and named as such by its founding fathers (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 54−55) – their way, this, of signifying what marked their discipline as different from the other modern European social sciences – appeared to have run its course (cf. Ingold 1996: ix; Kuklick 2008: 75). Its specificity had dissolved into indistinction. History had ‘tramp[ed]’ over its earlier generations, to evoke our epigraph from Zadie Smith, if not altogether unsentimentally then certainly ruthlessly. Anthropologists, it should be noted, have long had a tendency to do just this. Already in 1959, Edmund Leach (1961: 1f) had argued that the original ‘unity of aim’ of social anthropology – its commitment to the comparative, functionalist analysis of social structures – had led into a dead end: that, like butterfly collecting, it

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yielded taxonomies, not useful theoretical generalizations. Even earlier, Evans-Pritchard (1950: 123), for whom the discipline was better regarded as ‘a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art’, saw a similar dead end in the ‘false scholasticism’ to which ‘The Revolution’ had aspired. Ours is an epistemic community with decidedly hypochondriacal proclivities (cf. Geertz 1988: 71). The threat of indistinction of one kind or another, in short, has been a recurrent nightmare among British anthropologists, especially in recent times. At fin de siècle, for instance, Englund and Leach (2000: 238) offered a strident defence of the discipline against the growing number of its practitioners who had taken to trafficking with ‘metropolitan theorists’, thus to merge anthropology into cultural studies or sociology. For them, the ‘metanarrative of modernity’, in tandem with the deployment of ‘familiar sociological abstractions’, is robbing our practice of its uniqueness – which, they hold, lies in long-term, in situ ethnographic fieldwork. Their defence reads somewhat ironically against Anthony Giddens’ (1995: 274) dismal depiction of contemporary anthropology: that it is a field with an evaporating subject matter, with a method it shares with other social sciences, and with a deficient theoretical core. It is yet more ironic in light of G.P. Murdoch’s much-quoted assertion, made some sixty years ago from America: that, for all the ‘ethnographic competence and theoretical suggestiveness’ of their work (1951: 466−467) – which, with splendid iconoclasm, he then tore to shreds – British anthropologists could not be called anthropologists at all. Given their disinterest in culture, their exclusive focus on social groups and relations, their concern with synchrony over diachrony, and their pursuit of general laws of social structure and function, they were indistinguishable from sociologists (1951: 471).2 The question of what British anthropology actually is in the present, patently, has a long past. Nor is it only a question for British anthropology. Anthropology in the USA – afflicted since the 1980s with critiques of its textual practices, its foundational concept of culture, and its ethical bona fides – has also been hearing of late that it has become hard to separate from other disciplines and discourses. George Marcus (2008: 2), for one, claims that, despite its institutional strength, it is ‘in suspension’: that it has ‘no new ideas, and none on the horizon’. Its intellectual creativity and energy, he believes, nowadays comes less from its own interiors than from its interactions with feminist studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, science studies, and the like. Once upon a time, anthropologists feared, groundlessly as it turned out, that globalization might dissolve the particularity of other cultures into bland cultural sameness; it was a fear with roots deep in the ideological fabric of modernity itself. Now, by contrast, many hold that it is we, not our ‘natives’, who are undergoing erasure. And losing our raison d’être. Such claims tend to spawn counter-claims. The idea that British social anthropology has lost its uniqueness, not surprisingly, has elicited several. Pace Englund and Leach, however, these do not depend on the transparent fantasy that it is intensive, localized fieldwork that defines us. There Giddens is correct: this method is no longer exclusively ours, although, in general, anthropologists cleave more than other social scientists to an ideal of ‘thick’, rather than ‘thin’, ethnographic description (Geertz 1973; but cf. J. L. Comaroff 2010: 526f). Ethnography, in other words, may be a necessary condition for anthropological distinctiveness – though there are some anthropologists in the USA who would now contest even this – but it is certainly not a sufficient one. The fact that it remains critical to our identity, or that most of us do it, is not, in itself, enough to secure our distinction, in either sense of the term. Which is why there have been efforts to look elsewhere. For Jonathan Spencer (2000), the answer lies neither in the means of producing knowledge characteristic of UK anthropologists, nor in the species of knowledge they produce. Instead, it resides in the fact that they constitute an identifiable epistemic community, one that shares discursive, pedagogic, and research practices (cf. Knorr

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Cetina 1999). These practices are embodied in such things as a ‘seminar culture’, in which forms of tacit knowledge – and strong loyalties – are imparted (Spencer 2000: 17f). The singularity of British social anthropology, in other words, inheres primarily in its institutions, traditions, customs and social relations. This sounds very much like the sort of thing that an older generation of ethnographers took to be their analytic object: a small, culturally enclosed, selfreproducing ‘society’ of sorts. It is by these means, suggests Spencer, that the discipline defines and defends its boundaries, by these means that it sustains itself, and by these means that it determines what is or is not properly anthropology.3 Spencer is not alone in looking to institutional practices rather than intellectual content; recall Henrietta Moore’s observation to the effect that there has been a retreat in British anthropology from robust claims to write theory (above, p. xxviii). In like vein, John Gledhill (n.d.) notes that, nowadays, anthropologists in the UK are ‘as likely to be inspired by European social theorists’ as they are by other anthropologists. Nonetheless, he says, they have retained a high level of coherence as a relatively small, relatively marginal community in which – and here he goes further than Spencer – ‘it is still possible to discern a specifically “British” approach to research and argument.’4 While Gledhill does not go into detail on the substance of that approach, Richard Fardon, in his Introduction to this Handbook, points to a common ground less in grand theory – which has always been a subject of some ambivalence in the predominantly empiricist episteme of British anthropology – than in ‘theorized methodology’: a methodology, we take him to mean, that puts ethnography at the centre of its mode of production, but sees the knowledge it yields partly as a function of the questions that it is asked to address. A different species of answer is proffered by Keith Hart (2008). Consonant with histories of the discipline that stress the degree to which it took on a unique shape in each of its major host countries (e.g. Barth et al. 2005; Mills 2008; Gingrich 2010a), Hart sees anthropology in the UK as a product of its specific structural and historical context (cf. Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 56): in a ‘nationalist century’, its distinctiveness lay in the liberal vision it provided of a universe made up of bounded cultures and self-reproducing societies founded on ‘eternal principles’ of order. Its ‘primitive sociology’, rooted in the Central European culturalism of Malinowski and the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown, argues Hart, afforded an ideological defence for the nation-states of a war-torn world against revolution. This, rather than its conventionally asserted role in the management of empire, he goes on to say, gave British anthropology, and its grounding in ethnography, its historical function: it buttressed a particular sort of national self-imaging. But the capitalist formation on which that imagining was founded has long been metamorphosing, rendering its mode of knowing anachronistic; hence, the anachronism of the idea of a distinctive British anthropology. This take on the counter-revolutionary role of British anthropology is certainly provocative. So is the assertion that its ideological function at the metropole was of greater consequence than its deployment in colonial overrule; in respect of the latter, we prefer to see these two things, metropole and colony, as entailed in each other, and therefore as part of a single formation. Hart also leaves unspecified precisely how global transformations in these ‘murky times’ might be linked to shifts in the content and the structural location of anthropology in Britain today. But he is surely right to stress the historical contextualization of the discipline in structures of the long run. If we follow his logic into the Age of Now – in which the world at large is being recalibrated by changes in the proportional relationship of the market to society, by the reconstitution under neoliberal governance of nationhood, the state, and political life, by the erosion of ideological differences under the sign of the technical efficiency of capital, by the fetishism of culture as property – the question becomes this: Is there anything distinctive about the ways in which British anthropology is being drawn into the analysis of social forms

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congealing across the planet in the here and now? In large measure, this Handbook seeks to be an answer to that question. But we are running ahead of ourselves. In posing the problem as he does, Hart also prompts us to look again at the fertile mix of hubris and genius that underlay the founding ‘Revolution’ of British anthropology, specifically, its unique cult of knowledge production. That cult, as it turned out, was to prove less than revolutionary in its ideological implications. Yet it sustained for the discipline a potent marginality in the UK academy, a marginality upon which rested both its distinction and its distinctiveness. To the extent that its past continues to inform its practice in a radically realigned present, however spectrally, it remains pertinent to what may lie ahead for anthropology here. If, along with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (2003: 38), we view the future as a ‘structure of hopes and expectations’, as a history actively to be made – even if not entirely as we please – then interrogating our genealogy becomes vital, not least for the ways in which anthropology might recast itself in times to come. * * * * * * * The pioneering, even prophetic ethos of early twentieth-century British anthropology was quintessentially modernist in its vision of human life as social process, its common properties discoverable through systematic empirical observation. But it derived its unique brand of knowledge from the study of the underside of modernity: of primitive peoples who were conceived both as our natural forebears and as savage inversions of civilization. The paradox of similarity and difference inherent in this doubling was foundational to the discipline. Erected on the sensitive frontiers between Europe and its others, it took shape in the ready laboratories offered by the colonial world. From there, the first generation of professional ethnographers sent vividly documented accounts of timeless, homogeneous societies, isolated organisms preserved in the aspic of empire. Defined as terra incognita, these were places where European thought was held to have scant purchase, calling for a new sociology of the premodern world, one capable of plumbing the depths of Homo sapiens as social species. Our common origin myth depicts this enterprise as the product of a joint becoming: Malinowski, the Romantic, it is said, invented fieldwork, making empirical observation into a process of sustained witnessing, a testimony to the ‘native’s point of view’; Radcliffe-Brown, by contrast, imposed order on raw ethnographic material, reworking Durkheim’s idea of the social fact into a more prosaic natural science of non-Western society, based on the comparative study of institutions. The primacy of the sociological, as we have noted, was to remain a distinctive feature of the British school, making culture and meaning into second-order representations of social arrangements, albeit often in complex figurations. But the ideology of empiricism has always been something of a subterfuge. Theory never springs directly from facts, of course, which is why, at their most creative, anthropologists have always flouted their own ‘scientific’ prescriptions. To be sure, generations of them would argue over how to arrive at generalizations from an unruly melange of idiosyncratic accounts, a commitment to induction that, according to Kuper (1983: 205), would eventually condemn anthropology in the UK to theoretical decline and ethnographic particularism. But the counterpoint of the particular and the general, of data and analysis, has always been more complex, more elusive. It has always been a matter of what Peirce (1958: 136) termed ‘abduction’ and Edmund Leach (1961: 5) called ‘inspired guesswork’. A strikingly eclectic array of ideas, large and small, was put into play as the discipline invented itself, facilitated by the possibilities offered to the sociological imagination by a model of discrete, small-scale societies, societies susceptible to bold, holistic analyses of their internal workings. At the same time, those ‘savage’ societies were also Europe’s camera

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obscura, living manifestations of its dreams and nightmares. The most provocative insights generated within British anthropology over the years have, arguably, stemmed as much from preoccupations in the Western world as from facts on exotic ground. Whether it be Malinowski’s vision of the rationality of primitive economics or of the cultural specificity of the Oedipus complex, Evans-Pritchard’s accounts of witchcraft as a practical philosophy or of the possibility of social order sans government, Turner on the liberating effects of communitas, Gluckman on catharsis, or Douglas on dirt as matter out of place, the fertile redeployment of metropolitan theory by estranging familiar phenomena has a long history in our discipline. The aura of theoretical experimentation was especially evident in the formative years of British anthropology. Take Radcliffe-Brown’s preface to African Political Systems, an influential text intended to demonstrate the accomplishments of a maturing British structural functionalism. The piece began with a predictable paean to the study of comparative institutions, to its capacity for offering up general sociological laws. But how, it asked, are particular types of institutions – like those that comprise ‘political organization’ – to be identified and isolated from the total systems of which they are part (1940: xii)? Almost immediately, it segues into a reflection on the nature of abstraction in social analysis, coupled with a trenchant critique of brute positivism. Without ‘new and fruitful ideas ... method in itself gives birth to nothing’ (1940: xiii), wrote Radcliffe-Brown. Yet, in giving account of ‘simpler societies’, the theories of political philosophers or economists are insufficient, too parochial. It was incumbent on anthropology, therefore, to ‘make [its] own’ more comprehensive concepts. He attacked the task with gusto, pondering, like a Carl Schmitt for the antipodes, what might be the distinctive features of political, as against other, forms of organization; a quite different spirit, this, from one that would limit itself to what may be induced purely from empirical facts. In the end, Radcliffe-Brown’s definition of politics – to paraphrase, the maintenance of social order, within a territorial framework, by means of the organized use or threat of physical force – was a banal echo of European ideology. But we encounter some strikingly prescient insights along the way. Like the claim that ‘the state’, spoken of in terms of ‘sovereignty’ or the power to exercise will, was a ‘fiction of the philosophers’, that what does exist ‘in the phenomenal world’ is a complex organization of relations and roles concerned with maintaining the balance of law and war (1940: xxiii). The anthropological imagination at work here was an uneasy amalgam of critical estrangement and ethnocentrism, a consequence, perhaps, of the will to translate the worlds of living premoderns into the language of intellectual elites in late imperial Britain. In that light, the challenge was to show how, in the absence of complex regulating mechanisms, these ‘simple’, self-reproducing societies could wrest order, stability, and continuity out of anarchy. The conventional answer, which took its lead from Radcliffe-Brown, lay at once in their interlocking structures of functionally homeostatic institutions, in the tempering of human nature through rules of kinship, and in the cultivation of moral subjects by means of customary law and the imperatives of religious practice. True, following Hart (2008), this Arcadian model could be read as an exotic endorsement of liberal ideals of nationhood, sans class conflict and struggle. But it could as well be seen as a critique of Enlightenment universalisms and the regime of knowledge of which they were part. The story is also more complicated insofar as the model of self-regulating social systems had more than one variant, arising out of the fact that its stress on norms, order, and regulation existed in tension with the view, associated with Malinowski, that strategic, utilitarian, rule-bending action was characteristic of even the most ‘savage’ of peoples. For the likes of Max Gluckman and Victor Turner of the Manchester School, strife, self-interest, and structural tension were as endemic to premodern as they were to modern societies. However – and here

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the Mancunians drew on a theoretical repertoire that included both Simmel and Marx – whereas capitalist societies were built on inherent contradictions, precapitalist ones were founded on conflict. The former were ‘historical’, being caught up in a linear movement through time and liable to change, even to undergo revolution. The latter were ‘ahistorical’, being characterized by cyclical processes, equilibrium, repetitive reproduction, and, where they occurred, rebellions that left the structure of things in place, even as they altered relations of power and authority among living persons. If this was a boldly theorized vision of the precapitalist world, a broadly similar, similarly bold, move was made by Edmund Leach (1954). Leach deployed the work of Pareto to reduce the disorderly, conflict-laden history of Highland Burma to a model of oscillating equilibrium, one that sought to make sense of processes of the long run by showing that they moved between two models of social organization − one highly hierarchized and state-like, the other egalitarian and decentralized. Of course, neither of these efforts to fuse a Malinowskian attention to conflict with a Radcliffe-Brownian concern for social order dealt with historical facts beyond the bounded, homeostatic worlds with which they were concerned. Again, perhaps the first, most comprehensive effort to do so would come from the Manchester School in Central Africa, where the destabilizing effects of empire could not easily be ignored. Under the influence first of Godfrey Wilson, then of Max Gluckman, the Mancunians enlarged their ethnographic compass to take in the interpolation of ‘tribal societies’ into the colonial political economy. Gluckman attacked Malinowski’s effort to explain social change here through the prism of ‘culture contact’, insisting that Africans, perforce, participated with Europeans in a ‘single social system’ (Ferguson 1999:26). In the upshot, the Manchester School found itself drawn into studies of the impact on rural communities of processes of proletarianization, labour migration, underdevelopment, urbanization, and new configurations of class and identity. But, being committed to an equilibrium model of indigenous social systems, and sustaining a view of those systems as selfreproducing, they could not, in the end, develop a theoretically principled historical anthropology of colonialism, let alone empire, a shortcoming for which anthropology at large has long been taken to task by critical theorists. Nonetheless, as all this suggests, post-Second World War British anthropology found itself having to address large problems and large matters of theory from the vantage of what had become known as the Third World. And, as it did, so the discipline in the UK became a fertile community of argument, one with salience for the academy at large. That community of argument flourished in the 1950s, all the more so as processes of decolonization gained momentum, irrevocably altering the imperial terrain on which British anthropologists had long worked. It was also fuelled by their intellectual exchanges with the other social sciences and other national anthropologies. Thus, for example, just as Evans-Pritchard had insisted that the discipline should shake off its positivist heritage and define itself as ‘a kind of ... philosophy or art’ (above, p. xxv), so some of his colleagues became preoccupied with what, in Britain, remained the relatively neglected study of meaning and symbol, prompting a reengagement with French writings on structure and classification, among them, the classic works of Mauss, Hertz, and, later, the linguistically-inspired structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. ‘Neo-structuralism’ in the UK sought to reconcile models of the universal logic of human thought with a properly British concern for ideas as the reflex, and reflection, of social relations. For its critics, this was an indigestible reduction of philosophical formalism to flat-footed empiricism. Patently, it did little to shift the abiding fixation on ethnographic particularism. But, yet again, it yielded insights of bold significance – the influential writings of Victor Turner on ritual, Mary Douglas on cosmology and classification, and Edmund Leach on myth and verbal categories – and sparked productive debate about the place of the unconscious in social analysis.

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And then, quite suddenly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s – when Great Britain and much of the world was in creative ferment – this imaginative effervescence, this theoretical ambition, ran out of steam. As we ourselves prepared, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1968, to do traditional fieldwork in rural South Africa, the streets around us were alive with protest against the Vietnam War, apartheid, and the cultural establishment. A decidedly postcolonial spirit, emanating from the ‘new nations,’ was beginning to assert itself. We were entering what Adam Kuper (1983: 185−189) would dub ‘the lean years’, a time of parochialism and ‘discounted’ theoretical debate. * * * * * * * And so, back to the present Andre Gingrich (2010b: 552) has noted, for the discipline at large, that ‘the era of national traditions is coming to a close’. This is hardly surprising at the dawn of what appears to be a post-national age; not an age, we stress, in which nationhood is likely to disappear, but one in which it is re-situated in a global topography of economic, political, legal, demographic, digital, cultural, and religious scapes, of articulations and disarticulations, ruptures and flows. In sum, just as the modernist nation-state is now saturated with awkward cacophonies of cultural difference, has forfeited a large measure of its sovereignty, and finds its borders ever more porous to the movement of capital, commodities, images, and persons, so national anthropologies have seen their substantive identities thoroughly compromised. To parse the matter once more into Jonathan Spencer’s three-part question, now in the indicative voice. To the degree, first, that its frontiers have been breached, anthropology in the UK is unlikely ever to be uniquely British again (cf. Barth 2005: 56). Second, to the degree that the existence of society itself is everywhere under scrutiny in the neoliberal age, the discipline here is no longer exclusively social in its horizons; in 1989, interestingly, the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory in the UK met to discuss the proposition that ‘The Concept of Society is Theoretically Obsolete’ (Ingold 1996: 55−98). And third, to the degree that anthropology is faced everywhere with doubts about its raison d’être – recall both Giddens and Marcus – its role in the production of knowledge is increasingly hard to distinguish from those of, among other things, cultural studies, science and technology studies, feminist studies, history, linguistics, and philosophy. Mark, in that regard, that Part 1 of this Handbook deals at length with the interdisciplinarity of our subject. Which is why, to the degree that it retains an identity at all, that identity lies – as Spencer, Gledhill, and others have said – in a community of practice that knows itself as a community but is struggling to define the precise content of its practice. This is also why it has become so difficult to characterize British anthropology in the present tense. Its present, to be sure, is somewhat tense. And therein lies an important set of clues. The fact that British social anthropology is post-national does not mean that it is posthistorical. Hence the questions we posed above: • To what is it responding, in the history of the present, if not to the imperatives of nation or empire? • What are the structural conditions, to return us to J.M. Coetzee’s literary aphorism, to which its hopes and expectations are attuned? • And how has it reacted to those conditions? Fredrik Barth (2005: 56) notes that the predicament of anthropology in the UK has to be read in the context of an ‘epoch of marked decline in the British universities ... caused by shrinking economies and stifling regimes of bureaucratic regulation.’ While the discipline has

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sustained a steady research profile under straitened conditions, and goes about its business quite effectively, it has, he suggests, suffered a ‘loss of self-assurance [and] self-sufficiency’, not to mention an outflow of scholars to the USA. The decline began in the Thatcher years, during which the restructuring of institutions produced a relentless culture of audit, evaluation, and standardization, of funding squeezes, creeping privatization, and unvarnished economism; E.P. Thompson’s (1980) nightmare of ‘the business university’ circa 1970, it seems, would mature into a full-blown reality. What is more, adds Gledhill (n.d.), anthropologists, starved of financial support, have also had to deal with ethical encroachments. Of these, the most stark has been the pressure exerted by funding agencies, more or less directly, to do research – on topics like crime, immigration, terrorism, poverty – that might be deployed against vulnerable populations, that serves the interests of government, or that appeal to the private sector. Nor is this merely an ethical issue. It is also ‘intellectually deadly’ (Gusterson 2011: 2). Gusterson points out, perspicaciously, that, under prevailing institutional conditions, few of the great works of modern social anthropology – those of the likes of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Leach, or Douglas – are likely to have been possible, being of no demonstrable value to the corporate world or to contemporary UK educational policies, which, notes Richard Fardon (2011: 2), are currently being directed toward science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, with potentially disastrous effects for the ‘smaller disciplines.’ The result? ‘Neo-liberalized students ... over-regulated universities ... the worst of times.’ As this implies, the changing institutional ecology in which British anthropology finds itself is part and parcel of a broader process: the neoliberalization of the political economy of knowledge. We refer here primarily to its epistemic, not its pragmatic, effects, to what present themselves as suitable objects for study, suitable concepts with which to study them, the Weltbild, the world-picture, into which our research interpolates itself. Neoliberalization – itself a rather crude, under-specified gloss for the contemporary moment in the history of capital, tout court – has effected major transformations in the lineaments of economy and society, of politics and culture, and, as we have said, of the nation-state. These transformations have occasioned shifts in the ways in which the social sciences perceive, problematize, and portray the world. Summarily stated, there is a strong tendency in the neoliberal Weltanschauung to de-historicize history in favour of presentist contingency, to turn away from most forms of theory work, and to prefer, in producing knowledge, to cleave to the safe shores of empirical accounting – phrased, however tacitly, in one or another form of methodological individualism that ‘explains’ phenomena by arranging them into ensembles of events, actors, and actions, all alike motivated by the material and affective utilities of a hyper-rational Homo economicus; precisely the thing, that is, against which Durkheim wrote his sociology to begin with. This, in part, is why we, in the social sciences, find ourselves debating the utility of our ur-concepts, noun-concepts like society or culture, finding it easier to speak in adjectives (the social, the cultural). In this Weltanshauung, which avoids discursive abstraction even as it renders human life ever more abstract, it is unacceptable to account for quotidian ‘facts’ with reference to invisible forces or larger determinations, de rigueur to treat the surfaces of the observable universe as the outer limit of our analytic horizons, and necessary, in an increasingly anti-intellectual climate, to compromise on complexity in order to be heard at all. Put the two things together – the prevailing institutional ecology and the neoliberalization of the political economy of knowledge – and the terrain of contemporary British anthropology becomes more legible. For one thing, its research foci have been affected, evincing a strong turn toward the pragmatics of applied anthropology, the anthropology of development, and the anthropology of public policy (Barth 2005: 56−57; Gledhill n.d.). There has also been a growing concern with topics related to the sciences, like conservation ecology, the environment, ethnobotany, behavioural genetics, human−animal relations, human evolution, new

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technologies, historical demography, cognition, and medicine; also with topics of broad popular interest, such as new media, aesthetics, civil society, tourism, trauma and conflict, work and unemployment (Kuklick 2008: 76−77). At first glance, this would appear simply as a cynical move to make the discipline more marketable, to make it more appealing to an imagined community of consumers, and to make its brand more sustainable. But many anthropologists have been attracted to these sorts of issues for their intrinsic interest and importance. Moreover, a good deal of conventional ethnographic research continues despite this – or perhaps because of it – to be published in British journals; ‘some influential schools of contemporary anthropology,’ says Adam Kuper (2005: 60), have preferred to ‘[turn] in on themselves, insisting that true anthropology concerns itself with the symbolic behaviour of faraway peoples.’ But it is not merely by feeling the need to overhaul their subject matter, to address topics of current concern, or to reach out to various publics that British anthropologists have been imbricated in the neoliberal moment. A fair number have been drawn by the critical challenges posed by the effects of that moment, some of them deeply troubling, to broaden their conceptual horizons in order to explore the impact of translocal economic, political, and cultural forces on the lifeworlds of both the global south and, if to a lesser extent, the global north; hence, for example, recent efforts to interrogate the diverse faces of cosmopolitanism,5 thus to make anthropology itself more, well, cosmopolitan. By and large, though, the disciplinary response in the UK to the provocations posed by the history of the present has been to write exquisitely detailed accounts of the coming to ground of planetary processes in different exotic locales: in the more-or-less bounded, intimate lifeworlds that have always been our first object of study, worlds putatively accessible only to ethnography as a hands-on craft. This enterprise often bespeaks an investment in documenting how ‘little peoples’ retain their integrity in the face of the homogenizing effects of globalization; even more, how, heroically, they keep at bay those effects, even turn them to their own ends. Of course, few locales can plausibly be held these days to escape the reach of the Empire of Capital; the founding fiction of a non-capitalist universe of self-reproducing societies – productive as it once was for the theory-work of a rising anthropology – has long been unsustainable. Arguably, however, the implicit refusal to address the historical entailment of those peoples in the global order, or to analyse the larger forces that are reshaping their micro-environments, is itself an effect of the Weltanshauung of neoliberalism – which has a tendency to hide its own inner workings, thereby to render invisible the ways in which they play themselves out in dispersed places on dispersed peoples. In so doing, they reinforce the illusion of the relative autonomy, integrity, and self-determination of those peoples, many of whom seem at least as anxious to claim connection to the global order as disconnection from it. But the most fundamental effects of the neoliberal moment on British anthropology, perhaps, are those of which we spoke earlier: the resort to an episteme that tends to de-historicize history; that, in stressing the contingent and the continuous present over the systemic and processes of the long run, confines its descriptive analyses largely to the surface planes of social, cultural, and material life; that, in taming risk, puts much of its faith in the respectable facticity of empiricism; that is sceptical of the value, or even the possibility, of theory, preferring, when necessary, to import it, ready-made, from outside, from such established scholarly sources as British or French sociology. In speaking of this last, of theory-scepticism, Adam Kuper (1983: 202−204) argues that anthropologists in the UK have always tended to opt for the inductive over the deductive, choosing to have ‘little to do with grand theory’ that is unverifiable by ‘observational techniques’; this species of theory, for him, amounts little more than a ‘theological world-view’. Kuper may be stretching a point in respect of the past. It is hardly as if the classic work of earlier generations of anthropologists – from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown through Evans-Pritchard to Gluckman and Leach – were not grand,

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deductive, or ‘theological’ in this sense. But his observation does seem to apply in the present. No wonder he (2005: 60) holds that, in the final analysis, contemporary British anthropology takes ‘its own distinctive DNA’ to lie above all in its methodology, in its commitment to ‘thick’ ethnography; this in spite of the fact that, as Fardon notes below, there has always been a discrepancy of scale between our sites of fieldwork and our fields of inquiry, a discrepancy never larger than it is at present. Still, in the neoliberal Weltanschauung, method, the technical means by which specific ends are accomplished, is given a great deal of weight – and not only in anthropology. * * * * * * * The distinctive approach of British anthropology, Keith Hart (2008) contends, ‘so brilliantly adapted to conditions in the mid-twentieth century’ – to the high era of nationalism, liberalism, and state capitalism – ‘may not serve us well in the next’. One might argue that the British anthropology of the early twenty-first century, as we have sketched it, has already adapted, quite expeditiously, to its historical times, to a ‘post-ideological’ age in which global capitalism has outgrown the nation-state, in which society and polity elude easy conceptual grasp, in which cultural identities trump other forms of difference and belonging, and in which the market appears to drive more or less everything. Has a liberal anthropology given way seamlessly to a neoliberal one? This, in turn, raises a yet more fundamental question: Should British anthropology continue to exist as a distinct, empirically oriented, inductive discipline that focuses – in a mobile universe, a universe of inordinately complicated, labile webs of transactions, relations, mediations, and flows – on social phenomena of small, observable scale? Also, Ought we to persist in leaving theory-work to the prophets and the philosophers and a few select sociologists? There are good reasons to believe that this would not serve British anthropology well. They turn, once again, on the double sense of disciplinary distinction: on what remains distinctive about our analytical perspective and on what of its accomplishments distinguish themselves in the contemporary political economy of knowledge production. Both are anticipated in what we have already said. Many of the Big Questions in the Age of Now that strike anthropologists as compelling are shared by other disciplines as well. But ours brings a particular perspective to them. Above all, it has, in the past, been more ready than its sibling social sciences to estrange taken-for-granted terms, concepts, and phenomena, asking what they actually mean, wherein lies their phenomenal reality, how they came to be constructed and construed as they have been. Take democracy and development, two common tropes of our times, both of them elements in the globalization of neoliberal governmentality. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have explored the impact of each, focusing on the conditions under which they ‘take off’ or ‘fail’ and the like. By contrast, anthropology, at its best, begins by interrogating their ontological status as social facts in the world. It asks what these phenomena actually signify to everyone caught up in the processes that occur under their name, what sorts of practices, ideas, schemes, and values they congeal and/or conceal — and how, as we said earlier, they come to ground in different locales, thus to construct lived realities that appear at once similar and yet different across global space and time. In posing these foundational questions from its particular vantage, the discipline situates itself well to speak back critically to Euromodern social theory, its normative ideals, and its conceits. To the degree that anthropology has no option any more but to address the effects of social processes of large scale and longer runs, it is likely always to do so by interrogating them ‘from below’. In this regard, as we have intimated, the discipline has long been at the vanguard in analysing how those processes imbricate themselves in, and inflect, the lives of sentient

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subjects in dispersed places. And how they are apprehended, configured, and deployed, from within vernacular moral and material economies, in terms that are never entirely predictable. In so far as we meet the challenge of plumbing the ways and means by which abstract historical forces take on concrete form in different contexts, anthropologists are especially well placed to show how people ‘make history and society’, space and place, where they succeed in imposing their agency upon the world, and where their efforts to do so are structurally constrained or curtailed; although this last requires that we forsake the naive romance of native resistance to globalization (see above) for a dialectical take on the history of the present. To be sure, ethnographers ought to be able to read, in the encounter between the local and the worlds beyond it – there are, after all, many scales of relevance between the local and the global – what the proportionate effects are of each on the others. And, by extension, make clear how the ideological imperatives of the moment, be it ‘development’ or ‘democratization’ or anything else, may be more or less waylaid by what they confront on the ground; how they may be critically reformulated, both as explanations of past events and as prescriptions for times to come; how, in the upshot, the future is unlikely to consist in a long teleological march toward the End of History. But, to reiterate, if any of this it to be done by we anthropologists, we cannot stand back from taking seriously the interrogation of the larger determinations so evidently at play in and on the social ecologies in which we work, either methodologically or theoretically. Methodologically speaking, the way has been prepared by developments in the discipline in recent years. Echoing the earlier innovations of the Manchester school, scholars of translocal phenomena have devised new techniques – multi-sited ethnographies, ethnographies of different dimensions, and ethnographies of peripatetic persons, objects, and signs, for instance, not to mention ethnographies that triangulate the field, the text, and the archive – to lay bare social worlds at once situated and mobile, at once fixed and in flow, at once concrete and immanent. Elsewhere, we have spoken of this as ‘ethnography on an awkward scale’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003): ethnography, that is, directed not just at describing contingent events and actions, everyday life and the social personae involved in it, local communities and their signifying practices, but ethnography, predicated on a counterpoint of the deductive and the inductive, designed to capture the processes by which space and time, place and population, distribution and flow congeal into larger social phenomena, taking shape as virtual vectors made visible, just like iron filings on large magnetic fields. The directionality and logic of these processes, like magnetized iron filings, can never be taken, a priori, to be random. Quite the opposite. Ethnography as method demands that we seek out the relationship between the contingent and the constellation, and the incidental and the incidence – all the better to account for hidden determinations and to grasp how they may be made manifest in any locale, whether it be in the concentrations of power and domination, the vectors of vulnerability, or the zones of autonomy that compose the topography of ordinary life. Theoretically speaking, the message is clear. Retreat into inductive particularity is insufficient, at once epistemically and ethically. If we are to grasp what it is that constructs and configures the lifeworlds that we study, if we are to make sense of the often troubling social facts that we discern within them, it is necessary to connect the dots, so to speak: to disinter, render visible, and account conceptually for, those larger processes and phenomena, those forces and determinations – and for the manner in which they affect, and are affected by, their encounter with the practices, purposes, moralities, and materialities of different peoples and places. Here, it would serve us well to recover something of the hubris of an earlier anthropological age, to operate with the presumption, unless and until proven otherwise, that it is both possible and necessary to establish systemic relations among the minutiae of the phenomenal world, holistically conceived – and to indulge in inspired guesswork in seeking out, indeed explaining, the

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connections among them. The content of those classic theories is no longer of salience to us, of course; the limits of their analytic assumptions, for all their heuristic value, ensured their failure. Nor ought we to sustain the faux independence that our disciplinary forefathers claimed from the other human sciences – from which they borrowed liberally anyway. But what we can take from them is a willingness to refashion existing theory, thus to estrange the worlds that we study. And to take peripheral facts and recast them into forms of knowledge of very general salience to the academy at large. If that is theory as theology, it has the advantage at least of rendering anthropology a potentially revelatory critical project. To be sure, social anthropology, with its continuing history of unassailable accomplishment, does remain uniquely capable of sustaining itself as just such a critical project. The bolder, we believe, the better. After all, we should surely be wary of ceding the large, complex theoretical questions of our day to the ready reductionism of market rationality, popular scientism, psychologism, emotionalism, or biogenetic determinism., Or, for that matter, to various sorts of postmodern nihilism, or even to philosophy or ... theology. In confronting the issues that concern us now, we would do well to recall the enduring relevance of a rich modern heritage: of Durkheim’s critique of methodological individualism, Mauss’s gift of the ‘total social fact’, Weber’s grasp of the complexities of Verstehen, of intersubjective meaning, and of Marx’s commitment to denaturalizing surface realities in order to reveal the deep interplay of social, material, and moral forces that give them life. There could hardly be more challenging times, in sum, in which to commit ourselves again to the counter-hegemonic inquiry that has always characterized our endeavour at its most vibrant: to renew, that is, a critical social anthropology that is at once distinctive and distinguished.

NOTES 1 The tendency to refer to British anthropology as a ‘tradition’ is not uncommon; see e.g. Kuklick (2008) and Gledhill (n.d.). 2 Murdoch’s point was underscored by Ernest Gellner (1970: 22f), who, from within the British social sciences, pointed out that there was no difference between the ways in which anthropologists and sociologists deployed their key concepts. 3 Spencer (2000: 20) is less sure of the future. Current conditions, he says, are making it difficult to sustain this community of practice; they could lead to the ‘end of British social anthropology as we have known it.’ 4 Cf. also Kuklick (2008: 77). ‘British anthropology,’ she says, ‘has distinctive features, if only because it is practiced within distinctive institutional structures.’ 5 In 2006, the Association of Social Anthropologists convened a conference on Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology, see http://www.nomadit.net/asatest/conferences/asa06/theme.htm, accessed 22 February 2011, some of the papers from which were published in Werbner (2007).

REFERENCES Barth, Fredrik. 2005. Britain and the Commonwealth. In One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology (The Halle Lectures), Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. 2005. One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology (The Halle Lectures). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Coetzee, John M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker & Warburg. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2003. Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction. Ethnography 4(2):147−179. Comaroff, John L. 2010. The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/discipline. American Anthropologist 112(4):524−538. Englund, Harri and James Leach. 2000. Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity. Current Anthropology 41(2):225−248. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland and Finn Sivert Nielsen. 2001. A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1950. Social Anthropology: Past and Present. (The Marrett Lecture, 1950.) Man 50(198):118−124. Fardon, Richard. 2011. Feigning the Market: Funding Anthropology in England. Anthropology Today 27(1):2−5. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford J. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford J. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1974. Concepts and Society. In Rationality, Bryan R. Wilson (ed). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Giddens, Anthony. 1995. Epilogue. In The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World, Akbar Ahmed and Cris Shore (eds). London: Athlone. Gingrich, Andre. 2010a. After the Great War: National Reconfigurations of Anthropology in Late Colonial Times. In Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones: World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe, Reinhard Johler, Christian Marchetti, and Monique Scheer (eds). Bielefeld: Transcript − Histoire. Gingrich, Andre. 2010b. Transitions: Notes on Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potentials. American Anthropologist 112(4):552−561. Gledhill, John. n.d. Social Anthropology in the British Tradition. English summary of La antropología social en la tradición británica, keynote lecture to a conference on La Antropología en España y Europa, Madrid, September 2008; http://jg.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/Conferences/Social%20 Anthropology%20in%20the%20British% 20Tradition%20English%20Summary.pdf. For the full Spanish version, see http://www.ucm.es/info/ antrosim/ docs/John_Gledhill_Antropologia_Social_en_la_tradicion_britanica.pdf. Gusterson, Hugh. 2011. Lowering British Higher Education. Anthropology Today 27(1):1−2. Hart, Keith. 2008. British Social Anthropology’s Nationalist Project; http://thememorybank.co.uk/2008/04/08/ british-socialanthropologys-nationalist-project/. Ingold, Tim. 1996. Preface. In Key Debates in Anthropology, Tim Ingold (ed). London: Routledge. Knorr Cetina, Karen. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuklick, Henrika. 2008. The British Tradition. In A New History of Anthropology, Henrika Kuklick (ed). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Kuper, Adam. 1973. Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922−1972. London: Allen Lane. Kuper, Adam. 1983. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kuper, Adam. 1991. Grande-Bretagne. L’anthropologie britannique. In Dictionnaires de l’Ethnologie et de l’Anthropologie, Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard (eds). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 305−308. Kuper, Adam. 2005. Alternative Histories of British Social Anthropology. Social Anthropology 13(1):47−64. Leach, Edmund Ronald. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Bell. Leach, Edmund Ronald. 1961. Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone Press. Marcus, George E. 2008. The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition. Cultural Anthropology 23(1):1−14. Mills, David. 2008. Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology. New York: Berghahn. Moore, Henrietta L. 1999. Anthropological Theory at the Turn of the Century. In Anthropological Theory Today, Henrietta L. Moore (ed). Cambridge: Polity Press. Murdoch, George Peter. 1951. British Social Anthropology. American Anthropologist 53(4):465−473. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols 1−6, 1931–1935. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald. 1940. Preface. In African Political Systems, Meyer Fortes and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Smith, Zadie. 2000. White Teeth. New York: Random House. Spencer, Jonathan. 2000. British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:1−24. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1980. Writing by Candlelight. London: Merlin. Werbner, Pnina, ed. 2007. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, ASA Monographs 45.Oxford: Berg.

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Introduction − Flying Theory, Grounded Method Richard Fardon (Chair of the ASA 2001−2005)

AVOIDING THE SENSE OF DÉJÀ VU What might a Handbook of Social Anthropology published early in the second decade of the twenty-first century offer its readers that they did not already have? The question preoccupied the editorial team from their first discussions.1 It begs an answer to another question: Who are these intended readers? Answer the second question and the first might answer itself; so the short answer is that the (around eighty) authors of these chapters address primarily their peers: other researchers, who may be postgraduate research students, postdoctoral anthropologists, or anyone trained in other disciplines who draws on anthropological approaches in their work, whether or not within the university. We imagined for ourselves a readership thinking about original research projects, their own or their students’, and wanting to be stimulated by a brush with cutting-edge opinion in the fields relevant to them.2 We thought they might ask themselves the very general questions about their research that are addressed by the four Parts into which the Handbook is organized – What? Whereabouts? How? What next? Part 1, Interfaces, provides a set of subject-specific answers to the questions: What

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problems are on anthropologists’ agendas, and how do these relate to those of other disciplines or, more loosely, subject clusters? Part 2, Places, asks where these questions are pursued, and what that apparently innocent word ‘where’ might mean in this question? Part 3, Methods, picks out some aspects of the ways contemporary research is carried out that have struck recent commentators as either problematic, or intriguing, or both. Part 4, Futures, looks at the direction some of the liveliest of current concerns in anthropology will take in the foreseeable − and even not so foreseeable − future. Having decided a target readership for the Handbook, as well as questions to set broad parameters relevant to them, the next decision involved some roughly defined period that specialist contributors would be invited to address in their chapters. Social anthropology, as any undergraduate student soon learns, became soundly established in the UK university system a little under a century ago, in the age of theoretical functionalism and structural functionalism, under the guidance, respectively, of Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. They, and Malinowski particularly in this regard if not all others, borrowed a leaf from Emile Durkheim’s book. Durkheim’s argument for

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the autonomy of sociology from psychology had involved definition of a distinctive subject matter, the analysis of ‘social facts’ and of ‘social currents’, by the use of a holistic method distinctive to the discipline. The founders of social anthropology similarly argued for an essentialist view of the newly realized discipline that was to champion holistically oriented local research by immersion in non-Western societies. The new discipline would be distinctively what other disciplines were not, and this was the basis for its use of (often negative) contrast (‘here but not among the whomever’) and (often negative) comparison (‘but this is not everywhere the case’) to make its particular contribution to the disciplinary landscape. In the same way that Durkheim’s sociology had been not-psychology, so anthropology was argued (by some at least) to be unlike a variety of other disciplines that at times included history, economics and philosophy. Most of these assertions elicited contrary propositions that anthropology was not as unalike aspects of other disciplines as its proponents chose to argue but, irrespective of their details, simply by taking place these debates provided a claim to headroom for the newcomer in the university system. Research and pedagogy relatively soon began to fall within sub-fields that, tonguein-cheek, were sometimes summed up as the discipline’s PERKS (politics, economics, religion, kinship, and symbolism), and for some decades most anthropologists made their reputations as experts in one or more of the PERKS. These distinctions were later overlaid by another set of differences that were based on the grand theoretical allegiances that replaced arguments internal to structural functionalism when that envelope split. These schemas largely represented ways of combining methodological individualism and holism, with an abstract image of society (as network, class pyramid, or enclosing environment). Some were named for their ancestors (Durkheimian, Weberian, Marxist, etc.) and others for their analytic leanings (transactionalist, symbolic interactionist,

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structuralist, etc.). These developments in social anthropology occurred during a halfcentury or so that saw a Second World War and the formal dismantling of European territorially based empires, as well as the founding of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) in 1946, and the inception of its conferences in 1963. The state of development of the discipline during the 1960s is evident from the very broad topics covered by the ‘books of the conference’ (oddly called ASA Monographs) edited by the second generation of professional social anthropologists: history, religion, myth, politics, economics, ‘complex’ societies, witchcraft, language, kinship, socialization …. As subjects many would remain interesting nowadays, or at any other time, but they would be impossibly inclusive as conference topics (perhaps plausible as titles of introductory course readers). By the 1970s a generational change in personnel and ideas was afoot in social anthropology; their theoretically defined interests are represented by the volumes of the Second ASA Decennial Conference in 1973, including more expansively conceived versions of transactionalism, symbolism, and Marxism, as well as ‘texts and contexts’ presaging the imminent literary turn, and these were presented partly as critiques of the shortcomings of the two previous generations’ reliance on structural functionalism. As significantly, the topics around which the annual conferences convened began to narrow, in recognition of the necessarily specialized nature of the questions about which focused discussion might be anticipated. Whether this represented the end of a tradition of social anthropology or a more subtle transmutation was not immediately obvious. By the early 1980s, theory had become a commodity that social anthropology more consistently imported than exported, and like many others of the then younger generation (a rather small UK generation thanks to a decade of austerity in the university sector), I found myself closely reading Pierre Bourdieu, who might be considered an anthropologist in his early career,

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and Michel Foucault, both of whom provided means to conceive of the relationship between power and knowledge, and raised questions about human agency, in ways that went beyond the sociological classics. The impact of the publication of Writing Culture in 1985, proposing a textual critique of the authority of anthropological writings, was hard to underestimate at the time, and it dominated much of the more theoretically oriented discussion in the discipline for almost a decade, including whether the critique was itself postmodern. I skate over this history briefly, because other than to remark how different it looks in the light of current concerns than it did then, it preoccupies contributors to this Handbook remarkably little. Surprisingly, while contemporary social anthropology of the past quarter century has assimilated, indeed normalized, some of the postmodernist concerns of the 1980s, in most other regards it seems have picked up its modernist trajectory (broadly towards specialization). For instance, several authors in this volume feel the need still to argue for the indispensability of ethnographic fieldwork to the anthropological project. But this is not in order to suggest that ethnography and anthropology are the same, but that they are complementary activities at a disciplinary, and typically also individual, level. Without anthropological theory, ethnographies cannot fly beyond their guaranteed provincial readerships; but without ethnography, anthropological theory loses the groundedness it draws from close attention to local lives. Postmodernism burrowed deeply into anthropology’s collective psyche (returning with serious concerns about its practices, texts, and truths), but later modern anthropology has tended to look outwards from anthropology to seek complementarities with other intellectual pursuits. This involves inter-disciplinarity, rather than the dissolution of disciplinary identities, and it depends on disciplines having, as they say, ‘something to bring to the table’. It has also resulted in a transformative tangle of rootstocks between elements of different disciplines.

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THE STRUCTURE OF THE HANDBOOK Part 1 of this Handbook seeks to capture this sense of complementarity between social anthropology (itself composited of anthropological theory and ethnographic description) and its disciplinary others in terms of the particular interplays of agendas and ideas that have characterized the external relations of anthropology as a contributor to collaborative thinking (whether as actual working collaboration, or as shared intellectual presence in an environment of similar concerns). Firstgeneration modern social anthropology had an exclusive relationship to other disciplines, acting as a safe house for types of data of intense interest to its practitioners but marginal interest to most others (archaeologists, folklorists, comparative historians, etc.). Second-generation modern social anthropology might be characterized as expansionist, keen to extend its fieldwork terrain by annexing border areas and sometimes entire continents of enquiry, and offering the anthropology of most things you cared to think of. It had an invigoratingly optimistic, could-do-better, attitude towards other disciplines seen as competitors. Following a postmodern interlude, contemporary social anthropology, at least on this admittedly one-dimensional and selective way of slicing the epoch, has a more collaborative attitude to inter-disciplinarity: anthropology and rather than anthropology of. This has led to the emergence of a large number of collaborative inter-disciplinary fields to which anthropologists bring particular theoretical and methodological proclivities. Participation in them involves a degree of mastery of the literatures of the partner disciplines, a wide roster that includes the arts, humanities, and sciences as well as social sciences. The subjects of the 16 chapters in Part 1 make this apparent: art, archaeology, biomedicine and bioscience, economics and development studies, gender studies , history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, museum studies, politics, postcolonialism, public policy, psychology, and religious studies. Looked at this way,

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social anthropology is a relational discipline, drawing reinterpreted elements from its history of modernism into productive tension with collaborating disciplines. This is a significant strength, but because of the propensity of these collaborations to become somewhat hermetic to outsiders, also a challenge to the community of researchers and teachers. There is, in short, the danger of social anthropology deconstructing itself into a series of sub-disciplines, each of them wholly comprehensible only to its own interdisciplinary constituency, leaving the discipline as a whole like a doughnut with a hole in its middle. Even if it is not always easy to do so, in the event, anthropologists do continue to communicate with one another across these potential enclaves. One reason for this is that many potential sub-disciplines harbour their own disciplinary ambitions, presenting themselves as perspectives on the whole, a point that also emerges from Part 4. Other reasons have to do with the concern of all social anthropologists, irrespective of sub-disciplinary interests, with problems of method. These concerns cut across subdisciplinary differences, and the theorization of methodological issues now provides a site for a shared disciplinary debate, which is the subject of Part 3 of the Handbook. Ethnographic enquiry has to be undertaken in some kind of definable place or places, but saying this is not to confound the space intensively explored by ‘fieldwork’ with the field throughout which enquiry as a process extends. The research process creates a locality to which the results of fieldwork will apply. There are reasons to argue that this relation – between fieldwork and the field of research – has become more complex: research in virtual and multi-sited locales clearly involves challenging problems of logistics and planning. Movement from predominantly rural to predominantly urban fieldwork sites had already obliged ethnographers to discover more explicitly active and purposeful models of fieldwork. The early modern ethnographic narrative of ‘immersion’ made pioneer fieldwork sound

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in recollection much more passive than it must have been in practice, and early ethnographers were later to be accused of extending the results of their fieldwork in small localities to describe larger imagined tribal or ethnic entities. While not entirely without foundation, close reading suggests this has often been a failing of readers as much as writers, or a consequence of the need for pedagogic clarity, or of simplification in the interests of comparison. Evidence of the smaller locales of fieldwork can be found readily in most early modern monographs. Even in this restrictive sense, the non-coincidence between the locale(s) of fieldwork and fields of enquiry is not a new phenomenon. Undeniably it is becoming an increasingly complex one, a matter placed in the foreground by anthropologists who situated their research in the, subtly different, widest fields of world systems theory, globalization, postcolonialism, imperialism and new imperialism, or diasporic studies and cosmopolitanism. Part 2, therefore, interrogates both newer and enduring localizations of ethnographic practice. Some have clear continuities with regions that would have seemed important a quarter century ago; others are reconfigured by the emergence of strategic geographic blocks, transnational identities, or non-geographical comparisons. Thus we find, for instance, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and island Southeast Asia, but also North and Latin American national societies, indigenous peoples, and globalized considerations of migration, and cosmopolitanism. Even where regional focuses of enquiry might appear unchanged this is seldom the case, as a title like ‘Replacing Europe’ (Chapter 2.2), for instance, makes explicit. Social anthropologists, I noted earlier, now seem enabled to hold discussions across their differences of sub-disciplinary attachments and local expertise as much by questions of theorized methodology as grand theory. Part 3 addresses only some of the topics that might be anticipated of a work on research methods. We have not sought to replace the specialist literature on research methods but

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INTRODUCTION

rather to supplement it with chapters that are indicative of current discussions around methodological differences. When Roy Ellen’s edited volume initiated the ASA series of volumes on research methods nearly three decades ago,3 it is notable that he was able largely to submerge his own and his coauthors’ identities into a chorus that delivered a connective narrative in a unified voice. This guide continues to be relevant to intending researchers today (and it remains in print). In Part 3, as elsewhere in the Handbook, we emphasise authorship because we focus on areas that are contentious and contended. When is fieldwork by immersion comparable to short-term research? How should anthropologists study ethics, including their own? What kind of field site is an archive? What are the potential pitfalls for anthropologists of accepting commissioned research, or indeed of the continuum of research initiatives from the more academically- driven to policy-driven ends of a spectrum (via the, now widespread, thematic priorities of funders)? Is it possible to investigate war zones ethnographically? Questions can be asked about visuality, materiality, and language as research elements, and comparison as both the outcome and precondition of research. Part 3 demonstrates a lively area of contention that is becoming highlighted not least by the ways that increased inter-disciplinarity begs the distinctiveness of anthropological method, and by the transmutations of locale, that are discussed in Parts 1 and 2. Looking too far into the future invites guesswork, so with the exception of its more fictionalized and provocative coda the future gazing in Part 4 is confined to topics on which a considerable body of ongoing research ensures at least some extrapolation of current trends. Four clusters of issues are held up for interrogation, and the reader is at liberty to trace back through the preceding Parts of the Handbook for evidence of their prominence. Anthropology has been a contributor, theoretically, comparatively, and methodologically, to studies of cognition and neurobiology; of the environment, including

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the secure provision of food and energy, as well as responses to disaster; of medically related studies in the broad sense of concern with bodies, well-being and demographics; and of the impact of new technologies both on the societies studied by anthropologists and on anthropology as the study of technologically transformed societies. Other than in its non-portability, this Handbook was not designed to be monumental, although its scale and scope might make it difficult for anyone, even after reading Marilyn Strathern’s parting thoughts, to believe that our most difficult decisions involved what to omit. As a survey of the past quarter century, a decade from now it should have become another historical marker of disciplinary change. Some of its Futures may have come to pass, and others will acquire the quaintness of past futurology (like the 1950s shape of kitchen robots to come). The Handbook is an invitation to further research and will more than serve its purpose if it facilitates that end and contributes to its own supersession. Leaving aside the masochistic elements of undertaking to manage a project on this scale, I emerged at the conclusion of it with a reassured sense that contemporary social anthropology, in its balance between intellectual adventure and practical grounding, and in its ability to wear its seriousness dashingly, is well provided to be a provocative presence in a crowded disciplinary world.4

NOTES 1 The overall shape of the volume was conceived in 2005 by Richard Fardon, when Chair of the ASA, in discussions with Robert Rojek at SAGE, and refined with John Gledhill when he became Chair later that year. Helpful reviews were solicited by the publishers from William Arens, Alan Barnard, Signe Howell, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Marilyn Strathern, and Christina Toren. John and Richard issued invitations to section editors that Olivia Harris, Trevor Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang, and Richard Wilson graciously accepted; they subsequently developed the four parts of the Handbook collaboratively but with a measure of autonomy.

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On Olivia Harris’s death, Veronica Strang and Richard Fardon brought Part 3, largely commissioned by Olivia, to completion. As managing editor, I am indebted to John Gledhill and my co-editors for their, on occasions tested, equanimity. Deepa Joshith led the team in Bangalore that brought this complex project to publication. Royalties from this volume, authors’ as well as editors’, have been contributed to the Radcliffe-Brown and Firth Funds of the ASA to support students in the final stages of doctoral research in anthropology. This gift and the volume are dedicated to Olivia Harris, who is greatly missed. 2 To answer the second question in the negative: students embarking on undergraduate or on the taught elements of postgraduate degrees in anthropology have a choice of excellent text books in the social anthropological tradition, with marked productivity around the millennium. These are too many to enumerate here, but widely used texts (hence frequently revised and reprinted), roughly in order of difficulty, include the following: Joy Hendry, 1998, 2008, 2nd edition, An Introduction to Social Anthropology: Sharing our Worlds (previously, Other People’s Worlds); Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 1995/2001/2010, 3rd edition, Small Places, Large Issues: an Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology; Robert Layton, 1998, An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology; Henrietta Moore (ed.) 1999, Anthropological Theory Today; Alan Barnard, 2000, History and Theory in Anthropology; Michael Herzfeld, 2000, Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society; and Wendy James, 2003/2004, The Ceremonial Animal: a New Portrait of Anthropology; texts from an earlier generation include David Pocock,

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1975/1999 (reprinted with an Introduction by Jeremy MacClancy), Understanding Social Anthropology. Additionally, there are encyclopaedia-style texts: notably Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds) 1996/1998/2002, Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and on anthropology more broadly, Tim Ingold (ed.), 1997/2002, Companion Encyclopedia to Anthropology. Humanity, Culture and Social Life. 3 Readers looking for guides to method in a narrower sense will have no difficulty finding them elsewhere, not least in the ASA series. Roy Ellen, 1984, Ethnographic Research: a Guide to General Conduct (Academic Press), was followed by four specialized volumes, all recently out of print but still available in libraries: Alan Barnard and Tony Good, 1984, Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (Academic Press); J. Altman and C. Gregory, 1989, Observing the Economy (Routledge); R. Finnegan, 1992, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (Routledge); and M.D. Fischer, 1993, Applications in Computing for Social Anthropologists (Routledge). The series was later revived briefly: J. Hendry, 1999, An Anthropologist in Japan: Glimpses of Life in the Field. (Routledge); C. Davies, 1999, Reflexive Anthropology (Routledge, 2nd edition 2007); and I. Edgar, 2004, A Guide to Imagework (Routledge). 4 But from a UK provincial viewpoint and writing in 2011, I feel I need to add that the British role in this envisaged social anthropology will depend upon a funding environment that is amongst the most inscrutable of factors when projecting the discipline’s future. The reader will note, with Jean and John Comaroff, the wider establishment of this version of the anthropological discipline globally.

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PART I

INTERFACES Edited by Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson

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Introduction − Anthropology’s Interdisciplinary Connections Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson

According to the SAGE Guidelines that frame this volume, handbooks are intended to be ‘reviews, accounts and audits of a discipline’ that try to address the questions, ‘What is the state of the art?’ ‘Where is the discipline going’, and ‘What are the key debates/issues that comprise the discipline’? Part 1 of this ASA Handbook provides answers to all three of these questions by asking a fourth: ‘How does contemporary social anthropology relate to other disciplines or branches of knowledge?’ While not intended to be exhaustive in their coverage, these 16 chapters illustrate the breadth and scope of social anthropology, as well as the key trajectories and research agendas that its practitioners have been pursuing over the last quarter century. Some of these represent long-standing disciplinary connections, notably linguistics, archaeology, economics and law, whereas others represent more recent interfaces and developments in knowledge to which social anthropology has contributed, such as science and technology studies (STS), media and cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. This section lays out the wares of current social anthropology by exhibiting how anthropologists contribute to wider academic and professional conversations, by framing

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other disciplinary discussions in different terms, or by challenging their operating assumptions and defining principles. In this engagement with disciplines that are both cognate and distant, we see what social anthropology has to offer as a qualitative social inquiry into all aspects of human behaviour, from art, psychology and religion, to literature, politics and development studies. Given the apparent trend towards evergreater sub-disciplinary specialization, is there a danger of social anthropology fragmenting and losing its coherence or distinctiveness? Such questions evoke a sense of déjà vu. As Jane Cowan reminds us in her chapter on anthropology and history, the intellectual and social upheavals of the 1960s threatened to plunge both social anthropology and history into a state of what Bernard Cohn termed ‘epistemological anarchy’. Eric Wolf (1980) famously complained about the effects of too much specialization that was occurring within the discipline during the 1980s. With the sub-fields increasingly pursuing their own interests, he and others feared that anthropology was coming apart, that there was no longer a shared language that we speak, however idiosyncratically. As Ortner (1984: 127) summed it up, ‘We no longer call each other names’. Yet what is

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striking in these chapters is precisely the degree to which the discipline has retained a common centre: if not entirely in terms of theory, then certainly with regard to methodology, or at least to a shared commitment to an empirical and ethnographic approach in the production of anthropological knowledge. While we should be cautious about overstretching our claim to disciplinary unity, the chapters in this section highlight at least four characteristics of contemporary social anthropological inquiry. 1 Anthropology is an integrative and comparative discipline. Even if social anthropologists now refrain from the claims of holism made by earlier generations of theorists, there remains a remarkable breadth and range of inquiry in the discipline. This scope is both theoretical as well as geographical, and aims at the integration of social processes that other social science and humanities approaches often isolate and treat as separate and distinct for the purposes of study. Being more reticent to give causal priority to any one sphere of social life, and being attuned to the contingency and unpredictability of social relationships, social anthropologists are less predisposed to seeing one aspect of human sociality as determinative of all others, or to sequestering a small number of variables and testing their causal relationships. Instead, their analyses are more likely to demonstrate the interconnectedness of social processes, even those in far-flung locales, including those conventionally held to be disparate and unrelated. This is particularly wellillustrated in the chapters on gender (Henrietta Moore), literature (Bill Watson) and economics (Keith Hart). As Keith Hart argues, ‘We need to rescue economics from the economists’ in order to show how money, markets and social action are imminent and embedded in wider structures. Much the same argument can also be made for the study of policy, politics and law − all of which are entwined in wider symbolic systems and fields of social action. 2 Anthropology is inherently contextualizing. As implied by the integrative approach outlined above, social anthropology is an inherently contextualizing endeavour that delineates the deep and abiding attachments of particular social phenomena to local contexts, including those held to be global or long-distance forms of exchange and interaction such as international law or globalized media representations. Despite their widespread circulation, representations, people and commodities still remain embedded

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in historically constituted and deeply sedimented social relations. Anthropologists have demonstrated how messages are often received in ways other than those intended by the social actors who design, say, global advertising campaigns or international development policies, and this differential reception goes some way to explaining why top-down policies and programmes seldom unfold as planned. Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer draw on case studies from Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland to show why analysts need to take more seriously the way that the category of the ‘political’ is conceptualized by local actors. In her chapter on the anthropology of law, Sally Engle Merry documents how women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in four cities translate international human rights into local terms, thereby ‘vernacularizing’ a set of globalizing ideas and practices. Kevin Latham’s account of anthropological studies of new global media makes a strong case for using ethnography to find out what people ‘really’ do with television, video and other media. However, this raises one of the conundrums of anthropological analysis: how to reconcile the external (or ‘etic’) and theoretical perspectives of the observer with the insider (or ‘emic’) accounts of the local actors themselves. As Martin Mills argues, while social anthropology and religious studies share a critical sympathy with the religious communities that constitute their traditional subject matter − and while they are united in their rejection of the unqualified positivism manifested in comparativist and behavioural explanations of human action – cultural relativism has its limits. 3 Anthropology retains commitment to social agency. As a consequence of the ethnographic research techniques of language learning and long-term immersion in the field, social anthropologists are often resistant to those social science accounts which marginalize or neglect the conscious agency of the actors involved in social processes. A phenomenological account of social agency − what people think, their consciousness of macro processes, how they plan and strategize and make sense of their actions − has been a hallmark of social anthropology since Malinowski. As a result, social anthropology has often been sceptical of deterministic theories and excessively universalizing approaches which portray social actors as relatively powerless ciphers for the deep structures of society, language or the human mind. A prominent place for the volition of social actors can be found in a number of the contributions to Part 1. In her chapter on anthropology and psychology, Christina Toren makes the case for a ‘unified model of human being’ that is ‘explicitly opposed to cognitivist models because of their inability to come to

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grips with human historical actuality in general and their own historical nature in particular’. Cris Shore’s chapter on the anthropology of policy provides a counterpoint to the anthropological tendency to highlight individual autonomy and agency, as he shows how ‘policies are technologies that powerfully influence human consciousness and behaviour; they create the bureaucratic taxonomies that define the conditions of people’s existence’. Part of the value of an ‘anthropology of policy’, he suggests, is that it offers a critical window on the wider processes and relations of power that are shaping the contemporary world. Richard Werbner’s chapter on postcolonial identity and subjectivity, by contrast, illustrates both the high degree of moral agency and the complex identity strategies that exist in postcolonial Africa and Asia, as well as the powerful processes of postcolonial subjection that are redefining identity, self and other, particularly in those situations where traumatic conflict has led to a breakdown of society and the norms of civility. 4 Culture matters to anthropology. Although social anthropology’s traditional concern with (and some might say obsession with) culture has diminished, anthropologists continue to insist on the necessity of the term, broadly conceived, and understood as the symbolic and learned ideas and practices found in different societies. None of the chapters in this section sets culture up in opposition either to biology or to principles of social structure and social organization such as race, nation or social class. Virtually all of them conceive of culture as a mutually constitutive element that is necessary for a full understanding of those elements of social organization. In Sarah Franklin’s chapter on the anthropology of biomedicine, ‘biology is no longer seen as prior to culture, but as a domain of phenomena that is shaped by historical and cultural forces’. In a similar vein, Alessandro Duranti proposes a linguistics of human praxis that shifts our attention from ‘the study of linguistic structures as manifestations of a common code (or grammar) to the study of language as a socio-historically defined resource for the constitution of society and the reproduction of cultural meanings and practices’. Several contributions go further by showing how forms of material culture such as art (Arnd Schneider), museum artefacts (Brian Durrans) or genres of literature (Bill Watson) can be used to shed light on deeper aspects of the societies that produced them. Julian Thomas’s chapter on anthropology and archaeology also shows how material culture − in combination with ethnography − can provide a valuable tool for ethnoarchaeologists to understand human prehistory by interpreting historical sites.

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Understanding the present remains the core challenge of contemporary social anthropology. Regrettably, we were unable to include a number of potential topical areas such as anthropology and sociology, the anthropology of education, or of tourism, or anthropology and architecture. These are all areas of valuable exchange between anthropologists and other disciplines, but the editors of this admittedly large and compendious Handbook faced unyielding space constraints that called for difficult choices and a need to prioritize certain areas where we felt the anthropological contribution was most apparent. Other editors may have selected a different list, all of which underlines the remarkable breadth and depth of social anthropology as a discipline with a global purview and a distinctive set of methods and theories that seek to comprehend all aspects of human behaviour. That wide purview explains why anthropology necessarily interfaces with so many other disciplines, and why it has evolved into so many sub-disciplinary fields and specialisms. Is this evidence of disintegration and fragmentation? Quite the contrary: returning to Sherry Ortner, who described a similar process of epistemological ferment over a quarter of a century ago, these expressions of ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’ are often the classic symptoms of liminality, which, as social anthropologists well recognize, is ‘the breeding ground for a new and perhaps better order’ (Ortner 1984: 127). As Marilyn Strathern points out in the Afterword to this Handbook, however, creating that new order will be the task for anthropology’s heirs, in whose hands the future of the discipline will lie.

REFERENCES Ortner, Sherry. 1984. ‘Theory in anthropology since the sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1): 126−166. Wolf, Eric. 1980. ‘They divide and subdivide and call it anthropology’, New York Times (30 November), Ideas and Trends Section, p. E9.

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1.1 Anthropology and Linguistics Alessandro Duranti

Over the last few decades, the anthropological study of linguistic structures, genres, and activities in private and public settings has redefined the goals and boundaries of what ‘linguistics’ means for the social sciences and anthropology in particular. The ‘linguists’ in today’s anthropology departments – or ‘linguistic anthropologists’ as they are known in the United States and Canada – are not only different from most of their colleagues in linguistics or language departments but also they are different from the linguistic anthropologists of two or three generations ago. One of the main differences is the theoretical and methodological shift from the study of linguistic structures as manifestations of a common code (or grammar) to the study of language as a socio-historically defined resource for the constitution of society and the reproduction of cultural meanings and practices. The current trend, then, could be seen as a continuation of what a little over two decades ago I called ‘a linguistics of the human praxis’ (Duranti 1988a). The term ‘praxis’ in this case was meant to recognize the interest within the Ethnography of Communication (Hymes 1964; Gumperz and Hymes 1972) for the use of language in the conduct of social life: that is, for what language does for, to, and through speakers. This focus has not changed and it is safe to say that an anthropologically informed linguistics is a

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linguistics that starts from the assumption that language plays a key role in how society is organized and reproduced. What has changed over the last few decades is that linguistic anthropologists have rendered more nuanced their use of some key notions taken from linguistics, philosophy, and social theory. In this chapter I will focus on three such notions: namely, performance, indexicality, and agency. I will show that their use in the analysis of speaking allows linguistic anthropologists to clarify how the details of linguistic structure participate in the constitution of particular aspects of the social context, including events, acts, stances, and identities. Throughout the chapter, I show that the attention to linguistic structure and linguistic performance can provide us with important analytical tools for understanding how acts, persons, and activities are connected. This connection is crucial for the fabric of social life and for the managing of social action.

PERFORMANCE Noam Chomsky introduced performance in his ground-breaking monograph Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965), but only to dismiss it as theoretically less important than competence, the knowledge of language. Chomsky’s arguments in favor of the

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study of what ideal speaker-hearers know (competence) as opposed to what they say in a given situation (performance) echoed Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole and influenced theoretical linguists. Indirectly, it contributed to the development of the separate field of sociolinguistics in the 1970s and the rebirth of linguistic anthropology in the 1980s (Duranti 2003). As linguistics became more and more focused on formal models based on native speakers’ intuitions about what constitute well-formed sentences in their language,1 a number of scholars advocated the importance of the study of language use across speech styles (e.g. Labov 1966, 1972) and social situations (e.g. Hymes 1964, 1972). During the 1950s, performance had also been evoked in John Austin’s Harvard lectures on how utterances manage to do things. The publication of these lectures (Austin 1962, 1975) not only gave birth to what was later called Speech Act Theory (Searle 1969), but also helped establish the field of pragmatics, understood as the study of the relationship between language and the contexts of its use (Gazdar 1979; Levinson 1983). An important part of Austin’s model was the notion of performative verbs. These are verbs like declare, command, request, etc. Used in the present tense and with a first-person singular subject – as in I request that you leave the room – they make explicit what a given utterance – e.g., leave the room! – is meant to accomplish (as we know, speakers very rarely make use of performative verbs in the firstperson present tense form). Performance for Austin was thus identified with action or, in his terms, with the force that a given utterance has (see also Duranti 2009). In the 1970s, linguistic anthropologists adopted the term performance for examining genres like poetry, oratory, storytelling, or singing not only as texts but also as the products of interactions between speakers (or singers) and audiences. This shift of focus came with an appreciation of the creativity that is always at work in speaking and of the responsibility that speakers assume for the ways in which

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they deliver a given message (Bauman 1975; Hymes 1975). Several years later, Judith Butler also adopted the notion of performance, renaming it performativity and changing its basic meaning from what a speaker does with language to the process whereby the speaker (or others) are constituted (in the phenomenological sense of the term) through language and other symbolic acts. More specifically, Butler argued that gender is not just the cultural interpretation or embodiment of a pre-established or pre-formed sex, but ‘a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status’ (1988: 520). As she made clear in the preface of the new edition of her 1990 book Gender Trouble, Butler was seeking to undo what she saw as normative presuppositions and interpretive practices in the feminism of the time: ‘Gender Trouble sought to uncover the ways in which the very thinking of what is possible in gendered life is foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions’ (Butler 1999: viii). Since such presumptions are contained, or, rather, indexed by language use (Butler 1993), it is not surprising that Butler’s notion of performativity and some of its theoretical implications to rethink the role of language in the construction of social identity became part of the discussion of social identity and social identification among linguistic anthropologists (Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Hall 1999; Kulick 2000, 2009). More recently, Richard Bauman’s (1975) original definition of performance as responsibility for the ways in which a given message is delivered has been enriched by a number of studies that look at what performers actually do, think, and feel while performing. For example, Harris Berger and Giovanna Del Negro (2002), drawing from Berger’s (1999) phenomenologically informed ethnography of musicians in three traditions (rock, metal, and jazz), argued that performers not only have different ways of organizing their own and their audience’s attention

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but also different levels of awareness, which are activated by the specific historically defined cultural organization of the event in which they perform. Musicians can at times get lost in the flow of sound they (and sometimes their audience) produce, and other times − in order to solve a problem on stage − they become very attentive to their own and others’ actions, achieving a high degree of reflexivity. Based on Del Negro’s fieldwork in a small Italian town, they also suggested that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of performing being self-conscious in public. During the passeggiata, those who choose to dress up and walk in the middle of the main road show their will to be subject to public evaluation, but they must also do it with disinvoltura – that is, with ease − a quality of being that must be displayed through posture, movements, and graceful recognition of the attention that their dresses and actions attract. These studies bring out aspects of verbal performance that had been previously overlooked. One of them is the recurring presence of improvisation in a number of speech genres (Caton 1990; Duranti 2008a; Pagliai 2002, 2010; Sawyer 2001; Tiezzi 2009) and in children’s verbal play (Sawyer 1996; Duranti and Black 2011). Another aspect is the tension between creativity and social control. If speaking is a form of action – as emphasized by speech act theorists − and of interaction – as argued by conversation analysts − then speech performance cannot but be regulated, or ‘regimented’ (Kroskrity 1998, 2000), while being both the target and the instrument of ideological assessment (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994; Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity 1998). These and other studies show that through the study of verbal performance linguistic anthropologists have returned in new ways to the earlier connections between linguistics and aesthetics established by scholars like Edward Sapir and Roman Jakobson but later forgotten in the midst of the so-called ‘Chomskian Revolution’ (Newmeyer 1986).

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The study of performance has also become associated with the role of the human body, tools, and the built environment in the constitution of meaningful actions, speaking included. From the point of view of data collection, this confluence of interests was made possible by the adoption of audio-visual technologies for the documentation of human interaction. From a theoretical point of view, the body and its material surroundings became particularly important for social theorists who were influenced by phenomenology. All stage actors know that the setting as well as their posture and movement on the stage play a key role in communicating to an audience what a given scene is about even before they open their mouth to deliver their lines. But it took some time for students of language use to find ways to even notice that the body and the material context of an interaction are key elements in the encoding of messages and their interpretations. Inspired by Charles S. Peirce’s theoretical writings on the notion of sign, Erving Goffman’s (1959, 1967) insightful observation of face-to-face interaction, and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) discussion of habitus and bodily hexis, linguistic anthropologists have been refining a number of analytical concepts that are meant to capture how language, body, and material environment are integrated in human action. One important development has been the expansion of the linguistic notion of deixis to the more general notion of indexicality, which has been adopted, empirically grounded, and refined in the study of language socialization, language ideologies, and non-verbal communication.

INDEXICALITY One of the major areas of intersection between anthropology and linguistics over the last several decades has been the study of indexicality, understood as the property that linguistic expressions exhibit when they presuppose or help establish an existential – spatial or temporal − relation with their referents

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(Peirce 1955: 107; Hanks 1999). Linguists have tended to discuss indexicality under the more narrow sense of ‘deixis’ (Lyons 1982; Levinson 1983). In English, for example, deictic terms include personal pronouns like I and you as well as spatial and temporal particles or adverbs like here, there, up, down, next, now, then, today, tomorrow, etc. These lexical items all share one property: their referent shifts from one context to the next (hence the term ‘shifters’, originally introduced by Otto Jespersen and then adopted by Roman Jakobson). An important contribution to an anthropological study of indexicality was made by Michael Silverstein (1976), who drawing from Peirce, distinguished between two different kinds of indexes (or indices): those that are context-dependent and those that are context-creating. To the first type belong deictic terms like ‘there’ in the utterance the letter is there, where the interpretation of the deictic adverb ‘there’ presupposes the possibility of identifying some location within the perceptually and/or conceptually available space to which ‘there’ would be applicable. From a truth-propositional point of view, we would say that the truth-value could not be assigned to the letter is there without having the contextual information necessary to know what ‘there’ refers to. Typical examples of the second type, namely, context-creating indexes, are personal pronouns like you in utterances such as What do you think? In this case, the pronoun you selects, out of the situation, one or more individuals to become addressee(s) and invites (or obliges) them to speak next. The pronoun you, in other words, establishes the speaking roles of the participants in the particular speech event. The notion of indexicality has also been used by linguists and anthropologists to talk about the social implications of certain linguistic expressions, such as the choice between tu and vous in French or a particular ‘speech level’ in languages like Javanese or Korean. Linguists have used the term ‘social deixis’ (Fillmore 1975) to refer to the fact that these expressions either presuppose or

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entail (to use Silverstein’s terms) particular social relations or social situations. Both address terms and referential descriptions index types of social relationships as well as different types of social occasions, in addition to a person’s political stance and even ideology of citizenship and participation in public life. Being on a first name basis, for example, is not a condition for using the first name to refer to important political figures or other celebrities. In 1996, when I was documenting a campaign for the US Congress in a Californian electoral district, I had a chance to observe and document that Hillary Clinton – then the First Lady – and other political figures were at times being referred to and even addressed by first name even by new acquaintances and strangers. This is not uncommon with celebrities (people all over the world referred to the Princess of Wales as ‘Diana’ before and after her tragic death in an automobile accident). But the fact that the referential form could change within the same situation and in the speech by the same person showed that speakers were shifting referential expressions not because they were adapting to the context (CONTEXT → LANGUAGE) but because they were activating different perspectives on the same person and thus redefining the context through language (LANGUAGE → CONTEXT) (Duranti 1992). As the discussion of ‘context’ became in the 1970s and 1980s a central concern for linguistic anthropologists and discourse analysts (Duranti and Goodwin 1992; van Dijk 2008), so did the concept of indexicality, which has been used by an increasing number of scholars for discussing language as a cultural and social phenomenon. It should not, then, be surprising that some of the more recent attempts at theorizing language from an anthropological perspective have tended to examine linguistic expressions from the point of view of their indexical meaning. A key feature of these contributions is the concern with the ways in which indexicality plays a role in the constitution of cultural

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knowledge and institutional roles and identities. Looming large behind these contributions lies the problem of the so-called micro−macro link (e.g. Alexander et al. 1987): namely, the issue of how the details of everyday interaction, in which language can be easily shown to play an important role for its users, are connected with and relevant to larger societal entities (e.g. institutions) and processes (e.g. socio-economic and socio-political change), where the role of language is minimized or taken for granted by researchers (but see Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage and Clayman 2010; also the essays collected in Browning and Duranti 2005, especially Levinson 2005 and Schegloff 2005). Several contributions to the study of indexical meanings have addressed the relationship between individual linguistic expressions and the context in which they participate and which they simultaneously help constitute, including the roles or identities of speakers, addressees, and bystanders. I will here review four of these studies. As we shall see, the general trend among these authors is to posit that indexical values participate in analytically distinct and distinguishable ‘levels,’ ‘orders,’ or ‘modalities,’ which are often hierarchically organized through relationships of dependency, intertextuality, relevance, etc. Since each of the four studies is the culmination of a long-term commitment by the author to the relationship between language and context, I will occasionally draw from other articles by the same author without claiming to be exhaustive or even moderately adequate in my account of their respective life-projects. My aim is to focus on some of their main points and key concepts. I will review the articles according to the order in which they appeared in print. Silverstein’s indexical orders In an article that reads as the culmination of more than three decades of teaching and writing about indexicality, Michael Silverstein’s (2004) ‘“Cultural” concepts

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and the language – culture nexus’ provides a complex and detailed argumentation about why one should look for culture in the dynamics of verbal interaction. Silverstein argues that cultural conceptualization is not so much found in the denotative meanings that are being communicated – what is sometimes informally called the ‘content’ of speech – but in their indexical meanings, which he defines as the interactionally (and textually) activated associations between the expressions used and the stereotypical social roles, identities, and relationships invoked by such expressions (see also Silverstein 1997 on the improvisational quality of discourse in real time). This approach makes a number of theoretical claims and showcases methods developed within linguistic anthropology (and related fields) to support those claims. The first assumption is that to speak of culture means to search for and deal with patterned behaviour such as (speech) events or their constituting ‘genres’ (e.g. lectures, interviews, greetings, casual conversation), which are recognizable (by an observer) within a particular socio-historical tradition. This implies that cultural analysis cannot be limited to meta-cognitive activities such as asking natives about their beliefs or to metalinguistic activities such as asking speakers about their linguistic classifications of nature, society, and their bio-psychological life. The second theoretical assumption is that cultural knowledge is understood as changeable, negotiable, and adaptable to contextspecific goals or needs. The use of language, e.g., speaking, is thus resource and occasion for the reproduction as well as for the testing of cultural knowledge. This is true of informal conversations and ritual contexts alike. Silverstein argues that even though there are differences between a casual conversation and an ‘official ritual’ like the service of the Eucharist, an analysis of the ‘textartefacts’ produced in such speech events can show that they share a certain type or degree of conformity. In particular, they each display a textual configuration that exhibits a

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hidden but detectable ‘conceptual’ apparatus, a ‘metrics’ of a sort where such poetic phenomena as parallelism are at play together with the ritual-like performance of ‘roles’ and even ‘role reversals’ (see also Silverstein 1997). For example, specialized vocabulary such as that used during wine tasting events has the ‘creative power to index consubstantial traits in the speaker.’ (Silverstein 2004: 643). The description of certain attributes of the wine while we are in the process of tasting it (and ‘testing it’) has the power to make us ‘the well-bred, characterologically interesting (subtle, understated, balanced, intriguing, wining, etc.) person iconically corresponding to the metaphorical “fashion of speaking” of the perceived register’s figurations of the aesthetic object of connoisseurship, wine’ (ibid). These examples show Silverstein’s conceptualization of culture as a dialectical process that is presupposed and interactionally achieved through the indexical values of denotational (i.e., descriptive) language. While we describe our past-life experiences or the content of a bottle of wine, we are also engaged in processes of evaluation that must take into consideration – and express our stance with respect to – the persons we are interacting with, what they say, and what they do not say.

The deictic field and Hanks’ notion of embedding Silverstein’s work has been adopted and extended in a number of directions. William Hanks, one of his former students, has taken on the challenge of providing a theoretical framework as well as empirical evidence for connecting the use of deictic terms to increasingly more complex contexts. Using detailed descriptions of the morphologically elaborate Maya deictic system, Hanks has theorized that language is a symbolic system that relies on embodied practices that are, in turn, embedded in culturally rich contexts of use (e.g. Hanks 1990). In one of his most

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recent theoretical efforts, ‘Explorations in the Deictic Field’ (Hanks 2005), he presents a model of linguistic reference that is based upon and further refines three conceptualizations of the term ‘field.’ The first comes from the linguistic study of semantic taxonomies (e.g. the field of colour terms or kin terms in a given language) that are familiar to social and cognitive anthropologists; the second, divided into symbolic field and demonstrative field, is inspired by the writings of psychologist Karl Bühler who, in the 1930s, built his ‘organon theory’ of language around the study of deixis (Bühler 1990); and the third comes from Bourdieu’s practice theory, where the concept of field (French champ) reaches out to include communities such as the literary, the academic, the scientific, the bureaucratic, etc., each of which has its own socio-historically constituted differentiations and forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1991). In this article, Hanks is addressing a number of challenging issues including the question of how to account for the uses of deictic terms that do not conform to their status as spatial locators: that is, terms that cannot be simply explained as expressing proximal or non-proximal objects (see also Hanks 2006). His solution to this issue is to invoke ‘the multidimensional structure of the local Zeigfeld [demonstrative field], which includes participation frameworks, perception, attention focus, memory, discourse, and anticipation, as well as space’ (Hanks 2005: 209). This is done by extending the spatialist view of deictics through a number of ‘correspondences.’ For example, tactual or visual immediacy is encoded in terms of spatial proximity, and objects that are neither close nor perceptible are understood in terms of memory connections, whereby what is spatially and perceptually unavailable is treated as a distal referent (Hanks 2005: 202). In addition to the demonstrative field, Hanks relies on two other analytical units or ‘logically ordered layers’: namely, Goffman’s notion of situation and Harvey Sacks’ notion of conversational setting. These three units are emergent, which

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means that they unfold in time (Hanks 2006) and that their actual configuration is meaningful to participants without being predetermined. An important contribution of Hanks’ work is the notion of ‘embedding’: that is, the principle that an analytical unit at a lower logical level, e.g. the deictic field of the kind described in the Maya examples provided in the 2005 article, is embedded in larger social fields, which for Maya speakers include the shamanic field, the agricultural field, and the domestic field, each with its relation to the market economy of the community. In contrast to the lower-level units mentioned above, the social field is not discourse-based, although there is discourse in it, is nonlocal − i.e. it draws from people and resources that are not co-present − and includes individuals as well as collectivities such as professional organizations and various other institutions (Hanks 2006). Like for Bourdieu, for Hanks the field is what provides authority to the individual acting in a particular role or position (e.g. doctor, teacher, cashier, policeman, bus driver).

Ochs’ Indexical Principle and the indexical construction of social acts and social identities If indexicality plays such an important part in language use, we should expect it to also be a key element in human development. This is Elinor Ochs’ starting point in her article entitled ‘Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity,’ where she proposes that socialization is ‘in part a process of assigning situational, i.e., indexical meanings … to particular forms (e.g. interrogative forms, diminutive forms, diminutive affixes, raised pitch and the like)’ (Ochs 1996: 410−411). The claim here is that becoming competent members of any community involves first noticing and then adopting, often in unconscious ways, a number of recurring associations between linguistic forms like those mentioned in the above

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quote and features of situations such as properties of persons, objects, and events. This idea, which Ochs calls the ‘Indexical Principle’, is meant to capture at least two generalizations. The first is that language carries traces of speakers’ subjective attitudes as well as traces of intersubjectively constituted properties of contexts (e.g. the nature of the activity, the identities of those involved, their roles) across situations. The second is that such traces have an indexical value that plays an active role in constituting higher-order constructs such as social acts and social identities. To show how this works, Ochs provides an example – taken from her research on language socialization in (formerly Western) Samoa – in which a 19-monthold girl performs the act of begging by uttering the first-person singular pronoun ita, which conventionally indexes a stance of piety toward the speaker. An important theoretical point here is that to understand the illocutionary force – i.e., what is meant to and able to accomplish for the speaker – of the expression containing the pronoun ita we do not need to invoke an implied but unrealized higher-order performative clause of the type such as I request that … − the so-called ‘performative verbs’ identified by Austin (1975) in his discussion of how speakers ‘do’ things with language (see above). Rather, it is the indexical meaning of ita within a particular sequence of turns that perform what Ochs calls the ‘sympathetic affective stance,’ which, in turn, constitutes the (speech) ‘act’ of begging (Ochs 1996: 421).2 Just like individual expressions can help constitute social (speech) acts, so can types of speech acts help constitute higher-order social identities within institutional settings. This is illustrated by Ochs and Taylor’s (2001) analysis of storytelling around the dinner table, which shows that the role of ‘Father’ as a powerful figure in modern American family is constituted by verbal exchanges in which the father is set up as the recipient of stories told by the other family members. Whereas at the level of the speech

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act, an utterance such as ‘Tell Daddy what happened at school today’ said (most typically) by the mother to one of her children is simply a request for some news or a story, at the level of family dynamics, it is one of a series of routines that set up the father as the ‘problematizer’: i.e. as ‘the co-narrator who renders an action, condition, thought, or feeling of a protagonist or a co-narrator problematic, or possibly so’ (Ochs and Taylor 2001: 439). Being put in the position of problematizer, in turn, reinforces the ideology that ‘Father knows best,’ which, inter alia, supports the subordinate position of women within the family. Another important contribution of Ochs’ article is what she calls ‘the Universal Culture Principle’: namely, the idea that ‘there are certain commonalties across language communities in the linguistic means to constitute certain situational meanings’ (Ochs 1996: 425). The theme of universality is not as explicitly addressed in the other three articles I discuss, but it is implicit, as all authors describe specific interactions that are meant to illustrate general semiotic processes and propose analytical tools that are meant to be of use across all kinds of socio-cultural contexts.

Goodwin’s analysis of action and embodiment The authors mentioned so far have tended to focus on language as the only or main code. In their analysis, they always start from linguistic forms or linguistic acts. This focus changes with the work of Charles Goodwin, who, starting in the mid-1970s, paid close attention to what the body was communicating. This interest in a broader notion of communication has remained constant in Goodwin’s writing. Thus, in his ‘Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction’, Goodwin (2000) calls for the analysis of language as typically embedded within interactions where embodiment and material culture (e.g. tools) play a crucial

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rather than a secondary role as meaningmaking resources. Like Hanks (see above), Goodwin is concerned with two main issues: (a) capturing the temporal unfolding of human social practices and (b) rescuing some of the elements that are usually assumed to be part of the generic and residual category of ‘context.’ Rather than being primarily concerned with ‘language,’ or ‘speech,’ Goodwin takes ‘social action’ as the goal of his analysis and stresses the importance of understanding how the participants themselves – e.g. three young girls competitively engaged in a hopscotch game – manage to make relevant certain aspects of the immediate or the remote context. If the goal is to analyse coordinated social action, then the point of view cannot be what an individual speaker thinks, wants, or says but what is done and attended to by all those who are involved in the activity at hand. Given the potentially infinite bits of information that could be evoked or implied, one of the activities that language use requires is the selection of what should be attended to, which includes the prediction of what is coming next and who is going to be part of it. To account for how participants manage to accomplish coordinated social action, Goodwin uses the notion of semiotic field: ‘The term semiotic is intended to note the way in which signs are being deployed, while field provides a rough term for pointing to the encompassing medium within which specific signs are embedded’ (2000: 1494). In this perspective, linguistic signs are embedded within other linguistic signs (e.g. a noun is embedded within a larger syntactic structure), accumulate further meaning from parallel systems of signification (e.g. the stress on certain key words), and the whole semiotic field constituted by language is further embedded within larger units or ‘courses of action’ like the game the children are playing. By being open to the potentially equal role played by different semiotic resources within sequentially linked acts, we come to appreciate that what might have been glossed as ‘non-verbal’ or ‘redundant’, e.g. a hand gesture signalling ‘four,’ can in fact be analysed

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as having its own spatio-temporal organization, which in turn makes possible different kinds of acts by the same speaker who is also using language. Together with posture and facial orientation, a gesture can constitute a type of act with its own ‘force’, which may amplify what is being said (Goodwin 2000: 1499). By discussing interactions among archaeologists, Goodwin shows that the analysis of embedded semiotic fields can be applied to professional practices where participants have access to semiotic fields that are not available to novices or observers who are not part of the scientific community. To be part of a profession, thus, means to be able to access and process particular semiotic fields, which may have their own special semiotic resources, artefacts, and types of embodiments (see also Goodwin 1994, 1997). Rather than privileging one field over another, Goodwin’s notion of embedded semiotic fields leaves open the exact contextual configuration (i.e. the locally relevant combination) of the fields involved. The semiotic resources themselves, including the material resources (e.g. the grid painted on the playground for the game of hopscotch or the Munsell colour chart available to archaeologists) are thus involved in a double task: (i) projecting what is coming up, i.e. what a possible next move is, and (ii) eliminating what could be relevant but is not going to be. The combination of the locally relevant array of semiotic fields constitutes a contextual configuration. A researcher’s goal is to identify emergent contextual configurations out of the complex activities humans get themselves involved in.

AGENCY In the 1980s, agency became a popular topic in the social sciences, especially thanks to the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (see also Ahearn 2001; Archer 1996, 2000; Ortner 2006). Agency has the advantage that does not necessarily imply intentions even though it does evoke such related

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concepts as control, effects, and responsibility, as often remarked by semanticists like Charles Fillmore (1968, 1977) and David Dowty (1991). Here is a slightly modified version of a working definition that I proposed (Duranti 2004): Entities are said to have agency, if they (a) have some degree of control over their own behavior, (b) engage in actions that affect other entities (including their own) and (c) are evaluated from a practical, aesthetic, and moral point of view for what they do and how they do it.

This definition assumes that a crucial quality of agentive entities is to have control over their actions. This quality, in turn, is associated with the exposure to the range of practical, aesthetic, and moral evaluations of which human beings are capable. The practical evaluation of what entities do as agents recognizes our practical engagement with all kinds of tasks, tools, and social beings. Practical here − in opposition to ‘theoretical’ – refers to our ordinary way of being involved in everyday tasks that we do not question. ‘Practical’ also suggests our interest in how a given action is problem-oriented. Finally, ‘practical’ refers to our practical interest in getting things accomplished and the fact that we are not neutral observers of a world that is independent of us. Language itself, as a medium for the representation of our world of experience, is not neutral either (Bakhtin 1981: 294; Duranti 2011). The whole history of linguistic anthropology can be understood as an attempt to study how human languages not only describe the world but also constitute it psychologically, interactionally, and institutionally. Languages have been used as socio-cognitive instruments to do things in the world, but they also come with a history of use that has a force of its own not always obvious to speakers (Whorf 1956; Lucy 1992a, 1992b). If utterances can have meanings that go beyond the intentions of their speakers, we must then accept that the agency of language is only partially controlled by its users – a reason for using the expression ‘some degree of control’ in the definition of agency provided above.

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To illustrate this tension between language as an instrument of human will and language as a guide to or constraint on our thinking, feeling, and doing, there is no better example than indexicality (see above). To say that the expressions that we use are indexically tied to the contexts of their previous uses means that they carry with them-i.e. they are able to evoke-the beliefs, attitudes, and feelings associated with those contexts. In some cases speakers may unwittingly participate in the reproduction of social injustice and social inequality through the use of expressions that imply a negative evaluation of their referents or of their recipients (Hill 1998, 2008) or make it difficult for some speakers to have access to social goods (Bourdieu 1991). It is not surprising, then, that linguistic anthropologists found Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) notion of ‘hegemony’ attractive as a way of talking about an ideological dominance that is not necessarily overt and yet effective on members of subaltern classes. As documented by Franco Lo Piparo (1979), the notion of hegemony has linguistic origins. Gramsci first encountered it as a synonym for ‘prestige’ while a student of linguistics at the University of Turin in 1917−1918. Later on, while writing in prison about the role of intellectuals in society, he extended what he had learned about the prestige of one dialect (the ‘Standard’) over the others to the prestige that the moral, religious, aesthetic, and political values of the dominant class have for the members of the other social classes.

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF INTENTIONS IN MEANING-MAKING One basic claim of the studies reviewed above is that the language we use is indexically rich: i.e. it evokes attitudes, feelings, and memories and connects our actions to real and imaginary contexts, which, in turn, help sustain, question, or revise established social identities and social institutions. This claim questions the standard theory of meaning-making in formal linguistics and analytical philosophy according to which

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meaning-making is based on imbuing utterances (or, more generally, acts) with intentions that must be intelligible to hearers/ recipients through conventional associations between certain expressions and certain meanings. The ‘intentionalist view’ is usually associated with H.P. Grice (1957), for whom it is the reliance on intentions that makes particular meanings ‘non-natural’:3 i.e. conventional, and therefore specifically human. The view is also associated with John Austin’s theory where intentions are part of the felicity conditions of speech acts (Austin 1975). John Searle further built on Grice, Austin, and early phenomenological accounts to make intentions the central component of his theory of meaning (Searle 1983). Once we introduce indexical meaning, speakers’ intentions can no longer be the sole or main source of linguistic interpretation. This is the case because it is doubtful that speakers can ‘intend’ all the indexical meanings of their words and, in turn, that hearers can be sure of which meanings were intended by the speakers. This does not mean that we should give up on ever entertaining hypotheses about speakers’ intentions or that we need to return to behaviourism and thus only talk in terms of stimulus and response. It does mean, however, that we need to be careful about founding our semantic and pragmatic theories mainly on reading other people’s minds. At least since the 1980s, a number of anthropologists have been critical of the intentionalist view, which has been defined as ‘Western,’ ‘personalistic,’ and far from universal. It has been argued that the intentionalist theory of meaning privileges an individualistic ideology of human society that does not explain a number of social phenomena where intentions do not seem to matter (e.g. Du Bois 1993; Duranti 1988b; Rosaldo 1982; Rosen 1995; Rumsey and Robbins 2008). Furthermore, drawing from their own observations in a variety of communities in Oceania and elsewhere, some ethnographers showed that not all people in the world share the view that one can have access to others’

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or even one’s own internal states or thoughts. For example, in some cases, cross-cultural communication is made problematic by the fact that some communities see as animate and intentional entities that other communities consider incapable of having intentions (Povinelli 1995). Although I was an early critic of ‘the intentionalist stance’ defended by Daniel Dennett (1987), over the years I have come to see some criticism of intentionalism as either empirically weak or theoretically questionable. From an empirical point of view, the fact that some people refuse to speculate about states of mind – what Rumsey and Robbins (2008) have called the local theory of the ‘opacity of other minds’ – does not mean that they do not engage in reading the minds of others and, in fact, when we look in some detail at the ethnographic evidence, it appears that even in those communities for which a claim of some kind of ‘opacity of other minds’ has been made there are contexts where people do guess what one was, is, or will be thinking or feeling (Duranti 2008b). Furthermore, over the years I have also come to see that it is vastly inaccurate to label the intentionalist theory as ‘the Western’ theory of interpretation, given that there are plenty of Euro-American philosophers who have a non-intentionalist view of meaning, including European existentialists and American pragmatists (Throop 2003); not to mention that Western neuroscientists have recently argued that empathetic reactions and non-reflexive, pre-conscious, pre-rational interpretations of others’ actions are very common in both primates and humans (e.g., Iacoboni 2008). This means that we need to continue to review and refine the concept of intention we use, which we can do with some help from early phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and by engaging in a careful analysis of the sources of knowledge that people display or reveal during spontaneous interaction (Duranti 2006, 2008b). Even in those contexts where spontaneity is foregrounded and valued, people are busy reading others’ and controlling their own

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intentional attention. For example, in a study mentioned earlier, Berger (1999) showed that in the middle of a performance, musicians may exhibit different levels of reflexivity about their own actions on stage depending on a variety of factors, including the type of music they are playing, their fellow musicians’ behaviour, and their audience’s reactions and expectations. This suggests that the notion of intention may be more effectively utilized together with other analytical notions such as attention, stance, and empathy. The fact that the term ‘intention’ is not found in all languages is also suggestive and needs to be further explored. More generally, there is a need for a more systematic study of the lexical, morphological, and prosodic encoding of actions for which the notion of intentions may or may not be evoked. One starting point is an integration of the notions of performance, indexicality, and agency.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have reviewed the study of performance, indexicality, and agency, three important concepts that have inspired the empirical and theoretical work of linguistic anthropologists over the last few decades. Even though these concepts were originally introduced and elaborated by grammarians or philosophers of language, over time they have acquired meanings that reflect the fact that they are being used by scholars who share an interest not only in how language is organized but also in how language is used in the conduct of social life. The use of these notions and their corresponding units of analysis has helped to further broaden the scope of linguistic anthropology much beyond the original goal of documenting nonEuropean languages and training ethnographers to learn and use them in the field. By further elaborating the notions of performance, indexicality, and agency, students of language as a cultural practice have been able to contribute to our understanding of identity formation, socialization, ideology,

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and intentionality, all areas that are at the core of social anthropology as presently conceived and practiced. A few generations ago structural linguistics was a discipline that inspired linguistic anthropologists as well as major figures in social and cultural anthropology (e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ward Goodenough, and Edmund Leach). The most recent research trends suggest that anthropologists working on language or discourse have broadened the range of disciplines, concepts, and methods they draw from. The overall goal, however, remains the same: to connect the details of grammar, discourse, and daily conversations with topics and issues that are at the core of the social sciences such as social inequality, cultural and social change, the relationship between people and their natural environment, the organization and distribution of knowledge and expertise, uses and abuses of science and technology, and physical and mental health across social groups. The challenge for the next generation of linguistic anthropologists is therefore not so much to find interesting topics to study but to cooperate with other anthropologists and social scientists in the development of a meta-language that can help to further uncover the key role played by communication in all domains of social life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I give special thanks to Keziah Conrad, Michael Silverstein, and Richard A. Wilson for their comments on earlier drafts and to my students and colleagues at UCLA for their friendship and intellectual engagement.

NOTES 1 I am using here ‘language’ in the singular because of Chomsky’s distrust for judgements of grammaticality by bilingual speakers: The language of the hypothesized speech community, apart from being uniform, is taken to be a ‘pure’ instance of U[niversal]G[rammar] ... .

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We exclude, for example, a speech community of uniform speakers, each of whom speaks a mixture of Russian and French (say, an idealized version of the nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy). The language of such a speech community would not be ‘pure’ in the relevant sense, because it would not represent a single set of choices among the options permitted by U[niversal]G[rammar] but rather would include ‘contradictory’ choices for certain of the options. (Chomsky 1986: 17) 2 See Silverstein (1977) for a critique of Austin’s focus on performative verbs as the conventional ways of expressing illocutionary force. 3 Here is Grice’s definition of non-natural or conventional meaning: ‘Perhaps we may sum up what is necessary for A to mean something by x as follows. A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience, and he must also intend his utterance to be recognized as so intended.’ (Grice [1957] 1971:441).

REFERENCES Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. Language and Agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:109−137. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1987. The Micro−Macro Link: Contexts and Other Connections. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Archer, Margaret. 1996. Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret S. 2000. Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Richard. 1975. Verbal Art as Performance. American Anthropologist 77:290−311. Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Music/Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Berger, Harris M., and Giovanna P. Del Negro. 2002. Bauman’s Verbal Art and the Social Organization of Attention: The Role of Reflexivity in the Aesthetics of Performance. Journal of American Folklore 115:62−91.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (translated by Richard Nice). Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Browning, Anjali, and Alessandro Duranti, eds. 2005. Special Issue: Theories and Models of Language, Interaction, and Culture. Discourse Studies 7(4−5):403−624. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2004. Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research. Language in Society 33:501−547. Bühler, Karl. 1990. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Translated and with an introduction by Donald Fraser Goodwin. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40:519−531. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Caton, Steven C. 1990. ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praeger. Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic Proto-roles and Argument Selection. Language 67(3):547−619. Drew, Paul, and John Heritage, eds. 1992. Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, John W. 1993. Meaning without Intention: Lessons from Divination. In Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, edited by J. Hill and J. Irvine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro. 1988a. The Ethnography of Speaking: Toward a Linguistics of the Praxis. In Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Vol. IV, Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, edited by F. J. Newmeyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro. 1988b. Intentions, Language and Social Action in a Samoan Context. Journal of Pragmatics 12:13−33. Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. Language in Context and Language as Context: The Samoan Respect Vocabulary. In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, edited by A. Duranti and C. Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Duranti, Alessandro. 2003. Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms. Current Anthropology 44(3):323−347. Duranti, Alessandro. 2004. Agency in Language. In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by A. Duranti. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Duranti, Alessandro. 2006. The Social Ontology of Intentions. Discourse Studies 8 (1):31–40. Duranti, Alessandro. 2008a. L’oralité avec impertinence: Ambivalence par rapport à l’écrit chez les orateurs samoans et les musiciens de jazz américaines. L’Homme 189. Duranti, Alessandro. 2008b. Further Reflections on Reading Other Minds. Anthropological Quarterly 483−494. Duranti, Alessandro. 2009. The Force of Language and Its Temporal Unfolding. In Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob May − A Festschrift, edited by K. Turner and B. Fraser. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishers. Duranti, Alessandro. 2011. Linguistic Anthropology: Language as a Non-Neutral Medium. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by R. Mesthrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro, and Steven P. Black. 2011. Socialization into Verbal Improvisation. In Handbook of Language Socialization, edited by A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B.B. Schieffelin. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Duranti, Alessandro, and Charles Goodwin, eds. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fillmore, Charles J. 1966. Deictic Categories in the Semantics of Come. Foundations of Language 2:219−227. Fillmore, Charles J. 1968. The Case for Case. In Universals of Linguistic Theory, edited by E. Bach and E.T.Harms. New York: Holt. Fillmore, Charles J. 1977. The Case for Case Reopened. In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 8: Grammatical Relations, edited by P. Cole and J.M. Sadock. New York: Academic Press. Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. London: Academic Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goodwin, Charles. 1994. Professional Vision. American Anthropologist 96(3):606−633.

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Goodwin, Charles. 1997. The Blackness of Black: Color Categories as Situated Practice. In Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Situated Cognition and Technologically Supported Environments, edited by L. Resnick, R. Säljö, C. Pontecorvo, and B. Burge. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Goodwin, Charles. 2000. Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32:1489−1522. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Translated by Quintin Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers. Grice, H.P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 67:53−59 [reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Language, edited by J.F. Rosenberg and C. Travis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall]. Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes. 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hall, Kira. 1999. Performativity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1−2):184−187. Hanks, William F. 1990. Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hanks, William F. 1999. Indexicality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9:124−126. Hanks, William F. 2005. Explorations in the Deictic Field. Current Anthropology 46(2):191−220. Hanks, William F. 2006. Context, Communicative. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman. 2010. Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hill, Jane H. 1998. Language, Race, and White Public Space. American Anthropologist 100:680−689. Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hymes, Dell. 1964. ‘Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication.’ In The Ethnography of Communication, edited by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. Washington, DC: American Anthropologist (Special Issue), pp. 1−34. Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, edited by J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hymes, Dell. 1975. Breakthrough into Performance. In Folklore: Performance and Communication, edited by D. Ben-Amos and K.S. Goldstein. The Hague: Mouton.

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Iacoboni, Marco. 2008. Mirroring People. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. Kroskrity, Paul V. 1998. Arizona Tewa Kiva Speech as a Manifestation of a Dominant Language Ideology. In Language Ideologies, edited by B.B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard and P. Kroskrity. New York: Oxford University Press. Kroskrity, Paul V., ed. 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Kulick, Don. 2000. Gay and Lesbian Language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:243–285. Kulick, Don. 2009. No. In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, 2nd edn, edited by A. Duranti. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 2005. Living with Manny’s Dangerous Idea. Discourse Studies 7(4):431−453. Lo Piparo, Franco. 1979. Lingua intelletuali egemonia in Gramsci. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Lucy, John A. 1992a. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lucy, John A. 1992b. Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyons, John. 1982. Deixis and Subjectivity: Loquor, ergo sum? In Speech, Place, and Action: Studies in Deixis and Other Related Topics, edited by R.J. Jarvella and W. Klein. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986. Has There Been a ‘Chomskian Revolution’ in Linguistics? Language 62(1):1−18. Ochs, Elinor. 1996. Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Carolyn Taylor. 2001. The ‘Father Knows Best’ Dynamic in Dinnertime Narratives. In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, edited by A. Duranti. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ortner, Sherry B. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Pagliai, Valentina. 2002. Poetic Dialogues: Performance and Politics in the Tuscan Contrasto. Ethnology 41:135−154. Pagliai, Valentina. 2010. Conflict, Cooperation, and Facework in Contrasto Verbal Duels. Language in Society 20(1):87−100. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by J. Buchler. New York: Dover Publishers. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 1995. Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending Australian Aboriginal Labor. American Anthropologist 97(3):505−518. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1982. The Things We Do With Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Philosophy. Language in Society 11:203−237. Rosen, Lawrence, ed. 1995. Other Intentions: Cultural Context and the Attribution of Inner States. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Rumsey, Alan, and Joel Robbins. 2008. Social Thought and Commentary Special Section: Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):407−494. Sawyer, R. Keith. 1996. The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal Performance. Semiotica 108(3/4):269−306. Sawyer, R. Keith. 2001. Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2005. On Integrity in Inquiry ... of the Investigated, not the Investigator. Discourse Studies 7(4):455−480. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by K.H. Basso and H.A. Selby. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1997. The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive Practice. In Creativity in Performance, edited by R.K. Sawyer. Greenwich, CT: Ablex. Silverstein, Michael. 2004. ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language−Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology 45(5):621−652. Throop, C. Jason. 2003. Articulating Experience. Anthropological Theory 3(2):219−241. Tiezzi, Grazia. 2009. La pratica dell’improvvisazione in ottava rima in Maremma. Forme dell’interazione nella poetica estemporanea. In Improvisar cantando. Atti dell’incontro di studi sulla poesia estemporanea in ottava rima, edited by C. Barontini and P. Nardini. Roccastrada: Biblioteca Comunale. van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Woolard, Kathryn A., and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1994. Language Ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:55−82.

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1.2 Anthropology and Psychology Christina Toren

Anthropologists who work at the interface of psychology and anthropology are by and large committed to anthropology as science. The problem for us, however, is that the institutional development of the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effectively allotted different aspects of what it is to be human to different disciplines. Faced with separate epistemological domains of anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and biology, scientists in the latter half of the twentieth century found themselves having to work hard to put the pieces back together again – body and mind, for example. As is often the case, however, new subdisciplinary domains intended to overcome conceptual difficulties served rather to entrench them. The 1970s saw the invention of psychological anthropology, the 1980s brought us cultural psychology, in the 1990s we rediscovered the body and phenomenology, and at the same time witnessed the resurgence of cognitive anthropology which, during the first decade of the twenty-first century would appear to dominate the field, contributing to the development of what is today called cognitive science. Whether, over coming decades, cognitive anthropology will continue to dominate our understanding of mind will have everything to do with the extent to which anthropology as an intellectual project is able

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to realize and come to grips with the real political implications of the ahistorical concept of human being that lies at its heart. The argument put forward in the present chapter is explicitly opposed to cognitivist models because of their inability to come to grips with human historical actuality in general and their own historical nature in particular. Thus, for all the often fascinating work that has been done in the various sub-fields of anthropology, and despite the explosion of knowledge in other sub-disciplinary domains – neurobiology and neuroscience, for example – the interface between anthropology and psychology at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century continues to throw into relief a question that remains fundamental to the human sciences, including anthropology: How are we to conceive of human beings? The answer we give to this question is important because it structures not only what we currently know about ourselves and others but also what we are capable of finding out. As will become apparent, the recognition of our historical nature provides for a resolution of debates concerning the relative validity of representational, social constructivist and neurophenomenological models of mind. This chapter proposes a unified model of human being whose manifold aspects remain entirely open to investigation, even while the

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model is intended to deal at once with the uniqueness – that is to say, the historical actuality – of what it is to be human and with critical issues at the interface of psychology and anthropology and, in so doing, prove to be a rigorous, explanatory, robust model of what it is to be human.

A UNIFIED MODEL OF HUMAN BEING What are the crucial aspects of such a model? Fundamentally, its object is to be conceived of at the outset as living and as human, not as an information-processing device. This model starts with human physical actuality: the fact that each one of us is, like other living things, biologically speaking autopoietic – self-creating, self-regulating. A newborn baby, infant or young child requires other humans to look after its primary needs, making its ontogeny a social process. Indeed, as living systems that are human, each and every one of us needs others if we are to maintain our autonomy over the course of our own lives and contribute to the lives of others. There is nothing paradoxical about this: rather, it is given to us as human beings that the particular nature of our autonomy resides precisely in the history of our relations with one another. Or to put it another way, our uniqueness in every single case is given in the fact that each one of us has a personal history that makes us who we are. A propensity for making sense of the environing world is a crucial aspect of human being. It follows that ‘making sense’ (or, in other words, learning) is a dynamic, spatiotemporal process that at any given point inevitably locates humans historically in relation to particular others in particular places at particular times in the peopled world. Or to put it another way, any given human is, in every aspect of his or her being, the dynamic transforming product of the past he or she has lived and is, at any given time, placed in relation to all those others (young and old, living and dead) whose ideas and practices are contributing to structure the

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conditions of his or her present existence. ‘Any given human’ here means any fetus, neonate, infant, child, adolescent, adult or old person, because autopoiesis is a process that begins at conception and ends only with death. We can think of ourselves, therefore, as living and manifesting the historical processes that engage us in literally every aspect of our being. For example, whether we consider the matter statistically in population terms, or personally, our physical make-up is the dynamic product of a particular biosocial history which, for all its possible complications and convolutions, could in principle be traced back over many generations; likewise the language(s) we speak and likewise our ideas of what is, or could be, in the world and our means for finding out. This personal history is continuous with our evolutionary species history. In the unified model, mind is a function not of the brain, nor of the embodied nervous system, but of the whole human being in intersubjective relations with others in the environing world. Implicit is a view of consciousness as an aspect of human autopoiesis. Here consciousness cannot be a ‘domain’ or a ‘level of psychological functioning’; rather, it is that aspect of mind that posits the existence of the thinker and the conceptual self-evidentiality of world as lived by the thinker. Intersubjectivity is shorthand for: I know that you are another human like me, and so I know that you know that because I am human, I know that you are too. It is this capacity for recursive thought that makes human learning (here intended in its broadest sense) a microhistorical process. Our intersubjective relationship to one another is always bound to be historically prior because, whenever we encounter one another, we do so as carriers of our own, always unique, history. I make sense of what you are doing and saying in terms of what I already know: any and all experience is assimilated to my existing structures of knowing. This goes for everyone – newborn babies and geriatric patients included. Making sense of the peopled world is a material, self-organizing

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process that at once transforms new experience in the course of its assimilation (and to this extent conserves what I already know) and transforms my existing structures of knowing in the course of their accommodation to new experience (and to this extent changes what I know). In this view, the human being whose ideas and practices we are trying to understand and explain is social through and through, and the world of people and things that this human inhabits crucially informs his or her entire constitution, specifically the continuing constitution over time of those processes we call ‘mind’. It follows that there is no aspect of anyone’s humanity that is not historically constituted. At any given time, when one acts on the world in any way at all, one’s understanding of the world, oneself and one’s relations with other humans, are all informed by one’s previous history – that is to say, one’s history up to that moment.1 The unified model takes for granted that intersubjectivity is emotional, that perceiving and feeling are aspects of one another, and that intentionality is given in an openness towards, and a felt engagement in, the peopled world.2 Here learning and teaching are aspects of the selfsame process.3 Throughout our lives, our active engagement in the world of people and things effects continuing differentiation of the processes through which we know what we know. The processes of mind are subject as much to change as to continuity, but as we grow older they become progressively less subject to radical change precisely because they are already highly developed. The longer they have been functioning to assimilate information, the more highly differentiated they already are, and the less radically they can transform as a function of accommodation to new situations. Thus, the unified model bears on humans as living. Understanding our biological substance is crucial to understanding not only our physical but also our psychological make-up; it makes a difference whether the phenomena of mind are conceived of as neuorophenomenological

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processes or as computational programs. More of this below; for the moment it is important just to realize that however sophisticated a computer may be, it does not bring itself into being by virtue of differentiation over time of its own physical substance. Our present knowledge of course leaves a great deal to be desired, but even so we understand enough of autopoiesis as a biological process to realize that logically it has to be applied not only to the physiological dimension of human being but also to those processes we call mind.

THE PROBLEM WITH CULTURAL MODELS The processes through which we know the peopled world, like the neurological processes of which they are an aspect, are likewise autopoietic, characterized by continuing differentiation through functioning. Once we understand this, it becomes obvious that information-processing (or representational) models of mind cannot capture its inherent dynamics. Take, for example, schema theory as found in various forms in cognitive anthropology. The idea of the schema-as-mental-representation took hold in cognitive anthropology in the 1980s and was incorporated in the 1990s into connectionist ‘neural network’ models of psychological functioning. Connectionist models of mind attempt to make computational theory consistent with what we know of the workings of the human brain; they employ an idea of parallel distributed processing that allows for a cognitive scheme that is always emergent, never quite fixed and thus provides for a model of how cognitive processes respond to their own environment and are modified by it. Nevertheless, as representation and as a component of the more complexly configured ‘cultural model’, the schema that figures in works by Holland and Quinn, D’Andrade and Shore (to take several well-known examples) is peculiarly static.4 Shore’s attempt to distinguish between ‘conventional models’ and ‘personal models’

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manifests neatly the problem with the schemaas-representation idea of mental processes. Because the schemas that compose cultural models are conceived of as mirroring mental representations of the world inside the human head, Shore’s ‘cultural model’ cannot intrinsically allow for the fact that in so far as we understand and embrace what is conventional, we do so as particular persons with particular histories. From which it follows that for any one of us the conventional and the personal are bound to be aspects of one another (an artefact of the selfsame process) and that continuity over time is likewise an aspect of transformation.5 If this idea of continuity-in-transformation sounds odd, just try thinking about yourself – your whole person, including your ideas about the world – as a dynamic system of transformations; ageing, for example, is one aspect of the workings of this dynamic system, and so is digestion, and so is reading a book, or having a conversation. You remain autonomously yourself even though, from moment to moment and year to year, your continuity through time is that of a dynamically transforming system. The problem with a representational model of mind that mirrors objectively given properties of the world did not go away with the development in the 1990s of cultural psychology. Shweder, however, did his best to move anthropologists away from what he characterized as the ‘Platonic impulse’ that presumed mind to be a fixed and universal property of the psyche. He argued for a cultural psychology that presumes instead that the life of the psyche is the life of intentional persons, responding to, and directing their action at, their own mental objects or representations and undergoing transformation through participation in an evolving intentional world that is the product of the mental representations that make it up. (Shweder 1991: 97)

He found support both in the idea that ‘the mind is embodied in concrete representations, in “mediating schemata,” “scripts,” and

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well-practiced “tools for thought”’ (ibid: 98) and, of course, in the idea of culture, which he characterized as ‘that part of the scheme that is inherited or received from the past’ (ibid: 101). The problem is that the implicit distinction between culture and biology and the representational information-processing model of mind on which Shweder’s account depends render his project incoherent, internally contradictory and unrealizable.6 Like other theories of this kind it has recourse to social construction in an attempt to explain the differences between intentional worlds: specifically, for example, between American and Indian ideas of the person. But social construction itself depends on a historically constituted idea of the person as an individual in society who interacts with other individuals to negotiate their respective ideas about an objectively given world. The “constructive” parts of a social construction theory are the idea that equally rational, competent, and informed observers are, in some sense, free ... to constitute for themselves different realities; and ... that there are as many realities as the way “it” can be constituted or described. ... The “social” parts of a social construction theory are the idea that categories are vicariously received, not individually invented; and [are] … transmitted, communicated and “passed on” through symbolic action. (Shweder 1991: 156)

In locating the constructive process in the person and what is social in an abstract space between persons (i.e. in language categories for example) social constructionists reproduce the very theoretical impasse they seek to dismantle.7 In the absence of an understanding that making sense of the peopled world is an historical process, Shweder cannot render analytical the categories he seeks to understand. ‘Cultural construction’ of course fares no better, theoretically speaking. The idea that much (if not most) of what humans say and do is the product of cultural construction is a truism of contemporary cultural anthropology.8 Culture continues to be taken for granted as explanatory, even though such analytical distinctions as culture–biology,

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society–individual, mind–body, structure– process, and emotion–rationality have long posed problems, especially for psychological anthropologists.9 Ideas of cultural construction rest on the same problematic Cartesian distinctions as computational models of cultural meaning.10 The ubiquity of the terms is such that I can find even in my own earlier work a number of appearances of ‘cultural’ and ‘construction’ and even ‘cultural constructs’. But it is not ‘construction’ that bothers me so much, it is ‘culture’ that is analytically empty.11 As what is relative and historically specific, culture inevitably implies its counterpart, biology, as the domain of the irreducible, the universal. The analytical poverty of this distinction becomes especially apparent when we turn our attention to anthropological studies where the focus is on children.

INNATE MODULARITY VS NEUROCONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT Anthropology’s objective is to explain the extraordinary multiplicity that is human being in the world or, more exactly, how the uniqueness that is peculiar to every one of us is located in what we have in common. Does it make sense then to think of a neonate as an organism that is born biological only to become cultural as a result of actions performed on it by its caregivers? Surely not, for even in this perspective the infant’s capacity to become the carrier of culture is inherent to it; thus, culture has to be in some sense given if its particular forms are to be achieved. But if our capacity for culture is biologically given and if all biological ideas are just as much historical artefacts as any other idea, it follows that the biological and the cultural are aspects of one another. So why retain the distinction at all? We cannot yet track the precise coontogeny of neurological processes and conceptual processes, though there are, for example, studies in the developing field of

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neurophenomenology that are relevant.12 What we can do, with some fair degree of validity, is theorize the process in which ideas are constituted over time – their ontogeny from birth onwards. As we shall see below, how we characterize ontogeny is crucial to our understanding of the historical specificity of what it is to be human at any time, in any place. From birth, babies are immersed in relations with caregivers; indeed, newborn babies show capacities which have the effect of facilitating social relationships and which, through functioning, become ever more highly differentiated or, in other words, developed. Not all the early capacities of infants implicate social relations, but even so, the very high salience of other humans for babies is apparent. Thus, over the past two decades or so, we have come to know that newborn babies prefer face-like stimuli to other attractive visual stimuli; can discriminate and imitate certain facial gestures of others; show categorical perception of speech sounds; discriminate between curved and straight geometrical shapes; discriminate linguistic input from other auditory inputs; and at four days have learned enough to differentiate their native language from others. At three months they show surprise if two solid objects seem to occupy the same space; at four months they show surprise if a solid object seems to have passed through a solid surface; at this age they also show complex cross-modal perception – matching speech sounds to lip movements on the faces that produce them. At six months they show talker normalization – recognizing as equivalent different speech sounds from different talkers; they are also able to make matches in numerosity between sounds and sights (examples drawn more or less verbatim from Elman et al. 1996: 107). ‘By six months, infants follow people’s gaze and attend to objects on which people have acted. By nine months, infants reproduce other people’s actions on objects, and they communicate about objects with gestures such as pointing’ (Spelke 1999: 402−404).13

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These demonstrable abilities of neonates and infants have given rise to the idea, now apparently taken for granted by cognitivists of various persuasions, that mind is innately modular – made up of a set of cognitive systems that evolved to deal with separate domains of our environment and that, consequently, all humans have in common. Cognitive science is a catch-all that takes in congruent models from a number of subdisciplinary domains – principally evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive and developmental psychology. What they have in common is a reliance on analytical distinctions between biology and culture and, for many if not most, the idea that mind is modular. The modularity idea was first proposed by Fodor, who argued for a limited number of innate perceptual and linguistic input systems whose outputs fed into central cognitive systems which functioned to integrate the information into more complex, problemsolving, forms of central cognition.14 The input-system-as-cognitive-module idea was taken up and elaborated by evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides (1992) whose ‘massive modularity’ model became foundational for anthropologists Sperber (1994, 1996) and Hirschfeld and Gelman (1994), among others. In the ‘massively modular’ model, mind is made up of cognitive systems that are ‘pre-wired’ (that is to say, innate) and domain-specific; only a subset of them have to do with so-called ‘social cognition’. Note however that ‘[t]he domain of a module is … not a property of its internal structure (whether described in neurological or in computational terms) ….’ but of the ‘mode of construal’ for which the internal structure provides (Sperber 1996: 135−136). A given mode of construal may be brought to bear on entirely novel conditions of the environment, provided they are amenable, as it were, to being so-construed. Sperber finds support from evolutionary psychologists to argue that ‘a cognitive module is an evolved mechanism with a distinct phylogenetic history’ (Sperber 1996: 124).15

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Massive modularity underwrites Sperber’s information-processing model of brain function and provides for his idea of ‘an epidemiology of representations’ as the key to understanding culture (Sperber 2006). This argument has a bearing on the extensive literature that offers us cognitive explanations of religious beliefs. The moduleas mode-of-construal idea provides, for example, for the way that modularity theory may be used to explain religion as the inevitable projection of human consciousness into cosmological ideas concerning an afterlife or the existence of gods.16 Researchers into cognition of religion by and large have in common with Sperber the view that the transmission of ideas itself constitutes a problem, though they differ as to their commitment to massive modularity. They all argue, however, that the commonalities to be found in ideas about gods, ancestors, the supernatural and so on can only be a function of invariant features of human cognitive architecture – that is to say, those that are hard-wired. They include a theory of mind module, a living things module, a module that stipulates the physical properties of objects, and a module that looks for and correctly recognizes agency.17 Indeed Sperber’s massive modularity argument requires that ‘to an important extent, cognition enables culture through domain-specific constructive mechanisms’ (Sperber 2006: 447). Nothing else, he argues, can explain ‘cultural stability’. There is, however, a major problem here and it has to do with the fact that the models of evolutionary psychologists and their cognitivist followers maintain a distinction between matter and information that does not make biological sense. Here I am at one with Evan Thompson, who sums up the problem as follows: The deepest fault of the metaphor of DNA as program or information-store is that it implies a dualist framework of matter and information, one homologous to the computationalist and functionalist dualism of the mind as informational software and the brain as hardware. In both cases, processes that are intrinsically dynamic

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(temporally orchestrated), embodied (somatic and organismic), and embedded (necessarily situated in an environment or milieu) – whether of ontogeny, evolution, or cognition – are projected into the reified abstractions of a genetic program in the cell nucleus or a computer program in the brain. (Thompson 2007: 185)

An information-processing model of mind is bound to retain distinctions between the hardware and the software, the universal and the relative, the individual and the social, the natural and the cultural. These distinctions are important to cognitivists: they provide for the idea that human biology is the domain of what is universal in human nature and that culture is the domain of what is relative. The anthropologist’s job then is to interpret people’s cultural representations of the world, their folk theories. This leaves explanation, science, in possession of the domain of what is natural and universal. The modularity of mind theory is a case in point. If only a certain subset of human knowledge can be properly described as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’, this implicitly isolates from contamination ther knowledge processes – ‘perception’ for example – thus providing for a claim to an objective science of mind. This model is unconvincing because it does not allow for the fact that literally every aspect of human being, including all perceptual processes, can be shown to evince a person’s history.18 There is, indeed, no necessity for holding to an unwieldy theory of innate massive modularity. We might, however, want to take the neuroconstructivist approach to child development proposed by the psychologist Karmiloff-Smith and her biologicalconnectionist colleagues who hold that development itself is the key to understanding how cognitive processes become structured in specific ways. … a mechanism starts out as somewhat more relevant to one kind of input over others, but it is usable … for other types of processing too. This allows for compensatory processing and makes development channelled but far less predetermined than the nativist view. Once a domain-relevant mechanism is repeatedly used to process a certain type of input, it becomes domain-specific as a

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result of its developmental history. (Karmiloff-Smith 1998, referencing Elman et al. 1996 and KarmiloffSmith 1995)

Insofar as neuroconstructivists accept the idea of innate modules, these can be nothing more than minimally specified transformational structures. Cognitive development is understood ‘in terms of self-organizing emergent structures arising from the complex interactions between both organism and environment’ (Elman et al. 1996: 113). Moreover, the careful experimental work that justifies the model comes to grips with the dynamism of organism and environment. Various problems remain, however: primarily that (like Sperber’s) the neuroconstructivist model is founded in a representational theory of the mind/brain and, concomitantly, in an idea of the person in which sociality is one among numerous emergent developmental structures, rather than inherent in every aspect of human being in the world; it follows that there is no awareness here that development is an historical process – that is to say, one that is embedded in historically constituted intersubjectivity. The experimental procedures used to elicit neonates’ and infants’ abilities, while wonderfully convincing, tend – as do all laboratory procedures – to divert attention from the real-world conditions in which the child acquires his or her abilities. The neonate and infant is at any given point immersed in manifold sensations – from skin surfaces, internal organs, visceral sensations of hunger and thirst, warmth and cold, the movements of its own limbs, the different sensory modalities – and so on and so on. Moreover, these manifold sensations are like as not embedded in the waking infant’s experience of being held, fed, dressed and undressed, played with, talked to, bathed, carried, caressed, etc., by mother and other caretakers. It seems important to stress here the infant’s wholebodied immersion from birth (or even, it might be argued, before birth) in specific social relations – the sounds, sights, and touches of others that produce comfort or discomfort, satisfy or withhold, soothe or

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arouse, that are lived aspects of a specific environing world. This very observation makes evident the necessity for rendering ‘developmental history’ more complete by incorporating into it an analysis of the specific social relations by which it is informed and in which it inheres; for all its focus on development, the neuroconstructivist model rests on an historically specific idea of the child that takes it for granted that what is social in the child’s make-up can by and large be differentiated from what is psychobiological. Thus, the neuroconstructivist model is not an adequate model of development. Because it does not address how intersubjectivity informs development, it remains an artefact of experimental procedures and connectionist modelling. Nevertheless, in the neuroconstructivist model our schemes of thought and action are self-regulating, transformational, and characterized by continuing differentiation through functioning. Conscious phenomena are the artefacts of this autopoietic, developmental process. And as the dynamic product of any given human’s intersubjective engagement in the environing world of people and things, cognitive processes that evince themselves early on in ontogeny are bound to look like modules – domain-specific, fast, informationally encapsulated, and mandatory.19

HUMAN SOCIALITY AND THEORY OF MIND My concern to come to grips with the historical actuality of human beings is in part derived from the nature of anthropology as a discipline. Not only does it engage the long history of differentiation that has given rise to the contemporary variety of languages, kinship systems, political economies, cosmologies and so on but also we anthropologists are not allowed to forget our past. There’s no in-built historical amnesia in the discipline because, wherever you do your fieldwork, if you are to attain any decent

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understanding of the people you work with, you have to read all the work done by those who preceded you in that geographical region and, if archives exist, those too. The more fieldwork you do and the more history and ethnography you read on your region, the more you become aware that history is a dynamic process that continues feeding forward into the transforming present and that this process must lie at the heart of what it is to be human. It follows that, in one way or another, we anthropologists have to come to grips in our ethnographies with the fact that everything about human beings evinces their history. This awareness is still held in check, however, by what appears to be an unwillingness to subject ourselves as scientists to the scrutiny we bring to bear on others. Rather we see the heralding of ‘a new scientific domain’. The roots or foundations of human sociality [is proposed as] a coherent subject for investigation constituted by intersecting principles of different orders (ethological, psychological, sociological and cultural) that work together to produce an emergent system, a system of human sociality and social interaction. (Enfield and Levinson 2006: 1)

The emphasis here is on bringing together findings from evolutionary and developmental psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology. The analytical premises underlying the proposed new synthesis remain, however, undisturbed – principally, the distinction between biology and culture, the universal and the relative, and often enough a concomitant dependence on modularity that makes it possible to distinguish social cognition from other forms of cognition. Sociality is central to an argument that provides for intersubjectivity, ‘enabling a brand of joint action that is truly open-ended in goals and structure [and] … provides the building blocks for human cultural diversity’ (ibid: 3). A pity then that for Enfield and Levinson the capacity for intersubjectivity itself rests on the idea of a (more or less innate) theory of mind (the so-called ToM).

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As currently understood, theory of mind is a domain-specific cognitive module whose component parts are concepts about mental states; it functions to understand what others have in mind and to predict what they are going to do. Given its association with rationalism and hypothesis-testing, the use of the word ‘theory’ here is instructive: thus, the theory of mind module is characterized as open to reorganization in the face of disconfirming evidence. The idea of a theory of mind idea module has proved persuasive to anthropologists, who have used it to argue for an idea of human nature in which people’s apparently tacit understandings are effectively privileged by the researcher over their declared ideas (see, for example, Bloch 2006). Even so, those who make use of the idea vary in their commitment to its being innate, ‘hard-wired’ in the sense of its being well-specified at birth, though they all consider it to be at least a constraining influence on development. Thus, an intermediate theoretical position is taken by Astuti et al. (2004), who argue for what they call ‘the constrained conceptual construction hypothesis’ which, proposes that each child must construct anew [for example, concepts of biological inheritance and natural human kinds] … this construction … is enabled and constrained by powerful innate domain-general learning mechanisms, such as causal analysis … or teleological … and essentialist modes of construal. (Astuti et al. 2004: 15−16)

Likewise, Astuti and Harris (2008) have argued that children are fundamentally rationalist in respect of their ideas concerning what happens after death and that this initial rationalism is progressively overcome, as they grow up, as a function of their taking on religious ideas held by their elders. Rationalist understandings remain cognitively available to a person, however, and the apparently paradoxical attributes of spirits may even be discussed – that they consume food but have no stomachs, for example. As Astuti and Harris recognize, however, it does not follow even from an admission that this is

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difficult to conceive of, that people will give up an idea that spirits consume the spirit substance of foodstuffs. I have no quarrel with Astuti and Harris’s primary findings, but in my view they show only that the youngest children have not yet had experience that would allow them to find out what spirits are. The various ‘sociality theorists’, whose work is brought together by Enfield and Levinson, have rather different theoretical commitments. For example, Tomasello, whose earlier ground-breaking work shows that child language acquisition is a constitutive process that is demonstrably not dependent on an innate, domain-specific, cognitive module providing the primitive structure of a universal grammar (a language acquisition device) or even on a theory of mind module. Rather, Tomasello demonstrates the rapid development of joint attention, gestural skills (especially pointing), and the ability to learn the intentional acts of others; these abilities, taken together with early-developing patternfinding skills, make it possible for children to find patterns in the way adults use linguistic symbols across different utterances, and so to construct the grammatical (abstract) dimensions of human linguistic competence. (Tomasello 2003: 4)

Likewise, in the Enfield and Levinson volume, Susan Goldin-Meadow argues convincingly that [t]he phenomenon of language creation in deaf children tells us that an individual child can reinvent the linguistic wheel, or at least its rudimentary aspects – as long as the child can interact with humans who behave humanely. (Goldin-Meadow 2007: 354)

There is a certain irony here in that Fodor’s initial idea of modularity had everything to do with the idea that humans could not possibly acquire knowledge so complex and highly differentiated as language in the absence of a dedicated, innate ‘language acquisition device’. The so-called LAD was among the first modules, central to the

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development of modularity theory throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Now that it is apparently unnecessary, we find it replaced by ToM. Sociality theory also takes in developments in the idea of ‘distributed cognition’, which is influential especially in the area of education and which is associated with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work on ‘situated learning’ and Michael Cole’s cultural historical perspective.20 The idea is more or less congruent with the neuroconstructivist model described above. Here cognitions ‘are not content-free tools that are brought to bear on this or that problem; rather they emerge in a situation tackled by teams of people and the tools available to them’ (Salomon 1993: xiii). Salomon is referring to the work of Cole when he argues for the view that ‘the proper unit of psychological analysis should be the joint (often, but not necessarily) socially mediated activity in a cultural context’ (ibid: xv, emphasis in the original). Hutchins’ view would appear to be close to this when he insists that ‘distributed cognition’ ‘is an approach to the study of all cognition’ (Hutchins 2006: 376). Distributed cognition sees real-world cognition as a process that involves the interaction of the consequences of past experience (for individual, group, and material world) with the affordances of the present. In this sense, culture is built into the distributed cognition perspective as at least a context for cognition. (ibid: 377)

This is all very well, but for all the expressed concern for real-world processes, the underlying dualist assumptions remain unaddressed by either Cole or Hutchins and the model remains, therefore, computational and ahistorical: oddly so, given Cole’s long insistence on the necessity for incorporating an historical perspective into cognition. The problem lies, I think, in the very way that his ‘cultural historical activity-based approach to cognition leads one to think about the distribution of cognition among people, cultural artefacts, and time’ (Cole 1993: 22). By contrast, the unified model of human being that I argued for above makes it obvious that,

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by virtue of evolution, we humans, like other living things, inhere in the world. From which it follows that inevitably we make use of its manifold aspects in making sense of it intersubjectively over time.21 But there is no mystery here, I think. Human sociality is all-pervasive, so I have little sympathy with the idea of sociality as a domain of investigation; moreover neurobiological, psychological, and sociocultural data give us access not to different ‘levels’ of integration (and thus of explanation) but to aspects of one and the same phenomenon. I argue that we cannot build genuinely explanatory psychological or biological models without reference (at least in principle) to the fact that our biology and psychology are embedded in a long history of social relations, whose analysis is going to be germane to any biological and psychological model that purports to be explanatory. Furthermore, our ethnographic analyses of social relations are essential for understanding the historical specificity of intersubjectivity in any given case and thus for showing how learning processes are themselves structured according to certain ideas about what humans are and can be.

EMBODIMENT AND NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY Anthropologists may be much encouraged by the publication of Evan Thompson’s brilliant Mind in Life in which he argues for a neurophenomenology … [whose] aim is to incorporate phenomenological investigations of experience into neuroscientific research on consciousness. Neurophenomenology focuses especially on the temporal dynamics of conscious experience and brain activity …. (Thompson 2007: 312)

From my point of view, the great thing about a neurophenomenological model of mind is that it is open to coming to grips with human historicity and, precisely for this reason, wants anthropological input.

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The idea that phenomenology could stand in an explanatory relation to biology … will sound odd to many readers. What could phenomenology possibly explain in this domain? The answer is nothing less than how certain biological processes are also realizations of selfhood and subjectivity…. (Thompson 2007: 358)

Of course, most writers (even Evan Thompson) continue to think that the problem is to build culture into their models, but this reintroduces the biology−culture distinction that has for so long interfered with our ability to produce a unified model of human being. As I have suggested, however, we do better to analyse ontogeny as an historical process, showing, for example, how language acquisition engages social relations that are themselves historically structured. Here Tomasello’s wonderfully convincing account of the fundamentals of language acquisition becomes useful again, because it is easy enough to show how the process is intrinsically historical (Tomasello 2003). I have to insist here that intersubjectivity should not be confused with ‘social interaction’. Nor should the process of making sense intersubjectively of the world be confused with ‘social construction’. Where learning is understood as a microhistorical process, the peopled world − for all it operates according to its own dynamics − cannot ever be understood independently of the history of the knowing subject. In other words, the validity of a given scientific study is itself an historically constituted judgement – which is not to say that scientific studies may not be arguably more, or less, valid. The point is that if our categories are to work analytically, they have to be rendered such by means of ethnographic analysis. They are not to be taken for granted, for they too warrant investigation – ‘society’, ‘individual’, ‘biology’, ‘culture’, ‘self’, ‘mind’, and so on, are cases in point. My argument here is, first, that because temporality inheres in consciousness, learning instantiates the microhistorical processes that over time give rise to the phenomena of consciousness as always open to further

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differentiation. Secondly, that because transformation and continuity are aspects of the microhistorical process of human autopoiesis, ethnographic analyses of ontogeny can provide a way in to theorizing the mutual connections between human evolution, history (a regional history, for example), contemporary lives, consciousness, and the neurobiology of consciousness.22 Moreover, it is important for us as anthropologists to understand that the peopled world provides for all our historically constituted descriptions of it, such that these always and inevitably partial descriptions are rendered objective in different ways.23 Ethnographic studies of how children make sense of the conditions in the world created for them by adults can contribute to the dynamic systems perspective on human development over time as an autopoietic and historical process – one that grounds the entire spectrum of individual difference (within and across regions of the world) in the way that our biology provides for sociality, specifically for empathy and intersubjectivity, as the bedrock condition of human being. Furthermore, the details of ethnographic studies of ontogeny as an historical process feed directly into the argument that the development of the neural processes that characterize human conceptual development is an emergent aspect of the functioning of an embodied nervous system for which intersubjectivity is a necessary condition.

NOTES 1 My first formulation of this model (Toren 1999: 1−21; 2002) was derived from a synthesis of the works of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis; Piaget on genetic epistemology, especially his idea of the cognitive scheme as a ‘self-regulating transformational system’ (i.e. as an autopoietic process); Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology; and certain of Vygotsky’s insights on language acquisition. My model has a good deal in common with Thompson (2007) and finds new support in his ground-breaking neurophenomenology and in Tomasello’s (2003) work on the ontogeny of language.

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2 Cf. Damasio (1999). who argues that emotion is fundamental both to the organism’s survival and to consciousness. 3 Csibra and Gergely (2006: 249) argue that ‘human pedagogy [is] an evolutionary adaptation for efficient knowledge transfer’, but if, for humans, living is knowing and vice versa, and if living and knowing are historical processes, then the idea of pedagogy as a ‘dedicated cognitive system’ is unnecessary, which is not to say that our various ideas of pedagogy are not important for what we know about the world and how we know it. See Ingold (2007) for a related argument from the perspective of ‘the social child’. 4 See D’Andrade (1995, Chapters 6 and 7) and Shore (1996, Chapter 2). D’Andrade provides a succinct account of the difference between a connnectionist model and a serial symbolic processing model. 5 Cf. Piaget’s biologically founded idea of the cognitive scheme as a ‘self-regulating transformational system’ which he explicitly likened to mathematical and logical structures and also to ‘structures … whose transformations unfold in time’ (1971: 15). 6 Take, for example, the following: … according to the premises of cultural psychology, even the transcendent realities portrayed by scientists are part of intentional worlds and cannot really take us beyond our mental representations of things. In the world of cultural psychology transcendence and self-transformation are possible but only through a dialectical process of moving from one intentional world into the next, or by changing one intentional world into another (Shweder 1991: 99). 7 See, for example, Nussbaum (2001) and compare Hacking (1999). 8 I first came across the idea in the domain of academic psychology in respect of children (see Kessen 1983). Cultural construction is also central to the development of the contemporary sociology of childhood, where it is inflected by an idea that the child’s agency challenges the discourses that constitute particular ideas concerning what a child is (James, Jenks, and Prout 1998). 9 See, for example, Schwartz et al. (1992). 10 See, for example, Strauss and Quinn (1997, Part II). Compare attempts to use the insights of phenomenology to analyse embodied mind: here the body is ‘the existential ground of culture’, which at once manifests and constitutes mind (e.g. Csordas 1990); culture, however, remains taken for granted. 11 My own attempts to theorize construction have involved, firstly, using Piaget’s ideas to render Bourdieu’s notion of habitus psychologically viable and capable of incorporating history (see Toren

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1990). Later I found it more satisfactory to do away altogether with the over-systematized and paradoxically static habitus and to put forward the theoretical synthesis outlined in Toren (1999, 2002).The unified model presented in this chapter is the most recent development of this model. 12 See Lewis (2000, 2005) for a dynamic systems approach that links emotion theory and neurobiology and Thompson (2007) for suggestions as to an experimental neurophenomenology of timeconsciousness. 13 The infant’s ability at four days to recognize its mother’s face seems to be based on the differentiation of ‘a general pattern processing system, rather than a face-specific one’ (Karmiloff-Smith 1995: 1298); see Elman et al. (1996: 115−118) for the ontogeny of facial recognition. 14 ... all the cases of massive neural structuring to which a content-specific cognitive function can confidently be assigned appear to be associated with language or with perception. … the key to modularity is informational encapsulation … hardwired connections indicate privileged paths of informational access (Fodor 1983: 98, see also Fodor 1988). Cole suggests that the origin of modularity came out of the debate between Chomsky, Piaget and others concerning what came to be known as the ‘language acquisition device’ or ‘language module’ (Cole 1996: 198). 15 The reader should be aware of the difference between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology. Mesoudi et al. (2006) propose a ‘unified science of cultural evolution’ which relies on an analogy between genes as carriers of biological characteristics and memes as carriers of culture. Compare the developmental systems approach which ‘defines evolution not as change in gene frequencies but as “change in the distribution and constitution of developmental (organism-environment) systems” (Oyama 2000: 77). The fundamental unit of evolution so conceived is the life cycle’ (Thompson 2007: 188). This latter perspective enables us to make the historical nature of human beings continuous with evolutionary theory. See also Robertson (1996). 16 For more or less radical perspectives that take this approach, see, for example, Boyer (1994, 2001), Astuti (2001, 2007) and Tremlin (2006). Whitehouse takes a somewhat different, though not unrelated approach. He hypothesizes that religious systems function according to two different modes of religious transmission – an imagistic mode and a doctrinal mode. The two modes indicate different forms of codification that correlate with distinct sets of psychological and sociopolitical features (see Whitehouse 2000, 2004).

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17 Researchers differ as to whether these are all direct products of evolutionary pressures exerted on our ancestors in the Pleistocene (see Tooby and Cosmides 1992); Sperber and Boyer, for example, argue that beliefs in supernatural moral agents develop as by-products of innate ‘pro-social cognitive mechanisms’ (see Pascal Boyer’s and Maurice Bloch’s contributions to the critical discussion of Bering 2006; also Sperber 2006). 18 For example, … during the last trimester of pregnancy approximately 65−70 percent of human fetuses are positioned with the right ear facing out and the left ear facing in toward the mother’s tissues and internal organs. As a result of this positioning, human fetuses receive different types and amounts of prenatal experience to the right and left ears and labyrinths during late prenatal development, probably contributing to cerebral lateralization for a variety of postnatal traits, including speech perception, language function, and limb dominance patterns, like handedness and footedness (Lickliter 2007: 14). 19 “[G]iven the extraordinary complexity of the human nervous system, the infant’s immersion in a world of highly differentiated sensation, and the rapid growth of interneuronal connections, this is surely ample time for … [the] autopoietic development [of infant abilities] out of much more primitive beginnings … as a ‘self-regulating transformational system’, a Piagetian scheme, even in its early stages, is going to ‘look like’ what cognitive psychologists call a module” (Toren 1999:12). 20 See, for example, Kirshner and Whitson (1997). 21 For intersubjectivity, see Trevarthen (1988) and compare contributions to Bråten 1998 and Rumsay (2003). 22 For developments in the anthropology of consciousness, see Throop and Laughlin (2007). 23 See, for example, Toren (2007, 2009, 2011).

REFERENCES Astuti, Rita. 2001. ‘Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 7: 429−447. Astuti, Rita. 2007. ‘What happens after death?’. In Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, and Charles Stafford (eds), Questions of Anthropology. London: Berg.

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Astuti, Rita, Greg E.A. Solomon, and Susan Carey. 2004. Constraints on Conceptual Development. A Case Study of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge in Madagascar. Oxford: Blackwell. Astuti, Rita and Paul Harris. 2008. ‘Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors’. Cognitive Science 32: 713−740. Bering, Jesse M. 2006. ‘The folk psychology of souls’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 29: 453−458. Bloch, Maurice. 2006. L’anthropologie cognitive à l’épreuve du terrain. L’example de la théorie de l’esprit. Collège de France/Fayard. Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York. Basic Books. Bråten, Stein (ed.). 1998. Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cole, Michael. 1993. ‘A cultural historical approach to distributed cognition’. In Gavriel Salomon (ed.), Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cole, Michael. 1996. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Csibra, Gergely and György Gergely. 2006. ‘Social learning and social cognition: The case for pedagogy’. In Y. Munakata and M.H. Johnson (eds), Processes of Change in Brain and Cognitive Development, Attention and Performance, XXI. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 249−274. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology’. Ethos 18: 5−47. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinemann. D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elman, Jeffry L., Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 1996. Rethinking Innateness. A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Enfield, N.J. and Stephen C. Levinson (eds). 2006. Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

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Fodor, Jerry A. 1988. ‘The trouble with psychological Darwinism’. London Review of Books 20(2): 11−13. Goldin-Meadow, Susan. 2006. ‘Meeting other minds through gesture: How children use their hands to reinvent language and distribute cognition.’ In N.J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg. Hacking, Ian.1999. The Social Construction of What? Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. and Susan A. Gelman (eds). 1994. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchins, Edwin. 2006. ‘The distributed cognition perspective on human interaction’. In N.J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg. Ingold, Tim. 2007. ‘The social child’. In Alan Fogel, Barbara King, and Stuart Shanker (eds), Human Development in the Twenty-First Century. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Life Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Allison, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout. 1998. Theorizing Childhood, Cambridge and Oxford. Polity Press. Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1995. ‘Annotation: The extraordinary cognitive journey from foetus through infancy’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 36(8): 1293−1313. Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1998. ‘Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2: 389−398. Kessen, W. 1983. ‘The child and other cultural inventions.’ In F.S. Kessel and A.W. Siegel (eds), The Child and Other Cultural Inventions. New York: Praeger Publishers. Kirshner, David and James A. Whitson. 1997. Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic and Psychological Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Marc. 2000. ‘Emotional self-organization at three time scales’. In M.D. Lewis and I. Granic (eds), Emotion, Development and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Marc. 2005. ‘Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28: 169−194.

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Lickliter, Robert. 2007. ‘Developmental dynamics. The new view from the life sciences’. In Alan Fogel, Barbara King, and Stuart Shanker (eds), Human Development in the Twenty-First Century. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Life Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. 2006. ‘Towards a unified science of cultural evolution’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 29: 329−383. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001.Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oyama, S. 2000. Evolution’s Eye: A System’s View of the Biology−Culture Divide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1971. Structuralism: London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (original 1969). Robertson, A.F. 1996. ‘The development of meaning: Ontogeny and culture’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 2: 591−610. Rumsay, Alan. 2003. ‘Language desire and the ontogenesis of intersubjectivity’. Language and Communication 23(2): 169−187. Salomon, Gavriel. (ed.). 1996. Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, Theodore, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz. 1992. New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shweder, R.A. 1991. Thinking Through Cultures. Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Spelke, Elisabeth. 1999. ‘Infant cognition’. In Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (eds), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cogntive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sperber, Dan. 1994. ‘The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations’. In Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and Susan A. Gelman (eds), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford. Wiley-Blackwell. Sperber, Dan. 2006. ‘Why a deep understanding of cultural evolution is incompatible with shallow psychology’. In N.J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg.

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Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life. Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Throop, Jason C. and Charles D. Laughlin. 2007. ‘Anthropology of consciousness’. In Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides. 1992. ‘The psychological foundations of culture’. In J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toren, Christina. 1990. Making Sense of Hierarchy. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. London School of Economics, Monographs in Social Anthropology, 61. London: The Athlone Press. Toren, Christina. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge. Toren, Christina. 2002. ‘Anthropology as the whole science of what it is to be human’. In R. Fox and B. King (eds), Anthropology Beyond Culture. London: Berg, pp. 105−124.

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Toren, Christina. 2007. How do we know what is true? The case of mana in Fiji.’ In R. Astuti, J. Parry, and C. Stafford (eds), Questions of Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Toren, Christina. 2007. ‘An anthropology of human development – What difference does it make?’ In Alan Fogel, Barbara King, and Stuart Shanker (eds), Human Development in the Twenty-First Century. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Life Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toren, Christina. 2009. Intersubjectivity as epistemology. Social Analysis 53(2):130–146. Toren, Christina. 2011. The stuff of imagination: what we can learn from Fijian children’s ideas about their lives as adults. Social Analysis 55(1), 23–47. Tremlin, Todd. 2006. Minds and Gods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trevarthen, Colwyn. 1988. ‘Universal cooperative motives: How infants come to know the language and culture of their parents’. In G. Jahoda and I.M. Lewis (eds), Acquiring Culture: Cross-cultural Studies in Child Development. London: Croom Helm. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2000. Arguments and Icons Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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1.3 Anthropology of Biomedicine and Bioscience Sarah Franklin

Two key transitions have led to the emergence and rapid growth of an anthropology of the biosciences and biomedicine in the latter half of the twentieth century. One is a change in the relationship between the disciplines of anthropology and biology, so that, as part of a broad post-war redefinition of anthropology’s engagement with the ‘culture’ concept, biology is no longer seen as prior to culture, but as a domain of phenomena that is shaped by historical and cultural forces, such as religion and politics, as well as social identities, including gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. The life sciences have increasingly come to be seen as culturally specific institutions, and ‘biology’ as a cultural product. This is manifest in the terms ‘biomedicine’ and ‘bioscience’, which refer to the manipulation of life as a means of both understanding it, and remaking it (Franklin and Lock 2003; Rabinow 1996). These terms also demonstrate the second significant major transition, which has occurred within the biological sciences, also in the post-war period, overturning previous certainties about what biology ‘is’, or how humans ‘are’ biological. This shift has variously been described as the molecularization, re-engineering, or redesign of life itself, and is associated with the genetic revolution,

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cloning, organ transplantation, assisted conception, stem cells, synthetic biology, and other areas of ‘high tech’ biomedicine and bioscience (Keller 2000; Landecker 2006). In sum, bioscience and biomedicine refer to significant post-war changes in how life is understood, and new mechanisms through which it can be produced and controlled, which are seen to have implications for understandings of both biology and culture (Gibbon and Novas 2008; Kaufman and Morgan 2005). These changes are also linked to a growing concern with the social, ethical and political implications of increasing biological control over life itself (Good 2001; Rose 2006). For some scientists, such as the British biologist Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, ‘the age of biological control’ provides a straightforward intellectual, political and ethical imperative to establish the limits biology ‘itself’ no longer provides. He writes, As the decades and centuries pass, the science of cloning and the technologies that may flow from it will affect all aspects of human life – the things that people can do, the way we live, even, if we choose, the kinds of people we are. Those future technologies will offer our successors a degree of control over life’s processes that will come effectively to seem absolute. Until the birth of Dolly, scientists were apt to declare that this or that procedure would be “biologically impossible” − but

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now that expression, biologically impossible, seems to have lost all meaning. In the twenty-first century and beyond, human ambition will be bound only by the laws of physics, the rules of logic, and our descendants’ own sense of right and wrong. (Wilmut et al. 2000: 5)

For the anthropologist, such a statement presents complex challenges. We must, for example, ask not only what kinds of cultures (e.g. professional cultures, national cultures, historical cultures) shape biological innovation, and the organization of research priorities in the life sciences, but also the reverse: How are non-scientific cultural contexts shaped by scientific ideas, applications, assumptions, and aspirations? This dilemma is epitomized by the very idea of a ‘scientific fact’. Since we know scientific facts do not emerge out of nowhere, fully formed, entering our stratosphere like meteors from another planet, but instead are carefully hewn and refined through a continual historical process of human labour, we cannot accord them absolute, permanent, objective status as asocial or precultural ‘facts’ that are simply ‘true’, or even necessarily here to stay (Fleck 1979; Latour 1993; Latour and Woolgar 1986). Science is an essentially sceptical practice. All of the most important contemporary scientific facts, equations, terms, experimental procedures, laws, and principles have withstood relentless questioning and continuous interrogation (Kuhn 1970). This means that scientific facts tell us ‘who we really are’ in two rather different senses: on the one hand, they convey information such as how many chromosomes are present in a normal human genome; on the other hand, even such a basic empirical ‘fact’ reveals that we have come to understand ourselves through the language of the genes. This chapter is organized to show how the anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine emerges both as a result of, and in response to, the difference between these two different ways of interpreting scientific facts. Like other branches of anthropology, the anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine, which studies the cultural significance of

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changes in the modern life sciences, can be unsettling because it challenges takenfor-granted ideas not only about who we are but also about how we came to understand ourselves through some categories rather than others. In the following sections of this chapter, this contrast is explored through five sequential frames of reference. First we examine early ideas about reproduction in anthropology, asking how these ‘conception models’ shaped the kinds of research undertaken by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, in turn, how these ideas developed and changed. In the following section, we turn to the latetwentieth century anthropological study of new reproductive technologies and the work of Marilyn Strathern, to ask how older anthropological questions about reproduction and biology were reworked in the context of bioscience and biomedicine, and what this reveals about reflexivity as a modern form of anthropological comparison. In the third section, we consider the work of Paul Rabinow and Donna Haraway to examine how some of the broad changes giving rise to what some have called ‘the biosociety’ have been conceptualized as a change in the relationship of nature to culture. This is followed by an ethnographic example concerning kinship, drawn from the work of Rayna Rapp, illustrating in finer detail how ‘biosociality’ is experienced in the context of prenatal genetic testing. Finally, we conclude with an overview of current topics in the anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine, including organ donation, stem cells, and cloning, demonstrating how the study of biomedicine and bioscience continues to generate anthropological innovation.

EARLY REPRODUCTIVE MODELS The discipline of anthropology was ‘born’ in the late nineteenth century out of many of the same questions that are being asked today about the relationship between human biology and the origin of social structures

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such as the family and kinship (Coward 1983; Franklin 1997). For the sake of historical perspective, it is worth reviewing briefly some of the ways in which ‘the biological facts of human reproduction’ were seen to determine human social organization, as well as how these views were challenged by the view that human biology is highly culturally plastic, or malleable. Much of this early contestation and debate was focused on questions of how to interpret the social or cultural significance of the natural facts of biological reproduction – also known as ‘the facts of life’. Following an essentially Rousseauian model of human emergence out of a state of nature, through which ‘man’ both retained, but also separated himself from, his original natural condition, many early anthropologists looked to so-called primitive societies for answers to questions such as how the human family emerged, whether marriage is universal, and to what extent social structure is determined by the need to satisfy certain fundamental biological needs? For many late nineteenth century thinkers, a key to the puzzle of how the ‘natural facts’ of sexual reproduction formed the base, or prehistory, to the early human family was the question of knowledge of physical paternity. Frederich Engels (1884 [1986]) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1887 ), for example, postulated that the origin of private property (as well as the family and the state) arose as a logical progressive evolution from the ‘discovery’ of physical paternity: e.g. the male role in the generation of offspring. Such theories were criticized, however, for proposing a narrow, unilinear path of human development based more on speculation than close observation. The early twentieth-century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of the British school of structural functionalism, was among many who argued for a less deterministic model of human social organization and a more plastic view of biology. He used the case of the Trobriand Islanders to argue that there was no direct correlation between either knowledge or ignorance of

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paternity and social structure. Since the Trobrianders claimed to be ignorant of physical paternity, but had complex and sophisticated societies, Malinowski claimed this correlation was false, and based on a misguided view of knowledge, as well as of the importance of ‘the facts of life’. As Malinowski observed in his classic monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific: Modern science shows … that their social institutions have a very definite organisation, that they are governed by authority, law and order in their public and personal relations, while the latter are, besides, under the control of extremely complex ties of kinship and clanship. (Malinowski 1961 [1922]: 10)

In The Sexual Life of Savages he added that: It is rather inconsistent to get excited about the faulty knowledge of the Trobrianders when it comes to processes of sexual fertilisation when we are perfectly satisfied that they posses no real knowledge as to processes of nutrition, or metabolism, the causes of disease or health, or any other subject of natural history. (1932: ii)

From these observations Malinowski generalized that ‘The ideas and institutions which control conception, pregnancy and birth show that these cannot be regarded by the anthropologist as mere physiological facts, but [must be seen as] facts deeply modified by culture and social organisation’ (Malinowski, 1962: 140). In his rejection of the idea that the ‘discovery’ of the biological facts of paternity could, in and of itself, determine any particular form of social structure, Malinowski introduced three key themes that would continue to reshape anthropology throughout the twentieth century. First, he argued that the nineteenth-century over-emphasis on the biological facts of sexual reproduction was a Western, or even more specifically a Victorian, obsession that was not universally either shared or relevant for the ethnographer. He thus also introduced the idea that scientific knowledge is at least in part culturally determined, and that it is important for the scientist to take this into account – and to be

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self-conscious about his or her own belief system. Second, he introduced the model of biological plasticity – arguing that beliefs about procreation can be adapted, adjusted and altered as part of a wider social process of creating individual and group identities. There is nothing transparent or obvious about ‘being biological’, he insisted. Finally, he introduced the idea of reflexive comparison – that another culture’s use of ‘scientific’ knowledge might shed some light on the particularities of how it is used ‘at home’. As we shall see, all of Malinowski’s observations have gained added significance in the contexts of assisted conception, organ donation, genetic screening and stem cells – in which the plasticity of both biology and biological identities have become increasingly prominent and explicit, and greater reflexivity about anthropological certainties has been required. Not only are such contemporary debates consequently continuous with the origins of anthropology but also this continuity offsets the common overemphasis on novelty that is a feature of many contemporary discussions of bioscience and biomedicine. Thus, as we shall see, although some of these more recent areas of enquiry may be new in a historical sense, they raise questions that are often very familiar to anthropologists. Malinowski’s critique of the overemphasis on ‘accurate’ knowledge of the ‘scientific facts’ of biological reproduction in accounts of the origins of social structure has been returned to repeatedly by other anthropologists over the course of the twentieth century. The American kinship theorist David Schneider, for example, took Malinowski’s argument to its logical conclusion in the 1960s, arguing that all Western anthropological theories of kinship shared a crucial false assumption in presuming that the biogenetic basis of kinship and reproduction is logically prior to its social construction. In contrast, Schneider argued that the logic of kinship was essentially symbolic, and that ‘natural facts’ were consequently symbols. He argued that the American ‘kin universe’ was not based on nature, but on the symbolic natural

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acts of reproduction and parenting, through which children came to symbolize conjugality and the closeness of the family, linked through ties of shared genetic substance, and thus by ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’. Like Malinowski, Schneider argued against an overly literal reading of ‘the biological facts’ and insisted they have no determining role in social life (Schneider 1980 [1968]). These claims were taken further by feminist anthropologists in the 1980s, following Sylvia Yanagisako’s influential response to David Schneider’s Critique of the Study of Kinship, published in 1984. In 1985, Yanagisako delivered a paper to the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, in which she argued that Schneider had overlooked the most important logical consequences of his own argument. She pointed out that the same naturalized model of sexual reproduction that Schneider saw as limiting kinship study also defined the study of gender – and that as a consequence the study of kinship, gender and reproduction were all essentially the same field: ‘Our model of the natural differences in the roles of men and women in sexual reproduction lies at the core of our studies of the cultural organisation of gender, at the same time it constitutes the core of the genealogical grid that has defined kinship for us’ (1985: 1). This insight proved crucial to a new synthesis in anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, not only between the study of gender, kinship and reproduction but also concerning the role of ‘natural facts’ in Western knowledge production more widely. In essence, the long-standing implicit biologism of anthropologists – even of those, such as Schneider, who only partially critiqued it – became the focus of a profound and thoroughgoing re-examination. This took the form of critiquing gender roles and the sexual division of labour, but more broadly the corresponding divisions between nature and culture, or biology and society (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).

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NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES To understand the full implications of this shift, it is useful to turn to the literature on new reproductive technologies, which began to be published in the mid-1980s, following the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978. Marilyn Strathern played a key role in the emergence of feminist anthropology, and her 1980 anthology, co-edited with Carol MacCormack, entitled Nature, Culture and Gender, had set the stage for an entirely new approach to both gender and kinship. In the same way Schneider had argued that biology was a symbolic, not literal, resource in the formation of American kinship, so Strathern (1980) argued that the nature−culture dichotomy, and Western categories of the natural more broadly, had similarly been taken too much for granted as one of the foundational frameworks for social theory. Rather than being a universal and primordial distinction, or one that was either self-evident or ‘factual’, Strathern analysed anthropology’s overreliance on its own indigenous knowledge categories of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ as a form of ethnocentrism. She further demonstrated that the model through which gender categories such as ‘male’ or ‘female’ were understood to be ‘based on’ an underlying natural or biological order, (so that ‘sex’ became the biological base to which ‘gender’ was the social addition, or ‘social construction’), could not explain either sex or gender in other societies where no such naturalized ontology exists. This insight represented a significant advance within anthropology, both by introducing a more radically reflexive approach to ‘natural facts’, and by diagnosing the crucial link between models of nature and biology, and models of gender and sex (Franklin 2001a). Strathern’s argument about the cultural specificity of the Western model of biological sex gained additional significance as technological assistance to human reproduction became increasingly widespread from the 1980s onwards in the form of in vitro

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fertilization (IVF), artificial insemination, surrogacy, and a host of other procedures designed to re-engineer the ‘natural’ reproductive capacities of humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms. In the context of IVF, during which the basic processes of ovulation induction, removal of ova, fertilization, embryo culture, embryo selection, and embryo transfer were conducted under the close supervision of technical experts, and thus surrendered into the helping hands of science, it could be said that biological reproduction had, in a sense, become fully domesticated. This did not make them entirely non-natural: indeed, a common representation of IVF in patient information leaflets is of ‘giving nature a helping hand’. However, the idea of technologically assisted nature was, according to Strathern’s analysis, a revealing hybrid: it showed that reproduction was now ‘after nature’ in two important senses – post the ‘unassisted’ nature that had come before, but also differently modelled after nature, in the sense of being a new kind of natural-technical phenomena. A key consequence, in Strathern’s view, of the rise of new reproductive technologies, and the prominent public and parliamentary debates which accompanied their regulation (such as the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Act), was of displacement. Having been supplemented by technology, to provide live human offspring, the former view of sexual reproduction being a consequence of natural facts that ‘stood for themselves’ was displaced by a new conception model according to which nature could be redesigned – or literally reconstructed. New ‘miracle babies’ born of IVF thus embodied a new origin – one that was both essentially and explicitly ‘man-made’. Thus, new reproductive technologies not only inaugurated a new age of reproductive control but also made explicit a new conception model, based on new ‘facts of life’ (Franklin 1997). At one level, these differed substantially from previous conception models which took nature as the ground for social action, by reversing this process, and

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making choice, technology and human aspiration the ground for ‘artificial’ reproduction. Significantly, the new reproductive technologies also introduced new uncertainties into the process of conception. These took a wide variety of forms. For example, although it might be said that it is a basic fact of life that it takes a sperm and an egg to make a baby (hence the old paternity debate), it turns out that a sperm and an egg are not enough, and this ‘causal’ explanation is only ever valid retrospectively – after a baby has been born. As IVF still demonstrates today, the presence of a sperm and an egg in a Petri dish does not guarantee either an embryo or a pregnancy will result. For all that successful human IVF did to confirm the benefits of scientific progress, and the fruits of modern biomedicine, it also, somewhat paradoxically, confirmed how much remains unknown and mysterious about the precise mechanisms leading to conception. This kind of uncertainty has proven to be characteristic of many areas of bioscientific and biomedical innovation, and has even been described by some social theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, as a defining condition of late modernity. As we shall see in the next section, anthropological study of new reproductive technologies identified many of the basic dilemmas characteristic of the hope of embodying progress in the contemporary era of high-tech biomedical and bioscientific innovation – described by Ian Wilmut earlier as the ‘age of biological control’. By symbolizing hope, progress, choice and control, new reproductive technologies opened new paths of human aspiration, fuelling what Mary Del Vecchio Good has described as ‘the biotechnical embrace’. By making human scientific innovation the mechanism for an unprecedented form of ‘artificial procreation’, IVF established a new reproductive model. New kinds of offspring could be born, such as ‘twins’ conceived in the same Petri dish, but born years apart with the aid of cryopreservation. Egg donors could become genetic parents to offspring gestated in their birth mother’s womb. And similarly, new

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models of parenthood could be forged, through what IVF ethnographer Charis Thompson (2005) has called ‘strategic naturalisation’, describing the complex ways that multi-party conception arrangements are aligned with preferred conjugal and kinship patterns. However, these new reproductive models also had much in common with pre-existing kinship structures and practices. And while it is correct to emphasize the novelty of techniques such as IVF, it is equally important to acknowledge that their emergence extends a well-established legacy of ‘biological control’ through livestock domestication, agriculture, and medicine (Clarke 1998). Similarly, although an undoubted confirmation of bioscientific ingenuity and progress, IVF continues to raise new uncertainties, and is the site of difficult choices and obligations that generate ambivalence, suspicion, and doubt. Thus, although novel, and often described as ‘racing ahead’ of society, in new fields such as stem cells and cloning, the science of reproductive biology can be studied by anthropologists using many of the same techniques through which the discipline of anthropology came into being more than a century ago (Franklin 2001b; Franklin and Lock 2003).

BIOSOCIALITY AND NATURECULTURES Published in the same year, 1992, as Strathern’s two path-breaking monographs (1992a, b) on new reproductive technologies were two of the early contributions to social theory which have had the most enduring influence on the anthropology of biomedicine and bioscience. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow’s concept of ‘biosociality’ was introduced in the context of early efforts to map the human genome, and his own efforts to forge an ethnography of bioscience. Writing from a Foucauldian perspective, Rabinow proposed a shift similar to that described by Strathern in the context of new reproductive technologies. As early as the

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1960s, the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault described the emergence of modern biology as a consequence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which Foucault argued formed the basis for modern biology. Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realise that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. (Foucault 1973: 127–128)

Darwin’s theory was revolutionary for many reasons, not only because he claimed that man descended from animals but also because he argued the same ‘helping hands’ of evolution that continued to shape animal nature also shaped human nature. An important implication of this principle, from an anthropological point of view, is that humans are subject to the same biological ‘laws’ as every other living thing. The disciplines that have developed this comparison most fully are evolutionary biology and socio-biology, through which, for example, human societies are studied not only in terms of animal behaviour but even in terms of the ‘laws’ that govern insect communities, such as ants. In the second half of the twentieth century, following the discovery of the structure of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953, the modern biological model of inherited genetic ‘programming’ began to become more influential in studies of behaviour. The idea, for example, that humans and other animals are ‘hardwired’ for certain behaviours, which are beneficial in evolutionary terms, gained influence. A paradigmatic example is the work of E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist, who coined the term ‘sociobiology’ to describe how certain social patterns, such as altruism, reflect an inherited biogenetic script that is not necessarily available to the conscious mind (Wilson 1975).

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The effort to unlock the secrets to the human genome that began to gain momentum in the 1980s was initially imagined to offer access to the molecular alphabet of this hardwiring, both structurally and conceptually. An enormously expensive and technically daunting initiative, the Human Genome Project was based on the same engineering model as IVF: by taking apart the genome and analyzing its components, it would be possible both to understand it better, and to intervene in its structure – and eventually to redesign it. To one of the earliest anthropologists of bioscience, Paul Rabinow, this project represented a remaking of the very idea of ‘man’. Whereas socio-biology had understood the human as a product of its biological ‘hardwiring’, Rabinow proposed a reverse scenario, for which he also proposed a new term, ‘biosociality’: If socio-biology is culture constructed on the basis of a metaphor of nature, then in biosociality, nature will be modelled on culture understood as practice. Nature will be known and remade through technique and will finally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural. (1992: 241–242)

According to Rabinow, the flow through which ‘culture is constructed on the metaphor of nature’ will be reversed: ‘nature will be modelled on culture’. The primal scene for this reversal, the new genetics (itself ‘a biological metaphor for modern society’), would be revealed, he predicted, through the development of new scientific techniques. In his view, the techniques of the Human Genome Project would ‘move’ existing social aspirations into our biology – much as the techniques of IVF had already accomplished by enabling intervention into the very earliest stages of life to create new offspring. Rabinow predicted that a consequence of the new genetics would be what he called a ‘truly new form of autoproduction’ accompanied and enabled by new social groups, such as genetic patient support groups: ‘groups formed around the chromosome 17, locus 16,256, site 654,376 allele variant with a guanine

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substitution … [which] have medical specialists, laboratories, narratives, traditions and a heavy panoply of pastoral keepers to help them experience, share, intervene in, and “understand” their fate’ (1992: 244). Thus, according to Rabinow’s prediction, biosociality would involve ‘the formation of new group and individual identities and practices arising out of … new truths’ (i.e. the new truths of the Human Genome Project). The change, as he noted, would involve a reversal of the presiding cultural logic – from nature to culture – so it flows backwards – from culture to nature. Writing in the same issue of the anthology Incorporations in 1992, science studies scholar Donna Haraway addressed a somewhat different, but related, shift in the context of new animal models containing human genes. Produced in partnership with Harvard scientists in the 1980s, DuPont’s transgenic OncoMouse® was the world’s first patented mammal. At once a tool for cancer research, a commodity, and an animal model containing human genes, OncoMouse® embodied, in Haraway’s terms, a new kind of ‘traffic’ between nature and culture. Whereas Rabinow proposed a ‘reversal’ in the ‘flow’ between nature and culture, Haraway proposed an ‘implosion’. OncoMouse®, she argued, was ‘many things simultaneously’: ‘A kind of machine tool for manufacturing other knowledge-building instruments in technoscience, the useful little rodent with the talent for mammary cancer is a scientific instrument for sale like many other laboratory devices’ (1997: 79). Significantly, both Haraway and Rabinow used the idiom of kinship to interpret the significance of what Haraway calls ‘naturecultures’ produced in the context of technoscience (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000). For Rabinow, new biosocial groupings, such as genetic disease patient support groups, would be differently based on ‘biogenetic substance’, through ‘family ties’ established on the basis of biomedical intervention and bioscientific innovation. These ties would affirm the importance of interventions into

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the very ‘stuff of life’ in order to alleviate the suffering caused by hereditary pathology. A new kind of kinship universe would thus reflect a different idea of ‘man’, or anthropos. This kinship universe would not simply follow the paths of genealogical descent, but would reverse this relation – making genealogical relatedness an object of technological ‘rewiring’. A somewhat different set of kinship implications are explored by Haraway in the context of OncoMouse®. Because she has human genes, and has been both born and made out of her intimate associations with human illness, she is a ‘sibling’ species, in Haraway’s terms, to which a complex human debt is owed: The techniques of genetic engineering developed since the early 1970s are like the reactors and particle accelerators of nuclear physics: Their products are “trans.” They themselves cross a culturally salient line between nature and artifice, and they greatly increase the density of all kinds of other traffic on the bridge between what counts as nature and culture for my people. … Like the transuranic elements, transgenic creatures, which carry genes from “unrelated” organisms, simultaneously fit into well-established taxonomic and evolutionary discourses and also blast widely understood senses of natural limit. What was distant and unrelated becomes intimate. By the 1990s, genes are us: and we seem to include some curious new family members at every level of the onion of biological, personal, national and transnational life. What could be more natural by the 1990s than worldwide commercial, familial, biotechnical, and cinematic genetic traffic? (1997: 56−57)

Here, as in early anthropology, the relation between ‘biological’ facts of life – in this case the ‘new’ naturalcultural facts of transgenic reproduction – and emergent categories of identity are theorized by Haraway using kinship models. As for both Rabinow and Strathern, it is the new forms of ‘traffic on the bridge between what counts as nature and culture’ and the ‘culturally salient line between nature and artifice’ that concerns Haraway. Anthropologically, what is significant in all three theorists’ work is their shared emphasis on the shared, biological

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embodiment of technological progress, and their use of kinship as a means of charting its effects.

NEW BIOGENETIC CONNECTIONS The changing social meanings of biogenetic substance in the context of new genetic technologies has, like the earlier field of studies of kinship in the context of assisted conception described above, become one of the core sub-fields of the anthropology of biomedicine and bioscience. Confirming Rabinow’s prediction of emergent ‘biosocialities’, numerous studies by anthropologists have examined the challenges of genetic choice in the context of increasing genetic information provided through new forms of genetic screening and diagnosis (Finkler 2000; Franklin and Roberts 2006; Gibbon 2006; Pálsson 2007). In one of the most influential of these studies, US anthropologist Rayna Rapp introduced the term ‘moral pioneers’ (1999: 306) to describe the often philosophical, as well as practical, issues faced by women undergoing routine amniocentesis during their pregnancy. In attempting to provide a ‘topography’ of amniocentesis through a multi-sited account of personal and professional encounters with prenatal chromosomal analysis, Rapp analyses how her informants negotiate the gap between biogenetic information − which is often highly technical but incomplete − and meaningful knowledge, which, by definition, is socially, not medically, defined, evaluated, and acted upon. She shows how ‘alternative and sometimes competing rationales’ (Rapp 1999: 10) must be weighed up and evaluated, often in complicated marital or family settings that can generate what she describes as ‘kinship friction’ (153) − a situation Rapp attributes to ‘the gap between statistical risk figures and phenomenological experience’ (175). This ‘kinship friction’ is worth examining in some depth, as it demonstrates the value of fine-grained ethnographic studies of bioscience and biomedicine such as Rapp’s

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in the effort to characterize the subjective experience of ‘the age of biological control’. The following case offers a typical example of how different logics of genetic interpretation produce what Rapp describes as a diagnostic ‘stand-off’ (1999: 188). The background to the case is the discovery of ‘something ambiguous on the #9 chromosome of the sample’ and a provisional diagnosis of ‘#9+’. The closest condition to which this could be assimilated is ‘some clinical reports on trisomy 9’, resulting in physical anomalies and mental retardation. After counselling, the mother decides to keep the pregnancy, and gives birth in early June. A month later the genetics laboratory requests a consultation via the mother’s obstetrician, and she agrees to attend with her baby son. He was a six-week-old Haitian boy named Etienne St-Croix. His mother, Veronique, spoke reasonably good English and good French. His grandmother, Marie-Lucie, who carried the child, spoke Creole and some French. The two geneticists spoke English, Polish, Hebrew and Chinese between them. I translated into French, ostensibly for the grandmother and mother ... . The geneticist was gracious with Veronique but after a moment’s chit-chat asked to examine the baby. She never spoke again to the mother during the examination. Instead, she and a second geneticist, both trained in pediatrics, handled the newborn with confidence and interest. The counselor took notes as the geneticists measured and discussed the baby. “Note the oblique palpebral fissure and micrognathia,” one called out. “Yes,” answered Veronique in perfect time to the conversation, “he has the nose of my uncle Herve and the ears of Aunt Mathilde.” As the geneticists pathologized, the mother genealogized, the genetic counselor remained silent, furiously taking notes, and the anthropologist tried to keep score. (Rapp 1999: 187)

This episode, from Rapp’s chapter on ‘Refusing’, illustrates the multiple languages of genetic translation and the difficulty of aligning these into a single narrative. The geneticists are working from known precedents to increase their scientific understanding by comparing a new case with previous cases through physical examination of the newborn ‘trisomy 9’. However, these ‘natural

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facts’, despite being based on objective scientific analysis, do not resolve into a single shared genetic diagnosis, but instead generate conflict. As Rapp observes: While the geneticists are confident that this child will share the developmental pattern reported in the literature for other children with very similar chromosomal patterns, the mother was quite aware of the idiosyncratic nature of the case, its lack of a clear-cut label and known syndrome. She therefore decided that the contest for interpretation was still an open one (Rapp 1999: 188).

Veronique’s rejection of a medicalized version of genealogical connection is underscored by her decision to have the child − more or less against the medical advice. Asked about her decision after the examination is over, on the way to the subway, Veronique explains that ‘more’ genetic information had not increased her confidence in expert medical advice. To the contrary, it had reinforced her sense of the limits of abstract scientific knowledge in relation to something as personal and intimate as her own pregnancy: But when they told me this, who knows? I was so scared, but the more they talked, the less they said. They do not know what this is. And I do not know either. So now, it’s my baby. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. And so will they. (Rapp 1999: 188)

For Rapp, what is important about this outcome is not only that it is made up of ‘alternative and competing rationales’ (1999: 10), but that it involves a direct rejection of biomedical expertise. Using Paul Rabinow’s concept of ‘biosociality’ discussed above, Rapp argues that: Biomedicine provides discourses with hegemonic claims ... encouraging enrolment in the categories of biosociality. Yet these claims do not go uncontested, nor are these new categories of identity used untransformed. Religious orientations and practices, informal folk beliefs, class-based and ethnic traditions as well as scientifically-inflected counterdiscourses also lay claim to the interpretation of extra chromosom[al material]. (Rapp 1999: 302)

Rapp’s ethnographic account of the new genetics emphasizes the plurality of meanings that accompany ‘scientific facts’, and the wide

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range of cultural knowledges that come into play as these new ‘facts of life’ are negotiated by various social actors, who have divergent interpretations of their significance. She thus shows how much picking and choosing is going on at the level of which information is accepted as useful knowledge, what kinds of authority are relied upon, and how individual decisions are reached amidst often conflicting individual, marital and familial priorities. The central paradox of prenatal testing is that it is primarily sought as a form of reassurance that everything is ‘normal’, when it is designed to detect exactly the reverse. Moreover, it is only when a test returns a ‘positive’ outcome that there are difficult decisions to be made. The most difficult decisions of all occur when normality is no longer a predicted outcome, which is, ironically, after the test has been ‘successful’ in detecting genetic disease. As Rapp notes, because genetic information is always partial, ‘in some sense, all positive diagnoses appear ambiguous to pregnant women’ (Rapp 1999: 188). Even when a chromosomal analysis is known with all possible certainty, it will not reveal how serious the disease will be, when its onset will occur, or how it may affect a child’s life span. Even in the very rare cases of single gene disorders where the outcome can be predicted with tragically accurate clinical precision, such as Tay−Sachs disease, spinal muscular atrophy, or Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the potential offspring is never fully reducible to a potential syndrome, even if it is terminal. Hence, the assumption that genes make us who we are is both too true to ignore, and too partial to be enough truth by itself.

AMBIVALENT BIOLOGIES The ‘partial’ nature of genetic information in the context of biomedicine returns us to the intersection between biology as a science and biological identity in a manner that illustrates a fundamental ambivalence toward both the embodiment of scientific progress and the

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meaning of the expression ‘biological control’. This ambivalence is a key theme in other studies of bioscience and biomedicine, including research on organ transplantation, cloning and stem cells. In her study of organ transplant, for example, anthropologist Sharon Kaufman describes the ‘moral confusion’ that ‘results in the creation of new kinds of persons, a new category of life itself, new relationships of care and familial burden, and new cultural narratives about life and death’ (2000: 70). These new categories and narratives challenge existing meanings of nature and natural facts, producing new hybrid entities ‘born’ of medical intervention, such as brain-dead cadavers that become organ donors after being removed from life support. As Margaret Lock notes, such transitional contexts create ‘uneasiness’ in part because of the difficult choices they require of families, professionals and patients alike. The determination of death for some patients has become ‘primarily a moral and not a medical matter, and the fulfilment of medical criteria, albeit often clouded by uncertainty, is a necessary but not sufficient reason to declare death’ (2003: 189). As Lock notes, these choices are difficult in part because they are more explicitly arbitrary: ‘widely debated and socially recognised assessments of what constitutes a morally acceptable social death must take place’ (2003: 191). Thus, they are also challenging because such difficult choices are themselves chosen: ‘These are the shifting sands we have created for ourselves in late modernity as a result of our intrusions into the “natural” world’ (2003: 191). As Sharon Kaufman and Lynn Morgan note in their discussion of emergent forms of life and death in the context of bioscience and biomedicine, there are both a cause and a symptom of more ‘ambiguous boundaries’ affecting the beginnings and endings of life. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitics’ they observe that: The stem cell, “orphaned” embryo, fetus, fetal specimen (the dead unborn), sperm and egg donors and recipients, comatose, demented, neomort, and “cadaveric” organ donor – all can be

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seen as biopolitical subjects, brought into being through the workings of biomedical regimes of power. Their emergence into social subjecthood creates new relationships and obligations (among strangers and kin, between doctors and patients, and between individual and institutions), new forms of knowledge, and new kinds of normalising practices at the same time as they foster tensions about political, ethical, and medical responsibility. (2005: 329)

Here, then, are the conditions of biosociality that continue to be analysed by anthropologists and other social theorists, who seek to depict the texture of lived experience in the context of the often-difficult choices presented by contexts such as organ donation, assisted conception, or genetic screening. Such studies also aim to address the overarching question of embodying progress in ‘the age of biological control’. Three of the most important overarching themes recurring across the anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine are progress, ambivalence and choice (Franklin and Roberts 2006). The pattern by which technology is developed to enable new choices, thus producing new obligations, new uncertainties and new risks, has become a prominent concern in the social sciences in the late twentieth century. Medical technologies, with their potent mix of open-ended promises, heroic achievements, ambivalent hopes and often impossible choices, epitomize a set of dilemmas alternatively associated with postmodernism or posthumanism. For example, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck used the ‘progress’ of medical technology, and in particular IVF, as a paradigmatic case his influential study Risk Society (1992). Beck’s argument centrally concerned ‘the logic of “progress”’ that informed the decision to attempt IVF in humans: In the sub-politics of medicine … the possibilities for thoughtless and unplanned exceeding of limits lie in the logic of “progress”. Even in vitro fertilization was first tested in animal experiments. One can very well argue over whether that should be permitted. But an essential barrier was crossed in applying this technology to people. This risk … is after all not a risk for medicine, but for the next generation of people, for all of us … (209−210)

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Like Ian Wilmut, Beck points to the challenge of limiting the application of medical technology, in particular at the point when it can be life-saving (or, in the case of IVF, lifecreating). Referring to the logic of progress, or what has been described above as the embodiment of progress, he describes how new risks are created not only for individuals but also for the population, when ‘essential’ barriers are crossed. For Beck, this problem of the ‘risk society’ – whereby it is progress itself that generates new risks – encapsulates a defining feature of late modernity. As Lock, Kaufman, Morgan, and others have shown, organ donation offers a case in point of the ‘shifting sands we have created for ourselves’, as Lock describes them. These risks are not only ethical or political but also are embodied, and in the context of assisted conception they are implicated in a mode of human reproduction. While being the focus of often desperate hope, new technologies such as cloning, stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine are thus, conversely, also at risk of creating systemic biological risks for future populations – risks that are ‘man-made’ in the name of progress and the moral obligation to alleviate human suffering. This is why, for example, Beck claims that ‘public debate on the potential for politics to exert influence over technological transformation is pervaded by a peculiar ambivalence’ (Beck 1992: 187). A similar pattern is confirmed by much anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine, suggesting that Wilmut’s proscription to limit the application of new means of biological control is sociologically more complex than it might seem.

CONCLUSION At the outset of this chapter it was argued that while scientific facts may provide increasing information about the human condition, the reverse may also be true. Indeed, as projects such as the Human Genome Initiative have revealed, there are

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fewer human genes than scientists expected, and they tell us less about ourselves than hoped (Keller 2000), while projects such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep may reveal more about human culture than biology (Franklin 2007). At the same time, the expectation that answers to the human condition might be found in the genetic code confirms something else about contemporary global scientific culture, which is that science and technology continue to be viewed as crucial components of human emergence and human progress. That a reflexive, critical understanding of progress, and in particular the embodiment of progress, is also a feature of ‘the age of biological control’ is a finding that is repeatedly affirmed in the field of what has come to be known variously as biosocial studies, social studies of the life sciences, or the anthropology of bioscience and biomedicine (Lock and Nguyen 2010). As a growing number of groundbreaking ethnographic studies confirm, bioscience and biomedicine are important contexts in which the meaning of the human is being remade, often by being rebuilt. As we have seen in this chapter, this effort is highly consistent with the origins of anthropology as a discipline, and continues to extend many of its founding insights and concerns. Thus, while ‘new’, and in many ways transformative of the category of the human on which anthropology is based, bioscience and biomedicine are also fields that can be analysed using some of the oldest methods and analytical models to which the discipline has given rise. It is thus both the importance of biomedicine and bioscience to society, and their increasing prominence within the discipline of anthropology, that ensure questions in this rapidly expanding sub-field will continue to generate innovative contributions to social science.

REFERENCES Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage.

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Clarke, Adele. 1998. Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences and the “Problem of Sex”. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Collier, Jane and Yanagisako, Sylvia J. 1987. Gender and Kinship Theory: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Coward, Rosalind. 1983. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Engels, Friederich. 1986. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin Books (Originally published 1884). Finkler, Kaja. 2000. Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. In T.J. Trenn and R.K. Merton, eds; foreword by Thomas Kuhn. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Franklin, Sarah. 1997. Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge. Franklin, Sarah. 2001a. ‘Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies’. In Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Study. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 302−328. Franklin, Sarah. 2001b. ‘Culturing Biology: Cell Lines for the Second Millennium’. Health 5(3): 335−354. Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Franklin, Sarah and Lock, Margaret, eds. 2003. Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Franklin, Sarah, Lury, Celia and Stacy, Jackie. 2000. Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage. Franklin, Sarah and Roberts, Celia. 2006. Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibbon, Sahra. 2006. Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge: Science and Citizenship in the Context of the New Genetics. London: Routledge. Gibbon, Sahra and Novas, Carlos, eds. 2008. Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London: Routledge

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Good, Mary Del Vecchio. 2001. ‘“The Biotechnological Embrace” Culture’. Medicine and Psychiatry 25: 395−410. Haraway, Donna. 1992. ‘When ManTM is on the Menu’. In Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds, Incorporations. New York: Zone Books, pp. 39−43. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium. Femaleman-Meets_OncoMouse. New York: Routledge. Kaufman, Sharon R. 2000. ‘In the Shadow of “Death With Dignity”: Medicine and Cultural Quandaries of the Vegetative State.’ American Anthropologist 102:1: 69–83. Kaufman, Sharon R. and Morgan, Lynn M. 2005. ‘The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Endings of Life’. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 317−341.

Keller, Evelyn Fox (2000) The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Landecker, Hannah. 2006. How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lock, Margaret. 2003. ‘On Making Up the Goodas-Dead in a Utilitarian World’ in Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds. Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 165–192. Lock, Margaret and Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, eds. 2010. An Anthropology of Biomedicine. New York, NY: Wiley. MacCormack, Carole P. and Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932. The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1961. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E P Dutton & Co. (Originally published 1922). Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1962. Sex, Culture and Myth. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1887. Ancient Society. London: MacMillan & Company.

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Pálsson, Gisli. 2007. Anthropology and the New Genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1992. ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’. In Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds, Incorporations. New York: Zone Books, pp. 234−252. Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rapp, Rayna. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. 2006. The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schneider, David M. 1980. American Kinship: a Cultural Account, 2nd edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (originally published in 1968). Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. ‘No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case.’ in MacCormack, Carole P. and Strathern, Marilyn, eds. Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–222.

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Strathern, Marilyn. 1992a. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992b. Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Charis. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilmut, Ian, Campbell, Keith and Tudge, Colin. 2000. The Second Creation: The Age of Biological Control by the Scientists who Cloned Dolly, London: Headline. Wilson, E.O. 1975. Sociobiology: the New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yanagisako, Sylvia J. 1985. ‘The Elementary Structure of Reproduction in Kinship and Gender Studies.’ Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C. Yanagisako, Sylvia J. And Carol Delaney, eds. Naturalizing Power: Feminist Cultural Analysis. New York, NY: Routledge.

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1.4 Anthropology and Art Arnd Schneider

The present chapter intends to delineate and assess the future potentials of the main fields of the anthropology of art. I will not engage here in the definitional issues surrounding the term art, nor provide a generic review of the historic literature: all of these have been covered sufficiently elsewhere (e.g. Layton 1991; Morphy 1994; Morphy and Perkins 2006; Svašek 2007). This chapter is divided into five main headings: (1) agency and relationality; (2) artworlds; (3) mimesis and appropriation; (4) materiality; (5) phenomenology, skills and creativity; and (6) practice. These categories are used as heuristic devices to structure the argument, as well as to introduce other themes (such as ‘aesthetics’) which will be referred to in contradistinction. In fact, many studies in the anthropology of art belong to more than one of these categories, or even point beyond them altogether. Moreover, the field of the anthropology of art borders and partly overlaps with neighbouring sub-disciplines of visual anthropology, and material culture; as well as larger disciplinary fields, such as archaeology, art history, art theory and art practice, and visual studies in general.1 There have been several attempts to integrate and confront perspectives and provide a more transdisciplinary view (e.g. Marcus and Myers 1995; Westermann 2005; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010). However, an impression

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remains that whereas anthropologists of art in recent decades have been keen to broaden their theoretical outlook to include the most contemporary theorizing on art by other disciplines, the effort of practitioners from these disciplines to engage with anthropological studies of art has been less forthcoming, except in the neighbouring discipline of archaeology, and to some degree, in art history.

AGENCY AND RELATIONALITY This essay will begin with what is, arguably, the most important recent theoretical contribution to the field: Alfred Gell’s landmark volume Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998). The following discussion lays out its principal argument, assesses its impact, and points to some criticism. Gell’s book signified the most radical departure yet in the anthropology of art, and its impact was not only felt in anthropology (Thomas and Pinney 2001), but also in neighbouring disciplines, especially of archaeology and art history (see Osborne and Tanner 2007). Significantly, some of its arguments can also be related to some theorizing in contemporary art theory (Bourriaud 2002) though it had itself virtually no reception in that field. In Art and Agency, Gell sets out to develop a theory of art which is genuinely

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anthropological. For Gell, anthropological theories are about ‘social relations’; contra American cultural anthropologists he does not allow for a separate concept of ‘culture’. ‘Culture has no existence independently of its manifestations in social interactions’ (Gell 1998: 4). Therefore, an anthropological theory of art also has to be about the social relations instantiated by, and expressed in, the past and present through art objects (or ‘indexes’, in the terminology of Piercean semiotics which Gell applies, 1998: 13). Gell uses the notion of ‘abduction’ for this process, by which he means that artworks become socially effective once their agency is inferred (or ‘abducted’) by those who view and use them. Artworks (‘indexes’) then can be both the ‘outcome, and/or the instrument of, social agency’ (Gell 1998: 15; original italics). Despite the fact that there is no direct reference to Bruno Latour (e.g. 2005), the idea that objects or things (here artworks understood as indexes) can have social agency seems to resonate with the main tenets of actor−network theory. However, Gell would probably not subscribe to the idea that objects/things can have social agency, irrespective of distributed and abducted human agency – for him they have this agency precisely as part of social life.2 For Gell then, artists are but one of the social actors in his theory of the art nexus, where, depending on their relational position, prototypes (‘the entit[ies] which the index represents visually’, 1998: 26), artworks (indexes), recipients (who abduct agency from the index) all exert agency (1998: 27). All of these social agents can appear either as agents-in-action or be acted upon as ‘patients’, depending on their position (1998: 26). Importantly, Gell’s theory is not restricted to the art of non-Western societies (long the domain of the anthropology of art), but explicitly addresses also modern and contemporary art (e.g. the work of Marcel Duchamp), and is meant to be applicable to all art. Gell builds on Marcel Mauss’s notion of the objectification of social relations, and Marilyn Strathern’s (and Roy Wagner’s) ideas of

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fractional personhood. Gell also expands on the arguments of Nancy Munn (e.g. 1977, 1986) regarding the transformations, in various stages (the final being within the ‘Kula Ring’ exchange) of Gawa canoes, Susanne Küchler’s (1985, 1988; cf. also 2002) analysis of Malangan masks, and Edmund Husserl’s theory of time (already expounded by Gell 1992b). Extending on this body of theory, Gell considers artworks (including modern and contemporary art) as distributed objects of the extended mind, where agency (of a creative individual over time) can be read from different biographical events (instantiated as artworks) during an individual’s life course. Gell, then, sees artworks both as process, where an artwork can go through several stages of idea, sketch, finished work, and later copies, as well as being part of a larger temporal series during an artist’s lifetime (1998: 233). Such theorizing, where temporalities rather than individual indexes (read: artworks) are essential, has important implications for the concept of style and, indeed, the intrinsically related category of repetition, ‘without (which) art would lose its memory’ (ibid.). This structural thinking about art resonates significantly with, even by contrast, the much earlier theoretical work The Shape of Time by art historian George Kubler (1962) and his conception of series of art objects – changing over time − as being the markers of time. This essay is not the place for a comprehensive review of Gell’s important contribution, which has already been provided by others.3 However, it is crucial to point out that Gell offers a general theory of art production and circulation, where art is seen as a ‘system of action’ (1998: 3, 6); the emphasis is clearly on ‘doing’ and ‘social relations’ which signifies a sharp break with theories emphasizing communication and meaning, as well as cross-cultural aesthetics (1998: ix). With its stress on relationality, Gell’s theory also foreshadows an interesting, and as yet little explored link (but see Born 2005; Sansi 2005; Schneider and Wright 2010) with more recent theorizing in contemporary

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art theory: namely Nicolas Bourriaud’s short, yet influential programme of Relational Aesthetics (2002). In it, the French curator-critic suggests that contemporary art is not so much about concepts and individual, physically autonomous artworks, or even the system of the art world, but, instead, is about the social relations instantiated by artists as artworks. Social relations, in other words, then become the materials artists work with, directly reflecting the processual nature of making art, rather than being confined to physically circumscribed material artworks. Thus, an invitation to, and celebration of, a dinner party by Rirkrit Tiravanija (Untitled, 2002), including the multiple social relations instantiated before, at, and after this event, become the ‘artwork’, rather than just consisting of an installation or other physical object. For Bourriaud (2002: 25) then, art consists of objects producing sociability (or tangible models of sociability), which is suitable for producing human relations. Ultimately, according to Bourriaud, artists use time as material, in that they now produce temporarily social relations apparently outside the traditional institutions of the art world (2002: 70). By contrast, critiques of Gell have underlined the continuing importance of symbolic meaning (even semiotic approaches; see Layton 2003: 458–461; Morphy 2009: 14), as well as cross-cultural aesthetics (Layton 2003; Morphy 2007, 2009). Thus, Layton sees art as ‘a culturally constructed medium of visual expression’ (2003: 461), and Morphy insists on taking into account the ‘knowledge and presuppositions that people bring to bear when acting in relation to objects’ (2009: 20) in clear contrast to purely social action. Other critics have suggested that Gell goes too far in developing a comprehensive theory of material culture, while at the same time excluding certain fields of symbolic empirical enquiry, such as art as languagelike communication (Arnaut 2001:191, 198). Bowden (2004) pointed to the lack of an account of aesthetic values of the societies discussed in the book. Winter (2007), too,

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while appreciative of Gell’s concept of agency, considers aesthetics still worth consideration, as one has to ‘see art both as a system of meaning encoding propositions about the world and as a system of action intended to change the world, precisely because the excitation generated by the work lies in the interaction between the two’ (Winter 2007: 62). Gell was deliberately not interested in art world studies (despite his acknowledgment of the importance of institutional theories, 1998: 8). However, it is what might be called his symmetric anthropological approach, aiming to deal with the art of both nonWestern and Western societies (cf. Wolbert 1998), and encompassing potentially all world art, which provides the link to the next section. Artworlds Following the early article ‘The Artworld’ by philosopher Arthur Danto (1964), ‘Art worlds’ has been a very influential and productive concept introduced into empirical sociological and anthropological studies by the sociologist of art Howard Becker (1982). Art here is no longer seen as an autonomous product, the outcome of individual creativity, but as the interplay of various actors within the institutional framework of the artworld: for instance, artists and their assistants, gallery owners, collectors, museums, and art critics. This institutional theory of art has wielded an important influence in anthropology, with numerous studies focusing on local art worlds (e.g. Ericson 1988; Plattner 1996; Colloredo-Mansfield 1999 in anthropology – the latter two with a strong economic focus; cf. also Simpson 1981 in urban sociology). The advantage of an institutional theory is that it allows functionalist analysis and description of the actors in the artworld. The disadvantage lies in its too narrow units of analysis which prevents a more dynamic analysis of other spheres and zones, beyond strict physical-spatial confines (such as a city or a neighbourhood, often the

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focus of artworld studies), such as power, international capital, the transnational/global art market, the influence of international arenas of art appreciation (among them art fairs, biennales, etc., the making of digital art, as well as exhibiting, and sales of artworks through the internet4). A variation of the artworld paradigm, though not directly influenced by it, perceives the different spheres of the artworld from the viewpoint of the objects, as artworks, artefacts or otherwise defined. In this case, as in Clifford’s (1988) ‘art−culture system’ (or, similarly, in Susan Vogel’s [1988] ‘art−artefact’ distinction), the emphasis is on how the object changes status in any of four semantic fields of (1) authentic masterpieces, (2) the zone of authentic artefacts, (3) the zone of inauthentic masterpieces, or (4) the zone of inauthentic artefacts (Clifford 1988: 223). A main advantage here, while retaining an emphasis on the present, is that an artsystem (or a ‘total’ artworld) can be historicized. This allows us to account diachronically for the historical changes in the status of objects, for example when they are transformed from ethnographic artefacts (collected under colonial regimes) to art objects in contemporary galleries and museums, and to explore interests and ideologies connected to such changes. How objects change their ascribed values of authenticity, and are variously, magical and religious objects, collector’s items, contemporary art objects, or indeed tourist art (for which see also the ground-breaking early study by Graburn 1976), is described and analysed in detail in an important study on African art by Steiner (1994).5 A dynamic and multi-sited ethnography, including the perspectives of the Pintupi Aboriginal painters, white ‘artworlds’ in Australia and the United States, leads Myers (2002) to a significant reformulation of the concept of art, in that ‘to designate cultural products as art is itself a signifying practice, not a simple category of analysis’ (2002: 7). This then ushers the move forward to study institutions (art agencies, galleries, museums, etc.) that ‘make objects into art’

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(ibid.). While rejecting any simple universality of art, and of aesthetics, Myers shows how these categories are produced, and historically changing according to the social actors involved; he insists that even in societies such as the Pintupi (or, for that matter the Venezuelan Piaroa; see Overing 1996) which do not, or very little verbalize aesthetics in relation to their art making, aesthetics nevertheless remains an important category in their practice of art making (Myers 2002: 118). Thus, in its classical form (i.e. Danto, Becker), the concept of ‘artworlds’ arguably has eclipsed its importance and straightforward applicability (if not validity), for current and future research on global artworlds. It now has to be combined with more dynamic, less spatially and institutionally bounded approaches, to account for the complexity and variety of current art production. In this sense, Svašek’s (2007) more processual approach to art production seems to be a move in the right direction. Any simplified idea of geographically bounded artworlds is also being surpassed by the recent upsurge in world art studies (e.g. Zijlmans and Van Damme 2008; Belting and Buddensieg 2009; see also Weibel and Buddensieg 2007). This new trend partly takes inspiration from geographically and conceptually wide-ranging studies by some art historians (e.g. Da Costa Kaufmann 2004), as well as evolutionary and neurological approaches to global art history (e.g. Onians 2008). Rather than conceiving of clearly demarcated regional, national, urban (even metropolitan), as well as provincial art worlds, in the new paradigms the global art production of all cultures and times becomes the dominant focus, while not denying important differences in power and historical development. For instance, Wilfried van Damme proposes that world art studies should be … doing for the for the visual arts what musicology does for music – or what, for example, linguistics does for language or religious studies for religion: to approach its subject matter from a

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global perspective across time and place and to study it from all relevant disciplinary viewpoints imaginable, ranging from evolutionary biology to analytic philosophy (Van Damme 2008: 27).

Furthermore, such a multidisciplinary perspective on the visual arts includes three broad areas: research on the origins of art; intercultural comparison; and finally, artistic exchanges between cultures, or interculturalization (see also Zijlmans 2008; as well as in a more ethnographic vein, Venbrux, Sheffield and Welsch 2006). Garcia Dos Santos (2009), however, puts his finger on a fundamental problem which arises when studying world art: the continuing distinction between ‘contemporary’ (largely Western) and ‘ethnic’ arts. He suggests that the problem is not so much the existent economic inequalities in the global artworld, but the one-sided ontological status afforded to art through the Western lens. Extending his argument with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), Garcia Dos Santos (2009: 169−171) demands that we must rethink the apparently unitary concepts of ‘world’ and ‘art’, which are after all those of the West, by acknowledging different ontological systems existing contemporaneously, such as those of Amerindian perspectivism and Western individualism, or Amerindian ‘multinaturalism’ and Western ‘multiculturalism’. The unevenness of the global artworld, however, has to do with the West’s historic expansion, and the exoticist appropriation of the art of others as ‘Primitive Art’. In the wake of the criticism of the important ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art’ show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, this debate has been extensively covered (e.g. Clifford 1988; Vogel 1988; Price 1988 Hiller 1991; Errington 1998). The recent opening of the Musée du quai Branly has sparked similar controversy around the question, of how the art of non-Western peoples should be presented in a contemporary museum (Price 2007; see also Shelton 2009). Whereas some of this debate is specific to the French context, other issues reflect a continuing, but at

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times rather stale debate (on which Clifford 2007: 12 rightly commented that ‘it admits of no solution’) in the anthropology of art, museology, and material culture studies on the status of objects and their presentation: namely, of whether these should be objects of art for primarily aesthetic appreciation, or objects (artefacts) presented with ethnographic context. That other possibilities exist, surpassing the simple art − artefact dichotomy, and which involve what new museology in this field has called the ‘source communities’, including non-Western contemporary artists, which have their own distinctive criteria of art appreciation, and develop their own collaborations with collections and exhibitions, has been shown convincingly by the Pasifika Styles exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Cambridge (Raymond and Salmond 2008), as well as other ventures, such as the ‘reciprocal research network’ encouraging collaborative research with ‘Originating Communities, First Nations Organizations, Researchers, Students, Museum Professionals, Academic and Cultural Heritage Organizations’ (University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology 2010). Art world studies, with their interdisciplinary focus, are a particularly fruitful field for anthropologists to engage with, when combined with an emphasis on the viewpoints of ‘source communities’ (see above) and more specifically, the different ontologies among those producing, circulating and collecting art.

MIMESIS AND APPROPRIATION A classical functional artworld approach, while good at mapping out different actors within it, is also insufficient to account for change in transnational and other cultural flows. It must be combined with, and eventually transcended by, more dynamic concepts, doing justice to the fluidity and interconnectedness of global artistic production, for instance through Appadurai’s concept of

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different ‘scapes’ (1996). For this reason, approaches which do not focus on a functionalist whole (the ‘artworld’), but rather on what individual actors do with cultural material (here: art), are better suited to understand questions of cultural change in a globalized world. Mimesis and appropriation are two such concepts that have been successfully employed in this context. Taking his inspiration from the Romance literature scholar Erich Auerbach (2003 [1946]), where mimesis is not only the imitation but also the representation of reality by writers, mimesis was used by Fritz Kramer (1993 [1987]) to analyse African artistic appropriations, in masks, sculptures, ritual and performance, of European colonial influences as well as other foreign cultures (Islam, or different African cultures). Mimesis, for Kramer (1993: ix), ‘arises from the confrontation with an alien reality whose underlying premises are not shared by the outside observer.’ Mimesis is rooted in the ‘compulsion to imitate’, and ‘in mimesis one conforms with what one is not, and also should not be’ (Kramer 1993: 249, 250). Yet, ultimately, appropriating moves through mimesis serve the wish to recognize oneself, both in European and African artistic expression (1993: 245). Michael Taussig on the other hand, taking his lead from Walter Benjamin’s idea of the mimetic faculty (1986 [1933]), and reformulating Frazer’s (2002 [1911]) notions of sympathetic and contact magic, investigates mimesis as a dialectic process between perceiver and perceived where both the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’ have power over each other (Taussig 1993: xviii, 38, 59). A fundamental characteristic of mimesis is to ‘get hold of something by means of its likeness’, through copy and imitation, as well as sensuous connection (and this precisely relates to the two types of magic distinguished by Frazer) (Taussig 1993: 21; also 24, 52). Interestingly, Gell also found Taussig’s point highly intriguing, but doubted whether humans had, as somehow supposed by Benjamin, an innate ‘mimetic faculty’ (Gell 1998: 100). For Kramer and Taussig, whose approaches usefully

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complement each other, mimesis is directly related to cultural appropriation. Nicholas Thomas’s work on the specific exchange relationships between Europeans and Pacific peoples has also contributed to theorizing appropriation in stressing reciprocal possibilities of transformation through object exchanges, particularly in relation to alienability and inalienability (Thomas 1991). Thomas has also applied the idea of appropriation as a two-way exchange, to the art of European settlers in Australia and New Zealand (1999, 2001: 139, 150). However, until very recently, the concept of appropriation had not been used much in a systematic fashion in the anthropology of art. Marcus and Myers (1995) provide another rare exception and suggest that appropriation ... concerns the art world’s ideology, discursive practices, or micro-technologies for assimilating difference (other cultural materials) in various ways. Such an assimilation of difference is generally accomplished by stripping cultural materials of their original context, or using representations of an original context in such a way as to allow for an embedding of this influence within the activities and interests of producing art (1995: 33).

With a stress on appropriation’s role in the global art world, Schneider (2003, 2006a, b) has attempted to provide a new theoretical grounding for the concept, by lending it a hermeneutic angle, when otherwise appropriation has negative undertones and the emphasis is often on power differentials between appropriators and those appropriated from. Appropriation is here conceived as a strategy with which individual artists work with materials outside their own cultural context to create something new. Often, such work is linked to constructions of new identities. However, rather than emphasizing simple taking out of context and taking from the other, this approach stresses the implicit potential of learning, and, in a hermeneutic sense, of understanding the other. For instance, in a study of urban-based Argentine artists who appropriate from indigenous cultures, Schneider (2006b) showed that a number of strategies of appropriation are

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used and combined with physical techniques, such as copy, travel, physical acquisition of objects (by collectors), and performance, to create new meanings and contexts for the ‘original’ objects (such as pottery in a ceramics workshop), which can only be understood jointly with their new material interpretations. Roger Sansi (2007) also recently worked with the concept of appropriation to investigate the multiple processes of incorporation and reworking of cultural materials in Brazil (from indigenous, African and European sources), and how this process is linked to different interest groups and changing constructions of national identity. His examples are fetishes and monuments surrounding the Candomblé cult in Brazil. His argument is that culture can only be appropriated once it has been objectified, in a process of historical construction (Sansi 2007: 1−8, 145). In fact, according to Sansi (ibid.: 5), processes of objectification are necessary to make culture, including art, available for new historical construction, and reformulations of identity and alterity, beyond paradigms of hybridity and syncretism (García Canclini 1995 [1989]; Steiner 1994). Rupert Cox (2003), on the other hand, uses the concept of mimesis, via Taussig, to analyse the processes of embodiment and aestheticization behind Japanese Zen practices, especially the tea ceremony and martial arts. Cox is particularly interested in the appropriation of bodily techniques through successive processes of imitation, adaptation, and transformation. Thus, for Cox, the central question is how highly formalized Japanese art practices, such as the tea ceremony (chado), the martial arts (for instance, Shorinji Kempo), and flower arranging (ikebana), develop ‘a body [for the participants] capable of expressing and experiencing aesthetic quality through imitation’ (Cox 2003: 105). This bodily capability Cox sees directly related to the mimetic faculty (as understood by Taussig’s reading of Benjamin). Studies of appropriation and mimesis show how important the materiality of things (including

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those classified as ‘art’) is in revealing the hermeneutic potential of appropriation: or said otherwise, the learning process implied when working with other cultural materials.

MATERIALITY Through physical processes of working with materials, and in techniques of other (cultures), artists and anthropologists in fact learn about and, on occasions of collaboration, with the other. Learning by doing, that is knowing through practice, has been important for anthropologists to understand cosmologies, world views, and more generally, the culture of their research subjects, even if this approach has been outside of the mainstream of anthropology.6 This kind of learning and knowing through art practices, in fact, is an essential ingredient of creativity that we will address further in the next section. Taking its inaugural lead from material cultural studies (promoted since the mid1980s at University College London [UCL] by Daniel Miller and Chris Tilley), the notion of materiality has now diversified, to include the notions of agency in objects, both as the extension of human agency (Alfred Gell), as well as independently of it (Bruno Latour). These approaches are now being used across fields of anthropology, archaeology, and art history.7 ‘Thinking through things’ (Henare 2005; Henare et al. 2007) then has become something of a programmatic orientation for these recent research directions, sometimes also involving collaborating artists, such as in the Pasifika Styles exhibition (Raymond and Salmond 2008; also Durand 2010). Importantly, as Henare et al. point out, things have to be considered on their own terms, as constituting meaning, not in need of further interpretive action (2007: 1−3). Things, in this understanding, are concepts, and do not have referential or indexical qualities, as objects or artifacts – they are ‘conduits for concept production’ (ibid.: 5). It is clear from such recent lines of research that materials

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themselves – which after all constitute the ‘material of art’ (as an important study by art historian Monika Wagner is called, 2001; also 2007) − have enabling and constraining effects on the process of artistic creativity, including practices of cultural appropriation. Arguably, one of the most fruitful approaches so far on materiality has been Susanne Küchler’s work towards the concept of the ‘Material Mind’ – the idea that cognitive intelligence, is not only distributed but also actively effective through a range of materials, enhanced by recent advances in nanotechnology and engineering (Küchler 2007, 2008). Materials such as ‘intelligent fabrics’ that can change according to environmental and bodily requirements (as well as many other adaptive and creative, intelligent materials) show how we cannot think any longer of an individual mind, with its isolated locus in the human brain. These specific properties, as Küchler says, ‘carr[y] our own mind beyond bodily confines.’(2008: 110) − a process, arguably, which had already started with the invention of tool-making. Yet to consider the ‘material mind’, as Küchler (2007) calls it, and specifically intelligent materials, has important implications for the processes of art-making and its analysis. First of all, many cultures have experimented with thinking through, and thinking with materials, specially fibres from plants and animals – in fact, cognitive processes are often expressed through and stimulated by these materials, the Andean case of the quipu writing and counting devices represents just one such case. Secondly, textile arts, as well as comparable arts and techniques of lashing and basketry, arguably have been at the root of contemporaneous and later developments in indigenous abstract architecture both in the Andes and in the Pacific (Paternosto 1996 [1989], 2001; 2001 Küchler 2007; Were 2010). Third, it is but a short step to import, or indeed appropriate, the cognitive insights and capacities from ‘intelligent’ materials, both ancient and contemporary, to the realm of art.8

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PHENOMENOLOGY, SKILLS, AND CREATIVITY Whether artistic creation is the expression of collective or indeed individual creativity has been a long-standing debate in the anthropology of art. After the dominance, with few exceptions, of approaches emphasizing collective creation (especially in small-scale societies) in the first half of the twentieth century, the more recent approaches emphasized the contribution of individuals in the creation of art (e.g. Gerbrands 1967). This stronger focus on creativity was given renewed impetus by Lavie, Narayan and Rosaldo (1993: 5) who stressed creativity as fundamental to the emergent construction of culture, following here closely Roy Wagner (1975), and the work of Victor Turner, to whom their edited volume is dedicated. Another emphasis is provided by studies which take their lead from phenomenological approaches, in the wake of philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Two trends are to be identified, one which has developed into the anthropology of the senses (e.g. Stoller 1997, Classen 1998, 2005, Howes 2003, 2007), the other inspired by Tim Ingold’s (e.g. 2000, 2006, Ingold and Hallam 2007) interest in the appropriation of nature, perception, and use of the environment, which requires and trains processes of skills and creativity (also Grasseni 2007). The first strand emphasizes experience-based sensuous knowledge and has been important in identifying areas beyond the spoken and written word as important for anthropological research, such as smell, taste, and haptic senses, as well as synaesthesia, and, for instance, in the work of Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes (1987), extrasensorial experiences with sorcery. Whereas the first strand, with its emphasis on the direct experience of the senses, would be very fruitful to combine with approaches to materiality, there has been as yet little cross-theorizing, and studies have been produced largely separately in each field (but see Steven Feld’s work since 1982 in collaboration with

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musicians, and more recently with visual artists, e.g. Feld 2010; and also Pink 2006, 2009 for another recent attempt to bridge these strands of enquiry, in this case in close affinity with visual anthropology and its methods). The phenomenologically inspired anthropology of the senses has been important to open up and emphasize the sensorially rich environment for anthropological study. Although it offers potential for the study of art, this has only been taken up by a few of its practitioners (cf. Stoller 2006). Michael Taussig’s significant body of work (e.g Taussig 2004, 2009), while not belonging to any of the two aforementioned strands, also highlights the senses in anthropology with relevance for the study of art, but comes from an altogether different reading of the neo-colonial or neo-imperial enfolding of the West’s senses into non-Western sensibilities, taking inspiration from and pointing beyond Walter Benjamin’s critical work, and combining experimentally forms of diary, montage, and critical analysis. The second approach, emphasizing skills and creativity, has been more explicitly connected to art studies and practices, and has led to a specific practical interest in artistic techniques and genres, and forms of representation and notation, such as in sketchbooks and fieldnotes (Ingold 2007; Wendy Gunn 2009; see also next section ‘Practice’). For instance, in an article on the weather, Ingold (2005) sees light as the fundamental perceptual quality, and artists such as Christina Saenz have made Ingold’s ideas productive in their own work (see also Schneider and Wright 2010). With regard to creativity, Ingold and Hallam identify four important types of improvisation: ‘generative, relational, temporal, and the way we work’ (2007: 1). Significantly, Ingold and Hallam also relativize Western notions of creative genius, as opposed to copying, but instead look for creativity also in seemingly repetitive artistic practices, such as Javanese dance and Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, in order to re-evaluate the notion of creativity itself, and

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challenge its Western universal pretensions. A number of studies, especially in relation to material practices of weaving (and other textile arts), as well as building techniques, have demonstrated the creativity implicated in processes of learning, imitation, repetition, and alteration, or change (e.g. Ingold 2007; Marchand 2009; more generally, also Naji and Douny 2009).

PRACTICE The interest in research into skills and creativity has also led to a renewed interest into exploring research practices with artists, in the form of collaborations. Practice, based on experience and skills (as outlined in the previous section), has been a major theoretical concern of anthropology, and the very same anthropologists who have been at the forefront of this debate (Stoller, Jackson, and Ingold) have also been engaged in advocating new ways of practice in fieldwork. In a quite literal sense of practice as a form of doing and making, this has focused on how artists’ techniques and research strategies, especially drawing (see also Powell 2001; Brandt 2011), can be made fruitful for the anthropological research process (Gunn 2009; also Ingold 2007). Thus, Gunn (2009) reports on a three-year collaborative project between the Anthropology Department at the University of Aberdeen and the Fine Arts Department at the University of Dundee. In this project, which culminated in an exhibition, the aim was ‘to transcend the boundaries within ways of working-knowing specific … to art, anthropology and architecture’, and further, ‘… to move beyond established approaches in anthropology that treat art as a repository of works, already complete and available for analysis. Instead, our focus was not the creative processes that continually bring these works into being, along with the persons in whose lives they are entangled.’ (Gunn 2009: 1). Working ‘true to materials’, artists, architects, and anthropologists were making a number of sketchbooks, notebooks,

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installations, and showcases, each showing different engagements with materials, situations or situated contexts, and types of notation (Gunn 2009: 9, 19). Much of the work (Gunn 2009: 25) was inspired by the broadly phenomenological approach of Tim Ingold (2000, 2007), as referred to in the previous section, as well as Christina Grasseni’s notion of ‘Skilled Vision’, meaning the ‘training of vision in professional, scientific, and everyday contexts’(Grasseni 2007: 1; see also 2004). In a broader sense, scholars have explored collaboration with artists in ethnographic fieldwork. Rather than working on artists as research objects, here artists become partners in collaborative fieldwork research (for examples and critical review of such projects, see Schneider 1996; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010). Here artists and anthropologists work in experimental ways to develop new terms (kinds) of research and representation (e.g. exhibition projects, cf. Macdonald and Basu 2007). The notion of experiment in and with the arts is of interest (Schneider 2008), as it points beyond received notions of experiments in the natural sciences, which rather than producing reproducibility in static laboratory settings, create ‘epistemic things’, as historian of science, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) calls it. This insight has important implications for anthropology, as Marcus has outlined recently: The account that Rheinberger gives of scientific practice in pursuit of epistemic things resonates with ethnographic inquiry, revised from the regime of conventional empiricism that was its originary model. This overlap of an artistic and scientific aesthetic of practice around the notion of experiment has been one of the more promising background conceptual environments for carrying out the refunctioning of ethnography at the intersection of art and anthropology … (Marcus 2008: 42).

Collaborations as incursions into each other’s fields of practice are not without problems, and Foster (1995), in this context, has pointed to ‘artist’s envy’: i.e. the desire by each side to emulate the practice of the other (often for the shorter ends of one’s own professional

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achievement, and without taking into account political and economic interests prevalent in the art world and academia), and not evaluating the full political responsibilities. For instance, Schneider (2010) in his collaborations with contemporary artists in the Argentine province of Corrientes found that different expectations to the project (a participation in, and documentation of, the procession of a local patron saint) had to be carefully negotiated, bridging different understandings of art, anthropology, and more generally educational and economic capital brought to the project. Ethics has been another important area that recently has come to the fore in the work with and on contemporary artists. Anthropologists, including those working on art, have been very aware of ethical issues, working with ‘traditional’ (albeit changing) societies: for instance, with Aborigines in Australia (see Morphy 2007). Yet for those working with Western-artschool educated artists this is an entirely new area, as contemporary artists often deliberately transgress ethical boundaries (precisely to show their historical and cultural contingency), whereas the majority of anthropologists have now adopted ethical codes (for example, those of the professional associations, such as the AAA), which have developed from anthropology’s chequered record of involvement in colonial and neo-colonial and neo-imperial enterprises which continues into the present. That mainstream anthropology, so far, has not opened itself up to more engagement with the arts is not only a result of its traditional forms of representation of research, which except for visual anthropology, is still delivered in academic book and article format, but also with a resistance, both practical and theoretical, to central ways of working and representing in the arts. Lucien Taylor, in this respect, diagnosed anthropology’s ‘iconophobia’ (1996), its fear of images, while Chris Pinney (1992) found that moving images rather than still images (as also reproduced in books) were found threatening by anthropologists because of their inherent multiplicity of meanings, and Alfred Gell

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(1992a) suggested that anthropology should not submit to the enchantment of art. One might well add ‘chromophobia’ (Batchelor 2000), the fear of colour, to this catalogue to characterize mainstream anthropology’s aversion to artistic practices (see also Schneider and Wright 2010). However, contemporary art and anthropology have much to offer each other, especially in the fields of practice and research design. Most art school programmes now offer research-based MAs and PhDs, and the notion of research more generally is being theorized in the contemporary arts. Visual anthropology programmes have been at the forefront of promoting practice-led PhDs in anthropology, while Tim Ingold and Wendy Gunn have been active to apply insights from artistic practices to anthropological research. George Marcus, following from the early work of the ‘Writing Culture’ critique, has been advocating a theoretical engagement with the contemporary arts, centring on the experimental open-ended nature of the anthropological research process. Thus, project preparation and hypothesis, artistic research and data gathering, and representation become parallel and joint research strategies. It is here, in the parallel and critical re-elaboration of research (and fieldwork in particular) as an experimental form in both art9 and anthropology, that the importance of practice resides (Marcus 2008, 2009, 2010; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010). OUTLOOK Art and anthropology then have largely reconfigured their relationship to each other in recent decades (for the historical precedents, see also Schneider 2011). The anthropology of art has finally overcome what had been an artificial distinction between Western and non-Western art. When, formerly, it dealt only with the latter as its objects of study, it now studies the arts globally. More recently, anthropology has also started to engage with theory and practice from contemporary artists,

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art criticism, and art history. In the anthropology of the visual (which encompasses now fields covered by both the anthropology of art, as well as visual anthropology), this has already included art history’s ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic’ turn’ (e.g. Mitchell 1994, and anthropologists can further learn from even more recent approaches in art history and theory, such as Bildwissenschaft (‘image science’) and Bildanthropologie (‘icon-anthropology’), promoted by scholars such as Hans Belting (1998, 2005), and Horst Bredekamp (2003).10 Importantly, the anthropology of art, which since the 1960s has matured into conceiving of human artistic creativity beyond a collective expression of the social or culture, can retrieve for its own practice the notions of creativity and experiment, in dialogue with art practice and theory (Schneider 2008). Thus, as we have seen in this essay, notions of creativity, circulation of objects, agency, relationality, multi-sited research locales in global and hybrid art worlds, and importantly, the idea that art practice itself can have an influence on how the study of global art practices is exercised, now have important theoretical implications for anthropology’s engagements with art. In sum, rather than thinking of two clearly separated fields, one being the investigating subject (anthropology), the other being the passive object of research (art), the two disciplines are endeavours of knowledge production, involved in setting experimental research agendas which can enter into fruitful dialogue.

NOTES 1 It is symptomatic of anthropology of art’s relatively marginal status that up until very recently no journals existed exclusively dedicated to the subject. The closest is perhaps the interdisciplinary RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics edited by Francesco Pellizzi at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, with its strong emphasis on aesthetics and art history. Gradhiva, since 2009, retitled Anthropology of Art, published at the Musée du quai Branly (and which had Michel Leiris among its originating editors),

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has been another important journal venture – in this case closer to museology, but also with a deliberately transdisciplinary focus. Other journals that regularly publish articles on art by anthropologists are the Journal of Material Culture Studies, as well as visual anthropology journals, such as Visual Anthropology, and Visual Anthropology Review, if the subject falls into a broader category of visual culture analysis. 2 Cf. The following the statement: ‘I am concerned with agent/patient relationships in the fleeting contexts of social life, during which we certainly do, transactionally speaking, attribute agency to cars, images, buildings, and many other non-living, non human beings.’ (Gell 1998: 22; my italics). In this sense Morphy’s charge that Gell focuses too much on the agency of objects themselves seems exaggerated (2009: 22) – and it is precisely on this ground that Leach (2007), who takes a more object-centred approach to agency, takes Gell to account. 3 For example, Thomas and Pinney (2001), Osborne and Tanner (2007), and therein Davis (2007). 4 Cf. also Marcus and Myers (1995: 30−35), Hart (1995), MacClancy (1997), Brydon (2001) and Svašek (2007: 90−94). 5 The subject has been further explored in an edited collection: i.e. Phillips and Steiner (1999; see also Kasfir 2007). 6 But see as historical examples, Bunzel (1972 [1929]), Reichard (1997 [1934]), and, more recently, Guss (1989). 7 For a good critical evaluation, see Knappett (2005); also Knappett and Malafouris (2008: xi). 8 See also Teshome and Wagmister (1997) and Wilson (2002: 215−218, 253). 9 Including design and design theory; see, for example, Barth and Raein (2007). 10 For a range of further interdisciplinary encounters, see Schneider and Wright (2006, 2010), Macdonald and Basu (2007), Schneider (2008), and Grimshaw, Owen, and Ravetz (2010).

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arnaut, K. 2001. A Pragmatic Impulse in the Anthropology of Art? Alfred Gell and the Semiotics of Social Objects. Journal des Africanistes, 71 (2), 191−208. Auerbach, Erich 2003 [1946]. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Barth, Theo and Mazar Raein 2007. Walking with Wolves: Displaying the Holding Pattern. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 1 (1), 33−46. Batchelor, David. 2000. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion. Becker, Howard 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter 1986 [1933]. On the Mimetic Faculty. Reflections. New York: Schocken. Belting, Hans. 1998. Bild-Anthropologie. Munich: Fink 2005. Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology. Critical Inquiry, 31, 302–319. Belting, Hans and Andrea Buddensieg (eds) 2009. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Born, Giorgina 2005. On Muscial Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity. Twentieth Century Music, 2 (1), 7−36. Bourriaud, Nicholas 2002 [1999]. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel. Bowden, Ross. (2004) A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency. Oceania, 74 (4), 309−324. Brandt, Andreas 2011. Haus and Landschaft in Asien/ House and Landscape in Asia. Berlin: Alpheus. Bredekamp Horst 2003. A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft. Critical Inquiry, 29 (3), 418−428. Brydon, Anne 2001. Review of: Stuart Plattner ‘High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market.’ Ethnologies, 23 (1), 326−329. Bunzel, Ruth 1972 [1929]. The Pueblo Potter: A Study of Creative Imagination in Primitive Art. New York: Dover. Classen, Constance 1998. The Colour of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination. London: Routledge. Classen, Constance (ed.) 2005. The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. Clifford, James 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James 2007. Quai Branly in Process. October, 120 (Spring), 3−23. Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi 1999. The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cox, Rupert 2003. The Zen Arts: The Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan. London: Routledge Curzon. Danto, Arthur. 1964. The Artworld. Journal of Philosophy, 61, 571–584. Davis, Whitney 2007. Abducting the Agency of Art. Art’s Agency and Art History. Eds Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Durand, Carine Ayele 2010. Anthropology in a Glass Case: Indigeneity, collaboration, and artistic practice in museums. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Ericson, Deborah 1988. In the Stockholm Art World. Stockholm: Dept. of Social Anthropology (Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology 17). Errington, Shelly 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Feld, Steven 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feld, Steven 2010. Collaborative Migrations: Contemporary Art in/as Anthropology: Steven Feld in Conversation with Virginia Ryan. Between Art and Anthropology. Eds Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright. Oxford: Berg. Foster, Hal 1995. The Artist as Ethnographer. The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Eds George Marcus and Fred Myers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Frazer, James 2002 [1911]. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Dover. García Canclini, Néstor 1995 [1989]. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Garcia Dos Santos, Laymert 2009. How Global Art Transforms Ethnic Art. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums. Eds Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Gell, Alfred 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Gell, Alfred 1992a. The Enchantment of Technology and the Technology of Enchantment. Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Eds Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gell, Alfred 1992b. The Anthropology of Time. Oxford: Berg. Gerbrands, Adrian 1967. Wow-Ipits: Eight Asmat Woodcarvers from New Guinea. The Hague: Mouton. Graburn, Nelson 1976. Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Grasseni, Cristina 2004. Skilled Vision. An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics. Social Anthropology, 12 (1), 41−55. Grasseni, Cristina (ed.) 2007. Introduction. Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeships and Standards. Oxford: Berghahn. Grimshaw, Anna, Elspeth Owen, and Amanda Ravetz 2010. Making Do: The Materials of Anthropology.

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Between Art and Anthropology. Eds Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright. Oxford: Berg. Gunn, Wendy (ed.) 2009. Fieldnotes and Sketchbooks: Challenging the Boundaries between Descriptions and Processes of Describing. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Guss, David 1989. To Weave and Sing: Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rain Forest. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hart, Lynn 1995.Three Walls: Regional Aesthetics and the International Art World. The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Eds George Marcus and Fred Myers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Henare, Amiria 2005. Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds) 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Hiller, Susan (ed.) 1991. The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. London: Routledge. Howes, David 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Howes, David (ed.) 2007. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Ingold, Tim 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim 2005. The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather. Visual Studies, 20 (2), 97–104. Ingold, Tim 2006. Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought. Ethnos, 71 (1), 9−20. Ingold, Tim 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim and Elizabeth Hallam 2007. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Eds Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam. Oxford: Berg. Kaufmann, Thomas Da Costa 2004. Toward a Geography of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kasfir, Sidney 2007. African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity. Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press. Knappett, Carl 2005. Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Knappett, Carl and Lambros Malafouris, 2008. Material and Nonhuman Agency: An Introduction. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach.

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Eds Carl Knappet and Lambros Malafouris. New York: Springer. Kramer, Fritz 1993 [1987]. The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. London: Verso. Kubler, George 1962. The Shape of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Küchler, Susanne 1985. Malangan: Art and Memory in a Melanesian Society, Man, 22 (2), 238–255. Küchler, Susanne 1988. Malangan: Objects, Sacrifice and the Production of Memory. American Ethnologist, 15 (4), 625–637. Küchler, Susanne 2002. Malangan, Art, Memory and Sacrifice. Oxford: Berg. Küchler, Susanne 2007. The String in Art and Science: Rediscovering the Material Mind. Textile, 5 (2), 124–139. Küchler, Susanne 2008. Technological Materiality: Beyond the Dualist Paradigm. Theory, Culture & Society, 25 (1), 101−120. Latour, Bruno 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor−Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavie, Smadar, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo (eds) (1993). Anthropology/Creativity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Layton, Robert 1991 [1984]. The Anthropology of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Layton, Robert 2003. Art and Agency: A Reassessment. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 9, 447–464. Leach, James 2007. Differentiation and encompassment: a critique of Alfred Gell’s theory o abduction and creativity. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically. Eds. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds). London: Routledge. MacClancy, Jeremy 1997. Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg. Macdonald, Sharon and Paul Basu 2007. Exhibition Experiments. Oxford: Blackwell. Marchand, Trevor 2009. The Masons of Djenné. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Marcus, George 2008. Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology. Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology. Eds Neni Panourgía and George Marcus. New York: Fordham University Press. Marcus, George 2009. Introduction: Notes toward an Ethnographic Memoir of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropology’s Decades of Transformation. Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of

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Transition. Eds James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marcus, George 2010. Affinities: Fieldwork in Anthropology Today and the Ethnographic in Artwork. Between Art and Anthropology. Eds. Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, Oxford: Berg. Marcus, George and Fred Myers (eds.) 1995. The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morphy, Howard 1994. Art. Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ed. Tim Ingold. London: Routledge. Morphy, Howard 2007. Becoming Art. Oxford: Berg. Morphy, Howard 2009. Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Gell’s Art and Agency. Journal of Material Culture, 14 (5), 5−27. Morphy, Howard and Morgan Perkins 2006. The Anthropology of Art: A Reflection on its History and Contemporary Practice. The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Eds Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins. Oxford: Blackwell. Munn, Nancy 1977. The Spatiotemporal Transformation of Gawa Canoes. Journal de Société des Océanistes, 39−51. Munn, Nancy 1986. The Fame of Gawa: a Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (P.N.G.) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Museum of Anthropology (University of British Columbia) http://www.moa.ubc.ca/RRN/about_overview.html (accessed 14/05/2010). Myers, Fred 2002. Painting Culture. The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Naji, Myriem and Laurence Douny 2009. Editorial. Journal of Material Culture, 14 (4), 411−432. Onians, John 2008. Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Osborne, Robin and Jeremy Tanner (eds) 2007. Art’s Agency and Art History. Oxford: Blackwell. Overing, Joanna 1996. Aesthetics is a cross-cultural category: Against the motion, Key Debates in Anthropological Theory. Ed. Tim Ingold, pp. 260–265; 276–293. London: Routledge. Paternosto, César 1996 [1989]. The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Paternosto, César 1999. North and South Connected: An Abstraction of the Americas (Essay and Exhibition Catalogue). New York: Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

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Paternosto, César (ed.) 2001. Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm. Brussels: Palais des BeauxArts. Philipps, Ruth and Christopher Steiner (eds) 1999. Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pink, Sarah 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. London: Routledge. Pink, Sarah 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Pinney, Chris 1992. The Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spye. Film as Ethnography. Eds Peter Crawford and David Turton. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Plattner, Stuart 1996. High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Powell, R. (ed. M. Oppitz) 2001. Himalayan Drawings. Zurich: Museum für Völkerkunde. Price, Sally 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Price, Sally 1993. Provenances and Pedigrees: The Appropriation of Non-Western Art. Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas. Eds D.S. Whitten and N.E. Whitten. Tucson, AZ: Arizona University Press. Price, Sally 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Raymond, Rosanna and Amiria Salmond (eds) 2008 Pasifika Styles: Artists inside the Museum. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Otago: Otago University Press. Reichard, Gladys 1997 [1934]. Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters (Introduction by Louise Lamphere). Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sansi, Roger 2005. Making Do: Agency and Objective Change in the Psychogenetic Portraits of Jaume Xifra. Quaderns de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia, 21, 91−106. Sansi, Roger 2007. Fetishes and Monuments: AfroBrazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Oxford: Berghahn. Schneider, Arnd 1996.Uneasy relationships: contemporary artists and anthropology, Journal of Material Culture, 1 (2), 1996, 183–210. Schneider, Arnd 2003. On ‘Appropriation’: A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept and Its Application in

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Global Art Practices. Social Anthropology, 11 (2), 215−229. Schneider, Arnd 2006a. Appropriations. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Eds Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright. Oxford: Berg. Schneider, Arnd 2006b. Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina. New York: Palgrave. Schneider, Arnd 2008. Three Modes of Experimentation with Art and Ethnography. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 14, 171−193. Schneider, Arnd 2010. Contested Grounds: Fieldwork Collaborations with Artists in Corrientes, Argentina. Proceedings of the Conference ‘Performance, art et anthropologie’. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, published online: http://actesbranly.revues. org/431#ftn5 Schneider, Arnd. 2011. Unfinished Dialogues: Notes toward an Alternative History of Art and Anthropology. Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. Eds Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (eds) 2006. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (eds) 2010. Between Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Shelton, Anthony 2009. The Public Sphere as Wilderness: Le musee du quai Branly. Museum Anthropology, 32 (1) 1−16. Simpson, C.R. 1981. SoHo: The Artist in the City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Steiner, Christopher 1994. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoller, Paul 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, Paul 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, Paul 2006. Circuits of African Art/Paths of Wood: Exploring an Anthropological Trail. Exploring World Art. Eds Eric Venbrux, Pamela Sheffield Rosi, and Robert Welsch. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Stoller, Paul and Cheryl Olkes 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memory of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Svašek, Maruška 2007. Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. London: Pluto. Taussig, Michael 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. London: Routledge. Taussig, Michael 2004. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Taussig, Michael 2009. What Colour is the Sacred? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Lucien 1996. Iconophobia: How Anthropology Lost it at the Movies. Transition, 69, 64–88. Teshome H. Gabriel and Fabian Wagmister 1997. Notes on Weavin’ Digital: T(h)inkers at the Loom, Social Identities, 3 (3), 333−344. Thomas, Nicholas 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Nicholas 1999. Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. Thomas, Nicholas 2001. Appropriation/Appreciation: Settler Modernism in Australia and New Zealand. The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Ed. Fred R. Myers. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Thomas, Nicholas and Chris Pinney (eds ) 2001. Beyond Aesthetics. Oxford: Berg. Van Damme, Wilfried 2008. Introducing World Art Studies. Zijlmans. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Eds Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme. Amsterdam: Valiz. Venbrux, Eric, Pamela Sheffield Rosi, and Robert Welsch (eds) 2006. Exploring World Art. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, NS, 4 (3), 469–488. Vogel, Susan 1988. Art-Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections. New York: Museum for African Art. Wagner, Monika 2001. Das Material der Kunst. Munich: C.H. Beck.

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Wagner, Monika. 2007. Hans Haacke’s Earth Samplings for the Bundestag: Materials as Signs of Political Unity. Journal of Material Culture, 12 (2), 115−130. Wagner, Roy 1975. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Weibel, Peter and Andrea Buddensieg (eds) 2007. Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Were, Graeme 2010. Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Westermann, Mariët. 2005. Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology. Anthropologies of Art. Ed. Mariët Westermann. Wiliamstown/New Haven: Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press. Wilson, Stephen 2002. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Winter, Irene 2007. Agency Marked, Agency Ascribed: The Affective Object in Ancient Mesopotamia. Art’s Agency and Art History. Eds Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolbert, Barbara 1998. Getrennte Kunstwelten. Überlegungen zu einer systematischen Anthropologie der Kunst. Anthropos, 93, 189−196. Zijlmans, Kitty 2008. The Discourse on Contemporary Art and the Globalization of the Art System. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Eds Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme. Amsterdam: Valiz. Zijlmans, Kitty and Wilfried Van Damme (eds) 2008. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz.

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1.5 Anthropology, Media and Cultural Studies Kevin Latham

The relationships between anthropology and media studies and anthropology and cultural studies have fundamental importance for any understanding of the general state of anthropology in the early twenty-first century. Not only have media and popular culture entered the realm of mainstream concerns in anthropology, but also how this has come about needs to be understood in relation to broader developments in the discipline. These two relationships are the primary focus of this chapter. However, it is important to remember that anthropologists have also sought to collaborate with scholars in other associated disciplines such as theatre and performance studies, communications studies and the emerging fields of new or digital media studies and Internet studies. These relationships will also be dealt with in passing in this chapter. In this respect, anthropology’s relationship with other disciplines such as history, philosophy, literary criticism and even economics and geography are also of relevance. The sub-discipline of anthropology of media, or media anthropology as some call it (see e.g. Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005), emerged in the late 1980s and through the 1990s to be consolidated in the early 2000s. There is a much longer ‘pre-history’

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of anthropologists occasionally focusing on media, using media in their work or incorporating some mention of media into their broader research. Nonetheless, this ‘prehistory’ is distinctly fragmented. Media were only rarely taken seriously by anthropologists prior to the 1980s. However, in this chapter I am concerned not so much with anthropological approaches to media per se, as with the inter-disciplinary relationships between anthropology and media and cultural studies. Clearly the two are related and have been closely intertwined in recent decades as the sub-discipline of anthropology of media has become more established. However, given that little work in anthropology prior to the 1980s really constituted any kind of engagement with these other disciplines, this earlier ‘pre-history’ will not feature prominently in this chapter.1 The starting point for this account will be the turmoil that shook anthropology to its roots in the 1980s and 1990s. I will then argue that although media studies and cultural studies are closely related, even overlapping disciplines, nonetheless, anthropologists have had contrasting engagements with the two. Whereas the relationship between anthropology and media studies has

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been largely one of mutual respect, expectation and collaboration, anthropologists’ attitudes towards cultural studies have been far more wide-ranging. Some anthropologists have turned to cultural studies for inspiration, while others have regarded it with some hostility as a threat to anthropology itself. None of these relationships, however, have remained static over the last two decades, something which is also true of the various disciplines involved. Anthropological theory and practice have moved on considerably over this period as have media and cultural studies, and this chapter attempts to chart some of the key movements on this shifting ground. However, importantly, the technologies that constitute people’s everyday media have also changed enormously over the last couple of decades. In the 1980s and 1990s anthropologists working on media started thinking predominantly about television (see e.g. Das 1995; Abu-Lughod 1993; Mankekar 2002), though with some attention then, and subsequently, to radio (Spitulnik 2002a; Swinehart 2009), photography (Pinney 1997; Sprague 1978), film and cinema halls (Hahn 2002; Larkin 2002), newspapers and journalism (Bourdieu 1998; Hannerz 1998; Arno 2009; Latham 2009) and video (Kulick and Willson 2002). Over the last decade, however, anthropologists have increasingly had to add various forms of new or digital media – most notably the Internet, but also mobile phones, digital video and others – to their interests (see below). Indeed, new media have provided the focus for new cutting-edge work in anthropology confronted with new conceptualizations, experiences and practices related to time, space, work, identity, community and much more (see below). Importantly, this work does not take place in an anthropological vacuum and anthropologists of new media have to contend with others making alternative claims to be the legitimate custodians of new media studies. Consequently, I will finish this essay by using the example of new media studies in anthropology to demonstrate how far these

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interdisciplinary relationships have changed over the last 20−30 years.

BACKGROUND: ANTHROPOLOGY IN CRISIS The so-called ‘crisis of representation’ (see e.g. Marcus 1992: 106; Moore 1999: 5) that hit anthropology in the late 1980s and which concentrated minds for at least a decade thereafter (see e.g. James, Hockey and Dawson 1997) plays a crucial role in shaping approaches to media and popular culture within anthropology, on the one hand, and the relationships between anthropology and media studies and anthropology and cultural studies, on the other.2 This crisis has been so widely discussed over the last two decades that many of the key issues raised at the time, such as the power relations involved in representation, the nature of ethnographic writing and enquiry, the importance of reflexivity, the problematization of notions of objectivity or the notion of ‘othering’, have now become established features of anthropological teaching and research methodology.3 As a result of anthropology’s crisis, anthropologists started paying much greater attention to processes of othering, to questioning what modernity and postmodernity are and how they relate to the people they study and to the importance of acknowledging anthropology ‘at home.’ This helped shape the discipline’s relationship with media and cultural studies for several reasons. First, anthropologists’ general failure up until the 1980s, even to acknowledge, let alone engage with media use among the people where they conducted research, was an ‘othering’ strategy through which the researched ‘other’ is distanced from the anthropologist in order to make objectification possible (e.g. Fabian 1991a). Probably the most widely recognized of these strategies has been in anthropologist’s use of time in their writing (Fabian 1983, 1991b). Fabian writes of the ‘denial of coevalness’ in ethnographic writing whereby

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anthropologists found themselves ignoring the co-present nature of ethnographic fieldwork in order to construct their informants as objects of representation (1983: 25−35).4 Anthropologists’ failure to acknowledge in their writing media practices such as watching television, listening to the radio or audio tapes, or reading newspapers, books and magazines, which were often common features of everyday life among peoples studied by anthropologists, was another such ‘othering’ strategy (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002: 3). Such media and technologies were often considered irrelevant, even unwelcome intrusions of the modern or Western worlds into indigenous social and cultural landscapes. Consequently, the denial of media use was another example of what Fabian calls allochronic discourse – the positing of other time for other people in anthropological writing (1983: 32−33). Second, with a greater awareness of these kinds of othering techniques and as anthropologists became more reflexive, attentive to the power relationships in representation and questioning of their own practices of academic objectification, the crisis encouraged anthropologists to pay more attention to media and popular culture in addition to (or as features of) their more traditional research interests. As Bruce Knauft (1994: 220) explained, ‘the growth of mass media, consumerism, and the shrinking of the global market place are social and economic trends of late capitalism,’ and the investigation of media and other popular cultural practices were often seen as a key components of such anthropological projects (see also Spitulnik 1993; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002: 3). Anthropologists found their research focus shifting closer to those of scholars in media and cultural studies. Importantly, many of these media and popular cultural practices became associated with notions of previously overlooked modernities or even postmodernities, which now became the focus of anthropological concern (e.g. Rofel 1999; Osella and Osella 2000; Harvey 1996 on modernities; Rouse 1991; Fischer and Abedi

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1990 on postmodernities). Consequently, anthropologists were spurred into more serious engagement with work in media studies and cultural studies as a result.5 This brings us to a third reason that anthropology’s crisis helped nurture new relationships between anthropology and media and cultural studies: not only were there overlapping interests in research topics but also, importantly, cultural studies scholars also brought with them a strong theoretical heritage focused on the issues that were largely new for anthropologists (see below). Theoretically, the Gramscian edge in the work of Stuart Hall in particular, but also many others in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, fitted well with the growing popularity and influence of Michel Foucault in anthropology as well as other postmodern and poststructuralist influences.6 Finally, we can also identify other important cross-disciplinary coalitions being formed at this time that helped catalyse these processes of interdisciplinary engagement. Famously, anthropology’s crisis was in part stimulated by close encounters with scholars in literary criticism (see e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986). However, this came just at a time when British cultural studies, associated with the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, Lawrence Grossberg, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy and others, was also becoming fashionable in departments of English and literature, particularly in the United States (Knauft 1994: 133). Consequently, a network of interdisciplinary relations emerged with anthropologists looking to literary criticism, cultural studies and media studies, while cultural studies scholars were looking for their own ‘ethnographic turn’ (see e.g. Morley 1992; Stanton 1996), which pushed them towards anthropology, and while influential scholars in literary criticism in the United States were themselves engaging with cultural studies as well. Importantly, within this broader emerging overlap of interests between anthropology and cultural studies there was also a particular niche for anthropologists of media,

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with many of the prominent figures in cultural studies having written some of the most influential and important works on media (e.g. Hall 1980; Morley 1980; Williams 1974; Hebdige 1979).7

ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES The negative self-critical anthropological Zeitgeist that emerged from the crises of the late 1980s eventually gave way to more positive efforts to find a solution to the newly perceived problems and challenges thrown up by globalization, the questioning of ethnographic authority and issues of power and representation. David Parkin in his Frazer Lecture given in 1991, and published a couple of years later (Parkin 1993), offered one such positive vision. As he saw it, what was potentially at stake was the notion of cultural difference and the ‘future of an anthropological concept of culture’ (1993: 81). Consequently, in order to overcome accusations of exoticization associated with the anthropological identification of ‘other cultures’, Parkin suggested that an alternative to classic assumptions of cultural difference was therefore to investigate how ‘all peoples personify, separate from, struggle and identify with the materials and images of their environment. This is to bring a notion of animated materiality into personal ontology that allows one to think in terms of transformable rather than intrinsic human distinctiveness’ (1993: 96). Such a move put human relationships with technology, material culture and imagery at the heart of a reconfigured anthropology in a way that resonated well with other prominent trends of the time and helped to animate the relationships between anthropology and media and cultural studies. Arjun Appadurai (1986) was one of the first to talk about the ‘social life of things’ in a precursor to Parkin’s move, while Daniel Miller, having identified material culture and

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mass consumption as neglected areas in contemporary anthropology, took the lead in a succession of publications aimed at rectifying that lack (see below). Daniel Miller’s name has since become almost synonymous with anthropological research on material culture and consumption, including various works on media (e.g. Miller and Slater 2000; Horst and Miller 2006). Appadurai prepared some of the ground for Parkin, Miller and others with his theoretical attempt to focus on the value-making aspects of the relationships between people and material objects. In this way he sought to decentre the notion of culture, as a predetermining or explanatory backdrop for action, while refocusing on notions of dynamic, transformative political relationships (Appadurai 1986). Parkin sought to combine an approach with people− object relationships at its heart with an effort to address the problems of a discipline which also found itself destabilized by globalization.8 Viewed against the backdrop of anthropology’s crisis of representation, what is significant about these authors, and others who have subsequently followed their lead (see e.g. van Binsbergen and Geschiere 2005; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007), is that they have come to constitute one of the ways that anthropology has dealt with its relationship with cultural studies, which, became at times fraught with tension in the mid-1990s. Despite overlapping interests and converging theoretical approaches between anthropology and cultural studies, not all anthropologists reacted constructively to the suggestion, commonly put forward in the 1990s, that perhaps anthropology and cultural studies in a globalizing world might ultimately become one and the same thing. Anthropological contributors to Steve Nugent and Cris Shore’s Anthropology and Cultural Studies (1997), for instance, were generally hostile to any suggestion that cultural studies might supplant anthropology or that anthropology might merge with its apparently rival discipline.9 What was at issue, as far as these authors were concerned, was the disciplinary integrity

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of anthropology itself and with some rather haughty dismissals of cultural studies, debates on this issue often descended into bickering and territorial protectionism (Nugent 1997: 1, 7; Sahlins 1994). For example, such a tension was revealed in a debate hosted by the University of Manchester Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) in 1996 on the motion ‘Cultural Studies will be the Death of Anthropology’ (GDAT 1996). Although there was more recognition in the debate itself, as opposed to its title, that anthropology and cultural studies both have much in common and potentially much to learn from each other without necessarily having to become one and the same thing, nonetheless those arguing against the motion were clearly resistant to the idea that anthropology’s uniqueness was coming into question. One of the reasons that the imagined eclipse of anthropology by cultural studies stimulated such vociferous resistance is because this purported rivalry was seen as a battle over the notion of culture itself – something clearly central to cultural studies, but which many anthropologists consider their own disciplinary domain. However, looking beyond the bickering, one also has to see these debates against the backdrop of broader tensions within anthropology about the nature of and future shape that the discipline should take following its critical turn at the end of the 1980s. Anthropology turned to cultural studies in no small part in order to make up for its lack of ‘a constitutive current of critique of modern capitalist society’ (Ward 1996: 8) to which cultural studies could unequivocally lay claim. Yet, despite the fact that mainstream anthropology has ultimately come to accept and even expect a range of necessary disciplinary transformations that largely emerged from post-structuralist critiques (see above), nonetheless at that time there remained a general hostility to anything seen as postmodern or poststructuralist among many anthropologists (see e.g. Spencer 1989; Wolf 1992). The past antagonism towards cultural studies to

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some degree reflected this tension (Nugent 1997: 5; Sangren 1988). Cultural studies, although it had to hand a range of critiques of (particularly Western) contemporary modern society, nonetheless remained, for more sceptical anthropologists, too abstractly theoretical and detached from the realities of everyday lived experiences, especially in the non-Western world. In due course, interest in these kinds of contentious debates diminished, perhaps not least because it became clear that the future existence of neither anthropology nor cultural studies was really in question. Importantly, however, anthropology and anthropologists have moved on in more quietly constructive ways unproblematically to borrow and appropriate the work of key cultural studies theorists for their own ends (consider for instance Ortner 2006: esp. 12−14). It is not uncommon to find the likes of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault – key inspirational thinkers in cultural studies – as well as Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Paul Gilroy and other key figures in cultural studies, cited in anthropological work. What is more, some of their key ideas (e.g. on identification, hegemony and power) have become broadly influential within anthropology. During this period of anthropological self-reconstruction in the 1990s and 2000s, some anthropologists effectively reinvented anthropological approaches to material culture, drawing in advertising, consumption and media use (see e.g. Miller 1987, 1994, 1995, 1998; Moeran 1996; Foster 2002). This is a good example of how anthropology and cultural studies focused on similar issues, although largely in different places, and yet managed to keep themselves disciplinarily distinctive. Material culture was not a new interest in anthropology. Indeed, with issues such as gift exchange and potlatch display among the earliest interests of anthropology’s founding fathers (see e.g. Malinowski 1922; Mauss 2002; Boas 1966), arguably material culture has been one of its longest-standing interests.

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However, the last three decades have seen approaches to material culture in anthropology redefined to incorporate work on consumption and consumerism in contemporary societies. In 1979, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood published The World of Goods, one of the first attempts to rethink the study of material culture in contemporary society outside what the authors saw as the prevailing theories of status display and utility. Douglas and Isherwood argued that consumption be seen as an information system in which goods symbolically manifest underlying cognitive social categories and social divisions. In Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Miller (1987), to some degree influenced by Douglas and Isherwood, argues that Mass goods represent culture, not because they are merely there as the environment within which we operate, but because they are an integral part of that process of objectification by which we create ourselves as an industrial society: our identities, our social affiliations, our lived everyday practices (1987: 215).

This forms the basis for subsequent work in which Miller argues that consumption be viewed as the ‘vanguard of history’, arguably displacing production from that role bequeathed to it by Marxist approaches in anthropology and elsewhere (Miller 1995).10 Miller’s work spearheaded anthropological interest in material culture and consumption from the 1990s onwards, taking a stance that has sought to emphasize the roles that material culture, consumption and media have played within an established social context of relations and practices. This broader body of work on material culture and consumption in anthropology has in some ways offered an alternative, less contentious way for anthropology to engage with cultural studies and its subject matter. Nonetheless, even though one might argue that it has often failed to ask suitably critical, political questions of these practices as a result, anthropology has nonetheless broadened its understanding and interest in popular culture. In recent years the discipline has started to

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take more seriously as objects of anthropological enquiry issues such as advertising (e.g. Mazzarella 2003; Malefeyt and Moeran 2003), clothing and fashion (Tarlo 1996; Brydon and Niessen 1998), retail distribution (Carrier 1994) and globalization and popular culture (Hannerz 1989; Martinez 1998; Pun 2003; Tsing 1994, 2000)). Yet at the same time anthropologists also often quietly distanced themselves from parallel work going on in cultural studies.11 These interests have to some degree blurred the boundaries between the objects of study of anthropology, cultural and media studies and also other disciplines such as social geography. However, anthropological approaches to this research are nonetheless often distinctive from other disciplines. What distinguishes anthropological attention to popular culture, media and consumption is its emphasis on extended ethnographic research methods and a focus on people and practices rather than texts or technologies (Ginsburg 1994: 137; see also Miller and Slater 2000). At the same time, anthropologists’ continuing interest in non-European, non-US research contexts has enabled them, more easily, to distinguish themselves from those working in other disciplines:12 not only does their regional interest mark them out but it also demands of them that they problematize and resituate the theoretical paradigms and assumptions that have shaped Western media and cultural studies in their new non-European or US contexts.13 The heated debates of the mid-1990s about the relationship between anthropology and cultural studies have in the course of time resolved themselves without any of the dramatic outcomes (e.g. the demise of anthropology) that some predicted. Rather, anthropologists have found their own ways to appropriate cultural studies theorists when useful, to make their own contributions to cultural studies in turn and in the meantime to expand the breadth of conventional anthropological research to new areas of cultural practice. Ten years into the new millennium, anthropologists have recovered a good deal

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of confidence in their own discipline and this is particularly clear in their handling of material culture, popular culture and media.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEDIA STUDIES For anthropologists interested specifically in media, the issue of collaboration or crossinspiration between their own discipline and media studies has not been particularly problematic. Many anthropologists interested in media have acknowledged their own disciplinary shortcomings as well as the contributions that, as anthropologists, they can make to other realms of scholarly enquiry. A certain academic humility has often been combined with a degree of self-confidence that was lacking in the early years of anthropology’s ‘crisis.’ The kinds of tensions that sometimes emerged between anthropology and cultural studies did not generally appear in relation to media studies. Indeed, anthropologists of media and media studies scholars have often worked together in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation.14 Anthropology of media emerged as a recognized sub-discipline in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, marked by a small flurry of readers and introductory writings (e.g. Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg, AbuLughod and Larkin 2002; Peterson 2003; Spitulnik 1993; Caldarola 1994; Ginsburg 1994) dedicated to media-related anthropology as well as the establishment of specifically media-oriented university courses and degree programmes.15 By the start of the new millennium it was starting to become possible both to identify anthropology of media as a sub-discipline in itself as well as finding work in mainstream anthropology also including discussion of media practices more routinely in the investigation of other social and cultural issues. Anthropology of media, as it has emerged over the last two decades, is clearly distinctive from the occasional and fragmented attention to media found in previous decades (see e.g. Peterson 2003; Askew and Wilk 2002). It emerged at

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a particular historical juncture in anthropology that was shaped by important developments both within and outside the discipline. As poststructuralist and postmodernist influences caused anthropologists to question their right to represent others, their relationships to colonial powers and just how their work constituted the ‘other’, so there was a serious questioning of anthropology and its traditional mode of representation, ethnographic writing, as media in themselves. Johannes Fabian’s (1990) detailed account of a theatre troupe in Zaire is a good example of the kind of ethnography that could emerge from these critiques. His theoretically engaged ethnography challenges conventional approaches to theatre and performance in anthropology (e.g. Turner 1982) to argue that ethnography is itself the performative production of knowledge. Fabian follows the troupe through a series of rehearsals up to a live performance on television. The troupe was preparing a play written and improvised by themselves around the Zairean proverb ‘le pouvoir se mange entier’ – ‘power is eaten whole’. However, as an example of how knowledge is ‘performed’ through ethnography, rather than offer an initial explanation of what the proverb means, Fabian lets the complexities and contradictions of the troupe’s understanding of the term gradually emerge through the ethnography itself. In one rehearsal the troupe plays around with ideas that subsequently never get mentioned again while the performance develops in a different direction. The final television broadcast also has to be understood against a backdrop of nuanced political satire and innuendo operating within carefully circumscribed boundaries well-understood by the troupe. At the end of the monograph the reader has a good idea of these complexities in a way that would have been undermined by pinning down the meaning of the proverb at the beginning or simply offering a political interpretation of the final performance. Fabian’s point is that knowledge production – both that of the anthropologist and his/her informants – is contingent, sometimes transient and

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almost capricious. For Fabian, it is important not only to problematize theatre and television as practices of knowledge production but also the whole ethnographic process itself. However, in relation to media at least, the negative critique of anthropology was not total. Whereas it was realized that anthropology had neglected media for too long, while sociology, media studies, communications studies, British cultural studies and other disciplines had embraced the importance of mass media from the 1970s on, most anthropologists of media nonetheless saw the distinctive contribution that they could make to these other disciplines through their ability to problematize an inherent Eurocentrism in most other work on media, even while appropriating the tools of conventional media studies. For example, Lila Abu-Lughod (1995) offers an ethnographically informed analysis of a television soap opera broadcast in Egypt in the 1990s. Her study offers an account of what Stuart Hall’s seminal work (1980) ‘Encoding/Decoding’ might look like in a non-Western setting. She analyses the complex jostling for position of politicians, journalists and television producers as they negotiate how the programme might represent nationalist history and politics. However, she contrasts this with some of the diverse, unpredictable and contingent ways in which different viewers of the programme actually watched it, some completely sidestepping any of the carefully planned political messages thought to be contained in the series. Consequently, the series has to be understood against contrasting and disjunctive historically situated backdrops – those of the producers and those of the viewers. Importantly, these moves coincided with a period in media and cultural studies when scholars were considering their own metaphysical and methodological impasses. In an increasingly globalizing world, where satellite television and other transnational media were transforming both media production and consumption contexts and practices,

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many media studies scholars started to become aware of their own deficiencies when it came to non-English-language mainstream media that had constituted the mainstay of media studies research dominated by issues of media power, ideology and reception in the past (see e.g. Curran and Park 2000; Shohat and Stam 1994). At the same time, media studies scholars in their own postmodern turn also questioned assumptions about audience research suggesting that audiences were as much discursive constructs as real groupings of people (e.g. Hartley 1992; Ang 1991, 1996; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Media and cultural studies therefore started to question the usefulness of conventional audience research based on people meters and other statistical survey techniques resulting in increasingly loud calls for audience ethnography to find out what people ‘really’ did with television, video and other media (e.g. Morley 1992). Consequently, there were forces both within anthropology, on the one hand, and media and cultural studies, on the other, facilitating collaboration and cross-fertilization. Anthropology could draw upon the decades of scholarship on media and communications in other disciplines to redress its own inattentiveness in this field, while also offering in return greater understanding of cultural contexts of media practice, critiques of Euro- and ethnocentrism and insights into ethnographic fieldwork methods. Scholars in media studies also started to look to anthropology for other inspiration in understanding media practices in new ways. Anthropological approaches to ritual, for instance, have commonly featured in recent media studies literature (e.g. Liebes and Curran 1998; Couldry 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005). Here we can also find other cross-disciplinary collaborations related to media. For instance in the late 1980s and early 1990s anthropologists teamed up with theatre and performance studies scholars to explore common interests in cross-cultural understandings of theatre (see e.g. Schechner 1985; Schechner and Appel 1990; Barba and

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Savarese 1991). Victor Turner, in his later work (1982, 1990), was keen to formulate a theoretical basis for understanding universal features (underlying structural patterns) of both social and stage drama, drawing upon and expanding his earlier seminal work on ritual (Turner 1969). Meanwhile, theatre studies scholars were looking to develop cross-cultural repertoires of performance skills with associated theoretical formulations of universals of performance (Schechner and Appel 1990; Barba and Savarese 1991). The relationship between anthropology and cultural studies, as we saw earlier, has developed over the years such that it is now characterized by a degree of mutual respect and appreciation, even if the two sides have tended to circumscribe their engagements with each other and generally remain distinct and separate. With media studies the relationship is slightly different and also viewed differently from the two sides. Even if some media studies scholars have engaged enthusiastically with anthropology, still many in media studies will pay little detailed attention to anthropology of media, apart, perhaps, from considering the possible benefits of ethnographic methodology.16 However, viewed from the other side of the divide, anthropologists of media have generally found work in media studies essential for their own research. This has meant that anthropologists working on media have developed a more open, eclectic – even if also selective – approach to work in media studies. This kind of openness has been taken a step further with research into new media and information and communications technologies, which we will consider in drawing this chapter to a close.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND NEW MEDIA Having only just started to become accustomed to dealing with conventional mass media, in recent years, anthropologists have also found themselves having to deal with new media – i.e. digital media and new information and communications technologies,

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most notably the Internet and mobile telephony. It is now common to find doctoral students in anthropology departments working on some aspect or other of new media or with a new media focus and interest featuring strongly in their otherwise non-media research projects. The widespread use of the Internet and mobile phones in many of the societies where anthropologists conduct their research, combined with a recognition of anthropologists’ past failures to acknowledge the importance of media in their work, has made it almost impossible for them to ignore the role that these technologies play in many everyday social practices, relationships and interactions. There are also important similarities between the issues that new media throw up for anthropology and anthropologists and those that caused the discipline’s crises of the 1980s and 1990s. New media are in many ways the media of globalization and transnationalism. Low-cost international telephony, the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone in many countries around the world, the increasing accessibility of the Internet, digital satellite television and increasing numbers of social practices that people can and do engage in regardless of geographical and political boundaries, from online gaming to e-commerce and political activism, all require anthropologists to redefine their notions of cultural practice and their sites of operation. However, new media do not simply pose the same old questions dealt with in the 1990s. They pose new challenges while also demanding more nuanced and complex answers to the old questions (see e.g. Axel 2006; Meyer and Moors 2006; Sardar 1996). The notions of culture and reality now come under scrutiny once again, with scholars within and outside anthropology commonly debating the nature of so-called cyberculture(s), virtual reality(ies), cyber- or virtual communities, identities and much more.17 The realms of social and cultural production have been transformed by the deployment of technologies affecting fundamental principles such as property, freedom, identity,

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community, space and time, the body, politics, activism and much more.18 All of this work offers food for thought for anthropologists of media, as well as anthropologists more generally, but it also offers another example of where cross-disciplinary interests are helping to redefine the field. Scholars in media and cultural studies are once again finding themselves focused on notions of culture, society and their transformation without necessarily feeling any compunction to draw anthropologists into the equation. This time around anthropologists were not so slow out of the blocks. Sherry Turkle’s early work on how our use of computers affects our notions of ourselves (1984), and her later work on identity (1997), have become required reading on courses on new media around the world, even if the technologies they referred to have aged much more quickly than the scholarship. George Marcus’s edited volume Connected: Engagements with media, published in 1996, was also a timely effort aiming to tackle both the emergence and importance of new technologies in everyday life as well as the need to rethink ethnographic writing and representation. Meanwhile, some of the first efforts to delineate what ‘virtual ethnography’ may entail were published more than 10 years ago (e.g. Hakken 1999, Hine 2000). However, anthropologists are nonetheless in the minority when it comes to the study of new media, and they find themselves among a range of contenders looking to appropriate new media for their own disciplines (e.g. Escobar 1994; Everett and Caldwell 2003) or establish the criteria for new disciplines such as ‘Internet studies’ (see e.g. Jones 2005; Sterne 2005). This has not stopped some from trying to stamp their distinctively anthropological stamp on new media studies. In their work on the Internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater are wary of notions in other new media studies literature of ‘virtuality’ or ‘cyberspace.’ ‘These terms,’ they suggest, ‘focused on the way in which the new media seemed able to constitute spaces or places apart from the rest of social life (“real life” or offline life),

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spaces in which new forms of sociality were emerging, as well as bases for new identities, such as new relations to gender, “race”, or ontology.’ (Miller and Slater 2000: 4). This ethnographic approach, largely sceptical of more postmodern- or poststructuralistinspired theory, has its advantages and certainly tempers some of the more fantastic speculation that has characterized some writing on new media. It is also reminiscent of empiricist reactions to postmodernism in anthropology. However, it does also offer a potentially limited and static understanding of the relationship between the development of new technologies and social change. What is needed is some kind of balance between remaining firmly grounded in both actual and, in this case, virtual realities (or blurring the boundaries between the two) while at the same time keeping an open mind to the often far-reaching and world-changing possibilities opened up by new technologies. Indeed anthropologists have started to produce innovative and ground-breaking works on new media dealing with precisely these kinds of issues. Boellstorff’s ethnography of the online realm Second Life (2008), for instance, pushes the boundaries of what, where and how ethnography can be done. In Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff (2008) offers a detailed ethnographic investigation of the virtual world Second Life.19 Rather than struggle with the anthropological and new media studies debates about whether the offline world is ultimately more important than the online world, Boellstorff deliberately sets out, with full discussion of the implications of doing so, to investigate Second Life as a culture in itself. He arrives in Second Life by landing in a small boat on a beach just as Malinowski recounted his arrival in the Trobriand Islands at the beginning of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Boellstorff 2008: 4) and from then on his ethnography takes place entirely in Second Life, working from his virtual home and office as his avatar Tom Bukowski. Boellstorff does not neglect the offline world and its relations with what occurs in Second Life.

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For instance, he suggests that time is less affected by virtuality than space (2008: 102−106) given the constraints of, say, operating three or four avatars at once or inevitably having to be away from one’s keyboard (known as ‘afk’) for some of the time. However, Boellstorff does resist the temptation to see Second Life as simply an extension, poor copy or supplement to the offline world, where people supposedly lead their ‘real’ lives. This approach is not without its problems of course – one does not, for instance, learn the relationship between people’s online characters and their offline worlds – but as a methodological starting point for his study, this position is productive, enabling him to detail, ethnographically, social practices in this online world. He shows, for instance, how ownership and intimate relations (including but not primarily of a sexual nature) are often based on choice and egalitarianism, with friendship often developing more quickly in Second Life as a result of more open sociality than that often found in offline worlds.20 Boellstorff also deals with questions of personhood, community, political economy and just how to think about virtuality, which he considers an increasingly central part of being human, not, as some would argue, a retreat from it. In addition, the author argues that understandings of the Internet have been overdetermined by ideas of the ‘information age’, a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’, emphasizing the communicational and data-based use of the Internet. Such preconceptions, he suggests, underestimate the extent to which online activity is not about communication between offline beings so much as a form of sociality in itself.21 As Boellstorff demonstrates, anthropologists of new media cannot isolate their work from other disciplinary approaches to the same subject matter as other anthropologists had more or less successfully managed to do earlier with their work on material culture and consumption. Anthropology of new media is thriving, among young scholars in particular.22 However, relatively speaking, the volume of published material in this

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emerging sub-sub-discipline is still tiny compared to either the overall body of literature on new media or overall output in anthropology. Consequently, any anthropologist looking to work on the Internet, mobile phones or other digital media inevitably has to engage with literature in the appropriate areas of media studies, cultural studies, sociology, political science, communications studies and other disciplines. This other work is often indispensable to anthropologists for the subject matter it covers. The domains of culture, identity, community and society, when it comes to new media, are no longer the privileged domains of anthropologists, and for extensive work on new media one has to look beyond the boundaries of anthropology. Consequently, anthropologists interested in new media find themselves in a new era of cross-disciplinarity, in which literature from outside anthropology has become as relevant, if not more so, than much of the literature written within the discipline itself. What has changed, compared to the 1990s, however, is that there are no longer fears about the demise of anthropology as a result of engagement with or partial usurpation of anthropology by work in other disciplines. In relation to media and cultural studies in particular, but probably also more broadly, anthropologists have become more interdisciplinarily tolerant of eclectic borrowing from other work on media and popular culture, while also finding themselves able to contribute to broader debates in other disciplines on the same subject matter.

NOTES 1 There are now numerous good introductory and review articles outlining anthropology’s trajectory from occasional engagement with media to the recognition of an established sub-discipline of anthropology of media (see e.g. Spitulnik 1993; Peterson 2003; Askew 2002; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin; 2002). We can also add Boyer’s chapter in this volume to this list. 2 The crisis can also be seen as a broader crisis among intellectuals which nonetheless had

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particularly strong ramifications in anthropology (see e.g. Hart and Grimshaw 1994). 3 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to elaborate upon this literature in detail. However, important and useful texts include e.g. Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), Clifford (1988), Fardon (1990), Fox (1991) and Gupta and Ferguson (1997). 4 Fabian defines this term as ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’ (1983: 31). 5 The launch of the journal Public Culture by Arjun Appadurai and colleagues in the United States − which rapidly became one of the key recognized publications in anthropology for articles on media and other popular cultural practices − represents a good example of both anthropology’s interdisciplinary turn and its particular engagement with media and cultural studies. Although describing itself as an ‘interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies’, the journal has always had a strong representation of anthropologists on its editorial board and published many articles written by anthropologists. 6 These influences are clear in the work of, for example, Faye Ginsburg, Debra Spitulnik, Johannes Fabian, Lila Abu-Lughod and many others. 7 I use the term ‘anthropologists of media’ here to refer broadly to anthropologists who have taken media consumption, production and other mediarelated social practices as one of the defining aspects of their research and teaching. This is broadly in line with the vision of anthropology of media put forward by other anthropologists of media. It should be distinguished from Susan Allen’s (1994) use of ‘media anthropologists’ to refer to the use of media better to convey to the general public the insights that anthropology has to offer on contemporary social issues. 8 Appadurai wrote his own seminal reflections (1990) on this issue. See also Gupta and Ferguson (1997) and Hannerz (1989). 9 Some anthropologists were, however, bewildered by this hostility. See e.g. Harvey (1996: 15) and contributions to discussion in GDAT (1996). 10 This marked the start of a series of works in subsequent years by Miller, often in collaboration with others, that span a wide range of consumption practices. These range from mass consumption in Trinidad (Miller 1994) to shopping (Miller 1998) clothing (Küchler and Miller 2005), the Internet (Miller and Slater 2000) and mobile phones (Horst and Miller 2006). 11 For example there are significant parallels and even overlaps between some of the arguments made by Miller (1995) in his lengthy essay on consumption as the vanguard of history and Jean Baudrillard’s work (1998, originally 1970 in French) first published more than 20 years earlier, yet the former makes

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only one sceptical and dismissive passing reference to the latter (1995: 20) despite its seminal status in cultural studies work on consumption and the consumer society. 12 Anthropology’s crisis of representation saw the discipline engage much more openly the ideas of doing anthropology at home. However, it is still true that the bulk of anthropological work is carried out by anthropologists working in non-native contexts. 13 Indeed, this expertise has constituted one of the primary incentives for media and cultural studies scholars to engage with anthropology. 14 Consider, for instance, Silverstone and Hirsch (1992), Rothenbuhler and Coman (2005), Stanton (1996) and Couldry (2003). 15 See also Boyer in this volume. 16 Even in that case, however, what passes for ethnography in media studies is often different from what would be expected in anthropology. 17 See, for example, Jones (1997), Robins and Webster (1999), Bell and Kennedy (2000), Bunt (2000) and Lull (2001). 18 The literature on new media has exploded in recent years. It is only possible to give example readings for any of these topics here: on property (Lessig 1999; Litman 2001; Stallman 2002), on freedom (de Sola Pool 2003), on identity (Castells 1997; Jones 1997; Mitra 2005), on community (Lotfalian 1996; Hadj-Moussa 2003), on space and time (Hylland Eriksen 2001; Green 2002; Lee and Whitley 2002); on the body (Waldby 2000; Stone 1992); on politics (Robins and Webster 1999; Ferdinand 2000; Sunstein 2001) and on activism (McLagan 1996; Spitulnik 2002b). 19 Second Life is one of the largest virtual communities, with tens of thousands of ‘residents’ worldwide (Boellstorff 2008: 255) who can, among other things, buy property, erect buildings, frequent bars, go to concerts or sporting events, attend weddings or worship, trade in virtual goods and services and develop relationships with other residents. 20 There is of course the problem here, when comparing Second Life to offline worlds, of with which offline world one compares the virtual world. In this case, for instance, people are more socially open in some offline worlds than others. 21 Boellstorff argues that, in place of information and knowledge, we should perhaps think of the importance of ‘craft’ in this contemporary era of virtually mediated interaction and social practices, an idea he puts forward in terms of his ‘Age of Techne.’ This is problematic, as Postill points out, in that in doing so he may be ‘replacing one dubious epochal claim with another’ (Postill 2009). 22 Much of the anthropological research on new media has to date been conducted at the PhD level and awaits publication. However, for an indication of the kinds of projects being investigated, see the EASA Media Anthropology Network

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(http://www.media-anthropology.net/). Other topics covered by anthropological papers on new media include Taiwanese digital puppetry (Silvio 2007), community politics in Malaysia (Postill 2008), blogging in ‘Persian weblogestan’ (Doostdar 2004) and sexual life online (Marshall 2002).

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (ed.) 1993. ‘Screening Politics in a World of Nations.’ Public Culture, 1 (5/3): 465−606. (Special issue on the politics of television in Third/ Fourth World nations.) Abu-Lughod, L. 1995. ‘The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity.’ In Daniel Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local. ASA Decennial Conference Series. London: Routledge. Allen, Susan L. (ed.) 1994. Media Anthropology: Informing global citizens. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Ang, I. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge. Ang, I. 1996. Living Room Wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.’ Public Culture, 2 (2): 1−24. Arno, Andrew 2009. Alarming Reports: Communicating conflict in the daily news. Oxford: Berg Books. Askey, Kelly and Wilk, Richard R. (eds.) 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Askew, Kelly 2002. ‘Introduction.’ In Kelly M. Askew and Richard R. Wilk (eds) The Anthropology of Media: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Axel, Brian K. 2006. ‘Anthropology and New Technologies of Communication.’ Cultural Anthropology, 21 (3): 354−384. Barba, E. & Savarese, N. 1991. The Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The secret art of the performer. Translated by Richard Fowler. London: Routledge. Baudrillard, Jean 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Bell, David and Kennedy, Barbara (eds) 2000. The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge. Boas, Franz 1966. Kwakitul Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Boellstorff, Tom 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1998. On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto Press. Brydon, Anne and Niessen, Sandra (eds) 1998. Consuming Fashion: Adorning the transnational body. London: Berg. Bunt, Gary (2000): Virtually Islamic. Aberystwyth: University of Wales Press. Caldarola, Victor 1994. ‘Embracing the Media Simulacrum.’ Visual Anthropology Review, 10 (1): 66−69. Carrier, James G. 1994. ‘Alienating Objects: The Emergence of Alienation in Retail Trade.’ Man 29/2: 359–380. Castells, Manuel 1997. The Information Age: Economy, society and culture. Volume II: The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentiethcentury ethnography, literature and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. & Marcus, G.E. (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Couldry, Nick 2003. Media Rituals: A critical approach. London: Routledge. Curran, James and Park, Myung-jin (eds) 2000. De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge. Das, Veena 1995. ‘On Soap Opera: What kind of anthropological object is it?’ In Daniel Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local. ASA Decennial Conference Series. London: Routledge. De Sola Pool, Ithiel 2003. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doostdar, Alireza 2004. ‘The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On language, culture, and power in Persian weblogestan.’ American Anthropologist, 106 (4): 651−662. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. 1979. The World of Goods. London: Penguin. Escobar, Arturo 1994. ‘Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture.’ Current Anthropology, 35 (3): 1−45. Everett, Anna and Caldwell, John T. (eds) 2003. New Media: Theories and practices of digitextuality. New York: Routledge. Fabian, Johannes 1983. Time and the Other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fabian, Johannes 1990. Power and Performance: Ethnographic explorations through proverbial

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wisdom and theatre in Shaba, Zaire. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fabian, Johannes 1991a. ‘Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited: From rigor to vigor.’ Annals of Scholarship, 8, (3−4): 381−408. Fabian, Johannes 1991b. Time and the Work of Anthropology. New York: Harwood. Fardon, R. (ed.) 1990. Localising Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Ferdinand, Peter (ed.) 2000. The Internet, Democracy and Democratization. London: Frank Cass. Fischer, Michael M.J. and Abedi, Mehdi 1990. Debating Muslims: Cultural dialogues in postmodernity and tradition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Foster, Robert J. 2002. Materialising the Nation: Commodities, consumption and media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fox, Richard G. 1991. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. GDAT (Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory) 1996. Cultural Studies Will Be the Death of Anthropology. Manchester: GDAT. Ginsburg, Faye 1994. ‘Some Thoughts on Culture/ Media.’ Visual Anthropology Review, 10 (1): 136−141. Ginsburg, Faye, Abu-Lughod, Lila and Larkin, Brian 2002. ‘Introduction.’ In Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds) Media Worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Green, Nicola 2002. ‘On the Move: Technology, mobility, and the mediation of social time and space,’ The Information Society, 18(4), pp. 281–292. Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James (eds) 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba 2003. ‘New Media, Community and Politics in Algeria.’ Media, Culture & Society, 25 (4): 451−468. Hahn, Elizabeth 2002. ‘The Tongan Tradition of Going to the Movies.’ In Kelly M. Askey and Richard R. Wilk (eds) The Anthropology of Media: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Hakken, D. 1999. Cyborgs@Cyberspace: An ethnographer looks to the future. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart 1980. ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in S. Hall e. al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. Hannerz, Ulf 1989. ‘Notes on the Global Ecumene.’ Public Culture, 1 (2): 66−75.

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Hannerz, Ulf 1998. ‘Reporting from Jerusalem.’ Cultural Anthropology, 13 (4): 548−574. Hart, Keith and Grimshaw, Anna 1994. ‘Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals.’ Critique of Anthropology, 14 (3): 227−261. Hartley, John 1992. Tele-ology: Studies in television. London: Routledge. Harvey, Penelope 1996. Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the national state and the universal exhibition. London: Routledge. Hebdige, Dick 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen. Henare, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin and Wastell, Sari (eds) 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge. Hine, Christine 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Horst, Heather and Miller, Daniel 2006. The Cell Phone: An anthropology of communication. Oxford: Berg. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas 2006 [2001]. Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and slow time in the age of information. London: Pluto Press. James, Allison, Hockey, Jenny and Dawson, Andrew 1997. After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London: Routledge. Jones, Steve G. (ed.) 1997. Virtual Culture: Identity and communication in cybersociety. London: Sage Publications. Jones, Steve 2005. ‘Fizz in the Field: Toward a basis for an emergent internet studies.’ The Information Society, 21 (4): 233−237. Knauft, Bruce 1994. ‘Pushing Anthropology Past the Posts: Critical notes on cultural anthropology and cultural studies as influenced by postmodernism and existentialism.’ Critique of Anthropology, 14 (2): 117−152. Knauft, Bruce 1996. Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge. Küchler, Suzanne & Miller, Daniel (eds) 2005. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Kulick, Don and Willson, Margaret 2002. ‘Rambo’s Wife Saves the Day: Subjugating the gaze and subverting the narrative in a Papua New Guinea swamp.’ In Kelly M. Askey and Richard R. Wilk (eds) The Anthropology of Media: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Larkin, Brian 2002. ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria.’ In Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila AbuLughod and Brian Larkin (eds) Media Worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Latham, Kevin 2009. ‘Media and the Limits of Cynicism in Postsocialist China.’ In: Harry G. West, and Parvathi

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Raman (eds), Enduring Socialism: Explorations of revolution and transformation, restoration and continuation. New York: Berghahn Books. Lee, Heejin and Whitley, E.A. 2002. ‘Time and Information Technology: Temporal impacts on individuals, organizations, and society.’ The Information Society, 18: 235−240. Lessig, Lawrence 1999. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. Liebes, R. & Curran, J. (eds) 1998. Media, Ritual and Identity. London: Routledge. Litman, Jessica 2001. Digital Copyright: Protecting intellectual property on the internet. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Lotfalian, Mazyar 1996. ‘A Tale of an Electronic Community.’ In G.E. Marcus (ed.) Connected: Engagements with media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lull, James 2001. ‘Superculture for the Communication Age.’ In J. Lull (ed.) Culture in the Communication Age. London: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge. Malefyt, Timothy Dewaal and Moeran, Brian (eds) 2003. Advertising Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Mankekar, P. 2002. ‘National Texts and Gendered Lives: An ethnography of television audiences in a north Indian city.’In Kelly M. Askey and Richard R. Wilk (eds) The Anthropology of Media: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Marcus, George (ed.) 1992. Connected: Engagements with media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, George and Fischer, Michael (eds) 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, Jon 2002. ‘The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants.’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 14 (2): 229−248. Martinez, Dolores. P. (ed.) 1998. The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, shifting boundaries and global cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss, Marcel 2002. The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge Classics. Mazzarella, William 2003. Shovelling Smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McLagan, M. 2002. ‘Spectacles of Difference: Cultural activism and the mass mediation of Tibet.’ In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds)

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Media Worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Meyer B. and Moors A. (eds) 2006. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Miller, Daniel 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, Daniel 1994. Modernity, an Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and mass consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg. Miller, Daniel (ed.) 1995. Acknowledging Consumption: A review of new studies. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don 2000. The Internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg. Mitra, Ananda 2005. ‘Creating Immigrant Identities in Cybernetic Space: Examples from a non-resident Indian website.’ Media, Culture & Society, 27(3), 371−390. Moeran, Brian 1996. A Japanese Advertising Agency: An anthropology of media and markets. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Moore, Henrietta L. 1999. ‘Anthropological Theory at the Turn of the Century.’ In H.L. Moore (ed.) Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morley, David 1980. The Nationwide Audience. London: BFI. Morley, David 1992. ‘Towards an Ethnography of the Television Audience.’ In Television, Audiences & Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 173−197. Morley, D. 1992. Television, audiences and cultural studies. London: Routledge. Nugent, Stephen 1997. ‘Introduction: Brother, can you spare a paradigm.’ In Stephen Nugent and Cris Shore (eds) Anthropology and Cultural Studies. London: Polity Press. Nugent, Stephen and Shore, Cris (eds) 1997. Anthropology and Cultural Studies. London: Polity Press. Ortner, Sherry 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, power and the acting subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osella, Filippo and Osella, Caroline 2000. Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and identity in conflict. London: Pluto Press. Parkin, D. 1993. ‘Nemi in the Modern World: Return of the exotic?’ Man, 28 (l): 79−99. Peterson, Mark Allen 2003. Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and myth in the new millennium. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pinney, Christopher 1997. Camera Indica: The social life of Indian photographs. London: Reaktion.

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Postill, John 2008. ‘Localizing the Internet beyond Communities and Networks.’ New Media & Society, 10 (3): 413−431. Postill, John 2009. ‘Review Notes on Boellstorff’s (2008) Second Life Ethnography.’ Online at: http:// johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/reviewnotes-on-boellstorff’s-second-life.mht. (Last accessed 4/11/2010). Pun, Ngai 2003. ‘Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in “Globalizing” China.’ Cultural Anthropology, 18 (4): 469−492. Robins, Kevin and Webster, Frank 1999. The Times of the Technoculture: From the information society to the virtual life. London: Routledge. Rofel, Lisa 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered yearnings in China after socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and Coman, Mihai (eds) 2005. Media Anthropology. London: Sage Publications. Rouse, Roger 1991. ‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism. Diaspora, 1: 8–23. Sahlins, Marshall 1994. Waiting for Foucault. Prickly Pear Pamphlet No.2. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press. Sangren, Stephen 1988. ‘Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography.’ Current Anthropology, 29 (3): 405−435. Sardar, Ziauddin 1996. ‘alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West.’ In Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz (eds) Cyberfutures: Culture and politics on the information superhighway. London: Pluto Press, pp. 14−41. Schechner, R. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, Richard and Appel, W. (eds) 1990. By Means of Performance: Intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. London: Routledge. Silverstone, Roger and Hirsch, Eric (eds) 1992. Consuming Technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces. London: Routledge. Silvio, Teri 2007. ‘Remediation and Local Globalizations: How Taiwan’s “digital video knights-errant puppetry” writes the history of the new media in Chinese.’ Cultural Anthropology, 22 (2): 285–313. Spencer, J. 1989. ‘Anthropology as a Kind of Writing.’ Man, 24 (1): 145−164. Spitulnik, Debra 1993. ‘Anthropology and Mass Media.’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 293−315. Spitulnik, Debra 2002a. ‘Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking reception through Zambian

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Will Be the Death of Anthropology. Manchester: GDAT. Williams, Raymond 1974. Television: Technology and cultural form. London: Routledge. Wolf, M. 1992. A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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1.6 Anthropology and Public Policy Cris Shore

(WHY) POLICY MATTERS Anthropologists have long worked alongside public policy initiatives and been linked to government policy programmes; they have often witnessed the impact of policies upon the people’s and cultures they study and on the institutions where they themselves work. But only relatively recently has ‘policy’ itself become an object and subject of anthropological enquiry. In many respects, the study of policy represents a blind spot for anthropology in much the same way that colonialism once did: everywhere present and embedded in the framework of social action, yet curiously unremarked upon and seemingly invisible to critical analysis. The reasons for this anthropological neglect may also have similar foundations: as with colonialism, anthropology’s encounters with policy highlight key ethical, political and epistemological challenges for the discipline in terms of its own entanglements with politics and power. Until the 1990s, most anthropological engagement with policy making tended to be of an ‘applied’ and largely uncritical nature: i.e. commissioned studies or consultancytype research that tended to be framed around the implicit (and sometimes quite explicit) question, ‘How can anthropology best serve policy makers or help solve policy problems?’ (Cochrane 1980; Willner 1980). The idea that anthropological knowledge should be more

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‘applied’ and thus more relevant to policy makers, or that anthropological research should be harnessed to service the needs of government (or industry) is not a recent notion. Even in the 1940s and 1950s Evans Pritchard (1951) had sought to promote applied anthropology as a kind of ‘managerial science of mankind’. Three decades later, leading figures in British anthropology including Raymond Firth (1981) were advancing equally narrow definitions of applied anthropology in terms of its perceived ‘value for government’ − or, as it is now commonly termed, ‘relevance to end-users’. In terms of its methodology and focus, the anthropology of policy is very different from applied anthropology. However, the question of utility and relevance raises a wider debate over what exactly anthropologists seek to achieve by applying their knowledge or engaging with policy makers: Is it dialogue, influence over policy professionals, or a way for academics to shape the formation or implementation of public policy? Or is the goal to unpack policy as a cultural category and to analyse its uses in order to shed light on structures and processes that shape society? To echo Feldman (2007), should anthropology ‘follow the policy gaze, or seek to critique it’? Or can it do both? In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly shifted towards the latter position, developing analytical approaches that

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seek to problematize policy both as a concept, or idea-force, and as a set of related practices (Shore and Wright 1997; Wedel et al. 2005). If this is one area that distinguishes the anthropology of policy from applied anthropology, it is also differentiates it from policy studies. Whereas most scholars tend to treat policy as a given, seldom questioning its meaning or ontological status as a category, an anthropology of policy starts from the premise that ‘policy’ is itself a curious and problematic social and cultural construct that needs to be unpacked and contextualized if its meanings are to be understood. The anthropology of policy also originated from a growing recognition that policy has become an increasingly central and dominant organizing principle of contemporary society, perhaps even of modernity itself (Shore and Wright 1997: 6). This is manifest not least in the pervasiveness of policy(ies) and in the bewilderingly complex ways the concept is put to work. Virtually every aspect of human life is now shaped by policies, whether these emanate from governments, public institutions or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private-sector bodies: From policies on international trade, resource management, law and order, national security and public health, to policies that define building regulations, employment relations, education, taxation, citizenship rights, the use of domestic space and the conduct of sexual conduct. From the moment of birth, people become subjects of policies that classify, order and regulate their behaviour, define their status and frame the norms of conduct that are expected of them (Shore and Wright 1997: 4). Policies are typically thought of as the property of governments and political parties, but they are now increasingly central to the functioning of a vast range of other institutions, from schools, hospitals and universities, to commercial businesses, financial corporations, charities and insurance companies – whose products are also defined as ‘policies’. All of these organizations depend upon policies to define their mission or institutional

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raison d’être, as well as to lend coherence and legitimacy to their goals. Policy, it seems, has become indispensable to the work of the modern state and its bureaucratic apparatus − and to modern organizations in general. This chapter sets out to explore anthropology’s contribution to the analysis of policy and the implications of a focus on policy for the discipline as a whole. I ask: 1 What exactly is ‘policy’ as a subject of anthropological analysis and how does anthropology’s approach differ to that of policy studies? 2 What can anthropology contribute to our understanding of how policies work as agents of change and as instruments of power? 3 How does a focus on policy contribute to anthropology, and what are the implications for the discipline in terms of its methodology and research focus?

In addressing these questions, I want to stress two key analytical themes. First, I show how anthropology provides a necessary corrective to the rational choice models and unreflexive positivistic accounts that still dominate the way that policy processes are typically conceptualized among academics and policy professionals. Second, I argue that policy provides anthropology with a lens for analysing wider political processes and systems of government. Through studying policy we can gain critical insight into the complex ways in which concepts, institutions and actors (or what I call ‘policy assemblages’) interact in different sites either to consolidate regimes of power/knowledge or to create new rationalities of governance. In this sense, policies are technologies that powerfully influence human consciousness and behaviour; they create the bureaucratic taxonomies that define the conditions of people’s existence. The main contribution of the anthropology of policy, therefore, is to the sub-fields of political anthropology, the anthropology of the state and ‘anthropology at home’. The case study I use to illustrate these points concerns two of the defining policies of this century: the US ‘Homeland Security Act’ and the ‘War on Terror’. I argue that these

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initiatives are both cause and effect of the pervasive sense of insecurity and risk that has come to characterize US society. But they are also symptomatic of the way that military norms and values are reshaping the fabric of liberal society.

POLICY AND ‘POLICY STUDIES’ Spurred by dissatisfaction with the conventional positivistic approach which represents policy analysis as a kind of ‘scientific’ endeavour, a number of scholars within political science and international relations have sought to develop alternative perspectives drawing on ethnography and other qualitative methods (Rhodes et al. 2007). In some instances, this ‘cultural turn’ in policy studies has been influenced by anthropology, particularly the work of Geertz, most notably in the development of ‘Interpretive Policy Analysis’ (Yanow 1996, 2000). Others, drawing on continental European philosophy, have turned to linguistics, discourse analysis and rhetoric as a way of rethinking policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993; Fischer 2003; Gottweis 2006; Peters and Pierre 2006; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). These developments open up a promising space for dialogue between anthropology and the more qualitatively oriented policy studies (Yanow 2011). However, while such approaches have introduced more qualitative perspectives into mainstream political science and the broad interdisciplinary field of policy studies (which includes politics, economics, operational research, organizational studies and public administration), they have done little to challenge the positivistic paradigm that prevails within these disciplines. That paradigm typically represents policy as an object rather than a set of cultural processes and practices. Being an ‘artefact’, it follows that policies must have authors – rational actors called ‘policy makers’ – who ‘make’ policy through a process of calculation and authorization. This paradigm, which Colebatch, Hoppe and Noordegraaf (2010)

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call ‘authoritative instrumentalism’, embodies at least four key assumptions: there are objective entities called ‘policies’; these are addressed to solving particular ‘problems’; they result from decisions made by some rational authority (a government, committee, management board, chief executive, etc.); and they are intended to produce some known and measurable outcome. According to this account, policy is conceptualized as governments identifying problems, making decisions and bringing public resources to bear upon these problems. Most academic research is also premised on the idea of policy as a neat, hierarchical and seamless flow that moves from ‘agenda setting’, ‘policy formulation, and ‘policy adoption’, to ‘policy implementation’ (and enforcement’) and ‘policy evaluation’ – which then lead to ‘policy reviewing’ and ‘updating’. This ‘policy cycle’ model, with its instrumental-rational assumptions, is the received wisdom and starting point for most textbooks today and continues to shape the way policy is taught in professional Master’s programmes and schools of government. Moran, Rein and Goodin’s Oxford Handbook of Public Policy (2006) exemplifies this tendency. Their book begins by noting that policy studies emerged from operations research during the Second World War and was originally envisaged as a handmaiden of government. Yet while the editors seek to challenge that instrumental conception by giving voice to many different perspectives on public policy, the way the book is framed simply reinforces the ‘high modernism’ approach that they criticize. Thus, policies are narrowly defined as programmes ‘by which officers of the state attempt to rule’ and as ‘instruments of this assertive ambition’ (Moran, Rein and Goodin 2006: 3). The book ends with two appendices, one containing a précis of the 2004 Queen’s Speech outlining the British government’s legislative programme, and the other a summary of President George Bush’s 2004 ‘State of the Union Address’. The message conveyed here is that these texts capture the

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essence of what policy is really all about – echoing Thomas Dye’s (1972) narrow definition of policy as ‘whatever governments decide to do or not to do’. Despite talk of ‘postpositivism’ in the policy sciences (DeLeon and Martell 2006: 39), most policy studies literature still portrays policy as a process in which one set of atomized rational individuals pursue authorized goals while another group of analysts − equally rational and atomized − measure the costs and benefits and review the effects of policy. Iris Geva-May’s book (2005) Thinking Like a Policy Analyst epitomizes this tendency. For Geva-May, learning to ‘think like a policy analyst’ is not unlike learning to ‘think like a doctor’ or other ‘clinical disciplines’: both require proper professional training, mastery of the appropriate ‘tricks of the trade’ and the diagnostic skills of a practicing clinician. Policy analysis, she declares, is far too important to be left to untrained amateurs (2005: 2−5). These arguments illustrate precisely why policy analysis needs to be rescued from the policy analysts, just as Hart (Chapter 1.10) argues that economics needs to be freed from the myopia of economists. The same vision of policy analysis as a ‘science’, and the same flawed rational choice models based on assumptions about ‘rational actors’ producing predictable policy outcomes, also underlies the ‘efficient-market hypothesis’ of mainstream economics and modern finance. The anthropology of policy tries to go beyond ‘learning the tricks of the trade’ in order to step outside the box and explore how policies work in practice, the conditions that create and sustain them and the kinds of relations they produce.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO POLICY In contrast to these overly rationalistic and statist models of policy, anthropological approaches emphasize the contingency, fluidity and ‘messiness’ of policy processes.

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They highlight the fact that policies are not confined to texts; nor are they simply constraining, instrumental-rational rational forces imposed from above by some authoritative entity. Rather, policy is both productive and performative, a complex, creative process that produces new kinds of relationships, new spaces for exchange, and new kinds of subjectivity. But the process by which policies develop is often ambiguous and contested. What is anthropologically interesting about a particular policy is its genealogy and the contestations and negotiations involved in its formation. Anthropological accounts are also sensitive to the way people experience, interpret and engage with these policy processes and to what policies mean in different contexts. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz (1973: 5), we take the analysis of policy to be ‘not an experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning’. However, the analysis of any policy requires more than just thick description; we also need to examine the contexts in which policies are embedded, the work they perform and their preconditions and genealogies, and their effects. Understanding why certain policies ‘succeed’ or ‘fail’ also entails knowing something about the way they are experienced and interpreted by people whose lives they effect. What makes the State of the Union Address (or the Queen’s Speech) anthropologically significant is not only its content or language but also how people receive and interpret it, what they do with it and the way it effects their lives. Policies might therefore also be viewed as ‘condensed symbols’ and as ‘floating signifiers’; their meaning is cultural and defined by context. Rather than taking policy as an un-analysed given, anthropology asks: What does policy mean in this context? What work does it perform and what are its effects? How does this policy relate to other institutions and practices within the particular society? And what were the conditions that made this policy possible? An important starting point is the meaning and use of the term ‘policy’. Mention of

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policy usually brings to mind ‘public administration’, ‘government’ and politics – these being the standard dictionary definitions of the term. However, the semantics of the concept reveal some important secondary meanings. From the Greek polis (‘city’) to the Latin politia came two associated meanings: the first was ‘polity’ (meaning civil organization, form of government and constitution of the state), and the second, ‘policy’ (meaning the art, method or tactics of government; the method for regulating internal order (Partridge 1958: 509)). With the formation of Robert Peel’s ‘new police’ in 1829, this last constellation of meanings split: administration of internal order became a domain of ‘policing’, notionally separate from policy. The meaning of policy as ‘art of government’ has also changed. Initially a pejorative term associated with ‘stratagems’, ‘trickery’, ‘cunning’, ‘deceit’, and ‘hypocrisy’, policy has now been ‘made respectable’ (Pick 1988: 97) in its contemporary guise and is defined in more neutral terms as ‘a course of action adopted and pursued by a government, party, ruler’ or organization (Stevenson 2010). These semantics highlight two important points. First, if policy has become associated with the concepts of ‘government’ and ‘administration’, it also belongs to a semantic cluster that includes ‘policing’ and ‘polishing’ − or what we might rephrase as ‘disciplining’ and the art of ‘spin’. The second is that many languages have no word for ‘policy’ per se that distinguishes it from the broader field of politics (just as ‘economics’ was once deemed inseparable from ‘political-economy’, perhaps). We should therefore be wary of approaches that isolate these fields into discrete disciplinary boxes, thereby obscuring the inherently social and political nature of policy making.

ANTHROPOLOGY AS POLICY CRITIQUE: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE An early inspiration for a more analytical engagement with policy came from American

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anthropologist Laura Nader. In her seminal 1972 essay entitled ‘Up the Anthropologist’, Nader called upon anthropologists to ‘reinvent’ the discipline by ‘studying up’; i.e. shifting the traditional disciplinary focus on the poor, peripheral and marginalized peoples towards a critical examination of the dominant elites and ‘hidden hierarchies’ of corporate power that shape American society, which include not only the large financial corporations, bureaucracies and political agencies but also the ‘advertising, insurance, banking, realty or automobile industries’, legislative bodies, universities and professional organizations (Nader 1972: 292). Anthropologists have responded to Nader’s call in various ways, many by focusing on ‘experts’, elite actors and the professional or institutional spaces that they occupy, which has necessarily entailed a closer interest in policy matters. Notable examples include Karen Ho’s analysis of the world view of Wall Street investment bankers (2005) and Gillian Tett’s (2009) study of the ‘shadow bankers’ and ‘derivatives’ entrepreneurs who brought financial ruin to JP Morgan; studies of stock markets in Chicago (Zaloom 2006) and Shanghai (Hertz 1998); ethnographies of nuclear weapons scientists (Gusterson 1996; Masco 2004), US military bases (Lutz 2002a), biomedicine and new reproductive technologies (Franklin, Chapter 1.3; Strathern 1992), genetics laboratories and universities (Rabinow 1999; Strathern 2000); international courts (Riles 2006; Wilson 2001); the strategic choices of Japanese traders (Miyazaki 2006); global customs regimes (Chalfin 2006); economic policy makers in Mexico (Schwegler 2008); and the epistemic cultures of physicists and molecular biologists (Traweek 1988; Knorr-Cetina 1999). Others have sought to develop theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying the institutional cultures of elites (Marcus 1983; Shore and Nugent 2002), and to bring anthropology’s critical and reflexive gaze to bear on the seemingly opaque worlds of policy professionals (Lea 2008). However, while many of these works deal with policy

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matters or have opened up the ‘black boxes’ inhabited by policy professionals, none of them have sought to theorize the category of policy itself. The first systematic attempt to develop policy as a coherent field of anthropological research was Shore and Wright’s edited volume, Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (1997). The authors developed three main arguments here. The first was that policies are inherently anthropological phenomena and should be conceptualized as discursive formations through which larger-scale processes of social and historical change can be mapped. As they also noted, policies often occupy the same role as myth in traditional societies, providing ‘charters for action’, guides to behaviour and legitimating narratives for leaders and would-be rulers. Second, while policies can be conceptualized as a type of narrative or performance, they are also political technologies that serve to create new categories of subjectivity; for example, ‘citizens’, ‘taxpayers’, ‘criminals’, ‘immigrants’, or ‘pensioners’. Insofar as they become internalized, policies also work as ‘techniques of the self’. But as with most forms of power, policy typically disguises the mechanism of its own operation, either by seeking to naturalize its arbitrariness or by concealing the particularism and hidden interests that often underlie its formulation. The third argument entailed the implications of a focus on policy for anthropological methods. If policies are instruments of power, they also provide instruments for analysing the operation of power. Following the connections or webs of relations that policies create provides anthropologists with a framework that links local practices with wider events and processes. This is not so much a method for ‘studying up’ as for ‘studying through’ (Wright and Reinhold 2011) and engaging in ‘non-local ethnography’ (Feldman 2011): i.e. analysing how events, processes and actors intersect. This represents a significant improvement upon George

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Marcus’s (1995) ideas about ‘multi-sited ethnography’ because it provides both a method for exploring the connections between seemingly disparate nodes in a network of relations and a framework for contextualizing and conceptualizing that network − or ‘policy assemblage’. The methodological thrust of the essays assembled in Anthropology of Policy drew heavily on the work of Foucault (1991) and other ‘governmentality’ theorists. This is perhaps unsurprising given that these essays were written in the mid-1990s when policies of neoliberalization appeared to be spreading particularly throughout Western societies. Several chapters highlight this. For example, Emily Martin (1997) shows how leading American ‘blue chip’ corporations conceptualize – and seek to produce – the ideal modern manager, pointing out that these ideal qualities (including ‘impatience’, ‘self-managing’, ‘constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities’, etc.), bear strikingly similarities to people with attention-deficit disorder (ADD); and Susan Hyatt’s (1997) account of women on a northern England council estate during the 1980s Thatcherite reforms, who belatedly discovered that the ‘community empowerment’ programme that they had joined in order to improve their housing estate left them responsible for managing all its problems−while the state quietly withdrew its responsibility. These essays provide useful analyses of the shift from ‘government to governance’, which has been a hallmark of the neoliberal programme for ‘rolling back the state’ by withdrawing government funding for public services provision. They also show how the language of ‘community’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘participatory governance’ has been mobilized to mask what in effect has been an extension of state power. Hence, the oft-noted paradox that while neoliberalization and globalization appear to have left the nation-state increasingly bereft of sovereignty and ‘hollowed out’, the power of the state − if measured in terms of ‘state effects’ − has actually grown under neoliberalism

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(Mitchell 1999; Trouillot 2001; Khron-Hansen and Nustad 2005). Neoliberal governmentality also entails instilling habits of self-government and self-management; i.e. ‘techniques of the self’ that transform the passive ‘objects’ of state policy (i.e. individual workers, job-seekers, customers or patients) into active subjects of their own subjectification. Policy professionals and experts play a key role in this process as it is by ‘means of expertise, self-regulatory techniques can be installed in citizens that will align their personal choices with the ends of government’ (Miller and Rose 1992:188−189). Several ethnographies have ably documented this process of self-management and regulation. Governing through ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-help’ is analysed in Cruikshank’s (1999) ethnographical study of homeless people in Philadelphia which powerfully illustrates how liberal democracies increasingly use civic engagement and community participation as instruments to create neoliberal subjects. Similarly, David Mosse’s (2005) ethnography of an aid project in western India also ‘lifts the veil’ on the politics of civic participation. Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are driven less by policy goals of laying the groundwork for more grassroots participation as by the need to legitimize the organization’s interventions and to maintain its relationships.

BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM AND GOVERNMENTALITY: ACTORS, NETWORKS AND AGENCY Recent work within the anthropology of policy has both extended and advanced beyond these governmentality approaches. What unites this scholarship is a shared methodological concern to use policy as a window for examining wider shifts and transformations in contemporary political regimes and systems of governance. The fluidity of policy and the way certain strategically

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placed actors exploit or manipulate the opportunities created by government policy agendas is well illustrated in Janine Wedel’s book Collision and Collusion (1998). This ethnographic account of the failures of Western aid policy in Eastern Europe explains why so many dollars intended for post-Soviet reconstruction ended up financing the consultants, bureaucrats and politicians who brokered the introduction of the new Western economic and political systems in the former Soviet Union. Wedel’s second book, Shadow Elite (2009), uses insights from Eastern Europe to examine the neoconservative elite that flourished under the Bush administration, revealing how similar kinds of networks of entrepreneurial individuals (or ‘flex nets’) were able to shift between the public- and private-sector roles to exploit the new financial opportunities that arose from state policies aimed at encouraging privatization. Policy language has been a particularly important focus for political anthropologists and interpretive policy analysts (Yanow 1996). Alongside participant−observation, event analysis and extended case studies, critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis feature prominently in the anthropological methods used to interrogate policy. As a meta-narrative, policy shares many similarities with certain types of universalistic morality: both make appeals to abstract universalism and are underpinned by a set of cultural ideals. But unlike universalistic morality, policy typically represents itself as a rational and collectivist endeavour: i.e. pragmatic, efficient and geared towards serving the needs of the community, rather than the interests of particular individuals. This perception that policy can be removed from the domain of ethics or politics is typically achieved by mobilizing technical, scientific or commonsense language, which recasts political choices − often based on ideology − as purely pragmatic or technical acts based on science. This is well documented in ethnographic studies of bureaucracies, particularly universities, where the introduction of new systems of management and accountability

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has promoted the rise of what has been termed ‘audit culture’ (Power 1997; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000; Shore 2008) and other disciplinary regimes of governance (Wright 2008). Susan Greenhalgh’s ethnography Just One Child Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008) explores similar processes in a nonWestern context. Drawing on concepts from actor−network theory, Greenhalgh shows how a group of aerospace missile engineers came to dominate the policy agenda as purveyors of the one ‘true’ science that could successfully resolve China’s population crisis during the 1980s. Their cultural capital as defence specialists enabled them to define authoritatively both the policy problem itself and the correct action (or ‘policy assemblage’) for its solution. The way policies travel and the processes or inscription and translation that occur as they move from one context to another are often more than simply matters of ‘policy transfer’ or ‘path dependency’. By bringing together assemblages of ideas, institutions and practices, policies construct new networks of relations and new domains of action and meaning. From a theoretical perspective, policy can thus be conceptualized as an actant: an object in a network which, although ‘silent and invisible’, nevertheless ‘acts or shifts actions’ and performs tasks (Akrich and Latour 1999: 259; Callon 2002: 63). Policies are thus cultural ‘agents’ as well as ‘artefacts’ and their effects may escape the designs and intentions of their authors (assuming a ‘policy author’ exists): i.e. once created, policies enter into complex relations with other actors and agents and these entanglements have unanticipated consequences. For example, the rise of ‘insider dealing’ and the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001 were logical outcomes of post-1980s policies aimed at deregulating financial markets. To echo Appadurai (1986), policies, like material objects, have complex ‘social lives’. The spread of New Public Management or the translation into policy of the ‘broken windows’ theory and policies of ‘zero tolerance’

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for crime exemplify this, as do other successful policies, including the rise of the German manufacturing industry after 1945 or the eradication of violent crime in New York since the 1980s. To analyse the work of policy, it is therefore important to reflect on their biographies and the dynamics surrounding their translation and migration across cultural boundaries. Another important contribution to the anthropology of policy has been in the study of nation-building and policies aimed at forging citizenship. This is exemplified in Feldman’s (2005) account of statecraft in Estonia and his analysis of the way the government in post-Soviet Estonia forged a new national imaginary that legitimized the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era Russian speakers. The strategic mobilization of culture and communication policies has been analysed in other contexts, including the European Commission, which, since the 1980s, has sought to legitimate the European Union (EU) project through ‘Europeanization’ initiatives aimed at forging a post-national European identity (Borneman and Fowler 1997; Shore 2000). These are other important research areas where the anthropology of policy intersects with the study of language, political symbolism and state formation. Although it is important to recognize the agency of policy, the agency of individuals and communities should not be overlooked. Much of the policy literature has tended to assume that subjects are passively constructed by policies and that policy bears down upon individuals like an immutable force majeure or, in the case of governmentality approaches, works upon the agency of individuals so that they regulate and police themselves in alignment with the aims of their political rulers. However, more recent anthropological contributions have focused explicitly on how people negotiate and contest policy. Examples include Però’s (2007) study of local political activism among immigrant groups in Italy and Flyvbjerg’s (1998) ethnography of grassroots democracy in Denmark. These studies recall James Scott’s (1985) work on ‘weapons

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of the weak’ and peasant strategies of resistance to state power. Whereas neoliberal policies seek to govern subjects by aligning the agency of individuals with the norms of the policy makers, subaltern groups sometimes ‘refuse to “know their place”’ (Clarke 2005: 460) and successfully challenge the terms that policies attempt to foist upon them.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MILITARISM Resistance to regimes of governance raises broader issues of hegemony and subordination and the question of why certain policies appear so effective in mobilizing populations and promoting new forms of governance. The post-9/11 US policy of ‘homeland security’ provides a good illustration of how an anthropology of policy approach can shed light onto these wider political processes and systems of governance. The al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center created a ‘state of emergency’ which provided the Bush administration with the justification it needed to enact sweeping changes to the US legal system. These reforms massively increased the power of the executive while eroding civil liberties and violating several amendments of the constitution (Jackson and Towle 2006: 144). Just six weeks after the 9/11 attack, a panicked Congress passed the hastily drafted and highly draconian antiterrorism bill titled the ‘USA PATRIOT Act’ (or ‘Uniting and Protecting America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’). This Act, with its cynical play on the themes of nationhood, security and patriotism, dramatically revised the nation’s surveillance and detention laws, giving unprecedented powers to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on American citizens and detain suspected terrorists. It simultaneously reduced the legal fire-walls, accountability mechanisms and checks and balances on government power that had been erected after the Watergate scandal. Senators and Congressmen were

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given virtually no opportunity to read the lengthy bill before being asked to vote on it. The Bush administration implied that members who voted against it were ‘un-patriotic’ and would be blamed for any further attacks. This was a powerful sanction at a time when a second attack was expected to follow at any moment and when reports of letters bearing anthrax were appearing daily. The language in which the PATRIOT Act was presented to the American public is particularly significant. While the dominant discourse was national security and the threat by terrorists who, in the words of George Bush (2001), ‘recognize no barrier of morality’, ‘have no conscience’ and ‘cannot be reasoned with’, the policy narrative was filled with metaphors of ‘danger’, ‘the urgency of a nation at war’ and the need to ‘bring down walls’ between intelligence-gathering and law enforcement. A recurring motif in the discourse of the US government was that these measures were ‘necessary tools’ to enable ‘our nation’s law enforcement, national defense and intelligence personnel’ to ‘bring terrorists and other dangerous criminals to justice’ (US Department of Justice 2004: 1). The Act was followed in November 2001 by the signing of a presidential directive authorizing trials of suspected terrorists and their collaborators in military tribunals rather than the courts. ‘Bringing terrorists to justice’ thus translated into a curious form of military justice involving detention without trial, ‘extraordinary rendition’ of foreign nationals and holding suspects in ‘legal black holes’ like Guantanamo Bay – all of which violated human rights and the norms of international law. Following the bombing of Afghanistan and the military assault on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in the Tora Bora caves, Bush delivered his 2002 State of the Union address in which he coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’ and warned that the United States would not permit dangerous regimes in the world to threaten America with ‘weapons of mass destruction’. This provided a foundation for two further key policy developments.

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The first policy was the announcement in June 2002 of the new US defence doctrine of ‘pre-emption’ (the right to inflict military strikes on any country suspected of harbouring terrorists). The second policy was the signing into law in November of a bill creating a unified ‘Department of Homeland Security’, which entailed the largest reorganization of federal government in over half a century. Born from the post-9/11 climate of insecurity, these two policy initiatives came to define the United States during the Bush era (Besterman and Gusterson 2010). These events surrounding the creation of the US ‘state of exception’ are well contextualized in the ‘anthropology of militarism’ literature. The study of militarism, I argue, represents one of the latest and perhaps most innovative developments within the fields of political anthropology and the anthropology of policy. Militarism is one of the most influential cultural forces of our time, drawing together a powerful nexus of institutions, money, power and influence. Like policy, militarism raises awkward questions regarding anthropologists’ own entanglements with government. Just as militarism continues to violently shape the international order through the so-called War on Terror, it is also having a profound effect on democracy and civil liberties through the impact of the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Bill. But, beyond this, militarism is reshaping virtually every sphere of American culture, from education, science, technology, research and economics, to politics, the judiciary, the media and popular culture. Michael Geyer (1989: 79) defines militarization as ‘the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence’. It entails not only increasing allocation of resources for military purposes but also the re-organization of non-military systems and institutions in line with military goals and values. Militarism thus represents a societal and discursive process in which martial values influence the political sphere and drive social change (Lutz

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2002b: 725). Militarism reshapes norms to legitimate the use of force as a tool of government, the presence of large permanent standing armies and the allocation of tax revenue to pay for them. It is intimately connected with the centralization of state power. But, as Lutz illustrates with her ethnography of Fayetteville, a city near Fort Bragg military base, militarism has contradictory effects and brings high social costs, including inequality, ‘apartheid-like conditions’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘environmental devastation around the bases at home and abroad’ (Lutz 2002b: 729). It also has more subtle effects, including the ‘deformation of human potentials’ into ‘hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality’ and the rewriting of national histories in ways that ‘glorify and legitimate military action’ (Lutz 2002b: 723). As Gusterson (2007: 164) concurs, militarism redefines masculinity and sexuality and glorifies war by creating a ‘degraded popular culture saturated with racial and nationalist stereotypes, aestheticized destruction, and images of violent hypomasculinity’. Over 50 years ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills warned that the US ‘industrial-military complex’ and its corporate power were creating a ‘military definition of reality’ (1956: 191). That trend has continued, particularly through the US film industry and media; films and television series such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Pacific create a powerful nostalgia and desire for war, encouraging the view that ‘war makes men, grants freedom to the nation and a kind of supercitizenship to those who wage it’ (Lutz 2002b: 724). The impact of US militarism can be measured in financial as well as cultural terms. Despite an acute budget deficit gripping the US economy, the estimated military expenditure in 2008 exceeded US$1 trillion (Lutz 2010: 46) – a sum six times larger than any other military in the world (SIPRI 2008). The United States also ranks as the world’s largest arms manufacturer and dealer, with sales for 2006 alone totalling US$123.54 billion,

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some five time higher than the next five major arms suppliers combined (Sharp 2008). All this money is mobilized to sustain the hegemonic military ideal that ‘war is human nature and violence has the power to get things done’ (Lutz 2010: 55). The military is also the largest employer in the United States, with a workforce of 2.3 million soldiers and 700,000 civilians and millions more receiving defence-related contracts (Lutz 2010: 47). Some 5% of the US workforce is thus directly or indirectly employed by the military and fully one quarter of all US scientists and technicians work on military contracts (Lutz ibid). According to a two-year investigation by the Washington Post, the massive US intelligence community created in response to the 9/11 attacks has now become so inefficient, unmanageable and extensive that no-one knows its exact costs or size (Priest and Arkin 2010). Among its discoveries, the Washington Post investigation found: 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programmes related to counterintelligence, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States; an estimated 854,000 people who hold top-secret security clearances (a population one-and-a-half times that of Washington), and who publish between them over 50,000 reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are either under construction or have been built since 2002, amounting to some 17 million square feet of space – the equivalent of three Pentagons (Priest and Arkin 2010). If this illustrates how militarism is reshaping the US system of government, it also reminds us of how policies work to construct new communities of practice and new social worlds. (Shore and Wright 2011). The distorting effect of militarization is also evident within US universities (Giroux 2008). Since 9/11, the US army has actively sought to recruit anthropologists for its war

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on terror, particularly its Human Terrain System (HTS) project in Iraq and Afghanistan (Price 2007). Some anthropologists have responded to this call by arguing that ‘cultural knowledge of adversaries should be considered a national priority’ (McFate 2004: 43). Montgomery McFate, who defines anthropology as ‘a discipline invented to support war fighting in the tribal zones’ (2004: 43, 2005: 24), even wrote part of the US Army’s 2006 counterinsurgency manual (‘FM 3-24’). For a discipline more commonly aligned with social critique, this attempt to co-opt anthropology to serve the CIA and the Pentagon has raised a heated debate over professional ethics and the uses of anthropological knowledge (AAA 2007; Gonzales 2007; Gusterson 2007; McFate 2007; Price 2007, 2010).

POLICY AS A CRITICAL MIRROR: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE WAR ON TERROR The US War on Terror provides an important test case both for the anthropology of policy and the study of human rights (Wilson 2005; Riles 2006). It also offers a critical mirror that takes seriously Nader’s call for anthropology to ‘study up’ by examining the hidden hierarchies in our own societies. Lutz’s ethnography of the effects of militarism in Fayetteville does this. Her study is offered as a microcosm of the process of militarization in America, showing us the social impact on the city’s inhabitants and what happens in a society in which people are organized for the production of institutionalized violence. It is precisely because the term ‘militarism’ is rarely applied to the United States that its military hegemony is hard to identity. The US PATRIOT Act provides another microcosm: this time, of the way that regimes of power are discursively constructed and maintained, and how symbolism, oratory and rhetoric are mobilized to

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create new subjects of power. As Wedel et al. observe (2005: 47): Like policy in general, the PATRIOT Act binds together a wide variety of actors, institutions, and agendas in new and ambiguous relationships. Actors with the legal, political, or institutional leverage can ‘clarify’ these relationships by appealing to the discourses that dominate the current political climate. ‘National security’ is perhaps the foremost discourse of the American present, and it manifests itself in myriad ways in the practice of daily life as well as in the way it is woven into the fabric of public policy.

The threat to national security successfully mobilized public support both for and against direct military action in foreign conflicts, but these actions have paradoxically contributed to the growing terrorist risk and have made Americans feel less secure (Besterman and Gusterson 2010: 14). The phrase War on Terror itself contains a fundamental paradox. As Nelson (2003: 21) observes, ‘terror is not a thing but a relationship’ (my emphasis). It is far from clear how one can wage war on something as abstract as a relationship − but perhaps that is precisely the point: War on Terror serves a multitude of political and military goals. Policies are tools of government, political technologies and floating signifiers. An important challenge for anthropology, beyond analysing the work of policy and the meanings that policies hold, is to develop alternative analytical frameworks for interpreting policies and analysing the regimes of truth that they create. An example of such a challenge is Mahmood Mamdani’s (2002) article ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on the Culture of Terrorism’. Mamdani offers a more historically contextualized account of the link between Islam and terrorism in post9/11 Western discourse by exploring the processes of meaning-making and identity formation of those who grew up in the refugee camps of Afghanistan. The Iranian revolution of 1979, he notes, was a turning point for US foreign policy. The Reagan administration aimed to expand the pro-US Islamic lobby and isolate Iran – both of which were

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important to the wider goal of intensifying its Cold War with the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, its strategy was to unite Muslims in a holy war against the Soviet Union. The US government therefore trained, equipped and financed the neofundamentalist mujahidin and al-Qaeda. This was to be the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA, which ‘in the fiscal year of 1987 alone amounted to 660 million dollars’ (Mamdani 2002: 771). The Taliban was a movement born across the border with Pakistan that grew from the dislocation and brutalization caused by the US war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban become progressively radicalized and militarized through the raids and atrocities of the mujahidin. ‘Simply put, after the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet’ (Mamdani 2002: 769). But this policy had a further twist. To fund this massive covert operation, the CIA used the drugs trade − just as it had previously done for its operations in Nicaragua. The effect was to turn the Pakistan−Afghanistan border into ‘the world’s top heroin producer, supplying some 60% of US demand’, and raising heroin addiction in Pakistan from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985 (Mamdani 2002: 771. Mandani thus offers an alternative anthropologically informed reading of the War on Terror, one that calls on political leaders in the United States and Britain to ‘face up to the relationship between their own policies and contemporary terrorism’ (Mamdani 2002: 773).

CONCLUSION Policies reflect ways of thinking about the world and acting upon it. They contain implicit models of social organization and visions of how individuals should relate to society and to each other. They can therefore be analysed as charters for actions and condensed symbols – or blueprints − that reflect

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key elements of the wider cultural systems in which they are embedded. But if policies are performative and instrumental, they are also inherently political; the quintessential tools of government and technologies of governance. They are the vehicles through which institutions seek to act upon the world and to manage, regulate or change society. Policies are therefore concerned with the imposition of order and coherence on the world; they express a ‘will to power’. However, to describe policies as instrumental should not be taken to mean they are devoid of symbolism and meaning or that they are necessarily ‘rational’ in the conventional positivistic and predictable sense of the term. As the case of the US Homeland Security Policy illustrates, policies have complex ‘social lives’ that often produce irrational and contradictory consequences and set in motion perverse runaway effects. The anthropology of policy has become an increasingly significant and coherent sub-field of anthropology, but it is still developing. More ethnographies and case studies are needed to develop this field, but anthropological work on bureaucracy, the state, elites, militarism and systems of governance are indicative of its challenges and potential. The interface between anthropology and policy studies offers exciting possibilities, notwithstanding the methodological and epistemological differences that may divide these disciplines. Anthropology’s main contribution to the study of policy has been to show how policy processes are embedded in larger social systems, how policies connect with processes of meaning-making and subjectivity and how policies ‘work’ in a political and symbolic sense. Similarly, policy’s contribution to anthropology has been to open up rich new fields of study that not only connect anthropology to other disciplinary concerns but also to wider public debates. The study of policy places demands on anthropology which are potentially transformative for the discipline. Policy also offers ‘an ideal venue for examining the grounding of global processes’ in our increasingly mobile and

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transnational world (Wedel and Feldman 2005: 1). Anthropology was traditionally associated with the study of poor, colonized and marginalized people: a policy perspective takes seriously Nader’s call to ‘study up’ and provides a methodology for redirecting anthropology’s analytical gaze towards the rich, the colonizers and the powerful.

REFERENCES AAA (American Anthropological Association) (2007) Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities. Report: November 2007. http://www.aaanet.org/ pdf/FINAL_Report_Complete.pdf Akrich, Madeleine and Latour, Bruno (1999) ‘A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Appadurai, Arjun, (ed) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Besterman, Catherine and Gusterson, Hugh (2010) ‘Introduction’, in H. Gusterson, and C. Besterman (eds) The Insecure American: How we got here and what we Should do about it. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Borneman, J. and Fowler, N. (1997) ‘Europeanization’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 487−514. Bush, George W. (2001) ‘Remarks by the President at Signing of the Patriot Act’ (Press Release), 26 October 2001. www.whitehouse.gov/news.releases/ 2001/10/print/20011026-5.html [Last accessed 21/12/2005]. Callon, Michel (2002) ‘Actor−Network Theory’, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier/Science Direct, pp. 62−66. Chalfin, B. (2006) ‘Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the anthropology of the state’, Current Anthropology, 47(2): 243−244. Clarke, John. (2005) ‘New Labour’s citizens: Activated, empowered, responsibilized, abandoned?’, Critical Social Policy 25(4): 447−463. Cochrane, G. (1980) ‘Policy Studies and Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 21(4): 445−458. Colebatch, Hal, Hoppe Rob and Noordegraaf Mirko (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Hal Colebatch, Rob Hoppe and Mirko Noordegraaf (eds) Working for Policy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Cruikshank, Barbara (1999) The Will to Empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. DeLeon, Peter and Martell, Christine (1996) ‘The Policy Sciences: Past, present, and future’, in B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds) Handbook of Public Policy. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, pp. 31−47. Dye, Thomas, R. (1972) Understanding Public Policy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Evans-Pritchard, E. (1951) Social Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Feldman, Gregory (2005) ‘Culture, State, and Security in Europe: The case of citizenship and integration in Estonia’, American Ethnologist, 32(4): 676−695. Feldman, Gregory (2007) ‘Following or Facing the Governmental Gaze: Academic and policy intellectuals in the early twenty-first century,’ Roundtable, Conference of the Canadian Anthropological Society−American Ethnological Society, University of Toronto, May 8−12, 2007. Feldman, Gregory (2011) ‘Illuminating the Apparatus: Steps toward a nonlocal ethnography of global governance’, in C. Shore, S. Wright and D. Però (eds), Policy Worlds. Oxford: Berghahn. Firth, Raymond (1981) ‘Engagement and Detachment: Reflections on applying Social anthropology to social affairs’, Human Organisation, 40:193–201. Fischer, F. (2003) Reframing Public Policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, Frank and Forester, John (eds) (1993) The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Flyvbjerg, Bent (1998) Rationality and Power: Democracy in practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (1991) ‘Governmentality’, I G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87−104. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geva-May, Iris (ed.) (2005) Thinking Like a Policy Analyst. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Geyer, M. (1989) ‘The Militarization of Europe, 1914−1945’, in J. Gillies (ed.), The Militarization of the Western World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Giroux, Henry (2008) ‘The Militarization of US Higher Education after 9/11’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(5): 56−82. Gonzalez, Roberto (2007) ‘Towards Mercenary Anthropology? The New US Army Counterinsurgency

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Manual FM-24 and the Military−Anthropology Complex’, Anthropology Today, 23(3): 14−19. Gottweis, H. (2006) ‘Argumentative Policy Analysis’, in B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds) Handbook of Public Policy. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, pp. 461−479. Greenhalgh, Susan. (2008) Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gusterson, Hugh (2007) ‘Anthropology and Militarism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 36: 155−175. Hertz, Ellen, (1998) The Trading Crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ho, Karen (2005) ‘Situating Global Capitalisms: A view from Wall Street investment banks’, Cultural Anthropology, 20(1): 68−96. Hyatt, Susan B. (1997) ‘Poverty in a “Post-welfare” landscape: Tenant management policies, selfgovernance and the democratization of knowledge in Great Britain’, in C. Shore and S. Wright (eds) Anthropology of Policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power, London: Routledge, pp.166–182. Jackson, Robert and Towle, Philip (2006) Temptations of Power: The United States in global politics after 9/11. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Khron-Hansen, Christian and Nustad, Knut (eds) (2005) State Formation: Anthropological perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How Science Makes Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lea, Tess (2008) Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous health in Northern Australia. Sydney, NSW: UNSW Press. Lutz, Catherine (2002a) Homefront: A military city and the American twentieth century. Boston, MA: Beacon. Lutz, Catherine (2002b) ‘Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the current crisis’, American Anthropologist, 104: 723−735. Lutz, Catherine (2010) ‘Warmaking as the American Way of Life’, in H. Gusterson, and C. Besterman (eds) The Insecure American. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mamdani, Mahmood (2002) ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A political perspective on culture and terrorism’ American Anthropologist, 104(3): 766−775. Marcus, George (1983) Elites: Ethnographic issues. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Marcus, George (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95−117.

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Martin, Emily (1997) ‘Managing Americans: Policy and changes in the meanings of work and the self’, in C. Shore and S, Wright (eds) Anthropology of Policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. London: Routledge, pp. 239–260. Masco, J. (2004) ‘Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos’, American Ethnologist, 31(3): 349−373. McFate, Montgomery (2004) ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, Joint Forces Quarterly, 38: 42–48. Available at http://www.dtic. mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1038.pdf McFate, Montgomery (2005) ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The strange story of their curious relationship’, Military Review, 85(2): 24−38. Available at; http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ milreview/mcfate.pdf McFate, Montgomery (2007) ‘Building Bridges or Burning Heretics’, Anthropology Today, 23(3): 21. Miller, Peter and Rose, Nikolas (1992) ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2): 173−205. Mitchell, Timothy (1999) ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.) State/Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 76−97. Moran, Michael, Rein ,Martin and Goodin, Robert (eds) (2006) The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mosse, David, (2005) Cultivating Development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu, (2006) ‘Economy of Dreams: Hope in global capitalism and its critiques’, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, 21(2): 147−172. Nader, Laura, (1972) ‘Up the Anthropologist – perspectives gained from studying up’, in D. Hymes (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Random House. Nelson, Diane, (2003) ‘Relating to Terror: Gender, anthropology, law, and some September elevenths’, Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, 10: 195−210. Partridge, Eric (1958) Origins. A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Però, Davide (2007) Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices: Left-wing politics and migrants in Italy. Oxford: Berghahn. Peters, B. Guy and Pierre, Jon, (2006) ‘Introduction’, in B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds) Handbook of Public Policy. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Pick, John (1988) The Arts in a State. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

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Public Policy’. In The Use and Usefulness of the Social Sciences: Achievement, disappointments, and promise, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 600(1): 30−51. Willner, D. (1980) ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: Anthropologists advising on public policy’, American Anthropologist, 82(1): 79−94. Wilson, Richard, (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Richard (ed), (2005) Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Susan (2008) ‘Governance as a Regime of Discipline’, in N. Dyck (ed.) Exploring Regimes of Discipline: The dynamics of restraint. Oxford: Berghahn. Wright, Susan and Reinhold, Susan (2011) ‘“Studying Through”: A strategy for studying political transformation’, in C. Shore, S. Wright and D. Però (eds) Policy Worlds. Oxford: Berghahn. Wright Mills, C. (1956) The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yanow, Dvora (1996) How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Yanow, Dvora (2000) Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Yanow, Dvora (2011) ‘Afterword: A policy ethnographer’s reading of policy anthropology’, in C. Shore, S. Wright and D. Però, (eds) Policy Worlds. Oxford: Berghahn. Yanow, Dvora and Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine (eds) (2006) Interpretation and Method: Empirical research methods and the interpretive turn. Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe. Zaloom, Caitlin (2006) ‘Ambiguous Numbers: Trading technologies and interpretation in fFinancial markets’, American Ethnologist, 30: 258−272.

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1.7 Anthropology and Law Sally Engle Merry

The anthropology of law is a rapidly developing field that is in ongoing dialogue with the legal academy and socio-legal studies. This chapter charts five areas of particularly rapid and significant growth since the 1980s. The first is the development of concepts of legal culture, legal consciousness, and law in everyday life. As legal anthropology expanded from an analysis of legal institutions such as courts, moots, or dispute processing centres to the study of how ordinary people use law in their normal lives, it raised questions about how people think about law outside these institutions and why they do or do not comply with the law. This leads to questions about what categories and identities law constructs for people and how these categories shape people’s conception of themselves and others. Consequently, the field moved from viewing law as a mechanism of social control to recognizing its capacity to shape culture and consciousness. While constituting identities, law also defines the legality of space and time, such as in the creation of private property and curfews. This constitutive approach to the interaction between law and social life considers both the way law shapes society and how society, in the form of social practices, norms, and inequalities, shapes legal institutions. A second area of growth is the expansion of the legal pluralism concept from colonial

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contexts to global ones. Originally developed to understand the duality of law created by the imposition of European law on colonized spaces, the concept of legal pluralism is now used to analyse a variety of modern phenomena such as multicultural societies produced by migration, ‘project law’ created in development programmes (Weilenmann 2005; Rottenburg 2009), and the overlapping of legal mechanisms of international law. Human rights and transitional justice are a third area of increasing anthropological attention. After the 1990s, anthropology shifted from debates between universalism and relativism in human rights to questions about how human rights ideas work in practice. Recent ethnographic work explored how transitional justice works in practice in various locales. A fourth recently developing field of legal anthropology focuses on quantification in global governance of law. This shift requires scientific techniques of measurement and quantification such as indexes and indicators to elucidate such technologies of law as documents and forms. These new sets of questions and fields of research require the fifth area: methodologies that are deeply ethnographic, global, and attentive to meaning and social relationships in context. Such techniques are located on different scales that move horizontally across national borders as well as vertically among

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local, national, regional, and international domains. This chapter concludes with an overview of contemporary methodologies that address phenomena at multiple scales and locations and the ensuing difficulties of translation and vernacularization. In sum, this essay addresses these five areas: law and everyday life, legal pluralism, human rights and transitional justice, legal technologies, and multi-scalar methodologies.

LAW AND EVERYDAY LIFE, LEGAL CULTURE, AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS A major development in the contemporary anthropology of law is an expansion of the space in which law has effects beyond legal institutions. The field moved from examining the role of law as exercised by legal institutions to exploring law’s role in everyday life (Sarat and Kearns 1994), and especially how the law is embedded in everyday interactions, arrangements, and identities. In this domain, law has both an ideological and enforcing role, rendering existing social hierarchies and processes for resolving conflicts natural and even hegemonic (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). Law constructs identities which are often naturalized, while serving important regulatory functions, such as creating certain identities including those of the citizen, illegal immigrant, and those of race and gender (French 2009). Research in this area considers the role of citizenship and undocumented status, along with struggles to acquire the papers that make a person a citizen. Susan Coutin, for example, describes the situation of undocumented immigrants as people who disappear (2000, 2007). Barbara Yngvesson’s work explores how documents such as the birth registration forms erase the birth mothers of adoptive children (1997, 2002, 2010). Yngvesson and Coutin have compared the role of documents and identities in adoption and deportation processes (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). Similarly, law defines spaces and times by prohibiting activities geographically and

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temporally (Blomley et al. 2001). For example, regulation of smoking and alcohol consumption focuses on the space and time in which activities are permitted rather than the activities themselves (Valverde 1998). Similarly, regulation of neighbourhoods depends on demarcation of space through gates and walls (Low 2004). Racial discrimination in the United States in the early twentieth century relied on spatial forms of exclusion, designating public areas as reserved for Whites. Tobias Kelly’s study of the regulation of persons and space in Palestine demonstrates the extent to which control of persons works through the regulation of space (2004, 2009), thus providing insights into how the legal regulation of space reinforced racial identities. The shift to examining law in everyday life sparked new theories of legal culture. In the early 1980s, Clifford Geertz suggested a cultural approach to law, arguing that law is not just a bounded set of norms, rules, and principles, but a frame that elucidates the world; ‘part of a distinctive way of imagining the real’ (1983: 184). In his interpretive theory, culture is a system of meaning, incorporating symbols both shared and public that constitute, communicate, and alter structures of meaning in law as well as in other domains of social life (1983: 182). Geertz advocates a hermeneutic approach rather than a functional one, arguing that ‘meaning, not machinery’ is the fundamental problem (1983). In Geertz’s concept of legal culture, law is a set of cultural principles and categories crystallized into legal concepts (see Rosen 1989, 2006). To compare Islamic, Indic, and customary adat law in Indonesia, for example, he evokes culture by using key terms as avenues to explore systems of thinking and practice. His analysis is based not on behaviour but on cultural categories embodied in key terms (Geertz 1983: 183). Similarly, to analyse how lower courts address day-to-day social problems, Geertz focuses on how the court interprets with its particular ‘legal sensibility’ enshrined in the judicial forum (1983). Law is local knowledge: ‘vernacular

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characterizations of what happens connected to vernacular imaginings of what can’ (1983: 215). Geertz’s work explores meaning’s fundamental categories embedded in law and culture. There are, however, at least four other theories about the meaning of legal culture. One common approach, the analysis of legal mobilization, focuses on when and how often problems are defined as legal. It describes the tendency of various individuals and groups to define their problems as legal and take them to the courts. Research on dispute processes shows that not all problems are thought of as legal issues, nor do those who think their problems are legal necessarily take them to the legal system. Research explores when and why a person comes to see an experience as injurious and under what conditions that problem is brought to the attention of the legal system (Felstiner et al. 1981; Merry 1990). Some problems are more readily defined as legal than others and some groups are less enthusiastic about thinking about their problems as legal than others. For example, in her study of a Southern Baptist community, Carol Greenhouse found a religiously based reluctance to see problems as legal and take them to court (1989). Social movements also may mobilize legal arguments, both at the domestic level via civil rights and at the international level through human rights (McCann 1994; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Merry et al. 2010). Social movements may use law directly in litigation strategies, or more subtlety as common ground for building alliances. The movement opposing violence against women is based on redefining forms of violence as a crime rather than as a mere form of marital discipline (Hautzinger 2007; Lazarus-Black 2007; Merry 2009). Even in the absence of litigation, rights concepts inspire activists, contributing to the use of law ‘from below’ (Rajagopal 2005; Rodriguez-Garavito 2005; Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). Individuals who frequently resort to legal strategies for dealing with problems may be labelled litigious, with the implicit normative

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judgement that they use law too often. Sometimes entire societies are labelled ‘overly litigious’, implying that ‘excessive’ patterns of legal mobilization are so widespread that the whole society can be characterized as overeager to turn to legal remedies. Yet, research shows that even possessors of legal rights are relatively reluctant to assert them, whether to deal with street harassment (Nielsen 2000, 2006) or disabilities (Engel and Munger 2003). A second interpretation explores legal culture by describing the norms of operation in specific legal institutions such as internal court culture, lawyer’s offices, and WTO dispute mechanisms. Legal ideas about evidence, case-handling, and procedural routine affect decision-making and the daily operation of legal institutions. The culture of legal institutions is shaped by structural characteristics, such as how people in positions of power acquired their positions, were trained, and understand the legal process. Their implicit judgements about gender, class, and race establish cultural codes and ways of doing things. A third dimension of legal culture is legal consciousness, which describes how individuals experience and understand the law and its relevance to their lives. It builds on shared understandings embedded in local or national culture, while being inflected by the individual’s experience with the legal system. The person who feels entitled to use the law will probably develop a different legal consciousness than the person who is ignored or finds her claims belittled (Merry 2003). Legal consciousness, in other words, is acquired as part of an individual’s cultural repertoire but can change with experience, particularly that of the legal system. For example, the US battered women’s movement emphasizes to those who have experienced violence that they have the right to not be hit, regardless of their own actions, and that they can appeal to the state for help. For women who find the police and the courts supportive, these ideas may become part of their legal consciousness, but for those who

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find little encouragement in the law, their legal consciousness may remain sceptical. Consciousness of legal entitlement requires positive reinforcement from the legal system; despite significant efforts to teach people that they have human rights, without positive feedback from the legal system, results disintegrate. Legal consciousness also relates to ideas about who is entitled to make a claim from the state. What does it mean to be a citizen? Who has this status? Are there cultural dimensions to it? Citizenship is a legal status, but it is also a social one, linked specifically to entitlement from the state and legal system. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey argue that legal consciousness refers to a limited set of notions that ordinary Americans have about the law: ‘before the law,’ ‘with the law,’ and ‘against the law’ (1998). These three distinct schemas − cognitive maps through which individuals see themselves in the world − clarify how the law works in relation to the self. A fourth way of conceptualizing legal culture is as legal ideology derived from work by Marx and Gramsci. Legal ideology describes a set of ideas by which a system is legitimated and justified, generating some level of consent by the governed that ranges from acceptance to support, depending on the legitimacy of the system. In this framework, law is relatively autonomous. Although the legal system reflects the interests of those in power, it is somewhat insulated since it follows its own internal rules and procedures. Law has a relatively autonomous relationship with economic and political power, which it supports and naturalizes since legal ideology makes inequalities seem normal. Anthropological work on legal ideology examines forms of hegemony exercised by law, both through explicit power and through the capacity to shape ways of thinking. This tradition examines the role of law as a mode of appropriating resources (Mattei and Nader 2008) and focuses on the way law creates hegemonies and constitutes a site of resistance (Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994).

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In sum, as the study of law has moved from a focus on legal institutions to the analysis of law in everyday life, its role in constituting identities, space, cultural practices, and in naturalizing and legitimating relations of power has moved to the centre of anthropological scholarship on law.

LEGAL PLURALISM, COLONIALISM, AND GLOBAL LEGAL PLURALISM Analysing the plurality and intersections of legal systems is a major contribution of anthropological scholarship on law. Ethnographic studies in villages, cities, bureaucracies, and many other locations reveal how multiple forms of order coexist in the same social space. Legal pluralism research explores both the nature of each legal system and its intersections with others, although the constituent units for comparison are sometimes disputed (Merry 1988; Roberts 1998; K. Benda-Beckmann 2001; F. BendaBeckmann 2002). Global, regional, national, and local legal systems, such as international law, European Union (EU) law, national law, and local regulations, are layered on top of informal modes of ordering in families, communities, and workplaces. Forms of normative ordering exist outside state law in virtually all societies. Some are based in institutions such as universities or corporations as private law (Macaulay 1963) and some govern social life in more informal ways. Whereas early research on legal pluralism determined that relatively separate legal systems coexist, as in the dual legal systems of British colonies, Sally Falk Moore’s notion of the ‘semi-autonomous social field’ argues that additional regulatory subgroups exist in industrial societies (1973). Rather than seeing plural legal systems as circumscribed and bounded, she argued that they are semiautonomous, operating within other social fields but not entirely governed by them. This plurality grew with late twentiethcentury globalization of labour and capital,

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along with expansion of international regulation and governance. A recent collection focuses on the mobility of law and legal actors and its implications for legal pluralism, examining migrants, legal transplants, and dimensions of mobile law (see BendaBeckmann et al. 2005). Burgeoning transborder movements of people, capital, ideas, and products triggered new regulatory systems. Global legal regimes such as human rights, women’s rights, and indigenous rights emerged, along with mechanisms regulating circulation of intellectual property, trafficked persons, and illegal migrants. Globalization produced new legal orders such as the human rights system, and fostered new kinds of interactions between local and global legal orders. Transnational legal regulations fracture the nation-state and support the demand for autonomous local legalities. Native self-determination − the assertion of a separate legal system and identity − is often framed in terms of international law (Jackson 2007; Speed 2008). Yet, claims for self-determination confront the struggles of postcolonial states to unify their legal systems and crush localisms. Thus, this new pluralism represents a shift from the centrality of the state as the source of legal ordering. The creation of the modern state involved efforts to capture and control disputing processes, to extinguish local forms and develop uniformity, but there is always a tension and some resistance to this capture in the form of legalities that are not within state control. Within this new pluralization of law and heightened contest between local and global orders, sovereignty emerges as an increasingly complex phenomenon, constrained by multilateral treaties and engagements. The contested dominance of state law contributes to the appearance of the state as weakening. Current challenges to state sovereignty include assertions of autonomous legality connected to the definition of the group as a people. Ethnonational movements such as those of indigenous peoples increasingly skip the nation-state and directly utilize international law to contest state policies (see Cowan et al. 2001). For example, the UN General Assembly

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passed a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 after decades of political mobilization. Here, indigenous peoples drew on international law to make claims for self-determination. Sovereignty is also contested by transnational systems of law such as the human rights regime, which handles some of the protections of citizens previously relegated to state authority and transnational systems that regulate business and property. Population movements such as illegal immigration and refugee flights generate pockets of peoples living in states in which they must hide from systems of law (see Coutin 2000, 2007). Contemporary pluralities of global law are largely rooted in the colonial era. Although there were significant transnational adoptions of law in the period before 1500, the imperial era from the sixteenth to the twentieth century represented an unprecedented expansion of legal systems, primarily from European and North American powers to their colonies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Concurrently, the nature of law in metropoles was transformed, incorporating concepts of race and difference into its basic fabric and developing new technologies of governance (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). The legacy of this historical process is a complex legal pluralism, in which countries typically have overlapping and contradictory legal systems coexisting with one another. This process created a layered system of legalities of unequal powers and distinct jurisdictions. Legal borrowing has continued apace in the postcolonial era, as newly emerging democracies such as those in Eastern Europe have borrowed legal codes from elsewhere. There has been extensive adoption of constitutions, commercial codes, and discrete legal systems from one country to another. Finally, an expansion in international law, originally focused mainly on the regulation of commerce and interstate relations, increasingly seeks to regulate the legal relations between citizens and their states. This growth has moved into fields such as economic

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relationships, cultural integrity of indigenous peoples, and status of vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, women, and children. As the human rights system has expanded in the post-Cold War period, its reach into new domains of social life has grown. Thus, the contemporary world holds a rich diversity of coexisting, overlapping, contradictory, and complementary systems of law at the local, national, and international level, a system produced to an important extent by processes of colonialism and postcolonialism. The result is a layered legal pluralism. An archaeological metaphor suggests simple chronological contiguity as one system is superimposed on another, but, in practice, jurisdictions overlap, leading to forum shopping and inconsistency. As systems interact, they redefine one another’s concepts and practices, although not with equal influence and power. Over time, the constituent legal systems change through legal innovations and revised social practices. Introduced systems are modified before they are adopted. The important questions for anthropological scholarship concern the nature of the relationships among the constituent layers. Understanding law in contemporary postcolonial societies requires an archaeology of law: an historical understanding of this complexity. Postcolonial states now confront hybrid systems of law, sometimes with remnants of colonial dual legal systems. Customary law systems were produced by interaction between European and local law under conditions of unequal power relations and expanding capitalism. Non-colonized peoples sometimes appropriated extensive aspects of European law to construct a ‘civilized’ society that could take a place in the European order of sovereign nations instead of in the ranks of the colonies. This was a successful strategy pursued by Thailand as well as Hawai'i (Merry 2000). Even in non-colonized states, law is deeply pluralized. Non-colonized states often incorporate indigenous peoples or immigrant communities with separate legal systems. Such internal colonialism results in subordinated

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populations struggling to retain distinctive sovereignties and legal orders (Biolsi 1995). Privatization increased reliance on non-state forms of governance, ranging from internal judicial procedures within organizations to private policing and surveillance systems (Low 2004). The spread of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms to many aspects of legal regulation diversified the procedures of law and probably its outcomes and forms of regulation. Non-state forms of law interact with state law, shaping the nature of state law itself. Pluralism can be seen as the key concept in a postmodern view of law (Santos 1995: 456). Santos uses the map as a metaphor to suggest that law is a system of signs which, like maps, represents/distorts reality through the mechanisms of scale, projection, and symbolization. Different legal orders, like maps, have different scales, different forms of projection and centering, and different systems of symbolization. A theory of unequal but mutually constitutive legal orders leads to new questions. How do these systems interact and reshape one another? How much is the dominant system able to control the subordinate? How do subordinate systems evade the dominant system? Do disputing strategies of subordinate users reshape the dominant system? Can contests among plural legal systems explain historical change? The concept of legal pluralism provides a useful way of exploring these questions. The concept of legal pluralism was recently applied to analysis of international law as a way to theorize its diversity, fragmentation, and occasional incoherence. Paul Schiff Berman suggests that legal pluralism offers a valuable framework for conflict of law scholars in arenas as diverse as religious practices and Internet jurisdiction (2002, 2005a, 2005b; see also Santos 1995; Perez 2003). Thinking of such clashes as conflicts among various legal regimes leads scholars to trace the shape of communities that hold particular views, even across national boundaries. Berman argues that legal pluralism acknowledges modern society’s characteristic multiple

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sources of law and claims to authority, including that of states, international bodies, and non-state entities. Instead of focusing on the emergence of ‘world law’ as nation-state legal regimes converge, he advocates using a conflict of law approach to emphasize important differences among people. A global legal pluralism theory of international law emphasizes the variety of linkages between international law and local conceptions of justice. Views of global legal pluralism may at times be overly static and not grant sufficient attention to the interactions among systems and their arrangements of relative power, and benefit from being complemented by an anthropologically sophisticated version of global legal pluralism. The pluralism of international law has some intriguing parallels to the relations between village and state law. Like law in small communities, international legalities are produced through a process of deliberation and consensus formation rather than imposition (Riles 2001; Merry 2006a). Global conferences, commission meetings, and trade negotiations produce resolutions, declarations, and policy statements. Such conventions constitute global law through multiparty discussion and international negotiation. Much of international law consists of multilateral treaties, collaboratively developed and adopted by individual countries. To some extent, the legitimacy of these international norms is a product of international compromise and consensus. As in Tswana disputes, rules are drawn from a repertoire of norms, general principles, and customs to resolve particular conflicts whose outcomes then influence the norms for future conflicts (Comaroff and Roberts 1981). In villages, as in international legal systems, central features of the legal process include custom, social pressure, collaboration, and negotiations among parties that develop rules and resolve conflicts (Nader and Todd 1978). In both systems, law is pluralistic, intersecting with other legal orders including nation-states and other forms of private governance (Nader 1991). Both orders

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constitute semi-autonomous social fields within a matrix of legal pluralism (Moore 1973). Both depend heavily on reciprocity and the threat of ostracism, as did the Trobrianders in Malinowski’s account (1926). Gossip and scandal are important in fostering international compliance just as they are in small communities; social pressure to appear civilized encourages countries to ratify international legal treaties (Koh 1997, 1999; Hathaway 2002). Countries urge others to follow the multilateral treaties they ratify, while treaty monitoring depends largely on shame and social pressure (Bayefsky 2001; Merry 2006a). As Madelaine Adelman observes, the procedures of monitoring compliance with human rights conventions such as the Women’s Convention are strikingly parallel to alternative dispute resolution (2008). The treaty body process, which monitors compliance with international human rights conventions, has a five-fold reliance on discussion and negotiation about actions in response to questions posed by the thirdparty treaty committee, focus on remedial activities rather than punishment, a set of general shared norms, pragmatic pressure to make small changes, and the shame of public exposure for failure to comply. These negotiations take place against a backdrop of justice that is only articulated in the text of the treaty. Thus, anthropological conceptions of legal pluralism provide a valuable perspective on international and village law, highlighting the importance of the intersections among various legal layers.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE Although anthropologists debated the issue of cultural relativism and universalism in human rights throughout the 1990s, by the early twenty-first century, attention shifted to the analysis of how human rights work in practice. A variety of books and collections discuss the operation of rights as a dimension

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of cultural practice (Wilson 1996; Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001). Some of these studies focus on the translations between the creation of human rights concepts and appropriation in a variety of local contexts (Merry 2006a,b; Goodale 2007, 2008, 2009; Goodale and Merry 2007;). Much ethnographic research examines how human rights ideas operate within local settings, but these studies typically recognize that the local settings are embedded within larger systems that shape them and that their boundaries with global ideologies are typically quite porous (Goodale 2002, 2008; Slyomovics 2005; Jackson 2007; Speed 2008). Recent anthropological research increasingly focuses on international institutions themselves, their systems of meaning and practices of work (e.g., Clarke 2009; Clarke and Goodale 2009). Human rights lawyers focus on drafting laws and reports rather than on the social and cultural processes of regulation, yet, it is increasingly clear that although a system of law is in place, its effects are limited. Human rights lawyers and activists worry about a lack of sanctions and the obstacles to implementation of a transnational law that preserves state sovereignty. Some activists say that, currently, the main challenge is implementation: that the legal codes are in place but their enforcement is lacking. The cultural impact of human rights is probably the most important dimension of human rights activism for anthropological analysis. An anthropological approach to the human rights system foregrounds the social practices of law and their embedded cultural categories, emphasizing local cultural understandings of law and the importance of analysing the social contexts of legal creation and implementation. Local rights consciousness is as vital to the transnational system as it is to national legal systems, but is a similarly fluid and shifting phenomenon. There has already been important work by legal academics and international relations scholars that complements such anthropological

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research (Chayes and Chayes 1998; Hathaway 2002; Rajagopal 2003; Slaughter 2004; Simmons 2009). A key dimension of the practice of human rights is the work of intermediaries who translate between human rights concepts and specific situations. Intermediaries take stories of particular injuries and translate them into human rights violations so that global audiences will pay attention. Successful human rights movements need personal stories from injured individuals which can be presented within the human rights framework. Particular experiences are translated into the more generic terms of human rights violations so that they can circulate more readily along transnational corridors. Conversely, intermediaries translate international documents into terms relevant to particular localized political struggles, enabling injured individuals to see the human rights violations against them. For example, for the women in the New Territories of Hong Kong who were denied the right to inherit land equally with their brothers, their participation in a human rights movement taught them to rethink their grievances of violations of kinship obligations as forms of illegal gender discrimination (Merry and Stern 2005; Levitt and Merry 2009). The anthropological approach draws attention to another kind of translator as well, calling for translation between lawyers and social scientists. Like the activist intermediaries who localize human rights, these academic translators need to know both sides and be adept at interpreting each in terms of the other. As human rights lawyers recognize that implementing human rights laws requires collaboration from social movements and changes in individual rights consciousness, opportunity for fruitful collaboration is created. However, this collaboration may also lead to conflicts among activists with different views of how human rights promote social justice. Susan Hirsch’s account of observing and participating in a terrorism trial as an anthropologist and as a victim reveals the tensions between legal intervention and

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social movement activism and her work of translation (Hirsch 2006). This scholarship examines human rights practices by asking questions about the enforcement and implementation of international human rights law. As my research on the process of monitoring the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) showed, this is a very murky process (Merry 2006a). Although this convention is legally binding on states that ratify it, states vary enormously in how they respond to this requirement; some opt out of key provisions when they sign the convention, some ratify it but regard it as nonself-executing, requiring further domestic legislation for implementation, and some simply ignore its ratification. For those states that fail to live up to their obligations, the consequences are indirect and serendipitous, including mostly shame and pressure from other states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), along with economic pressures such as reductions in foreign aid and investment and possibly a drop in tourism. As socio-legal studies of law within nation-states indicate, compliance depends largely on individual consciousness and commitment, not policing and force. Usually people conform to laws because they are part of their world, not because they calculate the relative costs of violation and compliance (Ewick and Silbey 1998). Thus, the creation of a new global legal order depends on the creation of new global cultural codes. Here, the gaps between normative ideas generated in international meetings and those within local communities pose enormous challenges for the implementation of human rights. Anthropology’s insights about how rights operate in everyday social life are highly relevant to the human rights domain. Anthropological and socio-legal research shows that rights do not constitute a coherent system but are contingent, fragmented, and unevenly supported by the general public. The articulation of rights does not guarantee their performance.

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Research in a highly rights conscious society such as the United States shows surprising areas of ignorance of rights and of unwillingness to assert them. David Engel and Frank Munger found that individuals with learning or mobility disabilities were very reluctant to claim rights even when a law existed that specifically conferred these rights to them (2003). Harri Englund’s study of human rights activists in Malawi reveals wide gaps between the way human rights are phrased and understood in English and in translation into the national language of the country (2006). Since achieving rights requires making claims, questions about how individuals come to view themselves in terms of rights and what conditions inspire them to make rights-based claims are of critical importance in promoting the transnational human rights system. For example, battered women are frequently reluctant to make rights claims out of fear, discomfort with the courts, and pressure from their spouses. They often file charges only to drop them. I have argued elsewhere that their willingness to adopt this rights subjectivity depends on the quality of response they receive from police, prosecutors, court officials, and judges. These interactions show the women if the promised rights to protection from domestic violence are taken seriously. When they are not, women abandon the legal system despite their need for safety. More recently, anthropologists have explored the forms of international justice applied to local situations of conflict, violence, and regime change. Typically called transitional justice, these processes are promoted as ways to heal social tensions and conflicts, mend rifts in the social fabric, and create democracy. Yet, transitional justice forums developed in the aftermath of authoritarian regimes or intense ethnic conflict raise questions about the relationship between punishment and reconciliation and the law’s role in restoring community after conflict (Teitel 2000; Wilson 2001, 2005).

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Transitional justice is advocated in the aftermath of dictatorship, such as the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina and apartheid in South Africa, after periods of ethnic violence, such as the genocide in Rwanda, and after insurgency and state violence, such as the conflict surrounding the Shining Path in Peru. It promises to bring reconciliation to warring factions, protect emerging democracies from past authoritarian leaders, and construct national histories of violence (Wilson 2005). New international criminal justice courts hold perpetrators responsible for crimes against humanity, trying them for the pain, suffering, and death they have enacted. Several anthropologists explore the practices of transitional justice as well as its promises (Wilson 2001; Coxshall 2005; Dembour and Kelly 2007; Theidon 2007; Clarke 2009; Clarke and Goodale 2009), questioning the extent to which transitional justice accomplishes its ends. They are sceptical about whether these mechanisms produce justice, reconciliation, a new narrative of the past, or even a sense of catharsis for victims (Das 2007). Studies show that local communities are often excluded from the process, that telling one’s story can become a rote performance designed to provide legal evidence rather than healing, and that they often ignore deep tensions among those who killed one another’s family members (Coxshall 2005; Theidon 2007). Clarke discusses the difficulty of establishing individual responsibility in situations of civil conflict and violence (2009). Still, the idea of justice remains a powerful motivating force behind these and other experiments (Clarke and Goodale 2009). There is clearly a need for more anthropological scholarship concerning the way transitional justice works in practice.

LEGAL TECHNOLOGIES AND KNOWLEDGE PRACTICES Researchers also explore how legal technologies construct and sediment forms of legal

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knowledge and practice. Pottage and Mundy describe knowledge practices within law, exploring how law constitutes persons and things (2004). Bruno Latour compares the construction of knowledge in French high courts to that of scientific laboratories (2004). Annelise Riles examines the importance of documents that channel and define knowledge while fixing law and its meanings in specific ways. She describes the hegemony of the matrix in human rights activism (2001) and the creation of property titles and financial documents in the international derivatives market as instances of knowledge creation in global circulation. Her work on Fiji examines deeds as particular kinds of law, instantiated in material form as documents (Riles 2004; Miyazaki and Riles 2005). Ong and Collier refer to these technologies as assemblages, analysing how they travel internationally (Ong and Collier 2005). Another way legal anthropologists examine technological dimensions of law is through analysis of systems dependent on numerical representation and commensurability across cultural systems, such as money and ranking. Bill Maurer analyses money as a system of meaning and a technology in Islamic banking systems or in alternative currency schemes (Maurer 2005a, b). I am currently studying the creation of numerical rankings and indicators of such diffuse concepts as human rights and the rule of law as technologies of global governance. These are only a few examples of a rapidly growing field of scholarship in legal anthropology that foregrounds the technology and knowledge systems of law. This approach offers a new perspective on legal anthropology, still focusing on everyday practices but now using a power/knowledge framework to understand the significance of discourses, representations, and systems of meaning. When applied to law, meaning as a mode of analysis tracks not only what people think but also how people understand and apply rules. Consequently, this research examines potential links with institutional violence or force.

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CONTEMPORARY METHODOLOGIES OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND LAW As the anthropology of law expanded from the study of disputes in small-community courts to a more global focus on law and legal institutions, it experimented with methods for studying law and legal ideas that cross local and national boundaries. In particular, contemporary anthropology of law examines how law moves across regions and scales, along with how it operates in international spaces. Multi-sited ethnographic research tracks the flows of people, ideas, laws, and institutions across national boundaries while examining specific nodes within this field of transnational circulation (Appadurai 1996). Research examines the role of individuals who carry legal technologies and innovations from one country to another (Dezalay and Garth 2002). Some studies focus on the role of transnational advocacy networks and coalitions (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999) and the role of international conferences (Riles 2001; Merry 2006a). Other research focuses on how unequal global resources channel flows and create blockage and exclusion (Tsing 2005). The ethnographic method provides important insights into this multi-sited, multi-scalar legal world, but it is not obvious how to best use it. It is essential to locate production sites of law, legal and social knowledge, and legal texts, along with places of implementation and enforcement. One must trace the circulation of legal ideas and implementation practices among local, national, and transnational spaces, requiring both a bottom-up examination of transnational ideas’ effects on local communities and an ethnographic analysis of global sites of legal production. The challenge is finding small spaces of interaction and meaning production amenable to this kind of research. Rural village squares and urban neighbourhoods are not sufficient; researchers also need to study conference centres and international institutions in global cities.

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Anthropologists are experimenting with various ethnographic methods to understand local and global phenomena, requiring study of small social situations and their interactions with other situations at different scales. Small sites work within complexly layered legal, economic, and political institutions. Their small size allows an ethnographic focus on actors, relationships, meanings, and discourse, along with an analysis of the way it embedded in larger social contexts. When researching situations that jump scales this way, it is critical to focus on processes of translation, interpretation, and vernacularization through which ideas cross scales and move among groups (Merry 2006a). The core methodological concepts for such ethnographic projects are those of scale, translation, and circulation among locations, social networks, and groups. It is essential to examine the context of powerful legal, political, and economic institutions. Within this overarching framework there are several discrete approaches. The first is the classic anthropological approach of analysing a single site, such as a village or local court, in the context of various scales of law, governance, and meaning. For example, political competition between two parties in one country may reflect pressures of capitalist development and aid conditionalities imposed by donor countries. A second approach compares two or more sites that have similar relationships to a global process. For example, Peggy Levitt and I studied the way women’s NGOs in four cities translated international human rights into local terms (Levitt and Merry 2009). In studying such vernacularization, the focus is not on how ideas circulate among the cities but in the diverse ways local communities respond to the same set of global ideas and practices. A third approach is multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998) which follows the circulation of ideas, people, and money. This approach is very useful for understanding migration, for example, when migrants are followed from sites of origin to destination sites and back again (Levitt 2001, 2007;

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Terrio 2009). It is certainly a productive approach for understanding how human rights law operates, as it is enacted in Geneva, New York, Vienna, and other major cities. The fourth approach involves theorizing local settings as deterritorialized, in the sense that they are discrete instantiations of a single socio-cultural world existing in various places. Although such a world exists in many specific sites, the cultural and social system exists in a transnational space. In other words, the ‘global’ exists as an interconnected social world, appearing in many discrete locations as micro social situations. The transitional justice movement, the human rights system, international NGOs, and most international organizations consist of individuals who circulate within restricted paths, encounter one another in various global settings, and share ideas about their actions. This happens at international conferences, for example, or when a UN agency organizes a site visit with other agencies. Such deterritorialized social systems are shaped by their existence in a multiplicity of places. Ethnographic study of them is challenging, but necessary since they represent an emerging global social world. CONCLUSION The anthropology of law is clearly developing rapidly, moving outside legal institutions into everyday life, beyond village law into legal pluralism, and across the small-scale community to examine phenomena that jump scales, require translations, and shift across borders. The field is veering away from conventional ideas of law and social order to examine the materiality of law and its instantiation in numerical representation. Legal anthropologists increasingly study international law and global governance. As it develops, legal anthropology experiments with new methodologies, examining layered forms of law and culture. A vibrant process of methodological exploration is responding to these challenges. The creativity and transformation of this field is to some extent

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the product of ongoing dialogue with both legal and socio-legal scholars. Overall, these developments suggest a rich intellectual future for the anthropology of law.

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McCann, Michael. 1994. Rights at Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 1988. ‘Legal Pluralism.’ Law and Society Review 22(5): 869−896. Merry, Sally Engle. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2000. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2003. ‘Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence.’ Human Rights Quarterly 25(2): 343−381. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006a. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006b. ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.’ American Anthropologist 108: 38−52. Merry, Sally Engle. 2009. Gender Violence: A Cultural Introduction. London: Blackwell. Merry, Sally Engle and Rachel Stern. 2005. ‘The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the Local/Global Interface.’ Current Anthropology 46(3): 387−409. Merry, Sally Engle, Peggy Levitt, Mihaela Serban Rosen, and Diana H. Yoon. 2010. ‘Law from Below: Women’s Human Rights and Social Movements in New York City.’ Law and Society Review 44(1): 101−128. Miyazaki, Hirokazu and Annelise Riles. 2005. ‘Failure as an Endpoint.’ In Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds). Global Assemblages. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 320−333. Moore, Sally Falk. 1973. ‘Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,’ Law and Society Review 7(4): 719−746. Nader, Laura. 1991. Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nader, Laura and Harry Todd (eds). 1978. The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies. New York: Columbia University Press. Nielsen, Laura Beth. 2000. ‘Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about Law and Street Harassment.’ Law and Society Review 34(4): 1055−1090. Nielsen, Laura Beth. 2006. License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Ong, Aihwa and Stephen J. Collier (eds). 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Perez, Oren. 2003. ‘Normative Creativity and Global Legal Pluralism: Reflections on the Democratic Critique of Transnational Law.’ Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10: 25−64. Pottage, Alain and Martha Mundy (eds). 2004. Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. 2003. International Law From Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. 2005. ‘The Role of Law in Counter-hegemonic Globalization and Global Legal Pluralism: Lessons from the Narmada Valley Struggle in India.’ Leiden Journal of International Law 18: 345−387. Review 34(4): 1055−1090. Riles, Annelise. 2001. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Riles, Annelise. 2004. ‘Law as Object.’ In Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis (eds), Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research, pp. 187−213. Risse, Thomas, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (eds). 1999. The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Simon. 1998. ‘Against Legal Pluralism.’ Journal of Legal Pluralism 42: 95−106. Rodriguez-Garavito, Cesar A. 2005. ‘Nike’s Law: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement, Transnational Corporations, and the Struggle over International Labor Rights in the Americas.’ In Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar A. Rodriguez-Garavito (eds), Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 66−91. Rosen, Lawrence. 1989. The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, Lawrence. 2006. Law as Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rottenburg, Richard. 2009. Far-fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid. Translated by Allison Brown and Tom Lampert. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.

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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa and Cesar A. RodriguezGaravito. 2005. ‘Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in Counter-hegemonic Globalization.’ In Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar A. Rodriguez-Garavito (eds), Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1−27. Sarat, Austin and Thomas Kearns (eds). 1994. Law and Everyday Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Simmons, Beth. 2009. Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. A New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Slyomovics, Susan 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Speed, Shannon. 2008. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Teitel, Ruti. 2000. Transitional Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terrio, Susan. 2009. Judging Mohammed: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration, and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Theidon, Kimberly. 2007. ‘Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War.’ Journal of Human Rights 6: 453−478. Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Valverde, Mariana. 1998. Diseases of the Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weilenmann, Markus. 2005. ‘Project Law – Normative Orders of Bilateral Development Cooperation and Social Change: A Case Study from the German Agency for Technical Cooperation.’ In Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Anne Griffiths (eds), Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 233−257. Wilson, Richard A. 1996. ‘Introduction: Human Rights, Culture and Context.’ In Richard A. Wilson (ed.), Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Wilson, Richard A. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the PostApartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Richard A. 2005. ‘Judging History: The Historical Record of the International Criminal Tribunal for the

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Former Yugoslavia.’ Human Rights Quarterly 27(3): 908−942. Yngvesson, Barbara. 1997. ‘Negotiating Motherhood: Identity and Difference in “Open Adoptions.”’ Law and Society Review 31(1): 31−80. Yngvesson, Barbara. 2002. ‘Placing the “Gift Child” in Transnational Adoption.’ Law and Society Review 36(2): 227–256.

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Yngvesson, Barbara. 2010. Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Yngvesson, Barbara and Susan Bibler Coutin. 2006. ‘Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories, and Return.’ American Ethnologist 33(2): 177−191.

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1.8 Anthropology and History Jane K. Cowan

THE ANTHROPOLOGY/HISTORY INTERFACE In 1980, Bernard Cohn, who had long been working at the interstices of anthropology and history, set out the ‘state of play’ between the two disciplines after three decades of intellectual and social exchange (Cohn 1980). Historians and anthropologists, he noted, both explored ‘otherness’: in time, for one group; in space, for the other. Both were concerned with text and context, and with grasping human meanings; both forms of knowledge entailed translation. Yet members of the two disciplines were divided into separate professional guilds, each of which produced its own distinct subject matter. With delicious parody, Cohn described how anthropologists constructed Anthropologyland, a place ‘where the natives are authentic, untouched and aboriginal’ and where social change came from ‘the missionary in a rowboat’ (or the trader, the labour recruiter, the government official). Using their sacred method of ‘fieldwork’, anthropologists sought out elders with the richest memories of days gone by and put together a picture of native life. Historyland, by contrast, was a world of paper: unlike anthropologists, who wanted to know what was in native heads, historians cared only for ‘what, purposely or

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accidentally, they had put down on paper’. Since poor and illiterate people generally did not write, and were rarely thought to be interesting enough for others to write about, all that paper described the lives of kings and queens, preachers and popes, and later presidents and prime ministers, congresses and courts; such figures were at the centre of the stories that historians told. But something happened in the 1940s − or rather, various things. The Second World War, independence struggles of colonized peoples, and decolonization, followed by the Cold War, woke up historians to the existence of the ‘non-Western world’, while it forced anthropologists either completely out of that world, or into a different relationship with it. Then came the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. All of this, said Cohn, threw both disciplines into a state of ‘epistemological anarchy’. Cohn concluded his essay by proposing a new conjuncture between anthropology and history, arguing that ‘history can become more historical in becoming more anthropological, and anthropology can become more anthropological in becoming more historical’. Three decades hence, one sees abundant evidence of that conjuncture, though it takes quite different forms: this chapter explores some of them. But first, I set out the shared arenas of dialogue, where, in thousands of

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diverse conversations, anthropologists and historians first got acquainted.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY: KEY ARENAS OF DIALOGUE SINCE THE 1980S If anthropologists and historians have occasionally exchanged ideas since the early twentieth century, by the 1980s a number of important arenas of dialogue were well established. By no means comprehensive, this section sketches out seven key arenas, many of which have continued to be fertile up to the present: British Marxist social history; the History Workshop Movement; feminism; Subaltern Studies; oral history; the new cultural history; and historical political economy approaches. Influenced by the political ferment of the 1960s, what most of those engaging in these arenas shared, notwithstanding their distinct genealogies and theoretical differences, was a preoccupation with ‘the little and the lowly’: with people positioned toward the bottom of the hierarchy and with humble things and mundane practices (Cohn slyly dubbed it ‘proctological history’). Along with this came a commitment to explore what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and others have recognized as the significance of ‘the insignificant’. Whereas this stance represented, in many ways, business-as-usual for anthropologists, it signalled a new departure for historians. The work of ‘the historiographic Left’ (Anderson 1992: 285), and particularly British Marxist social historians (many of them explicitly ‘New Left’), stands out for its decisive impact on anthropological thinking. Influence did not flow only one way, of course: Eric Hobsbawm’s involvement in Max Gluckman’s anthropology seminar inspired him to write Primitive Rebels (1959), while E.P. Thompson, emblematic figure of this trend, saw much common ground between historians, folklorists and anthropologists. Challenging the elite focus and conservatism of their own discipline, leftist historians were using a critical, often Gramscian, lens that anthropologists were

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later to find immensely fruitful. Through articles published in the journal Past and Present, founded in 1952 by the nucleus of the Communist Party’s Historians Group, and through extended monographs, like Thompson’s groundbreaking The Making of the English Working Class (1963), leftist social historians undertook a project of recuperation, rescuing ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson 1963: 12) those whose voices and experiences had been excluded from conventional histories, and in the process, rethinking the notion of ‘class’ in terms of historical relationships ‘embodied in real people and in a real context’ (Thompson 1963: 9; see also Anderson 1992; Eley 2005). Animated by similar political and intellectual convictions, the History Workshop Movement associated with Raphael Samuel, Sheila Rowbotham and the worker-students at the Oxford trades union college, Ruskin, commenced in 1967 as a series of one-day workshops celebrating history from a nonelite perspective, or what came to be known as ‘history from below’. More than simply a history of the labour movement, however, workshops included explorations of popular protest and ordinary people’s experience. Through workshops as well as through the History Workshop Journal; created in 1976, the movement aimed to democratize, deprofessionalize and politicize history: its radical pedagogical approach placed university faculty and knowledgeable lay persons on an equal footing. Among the History Workshop activists were a number of women involved in the 1960s women’s movement. Sally Alexander recalls the bewildering ‘gust of masculine laughter’ when, in the 1969 History Workshop, a group of women asked for expressions of interest in the theme of ‘Women’s History’ (1994 [1983]: 271). Undeterred, Alexander and numerous feminist colleagues pushed the Marxist charge of working class exclusion from history a step further by criticizing the masculinist orientation of labour histories and highlighting the degree to which women

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were, in Sheila Rowbotham’s words, Hidden from History (1973). They began to unearth evidence of women’s lives that traditional historical biases had obscured and, simultaneously, to explore the theoretical implications of that exclusion. Whereas historical materialism posited class as the primary determinant of social being and relegated questions of sexual difference and division to the realm of nature, socialist-feminist historians insisted that the sexual relation was historical. Recognizing this required a rethink of basic categories that not only had been insufficiently historicized but also had been imagined as ‘gender neutral’: the individual, the citizen, the political, the common good, the distinction between public and private spheres. As part of a larger feminist debate engaging activists and scholars across the academy globally, and from a variety of theoretical positions, feminist historians grappled with complex histories of women, femininity and feminist action, showing how class and gender shaped each other in actual historical practice (see, e.g., Campbell 1984; Steedman 1986; Hall and Davidoff 1987). Many feminist scholars have also drawn productively on psychoanalysis to give greater depth to their analyses of gendered lives, past and present. While by the late 1980s the feminist movement was forced to confront its own assumption of ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as coherent social and political categories and compelled to address the diversity within (e.g., Mohanty et al. 1991; Frankenberg 1993), feminist scholarship has remained productively provocative in its willingness to frame historical investigations in terms that draw insights from other disciplines and transgress boundaries: for instance, by making questions of subjectivity central to histories of gender relations. A number of feminist anthropologists dealing with historical issues have forged their approaches in the context of these debates: for instance, in feminist re-examinations of the lives and work of earlier generations of female anthropologists, explorers or journalists, such

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as Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan’s (1994) study of gender, nutrition and agricultural change in Zambia, which re-engages with Audrey Richard’s 1930s fieldwork, and Julie Marcus’ (1992, 2001) account of the career of the flamboyant Australian anthropologist and aboriginal rights campaigner of the same era, Olive Pink. Anthropologists have also contributed significantly to the research area, largely created and constantly retheorized by feminist scholarship, of histories of race, gender and class under various forms of colonial rule (Callaway 1987; Stoler 1995). Finally, feminist scholarship has been instrumental in instigating reflection on anthropology’s own disciplinary histories, institutionally and in the context of case studies of individual anthropologists. New Left in orientation and sharing much common ground with feminist approaches to history, the Subaltern Studies Collective, a group of South Asian − largely Bengali − historians, undertook to recuperate the voice and experience of ‘the subaltern’ within Indian historiography by challenging not only colonialist and nationalist but also Marxist meta-narratives. Drawing on a Gramscian notion of ‘the subaltern’ (a person or group of inferior rank due to social categorization), as well as Foucauldian insights on power and knowledge, the Collective has attempted to read Indian historiography against the grain to reveal subaltern consciousness and the social conditions that produced it. In a signature article analysing the historiography of peasant revolts under the Raj, for instance, Ranajit Guha (1983) criticized both of the dominant approaches − that of the British colonial historians and of the nationalist (often Marxist) Indian historians − for refusing to grapple with the religious element in rebel consciousness, and thus failing to ‘acknowledge the insurgent as the subject of his own history’ (Guha 1983 [1994: 364]). Subaltern Studies has generated a substantial body of historical work, with some of its members developing the intersection of history with postcolonial theory (see, e.g.,

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Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Chakrabarty 2000), anthropology (Chatterjee 2002) and feminism (Mani 1998). A basic familiarity with its problematic and approach is by now de rigueur among anthropologists, and has been widely influential, inspiring critical interventions in other postcolonial contexts such as Latin America (Coronil 2004). Ironically, one of the most significant interventions that Subaltern Studies has provoked challenges the very possibility of the subaltern historical project. Speaking from outside, although largely sympathetic to, Subaltern Studies, and informed by Derridean and Third World feminist perspectives, Gayatri Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) does not quite answer, ‘No’, but she insists that discerning subaltern voices requires deeper recognition of the ways that scholars − including critical, postcolonial scholars − remain implicated in the power relations of writing history. Sometimes described as an international social movement rather than a method, oral history has brought together not only anthropologists and historians but also folklorists, journalists, teachers, students and political activists. Sharing many aims with the Britishbased History Workshop Movement and with feminist and Marxist social history, oral history has deeper and more varied roots. In the United States, it harked back to the Depression-era project of the Works Public Administration Federal Writers Project, where writers earned their bread recording ordinary people’s stories, but also to the fictional trilogy, USA, by John Dos Passos and to the inspiring radio interviews since 1952 of the Chicago-based broadcaster and writer, Studs Terkel (1967, 1974). In Latin America, oral history had been an element of popular education projects and, in Europe, it was a method of both history collection and political consciousness raising, particularly in feminist groups. If, for anthropologists whose discipline was shaped in engagement with non-literate societies, oral history methods did not seem especially strange, the same cannot be said

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for the historical profession. Historians using these methods met firm resistance from colleagues who contrasted the trustworthiness of written sources with the biased views and faulty memories of living subjects. Grounded in a positivist world-view that many would find problematic, this scepticism has nonetheless had the salutary effect of forcing historians, and others using oral history methods, to push further not just the methodological but also the political, theoretical and epistemological issues surrounding subjectivity, remembering and forgetting and multiple versions of the past. Now classic works by Italian scholars Luisa Passerini (1987) and Alessandro Portelli (1991), among others, have deepened the sophistication of oral history − and the similar life history − approaches; they have also contributed to a widening of oral history scholarship’s scope from questions about representation of the past, to those of performance through narration, song and dance of historically situated selves and their pasts in the present (Tonkin 1992; McCall 1999). While the historical interventions discussed so far evolved in the context of a critique of elite histories flavoured by Marxism of one sort or another, much of the work dubbed ‘the new cultural history’ by some of its proponents had somewhat different antecedents. One strand of cultural history represented a turning away from the structural explanations of social processes and ‘mentalités’ characteristic of the Annales School toward a ‘reassertion of the particular and piecemeal, contingent and episodic’ (Anderson 1992: 282). This has entailed an embrace of microhistory and a more ‘ethnographic approach’ to understanding the past. Sharing with other ‘histories from below’ an interest in ordinary people’s lives, the new cultural histories have highlighted, as the name suggests, issues of culture, meaning and the ‘feel’ of everyday life in other times. Church records, particularly testimonies collected in inquisitorial investigations, have been key sources of ordinary people’s world-views in classic works of this genre, such as Emmanuel

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Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1980) and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (1980). For many historians participating in the ‘cultural turn’, anthropology has been a source of theoretical inspiration. The Oxfordbased historian Keith Thomas drew on EvansPritchard’s study of witchcraft among the Azande for his analysis of witchcraft in early modern England (1971), while Natalie Zemon Davis, investigating early modern France, looked to Victor Turner’s theories of ritual and Mary Douglas’s work on classification. Clifford Geertz’s interpretive approach and calls for ‘thick description’ stimulated a whole slew of historians, including, along with Davis, Greg Dening, Robert Darnton, William Sewell, Inga Clendinnen and Rhys Isaac, to attempt to reconstruct ‘worlds of meaning’. Many of these accounts focus on the micro level: following an individual (as in Davis’ [1983] The Return of Martin Guerre) or crafting a culturally coherent story out of a seemingly bizarre episode (as in Darnton’s [1984] analysis of the ‘Great Cat Massacre’ in 18th-century Paris). These approaches take cultural particularity seriously, exemplifying Cohn’s observation about the two disciplines’ shared preoccupation with human and societal ‘difference’. In their enthusiasm, some cultural historians have succumbed to the sins of reifying, homogenizing and essentializing ‘culture’, over which so much anthropological ink has been spilled. Their focus, moreover, on the micro level, and on cultural meaning, has elicited strong criticism from some anthropologists, who accuse them of overemphasizing ‘culture’ as against other forms of difference, as well as of failing to contextualize their stories in wider political, economic and historical processes. But their project need not be seen as uncritical of wider hegemonies. The new cultural historians have pursued the critique of the Western conception of the ‘human’ parading as universal through their own disciplinary avenues. As against the dominant historiographical tendency to portray those of other

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eras as governed by the same interests and emotions as ourselves, they have been at pains to show − to borrow the words of the novelist L.P. Hartley (1953) − that ‘the past is a foreign country’ (see also Lowenthal 1985). Explored in a stimulating debate organized by the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester in 1992 (Ingold 1996), this notion of the past’s utter foreignness − and the implied analogy of any culture’s incommensurability vis-à-vis another − was also an element in the exhilarating intellectual combat between two distinguished anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere, over how much the actions of the 18th-century Hawai’ian islanders who killed Captain Cook should be interpreted through the lens of culture (Obeyesekere 1992; Sahlins 1985, 1995; see also Borofsky 1997). In stark contrast to the microscopic focus of the cultural historians and of some of the Marxist social historians, and oral historians’ focus on individual experience, Eric Wolf in Europe and the People without History (1982) attempted an analytic history on a grand scale. Adding an anthropological perspective to Wallerstein’s world systems theory (though rejecting its evolutionism), and arguing against the view of cultures or societies as ‘islands’, Wolf aimed to show the world to be a totality of interconnected processes, involving the conjoint participation of Western and non-Western people. Magisterial in its scope and capacity for synthesizing broad political and economic processes, it criticized the implicitly triumphalist history of ‘European expansion’ for failing to include the ‘people without history’ who were its victims and silent witnesses (for an even more historically far-reaching, yet differently grounded, critique of European triumphalism, see Goody 2006). Being primarily a story of the expansion of European capitalism, though, Wolf’s book verges on conflating this history of contact with history itself, perhaps provoking Sherry Ortner’s (1984: 143) observation that political economists often treat history as ‘something that arrives,

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like a ship, from outside the society in question’. Moreover, while Wolf’s account demonstrates the profound impact of global trade on seemingly remote sites, and the ways that non-Western people became actively and creatively drawn into exchanges and dependencies, we learn little of how such changes were actually perceived by those ‘without history’. For this, the innovative approaches to constructing colonial histories out of fragmentary written records and contemporary material legacies developed by Michael Taussig (1980, 1986) have arguably been more evocative of − even if not directly articulating − indigenous experiences. Wolf’s ambitious effort to map the evolving political and economic relations between the West and the non-West since 1492 and, thus, to show the world as a totality or system, rather than ‘a sum of self-contained societies and culture’, has been influential. His work articulates a shared project among a number of Marxist anthropologists to define and develop a ‘historical anthropology’. A number of these authors have built upon Wolf’s approach to history as ‘a material social process … characterised by economic and political inequality and domination’ (Roseberry 1989: 11) in explicit rejection of culturalist approaches (among the most vehement, see Kalb and Tak 2005). Roseberry characterizes the work of Geertz and Sahlins as epitomizing a view of the Other as ‘different and separate, a product of its own history and carrying its own historicity’, whereas the global and historical political economy approach championed by Wolf would see the Other as ‘different but connected, a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of “our” history and “their” history is impossible’ (Roseberry 1989: 13). Yet it could be argued that conflating the two histories involves subsuming one of them, which the phrase ‘people without history’ unfortunately suggests. Consequently, the manner of apprehending the encounter between local and

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external worlds becomes crucial. With much greater attention to local formulations, John and Jean Comaroff, for instance, maintain the analytical distinction but argue for a dynamic dialectical relation: ‘…. all local worlds have their own intrinsic historicity, an internal dialectic of structure and practice that shapes, reproduces and transforms the character of everyday life within them – and … mediates their encounters with the universe beyond’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 97−98). With the inverse problem of the cultural historians, political economy’s focus on structural processes always holds a danger of erasing or underestimating local or ‘cultural’ difference. Yet, rather than rejecting the concern with meaning, the most compelling work in this tradition has been concerned to demonstrate intersections of meaning with power within historical processes, albeit within an overall framework of tracing the effects of capitalist penetrations. One could point to Sidney Mintz’s (1985) Sweetness and Power, which followed connections between the transformation of the Caribbean into plantation economies and changing class relations, forms of sociability and consumption practices in England, or Gerald Sider’s (1986) investigation of the cultural and psychological consequences of merchant− fisherman social relations in nineteenthand twentieth-century Newfoundland. In the best work of this kind, one sees an attempt to combine structural explanations of class, race and gender relations with careful, ethnographically detailed attention to what Raymond Williams (1977) called ‘structures of feeling’ and to the consequences for subjectivity. An exceptionally stimulating intervention in this vein is the edited collection by Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (1997), which draws not only on Wolf but also on the British Marxist social historians to examine ‘the makings of silences and commemorations’. If historians sought to recuperate the voices that history had omitted or silenced, Sider and Smith identify the ambiguities of

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breaking such silences, and discern a more complex set of ethical and conceptual issues arising when intellectuals engage with subaltern peoples’ histories. Outsiders’ efforts to elicit oral accounts of past events may encounter a refusal to speak rooted in many kinds of reasons: in a reluctance to antagonize present relationships, or in protest to a ‘public’ history that trivializes their past suffering, or because they, themselves, have repressed the unspeakable. In his perceptive analysis of retellings among Peruvian peasants of a collective land invasion in 1948, Smith (1997) focuses not on the distinction between ‘official history’ and repressed histories but rather on the performative effects of rehearsing these accounts collectively in order ‘not to close the book on the past’ and to keep alive a memory of their own agency. Smith recalls E.P. Thompson’s explicit vision of social history as part of a political project for the present, and queries the facile assumption that efforts by intellectuals to break open silences ‘for unrestricted and … vicarious consumption’ is necessarily a good thing. He nonetheless acknowledges that there may be moments when ‘voicing repressed histories should be endorsed, sometimes even against the memory of those we study’ (1997: 92).

NEW DIRECTIONS The key arenas of dialogue that I have mapped above, firmly established by the 1980s, have, as my summaries show, continued to evolve. Yet the past quarter century has also seen the emergence of new preoccupations. In the remainder of this essay, I explore four such areas of engagement which seem to me both significant and intellectually exciting. Michel de Certeau’s approaches to history An ongoing source of inspiration for scholars of anthropology’s cognate disciplines since

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the 1970s, the work of Michel de Certeau is being rediscovered by anthropologists in recent years (Napolitano and Pratten 2007). Working at the interstices of history, philosophy, the social sciences, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, Michel de Certeau developed what Ben Highmore calls a ‘metamethodology … dedicated to encouraging heterogeneity and allowing alterity to proliferate’ (Highmore 2006: 8). In studies of the past, as of the present, he argued that there was no privileged access to the real. Against the historiographical positivism of Leopold von Ranke − that history writing should ‘show the past as it once was’ − de Certeau argued that the past was unrecoverable. Nonetheless, he advocated a ‘critical historiography’ which aimed toward ‘“relatively” better practices, relatively more productive, more liberatory, ways of making and doing history’ (Highmore 2006: 36). De Certeau is important for anthropologists working at the interface of history because of his strikingly innovative approaches to this project. He conceived the present as composed of multiple temporalities. Whereas a ‘scriptural economy’ defines which accounts of the past are authoritative, filtering out disturbingly plural and disruptive knowledges, those repressed, sidelined stories can never be banned completely: they haunt as dreams, circulate as folklore or rumour, or erupt as possession, accusations of witchcraft or mystical speech (de Certeau 1984, 1988, 2000). Similarly concerned with the problems of discerning subjugated voices, de Certeau drew on psychoanalysis to inform his method, rather than his interpretation. Thus, de Certeau’s engagement with psychoanalysis as a founder member of Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris since 1964 underpins his advocacy of a particular form of attention in both ethnography and historical analysis: ‘a practice of listening, allowing voices to speak, of establishing a scene of communication that allows the unconscious to signify’ (Highmore 2006: 20). Even in texts where subaltern voices are apparently absent, they may be present as a trace in the voice of

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the dominant: reading the sixteenth-century French Calvinist Jean Léry’s tremulous description of ‘being ravished’ by the haunting beauty of the Tupi Indians’ singing, de Certeau saw those Tupi voices as altering the hearer, ‘opening a breach in the text and restoring a contact of body to body’ (de Certeau 1988: 235). As well as calling attention to the ways that ‘orality insinuates itself, as one of the threads of which it is composed, into the network − an endless tapestry − of a scriptural economy’ (de Certeau 1984: 132), de Certeau’s treatment of Lery’s text also highlights the importance of grasping ‘structures of feeling’ when writing history. While many anthropologists acknowledge a debt to de Certeau’s ideas and methods, recent years have seen more extended and imaginative engagement with his approaches to history (see Napolitano and Pratten 2007). One notable example is Delirio (2002), in which Marie Theresa Hernandez presents her account of ‘the buried history of Nuevo Léon’ in northeast Mexico via a sustained dialogue with de Certeau’s writings on history. Alongside those stories laboriously embedded into the nation’s official history, ‘illicit and hidden stories’, she claims, ‘join together in an underground economy of the fantastic. Denied legitimacy by textual history, they are embedded in walls, tunnels, and under the foundations of houses. Stories of people buried alive erupt repeatedly’ (Hernandez 2002: 14). In verbal expressions, recipes, photographs, portraits and architecture, and in stories of incest, evil and madness, Hernandez finds the ambivalent figures of the wild norteño, the barbarian Indian and the clandestine, inbred, fabulously rich Jews animating ‘occulted histories’ that the official history resolutely denies. As she recounts these eerily resonant stories and snippets of material evidence in a disarmingly plain prose style, Hernandez conveys the feeling of ‘delirium’ elicited when official history seems inchoate, unsettled by ‘the convoluted and opaque nature of the region’s written, oral and occulted history’ (Hernandez 2002: 260).

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Historicities Whereas de Certeau’s work addresses a primarily Western and European historiography, including its accounts of encounter with nonWestern others, and reveals the heterogeneity of memory, experience and representation within any scriptural economy, another relatively recent move in the anthropology−history interface (re)invokes the notion of ‘historicity’. If the Western concept of ‘history’ is grounded in the idea that the past and present are separated, this concept is inadequate for situations characterized by an entanglement of past and present. An old, but newly inflected, concept, ‘historicity’, allows scholars to focus ‘on the complex temporal nexus of past-present-future; [it] concerns the ongoing social production of pasts and futures’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 262). Those arguing for a renewed attention to ‘historicity’ would disagree with Kirsten Hastrup’s confident assertion that as a result of the historical anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s, ‘we no longer need to speak of historical anthropology because social anthropology as a whole has become historicised’ (Hastrup 1992:7). Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart (2005: 263) insist, to the contrary, that anthropologists ‘may have turned the corner too quickly, without stopping to consider closely enough what they consider “history” to be’. Michael Lambek’s (2002) subtle interpretation of the ways the spirits of human predecessors from multiple historical eras are called together through spirit possession in ritual contexts reveals one fundamentally different historicity, yet equally different senses of history can be found in less exotic locations. Listening to how the Greek islanders of Kalymnos debate ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, as they talk about the desirability of old styles of cooking versus fast food or whether throwing dynamite at Easter remains a ‘tradition’ worth keeping, David Sutton (1998) discerns a debate about the past as well as its significance and value in the present. Sutton’s patient attention to the everyday contexts where issues of history

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crop up obliquely or implicitly allows for fresh insights into seemingly familiar discourses. Charles Stewart similarly troubles the obviousness of the everyday by grappling with unconscious modes of historicity in contemporary Greece. Dreams, he contends, ‘are a mode in which people “feel” and apprehend history in a state of sleeping unconsciousness’ and through this, participate in making history (Stewart 2003: 482). These and other studies which work from an assumption of historicity share a similar point of departure to David Scott’s (1996) when he insists that histories of anthropological others must also be histories of the concepts through which such histories are constructed.

Embodying, materializing, remembering and forgetting the past An early and enduring theme in the anthropology−history dialogue has been the coexistence, as Maurice Bloch (1977) phrased it, of ‘the past and the present in the present’. Whereas Bloch was concerned with theorizing social change, a more prolific strand in this discussion focused on the self-conscious ‘invention of tradition’ by national or colonial elites in moments of social or political transformation. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s (1983) influential edited volume featuring six eminent scholars, all but one a historian, generated a large anthropological literature of local examples, demonstrating that such invention was indeed widespread, particularly on the part of nation-states seeking to establish their antiquity, and hence their authenticity and authority. However, the debunking impulse underlying much of this literature was eventually challenged, not least for its implicit assumption that nationstates and recognition-seeking cultural communities ‘invented’ while scholars had access to ‘true’ histories (Hanson 1989). The point about the ‘selective’ character of any history − in its sense as a ‘story about the past’ − having been made, the debate was able to move to

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more interesting questions: including what exactly was transpiring when individuals or communities ‘misrepresented’ past events (Rose 1993; Shyrock 1997; Herzfeld 2001). What the debate around ‘the invention of tradition’ highlighted − somewhat against the original thrust of its authors, ironically − was the inventiveness required in all forms of history-making, and not only on the part of elites but also among ordinary actors. This has been a prominent theme in Michael Herzfeld’s compelling accounts of the contestations surrounding historical reconstruction and the monumentalization of venerated pasts in the cities of Rethymnos (Crete) and Rome (Herzfeld 1991, 2009). Urban inhabitants in myriad roles − citizens, property owners, neighbours, kin − engage actively and often vociferously with state authorities but also, in the case of Rome, property developers and organized crime over the meanings and value (in all senses) of a historically multilayered built environment. Diverging stories of past and present compete for authority in these encounters. Alongside the ‘invention’ strand, anthropologists have taken up in diverse ways questions about the past in the present. This literature, moreover, overlaps significantly with, and draws from, the still burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on ‘memory’. Within the wide-ranging discussions around memory, one recurring preoccupation among anthropologists concerns the ways the past is embodied. Paul Connerton’s (1989) How Societies Remember, which asks us to recognize memory as social and not merely individual, is a central reference point, though many attempting to explore bodily practices of memory ethnographically draw equally or more on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) writings on habitus and on the work of de Certeau. Nadia Seremetakis (1994), as exemplified in her vivid description on memories of eating the peaches of her childhood, now replaced in the Athenian markets by hardier, but tasteless, new varieties, conveys the sensuality of memory, as does Sutton (2001) in his treatise on food and memory. A fascinating

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discussion has developed among some anthropologists of West Africa who discern memories of the slave trade embodied in practices of witchfinding, in ritual and dance, in modalities of exploitation and dependence in labour and parent−child relations and in forms of political violence (Ferme 2001, Shaw 2002, Argenti 2007). Coming out of anthropological investigations on trauma and memory, Veena Das has long grappled with the experiences of victims of political violence − notably, women who were abducted, sometimes raped and in many cases, separated from (though sometimes later reunited with) their families during the Partition of colonial India into the two religiously defined states of India and Pakistan in 1947. In a recent volume, she explores how ‘everyday life as a site of the ordinary buried in itself the violence that provided a force within which relationships moved’ (Das 2007: 11), revealing with immense tact how such women hold the past in their bodies and relationships even as they painfully craft new accommodations to their altered circumstances. With equal subtlety and compassion, Didier Fassin (2007) examines how the bodies of HIV-positive Black South Africans ‘remember’ (and carry) the privations, violence and humiliations of the colonial and apartheid past; he argues persuasively that AIDS transmission cannot be understood except by grasping this past and the current sexual and survival practices which are its legacy. The flip side to remembering is forgetting; yet, as a social process, forgetting is not straightforward. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson remarks on the bizarre ‘peremptory syntax’ in the French political philosopher Ernest Renan’s essay, ‘What is a Nation?’, when Renan notes that ‘each citizen is obliged to have forgotten’ facts inconvenient to the narrative of eternal national unity, like ‘Saint Barthelémy’, while paradoxically and at the same time, indicating these regrettably bloody religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants as those dividing ‘fellow Frenchmen’ (Anderson 1983 [1991: 199−201]). That forgetting may be

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intertwined with remembering is also central to Jennifer Cole’s (2001) account of forgetting − then re-remembering − colonialism in Madagascar. These, and other works, emphasize the materiality of history which marks bodies, as well as the material forms and spaces that organize and carry memory (e.g., Bahloul 1996). Archives Anthropologists’ engagement with archives, although already claimed as a territory anthropologists could share with historians, is one of the areas of greatest expansion in the history/anthropology interface (for recent ‘state of play’ summaries, see Axel 2002; Papailias 2005; Platt this volume); it is also part of the more wide-ranging archival turn in the human sciences (Steedman 2001). Not only are more anthropologists than ever working in archives but also they have become ever more thoughtful about what archives are and how they might be read and used. The move into archives, historians’ quintessential domain, gathered pace with anthropology’s attempt to address histories of colonialism, spurred on by the events of 1968. In part, this reflected a moral critique of colonialism’s continuing legacies, such as Kathleen Gough’s (1968) insistence that as ‘a child of imperialism’, anthropology must study postwar imperalism’s new forms. Revelations regarding ‘Project Camelot’, where the US military used anthropological knowledge for counterinsurgency in the Southeast Asian conflict, elicited disciplinary soul-searching and led to calls to ‘reinvent’ anthropology (Hymes 1972) in a more activist guise, including through ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972). Simultaneously, some natives began to ‘write back’ about anthropologists’ historical participation in America’s internal colonialism vis-à-vis its indigenous peoples (as in Vine Deloria’s [1969] scathing account of ‘anthropologists and other friends’ in Custer Died for Your Sins). Yet how was one to reconcile these accusations of complicity with the fact that most anthropologist

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saw themselves as liberal or even radical critics of colonialism, many actively intervening with colonial or state authorities on behalf of the people they studied? Nuancing these critiques required acknowledging broader structures. Talal Asad (1973) and colleagues, for instance, insisted that whatever the critical stances of individual anthropologists, colonialism provided the enabling conditions for anthropology to exist as a fieldwork-based practice. Moreover, leaving out the colonial context from anthropological accounts had not only ethical but also epistemological implications. Anthropologists’ attempts, in the self-consciously positivist mode of structural-functionalist analyses, to depict native societies as internally coherent systems − although an implicit riposte to colonialist assumptions of native lack − reinforced a fiction of separate worlds, as did their use of the ‘ethnographic present’, which implied that native subjects inhabited an ahistorical present or at least, a different ‘time’ from themselves (Fabian 1983). Such interventions, along with Said’s (1978) sweeping diagnosis of ‘Orientalism’ as an institutionalized Western practice of constructing its oriental Other, generated a cottage industry of critiques of anthropological representations of Otherness, eventually leading to the Writing Culture debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Yet anthropologists were interested not only in anthropology’s complicity with colonialism but also with wider questions concerning the colonial encounter and its ongoing effects, including the ways that colonial administrations produced new forms of knowledge about native peoples as they attempted to govern them. Although the formulation of this problematique owes much to Michel Foucault’s conception of power/ knowledge, Bernard Cohn’s (1987) work anticipated Foucauldian orientations in many ways. Trained in an American cultural anthropological tradition and influenced by the historicism of Albert Kroeber, Cohn rejected an approach to colonialism that traced ‘culture contact’ or ‘European influence’ on

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native societies. Rather, he insisted that colonizer and colonized needed to be placed in the same analytic frame: each produced representations of Self and Other for the Other; each was influenced by this process. Colonial categories might be guided by the interests of the more powerful party, but they were not simply imposed; rather, they were produced through complex interactions and contingent implementations (see, e.g., Dirks 1986). In attending to their dynamic interplay, Cohn’s work on the production of colonial categories as part of a wider sociology of colonial knowledge opened the way for anthropologists, but also historians, ‘to trace the production and consumption of [colonial] facticities’ (Stoler 2009: 33). Jean and John Comaroff set the bar high with their conceptually ambitious and methodologically innovative project to situate Christian missionization among the South African Tswana within a carefully delineated racially complex and multifaceted colonial encounter, while connecting this to global economies and dynamic relations between African localities and the metropole (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997): a project which also produced a stimulating theorization of Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). With a theoretical perspective informed by a powerful amalgam of feminism, critical race theory, political economy and Foucault, Ann Stoler, another leading thinker in anthropologists’ archival engagement, has addressed Dutch Indonesian colonial archives through a series of substantive questions: from her early work on race and colonial sexualities (Stoler 1995) to her most recent tracing of the affective dimensions of imperial governance (Stoler 2009). Simultaneously, she has continually wrestled with epistemological and methodological issues: in a key article, she advocated reading archives not just ‘extractively’ but understanding them as ‘cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority’ (Stoler 2002: 87).

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Although colonialism remains a privileged site for archival investigation, there has been some work on ‘socially transformative endeavours’ (Thomas 1994: 105) analogous to colonialism, competing or coexisting with it. Intrigued by conundrums in her ethnographic work in northern Greece, Jane Cowan turned to the League of Nations Archives to explore the ways a fledgling international institution ‘supervised’, yet also collaborated in, the nation-state’s production of internal sameness and difference (Cowan 2008) and to rethink the history of human rights. Tracing encounters between petitioners, states, international civil servants and early humanitarian activists generated by the League’s ‘supervision’ of Greece’s and Yugoslavia’s treaty obligations vis-à-vis the nationally ambiguous population classified in League files as ‘Bulgarian Minorities’, her work reveals the fraught emergence of ‘minority’ as an international political-legal category in the decades following the First World War (Cowan 2003, 2007). Anthropologists reading in the archives of state or international institutions, as in colonial archives, often find themselves following elites, yet their questions and problematiques distinguish them from traditional historians. Most endeavour to place the dispossessed and ruling groups ‘in the same contextual and analytical frame’ (Cohn 1980: 215); as the Comaroffs have stressed, ‘… histories of the repressed, in themselves, [hold no] special key to revelation; … the discourses of the dominant also yield vital insights’ (1992: 17). The relation of ethnography to the archive remains a live issue. At the level of method, the creative synergies produced when combining ethnographic approaches with analysis of archives have certainly been demonstrated. Innovative examples include Anastasia Karakasidou’s (1997) synthesis of oral histories, government records and media sources to reconstruct a century of Greek nationbuilding, Keith Brown’s (2003) juxtapositions of fieldwork, oral histories and archival evidence to chart the changing meanings of the past in the Republic of Macedonia, Luise

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White’s (2000) use of archives and extensive interviews to plumb rumours of bloodsucking Europeans in colonial East Africa as a trope of colonialist plunder, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach’s (1996) analysis of colonial-era aerial photographs, their own fieldwork observations and historical narratives collected from their Guinean informants to ‘reread’ a West African landscape, and Ilana Feldman’s (2008) work with retired Palestinian civil servants as well as Palestinian and British mandate archives to piece together the everyday practices of governing Gaza. In a particularly original investigation of archival poetics, Penelope Papailias (2005) goes beyond institutional archives to explore her fellow Greeks’ personal archive-making: a response, in part, to living in a country burdened by ‘too much history’. Such studies bring to mind John Comaroff’s riposte that ‘there ought to be no “relation” between history and anthropology, since there should be no division to begin with’ (1982: 143−144). Not only do multiple pasts coexist, albeit uncomfortably and with unequal audibility, in every present, in the sense argued by de Certeau and by advocates of the historicity perspective, but also the toolkits of both the historian and the anthropologist are needed to interpret any given social reality. Whither anthropology and archives? Not all anthropologists have welcomed the archival turn. Some fear that underpinning the rush to archives by increasing numbers of anthropologists is a wish to evade the risks and anxieties of fieldwork with complicated flesh-and-blood research subjects (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009). Sceptics note, moreover, that since anthropologists are not fully trained in historical methods, they may end up just producing bad history. These worries are not unjustified, although they seem to reinstate a picture of disciplinary distinctiveness that has not held for some time (Axel 2002). It is notable that virtually all of the anthropologists cited in this section turned to archives, and to historical questions, after − often as a result of − or simultaneous with an ethnographic engagement, usually of

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considerable duration, with a specific social ‘space’ or ‘scene’. The trick is probably to think of ethnography and archival work not as alternatives but as two sets of methods to be used in counterpoint. Raising similar interpretive and methodological issues, each is nonetheless distinctive in what it can, and cannot, reveal; yet scholars can elicit more, and more insightfully, if they use ethnography to think both alongside and against archival data, and vice versa.

CONCLUSION In the final pages of her landmark 1984 article on ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, Sherry Ortner admitted that while she chose ‘practice’ as the key symbol of 1980s anthropology, ‘many would have chosen … history’ (1984: 158). But for her, the amalgamation of history with ‘virtually every kind of anthropological work’ offered merely ‘a pseudointegration of the field that fail[ed] to address some of the deeper problems’ (1984: 159). Those problems arose particularly from a tendency to see history, in its role as an answer to how and why societies change, as ‘an external chain of events to which people react’. Ortner insisted, paraphrasing Marx, that history must be understood rather as ‘something that [people] make − within, of course, the very powerful constraints of the system within which they are operating’ (1984: 159). While anthropologists’ engagement with history − both as the ‘actual’ past and as stories about the past − since 1984 continues to be very diverse, the practice approach delineated by Ortner has significantly informed that engagement. Few anthropologists remain unconverted to the importance of history: increasingly, they focus on how societies, now conceived as always situated ‘in time’, produce, reproduce and transform themselves. At the same time, work at the anthropology−history interface varies widely, and there is little evidence of an emerging lingua franca. Even the sometimes used,

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though rarely defined, term, ‘historical anthropology’, is claimed by many different kinds of scholars, from Marxists to poststructuralists, who share little in the way of problematiques, objectives or methods. For Brian Axel (2002: 2), it ‘remains a marked field’ in as much as ‘its practitioners’… analytic procedures threaten to reveal the fragile epistemologies and contexts of present scholarship’s doxa’, a quality ‘that positions historical anthropology on the margins of conventional academic practice’. Yet that marginality vis-à-vis each discipline’s centres is simultaneously the interface between them and, as in other border epistemologies, the positionality which enables creativity and insight.

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Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ortner, Sherry. 1984. Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(1): 122–166. Papailias, Penelope. 2005. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Passerini, Luisa. 1987. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (English translation of Torino operaia e fascismo. Laterza: Roma-Bari, 1984.) Portelli, Alessandro. 1991. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rose, Deborah Bird. 1993. Worshipping Captain Cook. Social Analysis 34: 43−49. Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1973. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It. London: Pluto Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1995. How ‘Natives’ Think, about Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Scott, David. 1996. Postcolonial Criticism and the Claims of Political Modernity. Social Text 48(3): 1−26. Seremetakis, C. Nadia (ed.). 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, Rosalind. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shyrock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sider, Gerald. 1986. Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sider, Gerald and Gavin Smith (eds). 1997. Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and

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Commemorations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, Gavin. 1997. Pandora’s History: Central Peruvian Peasants and the Re-covering of the Past, in Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (eds). Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, pp. 80−97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271−310. London: Macmillan. Steedman, Carolyn. 1986. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago. Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stewart, Charles. 2003. Dreams of Treasure: Temporality, Historicization and the Unconscious. Anthropological Theory 3(4): 381−400. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87−109. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sutton, David E. 1998. Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Terkel, Studs. 1967. Division Street, America. New York: Pantheon Books. Terkel, Studs. 1974. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Random House. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz.

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Tonkin, Elizabeth. 1992. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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William, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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1.9 Anthropology and Archaeology Julian Thomas

EMERGING DISCIPLINES Archaeology and anthropology came into existence alongside each other, and the subsequent development of their relationship has been both complex and revealing. At different times each has claimed affinity with or distinction from the other for rhetorical purposes, so that the two disciplines have been to some degree mutually constitutive. For reasons of space, what follows will neglect physical and linguistic anthropology, and concentrate on the British and American contexts: it is acknowledged that this will result in a degree of simplification. Chris Gosden (1999: 10) has quite rightly pointed to the role that colonialism played in forming both anthropology and archaeology, the encounter between Europeans and societies unfamiliar to them fuelling an awareness of, and an imperative to investigate, human difference. However, the conditions that made archaeology possible were rather more extensive. The practice of archaeology rests on the notion that new knowledge can be created, and that material things as well as written texts can provide information about the past, as well as on a conception of time as linear and irreversible. Archaeology was nourished by the demand on the part of the emerging nation-states for a legitimating narrative

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based on evidence rather than myth, and the vision of deep time that emerged from geological uniformitarianism. Finally, archaeology drew on the ideas of human finitude, technological change, and the relationship between culture and nature that were associated with the Enlightenment (Daniel 1950: 38; McVicar 1984: 59; Thomas 2004: 2). Yet it was undoubtedly the colonial enterprise that enabled ‘exotic’ people in distant places to be equated with Europeans in the distant past, conflating spatial and temporal difference. This had the positive effect of reducing the dependence on the accounts of ‘barbarians’ that had been provided by classical authors, but it also began to establish the identification of non-Europeans as ‘primitives’ (Wylie 1985: 65). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Native Americans were commonly cast as the least cultivated form of humanity, so that John Locke was able to claim that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’ (1965: 343), while John Aubrey argued that the Ancient British had been ‘two or three degrees less savage than the Americans’ (Daniel 1980: 29). Similarly, John White’s illustrations of Britons and Algonquians are to some degree interchangeable, and importantly Robert Plot used American evidence to suggest how prehistoric stone tools might have been hafted

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(Piggott 1976: 7). This equation of the past with the present took on a greater significance in the eighteenth century, when ideas of social evolution that had been neglected since Greek and Roman times began to resurface. The evolutionary schemes of the Enlightenment were at first ‘conjectural histories’, composed of a succession of abstract social forms which illustrated the way that humankind had progressively transformed their conditions of existence through the application of reason (Cassirer 1951: 47; Horowitz 1987: 87). Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), had sketched the idea that different kinds of society were organized in quite different ways, but it was Turgot’s planned ‘universal history’ (eventually published in 1844) that introduced a scheme in which successive modes of subsistence (hunting, pastoralism, agriculture) reflected humanity’s gradual mastery of nature. In the manner of Voltaire, these imagined histories posited a universal human spirit and a knowable human nature, which are realized through the historical process. Once social development was understood as a series of distinct stages, these could be used as a basis for classification, and the past could be populated by analogies drawn from the present. Thus, conjectural prehistory came to be replaced by ‘ethnographic prehistory’ (Adams 1998: 34). An early example of the latter was Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which made use of descriptions of Native Americans in order to distinguish between stages of savagery and barbarism. It would be some time before archaeological evidence was used in a similar way. A significant step was Christian Thomsen’s work at the museum of the Danish Antiquities Commission at the start of the nineteenth century, in which exhibits were organized according to a three-age scheme of stone, bronze and iron (Klindt-Jensen 1975: 50). Having studied in Paris, it is probable that Thomsen was familiar with Mahudel’s abstract formulation of the three-age system of 1734 (Trigger 1989: 60), but his innovation was to employ a stadial scheme as a

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means for classifying artefacts. This kind of ordering itself represented a significant break from the cabinets and collections of the early modern period, which had been organized on the basis of perceived correspondences and sympathies between objects (HooperGreenhill 1992: 124). While the early ethnographic prehistories proposed sequences of social development, they lacked any clear sense of temporality or chronology. Some notion of the possible antiquity of humankind began to emerge with the discoveries of stone tools alongside the remains of extinct animals at Kent’s Cavern, Narbonne and Abbeville in the earlier nineteenth century. However, these results were not generally accepted until 1858−1859, with Pengelly’s excavations at Brixham Cave and the separate visits of Joseph Prestwich and John Evans to authenticate Boucher de Perthes’ finds in the Somme (Gruber 2008: 39). As the canvas of human history expanded, a debate developed between progressivists, who argued that contemporary ‘savages’ were comparable with the people who had lived in Europe in prehistoric times, and devolutionists, who considered them to represent the scattered remnants of lost civilizations (Jones 1980: 18). The argument was effectively decided by the publication of Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man (1863), which pointed out that the animal remains associated with the ancient Egyptian civilization were those of modern domesticates, and that the finds from Brixham and the Somme must therefore have been earlier in date. Accordingly, the rise of civilization must have been slow and gradual, rather than instantaneous and divinely inspired. Lyell’s use of archaeological and geological evidence to support a progressivist argument is a clear indication of the way that the new sciences were transforming evolutionary narratives from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards (Adams 1998: 50). The first truly archaeological prehistory, however, was John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times, of 1867. Lubbock organized his evidence according to Thomsen’s three-age scheme,

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adding a distinction between the Old and New Stone Age. Yet, while he discussed the subsistence activities of prehistoric people, Lubbock’s account of the growth of human society was focused tightly on technological change. In this respect, Lubbock’s arguments differ subtly from those of Lewis Henry Morgan, which represent the culmination of the tradition of ethnographic prehistories. While Morgan agreed that technological change was the motor that drove social evolution, his sequence of stages elaborated on Robertson’s terminology of savagery, barbarism and civilization, and each stage was characterized by a distinctive form of kin organization (Morgan 1877: 12). Where Lubbock uses archaeological evidence to document the process of evolution in specific areas, Morgan draws on ethnography to establish generalized stages that might be expected to apply more widely, if not universally. Yet while this suggests a degree of divergence between nascent anthropological and archaeological approaches, in the period following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) there was some commonality of purpose amongst those attempting to apply evolutionary insights to human society. For instance, Lubbock, Tylor, A.L.F. Pitt Rivers (then known as Lane Fox), Thomas Huxley and John Evans were all close associates in the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain during the 1860s and 1870s (Bowden 1991: 46). This was the milieu in which General Pitt Rivers, the ‘father of modern field archaeology’, was able to develop a set of ideas that compared the evolution of material culture to that of biological organisms (Bowden 1991: 54). On the basis of his interest in weaponry, Pitt Rivers asserted that types of spears and clubs that proved successful in warfare would be retained, while those that failed would be abandoned. It followed that it should be possible to create evolutionary typologies of artefacts, using the forms of classification that were already in use in biology (Thompson 1977: 34). Pitt Rivers’ early excavations were principally

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designed as a means of acquiring stratified sequences of artefacts (and particularly weapons), and it was only later that he developed the analytical approach to sites and landscapes for which he is renowned. His existing interest in ethnography and the collection of artefacts from around the world fuelled his belief that the study of non-Western peoples could inform the study of prehistoric Europe (Bradley 1983: 4). But it equally fed a deeply conservative version of evolutionism, in which social as well and biological change were perceived as progressing very slowly, and ‘savages’ (as well as the lower orders) were not to be advanced toward civilization by reform or education.

DIFFUSIONISM, CULTURE-HISTORY, AND STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM The success of evolutionism in the later nineteenth century displaced the perception of tribal peoples as ‘degenerate survivals’, but at the same time the trend toward social Darwinism began to erode the Enlightenment conviction of the psychic unity of humankind. Pitt Rivers’ and Huxley’s view that some peoples were more capable of social progress than others chimed with a growing interest in race, manifested in the late Victorian enthusiasm for anthropometry. By the end of the century, social evolution was starting to appear to some to be at once monolithic and uncomfortably implicated in imperialism. One alternative was to explore the possibility that human diversity was generated as much through cultural as biological processes, and this gave rise to diffusionism (Stout 2008: 75). The diffusionists held that innovations are unlikely to arise independently in different societies, and pass from one community to another forming complex and unique cultural configurations. The methodology of diffusionism relied on the distribution maps of cultural traits that had been pioneered by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, which demonstrated the spread of artefact

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types and cultural practices from one region to another. Necessarily, such an approach committed diffusionists to a view of culture as particulate, composed of discrete entities, rather than possessing an organic wholeness. In anthropology, diffusionism was used by W.H.R. Rivers (1914) to explain the complex patterns of cultural variation observed in New Guinea. In the period following the First World War, however, his associates Grafton Elliot Smith (1929) and William Perry (1923) developed rather more grandiose arguments, in which all cultural change throughout the globe had had a single origin. In their view, human beings were not naturally violent and competitive, but peaceable and conservative (Smith 1937: 20). For Smith, the ‘Egyptian miracle’ of seasonal abundance in the Nile valley stood in for the deity of the devolutionists as the motor behind all world civilizations, although in Perry’s account advanced forms of culture had been imposed on the passive communities of Asia and the Americas by force (Stout 2008: 89). The ‘hyper-diffusionism’ of Smith and Perry was very much a British phenomenon, and yet was never fully accepted by more mainstream British archaeologists, who employed the notion of cultural diffusion more sparingly (e.g. Childe 1936: 169). In the United States, archaeology and anthropology were developing in a rather different context from that of Europe. Prehistoric remains were investigated almost exclusively by people of European origin, so there was less of a sense that a ‘national past’ was being addressed. On the other hand, Native American communities existed alongside the dominant community, and a greater degree of continuity was to be expected between past and present (McGuire 2004: 376). As a consequence, ethnography and archaeology shaded into one another, and patterns observable in the present were projected backwards in what became known as the ‘direct historic approach’ (Lyman and O’Brien 2001: 6). Throughout the nineteenth century the ‘Indians’ were often considered to have been

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changeless over time, effectively a part of the natural history of the continent, only ever transformed by contact with White society (as for example with the introduction of horses, facilitating the mobile way of life of the Plains tribes). This picture was finally overthrown by the discovery of the first Palaeo-Indian finds, such as the stone projectile points found with Pleistocene bison bones at Folsom, New Mexico in 1927 (Trigger 1989: 186). Suddenly the First Nation communities were the inheritors of changing traditions, rather than exemplars of a timeless way of life. These developments had been to some extent anticipated by Franz Boas, whose culture-historic form of anthropology drew on Ratzel’s geography to present human cultural groups as distinguished by unique combinations of traits appropriate to life in a specific region, brought together through the process of diffusion. For Boas, the uniqueness of individual cultures is such that they possess quite specific ways of perceiving and understanding the world. The particularity of human societies could only be appreciated by understanding the historical sequences of cultural change that gave rise to their present configuration, and thus Boas upheld the notion of a ‘four-field anthropology’, integrating cultural, archaeological, biological and linguistic studies (Gillespie, Joyce and Nichols 2003: 156). Indeed, Boas himself undertook archaeological fieldwork in the Valley of Mexico with his student Manuel Gamio (Willey and Sabloff 1980: 91). This work set the tone for much of the archaeology that would be conducted under Boas’ influence, in which artefacts were understood principally as manifestations of cultural traits, whose position in stratigraphic sequences enabled the construction of classificatory tables (Lucas 2001: 47). The culture-historic approach was well suited to forcing some form of spatial and temporal structure on the mass of archaeological material that was beginning to build up in the Americas. But in both the New and the Old World, it imposed a view of the past in which people could only

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be apprehended as bearers of a uniform set of cultural norms (Childe 1946: 243). As a consequence of Boas’ influence, United States archaeologists working on the prehistoric cultures of the Americas were by the 1930s closely aligned with anthropology, in a way that their colleagues working on the Classical world and the ancient Near East were not. This was to have profound consequences following Franklin Roosevelt’s accession to the presidency in 1931. One of the principal features of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was the provision of federally funded job creation schemes, in areas that did not compete with the private sector. Prominent amongst these were programmes of infrastructural works, like those of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and major archaeological surveys and excavations that ran ahead of dam and highway construction (Patterson 1995: 74). The result was the public employment of large numbers of Americanist archaeologists to supervise these projects, the majority of whom had been educated in anthropology departments in the universities. The effective alliance between these professionalized archaeologists, museum professionals and academics was the force behind the formation of the Society for American Archaeology in 1934 (Willey and Sabloff 1980: 115). Another effect of this development was a period of sustained reflection on archaeological theory, heavily informed by the anthropological background of the protagonists. This culminated in a series of significant philosophical statements in the immediate post-war period, the most celebrated being Walter Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology (1948). Taylor was critical of the direction of much culture-historic archaeology, which had contented itself with the collection and description of evidence. He argued that this was because the discipline gained its identity from a series of technologies for acquiring information about the past, and that in order to explain this data archaeologists needed to draw on anthropological or historical conceptual frameworks (Taylor 1948: 44). Moreover, these ideas needed to

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be employed in generating research questions, rather than being brought in to make sense of existing evidence. In this respect, Taylor was reflecting a shift toward a more generalizing, scientific and law-based perspective that was growing in American archaeology and anthropology, which would culminate in a rejection of Boasian culturehistory (Phillips 1955: 246). This trajectory would only increase the separation that had developed between anthropological prehistory and Classical archaeology (Renfrew 1980: 291). Ironically, just as archaeology and anthropology were growing closer together in the United States during the inter-war years, the precise opposite was occurring in Britain. The emergence of structural functionalism was presented as a coming of age for British anthropology, in which the division between amateur collectors of field information and professional synthesizers and theorists was dissolved (Clifford 1988: 28). Bronislaw Malinowski advocated a form of participant observation in which ethnographers immersed themselves in the life of another society for an extended period, and used functionalist ideas ultimately derived from Durkheim as a means of organizing the mass of observations that would be generated in the process. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown rejected the ‘shreds and patches’ approach to culture promoted by the diffusionists, in which disparate elements are understood as being brought together by historical happenstance (Radcliffe-Brown 1935: 401). While they did not totally reject either history or evolution, they were wary of both stadial models of social development and the elaborate narratives of the hyper-diffusionists (RadcliffeBrown 1940: 11). The approach that they adopted retained the notion of human communities as behaving like organisms, which might or might not be functionally integrated. However, their focus was synchronic, concerned with how a society works now, as opposed to how it has changed over time. As well as efficiently structuring the results of fieldwork, this approach proved helpful

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for colonial administrators, as RadcliffeBrown recognized during his time spent teaching in South Africa (Gosden 1999: 83). Although the structural functionalists were principally concerned to distinguish themselves from diffusionism and unilinear evolutionism, the result of their eventual dominance of British anthropology was a growing rift with archaeology (Stout 2008: 104). Aware of this, Gordon Childe attempted to combine a vision of societies as organic wholes with a recognition that they also represent historical entities (1946: 248). However, his efforts were not strongly supported on either side, and the immediate post-war period was marked by a phase of single-minded empiricism within British archaeology.

ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALOGY AND ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY Even at times when archaeology has distanced itself from anthropological theories of culture and society, one area in which there has been some level of interaction between the disciplines has been that of ethnographic analogy. It is arguable that the identification of any artefact or structure relating to a past society is analogical, relying on information drawn from the contemporary world, and we have seen that this process was considerably enhanced by exposure to non-Western communities (Hodder 1982a: 11). In the Americas the possibility of relating archaeological finds with still-living societies made analogy an integral part of the disciplinary apparatus (Anderson 1969: 134; Lyman and O’Brien 2001: 9). However, even here concerns were raised concerning the legitimate use of analogies, given continued attempts to identify contemporary hunter-gatherers as ‘survivals’ of past cultures, pushed to the extremities of the earth by more ‘successful’ peoples (e.g. Sollas 1911: 269). Moreover, as Robert Ascher (1961: 317) was to point out, many of the cultures identifiable in both American and European prehistory had no obvious

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close analogies in the modern world. Consequentially, criteria needed to be defined for what might constitute a useful or credible analogy. One attempt to establish such criteria was provided by Grahame Clark, in connection with his excavations at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire (Clark 1954, 1972). Clark argued that analogies drawn between societies that existed in similar environmental conditions, and possessed a similar subsistence economy, would be more robust. On this basis, he used information from studies of Native American groups in northern latitudes to draw inferences concerning the sexual division of labour in Mesolithic Europe. The flaw with this argument was that it effectively implied that social relations were determined by ecology, economy and technology (Hodder 1982a: 13). In the American context, Ascher’s attempts to ‘place analogy on a firmer footing’ (1961: 324) were perhaps more successful. Ascher recommended that archaeologists should make themselves familiar with a wider range of ethnographic material, so as to avoid reliance on a standard set of examples. He also made the important point that human societies are constantly in the process of change, and this will limit the extent to which any present society will map directly onto the material traces of a past community. Finally, he noted that the kinds of information that archaeologists might be interested in would not necessarily have been recorded by ethnographers, and this might require that they should undertake their own observations of living communities: a suggestion that would gain in significance in the decades to come. Yet as the demand for a more rigorous and scientific archaeology grew during the 1960s, the practice of ethnographic analogy came to be regarded with increasing scepticism (Wylie 1985: 84). Since analogy projects information drawn from the present into the past in order to create an interpretation, it is effectively an inductive procedure, whose results are difficult to evaluate (Wylie 1985: 85). This was hard to reconcile with the deductivist approach of the New Archaeology

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(see below). At best, analogies were viewed as sources of hypotheses that might be tested using archaeological evidence, but in their initial phase of optimism the New Archaeologists imagined that, given a sufficiently rigorous methodology, archaeology could answer any question on the basis of its own evidence alone (Flannery 1972: 105). Analogy was therefore superfluous. Later, Lewis Binford (1983a: 417) would come to the much more pessimistic conclusion that arguments generated from observations on people in the present cannot be tested on the archaeological record, since they relate to entirely different kinds of phenomena: dynamic human behaviour in the former case, the static material outcomes of that behaviour in the latter. While the more anthropologically oriented archaeology of the United States remained cautious about analogy, a more positive attitude began to emerge in Britain. The subtle difference was that some British archaeologists identified ethnographic analogy less as a means of identifying specific artefact types, sites or social formations than as a way of confronting a set of assumptions about the past that are generated in contemporary Western society (e.g. Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967: 153). According to this view, our problem is not that we lack an understanding of the past, but that we implicitly imagine that we know more than we really do. Equally, British archaeologists have sometimes been quicker to accept that analogy cannot be done away with in archaeological interpretation, and that the best that one can do is to make one’s analogies as reliable and informative as possible. To that end, Ian Hodder (1982a: 16) draws a useful distinction between formal and relational analogies, where the former denotes analogy between two contexts which have only the outward appearance of similarity, and the latter a comparison between societies which are alike at a structural level. Similarly, Bruce Trigger (2004: 47) stressed that a comparison between past and present that stresses differences can be as helpful as analogy. In any

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case, much recent British archaeology has made use of ethnographic evidence as a source of information concerning the potential breadth of variability of gender relations, conceptions of personhood, and forms of identity, rather than in search of specific analogies (e.g. Fowler 2004). More recently, Matthew Spriggs (2008) has offered a critique of the use of analogy in ‘post-processual’ British archaeology, which he considers to suffer from imposing the ethnographic present on the prehistoric past. Many of the source ethnographies concerned are drawn from colonial contexts in Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, which have been subject to population decline and pacification, and where documented forms of social organization may be products of colonialism. Spriggs proposes that the archaeology as much as the anthropology of these areas may serve as useful sources of analogies, and that we should be comparing long-term sequences of development rather than ethnographic snapshots. Disappointingly, though, he provides no indication of how this procedure would provide counter-intuitive insights into areas such as personhood and social organization, and he actually appears to advocate a return to Clark’s comparison of societies with similar subsistence regimes (Spriggs 2008: 547). Ascher’s call for archaeologists to undertake their own research amongst living societies in order to investigate the relationship between social processes and material conditions was increasingly responded to from the end of the 1960s onwards. A new sub-discipline of ethnoarchaeology began to address such issues as the location and process of waste disposal, the manufacture and variability of artefacts, the spatial organization of social life, and mobility patterns associated with economic activities (Stiles 1977: 91). Some ethnoarchaeological research attempted to concentrate on physical processes that were not dependent on human intervention, such as the dilapidation and collapse of dwelling structures, the role of scavenging animals in the formation of bone assemblages, or the

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dispersal of artefact assemblages by wind and water action (Lane 2006: 406). However, in practice, these happenings do not take place in abstraction from any social context, and ethnoarchaeological research has had to take this into account. Much of the early work was concerned simply with demonstrating that intuitive interpretations of artefacts and structures could be thoroughly misleading, as with Bonnichsen’s (1973: 285) account of the explanation of structures and deposits at an abandoned Native American camp in the Canadian Rockies provided by a former inhabitant. In its mature phase, however, ethnoarchaeology was able to reveal something of the intricacy of everyday material life, and the complex re-working and cycling of objects and materials that contribute to what eventually becomes an archaeological site. As such, it laid to rest forever the impression that sites could be read as a ‘map’ of a past society, stopped in its tracks (Lane 2006: 410). This recognition was bought at the price of a loss of innocence, however. Some practitioners have come to argue that studying living people in order to provide insights about the past treats them in an unacceptably instrumentalist fashion, an ethical situation quite distinct from other forms of ethnography (Fewster 2001).

THE NEW ARCHAEOLOGY: ARCHAEOLOGY AS ANTHROPOLOGY The dissatisfaction amongst American archaeologists with a largely descriptive culturehistory resurfaced during the early 1960s. Revealingly, Lewis Binford’s (1962) polemic against the status quo was framed in terms of a need to make archaeology more anthropological, and it is highly significant that there had been a return to theories of social evolution within American anthropology by this time, inspired by the very different approaches of Leslie White (1959) and Julian Steward (1955). Although American archaeology was institutionally lodged within anthropology,

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Binford argued that it had failed to contribute to the major debates of the broader discipline, because it had not managed to relate its subject matter to the study of human society. Archaeologists continued to follow Boas in seeing material culture as a set of mutually equivalent traits, whose function was barely considered. Binford advocated a systemic approach, in which artefacts operated in a number of different ways in an adaptive process that linked culture, population and environment (Binford 1962: 21). Material culture was not simply technology, but was engaged in social, political and ideological relations. So although there may be aspects of past societies that cannot be directly observed in the material record, these would always have been linked systemically with material culture, even if the latter is generally recovered in incomplete form (Binford 1972: 91). Material culture was not only adaptive but also strategically employed. Culture should be seen not as a set of cognitive norms, passed down between generations or transmitted by diffusion, but as a range of behavioural options, that are participated in differentially (Binford 1965: 125). Once it is recognized that archaeology addresses societies as adaptive totalities, rather than material fragments, the subject actually has an advantage over other aspects of anthropology, since it has access to a broader range of societies and can study these over appreciable depths of time. The optimism of the early New Archaeology that grew out of Binford’s arguments was forcefully expressed in a series of studies of mortuary practice (Binford 1971; Saxe 1971). While previous generations of archaeologists had considered funerary activity to be part of the realm of ritual and religious belief, and thus beyond their interpretive competence, Binford argued that death rites played an adaptive role. On the basis of the comparison of a series of ethnographic cases, he suggested that mortuary practice represented a signalling system, whereby the social persona and status responsibilities of the deceased were conveyed to the surviving

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community, enabling them to adjust to their loss (Binford 1971: 23). It followed from this that societies with a more complex set of statuses and roles would have a more elaborate and diverse set of funerary customs, and that more or less ranked communities could be distinguished on the basis of the burial record that they left behind. The belief that the structure of past societies was reflected in − or could be correlated with − the pattern of traces that they left behind was also seen in studies of the spatial organization of settlement patterns (Renfrew 1973: 15), and the use of variations in pottery decoration to infer patterns of residence and descent (Deetz 1968: 41). The latter relied on the notion that micro-traditions of ceramic manufacture might be discerned within groups of rooms at south-west United States pueblos, such as the Carter Ranch Site, if potting were a female skill passed down between mother and daughter, and if communities had been matrilocal and matrilineal (Longacre 1964: 317; Hill 1970: 33). As we have seen already, it was in part the development of ethnoarchaeology that demonstrated the complexity of site-formation processes and their articulation with social practices, revealing these attempts to ‘read off’ social relations from the archaeological record as somewhat simplistic (Plog 1978: 148). At around this time, David Clarke argued that one of the emerging aspects of contemporary archaeology was an ‘anthropological paradigm’ (Clarke 1972: 7). Yet it is clear from his description that what he was referring to was not the application of anthropological insights to archaeological evidence, but the attempt to extract social information from the material record. In a sense, this was not archaeology acting as one element of a four-field anthropology, but attempting to supplant anthropology. It was Binford himself who reacted against the hubris of this position. Culture-historic archaeology had made inductive statements about the past, based on material evidence. The New Archaeology had employed a deductive approach, but had failed to recognize that its hypotheses related to dynamic

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systems, while its evidence took the form of static matter (Binford 1972: 89; Binford 1977: 6). The project of understanding past societies needed to be separated from that of rendering the evidence meaningful, and the two required different kinds of theory. Binford’s ‘middle range theory’ was effectively an artefact physics, intended to unravel the formation of the archaeological record. This required actualistic research in the present, in order to identify law-like relationships between forces and impacts, which Binford compared to ‘Rosetta stones’ (1983b: 113). Some of this work could be experimental: a person skilled in flint knapping could generate observations regarding the sequence of acts involved in making a particular type of tool, the character of the removals left on the surface of the core, and the nature of the debitage that would be generated. These could then be used to give meaning to scatters of knapping debris encountered on archaeological sites. But in practice, much of Binford’s own actualistic research took the form of ethnoarchaeology, conducted amongst the Nunamiut Eskimo (Binford 1978) and the Australian Alyawara (Binford 1986). While Binford held that this work had general significance, the fact that it was conducted in specific cultural settings rendered it just as analogical as any other form of ethnoarchaeology (Lucas 2001: 192). Moreover, it raises the ethical problems of using contemporary people as a vehicle for addressing the past in an even more severe form.

DIVERGENT ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGIES IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN While the New (or ‘processual’) Archaeology was responsible for very considerable methodological developments, its focus on systems theory and evolutionary ecology, and consequent neglect of human agency and social conflict, was soon subject to criticism (e.g. Kushner 1970: 131). Moreover, the kind

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of anthropological archaeology that it offered was not always highly rated by anthropologists. Edmund Leach, for instance, provided a negative commentary on the attempts of archaeologists to construct social models (1973: 767). Leach maintained that while anthropologists have direct access to social practice, archaeologists must content themselves with lifeless residues (1977: 166). However, it is notable that elsewhere Leach was to argue that culture needed to be decoded, revealing structures and messages that are not self-evident (1976: 2). If we adopt Leach’s structuralist approach, anthropology is just as inferential a discipline as archaeology, since it is concerned not with the practice itself, but the structure hidden behind the practice. In America, some commentators began to question whether archaeology really did have a closer affinity with anthropology than other disciplines (Gummerman and Phillips 1978: 187). This tendency accelerated at around the turn of the millennium, with a call for the break-up of the four-field model of anthropology, and the establishment of separate archaeology departments in United States universities (Gillespie, Joyce and Nichols 2003: 159). The complaint of some American archaeologists was that while they were still conducting anthropological research (of an evolutionary, functionalist, ecological kind), their social and cultural colleagues had embraced postmodern relativism and ceased to be anthropologists at all (Gosden 1999: 6). In Britain, entirely different forces had begun to come into play in the later 1970s, and were to have the effect that archaeology was to take an ‘anthropological turn’ just as America was travelling in the opposite direction. Louis Althusser’s structuralist revision of Marxist ideas had had a profound impact on anthropology in France and Britain, introducing new ways of thinking about economic relationships in pre-capitalist societies (Godelier 1977: 127). In particular, the way in which the exchange of highly ranked valuables can serve to establish prestige and alliance, and the role of the circulation of

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goods in relations between radically different social formations proved extremely suggestive to archaeologists (e.g. Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978). These ideas connected directly with the distributions of exotic artefacts that archaeologists routinely investigate, and were to prove highly influential in the study of both prehistoric societies and early states (Hodges 1982; Bradley 1984). Yet the renewed engagement with Marxism was to have other consequences. Both the New Archaeology’s use of positivist philosophies of science that stressed objectivity and value-neutrality and its ecological functionalism were identified as being linked to the grounding assumptions of contemporary capitalism (Rowlands 1982: 159). At much the same time, a series of ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture were beginning to move in a new direction, concerned with meaning and symbolism rather than function and taphonomy. For instance, Polly Wiessner’s work on artefact style amongst the Kalahari San demonstrated that while in some cases objects operated to routinely convey information about a person’s status, at times people consciously used their style of dress and adornment to actively negotiate their social identities (Wiessner 1983: 257, 1984: 195). In a similar study, Roy Larick described the way that young men amongst the Loikop (Samburu) adopted styles of spears that positively differentiated them from elder generations (Larick 1986: 279). Perhaps most significantly, the ethnoarchaeological research that Ian Hodder undertook in East Africa during the late 1970s addressed the significance of assemblages of mutually associated artefacts that had hitherto been described by archaeologists as ‘cultures’. A survey of compounds belonging to the Njemps, Tugen and Pokot groups in the Lake Baringo area of Kenya revealed that styles of dress, ornaments, ceramics and even hearth positions were not reproduced unthinkingly between the generations. Instead, people used material things knowingly and strategically in order to present themselves in advantageous ways. Moreover, different

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groups within ‘tribes’, such as women and young men, understood and manipulated particular kinds of objects in specific ways, so that the meanings of artefacts were not universally shared (Hodder 1982b: 27). Hodder’s concern with artefacts as symbols led to the conclusion that material culture is ‘meaningfully constituted’, and this fed into the developing critique of New Archaeology functionalism. If artefacts are symbols as much as technology, they need to be ‘read’ in a specific context, so that the ‘post-processual’ archaeology that Hodder advocated was one that rejected universal laws of culture for historical specificity (Hodder 1982c: 1). Eventually, the imperative to elaborate a ‘contextual archaeology’ would suggest a new kind of anthropological archaeology, which drew on Clifford Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ in order to construct ‘ethnographies of the past’ (Geertz 1973: 21; Hodder 1992: 14; Tilley 1996). By the 1990s, then, some British archaeologists were less enthusiastic about the discipline’s capacity to investigate great depths of time than the prospect of exploring unique and otherwise inaccessible cultural contexts.

MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES One way of understanding the ‘post-processual era’ in archaeology would be as a continuation of the process by which a rather sheltered discipline began to engage in a more extensive theoretical dialogue with the human sciences as a whole. We have seen that during the nineteenth century archaeology and anthropology were equally engaged in the study of social evolution, but thereafter the relationship became a less balanced one, with ethnography often understood as a source of analogies that could be borrowed by archaeologists. In a general sense, this has contributed to a concern on the part of archaeologists that their discipline represents a parasitic ‘importer’ of ideas from outside (Garrow and Yarrow 2010: 3). The balance has arguably begun to be redressed with the

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emergence of a distinct field of ‘material culture studies’ since the 1980s. While this is a genuinely interdisciplinary enterprise, involving contributions from areas as diverse as fashion, design, technology studies and human geography, much of the initial impetus came from the group of students associated with Ian Hodder in Cambridge at the end of the 1970s. Thus, while both Daniel Miller and Henrietta Moore now self-identify as anthropologists, their initial doctoral research was at least in part inspired by archaeological problems: ceramic production and variability (Miller 1985) and the use and meaning of domestic space (Moore 1986), respectively. Part of the success of material culture studies has lain in the ability of its practitioners to articulate a sophisticated theoretical framework for the study of the object world, applicable in both ethnographic and archaeological contexts. A central strand in this has been the theme of objectification, first outlined by Miller (1987: 21) in terms of a dialectical process in which human beings first externalize their ideas, beliefs and values in making material things, and then reincorporate them. There is thus a recursive relationship in which people and things are mutually constitutive: in making the world of artefacts, human beings realize themselves (Tilley 2006: 60). The emergence of material culture studies has coincided with a growing concern with the embodied and physical character of social life within anthropology (Miller 1998). The past two decades have seen a proliferation of material ethnographies and archaeologies of the present, and there have been indications in the past few years that the two are beginning to bleed into one another (Dant 1999; Graves-Brown 2000; Buchli and Lucas 2001a; Holtorf and Piccini 2009). However, it has been notable that for much of this period archaeologists and anthropologists have been carrying on parallel debates on landscape, architecture, the body, personhood and material culture without talking to each other as much as they might have done (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Hirsch and

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O’Hanlon 1995; Lambek and Strathern 1998; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007). Perhaps the principal distinction is that archaeologists are likely to approach the nexus of people and things by starting with the objects. The results can be impressive, as with Buchli and Lucas’ (2001b) evocative study of an abandoned council house in Britain. Despite this, important reservations regarding the whole project of material culture studies have recently been raised by Tim Ingold (2007: 8). Ingold points to the way that the notion of ‘material culture’ enshrines a distinction between a world of mental representations and one of inert matter, and casts the practice of making as one in which form is imposed on substance. In its place, he advocates a concern with human engagement with the world of materials. It remains to be seen how this shift of emphasis might affect the relationship between the two disciplines.

PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE Archaeology and anthropology developed out of the desire to understand human diversity and the emergence of human society. One of the similarities between the two is that their formation as professional disciplines was connected with fieldwork, and having worked in the field remains an important source of authority within the two disciplines (Gosden 1999: 33). Unlike contemporaries such as Lubbock, Pitt Rivers undertook extensive survey and excavation, establishing a model of argument based upon meticulous recording that is perhaps comparable with Malinowski’s role in anthropology (Clifford 1988: 32; Lucas 2001: 4). The difference is that while the work of the lone ethnographer has often been understood as an interpretive project from the start, the collective investigation of an archaeological site by a large team has usually been portrayed as a datacollection exercise, with interpretation deferred to a later stage (Andrews, Barrett and Lewis 2000: 526). Interestingly, the current use of ethnographic methods by

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archaeologists attempting to understand archaeological field practice (Edgeworth 2010: 53) or the public perception of the archaeological heritage (Jones 2005) presents another way in which the subjects are apparently converging. At the same time, the merging of archaeology and anthropology found in a more subtle appreciation of material things is bringing about a re-evaluation of the perceived asymmetry between the disciplines (Garrow and Yarrow 2010: 9). Leach’s argument that anthropologists have direct access to their subjects has been slow to die, but there is an increasing recognition that both professions are concerned with fragmentary evidence (Yarrow 2010: 21). It is even suggested that if archaeologists have learned to cope with absence and incompleteness, anthropologists might have something to learn from them. As we have already suggested, if human society is understood as a hybrid network composed of people and things, the main distinction between the two disciplines is that they enter the network at different points (Lucas 2010: 30). The potential for a productive dialogue between archaeology and anthropology is greater now than it has been for decades, but the conversation has barely begun.

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Saxe, A.A. 1971. ‘Social dimensions of mortuary practices in a Mesolithic population from Wadi Halfa, Sudan’, in: J. Brown (ed.) Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practice, 39−57. Arlington, VA: Society for American Archaeology. Smith, G.E. 1929. The Migrations of Early Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, G.E. 1937. In the Beginning: The Origin of Civilization. London: Watts. Sollas, W.J. 1911. Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives. London: Macmillan. Spriggs, M. 2008. ‘Ethnographic parallels and the denial of history’, World Archaeology 40, 538−552. Steward, J. 1955. Theory of Culture Change: the Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois. Stiles, D. 1977. ‘Ethnoarchaeology: a discussion of methods and applications’, Man 12, 87−103. Stout, A. 2008. Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Pre-War Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, W.W. 1948. A Study of Archaeology. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Thomas, J.S. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge. Thompson, M. 1977. General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century. Bradfordon-Avon: Moonraker. Tilley, C.Y. 1996. An Ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric Societies in Southern Scandinavia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C.Y. 2006. ‘Objectification’, in: C.Y. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Kuechler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds) Handbook of Material Culture, 60−73. London: Sage. Trigger, B.G. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trigger, B.G. 2004. ‘Cross-cultural comparison and archaeological theory’, in: L. Meskell and R.W. Preucel (eds) A Companion to Social Archaeology, 43−65. Oxford: Blackwell. Turgot, A.R.J. 1844. Plan de Deux Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle. Paris: Guillaumin. Ucko, P.J. and Rosenfeld, A. 1967. Palaeolithic Cave Art. New York: McGraw Hill. White, L. 1959. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw Hill. Wiessner, P. 1983. ‘Style and social information in Kalahari San projectile points’, American Antiquity 48, 253−276. Wiessner, P. 1984. ‘Reconsidering the behavioural basis for style: a case study among the Kalahari San’,

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Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 3, 190−234. Willey, G. and Sabloff, J. 1980. A History of American Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. Wylie, A. 1985. ‘The reaction against analogy’, in: M.B. Schiffer (ed.) Advances in Archaeological

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Method and Theory, Vol. 8, 63−111. London: Academic Press. Yarrow, T. 2010. ‘Not knowing as knowing: asymmetry between archaeology and anthropology’, in: D. Garrow and T. Yarrow (eds) Archaeology and Anthropology: Understanding Similarity, Exploring Difference, 13−27. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

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1.10 Anthropology, Economics and Development Studies Keith Hart1

Economic anthropology is a distinctive field at the interface between anthropology and economics. It achieved a measure of success in the three decades after the Second World War (what the French call les trente glorieuses) but has been less prominent since. I focus here on the dominant trends over the last quarter century. Free market orthodoxy lent considerable historical unity to this neoliberal era, a period now framed in retrospect by the global economic crisis since 2008. Economic anthropology was dominated in the twentieth century by the method of fieldwork-based ethnography; but it is time to open up once more to world history and to a more critical perspective on economy. I conclude with suggestions for its renewal as a discipline.

THREE PHASES OF ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY’S FORMATION The purpose of economic anthropology in the nineteenth century was to test the claim that a world economic order must be founded on the principles that underpinned Western industrial society. The search was on for alternatives that might support a more just

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economy, whether liberal, socialist, anarchist or communist. Since society was understood to have not yet reached its final form, there was great interest in origins and evolution. Anthropology was thus the most inclusive way of thinking about economic possibilities. The universities expanded in the twentieth century and knowledge was compartmentalized as so many impersonal disciplines modelled on the natural sciences. Anthropology found itself pigeon-holed as the study of those parts of humanity that the others could not reach. The job of the anthropologists was to accumulate an objectified data bank on ‘other cultures’, largely for consumption by insiders rather than the general public. The profession became fixed in a cultural relativist paradigm, by definition opposed to the universalism of economics. The development of economic anthropology as a discipline may be divided into three stages. In the first, from the 1870s up to the 1940s, most anthropologists were interested in whether the economic behaviour of ‘savages’ was underpinned by the same notions of ‘rationality’ that were taken to motivate economic action in the West. They first devoted themselves to assembling compendious accounts of world history conceived of as an evolutionary process.

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Later, in the years following the First World War, the practice of fieldwork became ever more dominant, and ethnographers sought to engage the more general propositions of mainstream (‘neoclassical’) economics with their particular findings about ‘primitive societies’. They failed, mainly because they misunderstood the economists’ epistemological premises. Four national traditions stand out in this period: the German, British, American and French. It is important to learn from the pioneers of this period. Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925) still have the power to inspire, especially the latter (Hart 2007a). In the second stage of development, from 1945 to 1975, economic anthropologists argued among themselves about the theories and methods needed to study their special preserve, which now included the world’s peasants alongside its dwindling number of tribesmen. ‘Formalists’ held that the tools of mainstream economics were adequate to this task, while ‘substantivists’ claimed that institutional approaches were more appropriate (LeClair and Schneider 1968). By this they meant that economic life in societies lacking impersonal markets was always ‘embedded’ in other social institutions, ranging from the household to government and religion. Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian-born historian, journalist and teacher (Hart 2008), was the principal source for this riposte to formal economics, first in his anti-market polemic, The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times (1944), and later in the Columbia Project of the 1950s, when his vision led a team of ethnographers, archaeologists and historians in a wide-ranging investigation of non-industrial societies (Polanyi 1957). This formalist-substantivist debate ended in a stalemate, opening the way for Marxists (Seddon 1978) and feminists (Moore 1988) to dominate for a while; but they too drew mainly on the traditional subject matter of exotic ethnography. The third stage of development takes us from the watershed of the

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1970s through three decades of neoliberal globalization. In this period anthropologists have expanded their inquiries to address the full range of human economic organizations, which they study from a variety of perspectives. The question remains: Do the capitalist markets that have allowed North Atlantic societies to dominate the world economy over the last two centuries rest on universal human principles or not? We may be proud of anthropologists’ commitment to joining the people where they live in order to find out what they think and do. But fieldwork-based ethnography needs to be integrated once more with a world history that it abandoned in the twentieth century. While a rapidly urbanizing world was consumed by war and economic disaster, anthropologists continued to publish ethnographies of remote peoples presented as being outside modern history. The period after the Second World War saw the rise of economics to the public prominence it enjoys today. The neoliberal era was not kind to economic anthropology, which became fragmented and incoherent. Yet this could also be described as an era of ‘normal science’, when a good deal of solid work was accomplished. If this has been theoretically diverse, that is true of contemporary anthropology in general. We all now live in one world driven by capitalism, so anthropologists have studied that. There was a marked shift back home to the Western heartlands; but the palpable sense of a shrinking world encouraged anthropologists to develop new ways of studying ‘globalization’ everywhere (Eriksen 2007). Three factors underpinned this shift: the end of the Cold War; the rise of China and India as capitalist powers; and the digital revolution in communications whose most visible symbol is the Internet (Castells 1996). Here I note the contribution made by the concept of an ‘informal economy’ to development studies and explore how economic anthropologists have adapted to an era of ‘one-world capitalism’ and how work on money relates to the global economic crisis.

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First, however, I review the theoretical trends of the last quarter-century.

BETWEEN THE CULTURAL TURN AND HARD SCIENCE By the 1980s, the Polanyi School had dissolved and many anthropologists who were less than thrilled with mainstream economics had abandoned the field to its own entropy. Clifford Geertz’s (1979) essay on the Moroccan suq is an extended reflection on the economy of Islamic civilization (the bazaar as forerunner of the informal economy – see below), but it was not written with the field of economic anthropology in mind. Marshall Sahlins, after publishing Stone Age Economics (1972), denied the value of a comparative ‘anthropological economics’ (his preferred label), since material life everywhere was structured by local symbolic orders of which bourgeois economics was one (Sahlins 1976). These giants exemplify the ‘cultural turn’ that has both subverted and invigorated economic anthropology in recent decades. The cultural turn was not new. The German pioneers of ‘primitive economics’ also aspired to grasp the native point of view, as had Malinowski (Spittler 2008). Later investigators of peasant societies such as Foster and Redfield emphasized their cultural aspects: e.g. the notion of ‘limited good’ (Foster 1965), which was thought to constitute a major cultural obstacle to accumulation. Arjun Appadurai (1986) inspired a generation of ethnographers to explore subject− object relations in the anonymous sphere of capitalist commerce. With Igor Kopytoff (1986), he drew attention to the complex ‘biographies’ of consumer goods. They might acquire a commodity form, but then leave that sphere to become heirlooms or community sacra. The bourgeois separation of persons (subjects) and things (objects) was deconstructed by new work on personhood, led by Marilyn Strathern (1988, 1999). But, as with the later Sahlins, these approaches often led away from economic anthropology’s concerns.

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The substantivist division between industrial and non-industrial economies lives on in an opposition between ‘commodities’ and ‘gifts’, which has been taken to represent a contrast between the capitalist West and the rest of the world – or as Strathern (1988) put it, ‘Euroamerica’ and ‘Melanesia’. Chris Gregory (1982) launched this opposition, even though he never intended the logical contrast to stand for ethnographic separation of whole societies and emphasized their practical combination in Papua New Guinea (Gregory 1997: chapter 2). Mauss (1925) wrote his classical essay to refute the bourgeois opposition of individual commercial self-interest to the altruism of the gift. Jonathan Parry (1986) showed that for Mauss the archaic gift was a hybrid of the two extremes. A market ideology that represents Christmas presents as pure gifts was then projected onto Mauss’s text as a basis for contrasting whole economies, ‘ours’ with ‘theirs’. Unlike the substantivists, proponents of the gift/commodity pair write about both types of economy, while generally keeping the same moral distance from ‘capitalism’. Daniel Miller (1987, 2010) has built up his ‘material culture’ project as an alternative to economic anthropology. Explicitly embracing an ethnographic method, he has championed empiricism in debates with the French sociologist Michel Callon (1998), who holds that the ideas of economists have shaped the functioning of markets in capitalist societies. Monographs on Trinidad have explored the local meanings given to capitalism and the Internet there, leading to a theoretical concern with ‘virtualism’ (Carrier and Miller 1998) to complement a focus on material objects. Miller’s project builds bridges to art history, archaeology, design and cultural studies of consumption, but not to economic anthropology, despite the considerable thematic overlap. The intellectual rigour of Stephen Gudeman’s cultural approach to the economy stands out, as does his commitment to the tradition of economic anthropology. In Economics as Culture (1986), he applied his ‘local models’

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perspective to Western economics as well as to the peasant economies of the non-Western world. In a collaborative work (Gudeman and Rivera 1990), he treated societies studied by ethnographers as living examples of the social history that classical economists grappled with in their texts. Gudeman challenges anthropologists to combine the tools of our trade with serious exposure to the history of economic ideas. His most recent overview (Gudeman 2008; see also 2001) is built on an opposition between ‘community’ and ‘market’, grounding the former in activities performed and valued for their own sake, primarily within households, and the latter in the means−ends relations typically found in trade. Gudeman (2008) depicts neoliberalism as a ‘cascading’ of markets into realms previously regulated by mutuality. This dialectical framework could in principle be applied anywhere. Anthropologists who came together under the banner of the new institutional economics (NIE) do not always see themselves as ‘formalists’, but they share a commitment to ‘hard science’ and predictive models. Whereas Polanyi regarded markets as one kind of economic institution among several, NIE could be said to view all economic institutions as markets (Hart 2010). They set out to incorporate the institutions themselves into formal models, holding that, rather than shaping economic activity exogenously, they evolve according to an underlying logic of rational choice consistent with neoclassical economics. The NIE approach, developed by Douglass North, Oliver Williamson and their anthropological followers, defines institutions as ‘the rules of the game’ (Acheson 1994). Their favourite example is property, often taken to provide the fundamental incentive structures for all economies. Economist Harold Demsetz (1967) drew on ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to argue that the emergence of private property rights could be explained as the internalization of externalities by individual choice-making actors considering relative costs and benefits. Garret Hardin (1968) claimed that systems of open access led to degradation of the environment (‘the tragedy

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of the commons’). Elinor Ostrom (1990), however, won a Nobel Prize for showing that local communities are perfectly capable of solving the ‘collective action problem’ when given a chance to do so. While economists like North and Demsetz assumed that efficient economic organization must be decisive, legal scholars have pointed out that property systems have many other social functions. For some anthropologists, the very concept of property is irreducibly Eurocentric and inappropriate for studying regions such as Melanesia (Strathern 1999). Economic anthropologists generally occupy the middle ground in these debates (Hann 1998; Hunt and Gilman 1998). Obviously people hold objects of many kinds in culturally specific ways, but property rules everywhere shape production and consumption. The common property solutions analysed by Ostrom only work if the rules are carefully specified and respected on all sides. Jean Ensminger (1992) showed in her influential study of Northern Kenyan pastoralists how markets transformed local lives within a few decades, mainly for the better. New institutions emerged to reduce uncertainty and actors’ transaction costs. Considerable benefits accrued to individuals following the breakdown of collective land tenure. In different language, Ensminger echoed Harold Schneider’s (1974) ‘formalist’ case for the benefits of modern commerce in Africa. Others with a ‘scientific’ bent have moved into fields such as experimental economics and neuro-economics. The combination of game theory and brain scanners raised hopes that the ultimate questions driving economic anthropology since the nineteenth century could at last be resolved. Laboratory experiments with the ultimatum game on American campuses showed that considerations of fairness lead individuals to deviate from the model of Homo economicus. Joseph Henrich (2004) carried out this game in other parts of the world, to see if ‘culture’ made a difference. People familiar with the market economy were found to behave more selfishly, while economies that emphasized cooperation were

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associated with more generous offers. It is not obvious what is being measured when members of small-scale societies in remote locations play these games under the control of Western social scientists. We gain no new insights into their economic relations. Henrich has published in leading economics journals and has engaged with biological anthropologists and other evolutionists; but the impact on economic anthropology has been minimal.

THE INFORMAL ECONOMY Anyone who visits the sprawling cities of what was once called ‘the Third World’ can see that their streets are teeming with life, a constantly shifting crowd of hawkers, porters, taxi-drivers, beggars, pimps, pickpockets, hustlers – all of them getting by without the benefit of a ‘real job’. Ethnographic study of this phenomenon generated the principal contribution made by anthropologists to development studies, including economics. Before he launched the ‘cultural turn’ in anthropology, Clifford Geertz (1963) wrote about entrepreneurship as part of an exploration of development questions in Indonesia. The majority of a Javanese town’s inhabitants were occupied in a street economy that he labelled ‘bazaar-type’. The ‘firm-type’ economy consisted largely of Western corporations who benefited from the protection of state law. These had form in Weber’s (1961) sense of ‘rational enterprise’, being based on calculation and the avoidance of risk. National bureaucracy lent these firms a measure of protection from competition, thereby allowing the systematic accumulation of capital. The ‘bazaar’, on the other hand, was individualistic and competitive, so that accumulation was well-nigh impossible. Geertz identified a group of Reform Muslim entrepreneurs who were rational and calculating enough to satisfy Max Weber (1904); but they were denied the institutional protection of state bureaucracy granted to the existing corporations and so their version of

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capitalism remained stunted at birth. He pointed out that modern economics uses the bazaar model to study the decisions of individuals in competitive markets, while treating as anomalous the dominant monopolies protected by state bureaucracy. Economists found this model at a time when the more powerful states awarded new privileges to capitalist corporations, society took a centralized form and a bureaucratic revolution transformed mass production and consumption. The global crisis of the early 1970s raised fears concerning ‘Third World urban unemployment’. Cities there were growing rapidly, but without comparable growth in ‘jobs’, conceived of as regular employment by government and the corporations. Keynesians and Marxists alike held that only the state could lead an economy towards development and growth. The question was therefore: How are ‘we’ (the bureaucracy and its academic advisors) going to provide the people with the jobs, health, housing, etc., that they need? And what will happen if we don’t? The spectre of urban riots and even revolution raised its head. This story didn’t square with my fieldwork experience in the slums of Accra. I wanted to persuade development economists to abandon the ‘unemployment’ model and embrace the idea that there was more going on in the grassroots economy than their bureaucratic imagination allowed for. The conceptual pair ‘formal/informal’ (Hart 1973) grew out of an attempt to figure out what happened to agricultural workers when they migrated to cities whose markets were only weakly organized by industrial capitalism. The formal and informal aspects of an economy are linked, since the idea of ‘informality’ is entailed by the institutional effort to organize society along formal lines. ‘Form’ is the rule, an idea of what ought to be universal in social life; and for most of the twentieth century the dominant forms have been those of national bureaucracy, since society has become identified to a large extent with nation-states. I wanted to insert a particular ethnographic vision of irregular

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economic activity into ongoing development debates. But a report on Kenya for the International Labour Office (1972) coined a concept − ‘the informal sector’ − and that is what it has subsequently become, a keyword helping to organize a segment of the academic and policy-making bureaucracy. So the ‘informal economy’ has a double provenance, reflecting an opposition between bureaucracy and the people that indirectly reproduced Cold War ideology (Hart 1992). No-one could have anticipated what happened next: under a neoliberal imperative to reduce the state’s grip on ‘the free market’, national economies and the world economy itself were radically informalized. Not only did the management of money go offshore, but corporations outsourced, downsized and casualized their labour forces; public functions were privatized, often corruptly; the drugs and illicit arms trades took off; the global war over ‘intellectual property’ assumed central place in the drive for profits; and whole countries abandoned any pretence of formality in their economic affairs. Here was no ‘hole-in-the-wall’ operation living in the cracks of the law. This convergence of legal and illegal forms of capitalism has reached the point where it is hard to tell them apart. The informal economy has come a long way as a result of neoliberal globalization. Perhaps it is time to be more discriminating in our approach to unregulated economic activities. Even so, some attempt must be made to harness the coordinating power of bureaucracy to the self-organized energies of the people (Guha-Khasnobis et al. 2006).

ONE-WORLD CAPITALISM The shift of industrial production to countries with cheaper labour and, in the case of China, India and Brazil, increasingly sophisticated capitalist organization, has been a consistent feature of recent decades. In the neoliberal homelands, a wave of outsourcing, downsizing and casualization of the labour force undercut the political power of the

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unions and implied that the Western masses now participated in capitalism primarily as consumers rather than producers. Anthropologists, taking their lead from sociologists and historians, have flocked to the study of consumption, often with a perspective drawn from ‘material culture’ rather than economic anthropology, as well as to marketing and the evolution of property forms under corporate capitalism. Historians and ethnographers traditionally studied the artefacts of local peasantries that were mostly made by hand. It was not easy to apply this approach to the city, since urban domestic interiors are often furnished with artefacts of similar function and only minor formal differences. Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu, adopting a post-Marxist and post-structuralist perspective, took a rather negative view of contemporary domestic decor, claiming that it is hard for consumers to express a distinctive identity through mass-produced commodities which give expression to people’s social position using a grammar imposed on them. Objects in such a system could only convey signs of social recognition, not of personality. Baudrillard (1975), taking his inspiration from semiotics, saw consumption as the manipulation of signs by a system. He argued that formal differences between objects performing the same function could be understood in terms of their possessor’s relative social position. Consumers try to conform to the behaviour of their own social group while seeking to differentiate themselves from others. Thus, models of consumption help to construct social and cultural identity. Bourdieu (1984) wanted to reconcile objectivity and subjectivity. Consumer behaviour may be seen as an expression of habitus and the things people own are the incarnation of objectified social relations. Differences in the goods we possess only signify distinction if individuals have incorporated this structure of outward appearances, with its hierarchy of practices and objects, into how they represent the world. While Bourdieu granted actors individual choice, he linked their consumption

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to a social position. For he assumed that every individual shares the same abstract code of meaning for these object-signs and that this is imposed from the outside. Mary Douglas (1979, with Isherwood) proposed a similarly over-socialized view of consumption. She told the economists that, if they were serious about consumer choice as the engine of the capitalist economy, they should turn to anthropologists for advice on ‘consumption classes’. A later generation of anthropologists granted consumers of massproduced objects more say over their actions. They took the idea of a system of objects, but showed also that actors build up a universe that has personal meaning and expresses their social identity. The Hegelian concept of ‘appropriation’ (Miller 1987) seeks to capture how mass-produced commodities are made personal by belonging to a specific way of life. Objects bought in a store are made into inalienable property as part of a home universe unique to their owner. People express both collective and individual identities in this way: rather than succumb to a world of objects, they personalize their material environment. Daniel Miller has taken this approach to A Theory of Shopping (1998), the Internet, mobile phones and clothing, from blue jeans to saris. Sophie Chevalier (2012) argues that the public and private spheres interact through objects that enter and circulate within a home. Social structure inserts itself into the private sphere through home decoration. This process of internalization is more a matter of reconstruction and reinterpretation than a simple mirror. Collective existence does not lie outside individuals, nor is private life simply an expression of the collective. We should not insist on a strict opposition between individual and collective or private and public. The process of getting people to spend money – the art or science of marketing – is also a rapidly expanding field of anthropological investigation. Marianne Lien’s (1997) research on a Norwegian food company showed that corporate marketing is an expert system of shared, specialized knowledge.

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She describes marketing as a ‘disembedding mechanism’ that operates at a global level. Kalman Applbaum (2004) agrees. He argues that modern marketing, from its origins in eighteenth-century England to twentiethcentury America, has absorbed moral criticism into its own quasi-religious system. Whereas an earlier generation of ethnographers highlighted the devastating consequences of capitalist development for local cultures (Nash 1993; Ong 1987), Applbaum shifts the culture contact model to one more suited to the globalizing present. He emphasizes the emergence of consensual meanings and goals in economic actions and attributes this to the corporations’ success in controlling every aspect of the social life of the commodities they sell. William Mazzarella (2003) is concerned with how Mumbai’s advertising agencies impart a local gloss on universal themes. Applbaum would say that it is misleading to focus on a narrow aspect of distribution and that marketing paradigms originating in the United States are becoming universal. The basic capitalist institution is the firm. Small businesses often remain important, but they have long been overshadowed by organizations with global reach. Of the 100 largest economic entities on earth, corporations now outnumber nations by more than 2 to 1. They are extremely flexible and overlap with government. Dynastic families still play a significant role in many large corporations (Marcus with Hall 1992); but in practice control has passed to a new class of directors, lawyers and accountants. Alexandra Ouroussoff (2010) showed that the distribution of wealth between shareholders and managers of corporations is highly contentious. After the millennium she interviewed senior corporate actors about risk in London, Paris and New York. Her method is still one of ethnography. Since the 1980s, the world economy has been in the grip of the credit rating agencies (Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch) who supervise what they take to be investment risk on shareholders’ behalf. They imagine that they can calculate

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and minimize future losses. Corporate executives, she found, have an opposed economic philosophy that holds profit and loss to be subject to unpredictable contingency. They have muted their public criticism of the rating agencies because of their need for investment capital; and their reports of company activities have become devious as a result. The resulting capitalist regime, Ouroussoff claims, has both stifled entrepreneurial growth and created an economic collapse that was inevitable because systemic. Yet academics, politicians and journalists persist in treating the financial crisis as a result of personal moral failure rather than of institutional contradiction. We still think of private property as belonging to living persons and oppose private and public spheres on that basis. This possessive individualism also allows abstract entities like governments and corporations to hold exclusive rights in something against the world (Macpherson 1978). At the same time corporations have retained their special legal privileges, such as limited liability for bad debts. We are understandably confused by General Motors having the same rights as a living person, while being exempted from responsibilities imposed on the rest of us. This impedes not only the practice of economic democracy but also even thinking about it: not only has private property evolved on balance from individual to corporate ownership but also its focus has also shifted from ‘real’ to ‘intellectual’ property, from material objects to knowledge (Hart 2005). This is partly because the digital revolution has led to the economic preponderance of information services whose reproduction and transmission is often costless. Radical reductions in the cost of transferring information through machines have injected a new dynamic into the conduct of business. Modern corporations rely on extracting rents from property secured by political privilege as much as on profits from direct sales; as the saying goes, ‘Information wants to be free’, meaning that there is consistent downward pressure on prices for information-based goods

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and services. The social effort needed to maintain high prices in a world of free production and reproduction is what drives capitalism’s central conflict today. As with corporate personhood, a sleight of hand is involved. If I steal your cow, its loss is material, since only one of us can benefit from its milk. But if I copy a CD or DVD, I deny no-one access to it. It is in essence a ‘public good’ whose use does not reduce the available supply. Yet corporate lobbyists use this misleading analogy to influence legislators to treat duplication of their ‘property’ as ‘theft’ or even ‘piracy.’ The world has become polarized between the corporations’ drive to privatize the cultural commons and huge resistance to that drive. Adrian Johns (2009) reminds us that this conflict is by no means recent. But the digital revolution has taken it to an unprecedented level. The Japanese electronics firm NEC recently discovered a criminal replica of itself organizing a parallel system of production and distribution, using the same suppliers outside the law and much more profitably. This is a long way from the car factories that shaped capitalism’s selfimage in the mid-twentieth century. But unchecked mastery of the world economy by corporate capitalism in the last quartercentury has indeed reached this point. It would be inconceivable without the cheapening of information transfers that has resulted from the digital revolution in communications (Hart 2000).

MONEY AND FINANCIAL CRISIS If graduates of the elite universities tended to choose banking as a career during the credit boom, the anthropology of money too has enjoyed a revival of late. Not coincidentally, the traditional aversion of the substantivists to money (epitomized by Bohannan 1959) has shifted towards recognizing some of its positive features for ordinary people; we have become less willing to inhabit one half of the divide between modern and traditional economies. Anthropologists and sociologists

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have long rejected the impersonal approach to money and markets offered by mainstream economics. Viviana Zelizer (1994), for example, shows that people refuse to treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated thing, choosing rather to ‘earmark’ it − reserving some for food bills, some as holiday savings and so on. Her examples come from areas that remain invisible to the economists’ gaze, especially domestic life. People everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments. This was the message of Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch’s (1989) influential collection. The case studies they assembled show that indigenous people take modern money in their stride, turning it to their own social purposes. There are two circuits of social life: one, the everyday, is short term, individuated and materialistic; the other, the social, is long term, collective and idealized, even spiritual. Market transactions fall into the first category and all societies subordinate them to their own reproduction. For some reason, money has acquired in Western economies a social force all of its own, whereas the rest of the world keeps it in its place. When money and markets are understood through impersonal and individualistic models, awareness of this dimension is surely significant. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are unknowable because impersonal. As a token of society, it must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society (Hart 2007b). This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is highly variable. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal

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source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol that allows each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful. Malinowski (1922) set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarized terms, juxtaposing exotic facts and Western folk theories, without acknowledging that their own ideas are influenced by contemporary history. Hart (1986), echoing Polanyi (1944: 193−194; see Hart 2009: 95−96), identified two strands of Western monetary theory that explained money either as a token of authority issued by states or as a commodity made by markets. The coin is a metaphor for these two sides of money. One carries the virtual authority of the state; it is a token of society, the money of account (heads). The other treats the money medium as a commodity, lending precision to trade; it is a real thing (tails). The two sides are related to each other as top to bottom; but rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (‘heads and tails’), economic policy swings wildly between the two extremes (‘heads or tails?’). By clinging to oversimplified notions of Western economic ideas, anthropologists have failed to learn from intellectual traditions that long predate our entry into this field. David Graeber (2011) has expanded on this approach in his global history of debt over the last five millennia, showing how money’s dominant forms have oscillated between virtual credit and currency. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and historical research in Cameroon and Nigeria, Jane Guyer (2004) identified an indigenous commercial civilization in the Atlantic Africa region. It is based on manipulation of multiple ordinal scales whose existence eluded not only the mercantilist historians but also ethnographers whose localism and lack of historical depth made them as ignorant as foreign traders of the regional economic system they encountered. Guyer has subsequently taken her African discoveries to a wide-ranging analysis of economic institutions in the United States and Britain.

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Money is a ‘memory bank’ (Hart 2000), a store allowing individuals to keep track of exchanges they wish to calculate and a source of economic memory for the community. The modern money system provides a wide repertoire of instruments to help people keep track of their exchanges with the world and to calculate the current balance of their worth in the community. So, a chief function of money is remembering. If personal credit today points towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the postmodern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to it as a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global. It is not enough for anthropologists to emphasize the personal controls that people already impose on money in practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the macro-economy that we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin it could bring down on us (Hart 2011). As Georg Simmel (1900) put it, money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society. The doyen of the emerging field of the anthropology of finance is Bill Maurer (2005a) who has investigated Islamic mortgages, tax havens, mobile phone banking and community currencies and also provided several synoptic reviews (Maurer 2005b, 2006). Maurer stands for a sceptical, pragmatic approach to money and is suspicious of over-generalized cultural categories, being more interested in what people can do with money than what it ‘means’ to them. Like Guyer, he believes that anthropologists have

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bought too easily into the liberal economists’ identification of money with means of exchange rather than payment. Anthropologists now routinely work in financial centres. Ellen Hertz (1998) was prescient in carrying out field research on the Shanghai stock market. Caitlin Zaloom (2006) studied how financial traders adjusted to new information technology. Both are quite traditional in their focus, being concerned with the traders’ local practices and point of view, even if their business is global. They do not relate their ethnography to a broader picture of political economy. Karen Ho (2009) interviewed employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other great finance houses. Her analysis explicitly engages with larger distributional questions, such as the system of granting bank employees large bonuses. She advocates the separation of investment and commercial banking and argues for bonuses to be linked to corporate productivity and long-term shareholder value. Ho draws on Marx’s (1867) theories of value, but her ethnography lacks the richness of the other two. It is a hard balance for economic anthropologists to strike. The failure of the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 triggered a financial collapse whose ramifications are still with us (Hart and Ortiz 2008). One victim of the crisis has been free market economics. It is hard to assert now that economies will prosper only if markets are freed from political bondage. In that sense, the conditions for proposing alternative approaches to the economy are more favourable. The Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett (2009) has a doctorate in social anthropology which she credits with having taught her to examine the economic scene more holistically and critically than most of her colleagues in the financial press. She began studying the market for credit derivatives for her best-seller long before the crisis broke. Her work is a fine example of how economics can be rescued from the economists. Economic anthropology should be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction.

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WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? The early ethnographers did not understand the economists’ aims and methods and settled for ill-informed commentary on a straw man, Homo economicus (Pearson 2000). Then, for a time, the formalist−substantivist debate drew the attention of other anthropologists to some fundamental questions of method. But (at least in the Anglophone world) this argument went unnoticed by economists and it did not leave behind a robust intellectual community of economic anthropologists. Echoes of formalism and substantivism may be seen in the positions taken subsequently by neo-institutional and cultural anthropologists, but recent work in economic anthropology has shown scant regard for shared intellectual history or for internal debate. Economists, policy-makers and the media have consequently found it easy to ignore what anthropologists have to say. The global crisis has opened up a new space for a critical approach to the economy. There is scope for more disciplinary rigour, but at the same time we must transcend the barriers that fragment the human sciences. I am less interested in demarcation lines than in developing new strategies for addressing the predicament of the world we live in. If a world economy that works for everyone is at stake, we cannot afford to neglect world history. Our previous efforts to match the findings of exotic ethnography to a narrow utilitarian creed were bound to fail; both the anthropology and the economics were inadequate to our common human purposes. Economic anthropologists have been breaking out of that straitjacket for several decades now. We should renew our engagement with Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, who complement each other in several ways (Hart and Ortiz 2008). One of Mauss’s (1925) key modifications to Durkheim’s legacy was to conceive of society as a historical project of humanity whose limits were extended to become ever more inclusive (Hart 2007). The point of The Gift is that society cannot be

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taken for granted as a pre-existent form. It must be made and remade, sometimes from scratch. Heroic gift-exchange is designed to push the limits of society outwards. ‘The whole intertribal kula is merely the extreme case … of a more general system. This takes the tribe itself in its entirety out of the narrow sphere of its physical boundaries and even of its interests and rights’ (Mauss 1990: 36). No society is ever economically self-sufficient. So to the need for establishing local limits on social action must always be added the means of extending a community’s reach abroad. This is why markets and money in some form are universal and any attempt to abolish them must fail. Polanyi (1944, 1957) drew attention to a plurality of distribution mechanisms that, in the modern world, affect the lives of millions of people who have no measure of control over them. He highlighted the inequality created by these institutions, as they swing between the symbolic poles of society’s external and internal relations, market and state, respectively. The immediate reaction to the financial collapse was to flip the coin from tails to heads, instead of insisting that states and markets have to be combined in less one-sided ways (Hart 1986). Polanyi’s call for a return to social solidarity, drawing on the voluntary reciprocity of associations, reminds us that people must be mobilized to contribute their energies to the renewal of society (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010). It is not enough to rely on impersonal states and markets. There has been a sharp increase in anthropological research on capitalism. But anthropologists have left the global effects of unequal distribution, the class conflict between rich and poor everywhere, to other branches of knowledge production. A focus on distribution at every level from global to local shows that the objective consequences of political economy and how it is understood by participants are one and the same process. The current crisis highlights this point, since it challenges contemporary financial norms, while its tangible effects are felt

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and feared throughout the world. Don Robotham (2005) rightly argues that the cultural turn of the neoliberal era has buried the economy from view or allowed it to appear only as consumption or exchange. Even in a post-Fordist age, people in Western societies still have to work for a living. Feminists have reminded us that production is not restricted to what takes place outside the home, just as Marx insisted that production and consumption are inextricably linked within a single economic totality. The human economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) has been occluded by the dominant ideology, but an anthropological approach will always grant priority to what people do and think in their everyday lives. In addition to marginalizing the many concrete ways that ordinary people make economic life their own, economists’ focus on individual private property has equally obscured the role of governments and corporations. State socialism, too, made its citizens pay a high price for a mechanical reading of the history of property. Any attempt to build society on an exclusive basis of private or common property is doomed, since human beings must learn to combine being selfreliant and belonging to each other in society. Ethnographers have shown this over and over again; but our myopic absorption in local complexity has precluded effective engagement with larger questions of world history. Markets are indispensable to a viable economy, but unlimited markets threaten democracy itself. In any case, study of the economy cannot be restricted to spot contracts in markets, since political institutions, social customs and moral rules are no less important. Economists disagree among themselves about how far to extend market principles. Even within the neoclassical tradition, some concede that in real-world situations rational choice approaches need to be set in a context of history and social structure. Economists with real-world concerns should take an interest in what anthropologists have discovered and in the kinds of theories we have advanced. In any case, Mauss and

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Polanyi, by providing the missing link between everyday life and the world at large, offer continuing inspiration for the renewal of economic anthropology as a field.

NOTE 1 This chapter draws heavily on collaborative work with Chris Hann (Hann and Hart 2009, 2011).

REFERENCES Acheson, J. (ed.) (1994) Anthropology and Institutional Economics. University Press of America, Lanham, MD. Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Applbaum, K. (2004) The Marketing Era: From professional practice to global provisioning. Routledge, New York. Baudrillard, J. (1975) The Mirror of Production. Telos, New York. Bohannan, P. (1959) The impact of money on an African subsistence economy, Journal of Economic History 19: 491−503. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Routledge, London. Callon, M. (ed.) (1998) The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell, Oxford. Carrier, J. and Miller, D. (1998) Virtualism: A new political economy. Berg, Oxford. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, society and culture. Blackwell, Oxford. Chevalier, S. (2012) Material cultures of home. In Dowling, R. (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home. Elsevier, Amsterdam, Chapter 365. Demsetz, H. (1967) Toward a theory of property rights. American Economic Review 67 (2): 347−359. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1979) The World of Goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption. Routledge, London. Ensminger, J. (1992) Making a Market. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Eriksen, T. (2007) Globalization: The key concepts. Berg, Oxford. Foster, G. (1965) Peasant society and the image of limited good. American Anthropologist 67: 293−3l5.

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Geertz, C. (1963) Peddlers and Princes: Social development and economic change in two Indonesian towns. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Geertz, C. (1979) Suq: the bazaar economy in Sefrou. In C. Geertz, H. Geertz, and L. Rosen, (eds) Order and Meaning in Moroccan Society: Three essays in cultural analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 159−268. Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The first 5,000 years. Melville House, New York. Gregory, C. (1982) Gifts and Commodities. Academic Press, London. Gregory, C. (1997) Savage Money: The anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Harwood, Amsterdam. Gudeman, S. (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and metaphors of livelihood. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Gudeman, S. (2001) The Anthropology of Economy: Community, market, and culture. Blackwell, Malden, MA. Gudeman, S. (2008) Economy’s Tension: The dialectics of community and market. Berghahn, Oxford. Gudeman, S. and Rivera, A. (1990) Conversations in Colombia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Guha-Khasnobis, B., Kanbur, R. and Ostrom, E. (eds) (2006) Linking the Formal and Informal Economies: Concepts and policies. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Guyer, J. (2004) Marginal Gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Hann, C. (ed.) (1998) Property Relations: Renewing the anthropological tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hann, C. and Hart, K. (eds) (2009) Market and Society: The Great Transformation today. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hann, C. and Hart, K. (2011) Economic Anthropology: History, ethnography, critique. Polity, Cambridge. Hardin, G. (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243−1248. Hart, K. (1973) Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana, Journal of Modern African Studies 11 (1): 61−89. Hart, K. (1986) Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 21 (3): 637−656. Hart, K. (1992) Market and state after the Cold War: The informal economy reconsidered. In R. Dilley (ed.) Contesting Markets. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 214−227. Hart, K. (2000) The Memory Bank: Money in an unequal world. Profile, London. Republished in 2001 as Money in an Unequal World. Texere, New York.

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Hart, K. (2005) The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago. Hart, K. (2007a) Marcel Mauss: In pursuit of the whole: a review essay. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2): 473−485. Hart, K. (2007b) Money is always personal and impersonal. Anthropology Today 23 (5): 16–20. Hart, K. (2008) Karl Polanyi’s legacy. Development and Change 39(6): 1135–1143. Hart, K. (2009) Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 91−105. Hart, K. (2010) New lamps for old. Why Veblen beats the Nobel laureates. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57: 97–103. Hart, K. (2011) Money as a form of religious life. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1: 156–163. Hart, K. and Ortiz, H. (2008) Anthropology in the financial crisis. Anthropology Today 24 (6): 1−3. Hart, K., Laville, J-L. and Cattani, A.D. (eds) (2010) The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide. Polity, Cambridge. Henrich, J. (ed.) (2004) Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hertz, E. (1998) The Trading Crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ho, K. (2009) Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Hunt, R. and Gilman, A. (eds) (1998) Property in Economic Context. University Press of America, Lanham, MD. International Labour Office (1972) Employment, Incomes and Inequality in Kenya. ILO, Geneva. Johns, A. (2009) Piracy: The intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Kopytoff, I. (1986) The cultural biography of things; commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 64−91. LeClair, E. and Schneider, H. (eds) (1968) Economic Anthropology: Readings in theory and analysis. Holt, Rinehart Winston, New York. Lien, M. (1997) Marketing and Modernity. Berg, Oxford. Macpherson, C.B. (ed.) (1978) Property: Mainstream and critical positions. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

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Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Marcus, G. with Hall, P. (1992) Lives in Trust: The fortunes of dynastic families in late twentieth-century America. Westview, Boulder, CO. Marx, K. (1970 [1867]) Capital Volume 1. Lawrence and Wishart, London. Maurer, B. (2005a) Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Maurer, B. (2005b) Finance. In Carrier, J. (ed.) Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 176−193. Maurer, B. (2006) Anthropology of money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 15−36. Mauss, M. (1990 [1925]) The Gift: Form and reason of exchange in archaic societies. Routledge, London. Mazzarella, W. (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Blackwell, Oxford. Miller, D. (1998) A Theory of Shopping. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Miller, D. (2010) Stuff. Polity, Cambridge. Moore, H. (1988) Feminist Anthropology. Polity, Cambridge. Nash, J. (1993) We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. Columbia University Press, New York. Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory women in Malaysia. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ouroussoff, A. (2010) Wall Street at War. Polity, Cambridge. Parry, J. (1986) The gift, the Indian gift, and the ‘Indian gift’. Man 21 (3): 453−473. Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds) (1989) Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pearson, H. (2000) Homo Economicus goes native, 1859−1945: The rise and fall of primitive economics. History of Political Economy 32 (4): 932−989.

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Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]) The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Beacon, Boston, MA. Polanyi, K. (1957) The economy as instituted process. In K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg and H. Pearson (eds) Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in history and theory. Free Press, Glencoe, IL, pp. 243−269. Robotham, D. (2005) Culture, Economy and Society: Bringing production back in. Sage, London. Sahlins, M. (1972) Stone Age Economics. Aldine, Chicago. Sahlins, M. (1976) La pensée bourgeoise: Western society as culture. In Culture and Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 166−199. Schneider, H. (1974) Economic Man: The anthropology of economics. Free Press, New York. Seddon, D. (ed.) (1978) Relations of Production. Frank Cass, Brighton. Simmel, G. (1978 [1900]) The Philosophy of Money. Routledge, London. Spittler, G. 2008 Founders of the Anthropology of Work: German social scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the first ethnographers. Lit Verlag, Berlin. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Strathern, M. (1999) Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological essays on persons and things. Continuum, London. Tett, G. (2009) Fool’s Gold: How the bold dream of a small tribe at J. P. Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street greed and unleashed a catastrophe. Free Press, New York. Weber, M. (1958 [1904−05]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Weber, M. (1961 [1922]) General Economic History. Collier, New York. Zaloom, C. (2006) Out of the Pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Zelizer, V. (1994) The Social Meaning of Money. Basic Books, New York.

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1.11 Anthropology and the Political Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer

As we put the last touches to this chapter, a wave of protests swept parts of North Africa and the Middle East, calling for the removal of autocratic and corrupt regimes and the return of a fully functioning democracy. What, we wondered, would anthropologists have to contribute to making sense of these events? Introducing a recent Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on the theme ‘Islam, Politics, Anthropology’, the editors briefly consider political science literature on an emergent ‘post-Islamist’ trend in Muslim politics (by the French scholars Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy). While acknowledging the usefulness of these analyses, the editors express some frustration with this argument: But in any case, the attention to state power and to the formal politics of elections and political parties is entirely too limited from an anthropological perspective. Scholars such as Roy and Kepel fail to take seriously modes and spaces of political action beyond the purview of formal politics and the state; it is precisely in these areas that anthropology has been particularly skilled in applying its tools. (Soares and Osella 2009: S10)

In itself the statement is unremarkable, an invocation of disciplinary common sense: anthropologists know that politics cannot be reduced to the arena of ‘formal politics and the state’, and they know that they must ‘take

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seriously’ manifestations of the political that escape the political scientists’ narrow restrictions. The problem which this chapter addresses is that this particular bit of common sense is not always shared by the people we research. Rather, like naïve political scientists, people talk and act as if politics and the political really can be restricted to a bounded area of life, and may have difficulty acknowledging the ‘politics’ that anthropologists claim to have discovered in other areas of their collective life. In Egypt in 2011, while nervous external commentators scoured events for evidence of Muslim Brotherhood involvement, the protestors themselves (including members of the Muslim Brotherhood) insisted their actions were focused on specifically political goals (Roy 2011). The last three decades have seen a dramatic return of politics and the political as central issues of anthropological concern. Some of this can be explained as a consequence of anthropologists being forced to become more conscious of the political context of their research, and especially of the potential political consequences of their research and writings. But alongside this reflexive concern with engagement and its consequences, there has been an expansion of the category of the political itself, which has become so diffuse and nebulous in recent usage that more or

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less everything might count as political for anthropological purposes. The cost of this theoretical freedom is twofold: a loss of acuity in the analysis of actually existing politics, and an inability to engage with our informants’ own ideas about what might and might not count as political. This chapter will start by setting out the issue, using examples from some of the most celebrated ethnographies of recent years. It will then trace at least two separate genealogies − one from earlier traditions of political anthropology, the other from French post-structural theory − for the expanded sense of the political that took root in anthropology at some point in the 1980s. Finally, we will briefly review examples from our own research in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka to illustrate what we see as the ethnographic limitations of the new ubiquity of the political. Let us start with one of the best and most influential ethnographies of the 1990s, James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1990). The book is a critical analysis of a development project in Lesotho which, in Ferguson’s view, failed to meet its own explicit goals, but nevertheless succeeded in another unacknowledged goal, the expansion of the state’s control over its more peripheral citizens. The technocratic language of development interventions like this, Ferguson argues, systematically masks the consequences of development interventions while ‘depoliticizing’ issues of inequality and powerlessness: For while we have seen that ‘development’ projects in Lesotho may end up working to expand the power of the state, and while they claim to address the problems of poverty and deprivation, in neither guise does the ‘development’ industry allow its role to be formulated as a political one. By uncompromisingly reducing poverty to a technical problem, and by promising technical solutions to the sufferings of powerless and oppressed people, the hegemonic problematic of ‘development’ is the principal means through which the question of poverty is de-politicized in the world today. (Ferguson 1990: 256)

Earlier, in the Preface to the book, Ferguson glosses this act of depoliticization as ‘everywhere whisking political realities out of

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sight, all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic state power’ (Ferguson 1990: xv). We do not wish to detract from Ferguson’s central diagnosis: many development interventions do indeed attempt to translate potentially contentious political problems into the bland language of technical solutions. But we do need to ask, what makes some realities, in his word, ‘political’? Where will we find the real ‘politics’ that is nullified by the ‘anti-politics machine’? The answer is not ethnographic: Ferguson’s book is not about what people in Lesotho do or say in the name of politics or the political: ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ describe what ought to be happening − in this case arguments about distributive justice − were it not for the obfuscatory fog of the development apparatus. They are not, in this analysis at least, descriptors of what is actually there. If we have to attach a label to the idea of politics here it would have to be ‘normative’. This curious status of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ is even more striking in a more recent − equally impressive and equally influential − book, Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). The book, as is well known, challenges conventional feminist expectations about women and Islam, by combining Foucauldian themes of ethical care with Talal Asad’s critical perspective on liberal secularism. Women active in Egyptian piety movements should not be dismissed as dupes of religious patriarchy; rather, their actions can be interpreted as expressions of a certain agency, albeit a kind of agency not directed towards the sort of goal Western feminists and secular liberals might deem to be desirable. This reading is obviously controversial but it is carefully argued and firmly based in Mahmood’s reflections on her ethnographic encounters with pietist women. Why, though, is the book entitled ‘The Politics of Piety’? What makes women’s prayer groups ‘political’? The answer is provided in the closing pages of the book.

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The section in question is entitled ‘Politics in unusual places’: The fact that the piety movement does not directly engage the state and its juridical discourses, however, should not lead us to think that it has no direct political implications. To the extent that all aspects of human life (whether they pertain to family, education, worship, welfare, commercial transactions, instances of birth and death, and so on) have been brought under the regulatory apparatuses of the nation-state, the piety movement’s efforts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political consequences. (Mahmood 2005: 193)

Again, the anthropologists’ idea of the political transcends the particularities of local context. It is not a concept whose purchase on the world is dependent on local definitions and meanings. Indeed, it would be fair to imagine that some women in this piety movement would be shocked and dismayed to hear their activities described as in any way ‘political’, with all that that would imply about the challenge their activity might present to the Egyptian powers-that-be. The reasoning here is strangely circular and not entirely coherent. The piety movement ‘does not directly engage the state’ and therefore might be (mistakenly) thought of as nonpolitical. But in so far as the modern state aspires to engage everything − all aspects of human life − so any effort to ‘remake’ anything within its vast ambition will have ‘political consequences’. Everything is potentially political and politics is ubiquitous and inescapable.

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORY AND GENEALOGY How did we get to this position? Anthropologists show rare consensus in agreeing on 1940 as the date when an explicit political anthropology was created. African Political Systems, edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), is often characterized as the subdiscipline’s beginning (Kurtz 2001; Vincent 2002). Articles in this Fortes and EvansPritchard volume considered forms of political

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governance using categories of state and stateless, substituting kinship and lineage systems for state structures. As part of a functionalist approach, this early political anthropology considered formal properties of such systems sui generis. A brief comparison with Ferguson and Mahmood shows how much has changed. In his Preface to the volume, Radcliffe-Brown defines the political as follows: The political organization of a society is that aspect of the total organization which is concerned with the control and regulation of physical force. This, it is suggested, provides for an objective study of human societies by the methods of natural science, the most satisfactory definition of the special class of social phenomena to the investigation of which this book is a contribution. (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xxiii)

Radcliffe-Brown famously dismissed the very idea of the state as a real entity worthy of study (1940: xxiii), while in the Introduction, the editors relegated issues of indirect rule to a set of ‘administrative’ rather than ‘anthropological’ problems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 1). For Mahmood and Ferguson, in the passages cited at least, the state is both real and malign, and most definitely worthy of study; ‘administrative problems’ are precisely the kinds of problem their anthropology aspires to address; and the idea of politics extends far beyond the realm of physical force into all areas of life. Moreover, neither Ferguson nor Mahmood is concerned with the language of scientific neutrality, grappling instead with the tension generated between their academic commitment to critique and their personal commitment to a broadly progressive politics. The one thing that unites them with the anthropologists of the 1940s is the conviction that the study of politics must extend beyond the study of the state and the formal institutions of government. In this respect the versions of the political with which we introduced this chapter can be seen to be over-determined: at once inheritors of a long tradition of finding politics outside formal political structures, and drawing on a more recent radical

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genealogy which can be traced back to the critical movements of the 1960s. But this genealogy itself has different branches. One comes from British cultural Marxism, as exemplified by Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; another comes from the post-structural currents in French social thought that developed out of the experience of the events of 1968 in particular. Of these post-structural currents, the single most influential figure is undoubtedly Michel Foucault. Anthropological interest in politics beyond the state could be justified − in theory at least − on empirical grounds (anthropologists had often worked in settings where the modern state had little presence or reach). The interests of Foucault and his contemporaries, however, were born of frustration with the suffocating political structures of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, coupled with disillusion with traditional workers’ movements, whose radical potential, it was felt, had been neutralized by the post-World War II culture of consumerism. In other words, while older political anthropology had been more or less indifferent to the state, Foucauldian influence was premised on political hostility to the state as a potential agent of change. It is again worth noting in passing that this premise is not necessarily shared by the people whose politics anthropologists describe and interpret, a point to which we shall return (cf. Spencer 2007: 140−142). In the 1960s, decolonization, revolutions, and new social movements reoriented anthropological attention towards profound political changes and anthropologists began to reconsider past approaches in light of historical relationships between colonialism and anthropological practice. In this period of student movements and decolonization, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, considerations of power became central to the anthropology of the political. This emerged as a commitment to an explicit study of power, whether operating in processes or structures, amongst groups or individuals. Feminist anthropologists also took up the concept of power to correct prior depictions

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of non-Western societies as egalitarian (e.g. Friedl 1975). Here, anthropological holism was targeted for glossing over inequalities and hierarchies within ‘primitive’ societies, and structural functionalism was targeted for its erasures of histories. Of this moment when Marxism and feminism converged to focus on power, Ortner writes: The two together made it difficult for many anthropologists, myself included, to look at even the simplest society ever again without seeing a politics every bit as complex, and sometimes every bit as oppressive, as those of capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, as anthropologists of this persuasion began taking the historic turn, it seemed impossible to understand the histories of these societies, including (but not limited to) their histories under colonialism or capitalist penetration, without understanding how those external forces interacted with these internal politics. (Ortner 1995: 179)

In other words, the turn to power and the political in British and US anthropology has roots in early anthropological approaches, in 1960s radical critiques of the global political order, and in identity politics which had begun to identify the workings of power and inequality in, to borrow Mahmood’s phrase, ‘all aspects of human life’.

FOUCAULT HISTORICIZED In one popular version of the times, lifestyle and counter culture had eclipsed traditional political issues. By calling everything ‘political’, young protesters became less and less attuned to those political issues that had consumed them only a short time before (Klein 1972: 331). This was the moment at which Foucault’s work started to be translated into English and started to make its mark across the humanities and social sciences in both Britain and America. Initially promoted by the anti-psychiatrists R.D. Laing and David Cooper, Foucault was not at first particularly noticed by anthropologists, although an early reviewer in Man concluded ‘Social anthropologists should therefore be aware and

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beware of Foucault’ (Loudon 1974). For a long time they seem to have been neither aware nor beware. The early 1970s translations of Foucault were reviewed in Man but not in any of the US mainstream anthropology journals, but by the time of Geertz’s 1978 review of Discipline and Punish (Geertz 2010 [1978]), Foucault was beginning to establish himself as a general intellectual presence in the United States, albeit still one of very marginal interest to most anthropologists. Asad’s 1979 Malinowski Lecture only references Foucault in a footnote, but his influence is apparent, not least in the eruption of the term ‘discourse’ throughout the argument (Asad 1979; cf. Scott 2006: 271). His influence in anthropology mostly came mediated, for example through Stuart Hall and Birmingham Cultural Studies (e.g. Comaroff 1985), or as part of the mélange of new critical voices from literary theory invoked so breathlessly in Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). By 1993, it was sufficiently pervasive for Sahlins to use Foucault’s name in the title of a satirical pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, lampooning the new ‘power functionalism’ that seemed to have taken over anthropology in the previous decade (Sahlins 1993). In a new history of Maoism in France, Richard Wolin (2010) has reconstructed much of the original context within which Foucault, and others, turned from conventional Marxism towards the politics of the everyday. Wolin describes how the student movement of 1968 was a defining moment, as intellectuals embraced a critique of postwar politics that rejected structuralism’s erasure of agency and embraced Maoism, on the way to rejecting the authoritarianism of the French Communist Party: a journey that in the course of the 1970s was to lead, somewhat counter-intuitively, to renewed engagement with Enlightenment conceptions of human rights. The influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, though undoubtedly based on an extraordinarily naïve and inaccurate understanding of contemporary events in China, paradoxically helped a whole generation of

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intellectuals and activists to free themselves from the shackles of the kind of authoritarian Marxism represented by the powerful but senescent French Communist Party (PCF). The telos of this particular French journey away from authoritarian Marxism, the moment of the so-called ‘nouveaux philosophes’ that followed the translation of Solzhenitsyn in the late 1970s, has had almost no impact on social and political analysis outside France, in stark contrast to the extraordinary influence of Foucault, Derrida, and latterly Deleuze and Guattari (Cusset 2008). The French ‘children of Marx and CocaCola’ (Wolin 2010: 50) embraced cultural politics. Post-war capitalism and the autocratic Gaullist state were seen as invading and distorting every dimension of life; the student movement, and movements that followed, therefore turned attention to the politics of everyday life (see Debord 1994; de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1974). These new movements emphasized the politics of the personal, rejecting formal distinctions between public and private. Experiences of gender and sexuality, immigration and imprisonment became the focus for social movements — and for social theory. Scholarship on social movements as sites of political practice emerged (e.g. Castells 1984; Touraine 1981). Touraine, Lefebvre and Ricoeur took part in the student protests. Foucault was teaching in Tunisia in 1968, where his students were engaged in their own high-stakes political struggle. Upon returning to France, Foucault embraced activism at the new University of Vincennes. Wolin argues that, of French intellectuals, Foucault was most transformed by 1968 – despite his disappointment with the movement’s immediate outcome: Foucault’s subsequent activism with the Prison Information Group was part of an intellectual shift from the death of man to a new humanism (Wolin 2010: 178, 288−289). This shift yielded key insights. Foucault came to argue that power is pervasive: ‘Power is everywhere not because it embraces

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everything, but because it comes from everywhere’ (Foucault 1979: 63). Not confined to states and markets, power operates in a variety of sites – schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, and throughout the quotidian spaces of life. Foucault characterizes his studies not as developing a theory of power, but an ‘analytics of power: that is ... a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis’ (Foucault 1979: 82). Politics in classical formulations mask the power relations that are actually happening: ‘right (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions, and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts into motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination’ (Foucault 1980: 95−96). A crucial vehicle for the subtle workings of power is discourse, which ‘can be both an instrument and an effect of power .... Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault 1979: 100−101). Rather than a narrow sociolinguistic definition of discourse, Foucault fuses rhetoric, practices and forms of knowledge, which function in the fashion of Gramscian hegemony. Power is simultaneously concealed and revealed in discursive instruments and effects. Analytics are then political acts that unmask and demystify power. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) demonstrates that the legacy of the French Enlightenment is not freedom, but techniques that produce, normalize and regulate subjects: indeed, discipline them into self-regulation (cf. Nord 1995 for a critique of this position). Foucault’s propositions have methodological ramifications: analysis ‘should not concern itself with the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations’, but ‘with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions’ (1980: 96). Furthermore, in

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these locations, resistance should be looked for ‘as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and the methods used’ (Foucault 1982: 208). However, as Wolin (2010) concludes, This notion of power as ubiquitous and its corollary notion of dispersed and local resistance were by no means Foucault’s discovery alone. Such precepts were central to the ethos of post-1968 gauchisme. In the aftermath of the May events, the student activists became convinced that there was no such thing as second-order, or lesser, political struggles. (Wolin 2010: 328)

In other words, this powerful and enormously influential vision has to be seen as a product of very specific historical and political circumstances, and its uncritical application to all circumstances at all times, as has happened in the years since Foucault’s death, raises questions which we will briefly consider at the end of this chapter.

REINTERPRETING FOUCAULT When Michel Foucault died in 1984, Hobart (1984) published an obituary in RAIN, predicting that Foucault’s work would profoundly reshape anthropology as a discipline. Foucault’s perspective on power was attractive for political anthropology, because it resonated with prior imperatives to describe and analyse politics beyond the boundaries of states and to critique classical political theory. Indeed, Vincent argues that the success of Foucauldian approaches led to the demise of political anthropology as a distinct sub-discipline: ‘A concern with the mechanics of power and the relation of power to knowledge (derived primarily from the writings of Michel Foucault) halted the involution of disciplinary and subfield specialization in its tracks’ (Vincent 1996: 433). In this spirit, we would argue that an understanding of power loosely based on Foucault’s ideas came to stand in for any more specific definition of politics, and the conception of politics

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itself was at once broadened (because anything could now be political) and reduced (because only power counted). In this way the study of the political became something that everyone might be expected to pursue. Foucault’s influence on anthropology has been immense. Geertz had started his early review of Foucault with the pithy observation that ‘Foucault’s leading ideas are not in themselves all that complex; just unusually difficult to render plausible’ (Geertz 2010 [1978]: 30). Yet, the generation of anthropologists setting out for the field as Geertz wrote, seem not to have experienced any difficulty at all. On the one hand, anthropologists like Paul Rabinow and James Faubion acted as key intermediaries in the process of editing and translation that made Foucault’s work available to Anglophone readers. On the other hand, by the mid 1990s, simply naming Foucault, rather than citing his work directly, was sufficient to invoke the broad orientation of his work (e.g. Yanagisako and Delaney 1995: 16). The first wave of influence came in the florescence of studies of power and resistance, from the mid 1980s onward (e.g., Comaroff 1985; Ong 1987; Scott 1985). Sceptics who shared Sahlins’ disdain for the implicit functionalism in 1980s and 1990s resistance studies, could instead turn to Foucault’s later work on ethics for inspiration (e.g. Laidlaw 2002). Said’s Orientalism (1978), with its mix of humanistic and Foucauldian theory, made all anthropological efforts at representations of other people potentially readable as politically shaped, and often, politically motivated. If nothing else, this dark imprimatur at least rendered anthropological knowledge powerful for someone − no small consolation for the members of a small and rather marginal intellectual community. For an analytics of power to define the domains and instruments of power, the analyst must discern its workings beyond the conventional institutions of political theory. Anthropological work on this strand of Foucauldian insight converged with ideational understandings of hegemony to problematize

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the study of political consciousness and political practices. Some anthropologists detected subtler expressions of domination and resistance, using phenomenological examples of religious and ritual practice to diagnose power via resistance (e.g. Comaroff 1985). Thus, embodiment became another early focus of Foucauldian enquiry. Others argued more vigorously for acknowledgement of actual, rather than false, consciousness. For example, Scott (1990) engages with Foucault to develop the concept of infrapolitics, where resistance to power is a crucial, unacknowledged form of politics. Indeed, ‘Under the conditions of tyranny and persecution in which most historical subjects live, it is political life’ (1990: 201). Here, the politics of resistance produce ‘hidden transcripts’ which analysts may not readily access, although subjects are conscious of them. A very similar mission to uncover the ‘invisible’ politics of those excluded from the formal apparatus of government informed the early work of the Subaltern Studies group in India (e.g. Guha 1997). But the convergence of Foucauldian understanding of power with hegemony as ideology more often focused on how power does not work at the level of consciousness. For example, Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) argue that power ‘presents, or rather hides, itself in the forms of everyday life ... these forms are not easily questioned’ (1991: 22; cf. Foucault 1979: 100−101). Here, discerning ‘power at its extremities’ leads anthropologists back to the concept of ‘everyday life’ as the site of politics (cf. Foucault 1980: 96). Studying power, and concomitant relations of domination and resistance, was firmly established as a substitute for studying politics by the 1990s. Insights of New Left anthropologists had been transformed by 1980s critical theorists and become theoretical and methodological common sense. The nexus of power, politics and everyday life preoccupied sub-disciplines from linguistic (e.g. Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990) to medical anthropology (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1992). Assumptions about the ubiquity of

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the political had hidden themselves in the forms of anthropological everyday life, their unquestionability itself a manifestation of some kind of disciplinary doxa.

POLITICS AS A CATEGORY OF PRACTICE Why should any of this matter? By the late 1970s political anthropology seemed to have completely run out of steam. If it has now conquered all, what is there to complain about? If we look at the kinds of topics that have occupied the anthropology of the political since the 1980s, the answer may become more apparent. If the 1980s themselves were the heyday of the anthropology of resistance, in which it became axiomatic to look for the workings of power in any and every setting open to anthropological interpretation, work since the 1980s has increasingly focused on the kinds of entity and ideas that 1940s anthropologists thought empirically irrelevant. There is now a growing and increasingly sophisticated anthropology of the state (e.g. Das and Poole 2003; Fuller and Benei 2001; Gupta 1995; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Navarro-Yashin 2002), as well as an anthropology of nationalism (Eriksen 2010), of citizenship (Ong 1999, 2006), of political violence (Das 2007), of human rights (Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001), and of democracy (Bernard, Briquet and Pels 2007; Paley 2009). The influence of Foucault can be traced in at least four rather different strands of the new anthropology of the political. One, following Said, focuses on anthropology as itself part of a knowledge−power apparatus (Said 1989). A second, itself too ubiquitous to resist specific citation, draws on the diffuse sense of power popularized by Foucault in his 1970s work. A third develops and expands themes from Foucault’s short essay on governmentality (e.g. Li 2007; cf. Foucault 1991). And a fourth has recently developed out of Foucault’s late attention to the domain of ethics and the care of the self (Faubion 2011; Mahmood 2005). Other theoretical

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influences in the new anthropology of the political have included Pierre Bourdieu’s powerful synthesis of themes from Weber, Wittgenstein and phenomenology (Bourdieu 1990), as well as the rhizomic metaphors of Foucault’s contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Most recently, the gnomic arguments of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 1998), who builds on themes from Foucault, Walter Benjamin and the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, have flooded the field, with Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ becoming the 2000s equivalents of Foucault’s 1970s language of power/knowledge (Hansen and Stepputat 2005). Indeed, for some, Agamben’s work is an extreme example of analytically equating power with politics (Rancière 2004: 302). Political anthropology in the 1940s had to look outside the institutional framework of Western politics in order to justify its very existence. If the Nuer, for example, lacked a centralized state, then it was up to the anthropologist to identify what for a Nuer might count as political. But if an anthropologist now defines her object of study as ‘the state’ or ‘citizenship’, then inevitably she has to contend with the fact that the people she is studying have their own, often quite specific ideas, about what the state is or who might be a citizen. To take an old example from Spencer’s doctoral research in Sri Lanka: a man sits at his teashop reading a virulently anti-Tamil pamphlet, written and published by a high-profile member of the government. Spencer comments, ‘I didn’t know you were interested in politics.’ The man responds, ‘This isn’t about politics. This is about the national question.’ What is happening if the national question − which is about to explode into civil war − is declared ‘outside’ the political? What does it say about ‘politics’? And about ‘the nation’? The answers to these questions have been explored elsewhere (Spencer 2008), but the questions bear reflection. In a recent article, Matei Candea explores similar questions. Corsican language activists working on a bilingual classroom project are horrified when a foreign TV crew starts

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to ask teachers obviously political questions about possible independence for Corsica: ‘We are in a school,’ an education official explains, and such issues do not belong in the classroom (Candea 2011: 310). Candea’s problem is that the space that might be considered political in much recent anthropology has expanded so much it is all but impossible to deal with statements like this. If we argue that protestations of being outside the political are always and everywhere really expressions of some pre-existing politics, we lose the capacity to make any kind of ethnographic sense of those statements. The point is not to veer in the opposite direction, and treat all statements by our interlocutors as unarguably true; rather, it is to treat statements about the limits of the political with the same respect we would accord any other ethnographic statement. So, in Candea’s example, making sense of the statement involves a recapitulation of the history of the republican tradition in French education, in which keeping the school as a space outside politics allows for children to develop into politically active citizens later in life. Or that is the theory which informs a long history of schooling in France. (A second, somewhat better-known strand, buttresses the resistance to the appearance of any sign of religion in the undisturbed environment of the classroom.) As a theory it is by no means uncontested, even by Candea’s informants, but even those who see other motives at work in the initial example, themselves end up acknowledging some kind of legitimacy to the boundary between the world of politics and the world of schooling. What we gain by taking seriously this insistence on bounding off the political is the opportunity to recover the wider cultural logic within which it is located. We can later return to the immediate politics of the initial situation if we want to, but our understanding will undoubtedly be enriched by the refusal to take the easy path of denying even the possibility of a nonpolitical space in the first place. Another example from Sri Lanka, where, in November 2008, three decades on and

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the war is ending. Spencer is in the last stages of a two-year collaborative project, researching the role of religious organizations and religious leaders during the long-running civil war. The project has been based in the east of the island, an area divided between Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. At this point, three members of the project team are in the town of Kattankudy, just south of Batticaloa, a town that prides itself on being the ‘most’ Muslim place in Sri Lanka. Shahul Hasbullah from the University of Peradeniya has arranged a meeting with representatives from the Kattankudy Federation of Mosques and Muslim Institutions. With Bart Klem, another member of the research team, Hasbullah and Spencer had already toured the town in the company of the Mosque Federation Secretary, starting with the bullet-marked walls at the site of a 1990 massacre of men and boys by the secessionist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam), and taking in both a demolished building by the beach, the headquarters of a controversial Sufi sect, attacked and partially destroyed in disturbances that followed the death of the sect’s leader, a man called Pahilwan, and the large, new central mosque being built by the followers of another Sufi leader, Rauf Mahlawi. Although conflict between Tamil paramilitaries and Muslims is a big part of the local story, there is obviously no shortage of conflict within the Muslim community itself (Klem 2011). The Mosque Federation meets in its own, newly constructed, building in the middle of town. At first there are only a handful of people at the meeting, but gradually the room fills up: urbane retired civil servants sit with bearded leaders of Jamaat-i-Islam, there is a local novelist, and an officer from the Muslim Peace Secretariat (a spin-off from the 2002 Cease Fire Agreement). Eventually, there are about 20 participants, all male (although women’s groups are also affiliated to the Federation we are assured), and predominantly middle-aged. The conversation moves back and forth between English and Tamil. As the evening progresses, the atmosphere

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relaxes and the comments become franker. The novelist starts us off: we have a solid organization and structure here, but such organizations are absent in other towns. Islam is a way of life and this organization responds to problems in an Islamic way. If there is a problem with other communities, people are selected to go to their areas and talk to their leaders and intellectuals. The Mosque Federation itself was founded in 1985 in order to express a common opinion when there is a problem. Among its accomplishments, we are told, is the observation of Fridays as public holidays within Kattankudy itself: ‘Even in political problems, this organization guides politicians. So when they come to Kattankudy, they come here first.’ In Tamil areas, we are told, the key decisions are made by armed groups. Here there are no armed groups. To organize paramilitaries, one man says, you need jungle, because in a city like this people will give information to the police. If someone comes to search, there is no place to hide here. Recently, the TMVP (the political party that has grown out of a breakaway faction of the LTTE) has deliberately tried to provoke conflict with Muslims in order to win influence in Tamil areas. In national politics, extremist groups are gaining influence and questioning the rights of Muslims. Someone quotes a recent interview with the Head of the Army in which he had asserted that Sri Lanka ‘belongs’ to the Sinhala people, while minorities are just ‘guests’ in the country. In this context, if there is any problem in Kattankudy, the national press will claim that Jihadi groups are getting involved. Towards the end of what has become a long discussion, the novelist returns to the theme of politics. This town is the most Muslim town in the country, he says. There are no bars, no liquor stores, no video shops and no theatre. But there are 60 mosques. This organization was the first of its kind in the country − other areas followed afterwards. Earlier, the leaders of the community were trustees of the mosques, and these positions were based on the kudi (matriclan)

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structure: each kudi provided one trustee. Crucially, in this organization there is no politics. It does not involve politicians. And that is why it is strong. Consider the implications. The Mosque Federations are remarkable organizations that came into existence in Muslim parts of the island during the 30-year civil war. They are quite obviously organized in direct response to the threat posed by Tamil paramilitaries, and possibly by agents of the Sinhala-dominated state. Their growth occurred in parallel with the emergence of a major Muslim political party, but their members are at pains to distance the Federation from the politicians. To simplify a much more complicated story: the claim to stand outside the world of politics is a crucial precondition for the construction of local solidarity. If the federations were to be taken over by politics – as represented by the workings of local big-men politicians − they could not survive. That at least is their understanding of their dilemma. Another example is drawn from Curtis’s fieldwork with the Belfast Pride Festival in Northern Ireland. On 31 July 2010, three clergymen and parishioners from their churches walked as an official contingent in the annual Belfast Pride parade. The next day, at an ecumenical church service, seven members of the clergy took part. The officiating minister began his sermon by paraphrasing Gandhi, ‘Christ’s message was good − but those Christians sure are hard to take!’. Addressing the gay and straight congregants, he spoke of how Christianity has been used to justify inequality, to oppose the enfranchisement of women, to preserve apartheid and slavery and to oppose interracial marriage. But he argued that even in Belfast, there have always been other voices within Christianity. He spoke of Christian abolitionists who barred slave trading companies from Belfast’s port, and invoked the eighteenthcentury tradition of dissent in Ireland. He then asked each congregant to regard the stones they had been given when entering the church. He reminded them of stoning as

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punishment for those who transgressed sexual norms, in the past and present. Invoking a Biblical exhortation to ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, he asked congregants to build relationships, rather than destroy them, and to lay their stones in a circle on the altar. One by one, people filed to the front and laid down the stones; later, when the minister asked congregants to embrace one another, I turned to an older man beside me, a long-standing gay rights activist. He wept as he put his arms around me, and whispered, ‘Happy Pride’. This was the first religious service hosted by a church as part of the festival. But Christian churches had begun to engage with the festival two years earlier, in 2008, joining an increasingly heated public debate about sexuality and Christianity. While obviously ‘political’, these debates must also be considered with reference to religious debates about the nature and role of Christianity − because for the protagonists, this dimension, religion itself, was a central priority. Although these are not new debates, they were profoundly reshaped by the now-notorious Iris Robinson, Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland and wife of Peter Robinson, First Minister of Northern Ireland. Mrs Robinson said much about homosexuality in the summer of 2008; most of her commentary was justified with reference to her deeply held faith. These remarks became a catalyst for local discussion of the proper domains of religion and politics – a perennially vexing issue in both of Ireland’s jurisdictions — and these debates centred on how to practice religion, rather than simply communal politics. After her infamous remarks, new voices joined the discussion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) equality, including trade unions and political parties that had previously been silent, while long-standing opponents began to modulate their critiques. Several groups expressed their support for gay rights by participating in Belfast’s annual Pride Festival; members of Christian communities were also inspired to take part.

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Most notably, a minister from All Souls NonSubscribing Presbyterian Church (Unitarian) became the first religious official to walk in the parade following the furore surrounding Mrs Robinson. Pride parades as a strategy to make LGBTQ communities visible have been examined by anthropologists in particular cities like Vienna (Bunzl 2004), Madrid (Enguix 2009) and San Francisco (Howe 2001). Although Pride is an international movement, parades are inflected with local significance and enmeshed in local concerns. In Belfast, most LGBTQ civil rights issues were settled law in 2008; civil partnerships were legal, discrimination in services and employment was illegal (with exemptions for religious organizations) and the new policing service liaised with local LGBTQ organizations. Broader political issues appeared ‘settled’ as well, with power-sharing and devolution in place. What remained unsettled was how to practice faith in the post-conflict era. Until 2008, religious people were visible only in protests of the stereotypical hellfire and brimstone variety, beginning with the first parade in 1991. At the first parade’s starting-point in Donegall Street, activists tried to tie a pink balloon to an elderly protester wearing a sandwich board that announced the end of days. One of those organizers told me, ‘I thought, “He’s gonna drop dead from the weight of that sandwich board. That’s a really good start to the first gay pride parade, killing some old man”’. At the 2010 festival, a protest representative also took part in an official event – an Amnesty International-sponsored discussion at the Europa Hotel. Posing with other panellists beneath the festival’s rainbow logo, an organizer remarked to him: ‘You know, this is the first time I’ve met you when you weren’t shouting at me in the street. I like you a lot better when you’re not shouting at me.’ At the nexus of politics and religion, it is how boundaries and their contents shift that is salient − as their makers define them. In Belfast, Pride as a political project fits a soixante-huitard (1968-er) definition of a

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new social movement, directed to changing society rather than the state (Touraine 1988). Here, distinctions between religion and politics are not tactics subservient to broader political logics, but are integral to their existence. As both a cultural and political project, Belfast Pride requires careful distinctions about how it is not ‘politics with a capital P’ (as some struggle to categorize their efforts); certainly these distinctions have an instrumental effect, since they distance the festival from particular parties and stances, while permitting collectivity around the dimension of sexuality rather than the usual political categories. However, interpreting this manoeuvre as mere pragmatism dismisses, and misses, the point: that multiple subjectivities coexist alongside potent shared experiences amongst LGBTQ people. The exclusivities of nation and sect that dominate even the power-sharing structures have created political parties and churches that cannot embrace, or in some instances acknowledge, the multiple processes of subjectivity at work simultaneously for Pride participants. Selfunderstanding emerges from experiential distinctions of religion and politics, as does the broader project of seeking acceptance, interlocution and redress – within the domain of religion. In this instance, as in so many others, religion offers a redemption that actually existing politics no longer attempts to promise. In many ways this particular example is very close to the spirit of Mahmood’s celebrated account of the pietist movement. The difference is that our response to the common desire to take other people’s religious commitments seriously allows us also to take seriously the boundary-work that the same people might do to keep religion free of what might be thought to be the contaminating effect of the political. Similarly, our own political commitment to those ideals of distributive justice, which inform Ferguson’s comments on the ‘political realities’ that development interventions actively suppress, should not blind us to the fact that a rather large amount of actually existing politics in

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Northern Ireland addresses other issues – like sodomy in Iris Robinson’s case. This does not make the politics less real. In the Kattankudy case, Soares and Osella’s dissatisfaction with political scientists’ concentration on parties and elections and the state glosses over the fact that many Muslims – both now and in the past – have been concerned about maintaining boundaries between religious and political forms of authority (Hefner 2004). This does not mean that they are therefore trapped by the discourse of liberal secularism. Far from it – the unruly big-man politics of Eastern Sri Lanka, from which the Kattankudy Mosque Federation sought to distance itself, can be characterized in many ways, but textbook liberalism is not one of them. These examples engage with ethnographic meanings of ‘politics’. In an important set of analyses of nationalism and identity politics, Rogers Brubaker, drawing on Bourdieu, makes a crucial distinction between ‘categories of practice’ and ‘categories of analysis’: the idea of the ‘nation’ or of ‘identity’ is extremely important as a category of practice, and one task for the analyst is to seek to understand the ways in which the idea of the nation or the idea of identity becomes produced and reproduced as a commonsense part of people’s understanding of the world and their place in it (Brubaker 1996; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). But, for this very reason, the same ideas are problematic if unreflexively adopted as categories of analysis. In our examples we have treated ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ as first and foremost categories of practice: the delineation of ‘the political’ emerges from, and produces, particular historical circumstances, particular cultural logics, and finally, particular subjectivities. As analysts, of course, we have our categories to approach these issues; but the replacement of ethnographic categories with analytical ones usually is accompanied by some reasoned or even apologetic recognition of the move. It is, perhaps, time for anthropologists to acknowledge the limits, as well as the breadth, of their understanding of the political.

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REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila and Lutz, Catherine A. (eds) 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 1979. ‘Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology.’ Man n.s. 14(4): 607–27. Bernard, R., Briquet, J-L. and Pels, P. (eds) 2007. Cultures of Voting: The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot. London: Hurst. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick. 2000. ‘Beyond “Identity.”’ Theory and Society 29: 1−47. Bunzl, Matti. 2005. ‘Anthropology Beyond Crisis: Toward an Intellectual History of the Extended Present.’ Anthropology and Humanism 30(2): 187−195. Candea, Matei. 2011. ’”Our Division of the Universe”: Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics.’ Current Anthropology 52(3): 309–334. Castells, Manuel. 1984. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume I. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cowan, Jane, Dembour. Marie-Bénédicte, and Wilson, Richard A. (eds) 2001. Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cusset, Francois. 2008. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Das, V. 2007. Words and Lives: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Das, V. and Poole, D. (eds) 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Debord, Guy. 1994. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Enguix, Begonya. 2009. ‘Identities, Sexualities and Commemorations: Pride Parades, Public Space and Sexual Dissidence.’ Anthropological Notebooks 15(2): 15−33. Eriksen, T.H. 2010. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 3rd edn. London: Pluto. Faubion, J. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan (eds) 1940. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1979. History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972−77). C. Gordon (ed.). New York: Pantheon Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’. In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 208−226. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. ‘On Governmentality.’ In G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Friedl, Ernestine. 1975. Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fuller, C. and Benei, V. 2001. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. London: Hurst. Geertz, Clifford. 2010 [1978]. ‘On Foucault.’ In Fred Inglis (ed.), Life Among the Anthros and Other Essays, pp. 29−38. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guha, R. (ed.) 1997. A Subaltern Studies Reader. 1986−1995. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gupta, A. 1995. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.’ American Ethnologist 22(2): 375−402.

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Hansen, T.B. and Stepputat, F. (eds) 2001. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hansen, T.B. and Stepputat. F. (eds) 2005. Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hefner, Robert W. ‘Review of Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.’ H-Gender-MidEast, H-Net Reviews. March 2004. Available at www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf. php?id=9077. Accessed 11 February 2011. Hobart, Mark. 1984. ‘Michel Foucault and Anthropology.’ RAIN 65: 4−5. Howe, Alyssa. 2001. ‘The San Francisco Homeland and Identity Tourism.’ Cultural Anthropology 16(1): 35−61. Klein, A. Norman. 1972. ‘Counter Culture and Cultural Hegemony: Some Notes on the Youth Rebellion of the 1960s.’ In Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology, pp. 312−334. New York: Pantheon. Klem, Bart. 2011. ‘Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka.’ Journal of Asian Studies. 70(3): 730–53. Kurtz, Donald V. 2001. Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002.‘ For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311−332. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York: Harper and Row. Li, Tania. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Loudon, J.B. 1974. ‘Review of M. Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic.’ Man 9(2): 318−319. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Navarro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nord, Philip. 1995. The Republican Moment: The Struggle for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173−193. Paley, Julia. (ed.) 2009. Democracy: Anthropological Approaches. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3): 297–310. Roy, Olivier. 2011. ‘This is not an Islamic Revolution.’ New Statesman 15 February 2011. Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Waiting for Foucault. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Pamphlets. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, Edward. 1989. ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.’ Critical Inquiry. 15(2): 205–225. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Scott, D. 2006. ‘Appendix: The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad.’ In D. Scott and C. Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Soares, Benjamin and Osella, Filippo. 2009. ‘Islam, Politics, Anthropology.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(s1): S1−S23. Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spencer, Jonathan. 2008. ‘A Nationalism without Politics? The Illiberal Consequences of Liberal Institutions in Sri Lanka.’ Third World Quarterly 29 (3): 611−629. Touraine, Alain. 1981. The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Touraine, Alain. 1988 [1984]. The Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Vincent, Joan. 1991. ‘Engaging Historicism.’ In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, pp. 45−58. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Vincent, Joan. 1996. ‘Political Anthropology.’ In Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, pp. 428−434. London: Routledge.

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Vincent, Joan. 2002. ‘Introduction.’ In Joan Vincent (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics, pp. 1−13. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wolin, Richard. 2010. The Wind from the East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yanagisako, Sylvia and Delaney, Carol. 1995. ‘Naturalizing Power.’ In Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, pp. 1−22. New York: Routledge.

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1.12 Anthropology and Religious Studies Martin Mills

On the website of a combined Department of Anthropology and Religious Studies in North America, the following rubric introduces the Religious Studies pages: Examining religion: How ought we to live? What is real and true? What do people hold to be sacred? What are human moral obligations? Understand how religion shapes culture.

This forthright blend of personal philosophizing, normative universalism and cultural relativism, as well as the subtle sense of discomfort that it may engender in anthropological hearts and minds, encapsulates many of the ambiguities, asymmetries and possibilities of the relationship between Anthropology and Religious Studies. In professional terms, there are few faculties that act so regularly as a home away from home in career terms for anthropologists as Religious Studies. I myself am such a sojourner. Having begun my academic career firmly within the comforting folds of the anthropology departments at St. Andrews, Edinburgh and Sussex, I took up an invitation in 2000 to help set up a fledgling Religious Studies department at the University of Aberdeen focused on the anthropology of religion. In 2010, just as I edit this article, I transferred back to anthropology (happily,

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still at Aberdeen): after a decade of growth, controversy and not a few squabbles, it became increasingly clear that, while popular with students, the very project of a ‘Religious Studies [Anthropology of Religion]’ department was politically untenable – unacceptable both within the mainstay of Religious Studies scholarship and the traditional disciplinary architecture of university organization. Given such a personal history, it is difficult not to be autobiographical (perhaps even partisan) about the relationship between the two academic traditions: prolonged fieldwork, after all, has always emphasized the impossibility of a genuinely objective overview. So, with the wish at least to be useful, it seems most fitting to follow Bernard Cohn’s example (Cohn, 1991) and concentrate on the kinds of things that those also contemplating this border from the anthropological side would perhaps find notable, strange, praiseworthy and frustrating. Ultimately, such a portrait can be nothing more than a caricature − but hopefully a recognizable one. The interface between Anthropology and Religious Studies is in many ways a wholly natural one. Socio-cultural anthropology’s founding figures (from Malinowski to EvansPritchard), as well as its most prominent theoretical pathfinders (from Marx, Weber

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and Durkheim through Geertz, Levi-Strauss and Douglas to Asad, Csordas and Taussig), carved out much of their intellectual reputations dealing with questions of religion and ritual. Whether informed by an engaged stance (such as that of Roy Rappaport) or a distanced, humanist one (such as that of Raymond Firth), addressing the question of religion has been persistently regarded as central, indeed pivotal, to anthropological theorizing (Firth, 1996; Rappaport, 1999). At the same time, both Anthropology and Religious Studies share long-standing commitments both to a critical sympathy with their subject matter, to deep, career-long interactions with particular religious communities, to a broad defence of cultural relativity in either its weak or strong forms, and to a rejection of comparativist and behaviourist accounts to human action. These parallels − which create certain general mutual alignments, although not necessarily specific agreements − have made the two subjects intellectual bedfellows within the ‘culture war’ that exists over science and religion, and cognate objects of the obloquy of positivistically inclined polemicists. Social science explanations of cultural and religious phenomena have been roundly rejected as part of a flawed and dualistic ‘Standard Social Science Model’ (Shepherd, 1980; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992) that grants excessive and unwarranted autonomy to cultural determination. Such debates about the disciplinary role of cultural knowledge are as public and polemical as they are theoretical: Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite ... . If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there − the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field − is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right... . If I am in the witness box and prosecuting counsel wags his stem finger and demands, ‘Is it or is it not true that you were in Chicago on the night of the murder?’ ... . I would not expect a jury, even a Bongolese jury, to give a sympathetic hearing to my plea that, ‘It is only in your western scientific sense of the word ‘in’ that I was in Chicago.

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The Bongolese have a completely different concept of ‘in’, according to which you are only truly ‘in’ a place if you are an anointed elder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat. (Dawkins, 2003)

Such crass depictions are merely straw men, but they also tend to hide the fundamental methodological distinctions between the various disciplines studying religion. This is as true of the differences between physical anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology as it is between the latter and Religious Studies, but this second gulf is often more difficult to pinpoint. Nonetheless, signal asymmetries exist between the two – in the role of theory, in their formation of a professional stance, in the place of the indigenous voice, and in their respective treatments of the category of ‘religion’. By comparison with Anthropology (of any stripe), Religious Studies is a hugely diverse field, populated by many scholars with a meticulous knowledge of particular religious traditions, histories and languages, and far more regularly engaged with the ‘real world’ of media and popular sentiment, governmental policy and social controversy than most corners of anthropology. Moreover, unlike social, cultural and physical anthropology, which after almost a century have developed some semblances of (to use Thomas Kuhn’s term) ‘normal science’ life in methodological terms, Religious Studies is by nature extraordinarily methodologically diverse. Nonetheless, it is also a field in which the question of what exactly one is doing – intellectually, professionally and ethically – springs up again and again, but in which many of the stock anthropological responses seem strangely inadequate. The professional interface between the two subjects is both an uncomfortable and asymmetrical one, fraught with tensions that are productive and obstructive in equal measure, and which anthropologists must navigate with care. One important consequence of these differences is that the flow between them remains primarily one of personnel rather than ideas. Like myself, many anthropologists

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specializing in religion spend time in Religious Studies departments and teach on their programmes, but rarely vice versa: the professional membrane is distinctly one-way. At the same time, Religious Studies as a field remains strangely immune to many of the theoretical insights that emerge out of Anthropology’s longer study of religion as an empirical phenomenon, happily acknowledging their existence but rarely if ever taking them to the heart of their debates. To understand this, we need to understand something of the theoretical history of Religious Studies itself.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES: A BRIEF HISTORY The origins of Religious Studies as a field goes back to the nineteenth century and, like anthropology, owe much to the impetus of Europe’s colonial endeavours (Leertouwer, 1991). As with orientalism (Said 1978), this link was as much administrative as intellectual, drawing on the works of ‘eminent scholars of the Orient’ such as William James and James Mill as a means to conceptualizing rule and law within non-European, non-Christian colonies. This endeavour was shaped by the automatic Christological assumption that associated religiosity with the formations of the divine word, and in particular textuality. Max Müller (1823−1900), the first Professor of Comparative Religion at Oxford University, argued in his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1882) that it is: the duty of those who have devoted their life to the study of the principal religions of the world in their original documents, and who value and reverence it in whatever form it may present itself, to take possession of this new territory in the name of true science. (emphasis added)

Müller’s work began with his study of the Zoroastrian Avesta in Old Iranian and finished with his editing of the 51-volume Sacred Books of the East series (1875−1904). This enormously influential series set the seal on the study of non-Christian ‘scripture’

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as the defining feature of the orientalist and, later, Religious Studies approach to religion. His writings on Indian mythology, logic and epistemology also served to carve out the category of ‘Eastern philosophy’ with all its implications, defining the paradigm of the history of religions as a history of elite ideas, textually enshrined in law and philosophy. The growth of the History of Religions (the principal intellectual predecessor of Religious Studies) as an academic discipline across Western Europe found its primary footing within Protestant theology departments. Following the work of the theologians P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920) and C.P. Tiele (1830–1902) in the Netherlands, four professorships were founded, while other chairs were founded in France, Switzerland and the United States (at Chicago and Harvard); in England, new chairs sprung up in London and Manchester. The ambiguous relationship between the theological and non-theological was carved deep into the wood of the early precursors of Religious Studies. Müller’s own vision of a science of religion (Religionswissenschaft), the subject of a seminal conference in Stockholm in 1897, derived many of its historical and textual methods from Lutheran and reform theology, while at the same time asserting a non-dogmatic, non-normative and nontheological approach to the study of religion. This tension − one ultimately between form and substance − was partially mediated by theories of religious evolution, which depicted the history of human society as a progressive move towards rational civilization, marked by the gradual metamorphosis of primitive polytheism towards ethical monotheism. Although the early twentieth century provided some of the greatest theorists in the study of religion, it was not until the 1960s that Religious Studies began to carve out its own distinctive institutional space within the academy. Encouraged by the anti-colonialism of the times, this period saw the proliferation of departments, student numbers and political influence. Stimulated by the emergence of a powerful liberal institutional base in the

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United States, headed by the Chicago School under Joachim Wach (1898–1955) and Mircea Eliade (1907−1986), and disseminated in the public sphere by authors such as Joseph Campbell (1904−1987), this period saw Religious Studies both step away from and overtake its theological forebears. Ultimately, this model had a profound impact on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing many Religious Studies scholars to distance their work from theology. In the United Kingdom, Ninian Smart, founder of Religious Studies at Lancaster and one of the most influential British figures in the field, strongly asserted a non-confessional and methodologically agnostic discipline that could feel at home within a secular liberal academy, while also addressing the deeper questions of meaning that religion inevitably implied.

Phenomenology and the category of ‘religion’ The struggles within the different branches of Religious Studies to renounce their perceived role as the handmaiden of Protestant theology mirror in many respects those that Anthropology has had with its own colonial and cultural past. Nonetheless, their respective solutions to such rites of disciplinary adulthood are also the point at which the two part company. For better or worse, Anthropology has increasingly focused on a particular set of methods − long-term fieldwork, participant observation and ethnography − as the basis of its disciplinary identity. Religious Studies has generally defined itself in terms of an object of study: that of ‘religion itself’. Whereas that focus on religion has opened the door to the comfortable use of multiple methods and theories – from anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, history and archaeology – the question of religion’s parameters as a category presents an equal identity crisis in Religious Studies to any experienced by Anthropology. Here, Religious Studies still rests uneasily on the legacy of the phenomenology of religion.

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Derived ultimately from the writings of Edmund Husserl (1959−1938), it takes a particular stance regarding the study of religion. The need to ‘bracket out’ (epoché) any foundational consideration of the truth-value of specific religious claims remains a bedrock condition of its separation from theology or biblical studies. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Religious Studies drew upon (in differing measures) the writings of the German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869−1937) and in particular his seminal work The Idea of the Holy (Otto, 1924 [1917]). Developing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768−1834) argument that religious truth was validated by a non-rational experience, Otto defined ‘religious experience’ in terms of the mysterium tremendum: an invigorating envelopment in a rapturous feeling of the ‘wholly other’ beyond ordinary experience, combined with a sense of ‘creature feeling’ or destabilizing humility in the face of such awefulness. The progressive refinement of this sense of the holy (heilig, which can equally be translated as ‘sacredness’) constituted for Otto both the individual’s own sacred history, and the evolving transformation of the world’s religious traditions, from the ‘crudely naïve and primordial emotional disturbance’ that characterized primitive illiterate religion’s ‘daemonic dread’ (Otto 1924: 15−16), towards an increasingly purified concentration on the experience of God. While rejecting Otto’s monotheistic evolutionism, Eliade and Smart both championed his emphasis on subjective consciousness as authenticating the religious voice. For Eliade in particular, Otto’s emotional ontology informed his distinctive emphasis on ecstatic experience in the definition of shamanism (Eliade, 1951 [1964]) and hierophany (Eliade, 1949, 1954). For Smart, it offered the possibility of a defining facet of religiosity that, while remaining true to the reality of religious enthusiasm, nonetheless implied no explicit methodological claim of religion’s truth, and thus could act as the basis of a secular, or at least agnostic, study of religion (Smart, 1971); at the same time, Smart

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sought to forge a descriptive model of religious indicators that accounted for those external aspects studied by other disciplines (Smart, 1973). In this regard, debates in Religious Studies again closely aligned with many of those in theology, in particular John Hick’s laying out of a pluralist theology, based on his distinction between a trans-categorical ‘knowledge of the Real’ and a necessarily compromised categorical theology of that knowledge: that all religions shared an imperfect and incomplete endeavour to give words to a wordless experience of the noumenal (Hick, 1993 [1973]). As within Protestant theology, this emphasis on religious experience served as a counterweight to the traditional Christian centrality of scripture as the defining anchor of a religious tradition. Inasmuch as the Christian Bible, the Buddhist sutras, the Islamic Qur’an and the Hindu Vedas constituted the structural fulcrum of ‘conservative’ tradition, the prevalence of shamanic voices allowed for the possibility of localized change, agency and heterodoxy (see, for example, Samuel, 1993). While critiqued often enough, such dichotomies often mesh with cognate frameworks − of ‘great’ versus ‘little’ traditions (Redfield, 1956) and ‘world’ versus ‘indigenous’ religions (Kunin, 2003a) − to generate a powerful institutional imaginary that persistently shapes course and curricular structures, as well as a wider platform for an implicit but enduring religious evolutionism. It also lends a strong expressive paradigm to Religious Studies’ presentation of religious life. Whether we are talking about religious claims or ritual practice, the idea that such ‘external forms’ are expressing an ‘inner meaning’, imminent within revealed text or ecstatic consciousness, remains common currency, casting once again the shadow of Protestant theology (Asad, 1993). The ‘phenomenology of religion’ has come in for serious criticism in recent decades (Kunin, 2003b), and attacking Eliade in particular has been referred to as the ‘preferred blood sport’ of Religious Studies scholars throughout the 1990s (Antes, Geertz and

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Warne, 2004: 25). The principal area of debate here is the degree to which ‘religion’ constitutes a sui generis phenomenon, or one that can be opened up to external lines of explanation. Robert Segal, for example, has argued for a far more reductionist approach to the study of religion (Segal, 1983, 1989; Yonan, 1994), seeing social scientific explanations as the means by which an understanding of religious phenomena can escape the exclusive enclave of believers. In doing so, Segal distinguishes between why religious believers believe what they do (which, he argues, is the limit of the social sciences), and what they believe, which remains unreachable by non-believers and ultimately the academy. Like many Religious Studies scholars, it is difficult to get beyond the impression that Segal’s strong arguments in favour of a social science of religion nonetheless see it as epiphenomenal, peripheral to an inscrutable essence. Whereas Otto’s thesis may have been widely criticized in its explicit form, its implicit capacity to define the field of Religious Studies remains. Nonetheless, the ghost of Otto’s thesis can also be seen in an imbalance in the treatment of differing kinds of theory: while those that locate religiosity within the psychological domain − Freud, Jung, Levi-Bruhl, Tylor and those modern proponents of the cognitive sciences of religion (Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2002; Pyysiainen, 2002) − receive considerable quantities of attention, those that locate its explanatory centre elsewhere − such as within social, economic or cultural causes − are often seen as epiphenomenal to the ‘essence of the matter’.

‘RELIGION’ AND ITS MALCONTENTS This is only one side of the story. The other side lies in the endeavours by scholars to define Religious Studies as a field of study. Particularly in the last 40 years, many (including Smart himself) have sought to unpick their bond to such a restrictive view of religion, generating instead a dialectic between

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method and object. Thus, Capps (1974: 727) argues that, Religious studies is not a discipline, and it is not a subject. Rather it is a subject field within which a variety of disciplines are employed and an enormous range of subjects are treated. It is a subjectfield before it is anything more discrete than this. It follows that what one does within the field depends upon where he is standing, and where one stands influences what he discovers. Thus, when one looks about for analogues to religious studies, he should not be content with anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and the like. For religious studies is less like philosophy, psychology, and anthropology than like ‘environmental studies’ or even ‘ethnic studies,’ for in both cases the name of the subject field indicates that it is a collectivity in which a variety of useful endeavours occur which draw upon a large number of disciplines, methodologies, and sensitivities. (Capps, 1974: 727)

Seeking to rationalize this problem of ‘religion’ – not as a category of phenomenon (Saler, 1993), but as a means of study – Smart famously argued that Religious Studies should include the following dimensions of examination: the doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional and (later) material (Smart, 1973). This eclecticism, while remaining one of the strengths and the freedoms of the field, nonetheless includes its own limitations (Why, for example, not the therapeutic?) and presents its own conundrums. In particular, the lack of a theoretical core (except perhaps in the sense that the ‘essence’ of religion might be untheorizable) means that the disciplinary home of Religious Studies remains ambiguous. Is Religious Studies a social science, for example, or a humanity? Is it closer in tone and allegiance to anthropology and sociology, to philosophy and theology, or to history and literature? In an epoch of management and financial reform in the higher education sector, Religious Studies faculties all too often find themselves at the periphery of the kind of established academic categories that many senior managers either sympathize with or recognize. Even in its flourishing heyday during the 1960s, Religious Studies had a hard time being recognized as a proper

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academic discipline at all. As Schlatter notes: A considerable body of American scholars are of the opinion that religious studies are no part of the humanities, no part of the liberal arts, not an objective scholarly discipline. (Schlatter, 1963: ix; see also Hart 1992)

Ill at ease with the historically established categories of the humanities (but aligned with its ‘liberalizing’ mission), uncomfortable with the performative empiricism of the social sciences (yet enthusiastic about its trans-cultural vision), Religious Studies must nonetheless orient itself with the intellectual paradigms of other, older disciplines in order to recruit successfully, get home funding for research, and support for seminars and conferences. Of course, much of this depends less on questions of intrinsic intellectual merit than ones of departmental sovereignty, especially in the proximity of established theology faculties. Like all differences, such questions may be handled well within the ‘broad church’ of larger departments, but can equally constitute the basis of serious disagreements over curricular structure, research priorities and the treatment of religious constituencies within the student body. Anthropologists looking to work in or with Religious Studies departments therefore need to think carefully, and ask careful questions, about their specific orientation. Many social scientists, particularly anthropologists, remain deeply sceptical of the basic project of Religious Studies, seeing it as little more than either a cipher for a colonialist and unreconstructed Protestant worldview, or a platform for Augustine’s fidus quaerens intellectiam (‘faith seeking understanding’) in an increasingly secular academy. For the late James Thrower, such parameters downplayed the strong naturalist traditions that emerged within the world’s religious traditions (Thrower, 1980) and the importance of ‘secular religions’ (Thrower, 1983, 1992). More recently, Timothy Fitzgerald, whose work The Ideology of Religious Studies (Fitzgerald, 2000), has

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caused something of a storm of comment, has argued that: There is no coherent non-theological theoretical basis for the study of religion as a separate academic discipline .... Religion cannot reasonably be taken to be a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive cross-cultural aspect of human life. (Fitzgerald, 2000, pp. 1, 4)

For Fitzgerald, the term ‘religion’ should not only be jettisoned for empirical reasons (because there is no cognate term in the cultural lives of, for example, Japan or India), but also because the term itself is ideologically charged through its part in the long history of European colonization. Instead, he asserts both the use of something less problematic such as ‘cultural studies’. Fitzgerald’s position would hardly be new to anthropologists. Indeed, the Canadian luminary Wilfred Cantwell-Smith had made much the same argument almost half a century before: Neither religion in general nor any one of the religions, I will contend, is in itself an intelligible entity, a valid object of inquiry or of concern whether for the scholar or the man of faith. . . . My own suggestion is that the word, and the concepts, should be dropped. (Smith W. C., 1978 [1962], pp. 12, 50 )

The prevalence of this argument implies something of the existential nature of the issue (Dubuisson, 1998; Sabbatucci, 2000). Such troubles are hardly unique to Religious Studies, and are mirrored by comparable critiques of the ‘problematic connotations’ of the term culture by anthropologists (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Brightman, 1995; Tweed, 2005). Indeed, as with culture, the category endures precisely because of its powerful ideological salience within Western academic and popular life, and because many scholars – even those that accept Fitzgerald’s basic argument (McKinnon, 2002: 74) – cannot find a better word for the particular brand of intellectual questions that Religious Studies addresses. As Smith concludes: ‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and

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therefore is theirs to define. It is a second-order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept like ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon. (Smith J. Z., 2004, pp. 193−194)

THE QUESTION OF VOICE AND THE INTEGRITY OF TRADITION All of this creates certain conundrums for the anthropologist: Religious Studies is an intellectual tradition fully aware of the limitations of the category on which it is based, but unwilling to transcend those limitations; deeply interested in the study of ‘religion’, but only as a monolithic category strangely beyond the bounds of analysis. As a discipline it seems deeply preoccupied with a category it refuses to place or to break up. The pragmatic answer to these conundrums would have pleased Durkheim: that is, a pronounced division of labour, between specialists in theory (of which there are a few) and specialists in particular religious traditions (which are legion). There are also a dwindling number of comparativists, who specialize in categories such as shamanism, religious art and ritual across the globe, but they are fewer and fewer in number. Rarely, however, do theoretical and particularistic concerns combine in a manner redolent of the anthropological literature: the sense that theories should be rigorously tested against available empirical evidence, or even against the established corpus of known details of religious life, remains relatively rare. This separation derives largely from the place of religions as authoritative voices that hold court within the discipline, rather than as elements of ethnography that are the object of analysis. Religious Studies’ longstanding rejection of a normative framework for judging religions provides little to rationalize this question of voice, beyond the phenomenology of personal consciousness. In practice, the combination of academic

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achievement and personal confessional stance allow many to enter the arena as a validated voice for tradition. This emphasis on a largely unexamined subjectivity vastly diversifies the question of ‘authentic voice’, as well as rendering its nature strangely uniform and structurally indistinct. The capacity to speak for, interpret or represent a tradition − and an informant’s credentials for doing so − become unquestionable if backed by the force of vigorous conviction. While shades of this issue exist within anthropology too, the implicit insistence on the anthropologist qua academic means they rarely speak for their own tradition or culture, or at least far less so than in Religious Studies, where the specific religiosity of academics is regarded as professionally pertinent and publicly unquestionable. Particularly in the American context, Religious Studies is widely populated by academics that speak for particular religious traditions as well as about them. In many cases, such academics are called upon to pronounce on questions of orthodoxy, blurring the boundary between academic and sectarian spokesperson. It is salutary to compare Religious Studies’ openness in terms of membership with the relatively closed professional world of Social (and to a lesser extent Cultural) Anthropology, especially in areas such as the United Kingdom. Here, the methodological normalization of validated anthropological writing and professional membership − the nearabsolute requirement of long-term inaugural fieldwork, the common demand for undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications within the discipline, plus the loyalty to a canon of core theoretical works − mean that while anthropologists may enter and leave Religious Studies departments with considerable ease, the converse is simply not so. In this sense, Religious Studies is the product of a segmented concert of engaged, ‘indigenous’ voices that simply dwarfs equivalent moves in Anthropology. Laudable though this may be in principle, the upshot over the last few decades has been to render such traditions deeply resistant to meta-analysis according to

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concepts not derived from those traditions. Religious traditions are, by and large, both presented and explained wholly in their own terms. The ritual practices of Mahayana Buddhists are not just contextualized, but explained in terms of indigenous concepts of bodhicitta, sunyata and dharmadhatu; the legal institutions of Islamic communication in terms of hadith, fiqh, and ijtihad. Resort to such terms as explanatory naturally raises the problem of ‘tradition’, its boundaries and origins, as an explanatory platform at negotiated odds with the specific social conditions in which they are studied. The precise balance between these factors constitutes one of the central points of debate between the anthropologist and Religious Studies scholar. Thus, Clifford Geertz’s famous depiction of the Javanese slametan, or ritual meal, locates it thus: The Javanese village ... is essentially a set of geographically contiguous, but rather self-consciously autonomous, nuclear family households whose economic and political interdependence is of roughly the same circumscribed and explicitly defined sort as that demonstrated in the slametan. The demands of the labor-intensive rice and drycrop agricultural process require the perpetuation of specific modes of technical co-operation and enforce a sense of community on the otherwise rather self-contained families − a sense of community which the slametan clearly reinforces. And when we consider the manner in which various conceptual and behavioral elements from HinduBuddhism, Islam, and ‘animism’ are reinterpreted and balanced to form a distinctive and nearly homogeneous religious style, the close functional adjustment between the communal feast pattern and the conditions of Javanese rural life is even more readily apparent. (Geertz, 1957: 36)

By contrast, Mark Woodward’s counterinterpretation of slametan in History of Religions suggests that: mystical interpretations of Islam have served as paradigms for devotionalism, social order, and social life. This suggests further that contemporary Javanese religion must by understood in light of fields of meaning established by the larger Muslim tradition and raises questions concerning the mode of cultural analysis on which Geertz’s account is based. (Woodward, 1988: 55)

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The question of the parameters of particular ‘traditions’ as methodological and theoretical objects are long-standing (Marriott, 1955; Redfield, 1956; Dumont & Pocock, 1957; Obeyesekere, 1963; Tambiah, 1970), most particularly within religious communities themselves, where they are, and always have been, deeply contested (Kapstein, 1989). The centrality of elite written sources to Religious Studies’ methodology contrasts markedly with Anthropology’s concentration on local performance as the defining ‘text’ of social life. Most theoretical developments within the anthropology of religion take either the conditions or particularities of performance as the central context for explanation. This has led to two overarching modes of modern anthropological explanation. In the first, explanation is made with reference to general human modalities: thus, Van Gennep, Turner and (more recently) Bloch’s formulations (van Gennep, 1960 [1909]; Turner, 1977; Bloch, 1992) sought to tease out generic patterns of ritual performance; theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Douglas and Whitehouse sought to elucidate general features of human symbolic cognition (Douglas, 1966; Lévi-Strauss, 1970, 1975, 1976; Whitehouse, 1995); while more methodologically inclined analysts such as Bourdieu, Boddy and Tedlock focused on the manner in which religious knowledge is part of a practical and embodied engagement with the world (Bourdieu, 1977; Boddy, 1988; Tedlock, 2002). In the second, explanation is couched within particular historical aspects of the society and culture within which performance occurs: thus, Marxist theorists such as (early) Bloch, Ortner and Taussig locate religious and ritual formulations within surrounding structures of inter-generational, economic and ideological alienation (Bloch, 1977, 1986; Ortner, 1978; Taussig, 1980), while Lewis and Boddy locate possession practices within the semantic over-determination of surrounding cultures of gender (Boddy, 1988; Lewis, 1989). These patterns of explanation give form to most modern reviews of the anthropology of religion,

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categorized either by univeral themes (‘the body’, ‘gender’, ‘violence’) or theoretical ouevres (‘boundaries’, ‘ritualization’, ‘signs and symbols’); such characterizations of the anthropological study of religion as a whole rarely if ever organize themselves by religion in the manner central to Religious Studies. Attempts to resolve the tension between these two explanatory centres are found particularly in the endeavour to produce the ‘anthropology of’ a specific religion. This typically manifests itself in the form of individual courses within undergraduate anthropology degrees, but is equally found within many, often single-authored monographs and collections seeking to resolve themes distinctive to an arena of ethnographic study and debate that is prima facie dominated by a particular religion. The most fertile but disputed ground here are the ‘anthropology of’ Islam (Geertz, 1971; Asad, 1986; Marranci, 2008) and to a lesser extent Buddhism (Samuel, 1993; Gellner, 2001; Mills, 2003; De Silva, 2006 ) and Hinduism (Dumont, 1980; Fuller, 1992). In each of these, anthropological theorizing perches precariously alongside powerful indigenous discourses. The irony of such projects (in which I nonetheless happily participate) is twofold: first, the very oxymoron of identifying an ‘anthropology’ − i.e. the study of humankind in general − that is specific to those who follow a particular religion; and secondly, the fact that such a literature is generally dominated by a prolonged and critical consideration of the parameters of the ‘dominant’ religion itself. Ultimately, the tension between Anthropology and Religious Studies is found in not one problem, but two. The first is paradigmatic: the architecture of theoretical explanations − the degree to which they are seen as reductionist or non-reductionist, as based on indigenous or etic categories − and the parameters of relevant data that are legitimately brought to bear within an explanation. The second is historical: Religious Studies’ historical, orientalist and biblical origins necessitate a strong academic awareness of primary textual sources in their

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original languages, an emphasis that seems all too often at odds with the practice of systematic fieldwork and implicit (indeed, often explicit) rejection of textual evidence. As Brinkley Messick has commented, The exclusion of writing, as topic, source, or data, seems virtually an organizing principle of the old social sciences ... . While [a] recent reflexive interest in ‘our’ writings has a traceable and even respectable lineage in the discipline, an interest in ‘theirs’, that is, in writings authored by the peoples studied, was excluded early on from the purview of anthropological research. (Messick, 1993, 2−3)

Anthropologists are often unfamiliar with written sources despite their time in the field, and tend to sideline their importance as evidence or sources of meaning − a tendency all too often derived from a lack of facility with indigenous written languages than from any serious methodological considerations.

THE POLITICAL POSITION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES The second distinction is one of final purpose: the two disciplines diverge on the question of the purposes of interpretation. For anthropologists, interpretation is by and large part of a wider process of explanation, and the principal question is at what point the former ends and the latter begins. For much of the Religious Studies community, the primary responsibility lies in interpretation as an end in itself, or as part of a general academic responsibility to multi-vocality and multiculturalism within modern society. Above, I have identified the dominance of indigenous categories in the self-construction of Religious Studies explanations. It is therefore ironic that the discipline as a whole remains strongly trammelled by the historical categories of Christian thought. Apologetics, just war, exegesis, ethics and theology all retain a strong categorical imperative within key journals of the field such as Religion, History of Religions and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

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The reasons for this are manifold but intimately linked to the political place of Religious Studies, particularly within the English-speaking world: here, Religious Studies academics act as public intellectuals in a manner that anthropologists rarely do. In the European and American contexts, this generally involves the presentation of non-Christian religions, with regard to which Western media outlets in particular prefer ‘moderate’ religious academics as cultural brokers. Such representatives are usually both Western educated (and thus familiar with, and indeed indoctrinated within, Christian categories) and cognizant of the rules of European and American public discourse, which remain dominated by Christian intellectual frameworks. More than this, such academic spokespeople are generally acutely aware of existing debates between science and religion, much of which questions the very place of theology and Religious Studies in modern academia, causing such representatives to take the established side of ‘religion’. Indeed, Religious Studies scholars produce a small industry of writings that most anthropologists would find unsettling, perplexing or even downright distasteful: that is, the tradition of the normative essay. Deeply entrenched within a perceived disjunction between religious tradition and modernity, this form of Religious Studies literature effectively comes under the heading of ‘What should (members of religious population X) think or do about (new thing Y)?’ This is very much a facet of the substantive wing of Religious Studies, and embedded within arguments over orthodoxy and heterodoxy within specific religions. In Islamic studies, it can be recognized in the wide range of doctoral applications and journal articles given over to the legal status of modern forms of finance or the use of telephones, e-mails and multimedia – in other words, variations upon a theme of tafsir and fatwa. In Buddhist studies, it revolves around the morality of war and protest, of economy and environment.

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While this kind of writing remains semiperipheral to most Religious Studies scholars’ academic endeavours, it represents an important component of Religious Studies’ public persona. Whether it is an op-ed in Dharma World or Thought for the Day on Radio 4, Religious Studies scholars are called upon to enter the public area in the name of faith in a manner precisely cognate with the call upon theologians to present sermons. However, while this kind of public writing and speaking can be distinguished from the kind of critical-moral writing that occurs when anthropologists are faced with the profound ethical conundrums of their work, there are certain enlightening correspondences. When anthropologists write on such matters on sites such as Anthropology Today, they are usually engaged in a conversation with themselves (What should we think and do as anthropologists?). By contrast, as implied by the website tagline of the nameless American Religious Studies department mentioned at the beginning, Religious Studies’ public platform is much more clearly engaged with the question of wider public norms. This is also linked to their role in many countries as the educators of educators: that is, as teacher trainers, particularly within a post-Christian liberal context. This contrast illuminates an intriguing dynamic, in which anthropologists often think of themselves as a very specific moral community, comparable in this regard with the scholarly representatives of different traditions found within Religious Studies.

CONCLUSION: THE QUESTION OF EXPLANATION Much of the above may look somewhat negative, particularly about Religious Studies. That is not a general view I would wish to present. There is much that is laudable to the field: the powerful space given over to indigenous voices makes anthropological moralising on the matter look half-hearted; the wealth of

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textual and historical expertise generally humbles the comparatively illiterate anthropologist; and the linguistic skills of many Religious Studies scholars that I have met continues to be a source of wonder to me. More than this, the very methodological openness of the field allows the curious mind to wander at liberty, with no equivalent of the irksome but all too common refrain ‘But is it really anthropological?’ to clip one’s intellectual wings. It is difficult, however, to get around the sense of a field that is somewhat in stasis. At an address to the North American Association for the Study of Religion meeting in 1992, Jonathan Z. Smith briefly but famously complained that no-one in Religious Studies was actively working on new theories of religion, but rather spent their time overwhelmingly on interpretation (McCutcheon, 1994). This is not true of the study of religion in general − indeed, there has been a rash of new theoretical works on religion in the last 20 years − but these innovations have generally emerged from outside the dedicated fold of Religious Studies. While Religious Studies has theory specialists aplenty, it has bitterly few active theorists. This is for three main reasons, all of which provide important lessons for anthropologists: first because, as an academic field, Religious Studies has remained resolutely open in methodological terms by comparison with Anthropology, an openness which has bred theoretical introspection rather than innovation (a danger implicit in many broad churches); second, because it retains an implicit foundational ontology of ‘true religion’ which both precludes serious analysis and privileges uncritical presentations of ‘tradition’; and finally, because it has become deeply engaged in the public presentation and interpretation of religions, arguably at the cost of their study. For many Religious Studies scholars, these may well not be devastating criticisms; indeed, for some they will be plaudits. That said, they are all tendencies which are present within Anthropology itself, albeit offset by its more focused methodological project.

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Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that the principal theoretical debates that are out there involve the endeavour to interrogate the defining terms of the field. Much of the role of theory in Religious Studies therefore takes the form of a means to analyse and talk about ‘religion’, ‘secularity’ and so forth as categories, rather than as a means to examine particular social and cultural phenomena that happen to come under the category of ‘religion’. This tends to downplay the analysis of ethnography as a contextualising reality for religious phenomena in favour of the analysis of phenomena previously ringfenced as ‘religious’. In this sense, while anthropologists of religion have usually been welcome in the halls of Religious Studies, they may not sit upon the throne. In an important sense, to place anthropological theorizing at the heart of Religious Studies would be to cast down Religious Studies itself.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). ‘Writing against Culture’. In R. G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (pp. 136−162). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Antes, P., Geertz, A. W., & Warne, R. R. (2004). New Approaches to the Study Of Religion: Regional, Critical, and Historical. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Occasional Papers Series ed.). Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University Press. Asad, T. (1993). ‘Towards A Genealogy Of The Concept Of Ritual’. In T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion (pp. 55−82). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barrett, J. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe In God? Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Bell, C. (1992). Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bloch, M. (1977). ‘The Past and the Present in the Present’. Man New Series, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Aug., 1977), pp. 278–292. Bloch, M. (1986). From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Bloch, M. (1992). Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Unversity Press. Boddy, J. (1988). ‘Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance’. American Ethnologist, 15 (1), 4−27. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, P. (2002). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins Of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Brightman, R. (1995). ‘Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, and Relexification’. Cultural Anthropology, 10, 509–546. Cabezon, J. (2010). ‘Introduction’. In J. Cabezon, Tibetan Ritual (pp. 1−34). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Capps, W. H. (1974). ‘On Religious Studies, in Lieu of an Overview’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 42 (4), 727−733. Cohn, B. (1991). ‘An Anthropologist amongst the Historians’. In B. Cohn, An Anthropologist Amongst The Historians, and Other Essays (pp. 1−17). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (2003). ‘What is True?’. In R. Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (pp. 17−22). London: Phoenix. De Silva, P. (2006). ‘Anthropology of “Sinhala Buddhism”’. Contemporary Buddhism, 7 (2), 165−170. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. New York: Praeger. Dubuisson, D. (1998). L’Occident et la religion, mythes, science et idéologie. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe. Dumont, L. (1980). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, L. & Pocock, D. (1957). ‘Village Studies’. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1, 23–41. Durkheim, E. (1995 [1912]). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Eliade, M. (1951[1964]). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eliade, M. (1954). The Myth of The Eternal Return (Bollingen Series XLVI ed.). (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eliade, M. (1949). Traité de l’histoire des religions [Patterns of Comparative Religion]. Paris: Payot. Firth, R. (1996). Religion: A Humanist Interpretation. London: Routledge. Fitzgerald, T. (2000). The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Fuller, C. (1992). The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geertz, C. (1957). ‘Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example’. American Anthropologist, New Series, 59 (1), 32−54. Geertz, C. (1971). Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Gellner, D. (2001). The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hart, D. G. (1992). ‘The Troubled Soul of the Academy: American Learning and the Problem of Religious Studies’. Religion and American Culture, 2 (1), 49−77. Hick, J. (1993 [1973]). God and the Universe of Faiths. Oxford: OneWorld Publications Ltd. Kapstein, M. (1989). ‘The Purificatory Gem and its Cleansing: A Late Tibetan Polemical Discussion of Apocryphal Texts’. History of Religions, 28 (3), 217−244. Kunin, S. D. (2003a). ‘Indigenous Traditions and Anthropological Theory’. In H. K. Bond, S. D. Kunin, & F. A. Murphy (eds), A Companion to Religious Studies and Theology (pp. 95−118). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kunin, S. D. (2003b). ‘Phenomenology and the History of Religion’. In S. D. Kunin (ed.), Religion: The Modern Theories (pp. 116−136). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Leertouwer, L. (1991). ‘Primitive Religion in Dutch Religious Studies’. Numen, 38 (2), 198−213. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1970). The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to the Science of Mythology, Vol. 1. London: Jonathan Cape. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1975). From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to the Science of Mythology, Vol. 2. London: Jonathan Cape. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976). The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lewis, I. (1989). Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London: Routledge. McCutcheon, R. T. (1994). ‘Review of Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33 (1), 81−82. McKinnon, A. (2002). ‘Sociological Definitions, Language Games and the “Essence” of Religion’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 14, 61−83. Marranci, G. (2008). The Anthropology of Islam. London: Berg.

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Marriott, M. (1955). ‘Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization’. In M. Marriott, Village India: Studies in the Little Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Messick, B. (1993). ‘Written Culture’. Transformations. CSST Working Papers, University of Michigan. Mills, M. A. (2003). Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Müller, Max (1882) Introduction to the Science of Religion. London: Longmans Green And Co. Obeyesekere, G. (1963). ‘The Great Tradition and the Little in the Context of Sinhalese Buddhism’. Journal of Asian Studies, 22 (2), 139−153. Ortner, S. (1978). Sherpas Through Their Rituals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otto, R. (1924[1917]). The Idea of the Holy [Das Heilig]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pyysiainen, I. (2002). How Religion Works. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers . Rappaport, R. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redfield, R. (1956). Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Sabbatucci, D. (2000). La Prospettiva storico-religiosa. Formello: Edizioni SEAM. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Saler, B. (1993). Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: Brill. Samuel, G. (1993). Civilized Shamans − Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Schlatter, R. (1963). Foreword. In C. Holbrook, Religion, A Humanistic Field. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Segal, R. A. (1983). ‘In Defence of Reductionism’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 51, 97−124. Segal, R. A. (1989). Religion and the Social Sciences. Essays on the Confrontation. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Shepherd, W. C. (1980). ‘Cultural Relativism, Physical Anthropology, and Religion’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19 (2), 159−172. Smart, N. (1971). The Religious Experience of Mankind. London: Fontana. Smart, N. (1973). The Phenomenon of Religion. London: Macmillan. Smith, J. Z. (2004). Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

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Smith, W. C. (1978 [1962]). The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Tambiah, S. J. (1970). Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North East Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taussig, M. (1980). The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of Carolina Press. Tedlock, D. (2002). ‘The Poetics of Time in Mayan Divination’. In M. Lambek (ed.), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (pp. 419−430). Oxford: Blackwell. Thrower, J. (1980). The Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World. The Hague: Mouton. Thrower, J. (1983). Marxist−Leninist ‘Scientific Atheism’ and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. Thrower, J. (1992). Marxism−Leninism as the Civil Religion of Soviet Society: God’s Commissar. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press.

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Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). ‘Psychological Foundations of Culture’. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology & the Generation of Culture (pp. 19−136). New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, V. (1977). The Ritual Process. London: Penguin. Tweed, T. A. (2005). ‘Marking Religion’s Boundaries: Constitutive Terms, Orienting Tropes, and Exegetical Fussiness’. History of Religions, 44 (3), 252−276. van Gennep, A. (1960 [1909]). The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Whitehouse, H. (1995). ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor and Memory in Melanesian Initiatory Cults’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.), 2 (4), 703−715. Woodward, M. R. (1988). ‘The “‘Slametan”’: Textual Knowledge and Ritual Performance in Central Javanese Islam’. History of Religions, 28 (1), 54−89. Yonan, T. A. (1994). Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Leiden: Brill.

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1.13 Anthropology and Museums Brian Durrans

This chapter reviews the relationship between anthropology and museums over roughly the last 30 years.1 That relationship is transnational but can be explored in the space available only by concentrating on a few aspects best covered for Europe and North America. Especially in the last 20 years anthropology and museums have interacted in several fields, perhaps most interestingly in respect of representations and social engagement. After a brief orientation, I outline some key themes and shifts in the overlap of perspectives which anthropology and museums have brought to these fields. I then consider why, by contrast, their collaboration has been less productive than expected or claimed in respect of material culture, despite the strength of ‘material culture studies’ elsewhere. Instead of presenting a case for anthropology and museums to collaborate more fully and resourcefully in the future, I leave this idea mainly implicit in my assessment and criticism of what they have done together so far.

DISCIPLINE, INSTITUTION, INTERFACE2 Anthropology and museums are very different entities: the former, a loosely integrated, fuzzy-edged discipline rooted in the academy but practiced widely outside; the latter,

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a disparate set of public-facing, collectionbased institutions whose continuing popularity, like that of the cinema, speaks against the individuating effects of contemporary communications technology to the resilience of the social. Museums are experienced concretely as prominently located, usually imposing structures while anthropology is more familiar as an abstract descriptor than materialized in a set of offices and seminar rooms. Anthropology subsumes specific ‘anthropologies’ − ‘the museum’, specific museums but also a burgeoning network of initiatives inspired by some functions of the museum but rejecting its modernist associations. The ‘outputs’ of anthropology and museums are also different in that while both academic anthropologists and anthropological curators produce texts, many of the latter, but few of the former, produce exhibitions3 and associated programmes, not all of which leave, or can leave, a permanent record. This complicates the task of assessing exchanges of ideas in which the discipline and the institution share an interest. As with other disciplines, some sub-fields of anthropology are more interested in, or better served by, museum activities, collections or displays than are others. This may owe more to convention, however, than to the availability of relevant objects to exhibit, and above all to the convention that a museum

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offers primarily a visual encounter with things rather than catering to the wider sensorium or promoting discursive interaction among visitors, curators and others which exposure to such things can effectively encourage. What scope this encounter offers for anthropological insight will depend on the kind of museum, the topic under consideration, and who is involved; but over the last 30 years museums have drawn much ‘more widely from the social sciences and humanities, especially history, art history, sociology, psychology and cultural studies, than from anthropology alone.4 Reciprocally, academic anthropology has paid less attention to the constituencies or forms of encounter with which museums are mainly concerned.5 A university museum integrated with degree courses in anthropology can accommodate more aspects of the subject; a so-called ‘universal’ or culture-history museum perhaps fewer; and one with a non-anthropological focus may have little incentive to attend to anthropology at all. As a social institution, any type of museum is open to anthropological analysis, however, so if it is still rare for a museum lacking what appear to be ‘anthropological’ collections to which to apply anthropological insights in its work and presentations, this may be because the results, in those ‘anthropological’ museums where the discipline is applied in this way, have so far been insufficiently inspiring for others to imitate.6

REPRESENTATION In the ‘crisis of representation’ (Macdonald 1997, 2006) which museums have experienced in recent decades – although the word ‘crisis’ may overdramatize what has now become a routine concern – representation cannot strictly be separated from other forms of engagement with persons. There has been a significant shift from an earlier habit of producing an array of objects, images and texts for passive, visual consumption to a newer approach that encourages more active

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engagement and, for some, a sense of ‘empowerment’ and ‘ownership’ with respect to tokens of identity and ways of accessing them. But this shift hardly displaces visual consumption altogether. Representation and engagement overlap in the exhibition, and exhibitions remain the principal way in which museums communicate knowledge. Although in some ways the exhibition too has undergone a transition from ‘form’ to ‘process’ – with more scope for demonstrating performance, showing ‘ethnographic’ objects being made, or, more reflexively, for challenging existing displays with temporary art installations (Putnam 2001) − such activities neither change the basic plan of the exhibition or gallery that accommodates them nor do they subvert its representational logic by basking in its authority. By hosting such activities in or alongside its galleries (especially involving encounters with ‘living representatives’ of the cultures or communities concerned),7 a museum enlarges visitors’ understanding, explicitly of the culture(s) concerned but also implicitly of its own ‘culture of representation’. As Jack Goody observes, ‘representations involve doubt’ (Goody 1997: 9), and although injecting a dynamic element into a static display hardly risks confusion with ‘reality’, even hinting at a closer approach to that reality inevitably draws attention to the artifice of the display itself. Reference to ‘exhibitionary practice’, rather than simply the exhibition to which the practice gives rise (e.g. Bouquet 2000), perhaps registers that, while occupied in such practice, curators are as immune as ever to outside disruption of the routine tasks it entails. It is indeed hard to negotiate the technical imperatives of a practice that fulfils the essential expectation that museums show things in galleries to visitors,8 but, apart from the pragmatism of dividing them into permanent and temporary and of concern for the safety and conservation of exhibits within them, exhibitions are also kept as they are by the taste regimes of curators, visitors and others. As a representation, an exhibition

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yields to anthropological understanding not only by virtue of how it is perceived by those whom it represents and those for whom it represents (to adapt Sperber’s ‘communication’ model [Sperber 1985]) but also by virtue of how it came into being, i.e. as the work of its collective curation. Paying attention to the processes rather than just the product of exhibitionary practice is justified on Latour’s insight that a mediator partly constructs the mediated (Porto 2007:182). Anthropology brackets museum representations with others that have preoccupied it before, during and since the discipline’s own ‘epistemological crisis’ that crystallized around the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Although at the same time considerable rethinking was already underway in museums (probably driven by similar concerns from inside and outside the academy), the genre-blurring eclecticism then gathering pace had two significant if contradictory effects on museums and especially on anthropological ones. First, it made much traditional museological work seem tedious (for a while the postmodernist devil [or angel] claimed the best tunes). Second, and in contrast, while bearings were being lost and forgotten across the social sciences and humanities, museums took on a peculiar appeal as spaces for memory and negotiated engagement, above all with bordercrossing ‘others’, who were significant because their very presence − or representation − helped unsettle assumptions around knowledge and power that found expression at the time. In line with its strong theoretical orientation to consumption (e.g. Miller 1987), academic anthropology was more concerned with the effects of museum representations than with how they were produced. The most difficult challenge of empowering marginalized others, however, was to retain museums’ commitment to a suddenly unfashionable holistic understanding. The ‘whole’ was not necessarily some totalizing authoritarian view, but an alternative between discredited ‘great nation’ narrative and fragmented empathetic experience. But even

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when a museum’s collections are sufficiently comprehensive (and its curators sufficiently motivated) to support a broad framework of understanding, at least by setting the main time and space coordinates of a major slice of human history, the prospect of trudging round the galleries is likely to deter all but the keenest visitor. Discerning in the context of historical museums a further aspect of ‘democratizing’ representation effected by means of displayable objects, one art historian has remarked, ‘there is a facile politics here’ (Jordanova 2000: 256). Like anyone else, those formerly overlooked by dominant historical narratives deserve access to the whole or wider picture which their own (and others’) reincorporation into it makes possible. Cross-cultural and cross-period integration of virtual museum displays and ancillary information, suitable for both holistic and close-focused understanding, is now becoming practicable for the first time and on a large scale, thanks to new communications technologies. People’s capacity to use such technologies to enrich their social lives, co-opting the virtual to the real, suggests that whatever form it takes a representation will continue to provoke questions. Adapting curatorial arguments and representations to intended audiences is seldom straightforward. The ‘tone’ of authorship or of the ‘authoritative voice’ can be as hard to define as it is to control. The most controversial instance of ‘voice’ in this respect during the period under review was the exhibition Into the Heart of Africa, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1989−1990 (Riegel 1996, Cannizzo 1989; for a perceptive overview see also Mackey 1995). Among other things, this was a representation of ‘Africans’ for a public who apparently did not appreciate the curator’s intended irony in using the ‘white colonial voice’ in texts about the exhibits’ origin in colonial history. Long after the initial arguments had died down, one observer suggested that the exhibition, curator and host museum alike were as much victims ‘of local activism and a political agenda as [of] the

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failure of [… the exhibition’s] ironic commentary’ (Kaplan 2006: 167), although this hardly settles the matter since alleging that someone has (or had) a political agenda then begs other questions. This example makes clear, however, that if museums wish to avoid damaging controversies they should either restrict themselves to safe topics (and perhaps risk losing visitors) or consult and engage more widely in planning their programmes. Anthropology recognizes the ubiquity of politics but, as the above example suggests, the neutral position which their public role may oblige museums to assume usually centres on displayed representations. Shelton’s broad periodization of ‘museums and anthropologies’ in the past nearly two decades (Shelton 2006: 74−79) confirms the variety of current interests and practices, but also reminds us of the increasing political stakes in the sponsorship and routine funding of museums (in parallel to the corporatization of higher education). Because of their marketing opportunities, temporary exhibitions are generally much more attractive to a corporate sponsor than the infrastructure and background work on which they depend. Shelton’s near-global survey characterizes the period 1995−2005 as ‘post-narrative’. But what is meant by ‘global’ or ‘postnarrative’? Just as an assessment of museum practices in a nation-state cannot be limited to national or metropolitan museums, so a survey of global museology cannot ignore provinces, hinterlands or war zones. As for ‘narrative’, whether ‘post’ or not, the question is once again the balance between representational equity and capacity (or taste) for more integrated understanding, and how (technologically augmented) displays might facilitate or express either. This returns discussion back to the politics of representation, for with the globalization of capital, in which museums and anthropology are inevitably, even if critically, complicit, the conditions in which representation can be produced and accessed at all starkly underpin arguments as to who has ‘the right’ to represent whom. Making sufficient sense of this predicament

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in order to stand a chance, at least in some places, of restoring human control over apparently inhuman developments, may be something to which museums could contribute as, to some degree, agents of a re-scaled and enabling enlightenment. Although there are positive pointers in moves to fashion looser, more flexible and less formalized institutions appropriate to the communities who will bring them into being (e.g. Kreps 2003,, 2006), polarizing the two key models of cultural institution or ‘arrangement’ − the local and the global − is unproductive since the experiences and needs they address are complementary. Up till now, a politics of difference and a politics of inclusion have not always been easy to distinguish − most museums with an interest in anthropology seem to strike an unstable balance between the two − but whether alternative exhibitionary or museological forms choose to disentangle them along the way is for them to decide.

ENGAGEMENT It is mainly in museums of anthropology (i.e. in museums about itself) that anthropology, the discipline, intersects with the museum, the institution. This may seem odd, given that interpersonal engagement, above all in fieldwork, is canonical to the discipline. The reason is probably that museums of all kinds invest heavily to boost visitor numbers and in this regard compete with each other and alternative ‘visitor attractions’. With few exceptions, there is more interest in cultural demographics, patterns of consumption and visitor behaviour from sociology or art history than from anthropology. The museum visitor, moreover, is ‘passing trade’, not normally someone to engage with socially at all. Depersonalizing the nexus still further, planners habitually speak not of the visitor but of the visit. Since most museums have to take seriously both visitors and visits, and are concerned about anything that might affect their

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numbers, they are also sensitive about reputation. Although the issue of cultural restitution, whether of human remains or other items acquired under ethically dubious circumstances, has impacted nowhere as powerfully and (at least initially) as controversially as the NAGPRA9 federal legislation in the United States, for most European museums restitution or the prospect of restitution has involved primarily ethnographic objects rather than archaeological ones.10 From the standpoint of engagement, however, it is clear that in the handling of restitution claims or in anticipating future ones, museums have had over the last few decades a very strong incentive to liaise and engage with spokespersons for claimant or potential claimant communities. One curious effect of this is that such communities tend to be disproportionately favoured in the choices museums make about exhibitions to originate or visiting performers to host, which may bear as little relationship to the proportion of the collections involved as to (if they were asked) the opinions of visitors themselves. As featured in museums, ‘cultures’ and their living or inanimate representations come and go with a serendipitous illogicality. A representation might be not just an object or image but, alternatively, a person. The past display of ‘living exhibits’ at world’s fairs and colonial expositions (e.g. Greenhalgh 1988: 82−111; Rydell 2006: 144−148), long criticized as demeaning, has more recently prompted historical research about the ‘exhibits’ themselves, revealing, at least in the case of Filipinos, a degree of agency in ironic contrast to a dominant narrative of victimhood (e.g. Quizon and Afable 2004). By collaborating with curatorial colleagues in Cambridge (Jacobs 2009: 145−151; Herle 2008), Maori artist George Nuku contributed to a respectful public engagement exercise on the part of the hosting museum while furthering his own career as any artist might reasonably wish to do. Simply encountering him at work in a gallery offers no anthropological insight into any of the several categories of persons Nuku is positioned to represent −

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such as ‘exotic Others’ (with or without evident agency), Maori, artists, etc. But since ‘the native voice’ (McMaster 2007) is at the point of engagement just one voice, the encounter creates a point of connection between individual persons without necessarily challenging categorical preconceptions. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘natives’ were supposedly in their ‘own’ worlds (or reconstructed villages) when shown abroad. In the present century, ‘exotic others’ travel abroad in a shared world, but are reclassified as artists or cultural performers. Persons acting as representations of their communities, ‘cultures’ (or of themselves, or, perhaps unintentionally, of the category ‘artists’) are, however, only one option in museum engagement strategies, and they are usually absent from exhibitions and ancillary programmes, partly because such engagement is usually expensive to organize. Those mainly involved in museum engagement are staff and visitors. Here we are in the more esoteric world of museum technique, some aspects of which – e.g. modes of representation used for attracting and engaging visitors – are evidently more interesting anthropologically than are others, partly because they play to an existing concern with the culturally variable role of visuality and other ways of accessing information or experiencing affective states. In this field, academic interest from anthropology,11 museology or art practice12 has generally outpaced that of curators, given the practical constraints imposed by museums and the conditions of visiting − although new technologies or motivations may offer more possibilities in the future. One area in which public engagement has been developed, exploiting the museum’s visualist bias rather than abandoning it, is by encouraging exhibit-focused conversation, whether between visitors and curators or facilitators, or among visitors themselves. The difficulty (and expense) of arranging this in most Western museums contrasts with different conceptualizations of galleries as

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social spaces as experienced, for example, in the Lahore Museum (Bhatti 2005); but people’s styles and habits of conversation (if not of museum visiting) surely differ as sharply within most Western cities as they seem to between (say) London and Lahore. This bears on how a museum might engage with less familiar, even hitherto absent, audiences, or (if they are not on the radar) whomever it thinks it is normally addressing. In the next section (to counter an oversimplified view of museums from some anthropologists orientated to material culture), I briefly list the main ways in which members of the public have been engaged by museums in the past. This has potentially as much to do with producing knowledge as with disseminating it, if at least certain groups or individuals with special skills, experiences or insights could help enhance curatorial understanding of museum collections, the regularly updated records of which others can then access. Engagement of this kind, probably different from one situation to another, is still relatively rare and little-discussed, but its potential is enormous, not least because, in addition to serving curatorial scholarship, it also directly confronts and begins to overcome the dilemma, noted above, between ‘representational equity’ and commitment to integrated understanding.

MATERIAL CULTURE: THE MATERIAL AND THE SOCIAL Mid-way through the 30-year period we are considering here, an editorial written by a group of anthropologists to launch the flagship journal of ‘material culture studies’ declared that the last decade has seen museums come of age, in the sense that questions about their role and about what had seemed almost an intrinsic conservatism have led to a new self-consciousness about their function, and, more important, the consequences of that function with regard to the people who come to them. As museums give rise to museology, it becomes clear that the point

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of articulation with the rest of the academic world is through material culture studies. Without material culture studies, museums have substantive problems and issues but no foundation for the study of objects in context. (Journal of Material Culture 1996: 6−7.)

There is an interesting disjunction in this statement. It is certainly true that from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, there was much discussion about the history and ethics of museums, and the accessibility, honesty and intelligibility of their exhibitions,13 and that there was also a surge in museology.14 But by no means all museums were part of this development, and even the few that were found the discussions to which they contributed dominated by non-curators and even by those who had never worked in a museum15 − as if anthropology itself were to be audited and found wanting by sociologists or historians who had read the books but had little knowledge of its trademark working methods and perspectives. The issue is not simply why museums seemed ‘conservative’ but how uninterested outside specialists were in the full dimension of museums as social institutions. This is underscored by the implication, asserted as fact, that museums lacked the means to study objects ‘in context’; but if curators are hampered by the poor data accompanying many collections, their counterparts in academic anthropology could hardly hope, given the same collections, to do better themselves. Perhaps the argument was that museums failed to recognize what material culture studies sought to promote − that social and material worlds are everywhere mutually constructed − and therefore that museums missed the opportunity to connect the experiences of visitors in this respect with those of the people who had produced the objects held or displayed. It is true that museums failed (and still fail) to engage their public as imaginatively as they might via such shared experiences; however, this is partly because of the difficulty of finding appropriate presentational techniques for diverse audiences while seeking to expand the number and demographic range of visitors.

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Yet even before the mid-1990s, museums were increasingly realizing that engaging with those whom managements called ‘stakeholders’ involved much more than attracting visitors and, before and since, many visitors of all ages have taken part in discussions and ‘hands-on’ creative events, and some even in consultations where their own experience and knowledge have been recorded for the benefit of others. But museums also had outreach programmes and travelling exhibitions, and some too sent curators into ‘the field’ or welcomed representatives of communities whence their collections derived or for whom they were of special importance. The variety and vigour of these forms of engagement certainly expressed a ‘new self-consciousness about their function’ on the part of museums or their more active curators but, for museums, taking that function seriously implicated a far wider network than simply ‘the people who come to them’. The problem with the 1996 Journal of Material Culture editorial lies not in its target but in its reductionist failure to take seriously the distinctive ways in which museums produce and disseminate knowledge as social institutions. Museums are constitutively committed to enlarging audiences well beyond academic anthropology rather than functioning simply as repositories of collections or as a service for anthropologists or their students. They are also beginning to emerge as forums for intercultural dialogue (e.g., Bodo, Gibbs and Sani 2009) or, more ambitiously, for debate about certain contemporary social and political issues,16 a role that clearly transcends both the previously acknowledged and still core function of generating knowledge about past and present societies via engagement with collections, and the ‘civilizing ritual’ function which was less often acknowledged within museums but has long been criticized from without.17 The subsequent history of anthropology’s links with museums, furthermore, undermines the idea that it is primarily through material culture studies that museums can ‘articulate’ with the academy, since it is

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especially in the field of social representations that the most fertile collaboration has occurred, and to a lesser extent in forms of audience engagement. The smaller and more homogeneous the audience, the easier it is to engage with (whatever engagement involves). The general public, however, is the ‘elephant in the room’ for academic anthropologists interested in museums or perhaps the ‘smaller elephant not in the gallery’ for curators in generally less-visited university museums. For one exception we might turn to anthropologist and former director (curator) of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, Howard Morphy, who in a recent discussion of audiences properly refers to ‘the broader public’ (Dudley 2010: 282) and takes account of a wider spectrum of museums than just the anthropological; but he overlooks sponsors, critics and administrators – powerful, influential and potentially very thin-skinned pachyderms commonly less visible to academic anthropologists but whose opinions a conscientious curator needs to anticipate.18 When collaboration between museums and university departments on a particular theme might be expected, but has not happened, an explanation could lie in the difference between them as physical, social and intellectual settings for how anthropology is practised. Rather than simply the possession of collections, it is the different kind and scope of engagement with people (including those not normally thought of as ‘audiences’ but whose views still count) that most accurately differentiates museums from academic anthropology. Curators and academics both address a broad public but curators do so for the most part indirectly – via displays in galleries where the audience tends to be socially diverse, while teaching anthropologists typically address a smaller and less diverse student cohort in lectures and seminars, even if they also publish or broadcast more widely. To distinguish between the discipline and the institution on social rather than material grounds is to apply, reflexively, one of the

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insights of resurgent ‘material culture studies’ concerning object ‘biographies’ (e.g. Kopytoff 1986), where in this case the object is not only something the museum contains but also the museum itself (cf. Oberhardt 2001). Other social distinctions then come into focus, such as aesthetic taste, which is hugely influential yet rarely theorized in museum work but for academic anthropology is of theoretical rather than practical interest.19 Another concerns the museum as an ‘archive’ of social memory, a compendium of knowledge with pretentions to universality, or a means of reflecting on (say) human cultural or biological variation, or on categories of culture and nature20 − all of which might be interesting to anthropology and museums alike. But a museum as a place of free ‘edutainment’ or distraction (albeit geared to a ‘noble’ purpose, as in the socalled ‘Milwaukee [Public Museum] Style),21 where governing boards or trustees or international diplomacy may mediate an exhibition’s trajectory from the curator’s notepad to the gallery (e.g., Lord and Lord 1997), or even as a shelter from inclement weather, is more likely to interest those who work in it than anthropologists who do not, whatever either set of specialists think of the collections it contains or the exhibitions it presents.22 Introducing their chapter in this volume, Chua and Salmond (Chapter 3.7, Volume 2) observe that ‘some of the most exciting theoretical and methodological developments currently emerging in social anthropology and related disciplines’ have derived from museums and material culture studies (or ‘artefact-orientated ethnography’). How much of this excitement ‘derives from’ museums by virtue of their own distinctive contribution to it rather than simply by providing collections, exhibitions and institutional partnership for material culture-orientated anthropologists or students is hard to say, but it is at least clear that because of their distinctive working practices material culture is not the only ‘point of articulation’ between museums and anthropology. The shortfall in

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anthropology’s approach to museums is its inadequate attention to the museum as an object in the fullest sense that material culture studies themselves have consistently and enterprisingly explored elsewhere. Nowhere is this more evident than how differently museums and anthropology are affected by aesthetics. Bill Brown notes that ‘as the anthropological interest in artefacts waned (from 1905 to 1940), the aesthetic interest in them grew’, and he links, as ‘emblematic’ of these counter-currents, Boas’s decision to abandon museum work by resigning from the American Museum of Natural History in 1905, and Picasso’s use of African mask motifs in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 (Brown 2010: 184, fn2). Remarkably, until Alfred Gell (1998), anthropology was unable to liberate the social function of art from self-referenced aesthetic codes, and this, more than anything produced from ‘material culture studies’, directly and productively impacts on how museums might interpret and explain their collections. It also emphasizes the pervasiveness of aesthetics even in a discipline not especially concerned with it. For museums, however, aesthetics is a matter not only of interpretation or explanation but also, or alternatively, of presentation; and the detailed appearance of displays is of almost obsessive concern because they know it is on this that their efforts will be judged by many whose opinions matter. Even substantive differences in how objects are interpreted − as between culture-historical/anthropological and aesthetic perspectives − find common ground in ‘tasteful’ forms of display.23 To the degree that the ‘civilizing ritual’ of museums (not only of art galleries) involves the inculcation or reinforcement of, or complicity in, regimes of aesthetic taste, the only way a museum can hope to act as a means of understanding rather than of social control is by subverting the aesthetic criteria on which its patrons (in both senses) assess its worth. Such criteria have come to dominate not only what is shown but also how it is shown and, for many but perhaps not for all visitors, the

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framework or discourse of appreciation itself. Whatever the accompanying explanations, how exhibits are presented constitutes a frame of reference, a shock-absorber of the more visceral new. A reflexive approach to this subject, at least in the form of an exhibition – one that has not happened yet, that would expose its own aesthetic to criticism – resists the kind of collaboration which anthropology and museums could uniquely devote to it because to do so would breach prevailing rules of public engagement on which museums find themselves dependent. The social construction of taste is a familiar topic in anthropology, but anthropologists have yet to collaborate with curators in a robust analysis of this process as experienced inside the museum world, perhaps because, for museums, given the operational constraints upon them and the risk of appearing self-indulgent or even institutionally suicidal, the attempt may appear too reflexive for comfort. From introducing objects or arguments with which they are unfamiliar, or which expose them to new ideas, museums certainly modify their visitors’ understandings and their expectations of future displays. By varying their visitors’ aesthetic experience, museums may even modify their tastes, but they do not encourage their public to question aesthetic codes themselves by considering how − as anthropology can illustrate − they are established and maintained. On the other hand, art has been a subject of the liveliest anthropological debate for at least two decades yet without having made any significant impact on the general public nor even on the smaller audience of museum-goers and ‘artlovers’ who might be expected to be interested in it, were it presented in an accessible way. Even the display of biological specimens and associated text and graphic materials (e.g. Bouquet 1995), or of other objects of explicitly scientific or historical rather than of aesthetic interest, are subject to aesthetic rules of presentation, whether these are explicit (e.g. Hall 1987) or encoded in practice. Material culture has become an important research field, a development that is sending

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more students to explore museums than were formerly interested in collections and displays. However, neither their work nor the newer paradigm that relates artefacts to their original and transactional contexts − and to museums as examples of architecture, collections and sets of practices producing outcomes − have much influenced what museums actually offer their visitors. Is this simply an expression of the ‘almost intrinsic’ conservatism of museums? In anthropology’s ‘museum period’ (Shelton op. cit.), museums and university departments shared not only assumptions about the scope and methods of their common discipline but also the activities through which it was advanced. Neither of these more or less equal partners was yet sufficiently professionalized to forego intellectual engagement beyond the academy, at least among the more formally educated: an engagement which in Britain can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when across Europe universities enrolled in (or were reinvented for) a sociality appropriate to a new modernist state of Enlightenment pragmatism, and the emergent museum facilitated the ‘practice of the modern self’ that would last until the present (Preziosi 2003: 1). In anthropology as a discipline and in museums as institutions, details of interpersonal encounters or of objects collected, and what was done with them, were related to a wider social frame both by depending on patrons and visitors and by providing them in return with a means of generalized comparison and selfassessment.24 Art historian Donald Preziosi equates this practice with art, its ‘science’ with art history and museology, and its ‘theory’ with aesthetics, a formula neatly adaptable to artefacts and to museums not predicated on art as a constructed category, where ‘anthropology’ substitutes for ‘aesthetics’. If the museum as a setting and active agent of this self-fashioning is ‘our modernity’s paradigmatic artifice’ (op. cit.: 3) and reflexivity is paradigmatic of modernism, then it is reasonable to ask not merely what a museum ‘does’ − but, following Preziosi,

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‘what what it does does – [… what it does, in other words,] between its immediate effects and its long-term and commonly unintended or unforeseen side effects’ (op. cit.: 4). One take on Preziosi’s somewhat gnomic argument is that the museum ‘in modernity’ offers a changing array of preselected objects with reference to which people are invited to define their own ‘continually evolving’ characters. At the point of its ‘consumption’, this ‘pre-selection’ is doubly mysterious, hinting at neither the curatorial decisions nor the overwhelmingly aesthetic criteria on which they are based. Both the aesthetics and the museum, as their ultimate yet covert endorsement, constitute a closed (ideological) system that deters people from imagining alternatives so that ‘[t]he real […] is the artifact of masquerade.’ (op. cit.: 21). Here, what a museum ‘is’ is not simply a space for collections and exhibitions but a range of effects, not all or necessarily intended, presumably on visitors but also on anyone influenced by representations of and about museums that recur through social life. The scope of material culture in all this embraces the explicit and acknowledged side of museums, their contents and programmed activities, but also their implicit or ‘secondorder’ effects which, if imagined at all, are expressed as aspirations or platitudes on ritual occasions, declared in ‘mission statements’ and the like. Although such effects or ‘roles’ are sometimes discussed in museological and anthropological literature (and in wider forums) − that is, by or on behalf of museums in their more reflexive mode − they are (to repeat the point) not only not interpreted or reconfigured for the direct benefit of visitors, but neither does it seem likely that this attitude will change for as long as museums are obliged to maximize visitor numbers in a competitive milieu. Unless this parameter of museum work begins to be taken seriously by those with little grasp of its challenges, museums will likely remain just an afterthought in the material culture studies paradigm. Alternatively (or in addition), there

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seems just a chance that in the uncertain years ahead anthropology, to secure its prospects in an audit-driven and budget-shrinking competitive milieu of its own, may wish to set up its stall in the public domain. It might then do worse than partner museums experienced in engaging with the public. If it does so, it will recapitulate one aspect of a widely ignored history of Victorian and Edwardian anthropology at home in museums when its social reach was in some respects wider than it is today. During British anthropology’s ‘museum period’, [s]ome anthropologists […] classified their work as either ‘technical’ or ‘popular’, but the distinction between these categories was usually negligible. […] almost everything they wrote could be understood by any informed person of their time. […] the promoters of the discipline were […] concerned with the dissemination of their ideas and materials to increase people’s acquaintance with the subject. (MacClancy 1996: 9; emphasis added).

In the periodizations of museum anthropology discussed above, there is a telling omission in the consensus that this particular ‘museum period’ ended with the rise of functionalism in social anthropology. I end with a following reminder that, along with the bathwater of museum-based material culture, an ever-fractious but indispensable baby was also thrown out − the cuddly symbol of wider social engagement as an investment for the future in uncertain times: Malinowski’s contemporaries and students wished to bracket off their ethnography as a professionally distinct form of intellectual exercise which, by using their experience as a legitimating device, created simultaneously a distance between themselves and their readers, and a closeness between themselves and the societies they studied […]. (MacClancy, op.cit.: 10, citing Strathern 1987; emphasis added).

NOTES 1 This task is made slightly easier by the appearance of two broad surveys around the turn of the millennium, Bouquet (1999, 2000; see also Cannizzo

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1999), bracketed by the rather earlier Avé (1980) and more recently by Shelton (2006). I have tried not to overlap with them too much. Although not specifically concerned with anthropology, Wittlin’s wide-ranging historical interpretation of museums and their prognosis, published over 40 years ago, is an unrivalled reminder of the social dimension of museums. 2 The term 'interface' is used here to mean more or less the same as ‘overlap’, ‘interpenetration’, ‘intersection’, ‘partnership’, ‘relationship’ or ‘collaboration’. 3 This difference is perhaps more marked in Europe and North America (and Japan) where, despite occasional encouragement (e.g. Bouquet 2000), few academic anthropologists appear keen to play curator, even in the most attractive sense of putting on an exhibition. To judge from the careers and interests of, for example, Nicholas Thomas (e.g. Thomas 2010) and Roger Neich (e.g. http://www. pacificarts.org/node/495), it may be less marked, however, in the anthropological traditions of Australia and New Zealand. 4 Macdonald (2006: 14−15). 5 On the claim that anthropology is in ‘retreat from the social’, see Friedman (2005) and Siikala (2005). Although neither writer refers to museums, their arguments have far-reaching implications for the potential of museums and anthropology to work together – ‘[t]he entire issue of engagement is crucial’ (Friedman, op. cit.: 20). 6 Although an increase in anthropological studies of non-ethnographic museums signals an overdue extension of the field of interest shared by anthropologists and curators, those museums that most attract anthropology still seem to be mainly those that present themselves as ethnographic or anthropological (e.g. Dahl and Stade 2000:157). 7 Discussed in more detail below. 8 Hence, to my knowledge, no museum has ever taken up the (with hindsight, perhaps naïve) suggestion that to widen participation, exhibitions could be ‘drafted’ for others to ‘edit’, in parallel to how text is prepared for publication (Durrans 1988). 9 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). For a summary of its twodecade career, see Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh (2010). 10 For example, Simpson (1996) and Eyo (1994). 11 For example, Edwards, Gosden and Phillips (2006). 12 For example, Drobnick (2005: 268−272). 13 For example, Ames (1983, 1992), Bell (1994), Cannizzo (1991, 2002 [1996]), Clifford (1988), Coombes (1988), Duncan (1995), Durrans (1994), Feest (1994), Hooper-Greenhill (1992), Jones (1993), Kaplan (1994), Karp and Lavine (1991), Karp, Kreamer and Lavine (1992), Lumley (1988), Macdonald

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and Fyfe (1996), Pearce (1989, 1992), Simpson (1996), Stocking (1985), Tayler (1994) and Weil (1995). 14 Museology has not merely emerged from, or in reaction to, museums but remains predicated on, and in some measure vocationally linked to, them. I take museology as ‘the museum’ in reflexive (sometimes self-critical) mode and refer below to one or the other more or less interchangeably as museology points back to the museum and our present concern is anthropology’s interface with that. 15 Of the 27 contributors to Karp and Lavine’s pioneer critique Exhibiting Cultures (1991), only about half seem to have worked in museums and only four on an exhibition (Mack 2001: 198). Although they lack an exhibition focus, there is also a similar imbalance in Karp’s two later co-edited books on museums: Karp, Kreamer and Lavine (op.cit.) and Karp, Kratz, Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto (2006). 16 In the British Museum, for example, this function is meant to reprise the museum’s own origin in the British Enlightenment by offering itself as a space for civic debate. One theme, geared to the museum’s African programme and more broadly to conflict resolution worldwide, involved the ‘Throne of Weapons’, a work made in 2001 by contemporary Mozambican artist Kester. (Available at http://www. bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/97OnxVXaQke hlbliKKDB6A). 17 Duncan (op.cit.); see also Bouquet and Porto (2005). 18 Two swallows do not yet make a summer, but recent articles by Thomas (op. cit.) and Moser (2010) invite speculation that anthropology is at last beginning to take seriously not just communicative ‘cultures of presentation’ (Gould 1995: 37−42) but also some of the specifics of curatorial work. Where museums and anthropology brush shoulders with ‘society’, however, there is still reluctance to consider either the full spectrum of interests which museums must currently negotiate or those to which both museums and anthropology may wish to turn in the future if unprecedented attacks on the principle of democratized understanding are to be resisted. In an article published just as this chapter was being completed, Richard Fardon refers to impending changes to English higher education funding as ‘without overstatement, revolutionary’, warning that ‘[a]nyone concerned for the well-being of anthropology, not just in England but throughout the United Kingdom, ought to be worried’ and ‘[w]e shall need to rely on our learned societies and professional associations to extend the public platforms they provide for the discipline and its insights’ (Fardon 2011: 2, 3, 5). Whether such reliance will be sufficient, even if the discipline were championed by wider constituencies persuaded of its importance, and whether museums can become effective allies of anthropology as well

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as fighting their own corner, should be clearer all too soon. 19 ‘Aesthetics’ is discussed below as a key complicating dimension of the museum’s experience of, and approach to, ‘material culture’, to which even anthropologists orientated to material culture have been indifferent, its location in public engagement also speaking of museums as social rather than merely material entities. 20 Whereas museum-brokered orientations to ‘nature’ are an important theme in historical studies (e.g. Findlen 1994; MacGregor 2007; Torrens 2003), they are less evident in contemporary ones (e.g. Haraway 1989; Ferry 2010), but the subject clearly qualifies a museum not overtly ‘about’ anthropology nevertheless as one of anthropological interest. 21 Stocking (op. cit.: 10). 22 One of the few accounts by an anthropologist to take seriously the complexities which curators had to negotiate in the past is Ira Jacknis’s study of Franz Boas’s museum career (Jacknis 1985). At the time of its publication, Jacknis was attached to the Brooklyn Museum. For an even more detailed analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Science Museum in London, see Macdonald (2002), and compare Harvey (2005). 23 One of the sharpest differences in this respect is between the sparsely arranged and dramatically illuminated ‘arts premiers’ in the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions and the more densely ‘contextualized’ displays in the British Museum’s African (Court 1999; Phillips 2007), American and Wellcome galleries (see Shelton [2006: 75−76], on a parallel contrast between Paris and Göteborg), but it is hard to imagine that the former, meant to draw attention to the objects’ forms rather than to their functions, took more trouble over ‘design’ than the latter, which sought to acknowledge both. 24 For example, Mack (2003).

REFERENCES Ames, Michael M., 1983. ‘How should we think about what we see in a museum of anthropology?’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series IV, XXI: 93−101. Ames, Michael M., 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: the anthropology of museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Avé, J. B., 1980. ‘Ethnographic museums in a changing world’, in From Field-Case to Show-Case: research, acquisition and presentation in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology), Leiden, edited by W. R. van Gulik, H. S. van der

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Straaten and G. D. van Wengen, Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, pp. 11−28. Bell, Jonathan, 1994. ‘Social Anthropology and the study of material culture in Irish museums’, Anales del Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid), 1: 163−171. Bhatti, Shaila, 2005. ‘Exhibiting culture, curiosities and the nation at the Lahore Museum’. PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University College London. Bodo, Simona, Kirsten Gibbs and Margharita Sani, eds, 2009. Museums as Places for Intercultural Dialogue: selected practices from Europe. Dublin: MAP for ID Group. Bouquet, Mary, 1995. ‘Exhibiting knowledge: the trees of Dubois, Haeckel, Jesse and Rivers at the Pithecanthropus centennial exhibition’, in Shifting Contexts: Transformations in anthropological knowledge, edited by Marilyn Strathern (ASA Decennial Conference Series. The Uses of Knowledge: Global and Local Relations). London: Routledge, pp. 31−55. Bouquet, Mary, 1999. ‘Academic anthropology and the museum: back to the future. An introduction’, Focaal, Tijdschrift voor antropologie, 34: 7−22. Bouquet, Mary, 2000. ‘Thinking and doing otherwise: Aanthropological theory in exhibitionary practice’, special theme issue on Anthropology, Museums and Contemporary Cultural Processes, Ethnos, 65, 2: 217−236. Bouquet, Mary and Nuno Porto, eds, 2005. Science, Magic and Religion: The ritual processes of museum magic. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Brown, Bill, 2010. ‘Objects, others, and us (the refabrication of things)’, Critical Inquiry, 36, 2: 183−217. Cannizzo, Jeanne, 1989. Into the Heart of Africa. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. Cannizzo, Jeanne, 1991. ‘Negotiated realities: towards an ethnography of museums’ in Living in a Material World: Canadian and American approaches to material culture research: New objectives, new theories, edited by Gerald L. Pocius. St Johns: Institute of Social and Economic Research, pp. 18−28. Cannizzo, Jeanne, 1999. ‘Inside out: cultural production in the museum and the academy’, Focaal, Tijdschrift voor antropologie, 34: 163−176. Cannizzo, Jeanne, 2002 (1996). ’Museums’ in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, edited by Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer. London: Routledge, pp. 382−383. Clifford, James, 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds, 1986. Writing Culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Coombes, Annie, 1988. ‘Museums and the formation of national and cultural identities’, Oxford Art Journal, 11, 2: 57−68. Court, Elsbeth, 1999. ‘Africa on display: exhibiting art by Africans’, in Contemporary Cultures of Display, edited by Emma Barker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 147−173. Dahl, G. B. and Ronald Stade, 2000. ‘Introduction’ to special theme issue on Anthropology, Museums and Contemporary Cultural Processes, Ethnos, 65, 2: 157−171. Drobnick, Jim, 2005. ‘Volatile effects: Olfactory dimensions of art and architecture’, in Empire of the Senses: a sensual culture reader, edited by David Howes. Oxford: Berg, pp. 265−280. Dudley, Sandra H., 2010. Museum Materialities: Objects, engagements, interpretations (Afterword by Howard Morphy). London: Routledge. Duncan, Carol, 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside public art museums. London: Routledge. Durrans, Brian, 1988. ‘The future of the other: Changing cultures on display in ethnographic museums’, in The Museum Time-Machine: Putting cultures on display, edited by Robert Lumley. London: Comedia/ Routledge, pp. 144−169. Durrans, Brian, 1994. ‘Behind the scenes: museums and selective criticism’, Annales del Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid): 97−114. Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden and Ruth B Phillips, eds, 2006. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, museums and material culture. Oxford, Berg. Eyo, Ekpo, 1994. ‘Repatriation of cultural heritage: The African experience’, in Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: the role of objects in national identity, edited by Flora E. S. Kaplan. Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 330−350. Fardon, Richard, 2011. ‘Feigning the market: funding anthropology in England’, Anthropology Today, 27, 1: 2−5. Feest, Christian F., 1994. ‘Notes on ethnographic museums in the late twentieth century’, Annales del Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid): 11−28. Ferry, Elizabeth Emma, 2010. ‘“Ziegfeld girls coming down a runway”: exhibiting minerals at the Smithsonian’, Journal of Material Culture, 15, 1: 30−63. Findlen, Paula, 1994. Possessing Nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Friedman, Jonathan, 2005. ‘The relocation of the social and the retrenchment of the elites’, in The Retreat of the Social: the rise and rise of reductionism, edited by Bruce Kapferer. Oxford: Berg, pp. 19−29. Gell, Alfred, 1998. Art and Agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goody, Jack, 1997. Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards images, theatre, fiction, relics and sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell. Gould, Stephen Jay, 1995. ‘Ladders and cones: constraining evolution by canonical icons’, in Hidden Histories of Science, edited by Robert B. Silvers. London: Granta, pp. 37−67. Greenhalgh, Paul, 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, great exhibitions and world’s fairs, 1851−1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hall, Margaret, 1987. On Display – A Design Grammar for Museum Exhibitions. London: Lund Humphries. Haraway, Donna, 1989. ‘Teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908−1936, in Primate Visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. London: Routledge. Harvey, Penelope, 2005. ‘Memorialising the future: the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester’, in Science, Magic and Religion: The ritual processes of museum magic, edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 29−50. Herle, Anita, 2008. ‘Relational objects: connecting people and things through Pasifika Styles’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 15, 2: 159−179. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Jacknis, Ira, 1985. ‘Franz Boas and exhibits: on the limitations of the museum method of anthropology’, in Objects and Others: Essays on museums and material culture, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 75−111. Jacobs, Karen, ed., 2009. ‘Encounters with Polynesia: exhibiting the past in the present’, special issue, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 21, March. Jones, Anna Laura, 1993. ‘Exploding canons: the anthropology of museums’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 201−220. Jordanova, Ludmilla, 2000. ‘History, “otherness” and display’, in Cultural Encounters: representing ‘otherness’, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street. London: Routledge, pp. 245−259. Journal of Material Culture, 1996. ‘Editorial’, Journal of Material Culture, 1, 1: 5−14.

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Kaplan, Flora E. S., ed., 1994. Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The role of objects in national identity. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S., 2006. ‘Making and remaking national identities’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 152−169. Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine, 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, Ivan, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds, 2006. Museum Frictions: Public cultures/global transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds, 1992. Museums and Communities: The politics of public culture, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Kopytoff, Igor, 1986. ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64−91. Kreps, Christina F., 2003. Liberating Culture: Crosscultural perspectives on museums, curation and heritage preservation. London: Routledge. Kreps, Christina F., 2006. ‘Non-Western models of museums and curation in cross-cultural perspective’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 457−472. Lord, Barry and Gail Dexter Lord, 1997. The Manual of Museum Management. London: The Stationery Office. Lumley, Robert, ed., 1988. The Museum Time-Machine: Putting cultures on display. London: Comedia/ Routledge. MacClancy, Jeremy, 1996. ‘Popularizing anthropology’, in Popularizing Anthropology, edited by Jeremy MacClancy and Chris McDonaugh. London: Routledge, pp. 1−57. Macdonald, Sharon and Gordon Fyfe, eds, 1996. Theorising Museums: Representing identity and diversity in a changing world. Sociological Review Monograph Series. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Macdonald, Sharon, 1997. ‘The museum as mirror: ethnographic reflections’, in After Writing Culture: Epistemology and praxis in contemporary anthropology, edited by Allison James, Jenny Hockey and Andrew Dawson. ASA Monographs 34. London: Routledge, pp. 161−176.

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Macdonald, Sharon, 2002. Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg. Macdonald, Sharon, 2006. A Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. MacGregor, Arthur, 2007. Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and collections from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mack, John, 2001. ‘“Exhibiting Cultures” revisited: translation and representation’, Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society, 43: 195−209. Mack, John, 2003. ‘”Ethnography” in the Enlightenment’, in Enlightening the British: Knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century, edited by R. G. W. Anderson, M. L. Cargill, A. G. MacGregor and L. Syson. London: The British Museum Press, pp. 114−118. Mackey, Eva, 1995. ‘Postmodernism and cultural politics in a multicultural nation: contests over truth in the Into the Heart of Africa controversy’, Public Culture, 7, 2: 403−431. McMaster, Gerald, 2007. ‘Museums and the native voice’, in Museums after Modernism: Strategies of engagement, edited by Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 70−79. Miller, Daniel, 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Moser, Stephanie, 2010. ‘The devil is in the detail: museum displays and the creation of knowledge’, Museum Anthropology, 33, 1: 22−32. Nash, Stephen E. and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, 2010. ‘NAGPRA after two decades’, Museum Anthropology, 33, 2: 99−104. Oberhardt, Suzanne, 2001. Frames within Frames: The art museum as cultural artifact. New York: Peter Lang. Pearce, Susan M., ed., 1989. Museum Studies in Material Culture. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Pearce, Susan M. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A cultural study. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Phillips, Ruth B., 2007. ‘Exhibiting Africa after Modernism: globalization, pluralism, and the persistent paradigms of art and artifact’, in Museums after Modernism: Strategies of engagement, edited by Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 90−103. Porto, Nuno, 2007. ‘From exhibiting to installing ethnography: experiments at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, 1999−2005’, Exhibition Experiments, edited by

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Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 175−196. Preziosi, Donald, 2003. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, museums, and the phantasms of modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Putnam, James, 2001. Art and Artifact: The museum as medium. London: Thames & Hudson. Quizon, Cherubim A. and Patricia O. Afable, eds, 2004. ‘Rethinking display of Filipinos at St Louis: embracing heartbreak and irony’, Philippine Studies, 52: 439−444. Riegel, Henrietta, 1996. ‘Into the heart of irony: ethnographic exhibitions and the politics of difference’, in Theorizing Museums, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 83−104. Rydell, Robert W., 2006. ‘World fairs and museums’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 135−151. Shelton, Anthony Alan, 2006. ‘Museums and anthropologies: practices and narratives’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 64−80. Siikala, Jukka, 2005. ‘Theories and ideologies in anthropology’, in The Retreat of the Social: The rise and rise of reductionism, edited by Bruce Kapferer. Oxford: Berg, pp. 79−88.

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Simpson, Moira G., 1996. Making Representations: Museums in the post-colonial era. London: Routledge (revised edition). Sperber, Dan, 1985. ‘Anthropology and psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations’, Man, 20: 74−89. Stocking, George W., 1985. Objects and Others: Essays on museums and material culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Strathern, Marilyn, 1987. ‘Out of context: the pervasive fictions of anthropology’, Current Anthropology, 28, 3: 251−282. Tayler, Donald, 1994. ‘A temple of the muses or a forum for debate?’, Annales del Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid): 29−50. Thomas, Nicholas, 2010. ‘The museum as method’, Museum Anthropology, 33, 1: 6−10. Torrens, Hugh S., 2003. ‘Natural history in eighteenthcentury museums in Britain’, in Enlightening the British: Knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century, edited by R. G. W. Anderson, M. L. Cargill, A. G. MacGregor and L. Syson. London: The British Museum Press, pp. 81−89. Weil, Stephen E., 1995. A Cabinet of Curiosities: Inquiries into museums and their prospects. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wittlin, Alma S., 1970. Museums: In search of a usable future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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1.14 Anthropology and Gender Studies Henrietta L. Moore

My aim in this chapter is not to provide an overview of the study of gender in anthropology, but to make an intervention in a debate, to demonstrate once again that battles over terms are always about specific engagements with ethics and politics. Indeed, they are part of larger struggles over the conventions, practices and regulations that allow people to live and to make their lives liveable. This is particularly evident in relation to the notion of gender, which, as a term, originated in the academy and fanned out through activist circles to develop into a set of discursive frames that underpin national polices and international aid flows. Nearly every country in the world now has a gender policy. This does not mean, of course, that before the efflorescence of the concept in the 1970s that countries and governments did not recognize the difference between women and men as rights-bearing individuals with differing roles and responsibilities, but in the last 40 years gender has escaped the confines of the academy to become a form of governmentality. Anthropology has had its part to pay in this process, and any critical genealogy of the concept of gender has to reckon with the various consequences and entailments of its entangled production. This makes the question of social transformation, of what forms

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of action and critique bring about change, and of how the limits of the possible configure change, central to any discussion of gender.

GRIDS OF INTELLIGIBILITY In many cultural contexts, people struggle with the problem of what exactly is the difference between women and men? This ought to be self-evident, literally written on the body, but it rarely is. Male and female (physically sexed bodies) are not a problem, but the question of what it is to be masculine and/or feminine is another matter. The attribution of femininity to female bodies or body parts is not necessarily natural, a matter of obvious physical properties. The masculine and the feminine as gender constructs have social histories, most evidently in their relation to sexed bodies, and these histories change over time. The changing nature of gender systems is something that anthropology has come late to because its emphasis on cross-cultural comparison and the importance of cultural difference focused attention initially on gender variation. As a number of writers have made clear, the ‘woman question’ in anthropology was tied up from the

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end of the nineteenth century with anxieties about and enquiries into the relationship between civilization and female status. The evident anomaly between white AngloAmerican women who were fully constrained by the status of their sex, and denied rights to independence, property and the vote, and the freedoms, status, and control over resources accorded to women in so-called ‘primitive societies’ did not go unremarked (e.g. Fee, 1975; Lamphere, 1989). The juxtaposition of ethnographic example with Western customs provided a critique of evolutionary thinking, but also solidified the elision between gender and sex. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, gender was a self-evident feature of social order, but it was also indelibly marked by race as a consequence of anthropology’s comparative method (Visweswaran, 1997). This grid of intelligibility, this framework for posing and analysing questions, took shape in the context of the socialist and suffragette movements in Europe and the United States. The issue of social transformation and how it was to be brought about was a part of an emerging category of gender already criss-crossed by divisions of class and race (Stocking, 1991). The connection between ‘the woman question’ and emancipatory politics played an even larger role in the analysis of gender that emerged from the 1960s onwards. The notion of a gender system, as something distinct from sex roles, took shape in the context of the civil rights and the New Left movements where an earlier predominantly left politics based on union activism gave way to broader social critiques engaged with gender, race, war and sexual politics (Rubin and Butler, 1994: 63; Sacks, 1989). The analytic drive within anthropology was thus one which focused on how women were constrained by marriage and motherhood, their sexuality tied to reproductive demands, and their domesticity enforcing an exclusion from mainstream politics. Louise Lamphere recalls that one of the key imperatives of the early 1970s included addressing male bias in anthropological writing, both by empirical

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investigation of women’s position in other societies and by analysing society from the woman’s point of view. The woman’s point of view under consideration was both that of informant and ethnographer (Ardener, E. 1972). A vital part of such initiatives involved delineating the way that women were actors in their own right, rather than passive dependants, even under conditions of subordination (Ardener, 1978; Lamphere, 1989: 525). In consequence, the analytics of gender became allied to a self-conscious view of women’s position, their point of view and their forms of agency. The understanding of what it might mean to be a person of a female gender and to have to contend with certain forms of oppression and exclusion was thus fashioned through a comparative ‘tacking back and forth’ between the circumstances of women’s lives historically and around the world, and the circumstances of their ethnographers and the constraints and possibilities they were facing for transformation in their own lives. This mutual construction was not always lived explicitly but it had a profound impact on the definition and operationalization of the notion of gender. In trying to analyse gender as a category and as a relation, early work placed great emphasis on trying to account for women’s universal subordination (Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974). In an influential essay, Michelle Rosaldo provided a social structural explanation based on a division between a domestic sphere associated with women and a public sphere associated with men; this division accounted for the subordination of women to men and their encompassment by structures of male authority and prestige (Rosaldo, 1974). Sherry Ortner proffered a structuralist/symbolic explanation, where cultural valuations placed women in association with nature and men with culture (Ortner, 1974). What was puzzling about these explanations was that they were both powerful – well supported by ethnographic data – and yet incomplete. If gender and gender relations were about the social statuses of women and men in human societies, they were also

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about cosmological beliefs and symbolic valuations. It did not take long to establish that these two aspects of gender and gender relations did not always fit neatly together. Societies where women were apparently clearly subordinate in domestic, economic and political life could also be those which accorded significant value to powerful aspects of femininity. Conversely, societies where symbolic systems created relatively fixed and hierarchical valuations between the male and the female might be those in which women had considerable power and influence in the day-to-day running of affairs. The social and the symbolic were never completely divergent, but nor were they congruent (Moore, 1999: 152). This disjuncture raised a series of questions about the ontological status of gender itself. What is gender? The first response to this question was simply that it was not sex. Cultural variability was the weapon the analysts wielded, and the proposition that gender was to be understood as the cultural elaboration of the meaning and significance of the biological differences between women and men came to assume an almost unquestioned orthodoxy. However, as more empirical work was done in the field during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it became ever more apparent that investigations, for example, into the reasons for the universal subordination of women, were effectively taking gender as a social fact rather than exploring what the analytic term gender might refer to. Even when the critical focus of inquiry shifted in the 1980s from ‘women’ as the category of analysis to gender as a structuring principle in all human societies – women and men in their relations with each other – the term still lacked analytic purchase. Gender might be socially and culturally variable, but it was also ubiquitous, inhering in symbolic and value systems, relations of production and reproduction, transactions and exchange, power differentials, cosmology and religion, and forms of citizenship, nationalism and the workings of the state (Moore, 1988). The effect of feminist critique was to discover

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gender everywhere, but it was not enough merely to add data on women; the larger challenge was to use the concept of gender as an analytic prism with which to force open new questions (Rosaldo, 1980; Weiner, 1979). This was particularly evident in the work on Marxism, and discussions over the sexual division of labour, alienation and the interrelations between production and reproduction. Marxist theory was a powerful tool for analysing power and inequality in human societies, but it had a very weak conceptualization of gender, the family and the domestic sphere (Molyneux, 1978; Sacks, 1989). Many of the feminist arguments through the late 1970s and 1980s sought to analyse the family as part of the mode of production, to demonstrate that gender and sexual reproduction were integral to political economy (Moore, 1988: chapter 3). Much of this work sought to explore the historical specificity of gender relations – interrogating the nature of those relations most especially within the family and the household – through an analysis of the impact of capitalism on pre-capitalist societies and/or developing countries (e.g. Young et al., 1981). A common concern in this writing was a critique of the universal category ‘woman’ which occluded the historical particularities of gender inequality, and the specific forms of kinship and family under capital. Such work sought to denaturalize the family, motherhood and the domestic, and explored the way in which social reproduction was a constitutive feature of the labour market and of the relations between family and the state. A key question involved social change, and the potential for socialist societies to bring about changes in gender relations (Molyneux, 1981; Moore 1988: chapter 5). Many scholars in this period were influenced by and involved in the application of gender theory in development work in the Third World (e.g. Elson and Pearson, 1981). One again, the engagement with social transformation and the lived possibilities of people’s lives was a defining feature of the work.

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However, a neo-Marxist focus on the historical specificity of gender relations, the fact that the family is not a natural given, and that kinship relations are part of changing modes of production was only part of the story. What it left unaddressed once again was how the reproduction of human beings also entailed the reproduction of specifically gendered persons, and thus how modes of production and the sexual division of labour could not be understood apart from the symbolic values and cultural understandings accorded to gender. While an initial recognition of this problem had involved a turn to structuralist analysis, and to the symbolic structures associated with the binary categorizes of gender, and their relationships to ideas of power and value, as discussed earlier (e.g. Ortner and Whitehead, 1981), a further set of ruminations and debates drew on the work of Lévi-Strauss and his work on the elementary structures of kinship and the exchange of women. Lévi-Strauss’s account of the exchange of women can be understood, from one perspective, as an attempt to integrate kinship into a Marxist framework, to demonstrate that the economic cannot be extricated from the cultural and the symbolic. The exchange he discusses is the result of a cultural taboo on incest and the imposition of principles of exchange. But in so far as the elements of kinship he describes are cultural, they are only so in the sense that they form the universal laws of culture. Any understanding of culture as a form of practice, or of the symbolic system as historically specific and inhabited by thinking, acting agents is absent from this formulation. The result is a theory of gender and of gendered exchange, which, while it powerfully articulates the economic and the symbolic, simultaneously takes gender as a self-evident category, one which while not determined by biology is the logical entailment of the pre-existing and naturalized differences between women and men. The analytic purchase of such a notion of gender is minimal, resting as it does on the universal category woman. Feminist scholars thus had a profound difficulty with

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Lévi-Strauss’s formulation, but saw in his theory the glimmer of an idea about how gender might articulate the economic and the symbolic. The scholar who revealed the strengths and weakness of Lévi-Strauss’s formulation was Gayle Rubin. Her essay ‘Traffic in women’ started from quite another perspective: What was the actual character of gender difference at any particular historical conjuncture and how did women and men come to assume those gender differences? Her question was thus about the relationship between social structures and psychic structures, about how gender was lived and made liveable. Hence, her notion of the sex/gender system and the way in which she characterized it: ‘a “sex/gender system” is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied’ (Rubin, 1975: 159). Rubin quotes Lévi-Strauss on the fact that the sexual division of labour in the family, far from being the natural result of biology, is ‘nothing else than a device to institute a reciprocal state of dependency between the sexes’, and thus in a sense it is a taboo against the sameness of women and men, something which exacerbates the biological differences and creates gender (Rubin, 1975: 178). In insisting on the social construction of gender, Rubin takes the same line as many other theorists of the period. What makes her essay stand out is that she sees the sex/gender system not as an emendation of the mind, a cognitive system of classification, but as a product of historical human activity, thus prefiguring the practice and performance-based approaches to gender that were to follow. In addition, she introduces the idea that there is no easy distinction to be drawn between gender and sexuality, and that the sex/gender system operates in the service of a compulsory heterosexuality, and in this she anticipates the debates on queer theory and sexuality that characterize the anthropology of the 1990s and after. Rubin also draws implicitly and explicitly on

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Freud and Althusser to situate the production or constitution of gendered persons at the core of the political economy of the sex/ gender system. Her ideas here are no more than suggestive, but they start a long move towards theories of the postmodern/poststructuralist gendered subject (e.g. Moore, 1994). Rubin clearly stated that sex/gender systems could only be changed through political activism, thereby revealing − as did the work of other scholars in the 1970s − how much the analytic category of gender was shaped by aspirations for social transformation and gender equality. Rubin’s interest in sexuality led her to characterize gender as ‘the product of the social relations of sexuality’, to suggest that individuals are engendered ‘in order that marriage can be guaranteed’ (Rubin, 1975: 179−180). While this posited gender as fully socially constructed, it reduced sex to sexual practices and tied gender to kinship. In addition, it left the physical body, the fact of sex, as a residual category. A series of debates ensued about what was sex, if it was not gender? This challenge was taken up in innovative ways in the 1980s by a number of scholars influenced by Foucauldian theory who started by interrogating what it might actually mean to say that gender was the cultural elaboration of the natural facts of sexual difference. Yanagisako and Collier (1987) argued that this very formulation was predicated on the Western assumption that sex differences are about reproduction, an assumption they saw as underlying anthropological theories of kinship which they characterized as based on Western folk theories of biological reproduction. They contended that there was no reason to assume that the biological differences in the roles of women and men in sexual reproduction should necessarily underpin differing cultural notions of gender, suggesting that the study of gender should be disaggregated from the analysis of kinship (Yanagisako and Collier, 1987: 31−32). While they began by questioning the idea that gender necessarily had a ‘biological core’, their larger theoretical intent was to

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argue that this would ‘eventually lead to the rejection of any dichotomy between sex and gender as biological and cultural facts and will open up the way for an analysis of the symbolic and social processes by which both are constructed in relation to each other’ (Yanagisako and Collier, 1987: 42). Yanagisako and Collier (1987: 40) sought to advocate an approach to the analysis of gender that began from the explication of cultural meanings and how they are realized through the practice of social relationships in specific contexts. This provided an emphasis on the lived experience of gender and gender relations, but did not answer the question of what was gender as opposed to sex, since it effectively managed to abolish sex altogether (Moore, 1999: 153). The problem of how to distinguish sex from gender simply refused to go away. What could be done about the inconvenient body? Shelley Errington proposed a threefold classification of sex (lower case), Sex (upper case) and gender, arguing that we should distinguish between biologically sexed bodies (i.e. sex) and a particular construction of human bodies prevalent in Euro-America (i.e. Sex), which influenced the way anthropologists understood the sex/gender distinction. Gender as a term would be reserved for what different cultures make of sex (lower case) (Errington, 1990: 19−31). Errington argued that Yanagisako and Collier had confused Sex with sex. Consequently, her analysis − far from making sex disappear − created the illusion that it was doubly present (Moore, 1994: 153). The seduction of Foucauldian theory was evident because now not only was gender socially constructed but also so was sex.

DIFFERENCE AND ITS RELATIONS Definitional debates about gender as a category of analysis continued until the end of the 1980s when there was a marked shift in theoretical framing. This theoretical turn was inaugurated by three developments.

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The first was the critique of the exclusionary and homogenizing nature of the universal category of ‘woman’, on which much feminist theorizing rested. Black women, women of colour and ‘Third World’ scholars criticized Western feminists, including anthropologists, for developing a set of theories with reference to an homogenized or modal ‘woman’ who was by default effectively white and middle class (Hooks, 1984;). The problem for anthropology was that despite the discipline’s insistence on cultural difference, an unexamined commitment to ‘social wholes’, ‘social structures’ and ‘cultures’ tended to see gender as something that varied cross-culturally, without exploring how gender was simultaneously lived in racially and ethnically specific forms that were themselves the product of colonial and postcolonial forms of political economy (Mohanty, 1984). Critics were clear that the objective was not to begin from the differences between women and men, and then go on to examine the commonalities in women’s position worldwide – as evidenced in a great deal of writing in the 1980s about ‘Third World women’ – but to recognize that such differences are created by gender relations which are themselves racially, ethnically and culturally specific. What is puzzling is that in re-reading the anthropology of the 1980s, it is evident that there is a clear recognition of the fact that gender is not a unitary category, and that race and class are an integral part of gender identities. There is also an explicit recognition that the analysis of gender has to proceed through a careful examination of what people think and do, and the meanings their activities acquire through concrete social interactions (e.g. Rosaldo, 1980; Yanagisako and Collier, 1987: Sacks, 1989); anthropologists working on gender maintained an explicit commitment to representing the voices, points of view, experiences and emotional lives of the people they worked with, but somehow this failed to transform disciplinary thinking as much as it could have done (Strathern, 1987). For this to happen, there needed to be profound shifts

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both in politics, and in theoretical frameworks which would allow analysts to move away from a reliance on the notion of gender as a category, and a move towards a more sophisticated understanding of gender identities which hitherto had been fairly unproblematically acquired by persons of a specific gender living within a particular cultural context. In short, what was needed was a way of thinking difference differently. The second development was a critique of gender as a unitary category which explored the relationship between gender, agency and personhood. The foundational text for anthropology was Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift, which provocatively suggested that the female and the male are variants of each other, created transactionally, that is through concrete relations of exchange (Strathern, 1988: 126). Strathern’s wide-ranging opus not only critiqued Marxist−feminist theories of male dominance but also, through a discussion of the differing logics of gift and commodity economies, developed a powerful theory of personhood and agency based on ‘indigenous cultural categories and theories’ (Strathern, 1988: 138−145). Using the notion of the ‘dividual’, Strathern sought to build a theory of the multiply constituted gendered individual who is produced through relations of exchange within a network of consanguines (blood relatives) and affines (relatives by marriage). Unlike the autonomous Western individual, the dividual is dependent and interdependent, created through transactions with others, by the circulation of gifts conceived of as parts of persons (Strathern, 1988: 161−178). From this perspective, sexed beings are only produced through concrete sets of practices, cultural meanings and structures of power. Within the transactional economy Strathern describes for Melanesia, masculinity and femininity are relations rather than categories, their differentiation from each other only temporary and as a consequence of agency. This being the case, Strathern asks how do we know if something is definitively male or female? She critiques

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the Western assumptions that link persons and property, specifically the assumption that ‘breasts belong to women or that phalluses are the property of men’ (Strathern, 1988: 127). Her insight here is that our understanding of ideas about femininity and masculinity are enhanced if we move away from ‘ownership’ models to transactional ones. What differentiates women and men is not the maleness or femaleness of their sex organs, but what they do with them. Ownership models encourage us to over-naturalize body parts, to see them as self-evidently sexed by the bodies to which they belong. But, together, these attributes do not add up to an identity; identities and body parts do not necessarily go together. It is not just that breast and phallus do not belong unambiguously to particular sexed bodies, but that they are not wholly distinguishable objects − they do not necessarily form the basis for a stable set of representations of sexual difference (Moore, 2007: 184). The idea that the body is not the source and locus of identity raised a series of intractable questions about the relationship between gender identity and personal identity and/ or concepts of the self (Moore, 1994). These questions animated the third strand of theoretical development which was inspired by poststructuralist revisions of the subject and by psychoanalytic theory. An earlier view of gender variability simply posited that individuals were born into cultures and thus acquired through socialization a gender identity by compliance with cultural categories. This model easily accommodated and was advanced as the explanation for so-called ‘third genders’ and non-normative gender categorizations. The undergirding assumption in this work was that each culture defined, constructed and enacted its own distinctive gender system. However, what became apparent during the 1980s and 1990s was that cultures do not have a single model of gender or a single gender system, but rather a multiplicity of discourses on gender which can vary both contextually and biographically. These different discourses are

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frequently contradictory and conflicting. From this perspective, gender identity is an enigma; it requires explanation both from a collective and a subjective point of view. If this is the case, then the focus of enquiry shifts. If there are multiple discourses on gender, then how do individuals come to take up gendered subject positions? The poststructuralist concept of the subject which emerged in feminist theorizing in the 1980s and 1990s was quite different from the unified, post-Enlightenment subject which it sought to deconstruct. Its basic premise was that discourses and discursive practices provide subject positions, and individuals take up a variety of subject positions within different discourses. The result is that a single subject can no longer be equated with a single individual. Individuals are multiply constituted subjects, and thus the subject in poststructuralist thinking occupies and exists as the site of multiple and potentially contradictory positioning and subjectivities. Identity is constituted through the intersection of multiple discourses on difference, and does not result from a straightforward process of cultural socialization. Such a view allows researchers to focus on processes of failure, resistance and change in the acquisition of gender identity, as well as on compliance, acceptance and investment. This view of the multiply engendered subject explores how the experience of gender is structured through engagement with discourses and practices of difference. All the major axes of difference − race, class, sexuality and ethnicity − intersect with gender in ways which proffer a multiplicity of subject positions within any particular context. What emerges is a theory of the subject as the site of differences − differences which constitute the subject and are internal to it (Moore, 1994: 54−58). The process of subjectification, of becoming a subject, is never a finished or closed one. Power and ideology certainly work to produce subject positions, but they do not determine how individuals will identify with and take up different subject positions at

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different times; nor do they determine how individuals will be involved in the transformation of discourses of power and difference over time. The value of the non-unitary theory of the subject is that it provides a way of understanding how a complexly constituted self identifies with and/or resists and transforms the various subject positions available within a particular social, cultural, economic and political context. It explicitly links the dual aspect of subjectivity within one theoretical framework, accounting both for the workings of power and difference, and for self-realization, creativity and self-determination (Moore, 2007: 40−41). What is severely curtailed here is the notion of gender as straightforwardly determined by culture. A renewed emphasis on agency, however, has to proceed through the recognition that not even the most creative, self-reflexive people have complete knowledge of themselves or others. Fantasy, desire and unconscious motivation are at work, alongside strategy, rationalization and emotional intelligence in the process of making and sustaining a self (Moore, 2007: 41). An emphasis on gender as a process of structuring subjectivity rather than as a category or structure of social relations opened up the analysis to performance theory. As developed in the work of Judith Butler, this theory sought to meld social constructionism with psychoanalysis, Derridean theory and Foucauldian analytics. Butler’s contention is that gender is the effect of a set of regulatory practices that seek to render gender categories and identities stable through the imposition of a compulsory heterosexuality. Gender is thus seen as central to a process of becoming, of acquiring an identity, and of structuring subjectivity. Gender performativity as an ongoing discursive practice is open to intervention and resignification through a process of performative reiteration (Butler, 1990: 31−33). Her theory is not just concerned with how one enacts a gender within a specific set of regulatory practices, but with the disjunction between the exclusive categories of the sex/gender

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system and the actuality of the ambiguity, partiality and multiplicity in the way gender is experienced and inhabited, and in how subjectivities are formed. The ‘disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain’ (Butler, 1990: 135). This false stabilization conceals the discontinuities and disjunctures within heterosexuality, bisexual and gay and lesbian identities, producing a situation where sex, desire and sexuality do not seem to follow from gender (Butler, 1990: 135−136). What counts here is not what gender is, but how you do it. Performance theory found a ready acceptance in anthropology as a discipline already concerned with practice theory, agency, everyday life and how embodied praxis links to social and ideological structures. However, what is notable is how devoid practice theory in anthropology was – with the exception of parts of Bourdieu’s work – of any serious consideration of gender (Morris, 1995: 572), a point that can be made with equal effect with regard to the postmodernist critique in the discipline, and its impact on rethinking knowledge production, language and representation (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989). Feminist anthropologists through the 1980s and 1990s formed a very small bridge between feminist philosophy and politics and changing theoretical frameworks within the discipline (Moore, 1994).

THINKING DIFFERENCE DIFFERENTLY If the politics of the academy effectively marginalized the impact of the epistemological projects developing within feminism, a further challenge arose in the context of an engagement with gay and lesbian activism. The explicit critique was one about the neglect of sexuality and sexual practices in anthropological theorizing (e.g. Vance, 1991), a lacunae that was to find particular political and policy inflection through the 1980s and

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1990s as the HIV pandemic gathered pace (e.g. Parker, 1991). A variety of theoretical discourses circulated under the rubric of what came to be known as queer theory. It was at once a shorthand for any theoretical work concerned with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered sexualities, and a commitment to a project of theoretical transgression, a ‘queering’ of perspectives (e.g. Sedgwick, 1990; Warner, 1993). Queer theorists sought to mine the productive possibilities inherent in the recognition that identities are multiple, unstable and regulatory. This work was given particular focus and power by critiques from people of colour – scholars and activists – who had exposed the exclusionary presumptions of unitarian sexual identities, arguing that they were by default or treated race as additional rather than as co-constitutive (e.g. Ferguson, 2003; Johnson and Henderson, 2005; Rodriguez, 2003). However, tensions remained in the relationship between queer politics and queer theory. On the one hand, a commitment to a social constructionist orientation through the 1980s had contributed to the politics of a minoritarian homosexual identity concerned with rights and recognition. On the other hand, theoretical formulations emphasized that modern social science had been founded on the rejection of desire in the name of scientific reason and empiricism. This line of reasoning sought to expose regulatory efforts to organize bodies, pleasures and desires in both the personal and public domains, and thus interrogated the means through which all sexual and gender identities are constructed, and potentially deconstructed. This was built on the recognition – inspired again by the work of Foucault – that sexuality was socially created, historically variable and therefore political in the broadest sense (e.g. Weeks, 1995). While anthropologists strove to institutionalize the study of non-normative sexualities within the discipline (Weston, 1993; Lewin and Leap, 1996), debates between feminists and queer theorists raged as the latter endeavoured to delineate sexuality and

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sexual practice as the domain of their enquiry, leaving gender as the focus of feminist concerns (see Rubin and Butler, 1994). The reality was that the various theorists involved agreed as much as they disagreed, and engagements were as often productive as sterile, but the result was that even though all parties were discussing the interrelations between gender, sexed bodies and sexual identities, a view emerged that it was possible to theorize and to study sexuality as separate and distinct from gender. A more positive aspect of queer theorizing − and one which was taken up most explicitly by anthropologists − was the questioning of the hetero/ homosexual binary. A focus on heterosexuality as an organizing principle of the social and political emerged, entailing an explicit move away from a minority politics of homosexuality to a critique of the heteronormative and its organization of knowledge and difference. This involved an exploration of the way that knowledge and sexual practices organize bodies, desires, acts and social institutions through the differential way in which they are sexualized. This, then, was not the social construction of gender or of sex, but the sexual construction of the social. A generation of anthropologists were inspired by this shift in perspective and interrogated anew the relation between sexual practices, bodies, sexual identities and genders. What differentiated their work from an earlier generation concerned with ‘third genders’ was an emphasis on desire in the context of dynamic interrelations between race and class (e.g. Manalansan, 2003; Valentine, 2007), embodiment and identity, and an explicit recognition of the location of gay and lesbian anthropologists within the discipline (e.g. Lewin and Leap, 2002). Not all anthropologists working on nonnormative sexualities embraced queer theory, and debates have continued to rage about the distance much queer theorizing maintains between textual readings and interpretations and the lived experiences of individuals’ lives (e.g. Green, 2007). However, the existence of the debate did give renewed vigour and

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enthusiasm to the ethnographic exploration of the intersections of bodies, sexual practices and gender identities. One of the most notable features of the last 50 years has been the proliferation of gender and sexual diversity around the globe (e.g. Jackson, 2000). An earlier argument that what we were witnessing was the rise of ‘the global gay’ based on Western categorizes and carried by the vectors of consumption, lifestyles and identity politics (Altman, 2001) did not stand up to empirical investigation. Peter Jackson has argued that such is the dominance of Western assumptions about the relation of sexual and erotic practices to specific identities, as well as the institutionalized split between feminism/gender and queer/gay that we lack the conceptual tools necessary to understand this global phenomenon in non-ethnocentric terms (Jackson, 2000: 418). Other writers, such as Tom Boellstorff (2007) and Martin Manalansan (2003), have identified a ‘new queer studies’ that is characterized by a more progressive understanding of globalization and transnationalism. One of the principal aims of such work is to embrace the plurality of ‘queer subjects’ and to explore how they arise in specific national locations, and in complex relations to each other and to the modern state. One consequence of this is that much of the most compelling work on sexuality/gender in recent years has explored the multiplex intersections between globalization, national imaginaries, forms of belonging and sexual citizenship. This work has only just begun to develop the theoretical depth and breadth necessary to transform theoretical assumptions within these domains of scholarship, but it has yet to fully explore how gender/sexuality shape these larger processes rather than simply being the consequence of them. One of the major achievements of recent work on gender/sexuality is the critique of current theories of globalization and transnationalism, and the reappraisal of the comparative project of anthropology. Various authors have taken up the notion of ‘critical regionalities’ as a vantage point from which

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to analyse distinct modes of imagination and desire within wider networks of material and symbolic relations, and from which to critique over-generalized discussions of globalization (e.g. Johnson et al., 2000; Boellstorff, 2005). For Thailand, Jackson notes that between 1960 and 1985 the number of categories for labelling distinctive types of gendered/sexed being, phet in Thai, increased rapidly. Some of these terms were shortlived, and no new terms have emerged since the mid 1980s. However, before 1960, there were only three types of phet, and now commentators agree that there are at least seven which are widely recognized across Thailand in both rural and urban areas: ‘man’, gay king, gay queen, kathoey, tom, dee and ‘woman’ (Jackson, 2000: 409−414). As Jackson points out, we have to know both how to describe these new categories and how to account for their emergence. In the Thai case, Jackson suggests that these objects of inquiry (phet) are not sexualities or sexual identities, but eroticized genders. What is at issue here is the limited validity of the analytic separation of gender and sexuality that was foundational for queer studies as distinct from feminist inquiry (Jackson, 2000: 408). Jackson argues that the indigenous conception of phet incorporates sexual difference (male vs female), gender difference (masculine vs feminine) and sexuality (heterosexual vs homosexual) within a single formation. The historical system of three phet, with kathoey conceptualized as an equal blending of masculine and feminine within one body and one psyche, has been the imaginative source of all the new categories of the ‘gender continuum’. Categories such as gay queen and gay king are imagined in terms of their relative masculinity and femininity and only secondarily in terms of homoerotic partnering or practices. Gay men may describe themselves and others as ‘60−40’, ‘70−30’ and so on to refer to imagined percentage blendings of king (sexually insertive) and queen (sexually receptive). Sexually active men may engage in a wide range of behaviours, but this variability is

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seen as arising from a blending of the masculine and the feminine. A common Thai expression for a ‘real man’ is a ‘100%’ man, meaning someone who is strongly masculine and heterosexual. Contemporary Western gay and lesbian identity discourses often privilege sexuality over gender, and link sexual practices to identities; neither of these presumptions are appropriate for the Thai case. What recent work on gender in South-east and East Asia has revealed is the ‘profound burden of ethnocentrism’ that disables critical approaches to gender and sexuality (Jackson, 2000: 418). This point is underscored by a number of scholars who demonstrate the limitations the comparative project of ethnography places on our understandings of globalization and social transformation. Antonia Chao has discussed the globalization of ‘Western’ sexual identities and forms of sexual citizenship with regard to Taiwan. The masculine and feminine categories for lesbians, ‘T-Po’, are obvious borrowings from English and are recognized as part of historical entanglements (with American GIs and Hong Kong). However, the use of such terms does not indicate either that they are the direct result of Western discourses or that they are seeking to mimic Western identities or adapt local sex/gender systems to Western categories. The West, whatever that term might mean, is not the source of cultural change and social transformation. As Mark Johnson says of the Philippines: ‘The appropriation of the term gay and the identification with an imagined gay universe signal their own transgenderal projects, projects which are informed less by contemporary Western homosocialities than by local sensibilities about love, kinship, gender and gifting relationships’ (Johnson, 1997: 183). T or ‘tomboy’ describes a particular form of cultural appropriation and inter-cultural borrowings within South-east and East Asia where tomboy is paired with specific local terms for married woman or lady to produce ‘T-Po’ in Taiwan, ‘Tom-Dee in Thailand or ‘T-Bird in the Southern Philippines. It is paradoxically, the comparative

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method of anthropology that creates the fiction that change is new and that it emerges in relation to external influences (Johnson, 1997: 233), as well as the pervasive insistence in the human and social sciences that we now live in a new era characterized by unprecedented changes in capital markets, communications, information technology, flows of people and goods and the scale of interconnections. In each case, a careful historically situated analysis of the emergence of eroticized genders is required, as well as attention to the different material conditions and situations under which globalization is occurring, and through which specific national and transnational imaginaries emerge. Whereas there are important differences across countries, it is equally evident that gender and sexual diversity connect in complex, but specific, ways with economic and political change, transformations in family structures and marriage strategies, race categories and citizenship, waged work, media and communication, class structures and forms of consumption. Changes of all kinds open up new opportunities for new subject positions to emerge. However, this process is not in itself new, as Megan Sinnott points out: ‘The meanings of Thai terms for sex and gender categories have changed over time and are neither static nor homogenous’ (Sinnott, 2004: 4). Chao documents how feminist lesbians in Taiwan are drawing on ‘Western’ academic discourse to argue that the masculine and feminine ‘T-Po’ should be replaced by the term bufen (unclassified/undivided). This new term is certainly an important way for some women to reconceptualize their desires, but it introduces a new hierarchy of distinctions based on ‘cultured’ (modern)/ ‘uncultured’ (backward). These distinctions are part of a very specific geo-political imaginary which contrasts ‘the US’ and ‘the local’ (Chao, 2000: 384−387). Chao’s argument, however, is that this disavowal of the ‘T-Po’ distinction has to be seen in the context of a small elite who want to highlight their global status and authenticity (Chao, 2000: 388). What her

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work reveals, as does that of other scholars, is that the analysis of gender is no longer about comparing other cultures with the West or analysing sex/gender systems as if they were unchanging or necessarily culturally determined. Gender as an object of study cannot be located securely within tradition, and nor can it be framed by the notion of what is ‘other’, what is distinct spatially and symbolically. With regard to gender and sexuality, imagination and comparison are strategic, embodied and political acts, and are very far from being confined to the domain of anthropological enquiry, which is now revealed as simply part of those larger processes and longings. Recent work on gender thus focuses on the changing and multiple intersections between wider networks of material and symbolic relations, and embodiment, love and desire. What emerges from ethnographic studies in South-east Asia, South Asia, East Asia, the Pacific and Latin America is the central role of marriage in this process and its relation to social aspirations and national imaginaries. The meanings of marriage that circulate in popular culture are powerfully influenced by the state and mass media, and by government policy including family planning and HIV prevention programmes. Marriage practices have undergone great change around the globe, but the dominant model of marriage that is emerging is one based on monogamous love and choice (e.g. Hirsch and Wardlow, 2006). Love marriages are widely associated with modernity and with nationalism, partly because in many contexts love and choice imply ‘democracy, equality, and a horizon beyond the family and locality’ (Boellstorff, 2005: 105). The link between heterosexual marriage based on love and intimacy, and state and civil society discourses, often allied to religious and faith-based models and ideals, has not necessarily resulted in an improvement in women’s status or bargaining power within marriage. However, its link to national and transnational imaginaries of belonging and citizenship continues to find resonance among individuals who are not heterosexual.

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Romance and a long-term relationship are frequently reported as the major aspirations in same-sex relationships which are seen as characterized by love and choice. However, in many instances of male same-sex or gay relationships, the ‘male’ partner of the couple will have a girlfriend and may also marry a female partner (e.g. Boellstorff, 2005: 102−108). The connection of heterosexual marriage to social status, social reproduction, self-realization and modernity is crucial in the construction of a modern self. This raises questions about the relationship between sexuality and identity, and an increasing body of ethnographic work demonstrates that sexuality is not a major aspect of selfhood in all contexts, and not necessarily the basis for the construction of a gendered subjectivity (e.g. McLelland, 2000). It also emphasizes how gender normative categories underlie and underpin new eroticisms and forms of self-realization, casting new light on received ideas about personal autonomy and freedom and their relationship to sexuality and sexual practice. This explains why gender and erotic diversity are such notable features of contemporary social transformations at the individual, national, transnational and geopolitical levels, because they are powerful and multidimensional metaphors for transformations and boundary crossings, not because of their apparent sexual deviance, but because of their gender ambiguity and its connection to multiple sites of identification (Sinnott, 2000). Discussions about appropriate forms of masculinity and femininity around the globe have emphasized the point that not everyone wants to turn their erotic practices and ‘different ways of loving’ into social or political statements, or even into a ‘sexual identity’ (e.g. McLelland, 2000). Processes of identification can be reformulated through modes of bodily knowledge which emphasize the diversely gendered nature of bodies and the tactile nature of diverse bodily practices. This critique of the notion of identity and its link to embodied practices has been taken up in other areas of anthropology with regard

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to issues of subjectivity and agency. This work also intersects in important ways with issues of oppression, subjection, freedom and autonomy. It also explicitly critiques theories of meaning in anthropology, and the overreliance on models of language for formulating theories of the subject and of intention and agency. The most compelling example of such work is Saba Mahmood’s discussion of an urban women’s mosque movement that is part of a larger Islamic revival in Egypt where women from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds provide each other with instruction on Islamic scriptures, and on the social practices and bodily comportment required for the cultivation of piety and the ideal of the virtuous self. According to participants, the movement emerged in response to a perception that religious knowledge, as a set of principles and as a form of conduct, had become marginalized in the context of secularization and Westernization, reduced to an abstract system of beliefs with no direct bearing on daily living. Consequently, the aim of the mosque movement is to educate ordinary women in the virtues, ethical capacities and forms of religious reasoning conducive and foundational not only to religious duties and acts of worship but also to styles of dress and speech, the consumption of entertainment, financial and household management, the care of the poor and the character of public debate. As Mahmood points out, current feminist theories of agency are insufficient to explain the agency of these women who do not seek personal autonomy or the subversion of authority. They seek rather to inculcate and bring forth a pious self through the practice of bodily techniques. Mahmood argues that we need to attend to how specific kinds of bodily practice ‘come to articulate different conceptions of the ethical subject, and how bodily form does not simply express social structures but also endows the self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to act in the world’ (Mahmood, 2005: 138−139). For the women in the mosque movement, what is at

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stake is a particular conceptualization of the role the body plays in the making of the self, one in which the outward behaviour and practices of the body constitute both the affective potential and the means through which the interior self is realized (Mahmood, 2005: 159). What are acquired through these practices are not only forms of moral reasoning and argumentation which operate at the level of language, interpretation and ostensible reference but also somatic and affective potentialities which form the vital substrate of what in Foucauldian terms we can call a technology of the self. Here we see that feminist theories of agency based on performativity, where the potential for transformation is tethered to the inerrability of the sign and shifts in referential meaning, would only capture a small part of the form, content and intent of these forms of agency. Models of agency based on language − as are all feminist poststructuralist theories of subjectivity − are problematic because they give insufficient attention to somatic and affective potentialities, and to how they engage with agency and emergent forms of sociality.

CONCLUSION The study of gender in anthropology has always been about how to hold what is historically and culturally specific in productive tension with what has comparative relevance. As an epistemological project it has sought to critique disciplinary assumptions and practices and has been one of the areas of anthropological enquiry in which the politics and passions of the anthropologists themselves have been used to spectacular effect. Through that process, it has revealed the partial and situated nature of anthropological knowledge and its ethical entanglements with larger processes of social transformation and aspiration. What is evident from the wide-ranging corpus of work that exists is that gender is not something that can approached either as securely located in tradition or as newly transformed or ‘modernized’. Gender categories

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and practices have changed over time in all societies and are neither static nor homogenous. For the future, anthropology’s engagement with the politics of self, embodiment, belonging and desire will demonstrate the continuing validity of keeping open the notion of gender to future articulations. The original distinction between sex and gender created a space in which new disciplinary theorizing could take root. We need to continue to interrogate the grids of intelligibility our analytic terms impose, both as a way of establishing the grounds for action in specific contexts, and as a means to critically examine the means through which the category of the human is being produced, reproduced and transformed.

REFERENCES Altman, D. 2001. Global Sex. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Ardener, E. 1972. ‘Belief and the problem of women’. In S. Ardener (ed.) Perceiving Women. London: Dent. Ardener, S. (ed.) 1978. Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society. London: Routledge. Boellstorff, T. 2005. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff, T. 2007. A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith, 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Chao, A 2000. ‘Global metaphors and local strategies in the construction of Taiwan’s lesbian identities’, Culture Health and Sexuality 2(4): 377−390. Elson, D. and Pearson, R. 1981. ‘Nimble fingers make cheap workers: an analysis of women’s employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review 7: 87−107. Errington, S. 1990. ‘Recasting, sex, gender and power: a theoretical and regional overview’. In J. Atkinson and S. Errington (eds) Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fee, E. 1975. ‘The sexual politics of Victorian social anthropology’ In M. Hartman and L. Banner (eds)

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Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women. New York: Harper and Row. Ferguson, F. 2003. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Green, A. 2007. ‘Queer theory and sociology: locating the subject and the self in sexuality studies’, Sociological Theory 25(1): 26−45. Hirsch, J. and Wardlow, H. (eds) 2006. Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hooks, Bell, 1984, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, Boston: South End Press. Jackson, P. 2000. ‘An explosion of Thai identities: global queering and re-imagining queer theory’, Culture Health snd Sexuality 2(4): 405−424. Johnson, M. 1997. Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines. New York: Berg. Johnson, M., Jackson, P. and Herdt, G. 2000. ‘Critical regionalities and the study of gender and sexual diversity in South East and East Asia’, Culture Health and Sexuality 2(4): 361−375. Johnson, W. and Henderson, M. (eds) 2005. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lamphere, L. 1989. ‘The legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons’, American Ethnologist 16(3): 518−533. Lewin, E. and Leap, W. (eds) 1996. Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Lewin, E. and Leap W. (eds) 2002. Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. McLelland, M. 2000. ‘Is there a Japanese ‘gay identity’?’ Culture Health and Sexuality 2(4): 459−472. Mahmood, S. 2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Manalansan, M. 2003. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mascia-Lees, F., Sharpe, P. and Ballerino Cohen, C. 1989. ‘The postmodern turn in anthropology: cautions from a feminist perspective’, SIGNS 15(1): 7−33. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1984. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, boundary 2. Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 – Vol. 13, no. 1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism, pp. 333–358.

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Molyneux, M. 1978. ‘Androcentrism in Marxist anthropology’, Critique Of Anthropology 3(9−10): 55−81. Molyneux, M. 1981. ‘Socialist societies old and new: progress towards women’s emancipation’, Feminist Review 8: 1−34. Moore, H.L. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, H.L. 1994. A Passion for Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, H.L. 1999. ‘Whatever happened to women and men? Gender and other crises in anthropology’, in H.L.Moore (ed.) Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, H.L. 2007. The Subject of Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morris, R. 1995. ‘All made up: performance theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 567−592. Ortner, S. 1974. ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ In M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds) 1974 Women, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. (eds) 1981 Sexual Meanings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, R. 1991. ‘Sexuality, culture and power in HIV/AIDS research’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 163−179. Rodriguez, J. 2003. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: NYU Press. Rosaldo, M. 1974. ‘Woman, culture and society: a theoretical overview’ In M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds) Women, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rosaldo, M. 1980. ‘The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding’ Signs 5(3): 389−417. Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (eds) 1974. Women, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rubin, G. 1975. ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’ In R. Reiter (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rubin, G. and Butler, J. 1994. ‘Sexual traffic’ Differences 6(2−3): 62−99.

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Sacks, K. 1989. ‘Toward a unified theory of class, race and gender’, American Ethnologist 16(3): 534−550. Sedgwick, E. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sinnott, M. 2000. ‘The semiotics of transgendered sexual identity in the Thai print media: imagery and discourse of the sexual other’, Culture Health and Sexuality 2(4): 425−440. Sinnott, M. 2004. Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Stocking, G. 1991. Victorian Anthropology. London: Macmillan. Strathern, M. 1987. ‘An awkward relationship: the case of feminism and anthropology’ Signs 12(2): 276−292. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Valentine, D. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vance, C. 1991. ‘Anthropology rediscovers sexuality: a theoretical comment’, Sociological and Scientific Medicine 33(8): 875−884. Visweswaran, K. 1997. ‘Histories of feminist ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 591−621. Warner, M. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Weeks, J. 1995. Sexuality and Its Discontents. London: Routledge. Weiner, A. 1979. ‘Trobriand kinship from another view: the reproductive power of women and men’, MAN 14(2): 328−348. Weston, K. 1993. ‘Lesbian and gay studies in the house of anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 339−367. Yanagisako, S. and Collier, J. 1987. ‘Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinships’ In J. Collier and S. Yanagisako (eds) Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Young, K., Wolkowitz, C. and McCullagh, R. 1981. Of Marriage and the Market. London: CSE Books.

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1.15 Anthropology and the Postcolonial1 Richard Werbner

I draw on comparative arguments from postcolonial Africa and India to ask how anthropologists have understood the postcolonial, and how their understandings relate to those of mainstream postcolonial studies.2 History conceived as linear progress has had little bearing on most anthropological approaches to the postcolonial; these have not been underwritten by a simple narrative periodization of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. Both the nature and impact of the colonial legacy have instead been taken as problematic and contested, to be understood in the light of deepening social inequality across the postcolonial continents, and in consequence sometimes freighted with nostalgia for an imaginary past of colonial or precolonial sociality (Werbner 2002a; Fontein 2006; De Jong and Rowlands 2007; Argenti and Schram 2009). This understanding runs contrary to theories of globalization which give short shrift to postcoloniality and, thanks to an undue focus on a contemporary local−global binary, consign the legacies of empire to the shadows. Aside from anthropology, postcolonial studies have been dominated by literary studies3 that largely make their object of study in disregard of earlier, comparative debate about the postcolonial state (Werbner 1996: 7).4

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Rediscovery of the political thought of Antonio Gramsci in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, inspired renewed interest, and not only among Marxists, in the relationship between culture and power and in the tensions between coercion and consent (Lears 1985).5 Gramsci’s analytic insights have been adopted well beyond literary and cultural studies; his thought has become a travelling theory, as much at home in subaltern accounts written by postcolonial historians of riot and rebellion in colonial India (Guha 1998a [1977], 1998b) as it is in the cultural studies of post-imperial Britain by Stuart Hall and other sociologists (1982 [1991]). Like any travelling theory, Gramsci’s can be chameleon-like, colourfully camouflaged in its reception from one new home to another. How the Gramscian homecoming in Indian subaltern studies relates specifically to postcolonial anthropology on that continent and elsewhere I address later. More generally, a rethinking of the state was put on the agenda by a Gramscian ‘expanded conception of “politics” ’ and of its ‘investment on many different sites’ (Hall 1982 [1991]: 8−9; cf. Spencer 1997). Some anthropologists have argued that this poses a particular challenge for Africa where the problematic of a ‘collapse or retreat of the

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nation-state’ encourages ‘media-savvy’ civic movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to link ‘their local struggles directly to transnationally distributed fields of interest and power’ (Ferguson 2006: 102−111; see also Ferguson 2005). Revival of the dogma that the state is the ultimate ground for materialist explanation in political theory is not a viable alternative to this claim; instead, the postcolonial state must be approached on its own terms as a formidable challenge to critical analysis.6 Yet, anthropological interest in the state has predominantly focused on the cultural politics of everyday life (Fuller and Benei 2001), what are sometimes called ‘low politics’, rather than the ‘high politics’. Thanks in part to widespread disenchantment with liberation struggles, and with the postcolonial fruits of nationalism, many anthropologists of Africa have looked to the longue durée to periodize the postcolonial (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Ferme 2001; Shaw 2002; Argenti 2007). Some see that a second postcolonial era has begun, and there is a recently emerging counterview to the prevalence of Afro-pessimism, particularly in the study of elites and the civil service (Werbner 2004, in press, Yarrow 2011). Views on the general direction of change vary between the extremes of the perhaps overoptimistic Polyannas and the Cassandras, with their relentless rehearsals of disorder and apocalypse now, and their disagreement is not due entirely to differences between the postcolonies they address.7 Some anthropologists prefer to see the present hopefully, as the promised fulfilment of Africa’s Second Liberation Struggle after the passing of the founding tyrants, or as in India, as the formation of ‘community’ that transcends the borders of caste and class (De Neve 2000). Others claim people themselves fear an apocalypse, the ominous signs of which have already intensified most violently in genocide in Rwanda (De Waal 1994; Malkki 1995), in brutal crime, in vigilantism (Kirsch and Grätz 2010), in public injustice and in catastrophic social contradictions. Disagreements extend to opposed analyses of the local impact of

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global discourses on human rights and democracy (Wilson 2001; Mitchell and Wilson 2003; Englund 2006), and beyond this to an ocean of postcolonial debate about poverty and ‘development’ (Allen and Thomas 2000; Ferguson 2006). Political independence in Africa and elsewhere has all too rarely come with freedom from the imperial grip, even if the alien hands in effective, if mediated, command have changed. Debate has been growing among anthropologists about the interpretation of China’s expanding influence, especially in Africa. Does this portend a new colonial era? Or, is the pervasive condition still better understood as late capitalist domination by Western metropolitan powers, including metropolitan-based transnational corporations and global agencies (Ferguson 2006)?

IDENTITY AND SUBJECTIVITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE The story of ethnic difference in Africa has threatened to overwhelm larger debates about postcolonial identity politics across the continent. Once told in terms of tribe, now ethnicity and ethnogenesis, this narrative apparently remains spell-binding. Yet ethnic identities are only a small fraction of the identities mobilized in the postcolonial politics of everyday life, and anthropology has faced a major challenge to analyse how postcolonial strategies improvise multiple shifting identities over time. If, as Patrick Chabal suggests, ‘the “tribal” imperative is often represented as the ultima ratio of African politics’ (1996), then its exposure as a manipulated fiction has been a major contribution by anthropologists to postcolonial studies. This contribution explores the ways that subjectivities are changing, often in ephemeral ways, yet remain constrained by intractable conditions, some of long duration. In analytic terms, subjectivities have been defined as at once political, a matter of subjugation to state

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authority, moral, reflected in the conscience and agency of subjects who bear rights, duties and obligations, and existentially realized, in the subjects’ consciousness of their personal or intimate relations. Even these terms are not exhaustive, although fruitful analysis in terms of them has foregrounded an intertwined pair, ‘the subjective’ and ‘the intersubjective’, cognizant, with phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau Ponty, that one without the other is nonsensical. The intersubjective always provides the ground of the subjective; there is no subjectivity prior to intersubjectivity. Moreover, not only is it difficult to define a clear distinction between the subjective and the intersubjective but also a timeless distinction outside history would be undesirable. Accordingly, anthropologists have sought to historicize intersubjectivity, and to demonstrate the factual intertwining of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. What analysis reveals is the current postcolonial phenomenon that subjects are compelled to become aware of, and concerned about: their interdependence and mutual implication with significant others. Mutual implication is vulnerable, or uncertain, under current postcolonial conditions, and it invites actions to strategically realize and defend it. This interest in the historicity of intersubjectivity has remained an anthropological field, largely ignored in mainstream postcolonial studies. A second, related interest in the intertwining of subjectivity and intersubjectivity has involved analysis of the ways people actively negotiate from one postcolonial moment to the next. This is an empirical matter, requiring discovery rather than a priori assertion; subjectivities cannot be projected unreflexively as if they were universals (Weiss 2009). Anthropological analysis often starts from popular perceptions of the ways the subjective is implicated in the intersubjective. Anthropologists disclose postcolonial efforts to reach beyond past limits of subjection, in some cases even receiving from outsiders new ways of turning oneself into the Other, intimately, publicly, or perhaps for a passing yet powerful moment

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in play or ritual (Behrend 2002; Stroeken 2005). An instance of such postcolonial tension is in post-apartheid state formation, where the performance of ‘indigenous heritage’ recreates subjectivity.8 By contrast to this, playful or aestheticized self-fashioning may adopt the latest, most fashionable ways of being wholly Other. These processes sometimes proceed through new, virtually global struggles to control identity, demanding highly explicit consciousness, even modern subjectivism (Weiss 2009).

THE AMBIGUITIES OF SUBJECTION AND SUBJUGATION Subjugation and subjection, the terms in common use for subjective processes, are slippery. The sense of subjugation is not always restricted to the power of the state to dominate and make the subject. While subjection is often associated with disciplinary processes, it has become an umbrella term for the making of the subject in almost any sense, and usually in several senses at once. Postcolonial anthropologists cannot claim to have resolved these ambiguities or standardized their own vocabulary; the literature is too richly engaged, and the ambiguities brought together by the multiple senses of the basic terms too much the stuff of actual discourses, to allow that. Recognizing that subjectivity is an ambiguous concept, which includes reflexivity and intersubjectivity, and has various senses, postcolonial anthropology has problematized relations between the personal, the political and the moral across remarkably different postcolonial transformations. None of these relations is amenable to being understood through simplistic dichotomies, as proposed in subaltern postcolonial studies9 or subsequently in Mahmood Mamdani’s influential distinction between the citizen, a right-bearing person entitled to justice and living under the rule of state law, and the subject, living under so-called customary authorities, such as the

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kings, chiefs and their staff deployed by the colonial state (Mamdani 1996; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 1999: 23). Against this simplification, Francis Nyamnjoh argues that Africans ‘are both citizens and subjects … sometimes they are more citizen than subject and sometimes more subject than citizen’ (2001: 364). To question the extent to which subjectivities are determined by discourses, political economy, state structures, and personal dispositions, requires an analytic notion of agency that transcends the confines of individualism or the lone heroic actor. The relative autonomy of social actors, like the very category of the subject, becomes problematic under changing postcolonial conditions, as Pnina Werbner (2009) illuminates in her account of the dialogical subjectivities of subaltern and elite women in Botswana. Anthropologists have debated where and how marginalization, dispossession and exploitation have formed the grounds of subjectivities in very different postcolonies, but they have also found the ‘fun spaces’ (P. Werbner 1996, 2001) where, as in rap music and smartly dressed portrait photography, people indulge in the pleasures of playful self-fashioning (Behrend 2002; Stroeken 2005; Weiss 2009). Taking the fun as seriously as the apocalyptic pronouncements in popular practice leads to a deeper insight into what Brad Weiss calls, in relation to the postcolonial life-world of youth in urban Tanzania, ‘the fugitive character of reality […]. An understanding of the real as a phenomenon that is in danger of displacement or even disappearance plays a prominent part in reconfiguring social worlds in Arusha as well as reconstituting religiosity’ (2009: 207). Writing of postcolonial analysis of plural identities, Achille Mbembe has suggested, ... the postcolony is made up not of one coherent ‘public space’, nor is it determined by any single organizing principle. It is rather a plurality of ‘spheres’ and arenas, each having its own separate logic yet nonetheless liable to be entangled with other logics when operating in certain specific contexts: hence the postcolonial ‘subject’ has had

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to learn to continuously bargain [marchander] and improvise. Faced with this ... the postcolonial ‘subject’ mobilizes not just a single ‘identity’, but several fluid identities which, by their very nature, must be constantly ‘revised’ in order to achieve maximum instrumentality and efficacy as and when required. (1992a: 5)

For Mbembe, the postcolonial dynamic comes from its characteristic style of political improvisation, but that style materializes within ‘a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery which, once they are in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence’ (ibid.). In the light of his insights from Cameroon, Mbembe carried this argument further by taking seriously the obscene laughter with and not merely against the regime.10 Doing so, he made us recognize a link between domination and the grotesque in what he called the banality of power in the postcolony, and he moved our understanding of playfulness in the face of tyranny − whether bureaucratic, charismatic, domestic, nationalist or other − from the overemphasis on resistance typical of socio-political theory, towards recognition of connivance. Precisely because the postcolonial mode of domination is as much a regime of constraints as a practice of conviviality and a stylistic of connivance, the analyst must be attentive to the myriad ways in which ordinary people bridle, trick, and actually toy with power instead of confronting it directly. (Mbembe 1992a: 22, italics original)

The smile on the face of the tyrant has been a ubiquitous postcolonial icon standing midway between consensus and coercion. Anthropologists might detect resonances with Max Gluckman’s argument about ‘rituals of rebellion’ (1963, but Gluckman’s theoretical interest was in what he regarded as ‘an instituted protest [my italics] demanded by sacred tradition, which is seemingly against the established order, yet which aims to bless that order to achieve prosperity’ (1963: 114). For Gluckman, under certain ritualized conditions identities were persuasively formed in support of established value by open, yet highly formalized, expressions of conflict. The toying with power Mbembe

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describes has taken the postcolony beyond such familiar formulations applied to precolonial or colonial conditions. Mbembe had called upon Bakhtin only to stand Bakhtin on his head: when writing at the height of the Stalin era, Bakhtin suggested unofficial humour scoffed at the deity, opposed the official world, unmasked its pretence of reality and opened ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom’ (Bakhtin 1984: 6). For Mbembe, however, the divide between official and unofficial collapsed into a baroque style of political improvisation in which everyone indulged. To bend Geertz’s argument (1973) to Mbembe’s postcolonial purposes, the ‘wink’ and the ‘thick description of the wink’ has become the postcolonial work, par excellence; along with conviviality, connivance reigns.

VULNERABILITY, CONVIVIALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF THE SUBJECT The consequences of changes in postcolonial subjectivities for human vulnerability have been underlying concerns of different anthropological approaches: shared human vulnerability has a global context in ‘a world of hegemonies of all kinds’, to use Francis Nyamnjoh’s phrase. We are all at risk when it comes to being able to be who we are as agents in relationships with others, and when it comes to articulating and defending our collective interests. Building on public debate in Cameroon about convivialité culturelle, Nyamnjoh has introduced his own concept of ‘conviviality’11 as a matter of interdependence and intersubjectivity: the congenial fellowship − often light-hearted, merry, even hilarious − that is created between active agents who are otherwise in competition or conflict with each other yet determined to empower and not marginalize each other. Nyamnjoh’s aim in writing of conviviality has been to understand how postcolonial subjects can transcend their vulnerability while negotiating their subjection through

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relationships with others. Conviviality is the light side of subjectivity in the postcolony, the darker side being the one Nyamnjoh foregrounded in much of his other writing, including his remarkable novel, Mind Searching (1991).12 ‘Cameroon constantly needs’, Nyamnjoh observed, ‘to balance the tensions of a triple colonial heritage and other multiple identities that have made it “Africa in miniature” … and also, a paradise of paradoxes’ (Nyamnjoh 2001: 112). The question that Cameroonian academics, journalists, writers, politicians and clergy now ask is: How can Cameroon survive in ‘harmonious co-existence’, when it is ‘threatened by political, religious, ethnic and economic differences and inequalities’? What can keep such a postcolony united ‘despite its internal contradictions and differences’? How can its people realize their agency and subjectivity while drawing upon multiple and disparate cultural repertoires? No one believes there are simple answers, but such questions are being raised publicly and answered openly in a conscious quest for a survival strategy in the postcolony. Writing on Banda’s oppressive era in Malawi and its aftermath, Harri Englund has qualified Mbembe’s view to argue that however authoritarian the founding postcolonial regime, it did not entirely colonize the imagination of its subjects (1996a). Connivance in simulacra may have been real and far-reaching, yet not complete or unqualified; hence, it is liable to be challenged in moments of crisis by persuasive appeals to locally axiomatic morality and by people strategically using already available identities. Authors building upon Mbembe’s insights have opened major debates in a new field of social analysis, including the interpretation of language practices. Postcolonies are radically unalike, whence the need for postcolonial studies to illuminate correspondingly disparate identity strategies emerging in everyday life. More or less deliberate, ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, these identity strategies have put distinctive imprints upon postcoloniality through local languages, with their cultural richness of specific idioms,

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images, metaphors and metonyms that must be understood in the historic specificity of their contribution to making postcoloniality. Anthropologists have located postcolonial utterances in changing socio-political contexts, opening the possibility of tracing the emergence of arguments in a new politics of identity and belonging, which centres within the postcolony on who represents whom, to whom, and for whom. Anthropological accounts in this vein have addressed reflexive issues ranging from anthropologists’ textual authority, to the consequences for postcolonial theory of analysts’ own languages, and claims to use universal concept in representing postcolonial realities (Fardon 1990; Burghart 1990). Postcolonial anthropology has revealed just how wide the range of identity strategies is: from the defence of moral agency, respect and respectability, in the face of catastrophe, such as the AIDS pandemic (Ogden 1996; Simpson 2009), to promised novel Christian or Muslim identities, which redefine boundaries of morality (Masquelier 1996, 2001; van Dijk and Pels 1996), and the ‘identity giving power of the land’ (Thornton 1996), or emancipation of the ‘sovereign subject’ (Fisiy and Geschiere 1996) which make subjectivities powerfully felt as occult realities.13 Still others disrupt the very grounds of perception, identity and subjectivity, and even threaten the existence of moral agency.14 The postcolonial imagination, as a highly specific and locally created force, has reconfigured personal knowledge in everyday life, shaping subjective, moral and religious realities around the uses and abuses of power (Worby 1998). This reconfiguration has not been entirely peaceful: ‘culture-as-political struggle’ has also been waged by brutal violence; the postcolonies are ‘societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves’ (Mbembe 1992b: 3). For different postcolonies, anthropologists have shown how traumatic identities have been formed in intergenerational struggles, and how personal transformations have been

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made through political violence or human violation.15 Their accounts have revealed the redefinitions of identity, self and other that occur in processes of postcolonial subjection when civility ends. They have confronted brutal realities, when subjects of mutual respect become objects of violation in interethnic or inter-communal conflict (Tambiah 1986; Das 1990; Van der Veer 1994), yet they also show careful regard for the saliences of civility, honour and respect (Mines 1994; De Neve 2000; Whyte 2002; Klaits 2005, 2010). War-torn Southern Sudan is one region where remaking postcolonial subjectivities has been accompanied by escalating violence directed by the people against themselves. As Sharon Hutchinson and Jok Madut Jok show (2002), the political violence which overwhelmed the rural communities of Nuer and Dinka was largely driven from outside by pressures from international petroleum companies and by the postcolonial state’s ruling regime. In a new version of an old colonial policy, Nuer and Dinka endured the efforts of the postcolonial state to divide and rule by funding rival military elites to achieve control over this oil zone. During rapid polarization and militarization from 1991 to 1999, the ethnic other ceased to be the subject of ethical restraints during interethnic conflict between these neighbouring, intermarried peoples who recognize common ancestry. Previously, the lives of women, children and the elderly were sacrosanct, and they were never intentionally killed in battle. Slaying them was an affront to God as the ultimate guardian of human morality, which would visit the slayer or some member of his family with divine anger in the form of terrible illness, sudden death and other affliction. Hutchinson and Jok show the devastating consequences for Nuer and Dinka postcolonial subjectivities of devaluing the ethnic other from ethical subject to brutalized object, and how this has led to a vicious increase in gendered and inwardly directed aggression. The power of men over women has been magnified, and with that the

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vulnerability of women to violence and rape, not merely by enemy troops but even by male ‘protectors’ from their own ethnic group. Ending inter-ethnic civility brought about a profound shift in moral reasoning and personal consciousness that altered the very concepts of ethnicity. Militarization, and political violence against unarmed non-combatants, has sealed the ethnic divide from both sides, making it less permeable. Concurrently, the Nuer concept of ethnicity gravitated towards what Hutchinson and Jok termed ‘a more “primordialist”, if not “racialist” way of thinking about their “essence”’. Notwithstanding, Hutchinson and Jok also found signs of a potential reversal of this trend, and they hoped that inter-ethnic peace would ‘continue to reawaken Nuer and Dinka men and women to the historical fluidity and permeability of their ethnic identities for the greater good of the South’ (2002: 106). The outcome of recent elections in an overwhelming national consensus supports that hope.

STATE VIOLENCE, THE GENOCIDAL STATE AND QUASI-NATIONALISM The force of state violence against ethnic groups in the postcolony explains why anthropologists have problematized states and state-created domains in order to illuminate identity politics. As a liberation struggle against colonial domination, nationalism encouraged identification between nation and state. In many parts of Africa, it also brought with it a ‘quasi-nationalism’, which, while energized by ancient hostilities and a myth of priority to the nation-state, differs from ethnicity and operates in various situations, irrespective of any dominant cleavage dividing the nation (Werbner 1991: 159). As I observed two decades ago, the catastrophe of quasi-nationalism is that it can capture the might of the nation-state and bring authorised violence down ruthlessly against the people who seem to stand in the way of the nation being united and pure as one body.

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In such times, agents of the state, acting with its full authority, carry out the violation of the person. It is as if quasi-nationalism’s victims, by being of an opposed quasi-nation, put themselves outside the nation, indeed beyond the pale of humanity. They are dealt with ferociously not merely for the sake of political dominance by one part of the nation over another, but importantly also for the sake of moral renewal of the nation as a whole. (Werbner 1991: 159−160).

Such a catastrophe in postcolonial Zimbabwe has left many survivors alienated from their nation-state, some of them deeply convinced that the war for Zimbabwe failed to make it one nation. In the words of a member of the family I knew well in western Zimbabwe, ‘Mugabe says he fought and won the country. But has he got a country? No, he has no country.’ Like the colonial legacy of which it is a re-inscription, the quasi-national legacy lives as an unfinished moral narrative, and it motivates survivors to call repeatedly for political debts to be met and moral violations put right, especially by the state and its agents (Werbner 1996: 102, 106; Fontein 2010).

THE REAPPROPRIATION OF THE STATE, RECIPROCAL ASSIMILATION AND POLITICAL HYBRIDITY The cultural politics of everyday life, whether within or against state-created domains, are another concern anthropologists have foregrounded in postcolonial studies. Quoting Gramsci, Jean-François Bayart notes of ‘the reciprocal assimilation of elites’ that, ‘[i]n the case of Caesar and Napoleon I, it could be said that A and B, whilst being distinct and opposed entities, could after a molecular process, still end up in an “absolute” fusion and reciprocal assimilation’ (Gramsci 1983: 503, cited in Bayart 1994: 322−323, note 78). In Bayart’s usage, reciprocal assimilation describes the relations between new and traditional elites, their encompassing identities and their potential social inclusion or even political fusion. Elites were typically distinct, even if historically related, sometimes sharing

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familial or local origins. For Bayart, ‘reciprocal assimilation’ argues the importance of the longue durée for hybridity in political culture, which involves both continuity and change. Applied to the postcolony, ‘reciprocal assimilation’ highlights the problematic agency of dissimilar political actors in the selective alliance of disparate postcolonial elites, and draws attention to the hybridity of postcolonial political culture, as the active and changeable synthesis/antisynthesis of manipulated precolonial and colonial legacies.16 With such assimilation and hybridity potentially come acquiescence or resistance to state power, or indeed both, in specific socio-political contexts. Given Bayart’s stress on the longue durée, it would be mistaken to read into his argument the implication that political hybridity is distinctively postcolonial. This false contrast between the colonial and the postcolonial is rejected by most anthropologists, who prefer to accept Bayart’s challenge to analyse the reworking of traces of colonial political hybridity in the postcolonial.17

IDENTITY DEGRADATION, STEREOTYPES, OCCULT IMAGINARY Beyond political hybridity lies a further major problem. Given there are stereotypes, what factors affect their management, or encourage the degradation of identity? What does the imaginary of the occult represent in the changing postcolony? Jessica Ogden’s study of the AIDS crisis in Kampala discloses an uneasy transformation in postcolonial intimacy and domesticity, expressed in contested assertions about omukyala oumutumfu, the ‘Proper Woman’ (1996). Stereotypes stigmatizing town women with spoilt identities were a colonial legacy. Identity strategies that were empowering during colonialism gave rise to disempowering contradictions in postcolonial contexts. Ogden clarifies the historicity of identity politics and the changing impact for town

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women not merely of negative stereotypes but of their own strategies, and personal and moral defences against stereotyping. A related theoretical interest in the contingency and ambiguity of subjectivity lies at the heart of postcolonial analysis by Susan Reynolds Whyte, who shows how people in eastern Uganda survive the ravages of the AIDS epidemic (1997, 2002). Her analysis turns on a concept of the subjunctive: that is, the tentative and the conditional mood which is responsive to the if and maybe of experience, and looks to an uncertain future with both hope and doubt. In the people’s own terms, ohugeraga is trying out alternatives, one plan of action, then another. This subjunctive mood, Whyte suggests, prevails in subjection to the insufficiencies of healthcare systems in postcolonial African states. Related to the subjunctive is the concept of ‘civility’, which, following Richard Rorty, Whyte defines as a virtue people themselves recognize in their practical wisdom, of attending to others, showing them respect, and recognizing ‘their moral privilege to an account of how things are’. In everyday life, this exercise of civility − which relates to a sense of mutually dependence − qualifies realization of the subjunctive mood, as people cope with the chanciness of postcolonial health care. The occult imaginary and degradation through witchcraft victimization are among the most contentious problematics of postcolonial anthropology. Much has been written about the perceived resurgence of witchcraft as a topic of both academic and public discourse, and about the ambiguous topic of damage to others by occult means.18 Fisiy and Geschiere have been amongst those who helped redirect theoretical interest in witchcraft discourses from ahistorical questions of social control, responsibility or micropolitics in interpersonal relations towards historical questions of moral and political economy within the state under changing conditions of capitalism (1996; Geschiere 1997). Some earlier anthropology, however, had indeed analysed how the colonial state criminalized

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and dealt with witchcraft. Isaac Schapera’s account of ‘Witchcraft beyond Reasonable Doubt’ is an outstanding, albeit neglected, analysis tracing the introduction and impact of demands for ‘tangible proof’ of witchcraft in courts under the indirect rule of strong chiefs in colonial Botswana (Schapera 1955, 1969). Postcolonial anthropologists have recently approached the problem of the construction of the Other within the postcolony. Identity degradation, and the stigmatization of the intimate by the intimate, have been analysed in terms of the politics of everyday life in the city or the hinterland. This is not the distanced Othering of the Rest by the West. Anthropological accounts have taken us well beyond mainstream postcolonial studies of Eurocentric obsession with Orientalist discourse. In postcolonial ethnography, the ‘intimate enemy’ is an intimate. But are the cultural politics of ethnography in the postcolony the same, with the same implications for identity, subjectivity and authority, as they were in the colony? Rijk van Dijk and Peter Pels (1996), posing this question through research in Malawi under Banda, do not take it as an invitation to rehearse the routines of anthropology’s crisis of representation. Instead, they elucidate the power play over perception historically situated within the postcolony; they make us understand the sensory tactics through which postcolonial subjects of study assert themselves and their authority over the ethnographer as fieldworker. For some postcolonial subalterns, secretly in tension with an oppressive regime like Banda’s in Malawi, ‘the real source of power and authority’ is speaking and hearing the Word of God, having the sense of divine inspiration. The apparent agnosticism of the ethnographic stance may itself become threatening. All the more so when the ethnographer makes an account public, available to the subalterns’ enemies, which seems to valorize ‘book-knowledge’ or hierarchy over spontaneous revelation. Disrupting the ethnographer’s mode becomes a forceful countertactic in self-defence: hence, in subaltern

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performance, the deconstructed ethnographer. Religious apprenticeship, and identity through initiation, are emphasized in van Dijk and Pels’s argument. Becoming an apprentice, or undergoing fieldwork as an initiation, may have always been the mode of situated learning for some fieldworkers, whether colonial or postcolonial. But what is distinctively postcolonial, though often labelled postmodern, is the efflorescence of apprenticeships in religion as, first, a mode of interactive encounter during fieldwork and, then, as a retrospective mode for the organization of ethnography in the memoir genre. If colonial anthropologists like EvansPritchard, Griaule, Gluckman or Richards, sometimes postured as the Great Man of the kingdom, for their postcolonial successors the more acceptable posture is the Little Man or Little Woman under the religious and sensory tutelage of a hinterland master (who is rarely female). This reversal of roles, from colonial dominance/manipulation to postcolonial subordination/touching and feeling, is in keeping with the changed disciplinary expectation of the contemporary subject’s power play. That role-reversal highlights a further shift from Evans-Pritchard’s viewpoint on everyday moral and personal knowledge, common sense, and the matter-of-fact motivated witchcraft (1937). That viewpoint fitted his taking just enough of a participant role in everyday life and séances to claim to be an objective observer of witchcraft. An example of postcolonial reaction to this, reversing both approach and viewpoint, is Paul Stoller’s evocative and searingly personal memoir of being a sorcerer’s apprentice among Songhay of Niger (1987). Stoller has been criticized, as van Dijk and Pels report approvingly, ‘[His] rhetoric of the experiencing “I” tends to downplay the banality and matterof-factness of Songhay magic and religion in favour of a rarified idea of the occult’ (1996: 253). Yet Van Dijk and Pels defend the heuristic force of putting one’s body at the disposal of a postcolonial religious master, as Stoller courageously risked. By having access

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to an ‘inner’ experience of conversion, the postcolonial anthropologist can dare to merge the magical authority with the ethnographic. The ethnographer becomes directly and personally implicated in ‘the profound contradictions and tactical bricolage of the “contact” zone’ (1996: 254). Getting in touch, feeling it on and below one’s skin, marks that postcolonial anthropologist who − bodytattooed as it were − emerges as the postmodern tribal, the hybrid in perception. Here, in a word, complicity is the postcolonial tactic par excellence. We are reminded of Mbembe’s postcolony, the banality of power and the political culture of complicity: as in political culture, so in perception. The anthropologists’ contribution to postcolonial scholarship on colonial discourse has included revision of what Terence Ranger argued has been generally seen as a major shift in sociality from the precolonial period to the colonial: Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single ‘tribal’ identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild. These overlapping networks of association and exchange extended over wide areas. (Ranger 1983: 248)

With the colonial period came a ‘conscious determination’ on the part of colonial authorities and missionaries to combat this ‘untraditional chaos’ by tidying up its complexity (1983: 248). This thrust tended towards new social rigidities, including stabilized, well-defined tribes, the reifying of custom in inflexible codes, and the tightening of control over subjects less able to negotiate their own identities. Anthropological arguments highlighting the strategic negotiation of multiple postcolonial identities, however, have cast doubt on the effectiveness of this effort, suggesting the colonially imagined ‘custombounded, microcosmic local society’ did not become an everyday reality.19

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MORE POSTCOLONIAL DISCOURSE ON THE COLONIAL Comparison with postcolonial studies in India illuminates disparate yet related paths, notably in relation to the Gramscian historians of the Subaltern Studies Collective. It is worth noting in advance that, following Foucault more than Gramsci, critics have found the view of power in the subalternist project myopic, concentrated too narrowly on opposition. The logic of subalternist argument inhibits appreciation of power as, in Foucault’s terms, ‘disaggregated, permeating and pervasive’ (Masselos 1992: 120, citing Foucault 1980: 98; see also Ruud 1999).20 Ranajit Guha, the Collective’s mentor, opens the first issue of Subaltern Studies with a radical attack. Being ‘fiercely combative’ itself became a matter of postcolonial honour in the Collective. Colonial history should not remain in elitist hands so many years after independence, ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism’ (Guha 1982: 1, cited in Guha 1998b: xiv). This runs contrary to the Collective’s populist project to bring into view the enduring structure of the disjuncture between disparate domains − a disjuncture with a postcolonial after-life, or alternative re-incarnation. What this un-historical [elitist] historiography leaves out is the politics of the people. Alongside the domain of elite politics there existed another domain of Indian colonial politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant indigenous groups of the society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and intermediate strata in town and country – that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter. (Guha 1982: 4, cited in Guha 1998b: xiv−xv)21

Guha goes on to argue for a failure of representation in two senses: as a presence neglected in elite historical discourse, and also in ‘the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie

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to speak for the nation, vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people … were never integrated into their hegemony’ (Guha 1982: 5−6, cited in Guha 1998b: xv).22 This fundamental disjuncture is conceptualized with some variation by other subalternists. Partha Chaterjee, for example, perceives the emergence of a ‘sovereign domain’ counter to ‘civil society’, which is seen as a Western import ‘for the legitimation of colonial rule’, early in the nationalist anti-colonial struggle. The colonized create an oppositional cultural domain marked by the distinctions of the material and the spiritual, the outer and the inner. The inner domain of culture is declared the sovereign territory of the nation, where the colonial state is not allowed entry, even as the outer domain remains surrendered to the colonial power (Chatterjee 1993: 237).23

Questions arise here concerning Gramsci’s bearing for postcolonial anthropology. How and why do subalternists break from Gramsci in their conceptualizations of disjuncture between distinct domains of the state, and/or civil society, and the popular, which is ‘autonomous’ or ‘sovereign’? How does this approach relate to anthropological conceptualization of an alternative domain or public arena and its importance for postcolonial India? For Gramsci, peasant culture was fragmentary and derivative, a subaltern version in bits and pieces of ruling-class culture and, hence, a principal prop of ‘class hegemony and subordination’ (Arnold 1984: 161, citing Gramsci 1975: 327). This conception leaves little room for subaltern ‘autonomy’ and was found flawed by subalternist historians for India under alien rule. Empirically, it was too flat a denial of the striking discontinuities in culture and politics, which set subalterns apart from certain elites and their British rulers. Theoretically, it stultified dialectical analysis because it made hegemony into what Raymond Williams calls a ‘totalising abstraction’ rather than ‘a lived process’, which is open to challenge (Williams 1977: 112−112, cited by Arnold 1984: 166). Remade to be at home in India, Gramsci’s

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travelling theory was re-presented with added subaltern autonomy, claimed as more faithful than his original thought to ‘the historical, humanist and dialectical nature of his basic political and philosophical position’ (Arnold 1984: 166).24 To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, who speaks for the subalternist, if not the subalternist? Another voice does, however, speak for comparative historians beyond the limits of subalternist discourse in ways that mediate between that discourse and the recent postcolonial anthropology of India. Eager, like the subalternists, to focus beyond Westerneducated elites, the American historian Sandria Freitag began her North Indian urban research by studying riots. The outcome was an influential contribution to the postcolonial understanding of Indian attacks on Indians and the emergence of communal violence. However, the more she analysed riots in the early and late nineteenth century, by contrast with those of the 1920s and 1930s, the more she found she needed to rethink their context by examining ceremonies, processions and festivals alongside them in the public arena. Her approach to elites, castes and classes in competition or conflict contextualized riots within other ‘collective activities – a world often labeled by scholars as “popular culture”’ (Freitag 1989a: xii); it centred upon particular performance genres along with observances of civic identity and varied social expressions of power relationships. Where the subalternists turned to Gramsci for theoretical inspiration, Freitag looked to Victor Turner for a processual approach to symbolic action. This was another travelling theory in postcolonial studies, but one that sustained her rejection of the subalternists’ overdetermination of collective symbolic action in terms of ‘a fundamental opposition of upper and lower class, of oppressor and oppressed […] on some occasions, the symbolism did indeed express such opposition, [but] that is not always the case’ (Freitag 1989b: 20, n. 4). In the light of Freitag’s account, a subversive irony − one might say a truth of Perfidious

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Albion − appears. It is problematic for subalternist discourse, although Freitag herself does not say so. In question is not the idea of two domains but their dynamics. Both the subalternists and Freitag frame their arguments in terms of a binary division; but whereas the subalternist alternative public arena is ‘autonomous’ or ‘sovereign’, Freitag understands that the public arena ‘emerged throughout the British Raj in contradistinction to imperial institutions’ (1989a: 285). Unlike the subalternists, Freitag brings into view an imperial formula which, perhaps in muddled, pragmatic ways, the British brought to bear, adapted, and never completely abandoned.25 Based in a certain ‘imperial philosophy of rule’ (Freitag: 1989b: 6), the imperial formula was a device to deal with shifting contradictions by appearing to be a neutral arbiter. Seeming not to ‘meddle’ or visibly participate in the alternative public arena, the British were administratively implicated in it (partly through ‘even-handed’, seemingly apolitical regulations and court decisions in escalating litigation), while co-opting useful intermediaries from the arena’s so-called natural leaders, in good measure through acts of personal patronage. From the outset, the British were involved not merely in the formation of a hierarchy of administration but also in the recruitment of leadership of a certain type. ‘They looked’, Freitag suggests, for those exercising power through personal, patron−client relationships, whether operating through residential, occupational, caste, ritual, or extended kinship networks’ (1989a: 57). Exceptional indigenous leaders with an appeal ‘often ideological, that could transcend patron−client relationships and a functional role that awarded leadership status even to lower caste individuals’ were outside the imperial formula, so unwelcome and denied recognition (Freitag 1989a: 60). The big show for the British was the domain of the state; hence, their elaboration of imperial panoply and symbolism in state rituals. Here Freitag builds on famous postcolonial insights into the colonial ‘invention of tradition’ advanced by Bernard Cohn (1988).

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Applying the imperial formula meant avoiding visibility when it came to the petty politics of culture and identity in the alternative public arena. To have Indian subjects busy themselves with that suited imperial rule, British Raj officials believed in their heyday, so long as the room for the exceptional more ideological leaders was well under control. According to Freitag, the separation of public arenas and state institutions is a continuing legacy of the imperial state, which significantly affects the relationship between community and state in independent India (1989a: 298). Given a fascination with caste in village India, which long seemed to overwhelm anthropological research in the subcontinent, it might be thought that postcolonial anthropology would have little to say about the imperial legacy in India. Yet, about the time of the rise of Subaltern Studies in the 1980s, that tradition of research fell out of fashion among some anthropologists working in India (Fuller and Spencer 1990; see also Kumar 1988). Like the subalternists, a minority of them turned to focus on ethnic, caste and communal violence in riots (see Das 1989, 1990). This turn to public, especially urban, arenas carried forward some anthropologists’ interests not merely in oppositional power struggles but in political subjectivity more broadly, in the moral imagination and the contested construction of authority along with power. If for Subaltern Studies, ‘sovereignty’ figures in the background of an oppositional domain, it comes into its own in postcolonial anthropology as a focus for analysis of the intimacy of state and society. The Hollow Crown, the early work by Nicholas Dirks on a ‘little kingdom’ in south India (1987) is a landmark of this turn. Dirks argues that in precolonial times caste was ‘embedded in a political context of kingship’ (1987: 7)26 that was subverted by Imperial rule leaving the royal crown hollow. British intervention in the nineteenth century narrowed down the sovereign domain, demarcated it more rigidly, and divorced it from landholding and its revenue.

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Dirks’ argument is controversial for attributing the construction or reconstruction of caste in large part to British intervention. But what makes his work a landmark for postcolonial anthropology is his shift in focus towards the analysis of ‘royal authority and honor, and associated notions of power, dominance and order’ (ibid.). The very image of The Hollow Crown encircles two different yet overlapping interests pursued by postcolonial anthropology: a distinctive discourse of archaic, venerable kingship and an alternative arena of civic leadership. It is on great public occasions, after the end of kings or perhaps in the presence of a symbolic or ‘hollow’ king, that the idioms of the distinctive discourse of venerable kingship appear to resurface (Fuller 1985, 1992: 106−107; De Neve 2000; Osella and Osella 2001).27 Having become significantly ambiguous or controversial in the postcolonial present, kingship comes to appeal to another time in the past – it provides archaic kingly models for patronage and other current political behaviour (Davis 1983: 112−113; Price 1999: 66−68). Re-enacted in festivals and processions, kingship is sustained passionately through an enduring political imaginary of kharma (political virtue and cosmic order). Leaders eminent in the public arena in Tamil Nadu in south India, Mattison Mines observes, often vie fiercely with each other to sponsor ritual events in temple festivals, such as that in which the god, Kandasami, ‘is treated like a king’ (1994: 65−66). Such leaders or ‘big men’ seek a reputation for altruistic commitment to the civic community of their caste associations. They compete to gain constituencies based in part on patronage; and in the face of scepticism about the intentions of big men, notoriously creatures of hidden self-interest, they have to be seen to excel in generosity while acting on behalf of their followers. Geert De Neve’s (2000) account of kingly practice and competition for authority among industrialists in south Indian textile towns of Tamil Nadu pushes the argument further. He finds both continuity and a reworking of the

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kingly imaginary to recast the modern big man with the aura of the king: As the king’s authority and legitimacy were predicated on his ability to incorporate and protect all those under his realm, the big man’s influence, authority, and economic power depend on his capacity to integrate the entire community, and not only the members of his caste group. Rather than the [Hindu] model of identification between king and divinity, it is the idioms of royal protection and patronage which are most forcefully at work in contemporary Tamil society. (De Neve 2000: 516)

De Neve’s analysis acutely illuminates the cosmopolitan expansion of the public arena in that industrialists and their philanthropy reach beyond the limits of their own caste to promote ‘a sense of community which encompasses the whole town’ (2000: 516). Elsewhere in south India, Filippo and Caroline Osella observe a related reworking of the political imaginary of kingship.28 In the state of Kerala, the most important annual festival, that of Onam, is a major public occasion, when ordinary people, politicians and state representatives alike oppose the pervasive immorality of every day to a lost golden age, when Kerala was ruled by the mythical Mahabali, a just king who looked after the well-being of his subjects and kept the population well-fed and happy. (Osella and Osella 2001: 143)

But no single perspective on Mahabali and his kingship is shared by all the people. Members of the local non-Brahman landed elite read the king’s lost golden age in a way contrary to the different, more egalitarian perspectives of low-caste communities. The public occasion allows contested readings of contemporary moral flaws, such as the greed of Gulf migrants and the rampant consumerism of the nouveaux riches. While everyone performs and watches the spectacles, it is the ‘politicians, state representatives and a variety of “dignitaries” who judge them’. The Osellas argue that the local state works to appropriate the public occasion, to be its sponsors − its would-be ‘kings’− to make it a platform for Kerala identity and the developmentalist rhetoric of a left-led

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state government (2001: 143−145). Much of the public occasion bears the imprint of the state’s desire for an increasingly intimate relationship with its citizens. But dharma is not a solitary imaginary in postcolonial anthropology. Like their ‘intimate enemies’, the Indologists, anthropologists situate cosmological concepts of hierarchy and moral evaluations in terms of a much wider semantic field (Fuller 1992; Parry 1994). For present purposes, attention to certain instances must suffice: artha which, as power, is distinct from dharma but not necessarily opposed to it, and azhimati, corruption. ‘Artha, the realm of the pursuit of worldly interests,’ Arild Ruud reminds us, after the Indologists and Louis Dumont, ‘is inferior to dharma, the higher religious principle’ (2001: 133). It is to Dumont and an understanding of a village’s ‘normative universe’ that Ruud turns to when he responds critically to ‘modified subalternism’, as represented by Dipesh Chakrabarty ‘This universe [in a village] contains a deep ambivalence towards politics (or the pursuit of worldly interest, artha) and because it is ambivalent, it does not give rise to simple guidelines’ (Ruud 2001:132, citing Chakrabarty 1989). Not pure but, in Dumont’s terms, ‘shamefaced’ and thus morally dubious, politics is something villagers realize they cannot do without, but often have to do with, despite themselves, to manoeuvre and compromise, to wheel and deal, to reach out to those with influence and contacts, even such activity jeopardizes prized standards of equity. Ruud’s account of popular cynicism coexisting with high voter turnout and political participation contributes to a wider debate about the ‘discourse of corruption’. Following Akhil Gupta’s seminal essay (1995), and as analysed in a whole body of postcolonial anthropological research (see especially, Price 1999, Parry 2000 and the contributions to Fuller and Benei 2001), ‘corruption’ is no longer thought about as one thing but many instances and occasions, blurred in their boundaries, shifting in opportunity, sometimes morally good for the giver but demeaning for the too

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open receiver, always highly negotiable, occasionally deadly and dangerous, above all commonplace, though intermittently scandalous. The last word on that phenomenon and discourse is yet to be written, but a turning point, which awaits anthropological study, has come with the right to information (RTI) law, enacted by the Indian government in 2005. This is ‘a radical piece of legislation giving private citizens the right to demand written answers from India’s always opaque and often corrupt bureaucracy and state institutions such as the police and army’ (Jason Burke 2010: 21). Beyond the importance of the legislation itself, as a state-backed display of ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance’, there is the remarkable civic response in a popular movement of RTI activists. ‘In many ways’, The Guardian reports, ‘the law has been an astonishing success, prompting requests from tens of thousands of often poor, sometimes illiterate, always highly motivated citizens’ (ibid., italics mine). ‘In many ways’, but not all: most of The Guardian’s report is about intimidation, violence and assassination – the brutal consequences for would-be whistleblowers, and the challenge to the state of implementing the law with full protection for all citizens. Under the leadership of the activist Anna Hazare, a new populist movement recently achieved prominence in controversial circumstances. Hazare starved himself for 12 days until the Indian Parliament gave in to his main demands for a revision of anticorruption legislation to hold public officials accountable (Kulish 2011: 1, 8). His campaign mobilized thousands of protesters. Partha Chaterjee argues that their assertively nationalist demonstrations, waving Indian flags and singing patriotic songs, ‘identified an “enemy of the people” in the entire political class, including the government bureaucracy’ (2011: 2). He suggests that at heart the anti-corruption mobilization is also antipolitical, in the popular sense of politics as the affairs of politicians and their bureaucrats. It is as if ‘down with corruption’ has become a cry strong in moral and emotional

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force yet so hollow in faith in democracy as to suit a movement that is actually right-wing and authoritarian. This problematic characteristic of the anticorruption movement is becoming increasingly worrisome to anthropologists. Arjun Appadurai, declaring himself a middleclass Indian, contends that ‘the pro-Hazare gatherings certainly have some of the disturbing echoes of mass rallies under Hitler and Stalin with the working and middle-classes adoring a mediocre and Chaplinesque figure who promises a new wave of moral cleansing’ (2011:1). Past waves of moral cleansing imbue the latest with a tidal force that, if indeed new, is already known. Perceived to be historically familiar, colonial no less than postcolonial, it elicits almost a knee-jerk counter-action. Longer term, perhaps distinctively Indian, struggles over disadvantage are involved in the specific reworking of the moral and the political. Other protesting activists claim to represent and speak for the historically disadvantaged minorities, such as Dalits, who are largely outside Hazare’s movement. Hence the domination of public space by Hazare’s movement is contested, but media attention and governmental response have been minimal. Disadvantaged activists’ counter-rallies and counter-petitions make their own demands, full of anger at being largely ignored, now as in the past. These extend protests beyond the attack on ‘corruption by functionaries in higher places’ of the state; their reach, if not their grasp, is to the corporate sector, the media, religious trusts and much more (Giri 2011; Maurya 2011). But given this historic dynamic in the activism and counter-activism, and given also the shared disenchantment with politics and democracy is the reality of these struggles overwhelmingly, and not only specifically, Indian? Or can we approach that conflicted reality not merely comparatively but on another scale, the global scale caught in a New York Times headline, ‘Protests Rise around Globe as Faith in the Vote Wanes – Many are Driven by Contempt of Political

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Class’ (Kulish 2011)? Only the question is within our present sight; the answers await much debate that needs to be informed by substantial ethnography, and not classpositioned opinion alone.

THE STATE OF THE POSTCOLONY I have pointed to four main reasons why anthropologists analysing the cultural politics of identity, and the shaping of subjectivities in everyday life, in postcolonies have foregrounded the state and state-linked or statecreated domains. Briefly, these are: the ‘retreat of the state’ or its transformation; the importance of political violence and state genocide; the reappropriation of the state, reciprocal assimilation, and political hybridity; and the change in identity degradation, stereotyping and the occult imaginary of the postcolony. But has there been a ‘retreat of the state’? John and Jean Comaroff assert: For its part, ‘the’ state, an ever more polymorphous entity, is held, increasingly, to be in perpetual crisis, its power dispersed, its legitimacy tested by debt, disease, and poverty, its executive control repeatedly pushed to the limit and, most of all, its hyphen-nation – the articulation, that is, of the state to the nation, of the nation-state – everywhere under challenge. (2001: 633−634)

Whatever may be the reality of ‘the retreat of the state’ as a global phenomenon, in postcolonies, especially in Africa, the extremes have been and still are great. They are changeable from one historic moment to another, towards the over-riding importance of NGOs and their transnational alliances (Ferguson 2006: 89−112), or to an expansion of the state whose officials penetrate such organizations in the public sphere (Fumanti forthcoming). Anthropological points of departure to locate the changing horizons of identity politics across the postcolonies have been as variable, not necessarily privileging hybridity or the working class. Conventional class analysis has led all too readily to the dubious thesis of the single dominant class for the postcolony, the state bourgeoisie,

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which, as a unity, is effectively in command of state power. Against that, fruitful anthropological arguments about cultural politics in diverse postcolonies have started from the distinctive postcolonial realities of multiple arenas, fluid identities and positional relations of power, all of which are at once within and also negotiably constitutive of the state. As postcolonies, the Indian nationstate and some African nation-states, marked by their swelling state salariats, are still on the march. In many, the government is still the largest single employer in the national economy. Africa is yet to see the end of oppressive regimes which, like Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe, coerce their subjects through state terror, intimidation by the security services and more innocuous everyday controls. Africanists have much to say about postcolonies in ever more rapid decay or virtual collapse; and anthropologists, recognizing the greater potential for self-alienation, have opened out a series of problems in the cases where the state has failed − the modes of local resiliency, the cultural assertion of social identities for survival, the recuperation of moral and political agency.29 More broadly, anthropologists have shown the constructive and the destructive forces that identity strategies have had in postcolonies. Much anthropological research has redirected postcolonial studies away from its mainstream diasporic concerns back to arenas within the postcolonial states themselves. On this basis, anthropologists have engaged critically with postcolonial subjects themselves in the past and now continue to reflect upon our own participation in the making of postcoloniality.

NOTES 1 Without South Asianists, no Africanist can brave the overwhelming tides of the Indian research ocean; I thank Pnina Werbner for guidance and sharing her knowledge of the field with me, and Chris Fuller for help at short notice. Notwithstanding, responsibility for this chapter, warts and all, is mine.

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2 This chapter draws on my introductions to three edited volumes on postcoloniality (Werbner 1996, 1998, 2002a). 3 Many postcolonial texts engage with the critical ferment around Fanon’s paradoxical vision of decolonization and the New Man (1952, 1961; Gates 1991). 4 Diasporic intellectuals formed the vanguard among the literary critics in postcolonial studies. 5 Among anthropologists, few Indianists have engaged seriously with Gramsci’s ideas; notable exceptions being Parry (2009) and Ruud (1999). 6 For a historical critique of the distortion of this problematic in the mystifying notion that anthropology suffers from ‘methodological nationalism’, see P. Werbner (2008: 54). 7 On certain stark realities in Zimbabwe, see (Werbner 1991, 1996 1998, 1999) and, by contrast in Botswana, see Werbner (1977, 1981, 1993, 2002 b, 2002c, 2004, 2008, in press). 8 See Fairweather (2006) and Yoshida and Mack (2008). 9 Partha Chatterjee argues, ‘… the colonial state could confer only subjecthood on the colonized; it could not grant them citizenship’ (1993: 237). 10 On postcolonial derision and hollow laughter, see Bayart (1994: 293). 11 Nyamnjoh (2001); see also Nkwi and Nyamnjoh (1997) and Nyamnjoh (1999). 12 On connivance and the commandement in Cameroon and other postcolonies, see also Mbembe (1992a, 1992b) and Werbner (1996). 13 See Comaroff and Comaroff (1993, 1999), De Boeck (1996), Englund (1996b), Fisiy and Geschiere (1996), Masquelier (1996), Ogden (1996), Moore and Sanders (2001), Niehaus (2001), Sanders (2003), West (2005) and Kiernan (2006). 14 See De Boeck (1996), Fisiy and Geschiere (1996), Thornton (1996) and van Dijk and Pels (1996). 15 See Englund (1996A, 1996b), Fisiy and Geschiere (1996), Hutchinson and Jok (2002) and Argenti (2007). 16 On the parallel of syncretism/antisyncretism, see Stewart and Shaw (1994) and Werbner (1994). 17 See Werbner (1969) on the colonial political legacy and a post-apartheid youth elite, and also see Fumanti (forthcoming). On the reciprocal assimilation of elites and the virtual collapse of the state in Zaire, see De Boeck (1996). 18 On renewed academic interest in witchcraft and a critique of the modernist paradigm of witchcraft, see Werbner (forthcoming). 19 On the resilience of safe passage across local societies from antiquity in Africa, see Werbner (2011), and on the vision of the society without frontier and the crossing of strangers in colonial movements, see Werbner (1989: 223−244).

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20 Gyan Prakesh offers a subalternist rejoinder, by appropriating Foucault on power (Prakash 1990: 400), against which Masselos convincingly rejects basic subalternist assumptions. A critical point about subalternism is that it combines polarised social category with the mentality of opposition. The subaltern is presented as the oppressed in the act of protest and with the consciousness of action. Everything is brought together in the moment which combines mental state and action as one. Subaltern consciousness as it emerges in these texts is the consciousness of resistance and in resistance. Such consciousness may contain within it ideas of religion and caste, ideas of status and power but they are all subsumed in the act of protest and opposition to domination. Religion here is a focus for subaltern expression, it has no role otherwise as a set of belief systems which energise people.’ (Masselos 1982: 120–121). 21 Reviewing four volumes of Subaltern Studies, the Cambridge historian C.A. Bayly strongly criticizes the subalternist accounts. Denying the novelty of the investigation of peasant rebellion in rural colonial India, he does credit subalternists with acting as catalysts. They developed a major concern from the interest of a substantial minority of historians, but they were mistaken about the separation of domains: elite and peasant politics ‘continuously intervened and informed each other’ (Bayly 1988: 112). Nor did the subalternists get right peasant differentiation and conflicts of interest among subalterns themselves. For example, contrary to the subalternists, it was the petty landlords and secured tenants who formed the social stratum most prominent in ‘the most important rural radical movements both before and after the First World War’ (Bayly 1988:117). Often hostile to the middle peasant castes beneath them, they were brought together with townsmen in constant transactions between the countryside and the small town. Since Independence, their descendants have recreated their power, ‘sometimes in alliance with the rural and urban poor of Muslims, sometimes working against them’ (Bayly 1988: 117−118). Finally, Bayly finds an Achilles’ heel: the subalternists’ strength, a regard for riot and rebellion, meant being over-focused on periods of political violence among non-elites. Hence the subalternists raised no broad arguments about ‘the ways in which the poor and marginal appropriated and used elite ideologies for their own purposes’ (Bayly 1988: 112). 22 According to Arnold, himself a subalternist historian, ‘Guha does not see these two domains as entirely separate: from time to time they overlap and interact but they never become wholly integrated’ (Arnold 1984: 165).

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23 It is worth noting that Chaterjee draws attention to the domain’s special rhetoric, which is religious and ethical, ‘of love, kinship, austerity, sacrifice’ and even further, ‘antimodernist, antiindividualist, even anticapitalist’ (ibid.). 24 Gramscian revisionism by subalternists has come under attack from feminists who value Gramsci’s perception of the fragmented nature of consciousness. O’Hanlon criticizes the subalternist project for being enthralled by ‘the demand for a spectacular demonstration of the subaltern’s independent will and self-determining power’ (1988: 213). As an ethnographer of gender, Raheja concurs with O’Hanlon’s critique, ‘Guha (1983: 13), in speaking of the “sovereignty”, “consistency,” and “logic” of subaltern consciousness, has inadequately documented the limits of resistance, and the fact that the subaltern may at times speak from within the dominant discourse and at times stand outside and comment critically upon it’ (Raheja and Gold 1994: x14). 25 In practice, government involvement in the public arena has been highly negotiable. For example, in south India, at the start of British rule, the British inherited the Indian rulers’ role as patrons, managers and protectors of Hindu temples, but in 1833 under pressure from Christian missionaries, the government in India withdrew officially from involvement in religious institutions. ‘In fact, however, the government (at least in Madras) never succeeded in disentangling itself entirely from the temples’ (Fuller 1984: 113). 26 Dirks is one of an influential group of Chicago-trained anthropologists whose contributions to postcolonial anthropology are heavily influenced by the historical approach of their teacher, Bernard Cohn, and his engagement with Subaltern Studies. 27 Chris Fuller highlights the continuing, central importance of kingship in Indian society, despite the fact that no Indian king has ruled for over a century; in terms of dharma, sociocosmic order, he examines the relationship between the human king and the royal deity, and with an eye to assertiveness by Harijans and other low castes, he reviews a wide literature on sovereignty and village temple festivals (1992: 106−154). 28 The Kerala case has kingship associated with adharma, ‘a state of existence outside the “proper” socio-cosmic moral order’, and the king is a demon who eventually submits in complete sacrifice to dharma and the gods. Lower castes extol the egalitarian vision in adharma; upper castes, the triumph of dharma (Osella and Osella 2001: 118). 29 Malkki (1995), Devisch (1995, De Boeck (1996) and Ferme (2001).

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Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff (eds) 2001. Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State. Journal of Southern African Studies (3): 627−651. Das, Veena 1989. Subaltern as Perspective, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena (ed.) 1990. Communities, Riots and Survivors. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Davis, Marvin 1983. Rank and Rivalry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Boeck 1996. Postcolonialism, Power and Identity, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. De Neve, Geert 2000. Patronage and ‘Community’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6: 501−519. De Waal, Alex 1994. Genocide in Rwanda. Anthropology Today 10 (3): 1−2. Devisch, Rene 1995. Frenzy, Violence and Ethical Renewal in Kishasha, Public Culture 7: 593−629. Dirks, Nicholas 1987. The Hollow Crown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Englund, Harri 1996a. Between God and Kamuzu, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Englund, Harri 1996b. Witchcraft, Modernity and the Person. Critique of Anthropology 16 (3): 257−279. Englund, Harri 2006. Prisoners of Freedom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fairweather, Ian 2006. Heritage, Identity and Youth in Postcolonial Namibia. Journal of Southern African Studies 32 (4): 719−736. Fanon, Franz 1952. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Charles Markmann. (Reprinted, London: Pluto, 1986.) Fanon, Franz 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. (Reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.) Fardon, Richard (ed.) 1990. Localizing Strategies. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Ferguson, James 2005. Decomposing Modernity, in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzi, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson James 2006. Global Shadows. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferme, Mariane 2001. The Underneath of Things. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Fisiy, Cyprian and Peter Geschiere 1996. Witchcraft, Violence and Identity, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Fontein, Joost 2006. The Silence of Great Zimbabwe. London & Harare: UCL Press, Weaver Press. Fontein, Joost (forthcoming) Between Tortured Bodies and Resurfacing Bones. Foucault, Michel 1980. Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon (ed.). New York: Pantheon. Freitag, Sandria 1989a. Collective Action and Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Freitag, Sandria (ed.) 1989b. Culture and Power in Banaras. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fuller, C.J. 1984. Servants of the Goddess. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, C.J. 1985. Royal Divinity and Human Kingship in the Festivals of a South Indian Temple. South Asian Social Scientist 1: 3−43. Fuller, C.J. 1992. The Camphor Flame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fuller, C.J. and Veronique Benei (eds) 2001. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. London: Hurst and Company. Fuller, C.J. and Jonathan Spencer 1990. South Asian Anthropology in the 1980’s. South Asian Review 10 (2) :85–105. Fumanti, Mattia (forthcoming). The Politics of Distinction. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1991. Critical Fanonism. Critical Inquiry 17: 457−470. Geertz, Clifford 1973. Thick Description, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geschiere, Peter 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Giri, Saroj 2011. What is Right-Wing about the anti-corruption movement? Kafila.org/2011/08/26/. Gluckman, Max 1963. Rituals of Rebellion in SouthEast Africa, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen and West. Gramsci, Antonio 1975. Letters from Prison. Translated by Lynne Lawner. London: Jonathan Cape. Gramsci, Antonio 1983. Cahiers de prison. Volume II. Paris: Gallimard. Guha, Ranajit 1982. On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India, in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies I Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Resistance. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit 1998a. Dominance without Hegemony. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Guha, Ranajit (ed.) 1998b. A Subaltern Studies Reader. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil 1995. Blurred Boundaries. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375−402. Hall, Stuart 1991. Introductory Essay, in Roger Simon (ed.), Gramsci’s Political Thought. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hutchinson, Sharon and Jok Madut Jok 2002. Gendered Violence and the Militarisation of Ethnicity, in Richard Werbner (ed.) Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Kiernan, James (ed.) 2006. The Power of the Occult in Modern Africa. Berlin: Lit. Kirsch, Thomas and Tilo Grätz 2010. Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Klaits, Frederick 2005. Postcolonial Civility. Journal of Southern African Studies 3 (3): 649−662. Klaits, Frederick 2010. Death in a Church of Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kulish, Nicholas 2011. Protests Rise Around the Globe as Faith Vote Wanes. The New York Times September 28: 1, 8. Kumar, Nita 1988. The Artisans of Banaras. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lears, T.J. 1985. The Concept of Cultural Hegemony. The American Historical Review 90 (3): 567−593. Malkki, Liisa 1995. Purity and Exile. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Lae Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Masquelier, Adeline 1996. Identity, Alterity and Ambiguity in a Nigerian Community, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Masquelier, Adeline 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Masselos, Jim 1992. The Dis/appearance of Subalterns. Journal of South Asian Studies 15 (1): 105−125. Maurya, Dinesh 2011. New Civil Society of Dalits, Backwards and Minorities rise for their Rights! Kafila.org/2011/08/26/. Mbembe, Achille 1992a. Notes on the Postcolony. Africa 62 (1): 3−36. Mbembe, Achille 1992b. The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony. Public Culture 4 (2): 1−30. Mines, Mattison 1994. Public Faces, Private Voices. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, Jon and Richard Wilson (eds) 2003. Human Rights in Global Perspective. London: Routledge. Moore, Henrietta and Todd Sanders 2001. Magical Interpretations and Material Realities. London: Routledge.

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Sanders, Todd 2003. Reconsidering Witchcraft: Postcolonial Africa and Analytic (un)-Certainties, American Anthropologist 105 (2): 338−352. Schapera, Isaac 1955. Witchcraft beyond Reasonable Doubt. Man 55: 72. Schapera, Isaac 1969. The Crime of Sorcery. Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15−23. Shaw, Rosalind 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual amd Historical Imagination. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Simpson, Anthony 2009. From Boys to Men. New York: Palgrave. Spencer, Jonathan 1997. Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 3 (1): 1−19. Stewart, Charles and Rosalind Shaw (eds) 1994. Syncretism/Antisyncretism. London: Routledge. Stoller, Paul 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow − A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stroeken, Koen 2005. Immunizing Strategies. Africa 75: 488−509. Tambiah, S.J. 1986. Sri Lanka – Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. London: J.B. Tauris. Thornton, Robert 1996. The Potentials of Boundaries in South Africa, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Van der Veer, Peter 1994. Religious Nationalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. van Dijk, Rijk and Peter Pels 1996. Contested Authorities and the Politics of Perception, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Weiss, Brad 2009. Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Pnina 1996. Fun Spaces: on Identity and Social Empowerment among British Pakistanis. Theory, Culture and Society 13 (4): 53–80. Werbner, Pnina 2008. Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology, in Pnina Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. Oxford, New York: Berg. Werbner, Pnina 2009. Dialogical Subjectivities for Hard Times. African Identities 299−325. Werbner, Pnina 2010. Appropriating Social Citizenship. Journal of Southern African Studies 36 (3): 693−710. Werbner, Richard 1969. Constitutional Ambiguities and the British Administration of Royal Careers among the Bemba of Zambia, in Laura Nader (ed.), Law in Culture and Society. Chicago, IL: Aldine.

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Werbner, Richard 1977. Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law. Journal of African Law 21: 24−39. Werbner, Richard 1981. The Quasi-Judicial and the Experience of the Absurd, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Land Reform in the Making. London: Rex Collings. Werbner, Richard 1989. Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Werbner, Richard 1991. Tears of the Dead. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Werbner, Richard 1993. From Heartland to Hinterland, in Thomas Bassett and Donald Crummey (eds), African Agrarian Systems. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Werbner, Richard 1994. Afterword, in Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw (eds), Syncretism/Antisyncretism. London: Routledge. Werbner, Richard 1996. Introduction. In Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (eds). Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Werbner, Richard (ed.) 1998. Memory and the Postcolony. London: Zed Books. Werbner, Richard 1999. The Reach of the Postcolonial State, in Angela Cheater (ed.), The Anthropology of Power. ASA Monographs 36, London and New York: Routledge. Werbner, Richard (ed.) 2002a. Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Werbner, Richard 2002b Introduction: Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana. Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (4): 667−680. Werbner, Richard 2002c. Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation. Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (4): 727−749.

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Werbner, Richard 2004. Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Richard 2011. Cambridge Anthropology. 29 (3): 46–88. Werbner, Richard (in press). ‘Down-to-Earth’, in Martine Guichard (ed.), Friendship, Descent and Alliance. Oxford: Berghahn. Werbner, Richard and Terence Ranger 1996. Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. West, Harry 2005. Kupilikula. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, Susan Reynolds 1997. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whyte, Susan Reynolds 2002. Subjectivity and Subjunctivity, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Williams, Raymond 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Richard 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worby, Eric 1998. Tyranny, Parody and Ethnic Polarity. Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (3): 560−578. Yarrow, Thomas 2011. Development Beyond Politics. New York: Palgrave. Yoshida, Kenji and John Mack 2008. Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Africa. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey.

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1.16 Anthropology and Literature C.W. Watson

There are several ways to approach the relationship between anthropology and literature. Of these, the most common are perhaps the four following. First, one can look at the anthropology of literature, broadly speaking the study of the production and consumption of literature, texts, both written and oral: Who are the producers of these texts and under what circumstances are they produced, with what materials and in what quantity and for what audiences and readers? This approach is very similar to that developed in the sociology of literature, where the underlying premise is that the production of literature and art like the production of a manufactured good can be seen as an enterprise within a relatively self-contained domain involving specialist processes and contributing in a major way to the character of a particular society. Where the anthropological approach is distinctive from a sociological one lies in the close attention to particular examples, ethnographic studies of particular instances in specialist groups and small societies where a description of the specific dimensions of literary production serve to illustrate the broader sociological account, thus refining our understanding and helping us to perceive better the significance of literature for different communities within society.

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A second approach, less concerned with the quantifiable facts of production and consumption, but equally premised on the belief that understanding the literature of a society provides us with insights into the intellectual, moral and aesthetic visions of a people, places the emphasis on the content of the literature, treating the texts either as the information obtained from knowledgeable informants or directly, as in themselves quasi-informants, where the agency of the author is marginal to the text which in its completed and self-sufficient authentic and integral form stands independently as a statement about the society. Within this approach to literature there are two further divisions. One division looks for evidence, usually collaborative evidence to confirm data acquired through other methodological approaches, of an ethnographic kind describing institutions and artefacts, marriage arrangements, the structure of houses, political intrigue and religious observance. The other division, less concerned with the empirically observable aspects of social organization, mines literary works as sui generis repositories of a society’s knowledge and evaluation of itself. What is at stake here is the deduction from the literary artefact − a song, a poem, a novel, an orally recited epic − of a sense of the society’s perception of itself, its values, its basic

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premises about what it is to be human and its reflections on and criticisms of the existing situation and the responses to the flux of change.A kind of literary criticism but one deeply informed by, and informing understandings of the society drawn from other sources. Within both these sub-divisions there is an ongoing debate about what types of literature are most open to this kind of exploitation as informed sources. Is there a significant difference between those texts which are popular and for mass audiences and those produced for intellectual elites, or is this distinction in itself only relevant in certain types of contemporary society, and do we not find that in most of human history what we classify as literature, the major Hindu epics in all their transformations, Shakespeare’s plays, the Chinese ‘Four Great Books’, the sacred texts of the Middle east, the oral epics recited over long nights in distant places everywhere, there is no low-brow, high-brow difference? The same text can be interpreted in different ways and for different purposes. A third contemporary approach − one which has over the last 30 years absorbed much intellectual energy, generated considerable heat and led to deep divisions among anthropologists themselves − takes anthropologists themselves as writers (Marcus and Cushman 1982) manipulating the art of rhetoric to persuade readers to a position. In looking at such literary anthropological texts, the argument continues, the reader should be aware of the discrepancy between what the text purports to be – an objective transparent account of a lesser-known society – and what in fact it is – a political statement linguistically crafted to persuade the reader into adopting certain perspectives and politico-philosophical assumptions. In this respect the influence of Writing Culture, the title explains it all, edited by Clifford and Marcus, and first published in 1986, is difficult to exaggerate. This new awareness within the discipline coinciding with, and indeed in large measure stimulated by, the

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epistemological angst arising from postcolonialism has led to considerable experimentation in anthropological writing, not all of which has met with universal approval but which has certainly led anthropology and critiques of anthropology in new directions. One of these new directions constitutes the fourth area in which the relationship between anthropology and literature can fruitfully be explored: the non-academic but still ethnographic writings of anthropologists. In fact anthropologists have, it would seem, always reserved for themselves a literary space in which to give a different expression to their thoughts and observations from that which finds its way into their academic texts. The diaries in the field – of which the most notorious example is Malinowski’s posthumously published diary (1967) – and the notebooks and jottings filled not only with records and data to be transformed into ethnographic texts but also with reflections and reveries have since the earliest developments of anthropology as a fieldwork discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century remained that area in which anthropologists have self-consciously given free rein to their literary imagination. It is only relatively recently, however, that the importance of this kind of writing, both as pre-texts for the published anthropological work and as deserving of consideration in their own right have come under the scrutiny of the profession in works by Sanjek (1990) and Wolf (1992). Still within the category of non-academic work, but distinct from this semi-professional and largely private creative writing, has emerged a more popular literature, describing the anthropological experience for a wider readership than students and colleagues. Some of these are written in fictional form, of which one early example is Bowen (1956); some, one or two of them directly inspired by the demand for greater reflexivity, take the form of memoirs and autobiographical accounts (Read 1965; Grimshaw 1982; Powdermaker 1967; Visweswaran

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1994); and yet others, not at all hampered by a sense of postmodernist doubt follow the trend of comic travel literature, as best exemplified by Barley (1986), for cogent reasons widely condemned within the profession (MacClancy 1996: 230−235) but often mentioned admiringly by the lay reader. Other anthropologists have tried to give expression to their experiences in the form of novels and poetry, or through short stories of the kind written by Katy Gardner (1991) describing her fieldwork experience in Bangladesh in the 1980s. There have also been some excellent anthologies of personal accounts by anthropologists of their relationships with significant individuals in the field (Casagrande 1960; Watson 1999) which were largely intended for students of anthropology not so much to give them a how-to-do-it manual of fieldwork practice but to offer insights into the development and growth of the personality of the anthropologist in the field. They deserve to be better known outside the profession. Of these four approaches, this chapter will consider only the first three, with a particular emphasis on the vexed question of literature as data. Readers who wish to know more about the fourth approach, which considers the personality of individual anthropologists and their experiences and reflections, are directed to the references above and to the comprehensive article discussing the anthropologist as a figure in literary writing by MacClancy (2005) and to Vargas Llosa’s tantalizing novel The Storyteller (1989). For general accounts of the relationship between anthropology and literature, see the insightful work by Rapport (1994) and the excellent recent book by Barber (2007).

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF LITERATURE Anthropology as a fieldwork discipline in its early stages confined itself to the study of simple societies, both because they were unknown to the Western world and because, following the prevalent assumptions of the

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time, the early twentieth century, it was thought that such societies represented the earliest and least complex of forms of human organization and to that extent could tell us something of the evolution of human society in general, and almost (laboratory-like) could offer examples of the earliest forms of social structure from which we could draw deductive hypotheses about similar institutions in more complex societies. In the United States there was also in the early years a perceived urgency to record the way of life of Native Americans before it was lost altogether from sight as a result of the rapid transformations which were occurring. Given, then, that literacy was by and large unknown in most of these societies, when anthropologists did study the stories, myths, epics, histories, songs, proverbs, and speeches which circulated among the people it was with the intention of recording the repertoire and to make the documentation as complete as possible. To this extent, their pursuit was similar to that of nineteenth-century folklorists in Europe also anxious to take down fast-disappearing elements of what had once been a vibrant oral culture. Indeed, the work of scholars across the disciplines of philology, linguistics, history and anthropology often frequently overlapped and their studies complemented each other. Thus, the work of Milman Parry (1971) and A.B. Lord (1960) in recording the orally recited epics of Slavic bards and noting the use of formulaic phrases contributed immeasurably to Homeric studies and spurred anthropologists to look more closely at the bardic worlds of other societies, with especial attention being paid to the figure of the bard himself, the griot (Griaule 1975) of West Africa, the penglipurlara of the Malay world (Sweeney 1987), and the singer of tales the world over. A different focus on storytelling altogether emphasized that contained within the stories was a society’s history, a recording both of what it was conceived to have been, what had been remembered, and what the society would have liked it to have been. These two strands were blurred in the narratives,

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and anthropologists and historians were encouraged by the work of Vansina (1985) and others to collaborate to disentangle the ‘truth’ of the narratives and their contemporary significance. Developments in the study of oral literature, implicitly defined as what was not textually inscribed, led rapidly to a closer examination of the cognitive differences between those societies which were literate and could rely on texts to aid and confirm memory and facilitate the transfer of accumulated wisdom. The term orality, most frequently associated with Walter Ong (1982), was coined to stress the cognitive dimensions of this difference. Recently, anthropologists have taken up the challenge to test the ideas raised by Ong, both by looking at specific societies in the throes of moving from orality to literacy and refining our notions of what constitutes literacy (Street 1993) and examining the consequences of such a transition, and by looking much more broadly across civilizations and their histories and formulating large claims about the epistemological divide which separates oral from literate societies. Foremost among the latter group of scholars has been Jack Goody. As a product of his early fieldwork in West Africa he wrote a substantial work on the myth of the Bagre, though it was not published until much later in 1972. Subsequently, returning from fieldwork, he co-wrote an influential joint article (1963) with Ian Watt in which they set out the cognitive impact which literacy had on early European societies and this seems to have inspired him to range more widely to study the development of literacy in the West and the East and to develop strong arguments about the significance of the invention of alphabets and recording systems in universal human history (Goody 1977, 1986, 1987). That early work of Goody and Watt coincided with a particular interest in the rise of popular literacy in England and Europe. Earlier work had been done in this respect by Q.D. Leavis (1932) who focused on the

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identity of the readers of the newly available fiction, the circumstances under which reading was done, and the availability and influence of texts The Leavises and the whole Scrutiny movement were in fact greatly interested in anthropology, and some younger scholars such as David Pocock and Godfrey Lienhardt went on to make distinguished careers in anthropology; the meticulous attention to the task of interpreting the meaning of what they observed bears testimony to their Scrutiny heritage. However, the potential usefulness of using anthropological insights and perspectives gained from observing the part played by literary representations and their transmission in non-Western societies was not immediately followed up in studies of more complex studies with textual traditions: when it was, through the studies of popular culture, it became largely the province of cultural studies. And now that popular culture has moved so rapidly in the direction of audiovisual representation, anthropology recognizing this development has, it seems, preferred to leapfrog the production and circulation of texts and their significance and concentrate its energies on these new media. There have been some exceptions and one or two highly percipient studies have reminded us of the continuing importance of texts and how they are read and interpreted often in conjunction with visual and aural materials (see Boyarin 1993; Gaffney 1994; Meeker 1994; Millie 2009 and, for a beautiful example of the colonial control of reading material, see Jedamski 1990). At the same time, the continuing significance of oral literature and performance in the mainstream of the society (Kuipers 1998; Herzfeld 1988; Finnegan 1970, 2007) and also among nondominant groups within societies has received well-deserved critical recognition in the work of anthropologists such as Abu-Lughod (1988) and Raheja and Grodzins (1994), and among historians and literary critics employing notions of subalternity to demonstrate how texts can be voices of resistance to dominant ideologies.

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Although anthropologists have been slow to follow up on the contemporary significance of textual materials, one remarkable development over the last 50 years has been the turning of the anthropological gaze on the texts of the past − Jane Austen’s novels are a favourite source (Handler and Siegel 1999). As we shall see, there are similarities between this endeavour and the use of texts to draw conclusions about the nature of a particular historical social formation, but what we need to observe here is how historians, literary critics and anthropologists crossing disciplinary boundaries have employed anthropological concepts to illuminate texts rather than simply rifle the latter for information. In Britain the best-known example of a historian using anthropology is Keith Thomas. Although his method is open to criticism, he showed that anthropology could contribute substantially to our understanding of historical texts that would otherwise seem strange and alien (Thomas, 1963 1975; Geertz 1975; cf. Davis 1981). More recently, especially, but not exclusively, following the inspirational example of Clifford Geertz, historians and anthropologists in Italy (Ginzburg 1982; Muir and Ruggiero 1991) have written fascinating accounts of religious ideas through a close anthropologically informed reading of texts. The method has also been intriguingly applied to colonial archives, demonstrating through textual analysis how commonly accepted European theories of change and evolution and history determined systems of governance colonial policy (Schulte-Nordholt 1994). Recent critical work has shown just how colonial reports were permeated with assumptions that we now find highly questionable. This awareness of exactly how our ethnographic record, inevitably constructed through conventional contemporary current linguistic usage, is deeply imbued with ethnocentric views which derive from a dependency on currently accepted philosophical and moral ideas, has led to an anxiety about our own contemporary practice, and consequently to an attempt to lay bare the epistemological

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foundations underlying the structures of our own writing.

ETHNOGRAPHY AS LITERATURE Taking their cue from what has been called the linguistic turn and its influence of historiography (see Clark 2004 for interesting insights into the ways in which literary criticism, history and anthropology influenced each other, and for discussions on narrative, Mitchell 1981) and consequently paying close attention to the way in which anthropological narratives have been composed with the careful employment of rhetorical techniques to persuade readers of the authenticity of descriptive accounts, the authors of Writing Culture through close reading identified several linguistic strategies common to ethnographic writing. They noted, for example, how the trope of arrival in a strange community was frequently used both to establish the credentials of the anthropologists as observers and their intrepidity as adventurers: they had indeed come and seen and, by implication, conquered the other’s knowledge. These claims to a transcendent knowledge − it was also noted − were confirmed by the authoritative statements of the published writing which spoke in generic terms of the Trobrianders, the Tikopia, the Balinese (Crapanzano 1986), assuming a homogeneity in the behaviour and mentality of individuals in a community to which in fact the anthropologist had only had partial access. An important point was also made by Asad (1986) about the effects of translation from indigenous terms into academic European writing in terms of the readers’ perceptions of the society being described. There had been in anthropological circles earlier controversies over the issue of translation − often linked to debates about cultural relativism − and whether it could ever satisfactorily convey a full understanding of the universe of thought of other peoples with respect to, for example, their beliefs and their vocabulary of jurisprudence and the law of dispute

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settlement, but Asad’s argument was more that academic English represented a ‘strong language’ in the international currency of debate and was able to impose itself as more reliable and trustworthy than other languages and consequently could determine meaning by excluding the indigenous interpretations of weaker languages. Ideas such as these profoundly disturbed the relative complacency of the anthropological profession, which had after all − ever since its insistence on long periods of living in the field and becoming immersed in the everyday habits of a small community − prided itself that if any social science discipline could claim that it really told it as it was that discipline was anthropology. But, in fact, for anthropologists, who had been observing the devastating effects of the employment of the linguistic turn in scrutinizing other disciplines, it had only been a matter of time before the same critical gaze shifted to anthropology. Arising from these doubts about the formal structure of anthropological accounts, there was considerable experimentation with new styles of academic writing, all predicated on the wish to write a ‘reflexive anthropology’. Foremost among these were attempts to incorporate the personality of the anthropologist into the account and, implicitly or explicitly, by so doing to alert the reader to the potential epistemological and ethical biases in the ethnography. Subsequently, a number of autobiographical accounts of fieldwork appeared with the intention of describing not just the everyday tasks of the anthropologist in the field but more profoundly to expose the anthropologist’s fragility and the tenuousness of the relationships and encounters out of which self-confident narratives were later produced: the conjurer showing how the trick was done. Most anthropologists would recognize something of themselves and their own vulnerability in the field in what their fellow-anthropologists have written, but some accounts are better than others in seeking judiciously to balance the tension between the autobiographical desire to reveal oneself

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and the intention to allow the description of encounters and relationships to speak for themselves. Dumont (1978), Metcalf (1997), Descola (1996) and Grimshaw (1982) are good places to start. In sharp contrast to the purposeful exposure of the anthropologist, a second consequence of the new self-consciousness has been the attempt to write the anthropologist out of the picture altogether, and to try to represent the unmediated reflections of the informant. To be sure this type of writing, the capturing of the memories and autobiographies of significant individuals, long predates the postmodernist critique. But given the selectiveness which takes place and the frequent bracketing of autobiographical statements within other textual material, large claims to greater authenticity are often greeted with the same scepticism as claims in visual anthropology that letting informants speak directly to the camera and using subtitles allows one greater access to the original experience. Nonetheless, despite the qualifications which one might want to make, this orally elicited ‘autobiographical’ writing does constitute a different mode of representation, and is both informative and on occasions profoundly moving. The early autobiographies of Native Americans carefully recorded and transcribed − see, for example, Radin (1999) and Dyk (1967) − if they do nothing else lead us away from the homogenizing tendency of the comprehensive ethnography and at times draw readers poignantly into an emotional world, which, if we had depended solely on the academic report, would otherwise have escaped us. The best known example of this style of representation, Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez (1962), comes from a later period and in some respects anticipates much of the later postmodernist experimentation in as much as besides simply recording the narratives of individuals from a poor Mexican urban residential area it provides the space for members of one family to tell Rashomonlike their versions of the same events (Melhuus 1997). Another work of this kind

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which has achieved classic status is Shostack (1981), in which the anthropologist makes no secret about how the account was elicited and demonstrates how this in no way discredits the value of the account as one style of narrative. More recently, Caplan (1997) published the product of years of acquaintance with the same individuals and demonstrated unintrusively a postmodernist sensibility that sharpens our awareness of how these texts are created and consequently develops our critical appreciation of the making of ethnography. Of more direct postmodernist lineage, with reference to what has become known as dialogic anthropology, are books such as Crapanzano (1980), which works hard to reproduce the debates and discussions that he had in the field with a particular individual and, through that emphasis on the dialogical nature of the encounter, to allay the criticism of postmodernist colleagues who have questioned the authorial omniscience of the anthropologist. But sophisticated as this and other experiments − including, for example, theatre as ethnography − are, they are nonetheless unable to escape the criticisms that they are products of literary and philosophical conventions and that the twists and turns of the new ethnography often hamper rather than enhance understanding. At another theoretical level, Fabian (1983), extending further the critiques of linguistic style and usage and the power of rhetoric, argued that the particular deictic usage of an ethnographic text – broadly, the way in which the writer positions herself in relation to the reader through the use of linguistic devices such as tense and demonstrative pronouns – effectively excludes the subjects of the narrative from the construction and interpretation of their thoughts and actions as presented to the reader. Consequently, the implication is that anthropology, or at least the writing of it, is irredeemably and deeply flawed, since in the act of committing dialogically gained knowledge to a documented account the aetiology of the knowledge is suppressed and its full contextualized

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meaning therefore hidden from us. A counsel of despair, it would seem: ‘Of what we cannot speak thereof we must be silent’. Indeed, it is precisely because these sharp critiques of the limitations of ethnographic styles of representation, whether in the form of traditional academic monographs or various experimental modes, seemed to be leading to an impasse, and an almost paralytic fear of writing, that these discussions have now run into the ground (Spencer 1989). Once it has been accepted that writing carries its load of rhetoric, the demonstration that this is so through the unpicking of yet another text is otiose and repetitious. Anthropology moves on, wiser, sadder perhaps, but still, like the modern novel, also aware of its structural flaws, optimistically believing that there are tangible gains for us all in continuing to strive for ever more nuanced forms of representation.

LITERATURE AS ETHNOGRAPHY While the debate on ethnography as literature may, at least temporarily, have come to a halt a parallel discussion about the usefulness of literature as a source of ethnographic data continues. At one level, to which publications on the theme of anthropology and literature bear testimony (Archetti 1994; Benson 1993; Ashley 1990; Daniel and Peck 1996; Manganaro 1995), there seems to be no argument that literary works do contain substantial descriptions and comments and asides which allow anthropologists judiciously to reconstruct an account of institutions central to the depicted societies. Indeed, in classical scholarship relating to Rome and Greece, this perusal of the texts to elucidate the nature of society has always been a stock in trade of classicists and, as we know, it was this pursuit which led to the publication in 1890 of the first edition of great anthropological text, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1998). Modern anthropological scholarship, however, is rightly sceptical of this piecing together of such rags and tags

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from disparate places and historical periods to compose patchwork quilts which have no other coherence than an attractive collage of colours. Context is all, and the reference to a certain belief or practice must always be related first to its positioning within the text itself, but then also to what we know of the institutions of that place and time from other sources. In other words, rather than looking out adventitiously for references to support a thesis − Frazer − we must approach these classical texts holistically and systematically, informed by both theory and by a circumspect use of a comparative method to offer a hypothesis. Classical scholarship and anthropology have both benefited from this greater rigour and the work of Moses Finley (1956), himself inspired by anthropological writings, has in this respect been inspirational for anthropologists such as Just (1989) and Humphreys (2004), in particular, who have been exemplary models of the way in which anthropologists can work successfully with the corpus of surviving classical documents and inscriptions to answer questions about ancient institutions of law, religion, family organization and economic behaviour. The success of the model, combined with a turn towards a new focus on Europe and its past, has led anthropologists to look further afield at other literatures. Epic literature, besides being steeped in religious ideas and concepts, frequently centres on issues of kingship and authority and the prerogatives of kinship, and is therefore readily amenable to anthropological enquiry. Victor Turner, who was always so passionate about how dramatic forms and literary analysis could inform and be informed by the contemplation of contemporary ritual practice in a variety of settings (Ashley1990) also demonstrated how much richer Norse and Icelandic texts could become for the reader who was aware of the anthropological dimensions of the issues discussed there (Turner 1971). Becker (1995), looking at South-east Asian texts from a linguist’s perspective, has convincingly shown how an understanding of the conventions of texts and their performance

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can immeasurably enrich our understanding of the world of the audience. More recently, Parkes (2003, 2006), in a series of articles in work which he himself refers to as old-fashioned comparative ethnography − Frazer with a twist − has looked at accounts of kinship and fostering practices as documented in chronicles, epics and histories throughout Asia and Europe and shown conclusively how central these ideas were to institutions of kingship and governance. So far so good. Few would dispute the new understandings that emerge from turning the trained anthropological eye on these texts, both to illuminate the texts themselves and to build up a picture of ‘heroic societies’. However, the extension of the method to look at more recent works in the modern period has been more controversial. To all those, for example, who happily look through Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for references to incest and make conclusions about social attitudes or to those who on the basis of reading modern Indonesian literature argue that traditional Minangkabau matrilineal institutions are breaking down, there is a sharp riposte from critics of that approach that their method is little more than a form of Frazerism: they commit the elementary error of failing to see that the themes and plots of the literature have a life of their own, independent of prevailing social institutions and beliefs; fiction should not be confused with reality, however realistic it is dressed out to be; literature although purporting to represent life, exists in another ontological dimension from it. The criticism has an impeccable Platonic pedigree: banish the poets, lest their work be taken seriously; take care that they do not become ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The force of the criticism is undeniable. It is undoubtedly the case that certain forms or genres capture the public imagination and have a vogue, and that throughout the time that the vogue flourishes, writers will explore the same issues under slightly different guises, employing not only the same literary frameworks – the same generic structures

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and the same conventions of language usage and diction (prose/verse, elevated/common, stylized/colloquial) – but also sharing the same moral assumptions. Consequently, it is simply misguided to rely on literary material as representative of contemporary social behaviour (cf. Watson 1995). And yet that criticism cannot entirely stand, for the reason that there have been and still are genres whose objective it is to represent society as closely as any ethnographic work, and which lay the literature of that genre open to the same scrutiny as ethnographic work, agreeing to abide by a judgement of its success or failure according to the validity of its descriptive narrative in the same way as any ethnography would stand or fall by such criteria. Thus, for this literature, and I am thinking primarily of the modern European novel and its imitations, it is the correspondence with the empirically observable facts on the ground on which it asks to be judged. This is obviously true of a writer like Zola who filled notebooks, carnets, with everyday observations, no differently from the anthropologist in the field, which he then incorporated into his novels (1986). But it is also true of Henry James, ensuring that he had his facts right concerning the underground stations at which trains would stop, and Balzac, consulting a map to confirm the route by which a character would walk to his destination. The argument might, however, continue along several lines. First, that although writers can painstakingly ensure the verisimilitude of their accounts by establishing a tight correspondence between their descriptions and empirically observed reality, the scenesetting is an essentially trivial part of the narrative and not what is of central concern either to those who want to argue for literature’s representative reliability or those who would question it. The food displayed in the market in Les Halles (Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris), the underground stations at which trains stopped (James’ The Wings of the Dove) or the names of streets in Paris along which characters walked (Balzac throughout

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La Comédie Humaine) are not what anthropologists turn to the novels for when seeking information about the social and cultural life of the times, so their accuracy at this level is besides the point. It is the greater assertions that this literature makes in terms of defining what the significant institutions of the society are and how they are perceived and are worked upon by human agency that occupy the anthropological reader. How the systems of marriage and property affect social arrangements, how control and authority are exercised, how religious practices constrain permissible behaviour, and above all how challenges to the institutions are articulated and how they are gradually transformed: these are what interest both the novelist and the anthropologist. But, say the critics, to accept the authority of the novel, is to fall prey, to twist slightly the technical meaning of the term, to an ‘unreliable narrator’ for the reasons mentioned above: the constraints of the genre. To which the response might be that – yes, the writer is indeed not fully reliable but then neither are informants in the field, and that the way in which anthropologists gather information and come to conclusions is by forever checking and cross-checking, triangulating and ground-truthing in the terminology of the hard sciences. Consequently, one reads literature not as an ultimate arbiter but as one source among others, and it is useful in helping us to refine our analysis, pose new questions and reframe the problem. If, as we largely agree − at least those of us who accept that anthropology is a study of meaning − that what we try to do is to interpret people’s own interpretations of their behaviour, then the writer is one of those people, and the writer’s interpretations demand to be taken as seriously as we take knowledgeable informants in the field, not always reliable and sometimes misfits but nonetheless acute observers. Another attack on what they regard as a meretricious use of literature as a source of information about the world comes from those whose point concerns not the intention

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of the writer but the response of the reader. The literary work – and here the argument is confined to creative, imagined literature – is announced as fiction; it is made up, the people and the society it describes only exist in the imagination (Lamarque and Olsen 1994). The reader knows this, and despite the verisimilitude of the novel and the way in which it strives to create an empathy between readers and the characters, sometimes eliciting a strong emotional response from the readers for the plight of the heroes – we cry for Anna Karenina (Radford 1975), as Plato would have been horrified to see – nonetheless we know that this is fiction: the characters are not real, the experience of the work is an experience of entertainment. We do not take the world for real, and when we witness how some people do make this mistake – attacking an actor in character on stage for apparently abusing his wife – we smile and condemn them for making an epistemological category mistake: we know that this is fiction and the world it describes is confined to the pages of the book or the action on the stage. If we could not tell the difference between fiction and reality, there would be chaos. Readers of literature adopt a fictive attitude to literature and consequently do not call upon it for understanding of the world because they realize that this would be illegitimate. Similarly, anthropologists should steer clear of taking the imagined for the real and they should stop conceptualizing literature as though it was documentary and recall their own reading habits: in reading the fiction of their own society, they make a sharp distinction between the real and the imagined. The argument turns on whether in fact what is said about the fictive attitude does correspond to the reader’s response and on whether, even knowing the difference between fiction and documentary, we make the sharp division in what we claim to know and learn from both sources. For example, reading an anthropological account of how the principle of matriliny in west Sumatran society is articulated in institutions such as

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postmarital residential arrangements and the division of property, we feel we know what happens; we trust the ethnographer to tell the truth since the work, announced as the product of observations in the field, contains an implicit pact between writer and reader of the authenticity of the description which the reader has no way of verifying. The information is accepted, taken on trust, and becomes part of our reliable knowledge that we would have no hesitation in passing on as authoritative. Reading a novel about those institutions, say Nur Sutan Iskandar’s Salah Pilih (1928), we realize it is fiction and that the characters and plot derive from the author’s imagination, but nonetheless we are also aware that the social problems around which the novel turns, in this case the prohibition on clan endogamy, corresponds to a reality of which the author has knowledge and whose genuineness he implicitly attests to. Thus, from this work, too, we come to feel in possession of ‘the facts’, though it is true perhaps that our assurance of their validity is not so strong as in the case of reading the ethnography. But, then, if hard-pressed by interlocutors doubtful of information derived from the ethnographic account, we would have to discuss the reliability of our sources in that case too, by, for example, referring to the length of time the researcher spent in the field, her mastery of the language and the reliability of her informants. Consequently, the issue of the fictive attitude turns out not to be so decisive an argument as it seemed. The most challenging ethnographic uses made of literature, however, concern not the detail of the nature of social institutions and how they are perceived, or at least not of individual institutions such as marriage and property for which they are frequently mined, but the assumption that great literature can inform us of the moral underpinning of society. And it is great literature which is meant. The claims suggesting that popular literature offers an equally if not more representative insight into society have some merit in relation to a description of practices and

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everyday habits but do not deal with what we might call, at the risk of sounding slightly pompous, the moral and intellectual universe of a people in a time and a place. Within studies of literature there has of course been a long tradition of eliciting from texts an account of the thought-world of a society. Works such as Dodds (2004 [1951]) and Goldmann (1964) claim to identify through close reading how thinkers and writers imagined the nature of reality and the role played by people and society in responding to and creating that reality. Philosophers such as Williams (1993) and Nussbaum (1995), in their accounts of the moral thought of the Greeks and its evolution, rely heavily on literary texts. And Macintyre (1985: 239−243) moves easily from Greek tragedy to Jane Austen by way of another Scrutineer, D.W. Harding (1998), to deduce views of moral responsibility. Such a use of classical texts, however, is a priori fraught with difficulty because of the very remoteness of that period from ourselves and the underwriting of those texts by centuries of interpretation and shifts in language usage which make it impossible to reconstruct writers’ original intentions, as Martindale (1993) so cogently argues. While accepting what Martindale says about the classical world, we could try to salvage the argument by pointing to the greater proximity to ourselves in time, language and, consequently, thought, of the modern period in Europe, the sixteenth century onwards, and demonstrate the salience of key terms that will allow us to reconstruct the thought world of those times. This is often in fact the practice of anthropologists, who build up their picture of a society by looking at the interlocking of words, phrases, sayings and proverbs within what is taken to be a homogeneous world-view. But the same sort of anthropological nervousness that now greets such attempts to define a cultural homogeneity also applies to our own attempts at using such methods to understand even chronologically close antecedents of our own society. Williams (1976) tried through

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examining the historical evolution of the transformations of keywords such as society, individual, politics and culture to illustrate the moral universes of earlier forms of English society and show how shifts in meaning reflected fundamental shifts of moral consciousness. But in a sharp critique, Skinner (1980) showed that Williams was simply not aware of the complexity of the debates that were taking place in eighteenthcentury British political thought and had failed to understand the process of historical change and the nature of the intellectual world of the time. The possibility of reconstruction, then, of even the recent history of our own society would seem at first sight to be an illusion. In fact, however, Skinner’s critique, powerful as it, does not invalidate the method. Indeed, the critique itself, and Skinner’s own detailed work on the history of political thought through the close examination of texts, demonstrates how well it can work. Edward Said once criticized Williams for his failure to look in any depth at English literature outside a British context, but Williams in this respect was a child of his time. Postcolonial criticism of the anglophone and francophone literature now flourishes, but most of it seems to me to be not very historically or anthropologically informed: politically sophisticated and critically intelligent yes, but at the same time anthropologically naïve and historically ignorant. I am sure that there are critical traditions in languages and literatures of which I am unaware where native critics do try to elicit a sense of a ‘structure of feeling’ from contemporary texts, in say India or Japan for example, but I would venture that − sound as interpretations of the texts as they are − they are seldom directed by anthropological enquiry or premised on anthropological concepts. And yet, where we would expect anthropologists, either external or indigenous, to be giving the lead, there is a notable neglect of modern textual traditions. Why is it that anthropologists, fully aware that the discipline no longer confines itself

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to non-literate societies and that in the contemporary world the production of written (and visual) fiction constitutes so much of the imaginative vision of all societies, seem to refuse to engage comprehensively with such literature? One damning reason for the dismissal of the import of fiction seems to be that many anthropologists − albeit not all (a striking exception being Barber 2007) − simply do not have the linguistic skills to understand such texts fully. Another is the failure to comprehend that beyond both the surface descriptions of the text there are dimensions which repay attempts to fathom the common understandings of the readers to whom they are addressed. At the level of popular literature we need to appreciate what makes an indigenous novel a runaway best seller. In my own field I should be able to relate the popularity of Ayat-Ayat Cinta, an Indonesian best seller in which a potent mix of religion and romance has caught the public fancy, to what I know about the evolution of concepts of Islam and modernity in Indonesian society today, and the reading of it must contribute to, as well as simply supplement, my understanding. At another level, however, I should be able to read the novels of more profound writers such as Umar Khayam orY.B. Mangunwidjaja, seeking to give fictional expression to their reflections on Indonesian society, with sufficient anthropological understanding to delineate what constitutes the thought-world not only of the writers themselves but also of the taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs which control the ordering of the society. Anthropologists who fail to take such literature into account, whatever else they may choose to describe in their monographs and papers, cannot claim to offer an account of how societies today interpret themselves. I have left to last one literary genre which in many ways seems to me to be the genre which most closely defines newly literate and newly emerging societies: namely, autobiography. In written contemporary autobiographies we find individuals trying to make sense for themselves of their own lives and of

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that of their contemporaries and passing on that sense of themselves and their role in the evolving history of their nations to a younger generation. Within my own recent work, I have found the reading of such texts immensely rewarding. I like to think my reading is anthropologically and historically well informed, but what I also found was required from the reading was a sensitive openness to linguistic usage and an intuitive grasp, born out of long acquaintance with modern Indonesian society, of the values and intentions which were determining the structuring of the texts themselves. Enough I hope has been said to demonstrate that in the ‘common pursuit’ of better understanding between social worlds over time and space, anthropology and literature, ethnography and literary criticism, history and theory, hermeneutics and epistemology, all have their contribution to make. There should be no question but that the ability to read literary texts, broadly defined, intelligently, critically and contextually, whether written in their own native language or in the language of the people about whom they write, should be the possession of all anthropologists.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila (1988) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Archetti, Eduardo P. (ed.) (1994) Exploring the Written: Anthropology and the Multiplicity of Writing. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Asad, Talal (1986) ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in Clifford and Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 141−164. Ashley, Kathleen M. (ed.) (1990) Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barber, Karin (2007) The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Barley, N. (1986) The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud-hut. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (first edition 1983). Becker, A.L. (1995) Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Benson, Paul (ed.) (1993) Anthropology and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bowen, Elenore Smith (1956) Return to Laughter. London: Readers Union and Victor Gollancz. Boyarin, Jonathan (ed.) (1993) The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Caplan, Patricia (1997) African Voices, African Lives: Personal narratives from a Swahili Village. London: Routledge. Casagrande, Joseph B. (ed.) (1960) In the Company of Man. Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Clark, Elizabeth A. (2004) Text, Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent (1980) Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Crapanzano, Vincent (1986) ‘Hermes Dilemma: The Making of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 51−76. Daniel, E. Valentine and Jeffrey M. Peck (eds) (1996) Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Study. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Davis, Natalie Z. (1981) ‘The Possibilities of the Past’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 2, The New History: The 1980s and Beyond (II), Autumn, pp. 267−275. Descola, Philippe (1996) The Spears of Twilight; Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle. New York: The New Press. Dodds, E.R. (2004) The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (first edition 1951). Dumont, Jean-Paul (1978) The Headman and I. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Dyk, W. (1967) Son of Old Man Hat: a Navaho Autobiography. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: University of Columbia Press.

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Finley, M.I. (1956) The World of Odysseus. London: Chatto and Windus. Finnegan, Ruth (1970) Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Finnegan, Ruth (2007) The ‘Oral’ and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Frazer, James George (1998) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A new abridgement from the second and third editions (edited by Robert Fraser), Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original edition 1890). Gaffney, Patrick D. (1994) The Prophet’s Pulpit. Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gardner, Katy (1991) Songs from the River’s Edge: Stories from a Bangladesh Village. London: Virago. Geertz, Hildred (1975) ‘An Anthropology of Religion and Magic I’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer, pp. 71−89. Ginzburg, Carlo (1982) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goldmann, Lucien (1964) The Hidden God: A Study of the Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, translated by P. Thody. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goody, Jack (1972) The Myth of the Bagre. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goody, Jack (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack (1986) The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack (1987) The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack and Ian Watt (1963) ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3, April, pp. 304−345. Griaule, Marcel (1975) Conversations with Ogotemelli. An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press (originally published as Dieu D’eau 1948). Grimshaw, Anna (1982) Servants of the Buddha. London: Open Letters. Handler, Richard and Daniel Segal (1999) Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield. Harding, D.W. (1998) Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen. London: Athlone Press. Herzfeld, Michael (1988) The Politics of Manhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Humphreys, S.C. (2004) The Strangeness of the Gods: Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jedamski, Doris (1990) Die Institution Literatur und Der Prozess Ihrer Kolonisation; Enstehung, Entwicklung und Arbeitsweise des Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur/ Balai Pustaka in Niederländisch-Indien zu Beginn dieses Jahrhunderts. Münster and Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Just, Roger (1989) Women in Athenian Law and Life. London: Routledge. Kuipers, Joel C. (1998) Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haugom Olsen (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leavis, Q.D. 1932 Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, Oscar (1962) The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. London: Secker and Warburg. Llosa, Maria Vargas (1989) The Storyteller, translated by Helen Lane. New York: Picador. Lord, A.B. (1960) The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacClancy, Jeremy (1996) ‘Fieldwork Styles: Bohannan, Barley and Gardner, in J. MacClancy and C. McDonaugh (eds), Popularizing Anthropology. London: Routledge. MacClancy, Jeremy (2005) The Literary Image of Anthropologists, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 3, September, pp. 549−579. Macintyre, Alastair (1985) After Virtue, a Study in Moral Theory (second edition). London: Duckworth. Malinowski, B. (1967) A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: Routledge. Manganaro, Mark (ed.) (1990) Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George E. and Dick Cushman (1982) ‘Ethnographies as Texts’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 11, pp. 25−69. Martindale, Charles (1993) Redeeming the Text. Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meeker, Michael (1994) ‘Oral Culture, Media Culture and the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey’, in Eduardo P. Archetti (ed.), Exploring the Written: Anthropology and the Multiplicity of Writing. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Melhuus, Marit (1997) ‘Exploring the Work of a Compassionate Ethnographer. The Case of Oscar

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Lewis’, Social Anthropology, 5 (1), February: 35−54. Metcalf, Peter (1997) They Lie, We Lie. Getting on with Anthropology. London: Routledge. Millie, Julian (2009) Splashed by the Saint. Ritual Reading and Islamic Sanctity in West Java. Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) 1981 On Narrative. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Muir, Edward and Guido Ruggiero (eds) (1991) Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nur Sutan Iskandar (1928) Salah Pilih. Djakarta: Balai Pustaka. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1995) Poetic Justice. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen Press. Parkes, Peter (2006) ‘Celtic Fosterage, Adoptive Kinship and Clientage in Northwest Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2) April: 359–395. Parkes, Peter (2003) ‘Fostering Fealty: A Comparative Analysis of Tributary Allegiances of Adoptive Kinship’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, (4) October: 741–782. Parry, Milman (1971) The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited by A. Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Powdermaker, Hortense (1967) Stranger and Friend: The Way of the Anthropologist. London: Secker and Warburg. Radford, Colin (1975) ‘Why Should We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement, 69: 67−80. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and S.H. Olsen (eds), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Radin, Paul (ed.) (1999) Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (first edition 1926). Raheja, Gloria Goodwin and Anna Grodzins (1994) Listen to the Heron’s Words. Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rapport, Nigel (1994) The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M.Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Read, Kenneth E. (1965) The High Valley. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons. Sanjek, Roger (ed.) (1990) Fieldnotes. The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Schulte Nordholt, H. (1994) The Making of Traditional Bali in History and Anthropology, 8, (1−4): 89−127. Shostak, Marjorie (1981) Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Skinner, Quentin (1980) ‘Language and Social Change’, in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (eds), The State of the Language. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spencer, Jonathan (1989) Anthropology as a Kind of Writing, Man, 24, (1), March: 145−164. Street, Brian V. (ed.) (1993) Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sweeney, Amin (1987) A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thomas, Keith (1963) ‘History and Anthropology’, Past and Present, 24, April. Thomas, Keith (1975) ‘Anthropology of Religion and Magic II’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6, (1), Summer: 90−110. Turner, Victor (1971) ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Sagas’, in T. Beidelman (ed.), The Translation

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of Culture. Essays presented to E.E. Evans-Pritchard. London: Tavistock, pp. 349−374. Vansina, Jan (1985) Oral Tradition as History. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press (first edition 1961). Visweswaran, Kamala (1994) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Watson, C.W. (1995) The Novelist’s Consciousness, in Anthony P. Cohen and Nigel Rapport (eds), Questions of Consciousness. ASA Monographs 33. London: Routledge, pp. 77−98. Watson, C.W. (ed.) (1999) Being There. Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. Williams, Bernard (1993) Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wolf, Margery (1992) A Thrice-Told Tale, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zola, Emile (1986) Carnets d’enquêtes: une ethnographie inédite de la France, textes établis et présentés par Henri Mitterand. Paris: Plon.

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PART 2

PLACES Edited by Mark Nuttall

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Introduction − Place, Region, Culture, History: From Area Studies to a Globalized World Mark Nuttall

A popular image of the anthropologist, immersed in solitary ethnographic research somewhere far from home, is often conjured up to distinguish anthropology from closelyrelated disciplines such as sociology. But this image is increasingly critiqued by anthropologists themselves (and not only because fieldwork is carried out close to, and at home as well). Social anthropologists have to be more than fieldworkers in specific geographical places and locations; places have histories, including histories of their representation, and they connect with other places, both culturally and historically. Nonetheless, fieldwork remains a cornerstone of anthropological method and practice. Long-term engagement with communities, localities, places and regions not only provides insight into the diversity and richness of human life in different places at all times, in the past and present, as well as anticipation of what life may be like in the future, but also it provides fundamental material for anthropological theorizing. Part 2 highlights the work anthropologists do in different places of the world and the ethnographies they produce as an outcome of that work. The acceleration of interconnections around the world, and their increased

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density (not least through human population growth and movement) in the past quarter century, has altered the nature of the places in which anthropologists work, challenging them to rethink the wider contexts in which they encounter and engage with particular places of fieldwork: how places have come to be what they are and what they seem to be, how they have emerged as geographic expressions and cartographic imaginaries, been made into communities and celebrated as cultural homelands, or developed as political concepts, geopolitical regions, entities and ideas. Part 2 does not aspire to complete coverage of the globe in regional review, so readers will doubtless discover that a number of places are not included. Omissions are inevitable given constraints of length, but it is hoped that areas such as mainland Southeast Asia and parts of Oceania will be covered in the event of a later edition of the Handbook. Yet, in providing a nonetheless wide-ranging survey of major literature, themes and issues, the fifteen chapters capture many of the contemporary trends in the localized work anthropologists carry out around the world. Each chapter highlights key trends in ethnographic writing on a particular area (variously

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defined) over a period of, more or less, the past quarter century, and highlights emerging topics significant to current and future theoretical and ethnographic debate. Part of this involves questioning the historically fabricated ideas of the places and regions and movements that define these chapters, while still retaining a sense of the significance of places, and the effort to understand their different natures, that remains key to the anthropological endeavour. Quite which places become central to anthropological theorizing has varied historically. For instance, Mark Nuttall argues that, for a period, the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of the circumpolar North became peripheral to mainstream social anthropological theory and practice. But they are moving back to mainstream attention as the circumpolar world emerges as a region of international political and ecological concern, and at the same time a contested space where indigenous peoples negotiate land claims and forms of self-government predicated on ideas of indigenous homelands. Anthropologists working in the North are contributing to understanding such topics as human movement, human−environment/human−animal relations, personhood and kinship, indigenous rights and self-determination, and more recent settler societies, as well as environmental sustainability and global climate change. Looking to another place that has received increasing attention from anthropologists, Sarah Green shows how social anthropology’s engagement with Europe over the past quarter century, both as place and as idea, has been ‘diverse, intense, inventive and ambivalent’. She discusses the historical diversity of traditions and approaches to studying Europe, struggles with the distinction between self and other in the European context, the shifting nature of Europe, and the ways in which the social, political and economic changes affecting Europe over the period have transformed its geopolitical shape and relations with the rest of the world. As an entity, Europe is simultaneously many

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places with multiple interrelated locations; the chapter covers a growing literature that demonstrates how the relational and multiple character of Europe informs anthropological studies of, within and about Europe and its many parts. David Pratten discusses anthropology’s long engagement with sub-Saharan Africa, the region which has probably contributed more than any other to enduring topics of anthropological fascination, like witchcraft, ritual symbolism, descent theory, and local political processes, and customary law. Assessment of this regional prominence in the making of anthropological theory has itself become a reflexive concern of Africanist anthropologists to which they have reacted in terms of three intellectual moves: retroversion, introversion and extraversion. Pratten explains that, ‘since the 1980s African anthropology has challenged its past, interrogated the categories through which it knows the continent, and has illuminated those histories and issues through which Africa has been entangled with the rest of the world.’ As Pratten concludes, ‘the relative strength of the relationship between anthropology and Africa is not the issue; both are mutually implicated and mutually dependent.’ By contrast, Glenn Bowman makes a case that work coming out of the Middle East and North Africa, which was until lately tangential to current concerns in social anthropology, is now becoming mainstream: features of the region which seemed exceptional to a previous anthropology (such as urban cosmopolitanism, Islam, the networking of local, regional, urban, national and diasporic populations, and the situatedness of observers in all this) are central concerns of the contemporary discipline. He suggests that Middle Eastern and North African anthropologies have the potential to become exemplary sites for contemporary anthropology. At the heart of Bowman’s chapter is a critique of the categories of the Middle East and North Africa, and he explores strategies to reshape and refigure them.

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Magnus Marsden makes an innovative comparison between Southwest Asia and Central Asia, noting that most attempts to fashion the regional study of Central Asia have failed to consider Pakistan and Afghanistan. While significant anthropological scholarship on Central Asia existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union, critical attempts by anthropologists to identify the region as independent of the Middle East and Eurasia have largely been made since 1990; issues of concern have included postcolonialism, post-socialism, Islam and everyday religious life, the anthropology of the state, politics and ethnicity, and migration and transnationalism. Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery deal with what, like sub-Saharan Africa, has been another of the most stable, and long-standing ethnographic regions, South Asia. Concentrating on literature from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, they discuss research relating to gender and the body, work and livelihoods, religion, identities and political conflict, and the state and globalization. They show how anthropologists have been drawn increasingly into the overtly politicized aspects of life in South Asia, such as negotiations over economic resources, struggles over access to democratic institutions, and questions of power and social and economic inequalities; these kinds of political engagements, they argue, are likely to grow and become the predominant concerns of the anthropology of South Asia in the near future. As Dolores Martinez argues for Japan, for over a century Japanese anthropology has provided the most sustained case study of an anthropology of modernity, as well as the growth of a substantial cadre of anthropologists. She discusses recent preoccupations with particular aspects of Japanese modernity − identity, personhood and the self, environment and nature, and increasing concern with diversity and the heterogeneity of Japanese society − in light of more longstanding interests in the ideal of Japan as a classless and culturally distinct society.

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Martinez discusses the debates about the contested nature of Japanese anthropology but argues that, above all, the anthropology of Japan is about the anthropology of the development of a nation-state. As such, she reaffirms a point expressed by Japanese scholars that anthropology more generally has much to learn by paying greater attention to the arguments, theories and methods of Japanese anthropology. China is in some senses the other side of the coin and Jeremy Eades writes about the emergence of the anthropology of China, and the reshaping of interests and reorientation of theory and method, as that vast country and population undergoes what must be the most rapid industrial transformation since the initial Industrial Revolution. He points to a growing, yet rapidly changing literature that must be approached and understood within the context of transitions in Chinese society and economy. Beginning with a summary of the main research concerns before China’s reopening following the economic reforms, Eades then examines studies of rural communities and ethnic minorities on the Chinese periphery which began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s. He also draws attention to several other issues of pressing contemporary concern that are increasingly examined in the literature, such as religion, urbanization and internal migration, gender and the economic position of women, the effects of population policies, and consumption and popular culture. Roy Ellen outlines recent changes in the anthropological approaches to Archipelagic (or island) Southeast Asia where, by the 1980s, colonial and national traditions of ethnography were beginning to give way to more heterogeneous and international styles. The issues receiving most attention from anthropologists are diverse. Some issues are newer − including coastal and maritime topics (including fishing and artisanal whaling, territorial rights, coastal erosion and sea-level rise), rural−urban migration, the growth of capital cities and mega-cities

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(including the role of the urban poor in the informal economy) − whereas other issues are long-standing, such as foraging and subsistence systems, ethnicity and identity, kinship and social organization, belief, religion and ritual, economic and environmental change, politics, identity, ethnicity and nationalism. Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry survey some recent developments in anthropological work on Australia, Melanesia and New Zealand, respectively. While pointing to markedly different traditions of scholarship, they share a realization that the indigenous cultures of these three regions no longer occupy the central position they once did in the production of grand anthropological theorization. This does not preclude instances from these regions on occasion featuring in wider anthropological debate and theory, but generally the politics of research often determines the nature of anthropological work. Anthropological research is becoming increasingly difficult in Melanesia because of local political situations and tensions; although anthropologists find themselves in demand in Australia, it is often as consultants in Aboriginal land claims; by contrast, research among Maori in New Zealand has declined, because claims to land and rights involve historical grievances that require the insights of historians rather than anthropologists. The societies of indigenous America are surveyed in two sections: the first on indigenous North America by Pauline Turner Strong; the second on indigenous South America by Kathleen Lowrey. Although indigenous peoples throughout the Americas share compelling similarities, in both their historical and colonial encounters and their contemporary situations, anthropologists have approached the northern and southern sub-continents in profoundly different ways. Strong demonstrates the concerns with sovereignty and self-representation, cultural property and cultural heritage, cultural and linguistic revitalization, and cultural identity and community that have characterized scholarship on North America; Lowrey

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explores the emergence of the anthropology of indigenous South America not only as an outcome of European and North American encounters and research but also through the establishment and development of domestic schools of anthropology. In the following chapter, focusing innovatively on what anthropologists have to say about nonindigenous societies throughout the Americas, John Gledhill and Peter Wade propose that the anthropology of the Americas ‘has proved paradigm shifting in ways that advance thinking in the discipline more broadly and enable it to engage critically with fundamental social and political questions.’ Work on America has contributed particularly to the broader discipline of anthropology in ‘discussion of what is at stake in “ethnic” and “racial” categories as complex historical constructions.’ Gledhill and Wade demonstrate how ethnographic writings on immigrants to the Americas entailed researches of continental scope and historical depth that challenged existing anthropological methods and conceptual frameworks. Vered Amit continues this exploration of the similarities and differences between kinds of movement and mobility. For her, the study of movement has been foundational in the development of anthropology and other cognate disciplines such as sociology: early sociological theorists sought to conceptualize processes of urbanization and industrialization, while anthropology has long grappled with understanding different kinds of movement. Despite this being a current hot topic, however, she cautions against making ‘overly generalized invocations of contemporary mobility’. Nigel Rapport broadens the discussion of physical movement to consider the ways cosmopolitanism makes anthropological sense of the human condition, touching upon current debates on globalization, diaspora, transnationalism, transculturation, hybridity and ecumenism, and placing these in the light of human experience of embodiment. In a final contrast, Robert Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli demonstrate how a sense of locality, sustained by

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INTRODUCTION

the social and cultural meanings of particular places, has become the key to claims advanced by the world’s indigenous peoples. Whereas indigenous political leaders move increasingly within transnational and global networks of indigenous activism, they make

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appeals for recognition of rights to land, culture and distinctiveness that are linked to specific places: this thought neatly closes these chapters, which have all been concerned with the making of commensurability in claims about places.

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2.1 The Circumpolar North: Locating the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Mark Nuttall

LOCATING THE CIRCUMPOLAR NORTH Long considered remote, and placed at the very edge of world maps in the geographical imaginary, the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of the globe have also been somewhat peripheral to mainstream social anthropological theory and practice. Consider the kinds of monographs found on undergraduate social anthropology course reading lists. Typically, students are steered towards ethnographic classics and contemporary material from Africa, South Asia, Australasia, Melanesia, South America, Europe and most other parts of the world. Seldom, it seems, do ethnographies from high latitudes form part of the essential readings necessary for a solid foundational education in anthropology. This is not to say, however, that Arctic peoples have been absent from anthropological enquiry and theorizing, nor is it to suggest that published materials on circumpolar societies and cultures are not extensive. The situation is changing, moreover, and recent work has begun to contribute to wider anthropological debate. This chapter deals largely with anthropological research and scholarship of the past quarter century or so and, because of space constraints, refers mainly to studies published and available in English. I must also add that the circumpolar North covers a vast

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area of the planet, divided among eight nations (United States [Alaska], Canada, Denmark [Greenland], Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia); a diversity of indigenous peoples as well as more recent settlers live there and this chapter cannot, and does not, pretend to offer comprehensive coverage of a rapidly growing literature or to present a theoretical or ethnographic synthesis of the region as a whole (there is also a bias towards anthropological work with indigenous peoples, although in mitigation ethnographies of non-indigenous people are few and far between in comparison). Rather, my aim is to give the reader a taste of some of the key studies anthropologists have carried out in recent years as well as some of the major themes that preoccupy them. The popular image of the circumpolar North is of a treeless, remote wilderness with cold winters and cool summers occupying the northern reaches of the world. Geographically, it includes the Arctic Ocean, many islands and archipelagos, and the northern parts of the mainland areas of North America and Eurasia. The largest Arctic land areas are in Russia, Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Fennoscandia.1 There is considerable debate, in fact, as to how the Arctic should be identified and defined and where its southern boundaries actually lie. Definitions of the Arctic vary according to environmental,

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LOCATING THE ARCTIC AND SUB-ARCTIC

geographical, political, cultural and scientific perspectives and biases. Confusion also arises because of the way ‘Arctic’, ‘circumpolar North’, ‘Northern regions’ and ‘the North’ are all used interchangeably (Nuttall, 2005). Without wishing to add to the confusion, in this chapter I use all of these terms, but I title it ‘The Circumpolar North’ in recognition that the term encompasses regions described as arctic, sub-arctic and boreal.

REASSESSING EARLY ETHNOGRAPHY Although the first accounts of Arctic peoples are to be credited to explorers, missionaries and traders, from the sixteenth century onwards into the nineteenth, the first major studies of Arctic societies date from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s or so, many being products of large, scientific expeditions to northern coastal regions. Peoples such as the Inuit of Alaska, Canada and Greenland and the Chukchi of eastern Siberia entered the consciousness of a nascent anthropology, inspiring theories of migration, material culture, culture areas, shamanism, settlement patterns and environmental adaptation (specifically within a context of environmental determinism). Marcel Mauss’s Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo (written in collaboration with Henri Beuchat and first published in 1906) may be one of the more famous works on the circumpolar North that anthropologists know of, and indeed it was inspirational in the early days of the discipline, yet Mauss himself did not carry out fieldwork in an Arctic region − this exemplary essay on social morphology drew on the lengthy and rich writings of ethnographer-explorers who had worked in many parts of Alaska, Canada and Greenland from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards. In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States and descriptions of indigenous cultures were by-products of the surveys of geography and natural history that soon followed American acquisition. They included

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such as The Eskimo about Bering Strait by Edward Nelson (published in 1899 and based on his travels between 1877 and 1881) and John Murdock’s Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition, published in 1892 and drawing on a sojourn in northern Alaska in 1881−1883. A new age of scientific exploration and research in the polar regions began with the first International Polar Year (IPY) in 1882−1883 − expeditions, projects and surveys produced a wealth of material that remains tremendously significant today, contributing to understanding the historical and contemporary environments, peoples and cultures of regions such as northern Alaska, the eastern Canadian Arctic, coastal Labrador, northern Fennoscandia and northern Russia. In fact, the first three scientific descriptions of the Inuit are derived from German, Danish and US contributions to the first IPY and credited to Franz Boas, who wrote The Central Eskimo (1888) based on his year in Canada’s southern Baffin Island in 1883− 1984; Gustav Holm, whose Ethnological Sketch of the Angmagsalik Eskimo appeared first in German in 1888 and in English in 1914, and was a description of the people he met on Greenland’s east coast between 1883 and 1885; and Lucien Turner who published Ethnology of the Ungava District (1894) derived from his service as a US meteorological officer in 1882−1984. Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Knud Rasmussen led later scientific expeditions that were to have a major impact on anthropology: Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913−1918) studied the Copper Inuit and, subsequently, Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition travelled from Greenland across the Canadian Arctic to northern Alaska between 1921 and 1924. In Siberia and the Russian Far East, Waldemar Bogoras, Waldemar Jochelson and Leo Sternberg, who had all been exiled to Siberia in the 1890s, began to gather ethnographic material about the peoples amongst who they were living (Schweitzer 2000). Bogoras and Jochelson later joined the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, organized and led

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by Franz Boas between 1897 and 1902, and worked amongst the Chukchi and Koryak, respectively (Jochelson also worked with the Yukaghir). Bogoras’s monumental work The Chukchee (1904−1909) is widely considered the single best historical source on this Siberian people (Schweitzer 2000), while Jochelson’s monographs on the Koryak and Yukaghir are also rated amongst the finest ethnographies of northeastern Siberia. Just as Mauss’s theories were influenced by early descriptions of the Inuit, so was Robert Lowie profoundly struck by the works of Bogoras and Jochelson, using them to inform and illustrate his arguments in Primitive Society (1920). The work produced by these pioneering ethnographers was rich and descriptive and inspired the enquiries of later generations of anthropologists − indeed, they remain significant accounts of Arctic peoples and are unparalleled historical sources that anthropologists have yet to mine fully. I note this at the beginning of this chapter because it demonstrates the impact of Arctic ethnography on early anthropology, even if much theorizing about such things as ‘primitive communism’ and ‘Arctic hysteria’ has been now consigned to the past. Ethnographic work carried out in subsequent decades did not make the same kind of impression. This is not to dismiss a large and impressive literature. Readers wishing to gain insight into the vast Arctic anthropology literature that accumulated during the twentieth century, as well as the major themes and issues coming out of northern places, would find works by Damas (1984), Graburn and Strong (1973) and the Minority Rights Group (1994) rich and informative. Yet, little anthropological work carried out in the Arctic, certainly in the two or three decades following the Second World War, influenced much in the way of theory, at least in European anthropology, although books such as Jean Briggs’s Never in Anger (1970) and Hugh Brody’s The People’s Land (1975) certainly made a lasting imprint on the anthropological imagination.

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As David Riches pointed out in a seminal essay on Inuit ethnography, a tendency to see, study and describe Arctic societies such as those of the Inuit in Alaska, Canada and Greenland as isolated and traditional only served to isolate such scholarship from the mainstream (Riches, 1990). Indeed, Franz Boas once famously suggested that the Inuit have no myths of origin because they are too busy fighting for survival, while Danish ethnographer and geographer Kaj BirketSmith, in keeping with the view at the time that nature is external to the human world and that life in the Arctic is a constant struggle, wrote that ‘the life of the Greenlanders is a silent fight against cold, against starvation, indeed against space itself – the immense wastes of the Arctic’ (Birket-Smith, 1928: 2). Following the Second World War, Arctic anthropology also came to be characterized by different national approaches; for example, Canadian and US-based anthropologists favoured studies of kinship and alliances, leadership, social organization and social change or cultural ecology and ecological adaptations, whereas in the Soviet Union anthropologists were preoccupied with ethnogenesis and ethnic history. Ann Fienup-Riordan, referring specifically to Yup’ik communities of western Alaska, has written that ‘Western observers have simultaneously naturalized Eskimos as paragons of simplicity and virtue and historicized them as the victims of Western imperialism’ (FienupRiordan, 1990: xvi), and in a recent perceptive and provocative book, that has considerable generic relevance for other parts of the Arctic too, John Steckley (2008) has critiqued the cultural assumptions and mythologizing that have led to misreadings and misunderstandings of Inuit societies and cultures. Only in recent years, specifically from the late 1980s or early 1990s, has a newer generation of anthropologists engaged with circumpolar issues and contributed to the emergence of anthropological perspectives and theories that not only enhance understanding of northern regions but also contribute to the wider discipline of social anthropology. In seeking

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to address images, representations and misunderstandings of Arctic peoples, societies and cultures, they have both challenged previous disciplinary assumptions and advanced anthropological theory and practice. We are now entering a period when research carried out in high latitudes may once again have an important influence on the anthropological imagination. The reasons for this are several: the circumpolar North has emerged as an international political region perceived as under threat from sovereignty disputes, resource development, environmental degradation and climate change; there is now greater access to Siberia and the Russian North by Western anthropologists following the collapse of the Soviet Union; finally, there has been a growth of indigenous movements for land claims and self-determination, and concurrently a move by indigenous communities themselves to influence and control the nature and scope of research.

THE HUMAN WORLD The circumpolar North is a place, an idea and a discursive space (see, e.g., Heininen and Southcott, 2010; Nuttall, 1998). It has been viewed as a frontier of geographical and scientific exploration, and as a resource-rich hinterland, but a number of studies have set out to critique this while demonstrating the influence such persistent images have on northern societies (Brody, 1983; Chance, 1990; Nuttall, 2010). Far from being an empty wilderness or a resource frontier of boundless wealth, anthropologists have shown that this is very much a human world, a place where indigenous and local communities have depended on the living resources of land and sea, as hunters, fishers and reindeer herders (e.g., see Krupnik, 1993) in both historic and contemporary times. The importance of history has been underlined most markedly in significant studies from Iceland. Gisli Pálsson (1995) has described the cultural importance of language and the social power of historical and cultural texts

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for Icelanders, which have underpinned Icelandic identity from the days of settlement over a thousand years ago to the modern nation-state. Through analysis of tradition and ideology, landscape, memory and community, Kirsten Hastrup (1998) has shown how everyday life in Iceland is informed by the profound sense of a living tradition with historical depth that emphasizes cultural uniqueness. Different representations, images and ideas of the circumpolar North have also shaped different histories about the North, its peoples, wildlife and the environment; they have influenced ideals and ideologies about exploration, discovery, science, settlement and development; they have inflected attitudes towards, and relations with, Northern people; and they continue to inform debates about the future of circumpolar lands and peoples, thus offering fertile ground for anthropological investigation about historical and contemporary processes and about human−environment and human−animal relations. Beatrice Collignon’s ethnography of an Inuinnait community in Canada’s western Arctic uses the richness of place names and of local history, inscribed in a vast ancestral landscape, to refute the perception of many outsiders that the land is empty (Collignon, 2005). John Kennedy’s detailed work has blended historical anthropology and contemporary ethnography to illustrate how northern communities have long been affected by − and indeed are often the products of − global processes. Kennedy (1995) describes early European settlement on the coast of southern Labrador and the emergence of distinctive identity as a result of in-marriage between settlers and indigenous people, mainly the Inuit. Labrador coastal communities developed viable fisheries but they have been vulnerable to the fluctuations in local and world markets, out-migration and the influence of the state. Kennedy’s work is a fine example of how anthropologists have attempted to conceptualize linkages between northern communities and seemingly farflung, but nonetheless influential, centres of

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capital, control and domination, as Richard Caulfield and Jens Dahl have also done for whaling and seal hunting and small-scale coastal fishing communities in west Greenland (Caulfield, 1997; Dahl, 2000). Gisli Pálsson’s (1991) work on Icelandic fisheries challenged theoretical assumptions in ecological and symbolic anthropology and explored how relations and interactions between people and the environment were represented over time in both indigenous and anthropological discourse. By arguing that it is social discourse and social relations that allow us to understand the complexity of human and environmental relations, Pálsson moves us away from thinking only in terms of an ecosystem approach, or in terms of the symbolic, and encourages us to think of the significance of human intention and purpose in economic production. Although indigenous peoples are minorities in most parts of the circumpolar North (especially in Alaska, much of northern Canada, Fennoscandia and Russia), and while non-indigenous people make their lives there, the social anthropology of this northern world has been − and continues to be − preoccupied largely with indigenous peoples and indigenous issues. Indigenous populations include the Iñupiat, Yupiit, Alutiit, Aleuts and Athapaskans of Alaska; the Inuit, Inuvialuit, Athapaskans and Dene of northern Canada; the Kalaallit and Inughuit of Greenland; the Saami of northern Fennoscandia and Russia’s Kola Peninsula; and the Chukchi, Even, Evenk, Nenets, Nivkhi, Yukaghir and many other groups of the Russian Far North and Siberia (for a good overview of the contemporary situations of indigenous peoples, see Freeman, 2000). Anthropologists have long been drawn to studying hunting, herding, fishing and gathering, which are the main activities in many indigenous communities. Research has illuminated the complexity of indigenous communities characterized by mixed economies, where half or more of household incomes may come from wage employment, simple commodity production, or from government

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transfer payments (Caulfield, 2000). Yet hunting, herding, gathering and fishing activities remain of central importance, satisfying social, cultural and nutritional needs, as well as economic ones, and anthropologists have been concerned with understanding their significance for social identity, cultural survival and spiritual life: see Bodenhorn (2000) for northern Alaska, Hovelsrud-Broda (2000) for East Greenland and Wenzel (2000) for eastern Baffin Island. In particular, the place of animals and spirits, and people’s relationships with them has been a perennial theme of much northern-focused scholarship, exemplified recently by Willerslev’s excellent account of the Yukaghir of the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia (Willerslev, 2007). The dependence on animals for food, as well as for social, cultural and economic well-being, has also been the concern of anthropologists interested in rules for community hunting, in herding traditions and in patterns of sharing and gift-giving based on kinship ties and other forms of close social relatedness (Dahl, 2000; Fienup-Riordan, 1983; Kalland and Sejersen, 2005; Nuttall, 1992; Willerslev, 2007). Studies show how participation in family and community hunting, herding and fishing activities contributes to defining and reinforcing a sense of social relatedness, which is important for community and cultural identity, as well as providing a moral framework for relationships between people and between people and animals (Anderson, 2000; Dahl, 2000; Wenzel, 1991). Important work has been carried out on the gendered and generational aspects of these processes (e.g. Bodenhorn, 1990; Shannon, 2006). Anthropologists have generally agreed that kinship remains the very foundation of the social organization of many Arctic societies, and this is one area of research that can trace its own genealogy back to early ethnographers. In Greenlandic hunting and fishing settlements, for example, kinship is both the basis for social relatedness and social organization − not only between people but

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also between people and animals as nonhuman persons − as well as being a key organizing principle for hunting and fishing. The boundaries of kindred and descent-based groups, though, are shifting constantly, as are the interpersonal relationships that are defined in terms of kinship. In my own work, I have described how kinship is multifaceted, embracing genealogy, consanguinity, affinity, friendship, name-sharing, birthday partners, age-sets, the living and the dead (Nuttall, 1992), whereas, for northern and northwest Alaska, Ernest Burch has written extensively on historical and contemporary aspects of Iñupiat kinship and social organization, alliances, resource use and territorial organization (Burch, 1998, 2005, 2006). There is a fundamental belief in Inuit communities that when people die, their names, their kinship relations and their family relationships carry on in newborn children, so that people retain their social presence despite their physical absence. Anthropologists have pointed to the continued importance of naming, and the significance of these practices for indigenous understandings of personhood and identity (Alia, 2007; Fienup-Riordan, 1983; Nuttall 1992). In a significant study of Inuit childrearing practices, Jean Briggs examined dramatic interactions between a 3-year-old Inuit girl and the adults in her immediate social world, extending anthropological understanding of personhood and social interaction (Briggs, 1998). One of the few recent anthropological works to engage with kinship and the family beyond studies focused on Inuit is Klinovskaya Rockhill’s (2010) account of social orphans and residential care in the Russian Far East, in which it is argued that the state has become an integral member of post-Soviet kinship.

CHANGE AND CONTINUITY The colonization of the Arctic, and the exploitation of its resources, starting from the sixteenth century, but with increasing intensity during the nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, resulted in more frequent contact between indigenous peoples and outsiders, and a greater presence of the state in people’s lives. This also has been a recent area of concern for anthropologists (see Ssorin-Chaikov, 2003 for an account of statal presence in Siberia). Over the past fifty to one hundred years in particular, indigenous cultures have been affected by dramatic and far-reaching social, economic and political changes; tracing these processes, and understanding their impact and the responses to them, have been at the heart of many anthropological studies. For example, in northern Canada during the 1960s and 1970s, a number of social anthropological studies focused on ethnic conflicts between indigenous peoples and transient incomers, many of whom were representatives of government agencies (e.g. Brody, 1975). In a later study, Matthiasson (1992) compared Inuit life as it was lived on the land in northern Baffin Island in the early 1960s with that of settlement life a decade later. Descriptions of camp life in the ‘contact-traditional’ period are accompanied by summary accounts of the implementation of federal policy, the transition from trading post to settlement, relations between Inuit and white Canadians, and the politicization of Inuit culture. Despite widespread changes, there is a continuity in terms of how indigenous people rely on terrestrial and marine resources, and maintain human−animal and human−environment relations. This has been extensively documented by anthropologists such as David Anderson (2000), Florian Stammler (2007), Piers Vitebsky (2005) and Rane Willerslev (2007) for Siberia, Richard Caulfield (1997), Jens Dahl (2000) and Mark Nuttall (1992) for Greenland, Ann Fienup-Riordan (2000) for Alaska, and George Wenzel (1991) for Canada. Fienup-Riordan (2000) shows that such continuity is often dependent on the ways indigenous people view the place of ‘tradition’ within contexts of globalization. In her ethnography of the Viliui Sakha, contemporary horse and cattle agropastoralists of eastern Siberia, Susan Crate (2005)

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teases out the relationships between and consequences of local and global economic forces, showing how people conceptualize, understand and manage modernity and globalization. In the Russian North and Siberia, the period of postsocialist transition following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought its own challenges for indigenous peoples. In his account of a reindeer-herding brigade in Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula, David Anderson describes Evenki daily life in the context of economic and ecological challenges. An original contribution to historical and political dynamics of northern Asia in particular, and the circumpolar North more generally, Anderson’s work grapples with questions of ecological theory, nationalism and the formation of identity, showing how the Soviet state contributed to identity policy. In his account of the Dolgan and Nganasan, John Ziker (2002) describes how people adapted their hunting, fishing and herding strategies not only to environmental factors but also to the economic and political circumstances left in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse that were characterized by isolation and non-market survival economies. In Florian Stammler’s study of Nenets reindeer herders on Siberia’s Yamal peninsula, an argument is made that Arctic reindeer herding has not only emerged through these transitions possibly strengthened but that it has been neglected in general anthropological discussions of nomadism, and that its modern form can enlarge our understanding of people and animals on the move (Stammler, 2007). In her study of Koryak women on Kamchatka, Petra Rethmann (2001) examines history, disempowerment and marginalization and explores the strategies by which people have responded to the stark effects of political and socioeconomic disorder and collapse. Alexander King (2011) goes further and asks what it means to be a traditional Koryak in the modern world. King sets out to explore how Koryak engage in debates and conversations about ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ to express

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a culture that entails distinctive customs and traditions, thereby participating in strategies of community revitalization.

POLITICAL IDENTITIES, KNOWLEDGE AND CONFLICT Successful harvesting of the species used by indigenous peoples requires specialized knowledge of animal and fish behaviour, sea ice, and terrestrial conditions and weather. A considerable body of anthropological work has emerged that details the complex systems of classification and knowledge about the environment which is developed and enhanced through long-term experience and generational transmission (e.g. Anderson, 2000; Collignon, 2005). One point of agreement, both in academic scholarship and in local indigenous political rhetoric, is that this knowledge has both enabled indigenous societies to exploit highly productive ecosystems effectively in the region for thousands of years (Caulfield, 2000; Krupnik, 1993) and that it provides a foundation for cultural, spiritual and ethical concerns that guide the use and management of natural resources (Fienup-Riordan, 1983; Nuttall, 1998). Yet, as Bielawski (2005) points out, much early indigenous knowledge research in the circumpolar world was carried out in the context of conflict and dispute over wildlife management and historic patterns of hunting, herding and fishing (see also Anderson and Nuttall, 2004). As a result, this led to a ‘common assumption that indigenous knowledge is only environmental, and, even more strictly, only ecological knowledge. But indigenous knowledge is social as well as environmental; dividing these realms is itself an artifact of a western approach to knowledge’ (Bielawski, 2005: 951). At the heart of environmental debates there are often conflicts, disputes and disagreements over whose knowledge claims provide the most legitimate basis for environmental management and conservation policy,

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as well as for ensuring sustainable livelihoods and economic well-being. Conflicts persist: whether they concern aboriginal subsistence whaling in Alaska or Chukotka, or Inuit rights to hunt polar bears in Canada and Greenland, or conservationists’ arguments to protect them from being hunted, or the best ways forward in consultation and participation in pipeline development, impacts and benefits agreements with industry, or over the very nature and practice of scientific research (for the example of marine mammal hunting, see Kalland and Sejersen, 2005). Across the Arctic, indigenous peoples have demanded the right to self-determination and self-government based on the historical and cultural rights to the ownership of lands and resources. Over the last thirty to forty years, some Arctic states have recognized the claims of indigenous peoples to land and self-government, and a number of significant settlements have been negotiated and signed. Notable amongst these are the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, Greenland Home Rule in 1979 and Greenland Self-Rule in 2009, and in Canada the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), the Inuvialuit Agreement (1984), comprehensive land claims agreements with the Gwich’in and Sahtu Dene in the early 1990s and the creation of the new territory of Nunavut in 1999. The governments of Finland, Norway and Sweden have established Saami parliaments and, although these were designed as representative and consultative assemblies, Saami have nonetheless achieved a degree of ethno-political self-government. The most complex and unresolved issues relating to the autonomy and self-determination of the Arctic’s indigenous peoples are to be found in Russia. Although indigenous minorities of the Russian North were given certain rights and privileges under the Soviets, these rights have not always been recognized and many indigenous groups are demanding forms of self-government and regional autonomy. Some anthropologists have carried out ethnographic studies of land claim negotiations,

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or of the strategies employed by political elites and community leaders, as well as by emerging political associations and organizations (e.g. see Gray, 2005; Stern, 2006, for discussions of political movements in Chukotka and land claims and gas pipeline issues in Canada’s western Arctic, respectively). Norman Chance made an in-depth examination of Iñupiat strategies for responding to environmental threats, wildlife management and oil development on Alaska’s North Slope, as well as the corporate model of land management and economic development put in place by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (Chance, 1990). Paul Nadasdy showed how in Canada land claims and self-government agreements, as well as the very term ‘aboriginal title’, were based on European ideas of ‘property’, compelling indigenous people to think and speak in the ‘language of property’. This concept of property, he argues, is incompatible with the views many Canadian First Nations people have about human−animal and human− environment relations; hence, the land claims process undermines the very beliefs and practices that a land claim agreement is meant to acknowledge, recognize and preserve (Nadasdy, 2002). In the case of self-government in Greenland, I have written about how, from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, an emerging ethnic political awareness rippled through Greenland as the Home Rule movement gathered momentum. Young political leaders and their nascent parties, along with artists, musicians, writers and others concerned with spreading Inuit activism and ideas about autonomy, nurtured feelings of kalaaliussuseq, meaning identity as a Greenlander. Their work was characterized by political themes expressing Greenlandic identity and nationalistic feelings. The majority of Inuit were by then living in growing towns on the west coast, and the remaining villages and settlements were seen as the last outposts of a ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ Greenlandic identity that was inextricably linked to the

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life of the Inuit hunter and his family. The kalavik, or ‘pure-blooded Greenlander’, became a metaphor for tradition in terms of the hunting practices, forms of social organization, values, attitudes and beliefs that were considered to be genuinely Greenlandic. In this process of the formation of a new political identity in a self-governing territory, Greenland’s past became an important source for creating symbols to inform its present and guide its future (Nuttall, 1992). The political changes brought on by land claims and varying forms of self-government often include changes in the ways that living and non-living resources are managed. A greater degree of local involvement in resource use management has been introduced, including in some cases the actual transfer of decision-making authority to the local or regional level. In addition, significant steps have been taken with innovative co-management regimes that allow for the sharing of responsibility for resource management between indigenous and other uses and the state (Kalland and Sejersen, 2005). Co-management projects involve greater recognition of indigenous rights to resource use and emphasize the importance of decentralized, non-hierarchical institutions and consensual decision-making. This presents tremendous opportunities for collaboration between indigenous peoples, scientists and policy makers concerned with the sustainable use, management and conservation of living resources, although as Nadasdy (2003) shows in his study from the southern part of Canada’s Yukon Territory, knowledge integration in co-management systems remains fraught with technical, methodological and political difficulties.

MOVEMENT, MIGRATION AND URBANIZATION Despite the persistence of activities such as seal hunting or reindeer herding, it is mistaken to view the circumpolar North as a region comprised mainly of small, widely-scattered

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communities of indigenous peoples living traditional lifestyles under threat. Many Northern communities also bear witness to: rapid social, cultural and economic change; resettlement from small camps and villages into newly created towns; increasing urbanization; and processes around the erosion of tradition and the struggle for cultural survival and political autonomy and economic independence (Mathiasson, 1992; Kennedy, 1995). Dybbroe (2008) argues that the anthropology of Arctic societies increasingly acknowledges a general urbanizing trend throughout the region, encompassing smallscale, localized, communities as well as towns and cities. In her discussion of the relevance of the concepts of ‘urbanization’ and ‘urbanism’ to the Arctic, Dybbroe proposes an urban anthropological perspective that offers an insightful way to approach the globalized social and cultural realities of the contemporary Arctic. Anthropologists more generally are turning their attention to understanding such things as the relationships of the development of urban spaces to colonization and decolonization, the representation of urban life in narratives, and creativity in literature and art. Inuit, for example, not only migrate to cities outside the Arctic but also they grow up and live in the North under circumstances strongly tinged by urbanism (Condon, 1987; Dybbroe, 2008). Arctic peoples may live in increasingly urban worlds, with their cultural and ethnic mix of populations (migration to northern urban centres by people from other parts of the world also contributes to this), but this process of urbanization, as Thuesen (1999) shows for west Greenland, goes back as far as the eighteenth century. Today, Greenland’s capital Nuuk, with almost 16,000 people, is creating a new identity for itself as an Arctic metropolis, a vibrant city in which members of a younger, cosmopolitan-minded generation, many of them welltravelled and often fluent in several languages, want to live − and to which many more people from other parts of Greenland aspire to move. Rather than being seen as a

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place which sits uneasily in the Arctic, many would argue that this is where Greenlandic culture is being produced and reproduced, through its politics, its debates about language and identity, its educational institutions and its creative arts scene (Sørensen, 2008). Young Greenlandic artists have won prestigious scholarships to art schools in New York and other cities in North America and to Europe, or they have developed careers as fashion designers, musicians, actors and writers. While drawing on symbols of Greenland’s traditional Inuit past − hunting, animals, myths and spirits − these are nonetheless also reappraised reflexively by a new generation of artists, playwrights and dramatists, pop and rock musicians whose predecessors found them a rich source of inspiration. Indeed, as Greenland’s political culture and sense of itself as a modern nation in the making has developed, it is the villages which are now regarded to be problematic. Many Greenlandic politicians question where the old hunting way of life fits in with Greenland’s desire to become a modern nation (Nuttall, 1992). Searles (2011), on the contrary, argues that many Inuit in Canada’s Arctic view urban spaces negatively and continue to celebrate camp life. Recent demographic changes in Canada’s Nunavut Territory have made settlement patterns increasingly urban: Searles carried out fieldwork in the territorial capital Iqaluit, a growing city that is home to the largest concentration of Inuit and non-Inuit populations in the Canadian North. Yet, as Searles argues, the acquisition of Inuit identity and the way people strive to become ‘better persons’ continue to depend largely on their spending time out on the land and at sea, hunting, fishing, trapping and camping. Although there have been attempts to nurture what some see as a genuine urban Inuit identity that is not inconsistent with Inuit culture and society, urban spaces are more commonly seen by many Inuit as places where Inuit lifestyles, values and practices have been overshadowed by Qallunaat (‘white people’) ones. As Searles shows, some Inuit

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claim that it is not possible to ‘be Inuit’ in Iqaluit, and this rhetoric is adopted by many Inuit political leaders. For another part of northern Canada, John Kennedy describes change and decline in coastal Labrador. In 1992 the Canadian government announced a moratorium on fishing for northern cod, effectively shutting down the cod fishing industry of Newfoundland and Labrador. Kennedy describes the impact of this policy, which he envisages will cause further erosion of the conditions for social and economic life in small communities as young people leave for other parts of Canada, particularly large cities such as Toronto (Kennedy, 1995). Migration of indigenous peoples into more southerly cities from the Arctic increased substantially during the 1980s. As Kishigami (2008) shows, in Canada approximately 10,000 out of a total of 50,000 Inuit now live outside the Arctic regions, mainly in large southern cities. An increasing urban Inuit population has brought with it a growing problem of homelessness. Kishigami’s research in Montreal describes the life and characteristics of homeless urban Inuit, and the activities of the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal and of the Association of Montreal Inuit, which have become essential for their survival (Kishigami, 2008). Outside of Greenland, Canada and Alaska, little anthropological work has derived from studies in urban settings. One of the more recent works to deal with migration and contemporary life in a northern city is Niobe Thompson’s Settlers on the Edge (2008) which explores the experiences and lives of Soviet-era migrants to Anadyr in Russia’s far eastern region of Chukotka. Initially, representatives of a colonial power on a northern frontier, people who moved to Anadyr from different parts of the Soviet Union transformed themselves into a rooted community of locals who now lay claim to identity in ways similar to indigenous peoples. Thompson’s work points to the changing nature of identity politics in the Arctic, particularly the influence of both the state and oligarchs in remoter regions of Russia,

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and illuminates anthropological understanding of movement, migration and belonging.

RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE It is difficult to travel far in the North without encountering the workings and the social and environmental effects of the global economy and industry, and the consequences of dramatic social and economic change in Northern communities. Northern landscapes bear the scars of industrial development − oil and gas pipelines and seismic trails stretch across the tundra; the marks of clear-cut logging are etched deep on boreal landscapes; and abandoned airstrips and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line bear witness to the strategic importance of the North during the Cold War. Arctic communities are experiencing stress from a number of different forces that threaten to restrict harvesting activities. Like any other part of the world, the Arctic regions are not immune to processes of increasing globalization, and anthropologists are well-placed, working on the ground in and with local communities, to attempt to examine both the effects of the wider world and the local responses to them. Florian Stammler (2007), for example, has described the effects of energy development on Nenets reindeer herders in Russia’s Yamal region, as well as the patterns and strategies of coexistence that have been created between herding families and oil and gas workers. A theme beginning to run through recent anthropological writing is that the North is perceived by those living there, as well as being defined by scientific discourses, increasingly as a vulnerable and fragile place: its biodiversity and peoples are at risk from climate change, contaminants and globalization (Heininen and Southcott, 2010; Nuttall, 1998). These drivers of far-reaching change have a diffuse distribution around the globe, their origins often difficult to identify, while specific moral and legal responsibility for

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them is almost impossible to allocate. An emerging area of anthropological research is based on engagement with indigenous communities to understand their perceptions of the effects of pollution and climate change on environment and culture (e.g. Bielawski, 2005; Nuttall, 1998), which are shaped by their views about large-scale industrial development, as well as by the use of fossil fuels and imported technology. In recent work, Joslyn Cassady (2007) explores the significance and impacts of an abandoned federal radioactive waste dump, a legacy of an Atomic Energy Commission project known as Project Chariot, discovered in Alaska in 1992. Controversy erupted in nearby Iñupiaq hunting communities over the health effects of living on and harvesting food from what local people came to see as a ‘tundra of sickness’. Cassady shows how a number of environmental, social and moral uncertainties were sparked by the discovery of toxic waste and the fears it aroused. In a study of gender roles in an Inuit community in northern Quebec, Kafarowski (2006) shows how women and men identify and construct the contaminants issue differently; on this basis, she argues that the inclusion of gendered perspectives is critical to the development of effective environmental health policies and strategies in response to the presence of contaminants. Anthropologists have shown how rapid social, economic and demographic change, resource development, trade barriers and animal-rights campaigns, and restrictive wildlife management regimes have all had their impacts on hunting, herding, fishing and gathering activities (see, e.g., the collection of essays in Anderson and Nuttall, 2004). Wenzel (1991) has written a particularly fine case study of the tremendous and longlasting impacts animal-rights activists and their campaigns have had on Canadian Inuit hunting communities. For Iceland, Helgason and Pálsson (1997) describe the public discontent with the commoditization of fishing rights that has been a consequence of the individual transferable quota (ITQ) system,

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and which has resulted in fishing rights being concentrated in the hands of a few large operators − a discontent articulated in feudal metaphors such as ‘tenancy’ and ‘lords of the sea’. The ITQ system, although ostensibly seen by economists and resource managers as a way of achieving the sustainable use of fish stocks, has in reality changed power relations within local communities and regional fisheries, by contributing to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few large fishing vessel owners. More and more indigenous communities are engaged, or are attempting to engage, in dialogue with one another and with government and industry in order to express their views about what energy development could mean for both present and future generations in terms of socio-economic impacts, community sustainability, wildlife and environmental health. Some of their concerns about energy development arise from fears of drastic and long-lasting social, economic and environmental impacts, but other concerns are expressed because of disputes about the ownership, use, management and conservation of traditional lands and resources (Nuttall, 2010). Hunting, herding, fishing and gathering are also being challenged by climate change, and while anthropologists legitimately seek to understand local observations and perceptions of climate change (e.g. Krupnik and Jolly, 2002) these need also to be seen in the context of other changes. In northern Fennoscandia, Saami reindeer herders ranged far and wide in historic times, crossing national borders as they followed their reindeer herds between winter and summer pastures, but political developments have restricted migration routes over the last century or so. Economic developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries − such as mining, forestry, railways, roads, hydroelectric power and tourism − have all impacted on Saami herding livelihoods (Paine, 1994). In northern Norway, for example, the growing numbers of reindeer herds, together with the reduction of available pasture, curtail the

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flexibility of response available to Saami pastoralists. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for Saami herders to cope with variations in climate and pasture conditions (Bjørklund, 2004). Memories and knowledge of how the weather and climate has changed are found in oral histories as well as in contemporary observations. For Athapaskan people of Canada’s Yukon Territory and South East Alaska, Julie Cruikshank (2005) describes how memories of the Little Ice Age play a significant role in indigenous oral traditions. These stories are ‘sedimented’ on land just like geological processes. Athapaskan clan histories document travel across glaciers from several directions. Eyak, Athapaskan and Tlingit place names encapsulate information about local ecology and climate now rendered invisible by English names. Cruikshank’s work is of significance for its discussion of how surging glaciers present navigational, spiritual and intellectual challenges of a sentient ‘land that listens’. Stories about changes in the weather, to the landscape, and to glaciers persist with a richness, range and variety because of the ongoing risks they posed to everyday life well into the twentieth century. Today, as Athapaskan people demonstrate concern with climate change, there is a contemporary validity to these stories. They not only record the consequences of climate change, and enrich scientific understandings of past climatic conditions, but also provide information on the responses that helped indigenous communities cope with and adapt to climate change.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AS INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ACTORS As the Arctic has emerged as an international political region, indigenous peoples have nurtured critically important roles in responding to and shaping the direction of political dialogue on globalization, environmental change and sustainability and their cultural

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and environmental consequences, as well as influencing the scope and direction of research. Since the 1980s, indigenous peoples’ organizations have become increasingly important actors in Arctic environmental politics, giving a stronger voice to indigenous peoples throughout the circumpolar North and arguing the case for the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in strategies for environmental management and sustainable development (Nuttall, 2000). Over the last two decades in particular, these organizations have played a pivotal role in agenda-setting and political debate about the Arctic environment and resource development, and they have gained international visibility and credibility through their participation in policy dialogue and decision-making processes at regional, national and international levels. The Arctic Council, a high-level governmental forum with a mandate to cooperate on environmental protection and sustainable development, has given six indigenous peoples’ organizations Permanent Participant status. These groups − the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), the Saami Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwich’in Council International and the Aleut International Association − have set themselves at the vanguard of Arctic environmental protection and sustainable development for indigenous communities (Nuttall, 2000). They are now major players on the stage of international diplomacy, political dialogue and policy making concerning the future of the Arctic. The Arctic Council has allowed them a greater role in international arctic politics and provided an opportunity for these groups to position themselves to achieve international visibility with regard to environmental conservation and issues of cultural protection and cultural survival. Research has shown how indigenous peoples and the organizations that represent them use knowledge to define their interests and to pursue various claims. They also use it as a political lever to influence policy makers and to empower themselves so that communities

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can take decisive action on the future of natural resource use and environmental protection, as well as claiming the right to determine the course of economic development (Nuttall, 1998). Some have taken action in persuading governments to work on implementing measures for environmental protection and sustainable development. Notable success stories include the work of the ICC, which played a central role in the negotiation of the global Stockholm Convention on the Elimination of Persistent Organic Pollutants. Following the negotiations, the ICC continued to lobby states to ratify the Convention in their national legislatures. The Convention entered into force in May 2003, and the ICC continues to work to ensure that the Convention obligations are implemented. Images of isolation and remoteness obscure the reality that the diversity of regions that make up the circumpolar North are places infused with the history of human movement, human imagination, ambition, dreams and desire; places where indigenous peoples have survived, thrived and adapted for millennia, and have left their cultural imprint on the land; places marked by the histories of global interconnections; places across which people, ideas, knowledge and innovation have moved and continue to move; and places where more recent settlers have made homes and lives for themselves. Throughout the history of human encounters and human dwelling in the circumpolar North, this vast region has been subject to different, often conflicting and contested representations, images and ideas, which have shaped the ways we think about the circumpolar world, imagine it, have ventured into it, sought to exploit it or protect it, and how relations between indigenous peoples and incomers have been forged and influenced, but also the ways in which it is seen as a place in which to live, to move around and to get to know. As anthropologists are making apparent, largely on the basis of their collaborative work with indigenous and local communities, new perspectives are coming out of the circumpolar North that contribute (and

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often challenge) ways of thinking about human−environment relations, human− animal relations, history and movement. It may well be that social anthropology more generally is beginning to see a resurgence of interest in work in the circumpolar world that will have a major impact on the discipline in the years to come.

NOTE 1 Fennoscandia is the area of Northern Europe comprising Scandinavia, the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia, Finland and Karelia (in both Finland and Russia).

REFERENCES Alia, Valerie 2007. Names and Nunavut. Oxford: Berghahn. Anderson, David G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: the Number One reindeer herding brigade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, David G. and Mark Nuttall (eds) 2004. Cultivating Arctic Landscapes: knowing and managing animals in the circumpolar North. Oxford: Berghahn. Bielawski, Ellen 2005. ‘Indigenous knowledge’, in Mark Nuttall (ed.), Encylopedia of the Arctic. New York and London: Routledge. Birket-Smith, K. 1928. ‘The Greenlanders of the present day’, in M.Vahl, G.C. Amdrup, L. Bobe and Ad. S. Jensen (eds), Greenland. Vol. 2: The Past and Present Population of Greenland. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, pp. 1−207. Bjørklund, Ivar 2004. ‘Saami pastoral society in northern Norway: the national integration of an indigenous management system’, in David G. Anderson and Mark Nuttall (eds), Cultivating Arctic Landscapes: knowing and managing animals in the Circumpolar North. Oxford: Berghahn. Boas, Franz 1888. The Central Eskimo. Washington, DC: Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Bodenhorn, Barbara 1990. ‘”I’m not the great hunter, my wife is”: Iñupiat and anthropological models of gender’, Études/Inuit/Studies 14(l−2): 55−74. Bodenhorn, Barbara 2000. ‘“It’s good to know who your relatives are but we are taught to share with everybody”: shares and sharing among Iñupiaq households’, in George W. Wenzel,

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Greta Hovelsrud-Broda and Nobuhiro Kishigami (eds), The Social Economy of Sharing: resource allocation and modern hunter-gatherers. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Briggs, Jean 1970. Never in Anger: portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Briggs, Jean 1998. Inuit Morality Play: the emotional education of a three year old child. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brody, Hugh 1975. The People’s Land: Eskimos and Whites in the Eastern Arctic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brody, H., 1983. Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia frontier. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burch, Ernest S. 1998. The Iñupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press. Burch, Ernest S. 2005. Alliance and Conflict: the world system of the Iñupiaq Eskimos. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Burch, Ernest S. 2006. Social Life in Northwest Alaska: the structure of Iñupiaq Eskimo nations. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press. Cassady, Joslyn 2007. ‘A tundra of sickness: the uneasy relationship between toxic waste, TEK, and cultural survival’, Arctic Anthropology 44(1): 87−98. Caulfield, Richard A. 1997. Greenlanders, Whales and Whaling: sustainability and self-determination in the Arctic. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Caulfield, Richard A. 2000. ‘The political economy of renewable resource harvesting in the Arctic’, in Mark Nuttall and Terry V. Callaghan (eds), The Arctic: environment, people, policy. New York: Taylor and Francis. Chance, Norman A. 1990. The Iñupiat and Arctic Alaska. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Collignon, Beatrice 2005. Knowing Places: the Inuinnait, landscapes, and the environment. Edmonton: CCI Press. Condon, Richard 1987. Inuit Youth: growth and change in the Canadian Arctic. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Crate, Susan 2005. Cows, Kin, and Globalization: an ethnography of sustainability. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press. Cruikshank, Julie 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Dahl, Jens 2000. Saqqaq: an Inuit hunting community in the modern world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Damas, D. (ed.) 1984. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 5: Arctic. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Dybbroe, Susanne 2008. ‘Is the Arctic really urbanising?’, Études/Inuit/Studies 32(1): 13−32. Fienup-Riordan, Ann 1983. The Nelson Island Eskimo: social structure and ritual distribution. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press. Fienup-Riordan, Ann 1990. Eskimo Essays: Yupi’k lives and how we see them. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Fienup-Riordan, Ann 2000. Hunting Tradition in a Changing World: Yupi’k lives in Alaska today (with William Tyson, Paul John, Marie Meade and John Active) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Freeman, Milton M.R. (ed.) 2000. Endangered Peoples of the Arctic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Graburn, N. and B. Strong 1973. Circumpolar Peoples: an anthropological perspective. Pacific Palisades: Goodyear. Gray, Patty A. 2005. The Predicament of Chukotka’s Indigenous Movement: post-Soviet activism in the Russian Far North. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten 1998. A Place Apart: an anthropological study of the Icelandic world. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heininen, Lassi and Chris Southcott (eds) 2010. Globalization and the Circumpolar North. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Helgason, Arnar and Gisli Pálsson 1997. ‘Contested commodities: the moral landscape of modernist regimes’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3: 451−471. Holm, Gustav F. 1888. Ethnologisk Skizze av Angmagsalikerne [Ethnological Sketch of the Angmagsalik Eskimo]. Meddelelser om Grønland v. 10, Copenhagen. Hovelsrud-Broda, Greta 2000. ‘Sharing, transfers transactions and the concept of generalized reciprocity’, in George W. Wenzel, Greta Hovelsrud-Broda and Nobuhiro. Kishigami (eds), The Social Economy of Sharing: resource allocation and modern hunter-gatherers. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Kafarowski, Joanna 2006. ‘Gendered dimensions of environmental health, contaminants and global change in Nunavik, Canada’, Études/Inuit/Studies 30(1): 31−49. Kalland, Arne and Frank Sejersen 2005. Marine Mammals and Northern Cultures. Edmonton: CCI Press.

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Kennedy, John C. 1995. People of the Bays and Headlands. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. King, Alexander D. 2011. Living with Koryak Traditions: playing with culture in Siberia. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kishigami, Nobuhiro 2008. ‘Homeless Inuit in Montreal’, Études/Inuit/Studies 32(1): 73−90. Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Elena 2010. Lost to the State: family discontinuity, social orphanhood and residential care in the Russian Far East. Oxford: Berghahn. Krupnik, Igor 1993. Arctic Adaptations: native whalers and reindeer herders of Northern Eurasia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Krupnik, Igor and Diana Jolly (eds) 2002. The Earth is Faster Now: indigenous observations of Arctic environmental change. Fairbanks: ARCUS. Lowie, Robert H. 1920. Primitive Society. New York: Boni and Liveright. Matthiasson, John S. 1992. Living on the Land: change among the Inuit of Baffin Island. Lewiston, NY: Broadview Press. Mauss, Marcel 1979 [1906], with Henri Beuchat, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Minority Rights Group 1994. Polar Peoples: Selfdetermination and development. London: Minority Rights Group. Murdoch, John 1892. Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition. Washington DC: Bureau of American Ethnology. Nadasdy, Paul 2002. ‘“Property” and Aboriginal land claims in the Canadian Subarctic: some theoretical considerations’, American Anthropologist 104(1): 247−261. Nadasdy, Paul 2003. ‘Reevaluating the co-management success story’, Arctic 56(4): 367−380. Nelson, Edward W. 1899. The Eskimo about Bering Strait. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology. Nuttall, Mark 1992. Arctic Homeland: kinship, community and development in northwest Greenland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nuttall, Mark 1998. Protecting the Arctic: indigenous peoples and cultural survival Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Nuttall, Mark 2000. ‘Indigenous peoples’ organizations and Arctic environmental co-operation’, in Mark Nuttall and Terry V. Callaghan (eds), The Arctic: environment, people, policy. New York: Taylor and Francis. Nuttall, Mark 2005. ‘Arctic: definitions and boundaries’, in Mark Nuttall (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Arctic. New York and London: Routledge.

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Nuttall, Mark 2010. Pipeline Dreams: people, environment, and the Arctic energy frontier. Copenhagen: IWGIA. Paine, Robert 1994. Herds of the Tundra: a portrait of Saami reindeer pastoralism. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pálsson, Gisli 1991. Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: human ecology and Icelandic discourse. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pálsson, Gisli 1995. The Textual Live of Savants: ethnography, Iceland and the linguistic turn. Luxembourg: Harwood. Rethmann, Petra 2001. Tundra Passages: gender and history in the Russian Far East. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Riches, David 1990. ‘The force of tradition in Eskimology’, in Richard Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Schweitzer, Peter 2000. ‘The social anthropology of the Russian Far North’, in Mark Nuttall and Terry V. Callaghan (eds), The Arctic: environment, people, policy. New York: Taylor and Francis. Searles, Edmund 2011. ‘Placing identity: town, land and authenticity in Nunavut, Canada’, Acta Borealia 27(2): 151−166. Shannon, Kerrie Ann 2006. ‘Everyone goes fishing: understanding procurement for men, women and children in an Arctic community’, Études/Inuit/ Studies 30(1): 9−29. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai V. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stammler, Florian 2007. Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: culture, property and globalization at the ‘end of the land’. Münster: Lit Verlag. Steckley, John 2008. White Lies about the Inuit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stern, Pamela 2006. ‘Land claim, development, and the pipeline to citizenship’, in Pamela Stern and Lisa

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Stevenson (eds), Critical Inuit Studies: an anthology of contemporary arctic ethnography. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Sørensen, Bo Wagner 2008. ‘Perceiving landscapes in Greenland’, in Michael Jones and Kennth R. Olwig (eds), Nordic Landsapes: region and belonging on the northern edge of Europe. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, Niobe 2008. Settlers on the Edge: identity and modernization on Russia’s Arctic frontier. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Thuesen, Søren 1999. ‘Local identity and the history of a Greenlandic town: the making of the town of Sisimiut (Holsteinsborg) from the 18th to the 20th century’, Études/Inuit/Studies 23(1−2): 55−67. Turner, Lucien 1894. ‘Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory’, in 11th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology for the Years 1889−90. Washington, DC. Vitebsky, Piers 2005. Reindeer People: living with animals and spirits in Siberia. London: Harper Collins. Wenzel, George W. 1991. Animal Rights, Human Rights: economy, ecology and ideology in the Canadian Arctic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wenzel, George W. 2000. ‘Sharing, money, and modern Inuit subsistence: obligation and reciprocity at Clyde River, Nunavut’, in George W. Wenzel, Greta Hovelsrud-Broda and Nobuhiro Kishigami (eds), The Social Economy of Sharing: resource allocation and modern hunter-gatherers. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Willerslev, Rane 2007. Soul Hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley and Los: Angeles: University of California Press. Ziker, John P. 2002. Peoples of the Tundra: northern Siberians in the post-Communist transition. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.

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2.2 Replacing Europe Sarah Green

MULTIPLYING EUROPE Social anthropology’s engagement with Europe over the last 25 years (between 1986 and 2011) has been diverse, intense, inventive and ambivalent. This involves several familiar issues. First, the European region (however defined) has a history of several anthropological approaches separated by different languages, political structures and intellectual traditions. Second, the distinction between self and other in the European context has always been difficult for anthropologists, and has become more complicated, as both socio-political and intellectual shifts have occurred. And third, the major political and economic changes affecting Europe over the last quarter century have altered the geo-political shape of the region and its relations with the rest of the world: the end of the Cold War, which restructured ideological as well as social and economic divisions in Europe and beyond; major conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the expansion of the European Union (EU) into the former socialist areas of Europe; and the (neo)liberalization of finance and related economic changes. As with any 25-year period over the last few centuries in the European region, much has happened that has both affected and informed social anthropology’s engagement with Europe.

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The period before 1986, nevertheless, remains relevant, for much of what informed that period is still present today. While the region has become more obviously multiple than it seemed to be in previous years, and its relative location, both within anthropology and within the world, has shifted, Europe has not become something completely different thereby. Europe, both as place and as idea, is crucially relational and contingent: as an entity, Europe is simultaneously many places and has multiple interrelated locations which change across time; and that relational and multiple character informs anthropological studies of, within, and about Europe and its many parts. I should perhaps refer to ‘Europes’, but that would be both awkward and also incorrect: there is usually only one Europe from each vantage point, however internally diverse that entity is described as being; it is just that there are many vantage points. This multiplicity has meant that attempts to summarise the anthropology of Europe have been destined to highlight their own limits, whatever their merits: if they focus on preand post- Cold War conditions, then what has been happening in many Scandinavian countries and in France and Britain will be visibly absent; if they consider the expansion of the EU, then the regions not directly involved with that (e.g. Switzerland, Albania, Iceland

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and Norway) will be neglected; if the focus is the most studied European areas in Anglophone anthropology (the Mediterranean region, the former and now post-socialist regions, plus some north-western European areas), then the Baltic states will be absent; and in all of this, places such as the southern Mediterranean (North Africa), Turkey, some parts of central Asia and Russia are ambiguous, sometimes included and sometimes not.1 There are, additionally, the issues of language and different anthropological traditions in Europe. Language diversity is not simply a matter of people failing to read ethnographies in different languages: languages are also inflected with diverse intellectual traditions, hierarchical relations with one another and with the world, and political implications − what Gal calls ‘European language ideology’ (Gal, 2006: 164; Gal and Irvine, 1995). Language has often been a key element in the process of developing and asserting particular kinds of national belonging to state territories, perhaps especially in the European context; ideas and assertions about the character of languages, and their apparent inherent specificity and connection to certain peoples and their national projects, has formed an important part of what is referred to as the invention of modern Europe.2 As Irvine and Gal point out, the assertion that each language has its pure form, which belongs to a particular territory and people, is an historically specific idea that developed with the discipline of sociolinguistics in the nineteenth century, and is closely related to the rise of nationalism (Irvine and Gal, 2000). That development had profound implications for the status of those who are deemed not to speak a language ‘properly’ (e.g. migrants, or those speaking something that is denied the status of an official language); it also has profound implications for the way disciplines such as anthropology have classified the peoples and places they study and how they have often failed to incorporate the work of anthropologists writing in languages they do not understand. And of course the languages of past

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colonies and empire – English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish – have generated enduring specific relations between parts of the European region and other areas of the world; and those links have been fairly closely reflected in the regions around the world focused upon by anthropologists who have been trained in the European hubs of former colonial powers. As a result of all this, most overview studies of ‘the’ anthropology of Europe state that it is a moving target: this is particularly noted in Parman (1998), in Goddard et al. (1994) and in Hann et al. (2005). Hann mentions the language issue in passing, stating that: ‘Although some of the papers [in this volume] were originally written and presented in German, English dominated at the workshop. There was a general wish to publish in what has become, even in East-Central Europe, the lingua franca of the modern discipline’ (Hann et al., 2005: ix). The introduction later addresses the language issue further, explaining both the diversity in meanings of words for anthropology and related terms in various languages, and how the Cold War era affected the ability of anthropologists to communicate with one another across the political divide: scholarly endeavours were directly affected by international conditions. The superpower rivalries of the Cold War era greatly restricted the contacts that anthropologists of Eastern and Central Europe were able to maintain with their colleagues in the West. More bridges were built from the 1960s onwards, but even in the years of détente, the Russian language enjoyed privileges not enjoyed by English or French. (Hann et al., 2005: 9)

Note that the privileged language here was Russian, not English or French, a simple example demonstrating that the centre’s location depends on where you are standing at the time. Equally, the earlier remark stating that English had become the lingua franca of anthropology tells its own story about the location out of which this edited collection had appeared. In taking seriously the point that Europe is more of a contingent and relative location

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than it is a fixed place with particular characteristics, this chapter does not describe where or what Europe is, as such. Indeed, an added implication of the discussion above is that Europe as an idea has been repeatedly invented, and that anthropology has participated in that: a form of classification that outlines a place (metaphorical or otherwise), some peoples, some intellectual characteristics, some particular historical events and interpretations of those events, and then states that this is Europe or European. Of more interest is shifting relations between different elements of what is considered to be Europe/European, and how that has both reflected and contributed towards the way anthropology has changed its locations over the last couple of decades. That has involved a repeated process of replacing Europe, both in its multiple relations with anthropology, and in its multiple relations with other things. At the same time, previous ideas of Europe have persisted, though somewhat altered; the process of replacing Europe is constant, usually building upon and adding to previous relations rather than dislodging them. What has probably disappeared is a notion that it is a good idea to try and locate any unified notion of Europe or European anthropology.

MULTIPLYING EUROPEANIST ANTHROPOLOGIES In anthropology, the relative locations of centre and periphery are particularly important, and in the European context, there are two elements to this.3 First, there are the centres and peripheries of wherever Europe might be understood to be, and the tendency for anthropologists to choose more peripheral areas or peoples to study. Second, there are the centres and peripheries of anthropological practice and knowledge. Here, the issue concerns the idea of Europe as a key intellectual home of the development of anthropology. ‘Europe’, ‘European’ and the closely related ‘Euro-American’ (an implicitly Anglophone and partially de-territorialised

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notion of Europe) have regularly been used in (largely Euro-American) anthropology as reference points against which others were compared and contrasted. By the mid-1980s this had been fairly thoroughly critiqued (Fabian, 1983; Herzfeld, 1987; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Wolf, 1982). Depicting the world as ‘them’ and ‘us,’ and each side as being more or less modern, full of history or timeless, individualistic, scientificallyminded, rational, spiritual, moral, bound by kinship, alienated, in tune with nature, patriarchal, technological, violent, nationalist, etc. – was no longer possible without careful qualification. That critique has continued and developed, along with the suggestion that anthropology had reproduced an old ideological trajectory through which the ‘West’ had invented itself, and had simultaneously invented the Other to which the self was to be compared and contrasted.4 As a result of that debate, which also suggested that the depiction of the other was actually a different version of the self,5 the inherent associations between ‘European’, ‘Western’, and ‘Modern’, previously regularly used as if they were synonymous, began to be prised apart. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was an implication that the whole edifice upon which anthropology had based itself had reproduced a particularly politically inflected conceptual history. Anthropology might not in fact be trying to understand the other in the other’s own terms; nor trying to understand the self better through comparing and contrasting the self with the other; but rather, looking in the mirror at the self and using what anthropologists thought they saw (informed by historically contingent, spatially specific and ideologically inflected intellectual assumptions) to describe both the other and the self, as a kind of double invention (Kuper, 1988). One might think this debate would lead to a critical focus on European regional ethnography, given that the idea of Europe, and European intellectual traditions, had played such an important part in the development of the anthropological thought that was now

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being critiqued (Strathern, 1987). The late 1980s certainly did see an increasing visibility of European ethnography, partly related to the development of two associations representing European anthropology: the American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Anthropology of Europe was launched in 1987; and the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) began a couple of years later, in 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall fell). Yet this did not result in a coherent critical interrogation of the basis upon which anthropology had built its subjects and objects. The first set of EASA texts, published in 1992, contained a wealth of thoughtprovoking material, bringing together different studies from different regions and intellectual approaches into single volumes. And that was the point: the material was markedly diverse; there was no sign of an emerging ‘Europeanist anthropology’ that would be responding, as a coherent entity, to the thorny epistemological problems raised in the mid-1980s. Indeed, the five EASA volumes published in 1992 seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.6 I will briefly discuss three of them. Other Histories (Hastrup, 1992) re-opened the debate about anthropology’s relationship with historical accounts. Hastrup introduces the volume by suggesting there is an ‘inherent plurality of history’ in Europe, and that anthropology has a role in moving away from the ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Western’ understanding of history as ‘homogeneous, continuous and linear’ (Hastrup, 1992: 1). She suggests that the six essays in the volume not only demonstrate multiple histories but also multiple worlds in Europe. Adam Kuper’s collection, Conceptualizing Society, drew together six different examples of anthropological theoretical approaches within Europe (largely along a French−British axis), which highlighted, rather than resolved, that diversity of approaches. In marked contrast to these two volumes, Jeremey Boissevain’s collection, Revitalizing European Rituals, explored a range of contemporary ritual practices around Europe as a means to retrieve

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the continuity between past and contemporary European ethnography. Boissevain argued that processes of modernization in Europe were leading many people to reinvent7 a variety of rituals in rural, mostly Mediterranean, parts of Europe. Collectively, these volumes (and others being published at the time) generated a commentary that unravelled the idea of a coherent, linear relationship between Europe and other places, or within Europe, or within anthropology. The message was that there was no singular entity to be represented. The arguments, and the way ethnographic material was being described and analysed, all pointed to a growing recognition and embracing of multiplicity. As the 1990s proceeded, the way this multiplicity had in the past been hierarchically ordered and made to appear as a unity (certain understandings of Western were taken to stand for the whole of Europe/ European), which disguised the highly unequal relations between different elements of the European region, would become a key debate. Boissevain’s collection might seem awkwardly placed in this respect: while focusing on questions of the invention of modernity and tradition, it appears to evoke a continuity with earlier approaches. Where Hastrup contrasted a multiplicity of worlds within Europe with the singularity of the idea of Europe used within (Euro-American) anthropology, and while Kuper’s volume demonstrated some of the intellectual diversity in European anthropology,8 Boissevain’s volume was largely descriptive: it did not interrogate what might hold any of the papers together or pull them apart, even to the extent of an absence of any mutually agreed definition of ritual. Nevertheless, that absence also pointed to the emerging recognition of multiplicity; and Boissevain’s evoking of continuity with the past, rather than a break with it, was also a demonstration of the absence of a coherent centre to anthropological approaches towards whatever might be considered ‘Europe’ or ‘European’. Not everyone was distancing themselves from what had come before.

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THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: SELF/ OTHER AMBIVALENCE One question that all these volumes evoked in various ways, though not necessarily explicitly, was what I shall call the elephant in the room: in what ways did the ethnographic descriptions from European areas described in these texts reflect the yardstick that (Euro-American) anthropology had used to compare and contrast with others? Did these ethnographies describe various, possibly mutually contradictory, versions of the self; or did they describe the other, who happened to be located in Europe, and were therefore examples of internal self/other differentiations; or did they describe combinations of both self and other, or neither self nor other? This question was not going to go away simply by dismissing binary oppositions (self and other, west and rest, modern and traditional, etc.) and replacing them with another notion, such as hybrids (Bhabha, 1994); nor would it go away by insisting that there are multiple worlds in Europe, and not just one. As Juliet Mitchell pointed out decades ago, foundational ideas are difficult to dislodge in practice, even when it is obvious they are flawed. Mitchell noted that feminists committed to the idea of ‘the personal is political’ nevertheless found it difficult to prevent patriarchal logic from continuing to inform their understanding and experience of everyday life (Mitchell, 1974). Gayle Rubin, at around the same time, closely examined how assumptions about gender and sex had permeated the social theory upon which much anthropological analysis relied; she demonstrated the difficulty of simultaneously using the ideas of Marx, Freud or LéviStrauss while somehow escaping those authors’ reproduction of what Rubin called the sex−gender system (Rubin, 1975). In later years, Judith Butler considerably extended explorations of the process through which particular constructions of gender and sex are constituted as self-evident, always already there (Butler, 1990, 1993). Something similar was involved in notions of self and

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other within anthropology in relation to the idea of Europe: if people rely upon an idea as the basis for constructing their understanding of the world, and if, at the same time, the social, intellectual and political worlds in which they live constantly reinforce that idea, then it is highly unlikely that it will simply go away when it is pointed out that there are problems with it. For anthropologists engaging with European topics, ambivalence towards this issue has been a defining characteristic of the last quarter century, and it continues to be so, though differently, nowadays. During this particular period, that ambivalence has been based upon critical interrogations of internal, and hierarchically ordered, differentiations of Europe/ Europeans. Before proceeding to what happened in the late 1990s and 2000s, it is worth briefly going back to the period prior to the mid-1980s, to see how that ambivalence developed and changed over time, and to explore some of the difficulties involved in discussing this elephant in the room. In that earlier period, much (though not all) ethnographic research in European regions focused on places and peoples who were living in rural, remote and small groups: for example, Ingold working on the Skolt Lapp reindeer herders in Finland (Ingold, 1976); Friedl’s study of Greek villagers’ life and family structures in Vasilika (Friedl, 1962); Cole and Wolf’s work on cross-cultural relations in a border region of an Alpine valley (Cole and Wolf, 1973); Campbell’s study of patronage relations amongst the Sarakatsani nomadic pastoralists in the mountains of the Zagori in Epirus, northwestern Greece (Campbell, 1964); FavretSaada’s ethnography of witchcraft in the Bocage in France (Favret-Saada, 1980); Strathern’s study of kinship in Elmdon in Essex, UK (Strathern, 1981); and on the then Socialist side of the region, Halpern’s classic study of a Serbian village (Halpern, 1958); Chris Hann’s study of a village in Hungary (Hann, 1980); and Kligman’s study of symbolic transformation in Romanian ritual (Kligman, 1981). The researchers used much

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the same ethnographic methods, and focused on much the same kinds of issues, as anthropologists working in other parts of the world: moral and social relations; kinship organization; labour and techniques of production; hierarchies; nature−culture relations; ritual; and whatever made the people studied socially or culturally distinctive. One element was somewhat different: all drew attention to historical change-this was a particular moment in the lives of the peoples studied, and recent or forthcoming change was invariably noted in the texts. The reason was clear: the peoples studied lived in ‘Europe’, if not always the ‘West’, which was at the time assumed to be an inherently historical place; however distant some of these peoples might be from the centre of things, historical change was taken to be almost inevitable. A 1963 review of Friedl’s Vasilika, written by Fred Gearing for American Anthropologist, provides a flavour of this: Throughout, the author [Friedl] is watchful for the specific points at which urban markets, urban centers of authority and power, and urban values impinge. […] the book documents an area [Greece] less well understood (in its contemporary forms) than Africa or New Guinea; and, since that corner of the world contains rural people who live in intimate and long-standing association with cities and are within the Western tradition, the book reflects important and relatively new directions of contemporary anthropological inquiry. (Gearing, 1963: 1171)

Gearing depicts rural and urban as separate, with the urban likely to ‘impinge’ on the rural; Gearing also depicts Friedl’s study as novel because she was studying ‘Western’ people who had long-standing associations with cities. His qualifying remark that Friedl was studying an area that ‘in its contemporary forms’ was less well understood than Africa or New Guinea was a reference to classical Greece: Westerners knew a lot more about classical Greece than Greece’s contemporary version, it seems. Simultaneously, then, Friedl’s Vasilika residents were both other (not urban, not modern, not classical

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Greeks) and self (nevertheless, Western and closely associated with cities). The issues affecting anthropological studies carried out within the then socialist regions were even more challenging for ‘Western’ anthropological sensibilities, according to Halpern and Kideckel: in 1983, they conducted a review of Eastern European ethnographies written mostly by US-based anthropologists. They complained several times that Eastern European anthropology had been largely ignored in the West because the region had the double problem of being in Europe, but also having a lengthy history of scholarship that was entirely different from that developed in this West: Because of its cultural heritage, with a long-standing scholarly tradition, Eastern Europe has been of restricted interest to an anthropology focused on the ‘other,’ the non-European world […] American anthropologists working in this region must come to terms not only with a new culture but also with a fully developed system of scholarly investigation. […] The nature of these research traditions and their dominant ideas can differ greatly from Western anthropological thought and practice. (Halpern and Kideckel, 1983: 378)

Here, Eastern Europe is depicted as being simultaneously not sufficiently ‘other’ for anthropology, and also already occupied by intellectual approaches that somehow did not properly fit the ‘Western’ anthropological approaches. This was clearly pointing towards the existence of multiplicity and an ambivalent status for any singular idea of Europe; apparently, the response was to ignore this multiplicity. This ignoring of internal multiplicity was not limited to Europe: the article’s reference to American anthropologists actually meant anthropologists based in the United States: not even Canada, let alone Latin American anthropology, was included in the term. The tendency to separate things out − urban from rural, self from other, west from east, north from south − rather than look at the relations between them, and the relative location of each of these terms, was a strong habit within social anthropology in that earlier period.

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In short, the elephant in the room has been present for decades in ethnographic studies within the European region; and it was even mentioned at times, but not closely interrogated. The hierarchically ordered part-other, part-self depiction of different parts of what is understood to be Europe, as well as of the different peoples living there, has been a persistent underlying theme.

EMERGING CRITIQUES I now return to the way the elephant began to be explicitly confronted in the mid-1980s. I will focus on Michael Herzfeld’s account of (Euro-American) anthropology’s ambivalent engagement with Greece (Herzfeld, 1987) because it deals with one key idea that linked Europe, West and the self: the idea of Classical Greece, depicted by West European scholars as one of the roots of Western civilization. In Anthropology through the Looking Glass, Herzfeld (1987) directly confronted the elephant by analysing how Western intellectual traditions, including anthropology, had contributed towards inventing the idea of Greece as both self (classical Greece having been depicted as the origin of Western philosophical traditions); and, in relation to modernity, as other (Greece’s Byzantine and Ottoman history, and its location in southern Europe, somehow made it not fully Western). Herzfeld also argued that Greeks had incorporated this ambivalence into their building of the modern Greek nation, for Greek intellectuals used those same Western intellectual ideas as a basis for their new country (see also Herzfeld, 1986); Greeks were now, Herzfeld argued, having to live with the internal contradiction of being both self and other simultaneously. Herzfeld’s study thus unpicked one of the intellectual foundations of the distinction between European selves and others, and demonstrated its relatively recent, and quite strongly ideological, political history. Moreover, in showing how the underlying ideas informing these distinctions had directly

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informed the development of a new country (modern Greece) he also outlined how this ideology had a key effect on both the relative location of Greece within Europe and its treatment within anthropology. The ideas informing anthropological analysis and those informing Greek national historiography were not separate, but deeply interrelated. Using both ethnographic and historical analysis, Herzfeld further argued that the axiomatic links between European/Western/ Modern had developed during the period of transition between empires and states − and, significantly, that this transition had been neither perfect nor complete. There were many leftovers, elements that appeared to be either incomplete, done with mirrors and/ or contradictory, and Greece was a good example. There was also no neat way to resolve these bits and pieces into a coherent story, other than pointing to the historical circumstances that had generated this ambivalent part-self, part-other depiction of contemporary Greek identity. Given the centrality of the idea of classical Greece for the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization, Herzfeld’s study directly addresses the wider question of how one idea of Europe had developed and subsequently became deeply embedded within ‘western’ anthropological approaches: indeed, it was part of what made this particular form of anthropology ‘western’. While Herzfeld’s study directly tackled one aspect of the elephant, others were chipping away at other parts, in disparate and multiple ways. Studies began taking a more critical look at certain themes, such as gender relations (Cowan, 1990; Dubisch, 1986); the politics of language use (Gal, 1987); and the economic, rather than only political and social, basis of the development of the mafia (Gambetta, 1988). The latter is worth further mention: the Mafia had been previously studied either as a form of ‘amoral familism’ (Banfield, 1958) or as a leftover of a not entirely successful transition from feudalism to capitalism in Italy (Blok, 1974). Banfield’s study reinforced the image of southern

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Europe as socially ‘backward’ relative to the north; and Blok’s study reinforced the idea that southern Europe was less able than the north to make an effective transition to modernity through full-fledged state formation. In contrast, Gambetta’s study − and in a different way, the Schneiders’ studies of the anti-Mafia movement (Schneider and Schneider, 1997, 1994) − did not highlight distinctions between south and north, but instead emphasized overlaps and continuities. Indeed, J. Schneider subsequently edited Italy’s Southern Question: orientalism in one country (Schneider, 1998), which critically explored this form of stereotyping. Similar critiques were published that questioned the depiction of the Mediterranean as a ‘culture area’ (Herzfeld, 1984; Knudsen, 1992; PinaCabral, 1989). Apart from the fact that it was no longer convincing to argue there was something culturally similar about the peoples who lived in the Mediterranean region, there were also signs of the elephant there: many anthropological accounts of southern European areas seemed to reinforce (north-) western European stereotypical descriptions of the region. And that increasingly seemed to be related to an unthinking adherence to a self−other distinction that was generating the difference, rather than describing it.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the critical reassessment of what Europe stood for, and its location within anthropology, had already begun. When the political events began to unpack the capitalist and communist version of the East−West division, an additional challenge was added: the ‘order of things’ (to borrow from Foucault, 1974) that had been the object of critical scrutiny was now being politically rearranged. In the process, a variety of peoples, issues and places came into view in a different way from before. Halpern and Kideckel’s (1983) plea for greater visibility of the anthropology of Eastern Europe was answered, except that

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the entity had changed in the process. From ethnographic accounts emerging from the region, this was not only because of the structural changes that were occurring; it was also due to ordinary people’s everyday inventive engagement with the changing conditions (Burawoy and Verdery, 1998). Not only did the diversity of anthropological scholarship between the regions begin to become more visible, so did the diversity of modernities, ideas of Europe and historical accounts. Some depicted the collapse of socialism as a return to a pre-socialist era, as if the socialist era had been a temporary historical anomaly (Verdery, 1999). For others, new versions of capitalism were being invented that were quite different from the capitalism of western European countries.9 And there were many other aspects of the changes studied by anthropologists: notably, the social implications, often accompanied by commentaries about how different these were in different places, highlighting widespread resistance to attempts to generate a coherent ‘Postsocialist Eastern Europe’ region;10 the experience of the economic restructuring in everyday life;11 the political and structural implications of the changes;12 and a particular focus on issues of shifting gender relations in post-socialist contexts (that having been one of the key asserted social differences between West and East during the Cold War).13 In addition, there were some critical commentaries on the engagement between anthropology and various post-socialist contexts.14 For example, in a review article of four ethnographic texts with post-socialist themes, Lázló Kürti expressed undisguised irritation at what he detected as a ‘Western’ perspective on the ‘East’ in them. After quoting part of the Afterword in Uncertain Transition (Burawoy and Verdery, 1998), which speculates about ‘what indigeneous theorizing will arise to supplant or reconfigure Western imports’, Kürti responds: Simply put, there is one obvious, perhaps disturbing, answer to this book’s editors: certainly not the way they perceive the study of the East by the West. There is not one ‘indigeneous’ scholar

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represented in the volume edited by Burawoy and Verdery. (Kürti, 2000: 419)

Earlier in the review, Kürti had taken Gerald Creed to task for making a passing comment about the socialist period in Bulgaria in his ethnography (Creed, 1998), arguing the comment was generated from a ‘western’ perspective alone, and this was no longer acceptable (Kürti, 2000: 408). The implication was that the East−West division that had been politically removed was being rebuilt in this literature through omission: by not including the perspectives of those who lived and worked on the ‘eastern’ side, and who had also been trained there, the elephant was being reproduced, however unwittingly.15 The question of how to ‘place’ scholars with respect to the different locations currently being constituted in Europe is not an obvious one. Should the consideration be which texts an anthropologist reads, where they trained, or where they grew up? This is another, but importantly different, version of the elephant, this time echoing debates elsewhere in anthropology regarding authenticity.16 As such, the debate also comes quite close to discussions of ethn-icity, where the difference between knowing and being as the legitimizing basis for ethnographic description often reflects political tensions in the regions being studied. It is important not to confuse this issue with the one raised by Herzfeld, who was interested in exploring the process through which a certain, historically specific, idea of Europe, and its relation to contemporary Greece and the Greeks, had developed. His work is closer to that of Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (1994), which used the travel writings of Western European visitors to Eastern European regions to unpack how an Enlightenment-based Western perspective of the East−West distinction had developed. In contrast, the question of what difference it would make if an anthropologist is from a former socialist state, as opposed to being from a Western European one, concerns an assertion of the inherent, ontological difference that diverse vantage points will generate. Whereas Herzfeld was analysing the social

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and political outcomes of (Euro-American) epistemology and political history, Kürti was drawing attention to the possibility that being from a different vantage point might not only provide a different perspective on the East; it might also make different worlds visible. This implies that one place can also be many (real) worlds, and not simply many different descriptions of the same world.17 I hope it is clear by now how the elephants are multiplying and becoming relational: the unpacking of how the difference between self and other had been constituted in (EuroAmerican) anthropology, which tied in a particular understanding of Europe (synonymous with Western and Modernity), and how that had disguised multiple, hierarchically ordered, degrees of self and other within the European context; the development of associations that brought together scholars working in different European areas, highlighting the sheer diversity of approaches, intellectual traditions and concerns; and the dissolution of the former socialist states, which not only literally reshaped the European region politically but also led to an increasing demand that the voices from those regions be heard as loudly as those based in Western European and North American universities. Yet simultaneously, the self−other, West−East dichotomies persisted, and most particularly, the ambivalence about the degree to which certain places or people were part-self and partother, or entirely self, or entirely other, and, as importantly, the nature of their relations. Kürti was not alone in implying that the breakup of socialist regimes in the European region meant a shift in moral geometry from the ‘western’ perspective: the former socialist part of the European region began to be depicted in some Western European media, at least for a time, as a return of the kind of East that Larry Wolff had historically explored.

BALKAN ISSUES These issues of diverse vantage points, the apparent return of previous eras and the proliferation of worlds, raises the issue of the

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violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia (1991−1995). Efforts to understand the conflict led to a series of new readings of themes that had long been foci of attention in the anthropology of the European region, most particularly nationalism18 and questions of ethnicity,19 including what Bakic-Hayden famously phrased ‘nesting orientalisms’: not a simple dichotomy of self and other, centre and periphery, but multiples of selves and others, centres and peripheries, like Russian dolls (Bakic-Hayden, 1995). In addition, there was considerable attention paid to the gendered and sexual aspects of the conflicts.20 While this focus on former Yugoslavia raises many issues, I will limit my comments to the debates concerning the Balkans. As many scholars, including myself, have noted, the Balkans have been ascribed a particularly strange status, both as a place and as an idea, ever since the name was coined.21 Apart from the fact that ‘Balkanization’ has come to mean chaotic and destructive fragmentation in any context, the idea of the Balkans as a place was particularly unusual as well. Within dominant (Euro-American) modern thought, places are usually depicted as being fairly static entities: basically passive backdrops, the location where activities occur (Hirsch, 1995). In contrast, the Balkans were regularly represented as being highly active: not only disappearing during some periods (during the Cold War) and then reappearing again (after the end of the Cold War) but also somehow centrally implicated in creating world wars (particularly the First World War), and possessing an inherent tendency to continually change shape − to break apart into ever smaller pieces, then come back together in a different configuration, only to break apart again (Green, 2005: 151−153). In short, the Balkans had a reputation for being a peculiarly lively kind of place, full of highly powerful agency that appeared to be almost impossible to control in any permanent sense.22 This depiction of the Balkans as disappearing then reappearing, and becoming active again after the end of socialist rule in former Yugoslavia provided an opportunity

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to examine one process of the ideological ‘replacement’ of a part of Europe as it was occurring. My own ethnographic study of a small part of that suggested that the depiction of the Balkans as a dangerously unstable and active political landscape highlighted how closely interconnected different parts of the region were believed to be: rather than being an example of endless fragmentation, the external concern with the Balkans appeared to be the capacity for this apparently peripheral and remote place to have effects everywhere. In addition, the multiple claims to the same territory (Serb, Croat, Albanian, Bosnian, etc.), which were directly blamed for generating the conflicts, also highlighted that the problem was too much connection, not too much separation (Green, 2005: 129). Within a national logic, every territory should only have one claim to it; multiple claims always already mean too much overlap. So, in addition to ‘nested orientalisms’, in which there were multiple self−other distinctions that were hierarchically ordered, there were also many instances in which there was insufficient distinction − ambiguous, not quite complete, separation, overlaps, borrowings from a range of intellectual traditions. This work extended the critical analysis that had begun in the mid-1980s by looking more closely at the unfinished business, the leftovers that did not quite fit the story. Ethnographic, historical and other studies of the Balkan region, and of border areas more generally, have been particularly fruitful in this respect.23

THE EU: REARRANGING THE GOAL POSTS While these transformations were underway in the southeast, there were many other significant changes going on elsewhere. An additional 17 countries have joined the European Union (which was named as such in 1992) over the last quarter century, including Portugal and Spain (1986), Austria, Finland and Sweden (1995), and many of the former socialist states.24 Others applied for

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membership, but either subsequently withdrew or froze their applications (Norway, Switzerland), were rejected (Morocco), or are still in some stage of negotiation or waiting (Croatia, Iceland, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro and Turkey; Albania and Serbia are not yet official candidates). Special mention needs to be made here of Turkey. Turkey applied for EU membership at the beginning of the period I am considering, in 1987, and its potential membership is still currently in negotiation. No other country has held this waiting status for as long and nor, arguably, has any other candidate state generated as much divided opinion about its potential membership. The importance of this for a chapter entitled ‘Replacing Europe’ could hardly be overstated: if the dissolution of socialist Europe generated an intense debate about gradations of self/other and West/East from the perspective of differences in political economies and historical divisions involving concepts of modernity, then the question of whether or not Turkey should join the European Union draws attention to the East/ West issue in terms of Orient/Occident and the secular/religious distinctions. As many ethnographers working in Turkey have noted, the Ottoman, followed by the strongly secular Kemalist, history of the country, and its persistent location on the edge of maps of Europe, places it at the heart of the intellectual debates concerning the idea of Europe, and certainly the EU’s idea of Europe.25 Navaro-Yashin’s study, Faces of the State (2002), particularly draws out the way historical political, social and intellectual changes within Turkey at times playfully engaged with European intellectual traditions (e.g. the development of distinctive forms of modernity − modern with the ‘west’ removed, as it were), at times angrily challenged these intellectual ideas (e.g. in debates about how the Turkish state might be reformed, given the rise of more Islamist politics), and at times apparently entirely ignored those traditions (e.g. in rewriting of Ottoman histories). Ethnographies such as Navaro-Yashin’s, placed alongside studies of

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the political, ideological and intellectual foundations of the EU,26 highlights how every aspect of the elephant is now being critically reassessed. The efforts within the EU to promote policies that would encourage viewing Europe as a coherent, if internally multiple, whole − which incidentally has included support for a project to develop a Europe-wide Anthropology of Europe curriculum (Dracklé and Edgar, 2004; Dracklé et al., 2003) − have both built upon and added to earlier ideas of what Europe might mean. Moreover, in recent years, EU policies on its external borders have highlighted the continued ambivalence about the self−other issue. On the one hand, there was the development and expansion of the Schengen Zone,27 followed by the introduction of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).28 Both of these were intended to either remove borders (Schengen) or emphasize their relational aspects rather than their capacity to separate (the ENP). Neighbours of non-EU countries were to be redefined as being part of a ‘ring of friends’ rather than as external others or potential threats. At the same time, the EU imposed certain fairly explicitly ideologically inflected rules about how to qualify as an EU ‘neighbour’, which was sufficient provocation for Russia to decline the invitation (Liikanen and Virtanen, 2006). This has left the EU in the interesting situation of having some neighbours (e.g. Moldova, Belarus and, interestingly, both Egypt and Israel), some non-neighbours (e.g. Russia), and some places that are neither neighbours nor non-neighbours (e.g. Turkey, in an apparently perpetual state of waiting; Green, 2010). At the same time as all this opening of borders and neighbourliness, there have been intensely heightened levels of border controls and surveillance imposed by the EU (Brown, 2010; van Houtum et al., 2005; Melossi, 2008). The idea of a ‘borderless world’, in which total connection and free movement, as well as an encouragement of the acceptance of all differences, is encouraged, has its limits.

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Irrespective of the possible geo-political reasons for these developments, the ambiguity of degrees of self and other, and levels of perceived threat from external, dangerous and amorphous forces (Helman, 1988) has played an important part in the trends in EU policies towards its internal and external relations. Anthropological studies of migration to and from the European region, both legal and illegal, have explored many of the social consequences, as well as the ambiguities that have resulted from these somewhat ambivalent policies.29

anthropological thought, both in terms of the construction of persons and kinship (reproductive and genetic technologies), and in terms of the construction of places (new information and communications technologies). Work on cultural heritage, museums and the history of science also aimed to take a critical look at the foundations of ‘western’ intellectual traditions, and unpack how they had used classification systems to generate a variety of relations between self and other in a particular ‘western/European’ mode.32

NEW TECHNOLOGIES: REARRANGING OTHER GOAL POSTS

SUBALTERN AND POST-COLONIAL STUDIES: REARRANGING THE RELATIONS

Recent changes in political and intellectual contexts that have led to changes both in the idea of Europe, and with how anthropologists have engaged with that entity, also involves Europeanist anthropologists’ contributions to wider debates. One area of focus has been studies of a variety of new technologies, most particularly new information and communications technologies (ICTs)30 and new reproductive and genetic technologies.31 Interestingly, work on these topics is often not included in courses on the anthropology of Europe, but instead is more likely to appear in courses on medical anthropology or the anthropology of new technologies. The question of ‘science’ in general, particularly the kind associated with secular, European, Enlightenment modernity, still has a tendency to be treated as an ‘immutable mobile’ in Latour’s terms (Latour, 1987), behaving the same way everywhere, rather than being associated with a particular place. Rabinow’s study of the nationalizing of genetic material (Rabinow, 1999) is an interesting example of how anthropology can contribute to the question of how particularities enter into debates that are supposed to represent the view from nowhere. The research on new technologies also began raising questions about the foundations of

At the same time, there were challenges raised by developments in studies of gender and sexuality, as well as subaltern studies and post-colonial critiques during the 1990s, and the associated increasing influence of postmodern and post-structural thought, all of which effectively chipped away at the earlier idea of ‘Europe’. The relations between what had been constituted as ‘Europe’ and anthropology’s many and various others, upon which the invention of the idea of Europe had rested, began to be critically reassessed.33 The argument that Europe and Europeans had been as much defined by the experience of colonialism as vice versa, was a strong challenge to the previous argument that the direction of influence had been entirely from the centre to the periphery, and not the other way around (e.g. Stoler, 1999; Stoller, 1995). Thus, what began as a trickle of commentaries and ethnographic studies in the mid-1980s (e.g. Herzfeld, 1987; Marcus and Fischer, 1986), which carried on being discussed through the 1990s at the same time as Europe’s boundaries were literally changing shape, were joined by a flood of literature that suggested a much more multiple, multi-directional, porous and hybrid set of relations between ‘Europe’ and the rest of the world than had been imagined before. Balibar suggested that, ‘we are living

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in a conjuncture of the vacillation of borders ... that is at the same time a vacillation of the very notion of border, which has become particularly equivocal’ (Balibar, 1998: 216). In that context, many ethnographies published on the region understood to be Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s continually returned to these increasingly multiplying elephants, that also kept coming back to one: that key idea about the ambiguous and ambivalent distinction between self and other, and its multiple relations to this place, Europe, in its various bits and parts. Work that looked at the development of neo-nationalism and new forms of cultural fundamentalism during the age of multi-culturalism (Gingrich and Banks, 2006; Holmes, 2000; Stolcke, 1995) were in effect working on the way that forms of both internal and external differentiation were changing; a variety of studies that continued the habit of working on peripheral, marginal peoples and places (including my own work) began to focus more on their complex and multiple relations with an increasing proliferation of centres, rather than focus on what was separate or distinctive about them.34 And these ethnographies increasingly looked for the conditions that had made the places where they studied and the peoples appear marginal, rather than simply accept it as a fact. In cities, which have been a focus for anthropologists working in European regions for decades, anthropologists continued to study people regarded as peripheral or marginal, but the angle was often slightly altered: rather than assuming a separation between the peoples studied and the wider social or cultural context (as in the idea of ‘sub-cultures’, for example), the overlaps and relations between them received equal focus. Three examples from British ethnography illustrate this: Baumann’s ethnography on a variety of south Asian groups living in Southall, in London, was aimed at showing the overlaps and relations between these different ethnic groups rather than emphasize their differences (Baumann, 1996); my own study on radical and revolutionary feminist separatists in London critically

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assessed both anthropology’s easy use of the term ‘community’ and the discipline’s particular focus on the kinship aspects of gender and sexuality, rather than also its historically and politically inflected aspects (Green, 1997b)35 ; Cassidy’s study of horse breeding critically explored notions of class and kinship in Britain (Cassidy, 2002).

TOWARDS REPLACING EUROPE So, what has emerged from all of this? Matei Candea, in a recent ethnographic study of Corsica, provides one, increasingly common, answer: Anthropologists working in Europe … have often found difficulties in the widely held conviction that anthropology is, at heart, a science of difference or, to quote Adams, ‘the systematic study of the Other, whereas all of the other social disciplines are, in one sense of another, studies of the self’ […] Europe, that consistently shifting terrain of differences and similarities, can in no straightforward sense play the role of a stable ‘us’ against which the anthropological account of ‘them’ can be deployed. (Candea, 2010: 2−3)

The argument of this chapter has been that these instabilities, while shifting, have been fairly clearly and hierarchically ordered; that this ordering has involved a series of self−other distinctions combined with incomplete and overlapping part-self, part-other relations, and not only distinctions; that this issue goes to the heart of the basis of anthropology and that this is why, despite repeated and elegant intellectual attempts to do away with both the hierarchies and the binaries, the elephant has been remarkably resistant to being dislodged. Indeed, in becoming more visible, it has multiplied and proliferated. Yet, despite all of this ambivalence towards both the study of European objects and subjects within anthropology, and the difficulties encountered in deciding exactly what to do with them and where to locate them vis-à-vis the rest of anthropology, these multiple and multiply relational anthropologies have been enormously effective in

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providing material that is good to think, and that is crucial.

NOTES 1 For a range of such overviews of ‘the’ anthropology of Europe, see Bellier and Wilson (2000), Delamont (1995), Dracklé et al. (2003), Gingrich and Banks (2006), Goddard et al. (1994), Hann et al. (2005), Kürti (2000), Kürti and Skalník (2009), Macdonald (1993), Parman (1998), PinaCabral and Campbell (1992), and Vermeulen and Alvarez Roldán (1995). 2 See, for example, Chakrabarty (2000), Gourgouris (1996), Herzfeld (1986), Wolf (1982), and Wolff (1994). 3 I am not using the centre−periphery concept in the terms implied by Appadurai, in which he suggests that the importance of place to anthropology has been undertheorized (Appadurai, 1986). My key concern is about relative, not absolute, locations. 4 See, for example, Chakrabarty (1992), Gourgouris (1996), McClintock (1994), Said (1991), Stoler (1999), Trouillot (2003). 5 See, for example, Battaglia (1995), Clifford (1986), Faubion (1993, 1995), and Salmond (1995). 6 Boissevain (1992), de Coppet (1992), GefouMadianou (1992), Hastrup (1992), and Kuper (1992) 7 Drawing on Hobsbawm and Ranger’s notion of invention (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). 8 The individual authors in the Kuper volume were Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, Daniel de Coppet, Philippe Descola, Ulf Hannerz and Marilyn Strathern. 9 Humphrey (1991), Mandel and Humphrey (2002), Seabright (2000) and Verdery (1995). 10 Berdahl and Bunzl (2010), Bridger and Pine (1998), Humphrey (1998), Keough (2006), Kideckel (2008), Kürti and Skalník (2009), Leonard and Kaneff (2002), Pelkmans (2006), Pine (2003), Stewart (2002) and Svasek (2006). 11 Harper (2006), Mandel and Humphrey (2002), Pine (2002a), Sneath (2006), Stewart (2002), Verdery (1995). 12 Burawoy and Verdery (1998), Forbess (2003), Hann (2002, 2006), Verdery (1996, 1998) and West and Raman (2009). 13 Funk and Mueller (1993), Gal (1997), Gal and Kligman (2000), Green (1997a) and Pine (2002b). 14 De Soto and Dudwick (2000), Kürti (2000) and Svoboda and Lenk (2008). 15 Kürti, along with Peter Skalník, recently published an edited collection consisting solely of ethnographic studies written by anthropologists based in the former socialist region (Kürti and Skalník, 2009). 16 Conklin (1997), Nugent (1999), Pratt (2007), Theodosiou (2003) and Wilk (1999).

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17 This also relates to the distinction between perspectivism and perspectivalism discussed by Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Strathern (2011). 18 Danforth (1995), Friedman (2002), Gingrich and Banks (2006), Goldmann et al. (2000), Hayden (1992) and Jansen (2001, 2003, 2005). 19 Agelopoulos (1995), Bowman (1994), Brown (2001), Cowan (2000), Hayden (1996) and Karakasidou (1993, 1997). 20 Borneman (1997), Bowman (1994, 2003), Hayden (2000), Helms (2006, 2008) and Olujic (1998). 21 Bakic-Hayden (1992), Bjelic´ and Savic´ (2002), Fleming (2000), Goldsworthy (1998, 1999), Green (2005), Norris (1999), Scopetea (2003) and Todorova (1997, 2004). 22 Doreen Massey, a geographer, famously argues that all space is lively (Massey, 2005). 23 Assmuth (2003), Ballinger (2003), Ben Slimane (2010), Berdahl (1999), Cowan (2000), Donnan and Wilson (1994, 2003), Hart (1999), Jansen (2009), Karakasidou (1997, 2002), Myrivili (2004), Pelkmans (2006), Rösler and Wendl (1999), Scopetea (2003), Šumi (2003) and Wilson and Donnan (1998). 24 The states that joined in the 2000s are: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia (all 2004); Romania and Bulgaria (2007). 25 See, for example, Alexander (2002), Keyder (2003), Navaro-Yashin (2002) and Özyürek (2006). 26 See, for example, Bellier and Wilson (2000), Elman (1996), Hassner (2002), Holmes (2000), van Houtum and Pijpers (2006), Mitchell (2002), Parman (1998) and Shore (2000). 27 These are areas of free movement between certain states, including some EU member states − Britain is notably not a Schengen Zone member − and it also includes some non-EU states, such as Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. 28 Kahraman (2005) and Liikanen and Virtanen (2006). 29 Andall (2000), Andrijasevic (2006), Anthias and Lazaridis (2000), Brah (1997), Capo (2007), Cole (1997), De Waal (2005), Grillo and Pratt (2002), Jansen (2008), Jordan and Duvell (2002), Markowitz and Stefansson (2004), Meinhof (2003), Neeman (1994), Silverstein (2004), Sjöberg (1994) and Stolcke (1999). 30 See, for example, Agar et al. (2002), Augé (1999), Born (1996, 1997), Garsten and Wulff (2003), Green (2003), Green et al. (2005) and Hine (2000). 31 See, for example, Arnason and Simpson (2003), Bonaccorso (2009), Campbell (2007), Edwards (2000), Edwards et al. (1999), Franklin (1997), Mol (2002), Pálsson and Rabinow (1999, 2001), Rabinow (1999) and Strathern (1992).

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32 Here, the work of Sharon Macdonald has been particularly important (Macdonald, 1998, 2008, 2009; Macdonald and Fyfe, 1996). 33 See, for example, Bhabha (1994), Chakrabarty (1992), Chaudhuri and Strobel (1992), McClintock (1994), Pratt (1992), Steedly (1993), Stocking (1991) and Stoler (1991, 1995). 34 See, for example, Ballinger (1999), Candea (2007), Grasseni (2009), Lawrence (2007), Mandel (2008), Navaro-Yashin (2003, 2007), Sant Cassia (2005), Stacul (2003) and Stacul et al. (2006). 35 That study also covered the early years of the development of queer in London, which was a particular example of the interplay between the development of social theory and its reflection in social relations and practices.

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Humphrey, C. 1991. ‘Icebergs’, Barter and the Mafia in Provincial Russia. Anthropology Today 7:2, 8−13. Humphrey, C. 1998. Marx Went Away −but Karl stayed behind. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ingold, T. 1976. The Skolt Lapps Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irvine, J.T. & Gal, S. 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language: ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 35−83. Jansen, S. 2001. The Streets of Beograd. Urban Space and Protest Identities in Serbia. Political Geography 20:1, 35−55. Jansen, S. 2003. ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ Everyday Serbian Nationalist Knowledge of Muslim Hatred. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13:2, 215−37. Jansen, S. 2005. National Numbers in Context: Maps and Stats in Representations of the Post-Yugoslav Wars. Identities 12:1, 45−68. Jansen, S. 2009. After the red passport: towards an anthropology of the everyday geopolitics of entrapment in the EU’s ‘immediate outside’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15:4, 815–832. Jordan, B. & Duvell, F. 2002. Irregular Migration: the dilemmas of transnational mobility. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kahraman, S. 2005. The European Neighbourhood Policy: The European Union’s New Engagement towards Wider Europe. Perceptions Winter, 1−28. Karakasidou, A. 1993. Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 11, 1−28. Karakasidou, A. 2002. The Burden of the Balkans. Anthropological Quarterly 75:3, 575−89. Karakasidou, A.N. 1997. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: passages to nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870−1990. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Keough, L.J. 2006. Globalizing ‘Postsocialism’: Mobile Mothers and Neoliberalism on the Margins of Europe. Anthropological Quarterly 79, 431−62. Keyder, Ç. 2003. The Consequences of the Exchange of Populations for Turkey. In R. Hirschon (ed.) Crossing the Aegean: an appraisal of the 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn, 39−52. Kideckel, D.A. 2008. Getting by in Postsocialist Romania: labor, the body, & working-class culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Kligman, G. 1981. Calus: symbolic transformation in Romanian ritual. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Knudsen, A. 1992. A Mediterranean Problem. In K. Hastrup (ed.) Other Histories. London: Routledge, 82−101. Kuper, A. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: transformations of an illusion. New York: Routledge. Kuper, A. (ed.) 1992. Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge. Kürti, L. 2000. Uncertain Anthropology: Ethnography of Postsocialist Eastern Europe. A Review Article. Ethnos 65:3, 405−20. Kürti, L. & Skalník, P. (eds) 2009. Postsocialist Europe: anthropological perspectives from home. New York: Berghahn. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lawrence, C.M. 2007. Blood and Oranges: European markets and immigrant labor in rural Greece. Oxford: Berghahn. Leonard, P. & Kaneff, D. 2002. Post-socialist Peasant?: rural and urban constructions of identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the former Soviet Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Liikanen, I. & Virtanen, P. 2006. The New Neighbourhood − A ‘Constitution’ for Cross-Border Cooperation? In J.W. Scott (ed.) EU Enlargement, Region Building and Shifting Borders of Inclusion and Exclusion. Aldershot: Ashgate, 113−30. Macdonald, S. (ed.) 1993. Inside European Identities: ethnography in Western Europe. Oxford: Berg. Macdonald, S. 1998. The Politics of Display: museums, science, culture. New York: Routledge. Macdonald, S. 2008. Museum Europe: Negotiating Heritage. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17:2, 47−65. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: negotiating the Nazi past in Nuremberg and beyond. London: Routledge. Macdonald, S. & Fyfe, G. (eds) 1996. Theorizing Museums: representing identity and diversity in a changing world. Oxford: Blackwell. Mandel, R.E. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mandel, R.E. & Humphrey, C. (eds) 2002. Markets and Moralities: ethnographies of postsocialism. Oxford: Berg.

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Marcus, G.E. & Fischer, M.M. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Markowitz, F. & Stefansson, A.H. (eds) 2004. Homecomings: unsettling paths of return Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Massey, D.B. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McClintock, A. 1994. Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge. Meinhof, U.H. 2003. Migrating Borders: An Introduction to European Identity Construction in Process. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29:5, 781−96. Melossi, D. 2008. Controlling Crime, Controlling Society: thinking about crime in Europe and America. Cambridge: Polity. Mitchell, J. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Allen Lane. Mitchell, J.P. 2002. Ambivalent Europeans: ritual, memory, and the public sphere in Malta. London: Routledge. Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Myrivili, E. 2004. The Liquid Border: Subjectivity at the Limits of the Nation-state in Southeast Europe (Albania, Greece, Macedonia). PhD, Columbia University. Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2002. Faces of the State: secularism and public life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2003. ‘Life is Dead Here’: Sensing the Political in ‘No Man’s Land’. Anthropological Theory 3:1, 107−25. Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2007. Make-Believe Papers, Legal Forms, and the Counterfeit: Affective Interactions between Documents and People in Britain and Cyprus. Anthropological Theory 7:1, 79−98. Neeman, R. 1994. Invented Ethnicity as Collective and Personal Text: An Association of Rumanian Israelis. Anthropological Quarterly 67:3, 135−49. Norris, D.A. 1999. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: questions of identity and modernity. Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press. Nugent, S. 1999. Verging on the Marginal: Modern Amazonian Peasantries. In S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis & M. Stewart (eds) Lilies of the Field: marginal people who live for the moment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 179−95. Olujic, M.B. 1998. Embodiment of Terror: Gendered Violence in Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12:1, 31−50.

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Özyürek, E. 2006. Nostalgia for the Modern: state secularism and everyday politics in Turkey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pálsson, G. & Rabinow, P. 1999. The Human Genome Project in Iceland. Anthropology Today 15:5, 14−18. Palsson, G. & Rabinow, P. 2001. The Icelandic Genome Debate. Trends in Biotechnology 19:5, 166−71. Parman, S. (ed.) 1998. Europe in the Anthropological Imagination Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall. Pelkmans, M. 2006. Defending the Border: identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pina-Cabral, J.d. 1989. The Mediterranean as a Category of Regional Comparison: A Critical View. Current Anthropology 30:3, 399−406. Pina-Cabral, J.d. & Campbell, J. (eds) 1992. Europe Observed. Oxford: Macmillan. Pine, F. 2002a. Dealing with Money: Zlotys, Dollars and Other Currencies in the Polish Highlands. In R.E. Mandel & C. Humphrey (eds) Markets and Moralities: ethnographies of postsocialism. Oxford: Berg, 77−97. Pine, F. 2002b. Retreat to the Household? Gendered Domains in Postsocialist Poland. In C.M. Hann (ed.) Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, 95−113. Pine, F. 2003. Reproducing the House: Kinship, Inheritance and Property Relations in Southern Poland. In H. Grandits & P. Heady (eds) Distinct Inheritances: property, family and community in a changing Europe. Munster: Lit Verlag, 279−95. Pratt, J. 2007. Food Values: The Local and the Authentic. Critique of Anthropology 27, 285−300. Pratt, M.L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Rabinow, P. 1999. French DNA: trouble in purgatory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rösler, M. & Wendl, T. (eds) 1999. Frontiers and Borderlands: anthropological perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rubin, G. 1975. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex. In R. Reiter, (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 157−210. Said, E.W. 1991. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Salmond, A. 1995. Self and Other in Contemporary Anthropology. In R. Fardon (ed.) Counterworks: managing the diversity of knowledge. London: Routledge, 23−48.

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Sant Cassia, P. 2005. Bodies of Evidence: burial, memory and the recovery of missing persons in Cyprus. New York: Berghahn. Schneider, J. (ed.) 1998. Italy’s ‘Southern’ Question: orientalism in one country. Oxford: Berg. Schneider, J. & Schneider, P. 1997. From Peasant Wars to Urban ‘Wars’: The Anti-Mafia Movement in Palermo. In Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (eds), Between History and Histories: the Making of Silences and Commemorations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 230–262. Schneider, J. & Schneider, P. 1994. Mafia, Antimafia, and the Question of Sicilian Culture. Politics and Society 22:2, 237. Scopetea, E. 2003. The Balkans and the Notion of the ‘Crossroads between East and West’. In D. Tziovas, (ed.) Greece and the Balkans: identities, perceptions and cultural encounters since the Enlightenment. London: Ashgate, 171−76. Seabright, P., (ed.) 2000. The Vanishing Rouble: barter networks and non-monetary transactions in postSoviet societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, C. 2000. Building Europe: the cultural politics of European integration. London: Routledge. Silverstein, P.A. 2004. Algeria in France: transpolitics, race, and nation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sjöberg, Ö. 1994. Rural Retention in Albania: Administrative Restrictions on Urban-Bound Migration. East European Quarterly 28:3, 205−33. Sneath, D. 2006. Transacting and Enacting: Corruption, Obligation and the Use of Monies in Mongolia. Ethnos 71, 89−112. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2006. On Heterochrony: Birthday Gifts to Stalin, 1949. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12:2, 355−75. Stacul, J. 2003. The Bounded Field: localism and local identity in an Italian Alpine valley. New York: Berghahn. Stacul, J., Moutsou, C. & Kopnina, H. (eds) 2006. Crossing European boundaries: beyond conventional geographical categories. New York: Berghahn. Steedly, M.M. 1993. Hanging without a Rope: narrative experience in colonial and postcolonial Karoland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, M. 2002. Deprivation, the Roma and ‘the Underclass’. In C.M. Hann, (ed.) Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, 133−55. Stocking, G.W. 1991. Colonial Situations: essays on the contextualization of ethnographic knowledge. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Stolcke, V. 1995. Talking Culture − New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36:1, 1−24. Stolcke, V. 1999. New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. International Social Science Journal 51:1, 25−35. Stoler, A.L. 1999. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, L.A. 1991. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia. In M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender and the Crossroads of Knowledge: feminist anthropology in the postmodern era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 51−101. Stoller, P. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: spirit possession, power and the Hauka in West Africa. London and New York: Routledge. Strathern, M. 1981. Kinship at the Core : an anthropology of Elmdon, a village in north-west Essex in the nineteen sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. 1987. The Limits of Auto-anthropology. In A. Jackson (ed.) Anthropology at Home. London: Tavistock, 16−37. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. 2011. Binary License. Common Knowledge 17:1, 87−103. Šumi, I. 2003. What Do State Borders Intersect? Natives and Newcomers in Val Canale, Italy. Focaal 41:European states at their borderlands: cultures of support and subversion in border regions, 83−94. Svasek, M., (ed.) 2006. Postsocialism: politics and emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn. Svoboda, M. & Lenk, L.S.C. 2008. Anthropology of/in the Post-socialist World. Voznice: Leda. Theodosiou, A. 2003. Authentic Performances and Ambiguous Identities: Gypsy Musicians on the Greek−Albanian Border. PhD, University of Manchester. Todorova, M.N. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Todorova, M.N. (ed.) 2004. Balkan Identities: nation and memory. London: Hurst. Trouillot, M.-R. 2003. Global Transformations: anthropology and the modern world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Verdery, K. 1995. ‘Caritas’: And the Reconceptualisation of Money in Romania. Anthropology Today 11:1, 3−7.

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Verdery, K. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Verdery, K. 1998. Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989. American Ethnologist 25:2, 291−306. Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. New York: Columbia University Press. Vermeulen, H. & Alvarez Roldán, A. (eds) 1995. Fieldwork and Footnotes: studies in the history of European anthropology. London: Routledge. Viveiros de Castro, E. 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. Common Knowledge 10:3, 463−84.

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West, H.G. & Raman, P. 2009. Enduring Socialism: explorations of revolution and transformation, restoration and continuation. New York: Berghahn. Wilk, R.R. 1999. ‘Real Belizean Food’: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean. American Anthropologist 101:2, 244−55. Wilson, T.M. & Donnan, H. (eds) 1998. Border Identities: Nation and state at international frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wolff, L. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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2.3 Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology David Pratten

Africa is more important to anthropology than anthropology is to Africa. (Barnard 2001: 163)

Africa, as Barnard states, has provided anthropology with ‘unparalleled’ case material on almost every aspect of social life. Over its long history of engagement with the discipline Africa has arguably contributed more than any other region to the anthropological study of familiar topics such as witchcraft, ritual symbolism, descent theory, and politics and law in ‘small-scale’ societies (163). But we may ask, with others, whether this regional significance is still justified (Southall, 1983; Guyer, 2004). Given developments within African Studies and anthropology itself over the past quarter century, along with the articulation of a range of critical voices directed at Africanist anthropology, does Africa retain its important place within anthropology? How well has the field escaped the dilemma that Africa presents ‘classic’ ethnographic examples in both the exemplary and timeless senses of the term? How has Africa extended its contributions to anthropology beyond its ‘classic cases’ − Azande witchcraft and sorcery,

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Barotse and Tiv judicial processes, Nuer and Tallensi lineage structure, Maasai age grades and Ndembu initiation? Anthropology’s agenda was shaped by challenges raised in African research – an agenda which was consolidated during the colonial period and which expanded with the social and political upheavals which coincided with the end of colonialism on the continent. Social anthropology therefore was the most established discipline in the study of sub-Saharan Africa before the independence period of the 1960s (Bates et al., 1993). As a direct result of this colonial history, however, anthropology has become the most controversial of all the disciplines through which sub-Saharan Africa has been studied. The status of the discipline has been called into question more critically in Africa than in perhaps any other regional context. Compromised by its political complicities during the colonial era, and by its representations of African societies as functionally integrated, bounded and timeless, the voices critical of anthropology’s ‘invention of Africa’ have been varied and persistent. In response to these post-colonial critiques, and

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broader post-modernist trends within the discipline, I argue that Africanist anthropology has adopted three aspects – retroversion, introversion and extraversion. In the first section on its retroverted mode, I discuss how the anthropology of Africa emerges as a strong critique of its own intellectual heritage, realized in a flurry analyses of the history of the field. And, in the second section, I demonstrate how Africanist anthropology has deployed its introversion to turn itself ‘inside out’ and how, in Marcus and Fischer’s sense, anthropology in Africa has become an important ‘cultural critique’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1999: xvi). In relation to issues of development, the environment, and identity we can see that Africanist ethnographies have embraced Herzfeld’s view of anthropology ‘as a model for critical engagement with the world, rather than a distanced and magisterial explanation of the world’ (Herzfeld, 2001: x). The critiques of received wisdoms about Africa have arguably become ‘new classics’ within ‘critical anthropology’. These shifts in the discipline, of course, are not tied simply to trends within the academy, but also to social, economic and political experience in Africa itself. No other region has undergone the length and intensity of turbulence that Africa has experienced since Independence. And in the period under review, broadly the past twenty-five years, Africa has experienced the most profound upheavals: the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Rwandan genocide, civil wars on the Guinea Coast, structural adjustment programmes, and the end the Cold War and Apartheid. Underscoring this history are volatile economic trajectories. The impetus towards extraversion of the contemporary anthropology reviewed in the third section has been to interpret the effects of these profound shifts on African societies, and on beliefs and youth in particular. In these contexts, as Guyer states, the challenge for the anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa has been to engage with ‘the radical configuration of religious, economic and political

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life in a contingent relationship to global religions, global markets and global political dynamics’ (1999: 34).

RETROVERSION Recent scholarship within Africanist anthropology has had a retroverted, backwardlooking perspective and has been as concerned with the discipline’s colonial legacy as at any time since the Independence era. The debate concerning the relationship between anthropology and colonialism has regularly revisited earlier critiques of European ethnocentrism (Mafeje, 1971; Magubane, 1971; Asad, 1973; Owusu, 1978). Mudimbe’s (1985, 1988) interrogation of the power of anthropological constructions of Africa, for example, situates the critique within the discipline’s use of categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order that he calls a ‘colonizing structure’. Anthropology’s way of knowing and representing Africa, he states, is based on a set of paradigmatic oppositions: traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies. (Mudimbe, 1988: 4)

Underpinning the emergence of the anthropological representation of Africa, Mudimbe states, is an implicit assumption of evolution from the former paradigms to the latter in this dichotomizing system. Recognition of the influential legacy of these colonial ideologies has given rise to a debate over African anthropology’s future (Magubane and Faris, 1985; Keita, 1989; Rigby, 1996; Mafeje, 1998a, 2001). Indeed, in claiming that it has been caught between these colonial reifications and paralysing post-modernist self-reflections, Mafeje has condemned the discipline to an ‘entropic death’ (Apter, 1999: 589), and insists that the post-modern era is a ‘post-anthropological era’ (Mafeje, 2001: 66). Anthropology has

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been shunned on the continent, Mafeje argues, because it is not able to adapt to objects of study beyond those for which it was designed in the colonial period, and that unlike other social sciences ‘… anthropology as a discipline is founded on alterity which historically has issued into racism’ (Mafeje, 1998b: 101). While Mudimbe’s critique powerfully establishes important limits on the practice of Africanist anthropology, we may echo Apter’s observation that our understanding of the colonial encounter itself is nevertheless deepened when anthropology examines its own history (1999: 592). Indeed, retroversion and introspection have combined in a ‘flood’ of reviews of the history of the discipline which serve to draw a line under the ‘phase in which anthropology and colonial rule were part of the same formation’ (Pels, 1997: 177). This historiography has primarily concerned itself with theoretical periodization. Overarching histories of the discipline in Africa during the colonial period are also narrated in Goody’s (1995) The Expansive Moment and Kuklick’s (1991) The Savage Within. The most comprehensive retrospective has been provided in Falk Moore’s Anthropology and Africa (Moore, 1994),1 which contrasts a first wave of anthropology during the colonial period, concerned to describe, understand and compare ‘traditional’ societies in isolated and holistic fashion, with subsequent concern for ‘changing’ Africa, which took account of the impact of the cash economy, urbanization and wage labour. The net effect of these works has been to move the debate beyond generalized accounts − of anthropology as the reflection of colonial interests − and towards the more specific, contingent historical contexts of politics and place in the production of anthropology. Ordering Africa (Tilley and Gordon, 2007), for instance, revisits the stereotypical view of theoretically homogeneous national schools of colonial anthropology by emphasizing the transnational character of networks and institutions which comprised it, the debate and tensions over objectives and methods, the

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engagement with social change and the role of intermediaries (missionaries, administrator-ethnographers, assistants and translators) in the production of anthropological knowledge. This reflection on African anthropology’s past has also taken a regional focus. In their varied perspectives on the post-modernist literary critique of anthropology, contributors to Localizing Strategies (Fardon, 1990) addressed the way in which research institutes divided and defined areas of study and characteristic regional research themes. This connection into the present, from an analysis of the history of anthropology in Africa’s past, has also been addressed in ethnographic attempts to ‘revisit the classics’, and in attempts to shape regional ethnographic traditions through re-study or reinterpretation. Across the continent, therefore, anthropologists have returned to the ethnographic record of the colonial period in order to confront the ‘colonizing structure’ and to contest the tradition−modernity binary and to contextualize the opposition between subsistence, kinship and traditional coherence, on the one side, and cash and the market, on the other. In East Africa, for instance, Parkin (1990) highlights the thematic tradition of the study of states, descent and age-organisation in Kenya and Uganda, while James identified an ‘investigative’ mode of analysis common to Sudan and Ethiopia based on ‘practical confrontation with the geography, economy, vernacular languages and patterns of authority’ and typified by the work of EvansPritchard (James, 1990: 131). An ethnography which re-encounters this classic ethnographic tradition, and propels its story towards the present, is Sharon Hutchinson’s (1996) Nuer Dilemmas. Building upon Evans-Pritchard’s field studies of the Nuer carried out during the 1930s, Hutchinson sets out to shatter the illusion that ‘Nuer culture and social life are somehow above history and beyond change’ (1996: 21). ‘No longer the isolated, independent, cattle-minded warriors immortalized by Evans-Pritchard’ (22), Hutchinson’s ethnography provides a counterpoint to

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Evans-Pritchard’s image of a balanced social harmony. Her historical and dynamic account of the Nuer’s entanglements with conflict, cash and Christianity in Southern Sudan traces the shifting moral economy, premised on blood, cattle and food, from the end of colonial rule to the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. The commodification of livestock and labour in Nuer society, Hutchinson shows, heralds the reversal of the cultural logic of ‘cattle over blood’. Social relations marked by the movement of cattle have declined over the generations with political, legal and ritual consequences for managing and imagining marriage, divorce and death. West African ethnographic traditions, Tonkin (1990) argues, emphasise the combination of an ‘aspiration to coverage’, the bounded unit of study and the centrality of descent. Structural functionalism failed to survive decolonization as the field diversified into the study of state formation, economic development, gender and religion, and, as Hart (1985) notes, historical and Marxist approaches emerged to fill this theoretical gap. These established frameworks of West African ethnographic tradition have been challenged more recently on the grounds of their underlying Eurocentric formulations of personhood, agency and social relations. Piot’s (1999) Remotely Global, for example, is a study of the Kabre of northern Togo which, while it is not a re-study, nevertheless provides a critique of the British descent theorists of the West African Volta basin, Fortes, Goody and Tait, and the French Marxist critique of Meillassoux and Terray. Piot follows two paths. First, his work provides an ethnographic counterpoint to one of the key concepts of the regional ethnographic record. He argues that Fortes’ conception of the lineage as a ‘corporate’, bounded, property-owning unit was based on a Eurocentric conception of an individualistic society and that the Kabre practice of friendship and exchange relations (ikpanture) shows that a relational ethos is also at work between groups. Second, Piot seeks to show how societies of the West African Sahel are

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not ‘pristine spaces unaffected by history’ and illustrates that Kabre culture has been constituted by mobility in its engagement with the slave trade, colonial labour and postcolonial politics. The history of the anthropology of southcentral Africa, and the anthropologists of the Manchester School working at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute,2 has become a productive area of study in its own right, highlighting its colonial context and disciplinary legacy. In stressing the social brokerage role of the intermediaries, the research assistants and interpreters who worked with the anthropologists of the RhodesLivingstone Institute, Schumaker examines the ‘Africanization’ of anthropological knowledge production (Schumaker, 2001). Africanizing Anthropology is an ‘anthropology of the anthropologists’ that shows how fieldwork was subject to colonial circumstances, and hence situates the Institute’s contribution to the discipline in the context of personal and political networks and everyday practices. Other analyses emphasise the empirical, theoretical and methodological innovations the ‘school’ produced in the analysis of social change during the 1950s and 1960s in what is now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi (Werbner, 1984, 1990). In the context of social problems arising from industrialization and labour migration on the Copperbelt and elsewhere, these innovations focused on how to analyse the interaction and articulation of systems of social relations and values (or ‘culture contact’) between ‘traditional rural subsistence production’ and ‘modern urban industrial production’ (Werbner, 1990: 156). The methodological innovations of the case method, situational analysis and network theory developed by Gluckman and his colleagues were designed to move the ethnographic focus from the normative to actual practice and to capture the social as processual and situational. As a result, Evens and Handelman (2006) argue that the extended case bore the seeds of another way of looking at the social altogether and anticipated practice theory.

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Ferguson’s (1999) study of the social effects of the decline of the Zambian mining sector in Expectations of Modernity argues that the researchers at the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (particularly its first Director Godfrey Wilson) were complicit in a ‘modernization plot’. Their analysis of social change, he states, contrasted two ideological stereotypes, the ‘migrant labouring tribesman versus permanently urbanized townsman’, and a linear modernizing vision of ‘a settled, permanent urban class of Africans’ (Ferguson, 1999: 34) which was not borne out in the complex historical patterns of mobility between rural and urban areas. The plot unravelled with declining commodity prices in the 1970s, and in his analysis of mine-workers’ strategies for straddling the urban−rural connection Ferguson brings the analysis into the present in his anthropology of ‘broken lives and shattered expectations’.3 Turning further south, Kuper (1999) has identified a stream of contributions to the history of South African anthropology which have traced the contrasting trajectories of the Afrikaans-speaking Volkekunde and the English-speaking social anthropology in parallel to the historical association of the discipline with reactionary social forces of apartheid and with liberal and radical opposition (Sharp, 1981; Gordon, 1990; Gordon and Spiegel, 1993; Hammond-Tooke, 1997). As Volkekunde (ethnology) ‘captured’ the discourse on ethnicity and cultural difference, so neo-Marxist anthropological theorizing provided a new ‘emblem of opposition’ to apartheid and an impulse to ‘document, expose, and challenge the social contradictions and political-cultural myths’ of south and southern Africa (Gordon and Spiegel, 1993: 92). Wilmsen’s (1989) Land Filled with Flies is a key example of this approach and takes its theoretical lead from Wolf (1982) in questioning the anthropological representation of the San-speaking peoples of southern Africa as a living laboratory of ‘hunter-gatherers’ and as historically remote from economic and social processes.

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Inextricably linked to the logics of colonial capitalism, Wilmsen argues that the ‘Bushman/San’ are not a timeless given entity but the end point of an historical process of dispossession from a cattle-herding economy, dislocation from the surrounding economies, and relegation to an underclass during the colonial era.4 The debate over culture and context in South African anthropology is also reflected in urban research. In his study of the city of East London, Bank’s (2011) Home Spaces, Street Styles revisits the locus classicus of South African urban anthropology and the debate prompted by the publication of Mayer’s (1961) Townsmen or Tribesmen. Echoing the Copperbelt debate over the persistence of traditional rural identities amongst urban migrants, the East London controversy was inflected by the racial politics of the South African academy. Mayer’s formulation of patterns of urban adaptation insisted that they were shaped by a fundamental cultural distinction, the Red/School divide, in the rural Xhosa countryside of the Eastern Cape. For Mayer this pointed to the resistance of the Red migrants to the cultural influences of modern town life, but for his critics, including Mafeje (1971) and Magubane (1973), it was a form of cultural essentialism to assert that some migrants remained ‘tribal’ in outlook. Following Ferguson’s conception of loose performative cultural styles rather than fixed impermeable identities, Bank’s re-study concludes that the Red style is no longer influential in the township, and that we may best understand the complex lived space of the post-apartheid township through the lens of ‘fractured urbanism’ (2011: 241).

INTROVERSION As we have seen, Africanist anthropologists have, in recent decades, turned the gaze on themselves in revisiting classic ethnographies and ethnographic traditions. In turning itself ‘inside out’ it has become a ‘science of

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self-examination’. The apparent involution of this process belies the important ethical commitment it makes in reflecting on the politics of knowledge production, and in contesting the ‘colonizing structure’ of tradition versus modernity. Yet, it has gone further still. In an introverted mode, questioning the implicit assumptions of their own disciplinary canon, Africanist anthropologists have also applied this critical gaze to contemporary African ‘problems’ and the conventional wisdoms that surround such issues as the environment, development, refugees and ethnicity. In this section I review key examples of the ways in which the anthropology of Africa has interrogated the production of authoritative ‘scientific’ accounts of Africa that have shaped policy and intervention. These Africanist cases are important exemplars and form part of a wider trend within the discipline in which ‘[T]he destabilizing of foundational knowledges in many arenas of instrumental practice (the law, the sciences, political economy) continues to proceed apace ...’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1999: xix). Building on Richards’ (1985) observation that farmers’ knowledge was dismissed or ignored in colonial policy-making, the recent anthropology of agricultural and environmental change in Africa, typified by Fairhead and Leach’s (1996) Misreading the African Landscape and Moore and Vaughan’s (1994) Cutting Down Trees, has been characterized by a mistrust of established, received wisdoms. Received wisdom about environmental change in Africa is captured in images of overgrazing and desertification based on neoMalthusian assumptions that there is a fixed natural resource base (its ‘carrying capacity’) which will be exhausted by an expanding population. This received wisdom informs national and global policy, but recent anthropological approaches illustrate that, ‘… the same landscape changes can be perceived and valued in different ways by different groups; what is “degraded or degrading” for some may for others be merely transformed or even improved’ (Leach and Mearns, 1996: 12).

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In Misreading the African Landscape, Fairhead and Leach examine colonial conceptions of the Kissidougou forest in Guinea which were shaped by the belief that prior to French arrivals the landscape had been covered in pristine forest, and that its subsequent history was one of regression and loss under pressure from African farmers. Preconceived opinions of the rural farmer as ‘environmental destroyer’, common among today’s foreign experts and urban-based state functionaries, they argue, is based on the, ‘[r]acialist, pejorative views of African farming and forestry practices [which] came to dominate Guinée’s colonial administrations’ (114−115). Their investigation into the history and local experience of forested areas surrounding village settlements (so-called ‘forest islands’) reverses the received wisdom and shows how this ecological feature is not a relic in a deforested savannah, but a product, a growth of the social and agricultural management of the environment by the local population (121). A parallel case, further illustrating the historical failings of expert knowledge in African rural economies, is provided by Moore and Vaughan’s (1994) Cutting Down Trees. Revisiting Richards’s (1939) classic Land, Labour and Diet they ask how Bemba shifting cultivation practices known as citemene were understood and represented by colonial experts in what is now northern Zambia. Ecologists of the period decried the environmental harm caused by the cutting and burning of trees to enrich soils for millet cultivation, while Richards had highlighted the effects on women when the male labour responsible for citemene migrated to the Copperbelt. The misconception arose, to which Richards contributed, that citemene agriculture and the lack of male labour had caused chronic undernutrition throughout the region. In presenting a complex set of interwoven household strategies Moore and Vaughan’s ethnography also inverts assumptions and shows how citemene was not the exclusive mode of agricultural production for Bemba farmers, and that women’s, not men’s labour was crucial.

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The findings in these cases were prompted by the Foucauldian imperative to excavate the relationship between ‘scientific’ orthodoxy and the interests of the dominant authority; or as he put it, to uncover how power ‘… produces domains of knowledge and rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1977: 194). The implications of the ‘mis-reading’ of farming and forestry for policy also apply to the wider project of post-war planning − ‘development’. The scope of ‘development’ has served to ‘reconfigure the political and institutional landscape of the social sciences’ (Ferguson, 1997), and a foundational text in the critical anthropology of development is an African exemplar. Ferguson’s (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine provides an extended case study of an internationally funded development project in the highlands of Lesotho. In triangulating fieldwork between villagers, developers and the state, and in analysing the textual representation of Lesotho as a ‘less developed country’, Ferguson provides a model for the discursive unpicking of important categories in African social and political life. The study makes three important contributions. First, in the manner of Apthorpe, Escobar, Sachs and others, Ferguson demonstrates the powerful effects of ‘development discourse’. He argues that ‘development’ institutions generate their own form of language or discourse about Lesotho which simplifies and de-politicizes the divergent and complex contexts of poverty. Second, Ferguson demonstrates how this external expertise misreads the Basotho moral economy in relation to the exchange value of livestock. In an analysis of what he calls the ‘bovine mystique’, Ferguson explains that the project failed to commercialize livestock husbandry because cattle formed a unique category of property and source of prestige not convertible with cash. Third, and in a most innovative analytical move, Ferguson demonstrates that development projects, with an overtly apolitical agenda, nevertheless facilitated the political task of expanding state power in the guise of a technical mission.

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In this case a decentralization initiative comprising an improved road-link with the capital and a new district administration the project brought a stronger military and administrative state presence in a traditional opposition stronghold. It is in this light that Ferguson refers to the development project as an ‘anti-politics machine’, ‘depoliticizing everything it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own preeminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic state power’ (xv). Like ‘under-development’, the category of ‘refugees’ is another object of knowledge and control which denotes an aberration of conventional categories and an objectified subject to ‘therapeutic intervention’. Malkki’s (1995) Purity and Exile examines the meaning of refugee status in a case study of Burundians who were displaced to Tanzania in the early 1970s. With the ‘national order of things’ taken for granted and the relationship between people and place naturalized in our conceptions of identity, Malkki argues that the bodies and minds of refugees, of the displaced and deterritorialized, come to be seen as polluting, or even dangerous. Malkki further shows that the refugee camp nurtured an elaborate self-conscious historicity in which Hutu refugees challenged the classification of themselves in a ‘mythicohistory’ which reified and heroized their national identity. By contrast to ‘town’ refugees in Kigoma, who apparently lost this ‘moral history’ to the ‘shifting strategies of invisibility’, the narrative constructions of essentialized national typologies of ‘camp’ refugees comprised a moral community and contained prescriptions for conduct based on the boundaries between self and other, Hutu and Tutsi, and good and evil (Malkki, 1995: 54). Ethnic, national and cultural designations in this instance do not reflect anthropological representation so much as African remembering and resilience. Taken together, these accounts of environment, development and displacement in Africa, divergent and important contemporary

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topics, share several features characteristic of the field in recent decades. They question anthropological concepts of society as bounded, argue against approaches that naturalize history or essentialize culture, and expose the ways in which these reified understandings of cultural difference are harnessed to political visions (Malkki, 1995: 2, 14). These are Africanist anthropologists then who have chosen to take on the ‘epistemic challenge’ and have rejected ‘localized’ ethnography, but ‘insist on its unique value in plumbing the nature and effects of largescale social, economic, and political processes’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 156).

EXTRAVERSION Beyond these major contributions to the anthropology of anthropology, and the discursive analysis of Western epistemological categories, Africanist perspectives have also over the past several decades developed an anthropology that situates Africa within processes of extraversion, in Bayart’s (2000) sense of the ways in which Africans actively participate in the processes that created the continent’s dependent position within the global system. I will only touch on anthropological contributions to the study of religion and generation, although many fields have been shaped by this perspective. The study of religion, in its many guises, I would argue, has emerged as a key research area in African anthropology. In relation to African traditional religion (cult possession movements and witchcraft) and the spread of the world religions, Christianity and Islam, the research output is remarkable. The anthropology of African traditional religion has witnessed a range of closely crafted analyses of spiritual worlds and ground-breaking interpretations of spirit possession cults.5 However, the analysis of witchcraft has become ubiquitous, and, as Ranger notes, the sheer bulk of published work on witchcraft seems problematically to validate the notion that ‘Africa’ and ‘the

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occult’ go together (Ranger, 2007: 275). Witchcraft has long been indiscriminately used as a measure of primitiveness and a marker of otherness that freezes non-Western subjects in a pre-modern time. Recent scholarship on the topic has explored the relationship between witchcraft and ‘modern’ social forms such as the state, the market and the media. Taking up Ardener’s (1970) analysis of the economics of witchcraft in Cameroon, Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997) has proved a seminal text in understanding witchcraft not as an artefact of African tradition, but as the contemporary discourse on social and political change. Geschiere writes about the emergence of a small Maka elite from south-eastern Cameroon after 1945 who owed their preeminence to their modern education and to their links to the centralized Cameroon state. Recalling Marwick’s (1970) notion of the ‘index of social strain’, Geschiere highlights the ‘socially levelling’ effects of accusations directed at this urban nouveaux riche and how accusations serve to delegitimize sources of wealth. These witchcraft discourses provide explanations not only of contingent misfortunes but also of economic inequality, of new forms of individualism and the exploitation (or zombification) associated with the introduction of capitalist modes of production (Nash, 1979; Taussig, 1980). In this reading, then, witchcraft accusations seem so widespread and to draw on such similar logics that they appear to capture a universal, ‘a general uncertainty about modernity’ (Ciekawy and Geschiere, 1998: 2), and hence witches are interpreted as ‘modernity’s prototypical malcontents’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993: xxviii−xxix). This theme has been examined in a range of regional and economic contexts (Bond and Ciekawy, 2001; Moore and Sanders, 2001; Meyer and Pels, 2003; West and Sanders, 2003), and has been developed in more recent works on secrecy and dissimulation in Sierra Leone (Ferme, 2001), neoliberalism in Mozambique (West, 2005), and spiritual uncertainty in the context of HIV/AIDS and democratic transition in

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South Africa (Ashforth, 2000, 2005; Niehaus et al., 2001). Witchcraft, it transpires, is a mode of African extraversion, a way of making sense of global economic and political change. Within this field, the study of African encounters with world religions directly addresses this issue of global connections.6 The interpretive challenge to an anthropology of religion that engages with world-historical processes is how to blend the narratives of world religions and endogenous development in local societies. Contrasting perspectives on this question are captured in some of the most substantial anthropological scholarship emanating from the continent in the period under review: the Comaroffs’ (1991, 1997) Of Revelation and Revolution and Peel’s (2000) Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. In their study of the Tswana’s ‘long conversation’ with Protestant missions during the nineteenth century in South Africa, the Comaroffs illustrate how conversion proceeded at two levels, the evangelical argument of ‘images and message’ and the hegemonic imposition of European cultural practices and technologies − literacy and fashion, agriculture and architecture, medicine and money. The latter, they argue, constituted a ‘reform of the indigenous world’, so that mission acted as a vector of colonial values and industrial capitalism at an everyday level, and colonial hegemony and Tswana subordination was naturalized by a ‘colonization of the consciousness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 311). Hence, while they argue for a dialectical history of reciprocal determinations, ultimately it was the ‘civilizing mission’ of the evangelists which ‘... insinuated new forms of individualism, new regimes of value, new kinds of wealth, new means and relations of production, new religious practices’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997: 163).7 In contrast, in his study of the nineteenthcentury encounters of missionaries in southwestern Nigeria, Peel argues that the local Yoruba population were active participants in the historical process of religious conversion

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and simultaneously accepted the new religion and utilized it to create something new − Yoruba Christianity. Developing Horton’s theory of conversion as a ‘cognitive and practical adjustment’, Peel explains how a prior religious, ethical and cosmological ordering provided ‘the conceptual bridgehead’ (2000: 194) for subsequent mass Christian conversion.8 Arguing for the centrality of local religious change in the study of Christianity in Africa, he identifies the role of local society and culture in shaping the reception of mission and highlights how Yoruba ideas about power, status, cults and beliefs interpreted and accommodated Christian messages. In this reading, then, the emphasis within Yoruba religious narratives is not on the external forces of capitalism, colonialism, modernization and globalization but on the long span of African history, and religious movements with their own source and dynamics. As such, Peel concludes that ‘the mission situation is shaped by those whom a mission seeks to convert as well as by the power behind the mission’ (2000: 2). For decades the study of youth was subsumed in anthropological reflections on gerontocratic social structures especially associated with East African age-set systems (Kurimoto and Simonse, 1998). In this context, youth were defined in relation to lifecycle rituals, cohort initiation and structural marginality. Understood as an historically constructed social category rather than as a predefined life-state, youth has more recently formed ‘an especially sharp lens through which social forces are focused in Africa’ (Durham, 2000: 114). This interest has been sparked by a generational contrast that has emerged between those who grew to adulthood in the first two decades of African Independence (1960−80) and their successors, a ‘lost generation’, who grew up at the end of the Cold War and under structural adjustment and neo-liberal reforms, and who see their ‘youth’ without work or wives as something which is at risk of becoming ‘indefinitely prolonged’ (Cruise

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O’Brien, 1996: 58). Recent studies have tended to focus on the manifestations of this apparent crisis of social reproduction in terms of the mobilization of youth in the civil wars, notably Richards’ (1996) study of the RUF in Sierra Leone, along with the concentration of youth displaced in refugee camps and on the streets of the continent’s cities (Abbink and Kessel, 2004; Honwana and Boeck, 2005). Beyond the relation between youth and conflict on the continent, however, youth has emerged as a productive focus for issues including livelihoods (Utas et al., 2006), gangs (Jensen, 2008), education (Sharp, 2002; Coe, 2005; Straker, 2007), childhood (Gottlieb, 2004) and love and intimacy (Cole and Thomas, 2009; Cole, 2010). Chernoff’s (2003) Hustling is not Stealing, for instance, is an innovative verbatim oral history of a West African bar girl which provides a unique insight cutting across these issues of sex and survival in the African city. The contribution to the field from Africanist ethnographies of youth is ably demonstrated in two brief examples, Vigh’s (2006) study of former combatants in Guinea-Bissau, Navigating Terrains of War, and Weiss’s (2009) work with Tanzanian young men and popular culture in Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops. Vigh’s use of the concept of ‘social navigation’ in the volatile environment of an irregular militia revisits the anthropological issue of agency, and whether youth should be viewed as victims manipulated by powerful seniors, or as unrestrained perpetrators (‘loose molecules’). Drawing on de Certeau, ‘social navigation’ designates praxis ‘attuned simultaneously to the immediate configurations of the social terrain and to its imagined [future] reconfigurations’ (Vigh, 2006: 131). The barbers of Arusha, discussed in Weiss’s study, navigate the iniquities of the neo-liberal economy through a subjectivity of tough ‘invincibility’, and employ hip hop sensibilities and consumer symbols to generate a sense of power. This ‘thug realism’ is a global fantasy of mobility and modernity generated by the very same

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forces that undermine their capacity to secure their own future (Weiss, 2009: 238).

CONCLUSION Recent trajectories within Africanist anthropology, as in other regions, confirm this analysis of extraversion, particularly in relation to the themes of memory, modernity and mobility. Historical memory has become a direct object of analysis in, for example, the ethnography of how the West African slave trade is recalled in material culture (Ferme, 2001), divination practices (Shaw, 2002) and masquerade performance (Argenti, 2007). The analysis of migration has drawn attention to the important roles of diasporic trading networks (MacGaffey and BazenguissaGanga, 2000; Stoller, 2002), transnational religious movements (Matory, 2005), and to new modes of inclusion and exclusion, the ‘dialectics of flow and closure’, wrought by physical and social mobility in the era of globalization (Meyer and Geschiere, 1999, 2009). Africanist anthropologists have also focused the ethnographic critique on the making of modern consumers (Burke, 1996), modernist revolutions (Donham, 1999), the modern nation-state (Askew, 2002; Apter, 2005), the modern city (De Boeck and Plissart, 2004), modern citizens (Wilson, 2001; Englund, 2006), modern ethnicities (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009) and modern media (Larkin, 2008). These are ethnographies of modernity in Africa which do not celebrate the triumph of modernist narratives but confirm a ‘global disconnect’, modernity’s ‘decomposition’ (Ferguson, 2006: 192). Recent work has indeed attended to the normalization of crisis and uncertainty on the continent. These African expositions of existential uncertainty touch on ‘structural distrust’ in the context of HIV/AIDS (Whyte, 1997; Hunter, 2010) and a ‘culture of crisis’ in post-conflict contexts (Finnström, 2008; Lubkemann, 2008). Beneath the surface of this chaos or stagnation, however, it is also true that Africa is

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undergoing profound changes and that ‘… the decomposition and recomposition of structures, institutions and identities in Africa is, therefore, one which needs to be researched more closely’ (Olukoshi and Laakso, 1996: 77). Anthropology in Africa is still alive to play its part. Where there is cause for optimism in the field is in the work of and recognition accorded African colleagues. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa’s publication of African Anthropologies (Ntarangwi et al., 2006) heralded both a resurgence of the discipline at African universities (confirmed elsewhere: Nkwi, 2007), and also a strong argument in favour of dissolving the unhelpful ‘pure/ applied dichotomy’, since many African anthropologists are increasingly straddling the two worlds of consultancy and the academy. And as anthropology is more careful than ever not to essentialize or exoticize the continent, so anthropologists are increasingly able to challenge the journalistic impressions of a continent beset by crisis and failure not only with ethnographic counter examples but also by engaging with the category of ‘Africa’ and its place in the world (Ferguson, 2006). Retroversion, introversion and extraversion are not mutually exclusive categories by which we can understand the recent history of Africanist anthropology. Nor are they discrete stages through which that history has passed. Nevertheless, since the 1980s, African anthropology has challenged its past, interrogated the categories through which it knows the continent, and has illuminated those histories and issues through which Africa has been entangled with the rest of the world. Whether Africa is more important to anthropology than anthropology is to Africa these days is moot − the relationship on both axes waxes and wanes. But perhaps the relative strength of the relationship between anthropology and Africa is not the issue: both are mutually implicated and mutually dependent.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend my sincere thanks to William Beinart, Richard Fardon, Henrik Vigh, JDY Peel, Staffan Löfving, Ana Margarida Sousa Santos and Julie Archambault for their help and advice.

NOTES 1 The publication of this overview sparked further debate over the representation of African scholarship within the discipline (Mafeje, 1997, 1998b). 2 Now the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Zambia. 3 Other perspectives on Zambian society that revisit the post-colonial impact of the copper mining industry include Moore and Vaughan (1994), Crehan (1997) and Hansen (1991, 2000). 4 The critical alternative emphasises how !Kung San have maintained an old but adaptable way of life based on hunter-gatherer modes of production (Lee and Guenther, 1993). Barnard (2007) points to the ways in which the image and portrayal of the Bushmen changes with generations of anthropological theory. 5 On local cosmologies and ‘moral’ knowledge, see, Bloch (1986), James (1988), Jackson (1989), Fardon (1991) and Parkin (1991. On the analysis of spiritual knowledge, authority and identity, see McNaughton (1988), Dilley (2004), Kresse (2007) and Marchand (2009). And on the analysis of spirit possession, see Stoller (1997) on the Nigerien hauka, Olivier de Sardan (1984) and Masquelier (2001) on Hausa bori, Boddy (1989) and Lewis et al. (1991) on za¯r in Sudan, Lan (1985) in relation to guerrilla warfare, Sharp (1993) on health and well-being, and Lambek (2002) on historical consciousness. 6 The anthropology of Islam in Africa in recent decades has also focused on the tension between local and global, particular and universal, and urban scripturalist versus rural popularist traditions: see, for example, Holy (1991), Launay (1992), Lambek (1993) and Soares (2005). 7 In its relation to subaltern agency, this study also builds on and provides an interesting counterpoint to Comaroff’s (1985) study of Tshidi encounters with African independent churches. 8 Reversing Horton’s theory of conversion, Meyer’s (1999) analysis of Christianity in Ghana shows how contact with the forces of modernity stimulated rather than diminished beliefs in local spirits. Her work also embraces the shift in the focus

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of study from the 1980s on African independent churches to Pentecostal churches more recently and how a strategy of extraversion is critical in explaining the mass appeal of Pentecostalism.

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Boddy, J. (1989) Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, men, and the zar cult in northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bond, G. C. & D. Ciekawy (eds) (2001) Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and philosophical exchanges. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Burke, T. (1996) Lifebuoy men, Lux Women: Commodification, consumption, and cleanliness in modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chernoff, J. M. (2003) Hustling is Not Stealing: Stories of an African bar girl. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ciekawy, D. & P. Geschiere (1998) ‘Containing Withcraft: Conflicting Scenarios in Postcolonial Africa’, African Studies Review 41 (3): 1−14. Coe, C. (2005) Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, nationalism, and the transformation of knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cole, J. (2010) Sex and Salvation: Imagining the future in Madagascar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cole, J. & L. M. Thomas (eds) (2009) Love in Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. (1985) Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance. The culture and history of a South African people. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. & J. L. Comaroff (2003) ‘Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction’, Ethnography 4 (2): 147−79. Comaroff, J. & J. L. Comaroff (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. & J. L. Comaroff (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution: the dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. L. & J. Comaroff (2009) Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. & J. L. Comaroff (eds) (1993) Modernity and Its Malcontents, Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Crehan, K. A. F. (1997) The Fractured Community: Landscapes of power and gender in rural Zambia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cruise O’Brien, D. B. (1996) ‘A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa’, in R. Werbner & T. Ranger (eds) Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books.

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De Boeck, F. & M. F. Plissart (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the invisible city. Ludion: Royal Museum for Central Africa. Dilley, R. (2004) Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices Among Haalpulaar’en in Senegal: Between mosque and termite mound. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Donham, D. L. (1999) Marxist Modern: An ethnographic history of the Ethiopian revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Durham, D. (2000) ‘Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa: Introduction to Parts 1 and 2’, Anthropological Quarterly 73 (3): 113−20. Englund, H. (2006) Prisoners of Freedom: Human rights and the African poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Evens, T. M. S. & D. Handelman (2006) ‘Introduction: The Ethnographic Praxis of the Theory of Practice’, in T.M.S. Evens & D. Handelman (eds) The Manchester School: Practice and ethnographic praxis in anthropology. New York: Berghahn. Fairhead, J. & M. Leach (1996) Misreading the African Landscape: Society and ecology in a forest−savanna mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fardon, R. (1991) Between God, The Dead and The Wild. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fardon, R. (ed.) (1990) Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh and Smith: Scottish Academic Press. Ferguson, J. (1990) The Anti-politics machine: “Development”, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ferguson, J. (1997) ‘Anthropology and Its Evil Twin: Development in the Constitution of a Discipline’, in F. Cooper & R. Packard (eds) International Development and the Social Sciences. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ferguson, J. (1999) Expectations of Modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferme, M. C. (2001) The Underneath of Things: Violence, history, and the everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Finnström, S. (2008) Living with Bad Surroundings: War, history, and everyday moments in northern Uganda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin Books.

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Geschiere, P. (1997) The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia. Geschiere, P. (2009) The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goody, J. (1995) The Expansive Moment: The rise of social anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918−1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, R. (1990) ‘Early Social Anthropology in South Africa’, African Studies 49 (1): 15−48. Gordon, R. J. & A. D. Spiegel (1993) ‘Southern Africa Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1): 83−105. Gottlieb, A. (2004) The Afterlife is Where we Come From: The culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Guyer, J. (1999) ‘Anthropology: The Study of Social and Cultural Originality’, African Sociological Review 3 (2): 30−53. Guyer, J. I. (2004) ‘Anthropology in Area Studies’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (1): 499−523. Hammond-Tooke, W. D. (1997) Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s anthropologists, 1920−1990. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Hansen, K. T. (1991) ‘After Copper Town − the Past in the Present in Urban Zambia’, Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (4): 441−56. Hansen, K. T. (2000) Salaula: The world of secondhand clothing and Zambia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hart, J. K. (1985) ‘The Social Anthropology of West Africa’, Annual Review of Anthropology 14: 243−72. Herzfeld, M. (2001) Anthropology: Theoretical practice in culture and society. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Holy, L. (1991) Religion and Custom in a Muslim Society: the Berti of Sudan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honwana, A. & F. d. Boeck (eds) (2005) Makers and Breakers: Children and youth in postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Hunter, M. (2010) Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, gender, and rights in South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hutchinson, S. E. (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with money, war, and the state. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jackson, M. (1989) Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical empiricism and ethnographic inquiry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. James, W. (1988) The Listening Ebony: Moral knowledge, religion, and power among the Uduk of Sudan. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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James, W. (1990) ‘Kings, Commoners, and the Ethnographic Imagination in Sudan and Ethiopia’, in R. Fardon (ed.) Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Jensen, S. (2008) Gangs, Politics & Dignity in Cape Town. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Keita, L. (1989) ‘Research Discipline in the African Context: A Revised Paradigm’, Quest 3 (1): 3−19. Kresse, K. (2007) Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on the Swahili coast. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kuklick, H. (1991) The Savage Within: The social history of British anthropology, 1885−1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper, A. (1999) ‘South African Anthropology. An inside Job’, Paideuma 45: 83−101. Kurimoto, E. & S. Simonse (eds) (1998) Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa: Age systems in transition, Oxford: James Currey. Lambek, M. (1993) Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local discourses of Islam, sorcery and spirit possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lambek, M. (2002) The Weight of the Past: Living with history in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lan, D. (1985) Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey. Larkin, B. (2008) Signal and Noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Launay, R. (1992) Beyond the Stream: Islam and society in a West African town. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Leach, M. & R. Mearns (eds) (1996) The Lie of the Land: Challenging received wisdom on the African environment. London: James Currey. Lee, R. B. & M. Guenther (1993) ‘Problems in Kalahari Historical Ethnography and the Tolerance of Error’, History in Africa 20: 185−235. Lewis, I. M., A. Safi & S. Hurreiz (1991) Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori cult in African and beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lubkemann, S. C. (2008) Culture in Chaos: An anthropology of the social condition in war. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MacGaffey, J. & R. Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000) CongoParis: Transnational traders on the margins of the law. Oxford: James Currey. Mafeje, A. (1971) ‘The Ideology of Tribalism’, Journal of Modern African Studies 9 (2): 253−61. Mafeje, A. (1997) ‘‘Who are the Makers and Objects of Anthropology? A Critical Comment on Sally Falk

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Moore’s “Anthropology and Africa”’, African Sociological Review 1 (1): 1–15. Mafeje, A. (1998a) ‘Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide or End of an Era ?’, African Sociological Review 2 (1): 1−43. Mafeje, A. (1998b) ‘Debates & Rejoinders: Conversations and Confrontations with my Reviewers’, African Sociological Review 2 (2): 95−107. Mafeje, A. (2001) Anthropology in Post-Independence Africa: End of an era and the problem of selfredefinition. Nairobi: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Magubane, B. (1971) ‘A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology 12 (4/5): 419−45. Magubane, B. (1973) ‘The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology: A Failure of Method and Theory’, American Anthropologist 75 (5): 1701−15. Magubane, B. & J. C. Faris (1985) ‘On the Political Relevance of Anthropology’, Dialectical Anthropology 9 (1): 91−104. Malkki, L. H. (1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marchand, T. H. J. (2009) The Masons of Djenné. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Marcus, G. E. & M. M. J. Fischer (1999) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marwick, M. (1970) ‘Sorcery as a Social Strain Gauge’, in M. Marwick (ed.) Witchcraft and Sorcery: Selected readings. London: Penguin. Masquelier, A. M. (2001) Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matory, J. L. (2005) Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the AfroBrazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mayer, P. with I. Mayer (1961) Townsmen or Tribesmen: conservatism and the process of urbanization in a South African city. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. McNaughton, P. (1988) The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, power and art in West Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Meyer, B. (1999) Translating the Devil: Religion and modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, B. & P. Geschiere (eds) (1999) Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of flow and closure. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Meyer, B. & P. Pels (eds) (2003) Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of revelation and concealment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Moore, H. L. & T. Sanders (eds) (2001) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, witchcraft, and the occult in postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge. Moore, H. L. & M. Vaughan (1994) Cutting Down Trees: Gender, nutrition, and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890−1990. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Moore, S. F. (1994) Anthropology and Africa: Changing perspectives on a changing scene. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1985) ‘African Gnosis Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge: An Introduction’, African Studies Review 28 (2/3): 149−233. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nash, J. (1979) We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: dependency and exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press. Niehaus, I. A., E. Mohlala & K. Shokane (2001) Witchcraft, Power, and Politics: Exploring the occult in the South African lowveld. London: Pluto Press. Nkwi, P. N. (2007) ‘Editorial: Resurgence of Anthropology at African Universities’, African Anthropology 14: v−vii. Ntarangwi, M., D. Mills & M. H. M. Babiker (eds) (2006) African Anthropologies: History, critique, and practice. London: Zed Books. Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (1984) Les sociétés SonghayZarma, Niger-Mali: chefs, guerriers, esclaves, paysans. Paris: Karthala. Olukoshi, A. O. & L. Laakso (1996) Challenges to the Nation-state in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiskaafrikaininstitut. Owusu, M. (1978) ‘Ethnography of Africa: The Usefulness of the Useless’, American Anthropologist 80 (2): 310−34. Parkin, D. J. (1990) ‘Eastern Africa: the View from the Office and the Voice from the Field’, in Fardon, R. (ed.) Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Parkin, D. J. (1991) Sacred Void: Spatial images of work and ritual among the Giriama of Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peel, J. D. Y. (2000) Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Pels, P. (1997) ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 163−83. Piot, C. (1999) Remotely Global: Village modernity in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ranger, T. (2007) ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult: A Literature Review’, Africa 77 (2): 272−83. Richards, A. I. (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in northern Rhodesia: An economic study of the Bemba tribe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, P. (1985) Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: ecology and food production in West Africa. London: Hutchinson. Richards, P. (1996) Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, youth and resources in Sierra Leone. London: James Currey. Rigby, P. (1996) African Images: Racism and the end of anthropology. London: Berg. Schumaker, L. (2001) Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, networks, and the making of cultural knowledge in central Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharp, J. S. (1981) ‘The Roots and Development of Volkekunde in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 8 (1): 16−36. Sharp, L. A. (1993) The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, identity, and power in a Madagascar migrant town. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sharp, L. A. (2002) The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, history, and the colonized mind in Madagascar. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shaw, R. (2002) Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the historical imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Soares, B. F. (2005) Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and authority in a Malian town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Southall, A. (1983) ‘The Contribution of Anthropology to African Studies’, African Studies Review 26 (3/4): 63−76. Stoller, P. (1997) Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit possession, power and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge. Stoller, P. (2002) Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Straker, J. (2007) ‘Youth, globalisation, and millennial reflection in a Guinean forest town’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 45 (2): 299−319. Taussig, M. (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Tilley, H. & R. J. Gordon (eds) (2007) Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European imperialism and the politics of knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tonkin, E. (1990) ‘West African Ethnographic Traditions’, in R. Fardon (ed.) Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Utas, M., H. Vigh & C. Christiansen (eds) (2006) Navigating Youth Generating Adulthood: Social becoming in an African context. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Vigh, H. (2006) Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. New York: Berghahn. Weiss, B. (2009) Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global fantasy in urban Tanzania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Werbner, R. P. (1984) ‘The Manchester School in South-Central Africa’, Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 157−85.

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Werbner, R. P. (1990) ‘South-Central Africa: The Manchester School and After’, in R. Fardon (ed.) Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. West, H. G. (2005) Kupilikula: Governance and the invisible realm in Mozambique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. West, H. G. & T. Sanders (2003) Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whyte, S. R. (1997) Questioning Misfortune: the Pragmatics of uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilmsen, E. N. (1989) Land Filled with Flies: A political economy of the Kalahari. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, R. (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E. R. (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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2.4 Refiguring the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Glenn Bowman

In the twenty odd years since the publication of Lila Abu-Lughod’s and Michael Gilsenan’s masterly, and highly influential, summations of the contemporary state of play in the anthropologies of the Middle East and North Africa (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Gilsenan, 1990), not only have there been substantive regional and topical redrawings of anthropological focus but also radical transformations of the societies studied as well as of the wider world to which anthropologists appeal for support and with which they attempt to communicate. Abu-Lughod predicted, and was a participant in, anthropology following its subjects out of villages and into the cities. North Yemen and Morocco were ‘prestige zones’ for the anthropology she described (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 279); today, as Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar have argued (Deeb and Winegar, 2010), these places have been replaced by Lebanon (Beirut) and Egypt (Cairo). Two decades ago, the theoretical metonyms or ‘gatekeeping concepts’ (Appadurai, 1986: 357) which organized hegemonic discourses on the region were ‘segmentation, the harem, and Islam’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 280). Today, while segmentation, and the emphasis on

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tribes and patrilineal parallel cousin marriage which localized it, has largely fallen out of favour (though not, as Deeb and Winegar (2010) point out, ‘for policymakers, rightwing analysts, and embedded anthropologists’), the earlier interest in the hidden lives of women ‘behind the veil’ that Abu-Lughod saw as undertheorized and inflected by a ‘colonial discourse on Oriental women’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 289) has been reformed by feminist theorization and brought into a far more critical and incisive relation with the analysis of Islam. The proliferation and amplification of secular and religious identity politics over the past twenty years have given rise not only to increased concern with nationalism, populist movements, and subject formation but have also − fuelled by the events of 11 September and the further violence ‘legitimated’ by reference to them − generated contending discourses on the role of Islam in both domestic and public arenas. For the most part, anthropologists have sought to counter the clarion calls of the advocates of a ‘War on Terror’ with portrayals of the ‘everyday life’ of Islamic societies (LeVine, 2005), but some have been drawn to

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take up discursive arms in the defence of what they define as civilization (Price, 2011). In both the United Kingdom and the United States, popular and institutional support for mobilization against the ‘Arab’ and/ or ‘Muslim’ world has had an impact on anthropology, leading to attempts to muzzle critical anthropological voices addressing Islam, Israel, Iraq and other ‘regional’ topics, to cut funding for research, and to impede the hiring (and occasionally encourage the firing) of anthropologists working in the Middle East or North Africa. While the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa may continue to appear, in Gilsenan’s (1990) phrase, ‘very like a camel’ in having evolved at a tangent to the main currents of social and cultural anthropology,1 many of the features of the region which in the past shaped its exceptionalism as a field of study (urban cosmopolitanism, historical depth, the roles of Islam and of women, the complex networking of local, regional, urban, national and diasporic populations) have become distinctive concerns of the contemporary world. As a result, Middle Eastern and North African anthropologies now have the potential to become bellwethers for current anthropology. The field, like the regions it encompasses, is extensive and multiform, and I shall not attempt to summarize the significant and influential writings of the past twenty years; the recent essay by Laura Deeb and Jessica Winegar in the Annual Review of Anthropology (Deeb and Winegar, 2012) ably covers that ground. Instead, I shall investigate changes in the ways the Middle East and North Africa have been conceptualized by anthropologists over the past two decades, focusing on definitions of the terms and criteria for inclusion. Where I cite particular works (for the most part books in English) I do so either because these are texts familiar to me and salient to my argument, or because they were among texts practising anthropologists of the Middle East and North Africa referred to, in response to questions I circulated in July 2010, asking them to nominate ‘the three to five most

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important anthropological textswritten in the past twenty years for your approach to/ awareness of the Middle East’.

COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES The terms ‘Middle East’ and ‘North Africa’ are deeply imbued with European and American military and colonial history: hence, their conceptual boundaries have been shifting as fields of influence have expanded, retracted and relocated.2 The ‘Middle East’ charted by European strategists in the nineteenth century referred to the lands between the domains of the Ottoman Empire and those of British India (thus, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Turkestan and the Caucasus); meanwhile the ‘Near East’ encompassed the Balkan Peninsula and Turkic Anatolia as well as the region stretching eastward from Egypt to the Euphrates and southward through the entire Arabian Peninsula. ‘North Africa’ was a French term referring to colonies and protectorates (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania) established between 1830 and 1911 to the north of its African Empire, and the term came to encompass the Western Sahara and Libya, even though these came, respectively, to be under Spain and Italy. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War rendered such distinctions less pertinent, and in the inter-war period the term ‘Near East’ was in most quarters supplanted by ‘Middle East’, with consequent retraction from the original ‘Eastern’ territories. This tendency was accelerated by the 1939 establishment of the ‘British Middle East Command’ in Cairo (Davidson, 1960: 669−670) to control Egypt, Sudan and Palestine/Transjordan. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, with growing American hegemony in the region, the ‘Middle East’ of American political and military usage came to refer to Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. ‘North Africa’ continued for the

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most part to retain its colonial referents, although Mauritania was not consistently included in it. Recently, impelled in 2004 by the Bush Administration, a ‘Greater Middle East’ has been articulated by the G8 which encompasses not only the more recent definition of the Middle East, and the long-standing North Africa, but also Sudan and the earlier conception of the Middle East (Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and those areas of the Caucasus seen as ‘Islamic’). The addition of Somalia − a ‘state’ discontinuous with the rest of the region − gives the game away by suggesting that this large and disparate category is held together by an essentialized and antagonistic Islam, allied to the designation of ‘politically problematic’.3 At least in both popular and International Relations usages, military and (now post-) colonial concerns continue to define the borders of the region.

THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS’ MIDDLE EAST: ORIENTALISM AND THE ‘QUESTION OF ISLAM’ How have anthropologists sought to define the region and delimit their field of ethnographic study? It has proved difficult for generalists, when attempting to provide introductions to a field imagined as a coherent category, to avoid the colonial cartography. In 1981 appeared the first edition of Dale Eickelman’s The Middle East: an Anthropological Approach, a text which over the next 20 years, and with an updated second edition (1989), would provide a popular and authoritative introduction to the study of a region encompassing Asian and European Turkey, Western Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan, the Levant and North Africa (including Mauritania). By 1998 The Middle East had morphed into The Middle East and Central Asia: an Anthropological Approach through the addition of material dealing with all of the eastern regions added by the G8 to their definition of the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eastern Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan,

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Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Eickelman justified this extension in part because of ‘cross border cultural and commercial ties’ between the two regions, but more signally because ‘Islam remains a basic (although not exclusive) element of identity for most people of the region’ (1998: viii). Debates over the role of Islam in defining a coherent domain of study have long troubled anthropology and cognate fields (see el-Zein, 1977; Asad, 1996 [1986]; Donnan, 2001; Varisco, 2005; and, of course, Said, 1978, 1989), yet it continues to provide the rationale for bringing together the regions Eickelman called ‘the Middle East’ and ‘Central Asia’. Charles Lindholm, in his two editions of The Islamic Middle East (1996, 2002), consolidated the link between region and religion by adopting the historian Marshall Hodgson’s idea of a ‘cultural core region of Muslim society ... stretching from the Nile on the West to the Oxus on the East’ (2002: 7; see also Hodgson, 1974 and for a critique Burke, 2010), and adding North Africa. Bowen and Early’s Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Bowen and Early, 1993, 2002) similarly collocated Islam and the Middle East, ranging from Morocco through Sudan and Iran to Afghanistan. Gerasimos Makris’s Islam in the Middle East: a Living Tradition (2006), however, notably disarticulated the two, elaborating that Islam is sited in the Middle East rather than conflating them into an ‘Islamic Middle East’. There are reasons to maintain the distinction between communal affiliation and locale; not only do numerous non-Muslim communities, sectarian and secular, exist in the region amongst majority Muslim populations (themselves aligned with various exclusive Sunni or Shi’a branches) but also the characterization of a ‘culture area’ engages in precisely the kind of essentialization that Edward Said critiqued in his massively influentialOrientalism (Said, 1978). Lindholm, recognizing the influence of Said’s critique, defended his collocation of Islam and the Middle East by arguing for the validity of concepts of ‘culture and of cross-cultural

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comparison’ (1995: 806). Lindholm claimed anthropology had in effect ‘lost its way’ as a consequence not only of the influence of Said’s works but also of those of Geertz and Bourdieu, with their earlier turns towards interpretivism and agency.

the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient. (Said, 1978: 5)

[T]his new concern with ‘negotiated realities’ was preadapted to accommodate itself to Said’s attack on all forms of cultural constraint since it was a small logical step from arguing that the traditional anthropological-native categories were a disguise for the reality of maximizing individuals manipulating for advantage within culturally constructed webs of meaning to arguing that all categories whatsoever were merely reflections in the colonizing eye of the Western onlooker. (Lindholm, 1995: 807)

Following Foucault, however, Said did assert that discursive constructs such as Orientalism have practical impact; thus, Orientalist discourse created a simulacrum of the ‘Orient’ which prevented Orientalists from being able to observe the living societies of the region, and also provided models of deportment and governance for colonial agents active in the region, thus imposing that image on those societies (see Mitchell, 1988, 1998). Ironically, some commentators mistook Said’s critique of Orientalism’s literary misconstrual of the ‘Middle East’ as an assertion of Said’s belief that the literal Middle East was a creation of the West ‘without substance of its own’. As Hosam Aboul-Ela illustrates in a recent article, Said’s ‘relentless focus on the western gaze’ seemed to produce a ‘hyper-objectification of the Arab, who remains at the end of the study an object constructed, controlled and fully circumscribed by the discourse of Europe and America’ (Aboul-Ela, 2010: 729). Although, as Aboul-Ela chronicles, Said offered numerous correctives to this reading (see for instance his rejection of an early Foucauldian reductionism in his 1984 ‘Traveling theory’ and his celebration of resistance in 1993’s Culture and Imperialism) ‘still, the momentum of that earlier formulation which seemed to strip the orientalized, the colonized, and the subaltern of all agency and of any voice has been enduring’ (Aboul-Ela, 2010: 731). The rigorous reflexivity that informs the ethnographic work of Abu-Lughod and many other contemporary ethnographers of Middle Eastern regions is closely linked to the critique of discursive positioning put forward by Said; by attending to their positioning relative to the field, they refine awareness of the ways their training and the cultural baggage they travel with might

According to Lindholm, Said ‘portray[ed] the Middle East as nothing more than a pale and distorted reflection of European stereotypes, without substance of its own’ (1995: 806), and anthropologists (a particular target of his criticism being Lila Abu-Lughod, whose 1993 Writing Women’s Worlds is one of the texts reviewed in his article) followed in ‘credit[ing] Western intellectual discourse as the active creator of local realities and... downplay[ing] or ignor[ing] the history and tradition that Middle Eastern people continually refer to in identifying themselves and marking out the course of their lives’ (1995: 809). Said was, of course, by training and profession a literary scholar whose concern was with the discursive construction of what were, in effect, fictional worlds; Orientalism contended that the ‘Middle East’, as constructed through a long discursive Western tradition, was literally a fiction. Mitchell points out that the text was intended to repudiate the claim put forward by Orientalists past and present ‘that the Middle East was simply an empirical fact’ (Mitchell, 2003: 16) through asking the questions ‘How does one know the “things that exist”, and to what extent are the “things that exist” constituted by the knower?’ (Said, 1978: 300). In the introduction to Orientalism, Said wrote that,

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distort understanding of the peoples they work with. Abu-Lughod’s attention to her position as a ‘halfie’ (Abu-Lughod, 1988), like the concern with perspective of the other contributors to Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Altorki and El-Sohl, 1988), is an intentional move not only to renounce the dispassionate gaze of the disembodied scholar who ‘describes’ a world which is actually being constituted by that gaze (Bowman, 1998) but also to allow her ‘located’ voice to engage in dialogue with the voices of those resident in the field.4 The correlate of that reflexivity is close attention both to the detail of everyday life and also to the perspectives on, and interpretations of, that life by those who participate in it. Lindholm sees this ‘narrative ethnography [a]s part of a postmodern literaryanthropological genre that self-consciously seeks to subvert cultural stereotypes’ and demands of authors that they make an effort to ‘give the reader a sense of the particular and plural voices of the Others − an effort that is taken to be a morally noble thing, as the portrayal of uniqueness is thought automatically to awaken the empathy of the reader (generalization is bad because it turns individuals into abstractions and is therefore a discourse of hegemony)’. He contends that ‘the foregrounding of experience and personal voice at the expense of generalization, comparison or theory building is now the discourse of choice among a great many younger Middle East specialists’. This narrative strategy, apparently, meant to establish a sympathetic identification between readers and the people studied via the mediation of tales of the ethnographers’ experiences, allows readers of the texts the ‘recognition that the Others ... share our humanity’ but does so at the cost of producing ‘very few usable data’ and generating few, if any, conclusions or hypotheses applicable beyond the limits of specific field sites (Lindholm, 1995: 810−811). Edmund Burke III, whose Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East approaches the ‘transformations that Middle Eastern societies have undergone since the

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beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Burke, 1993: 2) through a diverse collection of biographies of twenty-four ordinary people, is taken to task by Lindholm for ‘an unwillingness to accept responsibility for theorizing or abstraction ... [or for] the development of any useful premises or hypotheses’ (1995: 812). Burke contends that, successful works ... locate their subjects in particular sociological and cultural, as well as historical, contexts, and do not invoke broad psychological or cultural traits in explanation. They are social biographies in their commitment to change and complexity, as well as to the individuality of their subjects. (Burke, 1993: 8)

This is an argument that Lindholm counters by arguing, ‘We are left wondering about change from what and to what, and whether we can say anything about the modern Middle East except that it is full of complicated individuals with varied life histories who live in very different historical and cultural contexts’ (Lindholm, 1995: 812−813). The issue of what else we might say is very much to the point. What Lindholm alleges in the post-Saidian texts he criticizes is the abandonment of any attempt to answer questions of cultural causation,5 questions which for him can be answered only via the concept of a Muslim culture, which he believes capable of rescuing Middle Eastern anthropology from the post-modernist morass in which it is emired. Quoting James Clifford − not the most obvious ally − Lindholm claims that ‘we “cannot yet do without” the notion of culture ... once culture is admitted, then it is possible to establish the grounds for generalization and comparison’ (1995: 818, quoting Clifford, 1988: 10).

IS THERE A MIDDLE EASTERN/NORTH AFRICAN CULTURE? This argument raises very real questions about how ‘culture’ is to be defined. Instead of coming to Middle Eastern history through ‘broad generalizations about Islam or the

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Ottoman state, or from stereotypes about the Arab mind or Islam’, Burke proposes a ‘bottom up’ approach through close engagement with the minutiae of the everyday life of common people (1993: 8). He is careful to point out that he is not seeking to use ‘typical’ individuals to represent Middle Eastern character metonymically or provide examples of a generic ‘Arab Mind’ (like Patai, 1973). Because the complexities of the area are so daunting, it is tempting to read Middle Eastern society through the lives of a few individuals. A homogenized and essentialist Middle East enables us to avoid engaging the historical and cultural specificities of the various groups and peoples who live there ... [However] by their sheer variety the twenty-four lives presented in this book constitute a potent antidote to the homogenizing and essentialist impulse. While different themes can be traced in these biographies, no one of them applies to all cases ... . The very number of lives is an incitement to thought, for one is compelled to consider the particular factors that appear to have been significant in shaping the individual lives recounted here and to locate them in a complex and historical context. (Burke, 1993: 8)

This focus on historical and cultural specificities, common to many of the ‘new generation’ of Middle East ethnographers and historians,6 entails not only nuanced and detailed ethnographic attention to lived lives but also, in its concern with the ‘transformations that Middle Eastern societies have undergone’, siting the communities in which those lives are lived within the multiplex strands of the region’s historical transformations. Lindholm’s query − ‘change from what to what?’ − is more readily answered through a focus on local contexts − i.e. the changes from the lives people understood themselves and their ancestors to be living in the more or less distant past to the way they act out and interpret their lives today − than it is in the wider, encapsulating terms of the ‘Middle East’ or ‘North Africa’. After all, the Middle East has seen radical changes throughout the period during which it has drawn the attention of ethnographers, Orientalist or not (for a survey of early regional anthropology, see Eickelman,

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1998: 27−52; and for twentieth-century developments Eickelman, 1998: passim; Anderson, 1996: 287−291). Even had Orientalists and their successors generalized from accurate observations, most of those generalizations would still have been rendered obsolete by demographic and technological transformations and the cultural and ideational changes effected by them. Eickelman notes that whereas the urban population of the Middle East was 10% in 1900, it was over two-thirds by 1990 (Eickelman, 1998: 13).7 With urbanization and the technological changes that accompany it came signal changes in social networks (Singerman, 1995; Meneley, 1996; Rabinowitz, 1997; Ghannam, 2002) and modes of communication (Armbrust, 1996; Eickelman and Anderson, 2000, 2003; Hirschkind, 2006) as well as practices of work (Hoodfar,1997), marketing (Elyachar, 2005) and consumption (Starrett, 1995a; Bruck, 2005). Such transformations gave rise not only to new patterns of social control and governance − bureaucracy (Mitchell, 2002; Feldman, 2008), education (Messick, 1993; Starrett, 1998), bio-politics (Kanaaneh, 2002) and medical intervention (Clark, 2009) − but also were the conditions for novel aspirations (Khosrav, 2007), identifications (Slyomovics, 2005), concepts of gender relations (Ahmed, 1992; Moors, 1995; Abu-Lughod, 1998; Ali, 2002) and imagings of community (Layne, 1994). The state has taken on both a more intimate and a more intrusive presence, facilitating more powerful forms of surveillance and intervention (Zureik, Lyon and AbuLaban, 2010), while also enabling more complex structures of identification and resistance (Wedeen, 1999, 2008; NavaroYashin, 2002). Such transformations have had an impact upon the countryside as well, directly and indirectly, not just because both media (Abu-Lughod, 2004; Hoffman 2008) and market (Kapchan, 1996) draw it into the ‘space’ of the city but also because patterns of labour migration and diaspora spin complex and well-travelled routes between places and identities (Chatty, 1996; Silverstein, 2004; Ho, 2006; Scheele, 2009).

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Pastoral nomadism, which through the image of the Bedouin had generated many of the significant tropes of Middle Eastern studies, had declined by 1970 to involve ‘slightly more than one percent of the population of the Middle East’ (Eickelman, 1998: 74). Even where nomadism is still practised, it has been transformed by changing technologies of transport and communication (Chatty, 1986; Cole 2003) as well as by the effects of colonial and post-colonial state formations (Khoury and Kostiner, 1991; Young, 1995; Shyrock, 1997; Alon, 2009). The significance and practice of tribal identity (see Caton, 2000, 2005), forms of religious worship, belief and mobilization as well as the structure and function of marriage practices have all continued to be reshaped variously by the differential impact of local, regional, national and international forces on the varied contexts in which they are practised. In light of these transformations, it is difficult to know how to invoke ‘culture’ so as to facilitate generalization and comparison (see Kuper, 2000 on the culture concept in social and cultural anthropology more generally). Lindholm, in his pursuit of cultural ‘causes’ generating the ‘effects’ of individual beliefs and practices and social regularities, posits a value configuration organized around equality and competitive individualism ... a high estimate of the importance of bravery, independence and generosity; a personal honor code based on self help, hospitality, blood revenge, sanctuary, and rigid sexual mores of female chastity and seclusion ... [with honor] inextricably located within the patrilineal and patriarchal families, clans and tribes into which men and women are born, and to which they owe loyalty and support. (Lindholm, 2002: 13)

Those who have lived or worked in the Middle East or North Africa will have seen shards from this value nexus glittering amongst the detritus of the everyday (Kandiyoti and Saktanber, 2001), but will just as often have heard assertions or observed practices that disavow, contradict, reinterpret and even violate those tenets.

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Culture in Lindholm’s formulation is generative rather than interpretative, whereas, for Abu-Lughod, Burke and the others Lindholm critiques in his review essay, culture is a means of defining situations − or having them defined − in ways sometimes enthusiastically accepted and at other times resisted. The ‘culture’ Lindholm refers to, which grounds itself in the Quran as well as in tribal traditions of honour and vengeance, is only one of several discourses circulating through the villages, cities and far-flung diasporas that constitute the contemporary Middle East, where it mingles with other ideas. It − if one can refer to something as an entity which is far from unitary and coherent − has authority, particularly when it glosses the power of states, institutions and movements with legitimacy (see Messick, 1993), but this authority is ‘given’ to it by social apparatuses such as pedagogy and patriarchy as well as, increasingly, by the desire of people and groups in an increasingly unstable world to fantasize a stable centre. The Quran and the hadith are traditionally immutable and inviolate and hence can be seen to provide a ‘still centre to the turning world’, but, as demonstrated by both piety scholarship (Mahmood, 2004; Deeb, 2006) and the mobilization of Islam towards new and modern structures of Islamic militancy (Eickelman and Piscatori, 2004; Marranci, 2009), they are tools that can be put to new and radically diverse uses, all the while helping those involved in radical reformations to seek emotional grounding and ideological legitimation for their programmes. The reworking of tradition in various forms of ‘art’ (music, painting and literature) also shows how the past is used to both ground and subvert identities and traditions (Stokes, 1992, 2010; Shannon, 2006; Winegar, 2006).

TALAL ASAD’S ‘IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM’ The malleability of Islamic and other cultural traditions demonstrates that culture, far from being something that exists and can function

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as an active agent, is a mode of expression that, in accord with social and historical contexts, variously legitimates or delegitimates contemporary beliefs and practices. This, of course, is the approach to Islam ethnographically mapped out by Michael Gilsenan in Recognizing Islam (1982) and theoretically elaborated by Talal Asad in ‘The idea of an anthropology of Islam’ (1996 [1986]).8 Asad defines Islam as ‘a discursive tradition that connects variously with the formation of moral selves, the manipulation of populations (or resistance to it), and the production of appropriate knowledges’ (Asad, 1996: 388). Islam here engages in a repertoire of personal and social shaping and, rather than being determinative, serves as a means of articulating selves or strategies deemed appropriate by the persons who, or groups which, invoke it: Clearly not everything Muslims say and do belongs to an Islamic discursive tradition. Nor is an Islamic tradition in this sense necessarily imitative of what has been done in the past. For even where traditional practices appear to the anthropologist to be imitative of what has gone before, it will be the practitioners’ conceptions of what is apt performance and of how the past is related to present practices that will be crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form. (Asad, 1996: 398)

Asad sets out an agenda to analyse the role of Islamic tradition in producing ‘Muslim’ subjects, suggesting how through various structures of pedagogy (Asad, 1993, 2003) Islamic discourse stitches particular local practices of self- and community-making into a global fabric of texts and rituals, thereby simultaneously associating the local with the historical depth and spatial extent of a sanctified faith and allowing communities means to bestow legitimacy on their sometimes heterodox responses to particular encounters with historical and social forces. Here, Islam functions as something akin to what Slavoj Žižek, following Saul Kripke (1980), calls a ‘rigid designator’: the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes

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its identity. It is, so to speak, the word to which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity ... . It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience − on the contrary it is the reference to a ‘pure’ signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself. (Žižek, 1989: 95−96, 97)

Appeal to the discourse of Islamic tradition bestows sanctity while leaving open to dispute, both internally and with other Islamic communities, the forms of belief or action such sanctity entails. Rather than appearing ‘as a distinctive historical totality which organizes various aspects of social life’ (Asad, 1996 [1986]: 388, referring to Gellner’s representation in Muslim Society [1981]), Islamic tradition in Asad’s formulation is a hypothesized touchstone applied within particular locales to the diverse range of practices of shaping bodies, subjectivities, and societies. As a result, its local mobilization is of primary importance: to ‘the anthropologist of Islam the proper theoretical beginning is ... an instituted practice (set in a particular context, and having a particular history) into which Muslims are inducted as Muslims’ (Asad, 1996 [1986]: 399). Asad’s approach is neither nominalist (see his critique of Gilsenan, 1996: 382f) nor essentialist; what he advocates is an anthropology that attends to the specific ways discursive elements are mobilized within particular contexts, and remains at the same time conscious of how local interpretations either draw legitimacy from, or provoke disputation and conflict with, discourses on Islamic tradition generated in other contexts (both contemporary and historical). What is signally important, both for the approach to an ‘Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa’ taken here, and for attempts by contemporary anthropology to engage with ethnographic theorization in that region, is the protean nature of Asad’s ‘Anthropology of Islam’. As a project it is characterized by a perspectival centre from where anthropologists and their subjects engage with ‘Islam’; the project’s domain is described by frontiers that expand and retract as the uses of Islamic

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tradition bring the subject community into contact, whether supportive or antagonistic, with other ‘Islamic’ communities. Whereas Lindholm’s approach is fundamentally deductive, setting out a checklist of core cultural values with which to ascertain membership (or not) of the Islamic Middle East, Asad’s is above all inductive because it ascertains a community’s working definition of ‘Islam’, asks how and why that definition is adopted in a particular context, and then seeks to understand what relationships it enables (or disables) with other ‘Islamic’ communities. In some instances, particular practices of Islam may force a community or society into antagonistic isolation from surrounding collectives which consider what that group does in the name of Islam to be ‘not really Islam at all’ (1996: 382); but under other circumstances (say in response to a widely disseminated perception of ‘Crusader Wars’ against Islam backed by ‘the social forces of industrial capitalism’ [1996: 401]),9 conceptions of scripturalist Islam calling for a global reinstatement of Islamic unity and purity may gather substantial transnational followings. Asad’s ‘Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ is in fact a deconstruction of the traditional concept of an ‘Anthropology of Islam’, proposing the means to investigate the work of Islam in societies rather than to study ‘Islamic societies’. Important contemporary ethnography devolving from Asad’s programmatic refocusing has concentrated on the relation of ‘Islamic’ knowledge to subject and state formations in specific settings: Hirschkind’s work on the circulation of cassette tapes of Islamic sermons (2006), Mahmood’s reading of the re-readings of Islamic texts by women in the modernizing piety movement (2004) and Starrett’s work on Islam in education, labour discipline and commodity circulation (1995a, 1995b, 1998) all focus on Cairo, while Messick’s work on the changing role of Islamicist and state texts (1993) moves between Ibb and the archives in Yemen. These texts use Islamic materials to open up perspectives on the particular settings they

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examine. Doing so, they reveal both how ‘Islam’ shapes those settings, and also more saliently how the particularities of those settings shape the Islams that manifest themselves there.

ESCAPING THE CAGE: BEYOND THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA The literal equivalent to what Asad has proposed for an ‘Anthropology of Islam’ would be an ‘Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa’ examining those ethnographic contexts in which ‘the Middle East’ and/or ‘North Africa’ were brought into play as discursive entities. Insofar as those categories are expressions of colonial and post-colonial governance, these contexts would be likely to occur either when locals were drawn into dialogue with representatives of outside powers still embracing such terminology (diplomats, military officials and NGO spokespersons, see Slyomovics, 2005) or else, as in various forms of mobilization against ‘the West’ and its proxies, when groups were defining themselves against powers which categorized them in such terms (Bowman, 2005). Abandoning the various historic, Western, geographical terms has its virtues, but it would not make reference to the region in any global sense unproblematic. If we chose to use emic categories for the societies we research, we would find that the borders of the communities referred to become quite labile: expanding at some moments to embrace the whole of the Islamic umma (though still excluding non-Muslim minorities as well as many heterodox Islamic communities), at others extending less generously to include only the ‘Arab world’ (to the exclusion of Turkey, Iran and points east), on occasions retreating to the bounds of ethnonational communities (often themselves constituted discursively in opposition to neighbouring communities or to minorities within the territory occupied by the group

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articulating identity), and occasionally drawing back into even less extensive communities that were defined in terms of class, urban or rural residence, political party, sectarian identity, or hamula.10 There are, of course, emic terms for the geographical regions traditionally referred to as the Middle East and North Africa and these, in the appropriate translation, would more accurately serve to designate appropriate regions. Thus, Al-’a¯lam al-’arabiı¯ (the ‘Arab World’) would be used generically to refer to those Arabic-speaking nations belonging to the Arab League (the whole of the Middle East and North Africa, including Somalia, Sudan and Mauritania and excluding Israel, Turkey, Iran and points east),11 while they would appropriately subdivide, using terminology dating to the Arab Conquest, into the mashriq (or ‘Arab east’, referring to those Arabophone countries to the east of Egypt and north of the Arabian Peninsula, although Egypt is commonly included in the rubric), the maghreb (or ‘Arab west’, incorporating Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and Western Sahara) and the šibh al-jazı¯ rat al-’arabı¯ ya (the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Yemen). Here, although the criteria for inclusion and exclusion are overtly linguistic, language sharing is itself the outcome of the successive waves of the Arab Conquest which produced shared historical and cultural reference points even for those non-Muslim populations brought under Islamic rule (reference points that allow for mutual intelligibility, even when positions taken with respect to them are disputed or conflictual). Iran, Israel and Turkey not only differ linguistically from the Arabophone countries but also have positioned themselves historically and politically in ways that preclude their inclusion in any generic cultural category with the neighbouring mashriq nations. This division extends to ethnographic works on those regions which hardly cross the boundaries of neighbouring ethno-linguistic communities (though, among the rare

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exceptions, see Romann and Weingrod, 1991; Rabinowitz 1997). While one can imagine resistance to replacing ‘the Middle East and North Africa’ with ‘the Arab World’, ‘the Arab West’, ‘the Arab East’ and ‘the Arabian Peninsula’ in shelfmark classification, introductory regional studies courses and general popular discourse, it is not only possible (I teach an advanced anthropology course titled ‘Southern Mediterranean: Maghreb and Mashriq’) but may well become an insistent demand when (and if) students and the general public become more fully aware of the cultural specificities of the regions. They will not, however, make such demands until they come to understand the diversity of the region far better, and anthropology has an important role to play in that pedagogy − a role for which some of the core developments of the past two decades have prepared it well. In Gilsenan’s and Abu-Lughod’s surveys two important, and profoundly connected, points about training and focus are stressed. Referring to the time he was preparing for his doctorate, Gilsenan observes that ‘many unambiguously anthropological colleagues felt that you could become “an anthropologist of the Middle East” only with an Orientalist training’ (Gilsenan, 1990: 228); he indicates that several influential anthropologists of the area by the 1990s had a background in Oriental Studies (mentioning by name Ken Brown, Dale Eickelman and himself; Charles Lindholm also read Oriental Studies as a first degree at Columbia University [Lindholm, 2001: 113]). For her part, Abu-Lughod asks ‘Why ... do we seem to have a larger than usual number of monographs only minimally concerned with contributing to or engaging with anthropological theory?’, and she replies to her own question that this may be due to the highly focused commitment to doing ‘battle against shadow stereotypes’ of Middle Eastern women and the Middle East in general (1989: 289−290). During the period discussed by Gilsenan, training in the anthropology of the Middle

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East was ‘not so much peripheral ... as absent’ (Gilsenan, 1990: 227), with the result that many of those who would become influential practitioners had their schooling in language and cultural analysis provided by Oriental Studies. Even those who did not suffer the ‘disabling aspects’ of that education (most of the women then writing on the area) found themselves operating in a field in which the terms of discourse were effectively written out in Orientalize. This meant that taking what Abu-Lughod calls an ‘oppositional stance’ (1989: 290) involved engagement with the terms of a debate ‘fixed on exceptions to comparative anthropological models’ (Anderson, 1996: 788) which directed one along ‘the less theoretically rigorous path of arguing against a vague but unchanging stereotype’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 290). The anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa consequently found itself caged within a particularly restricted regional tradition and isolated from vital theoretical developments driving late twentieth-century anthropology. New perspectives influencing the field when Abu-Lughod and Gilsenan wrote their ‘state of the art’ overviews − particularly the critique of Orientalism, a reflexive appreciation of fieldwork (see Rabinow, 1977; Crapanzano, 1980; Dwyer, 1982), and Asad’s deconstruction of the category of Islamic tradition − have substantially refigured the terrain. Although a generic conception of an ‘Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa’ retains a lexical grip on efforts to conceptualize an ‘area studies’ domain, effectively ethnographic work has largely abandoned the concept of a Middle Eastern /North African ‘core culture area’ in favour of close ethnographic research into particular field sites.12 This tightening of focus, with a concomitant shift from deductivism to inductivism, has been accompanied by − and undoubtedly supported by − a decline in the influence of Oriental Studies on anthropological research in the area. Of the 49 anthropologists working in areas loosely considered to be Middle East and North Africa who replied to my questions,

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only two had received training in Oriental Studies (one of whom was Dale Eickelman). More surprisingly, few had trained in graduate programmes associated with Middle East Studies Centres (in the United States, Title VI support for Arabic language training had been greatly attenuated in the 1980s); moreover, a majority of them had studied no, or at most one, course on the Middle East as either undergraduates or postgraduates. Most of those who carried out field research in Arabic had learned Arabic outside their formal academic studies, either through specialized language courses or while in the field. The consequence of this attenuation of dedicated ‘Middle East’ training is a much stronger integration of students of the Arab World (and I would assume other regions previously classed as Middle East and North Africa, including Turkey and Iran) into general anthropological pedagogy and hence the promotion of an engagement with the wider theoretical concerns of contemporary anthropology. Lindholm’s lament that the impact of interpretative, reflexive and ‘postmodernist’ perspectives on the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa has been a decay of ‘generalization, comparison or theory building’ (Lindholm, 1995: 811) proves to be misplaced; on the contrary, by engaging with broader anthropological theory − on a host of subjects, including subject formation, performativity, sexuality and gender, consumption and cultural production, nationalism and the nation-state, globalization and neo-liberalism – anthropologists of the region have included it within the discipline’s core concerns with human experience. In the process, the region has come to be seen for what it is − rich in history, deeply engaged in modernity and vibrantly involved in contemporary politics – and not a disciplinary enclave inhabited by exceptional beings and ‘very like a camel’. NOTES 1 ‘[E]thnography in the Middle East first fixed on exceptions to comparative anthropological

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models ... [because] much that is distinctively “regional” in scope as well as in type has few parallels in those parts of the world where anthropology had been worked out’. (Anderson, 1996: 788). 2 See Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’ (Mitchell, 2003), for an incisive analysis of the genealogy of Middle East area studies. 3 The G8’s ‘definition of the Greater Middle East: besides the Arab countries ... covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife’ (Achar, 2004). 4 The concern of Abu-Lughod and her co-contributors with the work of anthropologists with varying degrees of Middle Eastern background resonates with Gilsenan’s sensitivity to the role of an earlier generation of indigenous Middle Eastern scholars who trained in the West and produced significant and influential Middle Eastern ethnographies (Gilsenan, 1990: 225−226). 5 ‘The student might well ask why Middle Easterners remains so linked to their families and communities despite processes of modernization? Why is the rhetoric of honour still compelling? Why are tears the appropriate response to recitation of the Quran? But questions of cause and effect cannot be answered from the text, and from the point of view of praxis theory as it is reported here, ought not even to be asked’ (Lindholm, 1995: 812). 6 Just as attention to the historical roots of contemporary situations has increasingly driven anthropologists of the Middle East to engage with history, so too have historians of the region increasingly involved themselves in ‘ethnographic’ readings of the historical past; examples cited as influential by anthropologists include Barkey (1994) and Watenpaugh (2006). Two recent publications on Palestine deserve to be noted: Tamari (2009) and Campos (2010). 7 Other estimates predict urban percentages of 60% in 2000 (Eickelman, 1998: 93), and record 58% in 2008. (World Bank data including Iran but excluding areas east of there, as well as Turkey, Sudan and Mauritania; these data also note an urban population of 38% in 1968, http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ middle-east-and-north-africa/urban-populationpercent-of-total-wb-data.html, accessed 17 June 2011.) 8 Asad was a founding member of Britain’s radical Middle East Study Group, which, like the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar (AMESS) in the United States, critiqued orientalist approaches and engaged with Middle East issues via a largely political economy perspective (see Mitchell, 2003: 14−15). Gilsenan was another member of this academic collective, which continues to meet although

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many of its members have migrated to professorial posts in the United States. 9 As Asad points out, such social and technological developments both provoke perceptions and enable their dissemination. ‘Widespread homogeneity is a function not of tradition but of the development and control of communication techniques that are part of modern industrial societies’ (Asad, 1996: 401). 10 For examples of such identity shifts in the Palestinian instance, see Tamari (1982), Bowman (2006, 2012) and Lybarger (2007). 11 The Arab League recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara (contested by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), which, despite nominal disavowal, is in effect included in the Arab World. 12 Intriguingly, the call to attend to the discursive construction of social reality has encouraged some recent ethnographers to focus not on the field site as classically defined, but on the field of representations. Gilsenan’s Lords of the Lebanese Marches (1996, but based on field research carried out in the early 1970s) is a rigorous example of rural fieldwork, and is the book most frequently cited by my respondents in their lists of the five ethnographies which have most influenced them. It is, however, very much a micro-study of representations of self and other, and a later generation of ethnographies, inspired by it, and by Asad, have constructed discursive domains − whether television (Abu-Lughod, 2004), music (Shannon, 2006), artwork (Winegar, 2006), sermons (Gaffney, 1994; Hirschkind, 2006), archives (Messick, 1993), etc. − as field sites in themselves. A spectacular example, Ho’s The Graves of Tarim (2006), follows the genealogies and legends of Sufi sayyids from the Hadramawt, in southeastern Yemen across both centuries and the Indian Ocean back to their ancestral tombs.

REFERENCES Aboul-Ela, Hosam 2010. ‘Is There an Arab (Yet) in this Field? Postcolonialism, Comparative Literature, and the Middle Eastern Horizon of Said’s Discourse Analysis’. Modern Fiction Studies 56: 4, 729−50. Abu-Lughod, Lila 1988. ‘Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter’. In Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East), Soraya Altorki & Camilla Fawzi El-Solh (eds). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 139−61. Abu-Lughod, Lila 1989. ‘Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World’. Annual Review of Anthropology XVIII, 267−306.

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Abu-Lughod, Lila 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Abu-Lughod, Lila (ed.) 1998. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton Studies in Culture, Power, History) (trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Abu-Lughod, Lila 2004. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Achar, Gilbert 2004. ‘Greater Middle East: the US Plan’. Le Monde Diplomatique April. http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world. 11 June 2011. Ahmed, Leila 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ali, Kamran Asdar 2002. Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Alon, Yoav 2009. The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State. Oxford: I. B. Tauris. Altorki, Soraya & Camilla Fawzi El-Solh (eds) 1988. Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Anderson, Jon W. 1996. ‘Middle East and North Africa’. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson & Melvin Ember (eds). New York: Henry Holt, pp. 287−91. Appadurai, Arjun 1986. ‘Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, 356−61. Armbrust, Walter 1996. Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Asad, Talal 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Asad, Talal 1996 [original 1986]. ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’. In The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities), John Hall & Ian Jarvie (eds). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 381−403. (Original Publication − Washington: Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.) Asad, Talal 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barkey, Karen 1994. Bandits and Bureaucrats: Ottoman Route to State Centralization. (Wilder House Series

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in Politics, History & Culture). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bowen, Donna Lee & Evelyn Early (eds) 1993. Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Indiana Series in Arab and Islamic Studies) (trans.) Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bowen, Donna Lee & Evelyn Early (eds) 2002. Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Indiana Series in Middle East Studies) (trans.) Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bowman, Glenn 1998. ‘Radical Empiricism: Anthropological Fieldwork after Psychoanalysis and the Année Sociologique’. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures (special issue: Reflecting Cultural Practice: The Challenge of Fieldwork) VI: 2, 79−107. Bowman, Glenn 2005. ‘Constitutive Violence and the Nationalist Imaginary: the Making of “the People” in Palestine and “Former Yugoslavia”’. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, Francisco Panizza (ed.). London: Verso, pp. 118−43. Bowman, Glenn 2006. ‘A Death Revisited: Solidarity and Dissonance in a Muslim−Christian Palestinian Community’. In Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, Ussama Makdisi & Paul Silverstein (eds). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 27−49. Bowman, Glenn 2012. ‘Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics’. In Holy Places in the Israeli−Palestinian Conflict: Confrontation and Co-existence (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics), Yitzhak Reiter, Marshall Breger & Leonard Hammer (eds). London: Routledge, pp. 195–227. Bruck, Gabriele vom 2005. ‘The Imagined “Consumer Democracy” and Elite (Re)Production in Yemen’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 2, 255−75. Burke, Edmund III (ed.) 1993. Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East). (trans.) London: I. B. Taurus. Burke, Edmund II 2010. ‘“There is no Orient”: Hodgson and Said’. MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44: 1, 13−18. Campos, Michelle 2010. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caton, Stephen 2000. ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Caton, Stephen 2005. Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Chatty, Dawn 1986. From Camel to Truck: the Bedouin in the Modern World. New York: Vantage Press. Chatty, Dawn 1996. Mobile Pastoralists: Development, Planning and Social Change in Oman. New York: Columbia University Press. Clark, Morgan 2009. Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Clifford, James 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cole, Donald 2003. ‘Where Have the Bedouin Gone?’. Anthropological Quarterly 76: 2, 235−67. Crapanzano, Vincent 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davidson, Roderic 1960. ‘Where is the Middle East?’. Foreign Affairs 38: 4, 665−75. Deeb, Lara 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deeb, Lara & Jessica Winegar 2010. ‘The Politics of Middle East Anthropology’. Proposal for Annual Review of Anthropology. Private correspondence. Deeb, Lara & Jessica Winegar. 2012 [Forthcoming]. ‘The Politics of Middle East Anthropology’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41. Donnan, Hastings (ed.) 2001. Interpreting Islam. London: Sage Publications. Dwyer, Kevin 1982. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eickelman, Dale 1998. The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 3rd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Eickelman, Dale & Jon W. Anderson (eds) 2000. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eickelman, Dale & Jon W. Anderson (eds) 2003. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eickelman, Dale & James Piscatori 2004. Muslim Politics (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. el-Zein, Abdul Hamid 1977. ‘Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam’. Annual Review of Anthropology 6, 227−54. Elyachar, Julia 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Politics, History and Culture). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Feldman, Ilana 2008. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917−1967. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gaffney, Patrick 1994. The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gellner, Ernest 1981. Muslim Society (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghannam, Farha 2002. Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in Global Cairo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gilsenan, Michael 1982. Recognizing Islam. London: Croom Helm. Gilsenan, Michael 1990. ‘Very Like a Camel: The Appearance of the Anthropologist’s Middle East’. In Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, Richard Fardon (ed.). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, pp. 222−39. Gilsenan, Michael 1996. Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East). London: I. B. Taurus. Hirschkind, Charles 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Cultures of History). New York: Columbia University Press. Ho, Engseng 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (California World History Library). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hodgson, Marshall 1974. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, Katherine E. 2008. We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hoodfar, Homa 1997. Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kanaaneh, Rhoda 2002. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz & Ayse Saktanber (eds). 2001. Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London: I. B. Taurus. Kapchan, Deborah 1996. Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Series in Contemporary Ethnography). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Khosrav, Shahram 2007. Young and Defiant in Tehran (Contemporary Ethnography). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Khoury, Philip & Joseph Kostiner (eds) 1991. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. London: I. B. Tauris. Kripke, Saul 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuper, Adam 2000. Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Layne, Linda L. 1994. Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identity in Jordan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. LeVine, Mark 2005. Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the ‘Axis of Evil’. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Lindholm, Charles 1995. ‘The New Middle Eastern Ethnography’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.). I: 4, 805−20. Lindholm, Charles 1996. The Islamic Middle East: An Historical Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Lindholm, Charles 2001. ‘Kissing Cousins’. In Interpreting Islam, Hastings Donnan (ed.). London: Sage Publications, pp. 110−28. Lindholm, Charles 2002. The Islamic Middle East: Tradition and Change, revised edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Lybarger, Loren 2007. Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba (ed.) 2004. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Makdisi, Ussama 2000. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in NineteenthCentury Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Makris, Gerasimos 2006. Islam in the Middle East: A Living Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Marranci, Gabriele 2009. Understanding Muslim Identity, Rethinking Fundamentalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Meneley, Anne 1996. Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town (Anthropological Horizons 9). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Messick, Brinkley 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, Timothy 1988. Colonising Egypt (Cambridge Middle East Library). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mitchell, Timothy 1998. ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’. In The Visual Culture Reader, Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.). London: Routledge, pp. 293−303. Mitchell, Timothy 2002. The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, Timothy 2003. ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science’. In University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, October 2006. At http://repositories. cdlib.org/sciaspubs/edited volumes/3/3, pp. 1–32. Moors, Annelies 1995. Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences 1920−1990 (Cambridge Middle East Studies). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Patai, Raphael 1973. The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Price, David H. 2011. Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State. Oakland, CA: A K Press. Rabinow, Paul 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rabinowitz, Dan 1997. Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Romann, Michael & Alex Weingrod 1991. Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Said, Edward 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Said, Edward 1984. ‘The Path not Taken’. In The World, The Text and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. Said, Edward 1989. ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’. Critical Inquiry XV: 2, 205−25. Said, Edward 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Scheele, Judith 2009. Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia, Algeria. Oxford: James Currey. Shannon, Jonathan 2006. Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Shyrock, Andrew 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Comparative Studies on

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Muslim Societies). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Silverstein, Paul 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Singerman, Diane 1995. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Slyomovics, Susan 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Starrett, Gregory 1995a. ‘The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo’. American Anthropologist 97: 1, 51−68. Starrett, Gregory 1995b. ‘The Hexis of Interpretation; Islam and the Body in the Egyptian Popular School’. American Ethnologist XXII: 4, 953−69. Starrett, Gregory 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Comparative Studies in Muslim Societies 25). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stokes, Martin 1992. The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stokes, Martin. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tamari, Salim 1982. ‘Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian history’. In Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the

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Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Roger Owen (ed.). London: Macmillan, pp. 177−202. Tamari, Salim 2009. Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Varisco, Daniel 2005. Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Watenpaugh, Keith 2006. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wedeen, Lisa 1999. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wedeen, Lisa 2008. Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Winegar, Jessica 2006. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Young, William C. 1995. The Rashaayda Bedouin: Arab Pastoralists of Eastern Sudan (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishing. Žižek, Slavoj 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology (Phronesis). London: Verso. Zureik, Elia, David Lyon & Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds) 2010. Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics). New York: Routledge.

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2.5 Southwest and Central Asia: Comparison, Integration or Beyond?1 Magnus Marsden

This chapter highlights key trends in ethnographic writing on Central and Southwest Asia over the past twenty years, and points toward future areas of theoretical and ethnographic debate. It is structured around comparisons between work on Southwest and Central Asia for two major reasons. First, while important anthropological work on Central Asia did exist before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the most critical attempts to make it an anthropological ‘region’ that exist independently of the Middle East or Eurasia are based on research conducted after 1990.2 Yet while anthropologists have sought to recognize the limits of the concept of the region for framing ethnographic complexity (see below), most attempts to fashion the regional study of Central Asia in anthropology have advanced without taking into account long-term scholarly debates on Pakistan and Afghanistan.3 Secondly, important analytical reasons exist also for pursuing this explicitly comparative agenda. According to Heonik Kwon, anthropological attempts to theorize ‘the global’ from the perspective of ‘the local’ have recognized colonialism’s significance to the constitution of ‘the local’

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(e.g. Appadurai, 1996), while removing ‘cold war history from the horizon of local realities’ (Kwon, 2010: 25−26). Kwon’s insights are important to this chapter because they concern a comparison of societies conventionally thought of as being a part of either post-colonial Southwest or post-Soviet Central Asia. The chapter embarks on such a comparison not with the aim of restoring pre-existing cultural links between these spaces separated from one another by Russian and British colonialism, Soviet expansion, and the Cold War. The point of making the comparison rather, is to elicit the shared effects of these divisions on the state of anthropological work on (and about) these regions, their effects on people’s lives, as well as the ways in which future research might contribute to understanding their decomposition. Many scholars are now theorizing the geographies − cartographic, political, imagined, and affective − of Central and South Asia and the relationship of these to the wider Muslim world in the post-Cold War context. Faisal Devji (2009) explores, for example, how the usage of terms such as

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‘Khorasan’ by Islamist militants index attempts made by actors from in and beyond the region to imagine geographical space in ways that transcend ‘the nation-state’.4 At the same time, other scholars (e.g. Heathershaw, 2009) suggest how images of a space detached from colonial, national and Cold War divisions stand uneasily alongside projects of border strengthening pursued by the region’s nation-states, and supported by their international backers. Alongside such images of spaces either transcending or bounded by past political projects, there exists a complex range of older and newer forms of circulation of people, ideas and things across national and ideological boundaries.5 Some of these build on pre-colonial forms of movements (Kreutzman, 2003; Marsden, 2008a); others are practices of mobility important within the former Soviet Union and between it and ‘socialist friendly’ countries (S. Bayly, 2007; Naumkin, 2005); still more, however, are newer, and more reflectivemodern forms of globalization (e.g. Mandel, 2008). During my fieldwork, for example, I have encountered bus drivers from Tajikistan who ferried pilgrims to the pilgrimage in Mecca through Iran and Iraq after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and met the descendents of Bolshevik revolution-era émigrés from northern Tajikistan to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, who now work as professors in Khartoum, and visit their ancestral villages in Tajikistani territory in order to pray at the shrines of the saintly men from whom they claim descent, meet relatives, and also search for wives. A danger exists, however, that scholars theorizing the implications of these thickening connections between Central and Southwest Asia will recycle the language deployed by local and international political actors about ‘the region’. National elites seek to assert their country’s importance, for example, to a wider ‘Persianate’ space; international development organizations such as the Aga Khan Foundation promote the concept of the Silk Road as a way of thinking about this space’s future economic

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and political organization, while foreign powers call for nation-states to recognize the benefits of ‘inter-regional cooperation’ if also strengthening their borders.6 In the context of these complex and often paradoxical dynamics to merely ‘adopt new topics and places is ... not an adequate response to the demands of shifting disciplinary environments’ (Lederman, 1998: 436): hence, rather than for calling for the recognition of a new or expanded anthropological region, my aim is to bring comparative recognition to the breadth of processes that are unfolding ‘on the ground’ and that local and extra- local actors frame within their own concepts of the region.

THE REGION IN ANTHROPOLOGY The broader approach taken here builds on debates in anthropology over the past twenty years about the status and nature of ‘the region’. In the wake of work by Fardon (1990) and Appadurai (1986) on the ways in which anthropological theorizing is often localized in regions or ‘cultural areas’,7 and rash of studies on globalization (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Piot, 1999; Tsing, 2002), anthropologists are now exploring the ways in which slower historical processes produce transregional spaces, knowledge ecumenes, or ‘historic regions’ (Roitman, 2005). Such spaces are less reflective of scholarly attempts to organize disciplinary practices than traditional ‘culture areas’ (Lederman, 1998: 428); they also often encompass if not transcend cultural and political boundaries that are directly derivative of colonialism and Cold War politics (e.g. Bayly, 2007; Gupta, 1999; Ho, 2006; Lydon, 2009; Scheele, forthcoming; Scott, 2009; van Schendell, 2002; Werbner, 2004). These altered scales of analysis also require new concepts to understand the ways in which they cohere as spaces, realms, or ecumenes: religious ideas, texts and cosmoses are woven into regional geographies (Ho, 2006), for example, and recognizable patterns of heterogeneity rather

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than cultural homogeneity define a region’s limits (Barth, 1993). Such studies also recognize the complex consequences that arise when different logics of space collide with one another, such as when the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995) intersects with forms of spatial ordering embedded in religious and genealogical reckonings (Scheele, forthcoming). Regions as expansive as these also require those who move across them to learn and deploy particular skills and sensibilities, such as those referred to as ‘cosmopolitan’ (Ho, 2006; Simpson and Kresse, 2007). These theoretical developments are reflected in anthropological writing on Southwest and Central Asia. By the mid 1990s, scholars reflected on the ways in which cultural values lend homogeneity to an expansive pre-modern historical space incorporating parts of Southwest Asia, as well as Iran, Turkey and Central Asia. In 1991, for example, Canfield argued that ‘Turko-Persian Islamicate culture’ was for the ‘Muslims of inland Asia’ an ‘expressive means to represent their interests’ (Canfield, 1991: 1). After the Soviet Union’s collapse, anthropologists identified the reassertion of forms of ‘interregional connection’ that while ‘new’ were ‘imbued with the spirit of the ancient Silk Road’ (Werner, 2003: 106; cf Kurin, 2002). By the 2000s, however, such images of a ‘new Silk Road’ fitted better Central Asia’s five star hotels than its bazaars − the nature of economic practices which built as much on a Soviet legacy as the region’s deep history (Liu, 2003). At one level, ‘Turk’ and ‘Persian’ were increasingly recognized as being conflictual ethnic−political−moral categories, rather than the source of some homogeneous Islamicate culture (Devji, 2009; Tapper, 2008). At the same time, if Cold War boundaries have not simply ‘collapsed’, then neither have people from Southwest and Central Asia only become more invested in one another’s lives, as the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan and Central Asian migrants in Russian illustrate. By 2008, thus, Canfield reflected on the need

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to understand the dynamics shaping ‘the region’ as follows: There has been such a dust up, such a radical shift in the alignments of power, that in many places ordinary human beings are suffering, terrorised, dislocated, and deprived of familiar conventions of social interaction. Did anyone foresee how much conflict, confusion, grief would be experienced as the frontier collapsed? Our region is now deeply wrenched by conflicts that seem intractable, insoluble. We can only hope that the contradictions created by the changes of the last few decades will somehow be resolved. In any case, what that resolution will look like in another two decades is well beyond our horizon. (Canfield, 2008: 34)

Following Duara, ‘regions’ and connected ideas of regional interconnectivity are frequently tied to ‘imperial attempts to create economic blocs in which colonies or subordinate territories were promised self-governing status and other concessions, and sometimes were even constituted as nominally sovereign nation-states, although they remained militarily in the thrall of the metropole’ (Duara, 2010: 966). If nation-states are predicated on particular politicized models of space (Malkki, 1995), then so too are ideas of ‘the region’: it is important, therefore, for anthropologists to understand the role that ideas concerning the region are playing in shaping the particular types of regional contexts they study.

POST-COLONIALISM, POST-SOCIALISM AND ‘BETWEEN THE POSTS’ As Canfield and others now recognize, framing Central and Southwest Asia as part of a wider Turko-Persian world rests problematically on a conception of the durability of ‘indigenous culture’ in the face of colonial and Soviet modernizing policies, as well as the forms of violent conflict these played an important role in inciting. The idea that the Soviet Union’s collapse would lead inevitably to a reassertion of Turko-Persian orderings of space, in short, lies perilously close to orientalizing discourses that depict the

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Muslim world as inherently immobile, static and unchanging. Thus, it raises questions concerning the value of concepts concerning ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ as well as ‘socialist’ and ‘post-socialist’ spaces to anthropology. After the collapse of the Soviet Union much scholarship on Central Asia has sought to the understand people’s adaptations to ‘post-socialism’ − a term held to signal the state of ‘transition’ of people, institutions and places from the ‘command economy’ of the Soviet Union or Soviet bloc to the freemarket world. A chorus of scholars has noted, however, how the concept of ‘transition’ privileges the idea that socialist societies inevitably progress toward free-market capitalism, or, indeed, that there was some undifferentiated socialist form of economy (Humphrey, 1998; Verdery, 1996). On the basis of ethnographic studies, scholars have illustrated that the concept of ‘transition’ conceals the complex range of economic and social forms that have emerged since 1991: social networks, black-market activity, ethnicized trading communities, and moral understandings of ‘the market’ important to everyday life in Soviet times are evident in people’s lives in ‘post-socialism’ (e.g. Alexander, Buchli and Humphrey, 2007; Hann, 1993; Humphrey, 2002; Humphrey and Mandel, 2002; Kandiyoti, 1999, 2003; Liu, 2003; Mandel and Kandiyoti, 1998; Pedersen, 2006). Newer work, furthermore, questions not only the idea of transition but also the wider geopolitical nature of this, by exploring the ways in which ‘the currency and vernacular of development changed, from international brotherhood, socialism and solidarity to civil society, democracy, privatisation and the market’ (Mandel, forthcoming: 8), leading to complex and little understood power relations in aid dynamics. As a result, scholars have reflected on how far colonial and post-colonial are helpful for understanding contemporary life in Central Asia. Kandiyoti (2002) suggests that there was a widely held perception that if Russians felt ‘the collapse’ deeply, ‘Central

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Asians’ were altogether less effected − they reverted to indigenous kinship-based society and economy in order to survive.8 For Kandiyoti, this discourse indicates the extent to which colonial and Soviet forms of knowledge about ‘the periphery’ were founded on the assumption that ‘Asian life’ is unchanging and static, reflecting, thus, important similarities in Soviet and colonial forms of knowledge.9 Kandiyoti and Cole (2002) chart how far concepts developed for the study of colonialism in the Middle East − the political economy of metropole−periphery relations, colonial and indigenous institutions, as well as the emergence of ‘hybrid’ identities and epistemes − are helpful for understanding the Soviet Union’s presence in Central Asia: both colonial and Soviet forms of knowledge held an idea of timeless ‘Tradition’, yet Soviet modernizing policies penetrated more deeply into indigenous society than their colonial counterparts in the Middle East.10 These debates are often played out empirically in studies that compare British and Soviet policies relating to women in their Asian peripheries. A specific area of debate has emerged concerning the Soviet attacks in the Ferghana valley on veiling, which culminated in 1927 with the hujum, or public de-veiling of women. Some compare the hujum to the British decision to outlaw sati, or ‘widow burning’ in India (both led to anti-colonial resistance and signified colonizing attempts to legitimate their expansion to home populations through discourses of ‘civilizing rule’, although if sati was driven by an imperial desire to create colonial subjects then hujum was part of a broader project to create ‘Soviet man’: e.g. Northrop, 2004).11 Other historians place more emphasis on the ways in which women were active participants in debates about gender and national identity, both in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods (e.g. Kamp, 2006). These strands of women’s experiences of Soviet policy, moreover, are as comparable to work on women in Iran (e.g. Najmabadeh, 2005) and Afghanistan (e.g. Kandiyoti, 2007a) during

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the same era as they are to work on British India (Chatterjee, 1986). Anthropologists are also addressing how the legacies of past forms of state modernization shape the nature of contemporary gender relations. The ‘restoration of male supremacy’ in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is widely treated as the reassertion of Central Asian Islam’s patriarchy (e.g. Harris, 2004, 2006). More complex accounts emphasize the paradoxes of Soviet rule and the legacy of these for women’s lives today. The Soviet Union sought to modernize women’s lives yet also reinforce social structures and cultural values that linked women with tradition: women benefited from modernizing policies that led to high levels of female literacy and employment while they remained the most fertile in the Soviet Union (Kandiyoti, 2007b): the ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin, 2001) transformed women’s lives yet not in any wholesale way. The paradox of state policy towards women remains evident today: Central Asian republics promote the ‘revival of national traditions’ (Kandiyoti 2007b: 614) − to which women are central − because these enhance expressions of social solidarity in a differentiated world (Kandiyoti and Azimova, 2004), yet this makes non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that focus on ‘women’s rights’ especially vulnerable at moments of social and political upheaval. The complexities of these issues are showcased by ethnographic studies of non-consensual bride abduction in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which debate how far this and related forms of marriage practice signal the reassertion of ‘Islamic’ practices, or preSoviet patriarchal culture, or, alternatively, if they are best interpreted as emerging from Central Asia’s contemporary realities (e.g. Kleinbach and Salimjanova, 2007; Portisch, 2009; Snadjr, 2005; Werner, 2009). These debates also add critical perspectives to work on gender relations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Anthropologists working in those countries have tended to challenge

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depictions of women as suffering under repressive moral codes of honour and shame or ‘fundamentalist Islam’: gender relations, rather, are informed by complex normative standards (e.g. Grima, 1992; Marsden, 2005, 2007a, b; N. Tapper, 1990), inflected with sophisticated debates about Islamic teachings on these matters (e.g. Marsden, 2008a). Yet they have focused less on the pressure that these local normative standards have come under during extended periods of war, social transformation and migration (e.g. Haroon, forthcoming). What work has been conducted suggests that many men are ‘no longer able or willing to honour their obligations [to women], yet continue to use male privilege to convert the vulnerability of their dependents into material assets’ (Kandiyoti, 2007a: 180). Nevertheless, international development policy regarding women’s rights in Afghanistan is based on the assumption that pre-conflict support networks exist unchanged. Chari and Verdery (2009) argue the need for anthropology to move beyond either/or debates about post-socialism and post-colonialism, and construct an anthropology ‘between the posts’, which focuses on the shared yet differentiating effects of the Cold War on people’s lives across a range of global contexts. Afghanistan’s complex societies offer especially interesting possibilities for this project. Nazif Shahrani’s classic ethnography of the transformations in the socio-economic life of communities in the north-eastern Pamir region of Afghanistan, documented the ways in which mobile Afghan Kyrgyz pastoralists adapted to life in a context of Cold War frontiers separating them from their pastures in Soviet Central Asia (Shahrani, 1979). Shahrani’s work deserves countless re-readings not only for the accuracy of its material but also for the insights it offers in the ways in which indepth local studies can serve as critical contribution to understanding both local cultural particularity or Islam and geopolitical processes important on a global scale.

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ISLAM AND RELIGIOUS LIFE A second key and connected area of anthropological scholarship across Central and Southwest Asia concerns the study of Islam. Anthropologists in these contexts and elsewhere are actively contesting essentializing views of Islam and the Muslim world, which treat conflict between ‘the Muslim world’ and ‘the West’ as a natural and inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1993). Popular stereotypes of Islam’s role in Central Asia feed off the understandings of unchanging culture and tradition discussed above. After 1991 Central Asia emerged as a dangerous space of ‘radical Islam’ and its people were assumed to be in the processes of re-embracing ‘Islamic identity’ (Naumkin, 2005; Rashid, 2002; Roy, 1997). On the rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan (1995−96), Islam in Central Asia was depicted not merely as a threat to regional stability but also to world order: unhealthy interactions between post-Soviet Muslims and Southwest Asian Muslims in Pakistan’s madrassas, or Islamic religious colleges, were said to be indoctrinating post-Soviet minds with radical, extreme and sectarian forms of Islam (Rashid, 2002).12 In the face of these discourses of danger and conflict (e.g. Heathershaw and Megoran, 2011; Reeves, 2005b), anthropologists emphasize the multiply-layered features of Muslim thought and identity: Islam’s social meaning, they show, relates in complex ways to local cultural contexts and the socio-economic circumstances of particular communities (Gilsenan, 1982), and Islamizing processes are shaping the nature of Muslim life in ways that further enhance rather than homogenize its heterogeneity.13 I have sought (Marsden, 2005), building on earlier studies (especially Kurin, 1993), to emphasize the importance of debate and intellectual life to village Muslims in the Chitral region of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (now officially renamed Khyber-Pukhtunkhwah): far from being the passive recipients of

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so-called reform-minded forms of Islamic thought, Chitrali village Muslims creatively combined forms often highly personal faith and belief. Chitral, indeed, is only a two-day walk from Tajikistan, and the village where I worked was home to refugees from Tajikistan during the country’s civil war (1991−98): Muslim travellers across Cold War boundaries encountered more than just a society defined by its Islamism (Marsden and Hopkins, 2011). In the context of Afghanistan, David Edwards (1996) argues that Afghan moral universes are made up of three distinct moral domains (of honour and the tribe, Islam and equality, and monarchy and authority), which rest uneasily in relationship to one another, clashing, contradicting and informing outbreaks of violent conflict. Edwards (2002) documents the conflictual form of Afghan politics from the 1970s onwards in the context of half-baked, state-led modernizing transformations: these weakened old tribal structures and led people to seek new forms of identity security in party politics and ideological difference. Yet the forces for the resolution of the internal conflicts − notably saintly religious figures − no longer performed their roles, as in the eyes of many they had lost their authority, having become enmeshed in worldly acts of accumulation rather than the demonstration of spiritual purity and piety. Anthropologists not only enrich the wider understanding of Islam through ethnographic work on ‘local Islam’ but also ethnographic work with trained religious specialists and in law courts is contributing towards a deeper understanding of the ways in which Islam’s ‘traditional’ institutions, holders of authority, modes of knowledge and forms of knowledge transmission are adapting to the changing conditions of ‘modernity’ (e.g. Malik, 1996; Zaman, 2002). Importantly, there is a renewed interest in understanding the complexity of shari’a law’s place in the legal and political dynamics of Muslim societies (notably Peletz, 2002). This work is especially

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important in the current context: in 2007 a Taliban uprising in the northern Pakistani district of Swat was widely framed by Taliban leaders and their supporters in terms of the failure of Pakistan’s colonial-derived legal system to offer rapid, fair and inexpensive forms of justice. Nichols (forthcoming) and N. Lindisfarne (forthcoming) both emphasize the need to understand support for militants’ campaigns for shari’a law in the context of Swat’s political economy and pervasive class inequalities, rather than as inevitable products of Islamization.14 Shari’a is also an important yet little studied or understood dimension of life for people of Muslim background in Central Asia. Central Asian Muslims do use variants of shari’a law for conducting life events, even if the state legal systems of these countries are officially ‘secular’. Especially in marriage (the nikah), but also increasingly divorce (taloq), shari’a legal practices are important, and studies of the decision-making process that go into deploying Islamic law in such contexts would enrich the study of Islam in Central Asia and the gendered consequences that uses of ‘Islamic’ personal law hold for Muslims there and beyond.15 Work by anthropologists on Islam in Central Asia is, however, now contributing in critical and important ways to the anthropology of Islam, not least because it offers a unique set of contexts for understanding ‘Islamization’. Historians are now debating the extent to which Soviet policy led to the making of a unique form of Islam in Central Asia: earlier work suggested that Islam survived during the Soviet period in a combination of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ ways: some forms of Islamic ritual practice were permitted in the Soviet Union, while unofficial practices and knowledge were maintained and transmitted in private spaces, contexts and institutions (homes and secretive Sufi orders) (e.g. Naumkin, 2005). Islam, especially in its Sufi variations, hence, was just waiting to ‘reassert’ itself and for those knowledgeable about it to ‘re-Islamize’ society (e.g. Ro’I, 2000).16 Recent work (Khalid,

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2007) argues, rather, that the key institutions, epistemes and practices of Islamic learning in Central Asia were destroyed or at least radically transformed during the Soviet Union: ‘Islam after communism’, lacked things critical to its transmission and social meaning elsewhere. Soviet nationality policy, moreover, rendered Central Asian Islam part of Uzbek or Kyrgyz tradition − what Hann and Pelkmans refer to as the ‘folklorisation of Islam’; the making of a “‘cultural” Islam in which ties to national traditions were deemed more important than scriptural knowledge’ (Hann and Pelkmans, 2009: 1524). These differences between the context for Islamizing processes in Central Asia and other Muslim-majority contexts are compounded by the ways in which Islamization also relates differently to modernity in this context. Several anthropologists have shown how movements of Islamic reform often register attempts by people of Muslim background to fashion themselves as religious yet in ways that they also understand to be ‘modern’ (e.g. Osella and Osella, 2008; Osella and Soares, 2009). This dimension of Islamic reform is especially complex; however, in Central Asia, many post-Soviet Central Asians ‘concomitantly see themselves as being, becoming and having been modern’ (McBrien, 2009: 129, emphasis in the original), changing the terms on which they seek to fashion themselves as modern and Muslim. Importantly, while the study of Muslim identity configurations in Central Asia reveals such complex entanglements between Islam and modernity especially clearly, it is not unique in any simple sense. Comparative work on Islam’s relationship to politics and everyday life in Turkey reveals parallel insights into how peoples’ previous experiences of state-led modernization contribute to the nature of their identities as ‘Muslim’ or ‘secular’ persons (e.g. Özyürek, 2006; Tugˇal, 2009). Ethnographic work on Islam in Central Asia is thus significant in spurning critical contributions to the anthropology of Islam. Post-Soviet era political elites seek to maintain state

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legitimacy by promoting ‘national traditions’, within which Islam occupies an important role: as everywhere, states legislate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of Islam (Mamdani, 2004), yet in especially vigorous ways (Hann and Pelkmans, 2009; Rasanayagam, 2006). Abdul Iloliev (2008b) refers to the consequence of such policies as being the ‘museumification’ of Islam: as in the Soviet period, state authorities and local intellectuals transform shrines into heritage sites, something evidenced in settings as diverse as the mountainous Pamir’s villages (Iloliev, 2008a), and the shrine cities of Khorezm (Kehl-Bodrogi, 2006a) and Bukhara (Louw, 2007). The state fashioning of an acceptable form of ‘national Islam’ is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Turkmenistan, where the cult of the leader − or Turkmenbashi, Saparmurat Niyazov (d. 2006) − crafted a form of Islam shaped in relation both to ‘Turkmen tradition’ and ‘Turkmen spirituality’: together these presented ‘the nation, the state, and above all its leadership as the new sacra’ (Hann and Pelkmans, 2009: 1538; cf. Kehl-Bodrogi, 2006b).17 Despite the commonality of the restrictions placed on public Islam across this space, Islamizing processes are taking different forms in Central Asia, thereby challenging simplistic discourses that depict that region’s people as collectively reverting towards Turko-Persian Islam. Islam in Central Asia − as everywhere − is doctrinally diverse, and this means that the forms taken by people’s changing relations to Islam vary contextually, even if the region’s nation-states have used state power to fashion homogenized forms of national Islam.18 An emerging and engaging body of scholarship concerns the distinctiveness of Pamiri Ismai’li identity formations in post-Soviet Tajikistan: while Tajikistan is a predominantly Sunni country, and the Hanifi ‘school’ officially designated as the ‘official Islam’ (e.g. Bergne, 2007), Tajikistan’s Badakhshan province is home to Shi’a Ismai’li Muslims who are now fashioning their collective and personal identities in the wider context of the self-consciously global Ismai’li community and the trans-regional

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context of Badakhshan − Tajikistan’s Ismai’lis are remaking relations with Ismai’lis across the border in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Bliss, 2006; Iloliev, 2008a; Kreutzmann, 2003; Marsden and Hopkins, 2011). The diversity of Islamizing trends also reflects important differences in political economy between the region’s nation-states. Ethnographic work on everyday Muslim life in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan points towards a more public and contested space for Islam than in Turkmenistan, for example. Roche shows how Islam in Tajikistan is a critical component of the ways in which youth in Tajikistan order their socio-economic lives, shaping the nature of bazaar life, and the identities and moral universes of the traders who work within them (Roche, 2009).19 While state authorities often present ‘radical Islam’ as key threats to the country’s stability (cf. Heathershaw, 2009), young Muslims embrace ‘neo-Salafi’ forms of Islam, rejecting the national Islam of the state, which they associate with the strategies of the ‘elite’. Yet rather than inevitably being bent on Islamic militancy, these people form ‘groups of equals’ whose shared practice of Islam distinguishes them from the unthinking religiosity of other Tajiks (Stephan, 2006: 162−163). Similarly complex processes are also visible in Kyghzstan. Julie McBrien demonstrates how ‘scripturalist’ forms of Islam have been growing in importance in the south of the country where she has conducted fieldwork, where they are manifested in ‘Islamic weddings’ − events that reject ‘traditional’ and post-Soviet wedding practices. Instead, religious authorities are invited to talk to the guests about the need for Muslims to embrace Islam, provoking diverse responses from villagers, some of whom see them as affronts to their ways of being Muslim (McBrien, 2006: 3490).20 For Hann and Pelkmans (2009), the efflorescence of such forms of Islam in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is best explained by the ways in which the trajectories of these two countries have differed from other post-Soviet Central Asia nation-states: Tajikistan saw a civil war in which an Islamic

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party emerged as a powerful broker, while Kyrgyzstan experienced especially acutely the ‘destabilizing’ effects of liberalizing policies (Hann and Pelkmans, 2009: 1530). Recent studies of Islam in Central Asia have also sought to contribute to wider debates in the anthropology of religion, especially those concerning religion’s relationship to everyday life and experience (cf. Sahadeo and Zanca, 2007). Islam, they argue, cannot be abstracted from everyday realms of sociality and experience: understanding Muslim moral selfhood requires explorations of diverse realms of human experience. Johan Rasanayagam (2011; compare Das, 2010) explores how Muslims in both a rural (Andijon) and urban (the city of Samarqand) setting in Uzbekistan are engaged in a complex process of moral self-formation in which Islam plays an important yet not all-encompassing role. Muslims in Uzbekistan combine traditions of Islam that are advanced at the level of state-discourses, community leadership, Islamic reform as well as new religious movements, which might incorporate spiritualist and Christian teachings, as well as Islamic ones. Even in the context of Uzbekistan, where state policing of public Islam is especiallystrict, reflection on what it means to be Muslims carries on, yet in deeply embodied and experiential domains of life. This requires anthropologists to understand Islam in Central Asia as an ‘experienced’ as much as ‘discursive’ religious ‘tradition’. Louw’s (2007) work on Sufi shrines in Bukhara also emphasizes how the Uzbek state defines the meanings that people invest in this shrine, yet she also shows how meaning is reinscribed in a dynamic and creative way during shrine visitations: ‘everyday Islam’ is ‘neither a ‘religion of abstraction’ ... nor a religion of participatory emotional engagement with sacred space: it is both’ (Louw, 2007: 103). There is the danger that ‘Islam’ will become a ‘gate-keeping’ concept for the study of Central and Southwest Asia (cf. Abu-Lughod, 1989). In the context of postSoviet Central Asia, however, anthropologists

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are theorizing the importance of world religions other than Islam to regional religious landscapes, as well, as we have seen, the importance of other forms of religion held by local people to be indigenous to their societies. As in other post-socialist contexts (e.g. Lindquist, 2006), religious identities − ranging from different ways of being Muslim to other ‘indigenous’ forms of faith systems such as Zoroastrianism in Tajikistan − have been consumed, embodied and displayed in a market place of religion since 1991 (Pelkmans, 2006; cf Pelkmans and McBrien, 2008). Pelkmans explores conversion to evangelical Christianity in Kyghzstan in this context: both liberalization and Soviet policy have laid the ground for the success of missionary movements there. Missionaries present Christianity as compatible with Kyrgyz culture, and arrange for Kyrgyz Christians to engage in ‘folkloristic’ displays of Kyrgyz national identity. According to Pelkmans, this is possible because the Soviet Union amalgamated Muslimness with Kyrghzness, which made: the constituting parts seem shallow to people who started reconsidering them in the 1990s. While notions of Muslimness and Kyghnzness were previously positioned against an atheist ideology and a Russian ‘other’, these negative frames of reference became less relevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many this raised troubling questions of what else was involved in their Muslimness beyond Kyrgyzness. (Pelkmans, 2007: 895)

FROM THE FRAGILE TO THE SPECTACULAR: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE STATE For what by now should be very obvious reasons, ‘the state’ has also occupied a central theme of anthropological work on both Central and Southwest Asia, and it constitutes the third key theme that I explore in this chapter. At one level, the nation-states of post-Soviet Central Asia are a visible and pervasive dimension of people’s everyday

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lives, which international powers have constantly called to reform, ‘pull-back’ or ‘democratize’. At the same time, the region’s global political significance is often held to emerge from the fragility of its state structures, and their inability to provide security for their citizens − producing its infamous ‘ungoverned territories’ that pose a threat to the security of the world order.21 As many political scientists now recognize, however, these discourses of the failed or fragile state are largely unhelpful for two reasons.22 First, the spheres of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ institutions mingle: the symptoms of so-called ‘failed’ states (patronage systems, warlord politics and corruption) are hermetically connected to state rule, profiting from the overlapping of formal and informal rules (Schetter, forthcoming). Secondly, discourses that posit the existence of ‘ungoverned territories’ spatialize government and render even more rigid the distinction between state and non-state, thereby failing to recognize hybrid political spaces, or societies within which state penetration has historically been marginal (Scott, 2009). Anthropologists, thus, explore a wider range of questions relating to the understanding of the state in this complex space than whether it is too big or weak. Two key areas of theorizing by anthropologists have shaped the study of state forms in Central and Southwest Asia over the past two decades: the symbolism of state power and authority, and the importance of kinship to indigenous expressions of the state. Political scientists and anthropologists have built on one another’s work by recognizing the important role played by symbols to state authority, representation and meaning (Cummings, 2009). Manifestations of symbolic authority − public statues and ceremonial events − are especially evident in Central Asia where the ‘collapse of certainty led to a scramble for internally invented signs of certainty’ (Cummings, 2009: 1083).23 Several scholars have highlighted the production of such symbolic forms of statehood from the centre, working with intellectuals

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and cultural elites directly involved in the production of national culture.24 Laura Adams (2010), for example, argues that the importance of public displays of national identity and culture to state authority signals the existence of a ‘spectacular state’ in Uzbekistan. Through marches, statues and collective performance of dance and music during national holidays, the Uzbekistan state deploys spectacle to ‘restrict the field of particular actions that agents can take, but the restriction is disguised by spectacles aesthetically and psychologically pleasant properties’ (Adams and Rustemova, 2009: 1252): these flatten the country’s cultural heterogeneity and display the state’s capacity to exert its power on the bodies of the performers (Adams, 2010). Work on symbolic power in other Central Asia nation-states has pointed toward subtle differences in expressions of ‘the spectacular state’ across the region (cf. Heathershaw, 2009; Murzakulova and Schoberlein, 2009), challenging depictions of Central Asia’s postSoviet history as being characterized by a turn towards pre-modern ‘cultures of authoritarianism’.25 The margins of the state offer different perspectives for understanding the symbolic dimensions of state power and authority (cf. Das and Poole, 2002; Megoran, 2004; Reeves, 2005b, 2007, 2009b,). State borders, everyday life in borderlands and discourses of national territory are domains where forms of political symbolism more subtle and complex than those displayed in staged ceremonial rituals may be detected and theorized. Studies of Central Asia’s ‘borderlands’ have led anthropologists to recognize the extent to which their discipline’s earlier focus on globalization ignored how far the geographical worlds of many shrank after the collapse of the Soviet Union − Soviet-era borders having been of only minimal significance to people’s lives and livelihoods until they erupted in significance in 1998 (Megoran, 2004). The post-Cold War era has not, however, merely led to a ‘contraction of space’ or ‘ “retreat” to the village’: there are ‘too many cross-cutting family ties, too much resource

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interdependence, for everyday geographies to fit easily within the new borders of the nation state’ (Reeves, 2007). Ambiguity and paradox, rather, lie at the core of peoples’ experiences of space in this context, and deserve to be better theorized. State borders mark more than the territories of states: they also ‘materialize’ the state itself (Reeves, 2009b).26 Reeves builds on anthropological approaches that seek to understand the processes through which ‘the state comes to appear bounded, integrated and connected; as well as separate from the domain of “society” and authoritative over it’ (cf. Mitchell, 1999). In the Isfara region of the Ferghana valley, which traverses Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Reeves shows how apparently mundane and technical forms of state policy and discourse − e.g. road building27− come to be imbued with symbolic significance and power, and also manifested in the lived worlds of the valley’s inhabitants. Borderland dwellers internalize the notion that crossborder contact with others must be ‘regulated, contained, ... and managed’ (Reeves, 2007: 296), and they do so through discourses that present ‘the others’ who live across the border as dangerous and threatening to ‘our security’, and through policies that seek to regulate and minimize crossborder movement. Borders, Reeves shows, are unique sites for anthropological explorations of how people’s everyday experiences and conceptions of territory, space, statehood and identity interrelate: rather than being abstract dimensions of the domain of the political, these are ‘materialized’ parts of people’s affective and symbolic worlds, daily experiences and lived landscapes (Reeves, 2005a, 2009b). A second body of comparative theorizing on state forms in Central and Southwest Asia explores how older anthropological models of political and social organization might contribute to understanding modern state forms in the region. Political scientists often apply anthropological concepts − especially those of ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ (e.g. Collins, 2006;

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Schatz, 2004) − to understand modern state forms. For many anthropologists, however, they employ such concepts in a way that fails to do justice either to the complexity of the concepts or the political forms they seek to understand. The best anthropological work on ‘tribes’ documents how these are not ‘social groups’ bounded by shared kinship, but highly fluid concepts and forms of identity, contextually enacted and invested with wider significance (e.g. Dresch, 1994; Wedeen, 2007). Gullette, for example, challenges depictions of the Kyrgyzstan state by political scientists who depict it as a sort of modern expression of the traditional kinship state. In doing so, Gullette notes, they create an image of Central Asian kinship that is solely pragmatic, political and calculating, ignoring the ways in which kinship also has important emotional and nurturing dimensions. Gullette argues, thus, that attempts to relate political forms and practices to kinship relations need to recognize how kinship is deployed by people conceptually, in a way that allows them to construct ‘relatedness through various … categories’ (Gullette, 2007: 3885, 2009). These debates are of especially hotly contested relevance to the study of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The ‘tribal’ societies of these countries were of central importance for anthropological attempts to theorize the organization of ‘stateless societies’ and indigenous state formation (Barth, 1959, 1981; R. Tapper, 1983). In the context of the current Afghan war and the international intervention there, social scientists have built on anthropological work to ask how far durable state forms require political actors seeking to build states either to forge alliances with tribes or, alternatively, coerce units of society that lie beyond and are ideationally hostile to the state. For some anthropologists, these debates use the concept of ‘tribe’ in a way that overlaps too closely with US and British military discourses on ‘indigenous’ society in Iraq and Afghanistan (Gonzalez, 2009), which themselves bear the imprint of colonial knowledge constructions of ‘the tribes’

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(Hopkins, 2009; Lindholm, 1996; Titus, 1998). Others, however, recognize that older anthropological work on tribes and processes of indigenous state building is important because it raises alternative perspectives on what ‘the state’ is in this context. In what ways, for example, can so-called ‘Afghan warlords’ be thought of in terms of embodying state-like forms of relations rather than aberrations of such political dynamics (e.g. Giustozzi, 2009; Goodhand, 2005: Schetter and Glassner, 2009). These perspectives, however, are helpful only if connected fully to the political and economic worlds in which they are played out − the central argument, indeed, of earlier scholarship on indigenous processes of state formation (especially Barth, 1959, 1981; cf. Edwards, 1998). Knudsen’s work (2009) on an ethnic enclave community of Kohistanis in northern Pakistan probes the effects that sporadic yet critical forms of state penetration during both colonial and post-colonial times has had on levels of feuding and violence in this region. Nicholas Martin (2009, forthcoming a, forthcoming b) addresses through fieldwork in a village in Pakistan’s Punjab, the dynamics of the Pakistan state’s relation to local landlords (see also, Lyon, 2004). These landlords, Martin shows, are not some unchanging kin group, but a motley collection of people who have benefited strategically from their capacity to strategize in relation to changing political and economic circumstances over the past fifty years. What forms of local authority they hold, moreover, only barely resemble the forms of patron−client relationship documented by anthropology in the 1950s − the landlords are increasingly alienated from the social and emotional lives of the peasants who work their land (deriving their wealth and social status from business and Pakistani urban life), today treating them not as ‘clients’ but instrumentally as those who live in their villages and are their ‘vote banks’. It is in this context that people in Punjab and Swat have voiced their support for the ‘Pakistani Taliban’, serving also as an important

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reminder of the interactions between local political economies and politicized forms of global religion. David Sneath (2007) challenges many of the key assumptions underpinning anthropological approaches to ‘kinship society’. Within and beyond Central Asia, Sneath argues, anthropologists mistook societies organized by aristocratic forms of power and state-like authority for ‘kinship’ or ‘tribal’ social structures. This misrecognition, he argues, is tied to anthropological models of tribal societies that depict them − often romantically − as existing beyond the state, and subscribing to cultural values, notably those of egalitarianism, inimical to it. This led to an anthropological failure to recognize how far ‘state-like’ forms of authority connected to local expressions of ‘aristocratic order’ were an existent feature in apparently egalitarian ‘tribal societies’: even in pastoralist societies − the social ‘type’ most widely held as being both egalitarian and stateless − decentred and even mobile forms of statelike authority existed. These were often encountered by anthropologists, yet explained away as aberrations of the ideal or the product of social and political conflict, rather than historically durable social structures that also shaped local cultural values. Sneath’s work on Eurasian state forms raises a whole range of issues for further comparative study. Do the sources of Afghanistan’s instability lie less in the absence of a coherent moral discourses of the state ( pace Edwards, 1996) than in the existence of multiple forms of state-like relations and expressions of aristocratic authority, as well as modes of resisting these? How does such a perspective change the ways in which policy-makers might conceptualize ‘state-building’ in the country (cf. Shahrani, 2001a: 720)?

THE POLITICS OF ETHNICITY The nature of state-constructed ‘national identities’ and ways in which persons and communities internalize but also subtly transcend

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these is central to debates about the salience of ethnicity to life in Central Asia (Derluguian, 2005; Ilkhamov, 2004; Khazanov, 1995; Schoeberlein-Engel, 1994; Slezkine, 1994). Anthropological studies of identity politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan are well-suited to enrich these discussions given the extent to which they are shaped theoretically by debates amongst historians of British India, concerning the role played by the colonial state in the forging of religious identities and patterns of so-called communal conflict. Historians and social scientists in these contexts have focused their attentions on the role played by the police, law courts and scholaradministrators in framing conflict between citizens as incidences of irrational communalism rather than properly ‘political’ forms of contestation (e.g. Pandey, 1990, 2007). They have also emphasized the role played by ‘the state’ in actively orchestrating ‘sporadic’ outbursts of violent conflict (Brass, 2005; Tambiah, 1996). More recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which religious identities have undergone significant transformations in the context of the ‘vernacularization’ of democracy in India (e.g. Hansen, 2001) and Pakistan (Verkaaik, 2004). As suggested by events in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, involving violence between people of Uzbek and Kyrgyz ethnic backgrounds (the stereotypes of which also called upon images of the figure of the immoral trader), and evidence of the involvement of state security services in the violence (e.g. Reeves, 2010), significant overlaps exist between these bodies of work. A consideration of these suggests the urgent need for ethnographically grounded attempts to understand the local salience and texture of ethnicity as an identity marker that is enacted contextually, while also locating these enactments in particular political economies and sociohistoric settings. By placing local enactments of ethnicity in this historic and political context, anthropologists may reveal interactions between multiple ideas of what constitutes ‘us’ and ‘them’, sometimes coded as immutable forms of ethnic difference, and at other

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times in relation to shifting forms of class and status identity and consciousness. In Southwest Asia as much as in Central Asia, ethnic forms of identity and the expressions of conflict in which they are immersed are closely connected to the politics of the Cold War. This is illustrated by Mukulika Banerjee (2000) in her study of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement − a largely ethnically Pukhtun mass anti-colonial movement which had close links to Gandhi’s non-violent anticolonialism and also Nehruvian socialism. Modes of anti-colonial resistance and identity politics in Pakistan that were attacked by Pakistan’s new rulers because of their links to socialism were sidelined in anthropological studies of the country, which tended to treat local expressions of ethnic and religious conflict as being about the problems the new state faced in the management of cultural diversity, rather than dimensions of life that were also informed by past histories of political contest. Only now are anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines recognizing how far the paucity of work on peasant discontent, labour, trade union and socialist movements to Pakistan reflects the success of the Pakistan state and its allies in containing them, rather than their absence (e.g. Ali, 2009; Iqtidar, 2009, 2011). Parallels exist in the importance of ethnicity to understanding nationalism’s relationship to Islam in Central Asia and Pakistan. Oskar Verkaaik’s (2004) study of the role played by the Pakistan state in the production of markers of ethnic identity illustrates these especially clearly. His focus is on the Muhajir Qawami Movement (MQM), the principal political movement of Urduspeaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India at the time of partition. In the forty years that followed partition and beyond, the MQM emerged as a major political force in Pakistan, especially in the southern cities of Karachi and Hyderabad, in which many muhajirs had settled. Verkaaik shows how the political identity of the MQM creatively engaged the Pakistan state’s attempts to discursively construct the country’s different

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provinces as being populated by varying ethnic groups, each of which was culturally distinct and also the inheritor of a unique form of Islam − he refers to this as the ethnicization of Islam, similar to ‘the folklorization of Islam’ discussed in relation to Central Asia above.28 Verkaaik also emphasizes, however, how far the MQM did not simply nternalize the form that the state associated with a polite, sophisticated and urbane Islam. Rather, the MQM inverted the ethnicized Islam of the state: its activists enacted hypermasculine figures of fun, tropes, however, that also spilt easily over into the carnevelsque-like displays of violence for which the MQM became famous. In both contexts, anthropologists are recognizing the need to locate such forms of conflict in private as in public realms of life, as well as in the particular material contexts in which they are played out. Laura Ring (2008) theorizes ethnicity’s importance to conflict and daily life in Karachi through an ethnographic study of the ways in which ethnic and religious differences shape, are imagined, and negotiated in intimate domestic spaces − such forms of difference become ‘internal to being’ and a critical dimension of how Pakistanis think about and experience ‘the self’ rather than just an epiphenomenal feature of public political life (cf. Ali, 2010; Khan, 2006b; Sökefeld, 1999). Ring explores the important types of work − often through apparently mundane acts of exchange − in which women living in an apartment block in Karachi invest, in order to mediate fraught encounters between their neighbours who identify themselves as belonging to different ethnic communities. Ring also shows, however, how these women legitimize the forms of male behaviour on which ethnic conflicts in the bloc are founded − they say that Pakistan Muslim men are ‘naturally’ hot, virile and potent. Women, thus, negotiate ethnic conflict yet also legitimize it by upholding the naturalness of violence to male being. Ring’s work is of comparative importance because her study raises important questions concerning not just the study of women’s

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role in the mediation of social relations in Central Asia but also the importance of understanding how the materiality of the particular contexts in which ethnic identity is enacted shape the nature of ethnic conflicts, and their resolution. Apartment blocks are an important feature of urban life, both in the former Soviet Union (Humphrey, 2005) and post-colonial South Asia (Ring, 2008): ethnographies of them offer rich insights into understanding processes of community formation. Such work increasingly seeks to go beyond treating the neighbourhood and locality either in relation to pre-existing geographical scales or as romanticized sites of harmonious social interactions (Chandavarkar, 2009) ready for scaling-up to the level of the nation-state yet challenged by ethnically mixed populations and/or policed and threatened by ‘the state’ (Trevisani and Massicard, 2003). Rather, building on Ring’s work, neighbourhood and locality are better conceived as always contested parts of, and social settings for, the everyday practices and routines that are central to community formation. Research should focus, thus, on the ways in which these become mapped spatially in relationship to varying forms of social identity and political power.

MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND TRANSNATIONALISM A consideration of such ethnic forms of identity politics leads to a connected domain of life in both Southwest and Central Asia that has also been a focus of burgeoning interest: migration, diaspora and transnationalism. Alongside the importance of rigidly defined forms of national identity to everyday life and political economy in the Soviet Union, parallel attempts to fashion cosmopolitan and internationalist identities existed, through, for example, the promotion of inter-ethnic marriages (Edgar, 2007). The unravelling of the Soviet Union, and, in its wake, the making of new nationalisms, which often

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also led to the exodus of Soviet diasporas of Russians, Jews, Tatars, Germans, Poles and Meshkhetian Turks to older ‘homelands’ (Russia, Israel, Turkey, Germany), have raised acutely complex questions concerning the forms taken by citizenship and belonging not only in the former Soviet Union but also a wider world characterized simultaneously by globalization, the remaking of nation-states and the decomposition of Cold War ideological boundaries. At the same time, Central and Southwest Asia are spaces of both departure and arrival for many ‘labour migrants’ − Central Asians to Russian towns and cities, Pakistanis and Afghans to the Gulf and Malaysia − and ‘refugees’, especially Afghans. It is tempting to treat these forms of mobility as typologically different from one another: one relates to complex issues of history, culture and politics, the other to economic ‘push and pull’ factors. Anthropological work with migrants and on practices of mobility of various types, however, erodes this distinction:different forms of mobility, migration and diasporic community formation intersect with one another, contributing collectively to global changes in ideas and practices of citizenship, politicized economies of labour, as well as diasporic and transnational modes of identification.29 Ethnographies of Pakistan’s diaspora, thus, have illuminated the complexities of migration from South Asia to Europe and America, and the forms of Muslim and diasporic identity production these have helped to produce. Werbner (2004) documents the collision of complex networks of Sufi brotherhoods and transnational labour migration in order to theorize the ways in which such criss-crossing networks have led to the production of new geographic and cosmological orderings of the universe, experienced by Pakistani diasporic Muslims in lived ways. Far from being labour migrants or immigrants, Werbner’s Pakistani informants have actively produced ‘vernacular’ expressions of cosmopolitan identity (Werbner, 1999). Afghanistan, frequently depicted as a space of archetypal primitivism, is a country

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in which identity formations have for long been shaped by the mobility of its peoples (Edwards, 1996; Green, 2008; Markovitz, 2000; Nichols, 2008). Nazif Shahrani documented the importance of memory to the construction of the personal and collective identity of émigrés to Afghanistan from Central Asia after the Bolshevik revolution, as well as the ways in which they make moral claims on the present (Shahrani, 2001b). Shalinsky explores the gendered nature of such identity formations among Central Asian émigrés living in the city of Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, also tracing her informants’ lives as they became twice-émigrés, in Karachi after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Shalinsky, 1993).30 These historic patterns of mobility are regularly contrasted to forms of mobility held as being singularly caused either by state fragility or economic forces. Monsutti (2005), however, shows how treating mobile Afghans as ‘refugees’ fails to reveal the complex historical and social contexts on which such forms of mobility build (see also Adelkhah and Olszewska, 2007). The Shi’a Hazaras have long created and used transnational ties to support their livelihoods: the Hazara world incorporates the villages of the Hazarajat, neighbourhoods of Mashad and Tehran in Iran, as well as the Pakistani city of Quetta, to which Hazaras once travelled to become conscripts in the British Indian Army, as well as labourers in Baluchistan’s coal mines.31 A growing body of work also exists on Central Asian labour migrants to the former Soviet Union and Pakistani and Afghan labour migrants to the Gulf States. These studies build on wider developments in the anthropological study of migration (e.g. Osella and Osella, 2000), which emphasize understanding migratory processes not simply in terms of the economy of push−pull factors but also in relationship to its social embeddedness and significance to moral debates in particular locales concerning issues such as consumption, gender relations and kinship relations and roles (cf. Reeves, 2009a). It adds to these, however, through

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addressing the importance of the domain of the legal to understanding migrant experiences: ‘illegality’ is central to much Central Asian labourer migration to Russia’s towns and cities, requiring anthropologists to pay especially close attention to the ‘political economy’ of migration and ‘the policies that keep labour precarious and migrants largely invisible to state systems of accounting and social protection’ (Reeves, 2010: 9, emphasis in the original).32 Post-Soviet Central Asia adds further layers to existing anthropological work on migration because patterns of mobility important there often involve not only varying forms of rural−urban and international labour migration but also the ongoing relocation of ‘Soviet diasporas’. On the one hand, the migrations of Soviet era diasporas from Central Asia are leading to important reconfigurations of the texture of life: Humphrey and Skirvskaja (forthcoming a) develop the notion of ‘post-cosmopolitanism’ to define urban spaces that are shaped by the ‘bleaching out’ of heterogeneity (see also Abramson, 2000; Marsden, forthcoming b). At the same time, anthropologists are also tracing the trajectories of mobility and experiences of Soviet diasporas, including Central Asian Jews to Israel and Russian-Germans (or Volga Germans) to Germany. These studies reveal the complex relationships between practices of identification and citizenship regimes: Mandel explores how, as part of wider attempts to assuage guilt for the Holocaust, Germany gave special refugee status to Jews from the former Soviet Union, even making a new legal category − ‘quota contingent refugees’ − to allow it to do so (Mandel, 2008). Germany, however, presents itself as a ‘non-migration’ country and its legislation regarding Turkish ‘guestworkers’ has largely gone unchanged. Jews from the former Soviet Union who are now living in Germany are not unaware of these paradoxes, moreover, and ‘defy Germany’s ideologically motivated design for them and instead see Germany as a convenient steppingstone to the United States or other European destinations’ (Mandel, 2008: 323).

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These changing forms of citizenship and transnational identity are not only significant within ‘the West’ − they are also keenly felt within Southwest and Central Asia. Ethnic Kazakhs living in Mongolia and China33 are entitled, for example, to citizenship in Kazakhstan, while Afghan citizens who say they appear physically ‘Kazakh’ seek and earn citizenship in the country on the grounds of their being Afghan Kazakhs. Such practices and strategies are leading to transformations in the nature of Kazakh society and identity and they have significant implications for debates about citizenship in Mongolia, China and Afghanistan: all places where questions concerning who is and is not ‘really Afghan’ − or whatever − have grown in importance in recent years. In Mongolia and Russia, for example, nationalist movements have singled immigrant workers out for violent attack (e.g. Bulag, 2003), attacks that are also leading both migrants and their home communities, as well as state officialsto respond in varying ways, ranging from displays of outrage to the mobilization of new forms of moral community in chat rooms on the Internet. At the same time, the politics of ethnicity and questions concerning who is ‘Afghan’ have taken on new forms in Afghanistan, reflecting little understood yet historically significant dynamics between ‘Afghan’ diasporic politics (Hanifi, forthcoming) and those in the country itself. Patterns of mobility and migration are both leading to connectedness between these regions. They are also shaping political debates within nation-states about citizenship, nationality and belonging that are carving out the domain of ‘the political’ in little understood ways.

CONCLUSION In the context of a highly paradoxical political context where forms of regional ‘integration’ are pursued, yet national boundaries continue simultaneously to be held as essential to the maintenance of civility, security

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and stability, I have sought in this chapter less to stimulate anthropological work that cuts across the boundary of Southwest and Central Asia or to carve out a new anthropological region than to encourage work on the important role that ideas about ‘region’ in addition to those of the local, nation-state and global are playing in adding further texture and complexity to everyday life, identity, political economy and religion in Central and Southwest Asia. My own ethnographic research interests concern the connected societies of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan: hence, the comparative geographic focus of this chapter. They could, however, be addressed equally well from other angles and perspectives, which also transcend varying cultural, religious and political boundaries, such as from East Asia (e.g. Bulag, 2005), or, more obviously, the Middle East (Eickelman, 2002) and Eurasia. During the course of fieldwork in Afghanistan I have been asked by ethnic Turkmens how they might use international human rights legislation to press the government of Turkmenistan to recognize their rights to the land that their émigré grandfathers left behind them in the early twentieth century. Afghan mujahidin ideologues who fought in the anti-Soviet jihad have also told me how their perspectives on the war changed after reading a Persian translation of Steve Colls’ (2004) Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. ‘We sometimes ask’, one man − who had served as an ideologue for the Islamist mujahidin leader Hekmatyar, yet is now known amongst his kin and friends for befriending one-time Afghan ‘communists’ with the aim of bringing them back to Islam − confided in me, ‘why we ever fought against the Russians in the first place.’ These instances of people actively reflecting on ‘the Cold War’s’ consequences for their lives and societies as well as seeking to decompose its boundaries signal just one of the important roles that future anthropological work on Central and Southwest Asia will play in the development of

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anthropological theory and ethnography more generally. NOTES 1 This chapter has benefited from the insightful criticisms of Diana Ibañez-Tirado, as well as the editorial guidance of Richard Fardon and Mark Nuttall. It would not have been possible without support for fieldwork in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan from Trinity College, Cambridge, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the British Academy. 2 Central Asia during the Soviet period was largely out of bounds to Euro-American anthropologists. A large body of work does exist by Soviet anthropologists and ethnographers on Central Asia. Central Asia was, of course, a regional focus of Soviet ethnography – for an overview of which and references to further works, see Kandiyoti (2002: 289−291). See also Hirsch (2005), and for a comparative treatment of the anthropology of Siberia, see Ssorin-Chaikov (2007).For recent discussions of the methodological issues at stake in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in this region see Adams (1999) and Grima (2004). 3 Notable exceptions include Eickelman (1993) and Kreutzmann (2003). Scholars working on Central Asia hail from diverse intellectual backgrounds. Initially, many scholars studying Central Asia came to the region from Soviet studies backgrounds. Today, Central Asia is mapped either within post-socialist studies or, increasingly, the study of Muslim societies and cultures (cf. Eickelman 1993). Such changes are not without political significance – issues that I address below. 4 See, for example, www.khurasansrc.org. 5 For an overview, see Reeves (2011). 6 This is most clearly illustrated in the Shanghai Organization for Cooperation, yet also visible in the opaque use of the stick and carrot method by the US government to persuade Pakistan and varying Central Asian countries to assist in the NATO war effort in Afghanistan, notably through providing access to supply routes and military bases. 7 For a recent consideration of area studies in the USA from an inter-disciplinary perspective, see Szanton (2004). 8 Kwon (2010) also suggests that the focus on ‘the transition’ in former socialist countries has resulted in inadequate attention on transformations it also led to in the free market ‘West’. 9 For excellent recent historical work comparing Soviet and British colonial expansion, in the context, of course, of the previous history of the Russian Empire, see Edgar (2006), Morisson (2009) and Sahadeo (2007a).

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10 The Soviet polity, moreover, was organized around the concept of ‘ethnos’ or ‘ethnic nationality’ to a far higher degree than comparable ideas of religious difference shaped the political organization and economy of British India. As Kandiyoti notes, the Soviet ideas of ethnos was related to conceptions of nationhood and citizen in the Soviet Union, within which ‘nationhood is not relegated to legal citizenship of a state but is the prerogative of sub-state ethno-national groups’ (Kandiyoti, 2002: 291): see, especially, Slezkine (1994). On historical debates about the nature of British understandings of religious identity, the role played by administratorscholars in the production of these, and their relationship to political economy in India, see C. Bayly (1983), Dirks (2001), Jalal (2000), Pandey (1990) and Peabody (2001). Compare Slezkine (1991) on ethnography’s relationship to Soviet power. 11 Shahrani (1993) argues, for example, that the Soviet state should be treated as an extension of Russian colonialism. In Afghanistan, scholars have also suggested that static tribal codes such as Pashtunwali often advanced by British scholar-administrators sought to encapsulate tribesmen within a realm of unchanging ‘customary law’, the effects of which can still be seen today in the tribal areas of Pakistan’s Kyhber-Pukhtunkhwah province, the population of which are still governed by customary law and denied their full rights and responsibilities as the citizens of Pakistan; see, e.g Hopkins ( 2009). The ways in which masculinity is affected by colonial ideas of tradition remains little understood; although, see Marsden (2008b) and Banerjee (2000). 12 For a careful and balanced study of the expansion of madrassa education in Pakistan during the 1980s and on, see Malik (1996). 13 The problematic term ‘Islamization’ is widely used to refer to a range of processes that operate at the level of communities, individuals and states, yet which all contribute to a trend for Muslims from a variety of backgrounds to embrace and enact ‘doctrinal’, ‘scripturalist or ‘reformist’ forms of Islam, which are often also opposed to what Muslims reformers widely interpret as un-Islamic ‘local’ traditions. 14 See within Marsden and Hopkins (2011). 15 A very rich body of work does exist on complex interactions between different types of legal regimes – modern, Islamic, and human rights – in Iran. Zeba Mir-Hosseini (1993) explores interactions between Islamic and pre-revolutionary dimensions of Islam’s legal codes, emphasizing the capacity of women to use these laws as a bargaining tool. Osanloo (2009) documents the complex ways in which Islamic and human rights discourses have also folded into one another, creating tensions between Iranians as human-rights bearing citizens of the Republic and moral subjects of the Islamic state. 16 Knysh argues that this approach reflects not only Cold War aspirations for Central Asian Muslims

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to rebel against the Soviet elite but also ‘19th century fears of secret societies plotting to undermine imperial projects both at home and abroad’ (Knysh 2002: 144). 17 In this context, people may only seek to embellish such official forms of Islam in ways that do not appear to contest them in any fashion, as, for example, in adding further layers of complexity to the all-important and ‘Turkmen’ practices of shrine visiting (Kehl-Bodrogi, 2006b). 18 An especially interesting domain of everyday life in Central Asia to explore these issues is the context of the region’s bazaars, which, as I highlight below, are now seen as being critically important to understanding the forms of Islam emerging in this space. This is an area for more work to be undertaken. For one study, see Morgan Liu’s (2007) discussion of the relationship between Islam, bazaar and neighbourhood life in the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan. The study of this domain of life would no doubt benefit from a comparative consideration of Keshavarzian’s (2007) fine analysis of the Tehran bazaar, its relationship to the state and the changing religious and social profiles of its traders and merchants. Work on the bazaar in Afghanistan tends to be framed above all in relation to developmental issues: notably, the lack of equal access of traders to the market in the context of a ‘war economy’. 19 These include the Salafi School and the worldwide movement of preaching and purification, the Tablighi Jama’at. See, for example, Dudoignon (2009). 20 The current importance of scriptural forms of Islam in this region marks important changes within Kyrgyzstan’s post-Soviet history: in the 1990s much work emphasized the rising importance of local forms of spirituality, rather than Islam – reminding us also of the dangers that any turn to Islam there is permanent in any simple sense. A number of studies explore the importance of complex fusions between Islam and local religion in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. On the ‘syncretic’ Aq Jol white path movement in Kazakshan that explicitly sought to bring together Islam and the followers of other religious tradition through the revitalization of local practices of saint veneration and healing, see Jessa (2006). Interestingly, Jessa argues that Sufi brotherhoods have been more popular with young Kazakhs than such syncretic movement who have been supported mostly by people educated during the Soviet period and have also formed an important pathway of integration for the Kazakhs ‘returning’ to Kazakhstan from Kazakh population zones in China and Mongolia. 21 While a great deal of work on ‘state failure’ in the region is deeply problematic because it is based on Western assumptions of what the state should look like, some excellent work in political science and history has addressed in a subtle and nuanced manner the experience and nature of state

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fragility in the region itself. The work of Heathershaw (2009) on Tajikistan is especially admirable, as is Derluguian’s ’s (2005) wider study of why some countries in the former Soviet Union have experienced violent conflict, and others have not. 22 See, programmatically, Chabal and Daloz (1999). 23 The Andijon riots of 2006 in Uzbekistan are an especially well-reported and debated dimension of such a form of politics. For a measured attempt to frame this event in relation to available knowledge, see Megoran (2008). 24 A wide body of literature on older and newer forms of patrimonial relations between cultural elites, intellectuals and musicians in Central Asia also exists (e.g. Levin, 1999; Light, 2008; MacFayden, 2006; Spinetti, 2005. 25 Comparison with Pakistan is also instructive here: some scholars have argued that the roots of Pakistan’s authoritarianism can be found in Mughal culture and the emphasis it places on the personality of the leader. For a critique see Jalal (1995), and for a more complex excavation of the principles of Persianate Islamic thought concerning politics and authority, see Alam (2004). 26 On the long partition and the making of the India−Pakistan border, see Zamindar (2007). See also Sökefeld (2007) for a consideration of the Pakistan state from its northern borders. 27 For comparative work on roads as a material symbol of modernity and state power in Pakistan, see Khan (2006a) and, on Afghanistan, Green (forthcoming). 28 Compare Abashin (2006) on the complex interplay between religious, ethnic and genealogical identity markers in the context of post-Soviet Tajikistan. 29 See Sahadeo (2007b), for example, on the nature and complexity of Central Asian migration to Russian cities during the Soviet period. 30 These studies are now being enriched by newer ones of Afghan trading diasporas in Russia and Central Asia (Humphrey and Skivskaja, 2009; Humphrey, Skivskaja and Marsden, 2008; Marsden forthcoming a): these works reveal the ways in which patterns of movement important during the Cold War continue to shape people’s experience of space and the distributions of people around it. 31 Important studies by Adelkhah and Olzsweska (2007) address the details of the immersion of Afghan refugees in Iranian society and the forms of identity produced in that context. 32 There exists a wide body of work in anthropology and history concerning labour and labour relations in South Asia. Much of this work addressesthe extent to which debates in Marxist theory concerning the development of class consciousness are helpfully pursued in the worlds of Indian

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labour. See, for example, Behal and van der Linden (2006). 33 On whom, see, for instance, Portisch (2010).

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2.6 South Asia: Intimacy and Identities, Politics and Poverty Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery

India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the other smaller Himalayan countries together account for around one quarter of the world’s population, ranging from internationally networked computer-savvy middle classes in the large metropolitan cities to villagers and forest dwellers, from IT workers and Bollywood superstars to casual labourers in agriculture, factories or mines − and those who move between or negotiate the relationships among them. For the purposes of this Handbook, Pakistan is covered by Magnus Marsden in Chapter 2.5 on Southwest and Central Asia. Clearly, though, Pakistan’s historical and contemporary links with India and Bangladesh (in particular) impinge in many ways on our understanding of South Asia, so the two chapters should be read in tandem. Reviewing ‘social anthropology’ in South Asia is made an additionally complex and daunting task by the porosity of disciplinary boundaries. What passes for social anthropology elsewhere is called sociology in India, with ‘anthropology’ largely reserved for the study of so-called tribals (or Adivasis). Some scholars have training in both disciplines, and ethnographic work is also conducted by human geographers and others. Furthermore,

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anthropologists/sociologists of South Asia regularly engage with other disciplines: for instance, the Subaltern Studies historians have provided one of the most fertile crosslinkages (indeed, some anthropologists/ sociologists are also trained in history). But political science, economics and demography have also influenced debates and research topics amongst anthropologists/sociologists working in South Asia today. This chapter provides an overview of the fields in which we consider the most exciting and innovative work is being conducted. Necessarily, we have been ruthlessly selective. The resulting review is partial, and space constraints preclude detailed discussion of specific items. To make our task more manageable, we have chosen to focus almost exclusively on monographs and edited volumes (the latter often interdisciplinary). Of course, much important work is being published in general anthropology journals, not to mention journals that are primarily dedicated to work on South Asia. Amongst the latter, we would direct readers to Contributions to Indian Sociology, interdisciplinary journals such as Contemporary South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of South

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Asian Development, SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, http:// samaj.revues.org/index142.html), South Asia Research, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Other journals regularly featuring the anthropology/sociology of South Asia include Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (formerly South Asia Bulletin), Critical Asian Studies (formerly Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars), Journal of Asian Studies and Modern Asian Studies. In addition, surveys on South Asia, or specifically on India, can be found in Fuller and Spencer (1990) (dealing with the 1980s) and the 1,600+ pages of Veena Das’ edited Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology (Das 2003); see also ClarkDecès (2011) and Das (2010). Several series are dedicated to compendia of publications on specific topics: for instance, Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Oxford University Press, New Delhi) and Themes in Indian Sociology (Sage Publications, New Delhi); other volumes reprinting previously published materials include Jacobsen (2009) − which runs to nearly 1,800 pages − and Mines and Lamb (2010). In addition, the University Presses of California, Chicago and Columbia (along with Permanent Black) are collaborating in a new series for first monographs, ‘South Asia across the disciplines’. In their 1990 review, Fuller and Spencer noted that ‘even unromantic anthropologists’ were saying ‘less and less about the social, political and economic factors which mainly determine the “contemporary reality” of millions of ordinary people’s lives’ (Fuller and Spencer, 1990: 91). In the intervening period on which we focus, though, those concerns have become much more salient in anthropological writing on South Asia. Whilst Contributions to Indian Sociology still carried some papers debating ‘ethno-sociology’ and the striving ‘for a sociology of India’, such interests have been eclipsed. Similarly, conventional village studies no longer dominate ethnographic work in South Asia,

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probably for several reasons, including the ‘postmodern turn’ and its associated problematization of fieldwork, the often gruelling living conditions of rural life (that anthropologists could opt out of, even if villagers themselves could not) and the growth of interest in deploying ethnographic methods in other sites and on other topics. The bulk of South Asia’s population − over 70% in most places − is still rural, so village studies still have a key role to play in the anthropology/ sociology of South Asia (see Madan, 2003; Mines and Yazgi, 2010). Nevertheless, we welcome the growth in studies of factories and schools, the street and the state. And the new emphasis on the politicized manifestations of the hoary anthropological staples of kinship, caste and religion has been timely, for South Asian societies have experienced profound political and economic changes on the regional and global stages during the period under consideration: ethnic and communal conflicts, economic liberalization and globalization (see Deshpande, 2003 for an overview). Taking Fuller and Spencer’s 1990 review as a cut-off point, then, we discuss recent research under four headings: Gender, intimacy and the body; Work and livelihoods; Religion, identities and political conflict; and State and globalization.

GENDER, INTIMACY AND THE BODY The landmark report on the Status of Women in India (for a summary, see ICSSR, 1975) provided a crucial impetus to women’s (and gender) studies in India and South Asia more generally. The Centre for Women’s Development Studies in Delhi (http://www. cwds.ac.in) has published material by anthropologists (and other social scientists) in its in-house journal, the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, since 1994. Several presses publish on gender issues (e.g. in Delhi Kali for Women − now Women Unlimited and Zubaan − and in Kolkata, Stri), whilst Economic and Political Weekly publishes an annual Review of Women’s Studies (plus

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frequent articles on gender themes). Gender Studies is now a massive and diverse multidisciplinary field − and social anthropologists and sociologists often develop their work in dialogue and/or collaboration with historians, political scientists, human geographers, economists and demographers. Much early work concentrated on topics such as women’s access (or lack of it) to productive resources, dowry and dowry-related vulnerability to violence and women’s disempowerment more generally (see Basu, 2005). Over time, as gender studies became more fine-tuned, research has increasingly explored other issues, particularly how gender intersects with other socially defined identities, women’s agency as a counterpoint to portrayals of women’s victimhood, masculinities, emotions and the body. Women’s everyday lives entail a rich diversity of experiences as gender politics interplay with caste, religious community and class, as evidenced in topics as varied as the impact of the changing political economy of the fishing industry on Catholic Mukkuvar women at the southernmost tip of India (Ram, 1992) and of gender hierarchy on Buddhist nuns in Ladakh (Gutschow, 2004), and the expression and creation of urban Tamil Brahmin women’s subjectivities through ritual (Hancock, 1999); in Bangladesh, Muslim, Hindu and Catholic women and their positioning in relation to communal boundaries (Rozario, 1992), women, Islam and Islamist movements (Shehabuddin, 2008), and marriage and belonging (Kotalová, 1993); and low-caste women in Nepal (Cameron, 1998). In addition, several researchers have focused on the impact of ‘development’ − e.g. on poor women in Rajshahi (Bangladesh) (White, 1992), (in India) on tribal women in Jharkhand (Rao, 2008) and cashew workers in Kerala (Lindberg, 2004), and more generally (Kapadia, 2002). Other work has focused on gender politics and the life cycle, often in ways that spill over into medical anthropology. Several recent studies address the politics of childbearing, including birthing and the changing

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roles of birth attendants and modern medical institutions, among them Pinto (2008); see also Rozario and Samuel (2002), several papers in Unnithan-Kumar (2004) and Van Hollen (2003); fertility and domestic politics (Säävälä, 2001) and the harvesting of stem cells from infertility clinics in India (Bharadwaj and Glasner, 2008). There is an abundance of ongoing research on the highly politicized question of sex selective abortion and son preferences (see e.g. Patel, 2007; Srinivasan, 2006) as well as the implications of imbalanced sex ratios for young men’s marriage chances (Kaur, 2008). Rather little research details (leave aside problematizes) women’s roles in childrearing, however: women are tacitly assumed to nurture children and de facto their childrearing work has been largely naturalized. Yet it is clearly important to address women’s (undoubtedly changing) experiences of socializing children through childhoods marked by gender, class and so forth to transitions to very diverse adulthoods − the focus of work by Seymour (1999) and Donner (2008) in urban Orissa (Odisha) and Kolkata, respectively. At the other end of the life cycle, how elderly women in rural Bengal detach themselves from the ‘net’ of ties that previously linked them into social life is the subject of an account by Lamb (2000). A large-scale interdisciplinary study that included ethnographic work focuses on the difficulties that widows experience in ensuring a place to live and access to livelihood resources (Chen, 2000; see also Chen, 1998). Other discussions address care for the elderly more generally (Rajan et al., 2009), whilst Cohen (1998) focuses on the ageing body and the social and medicalized dimensions of senility in urban India. Some authors explicitly frame their discussions around women’s agency and resistance against gendered (as well as other kinds of) domination. Among these are women’s rituals as a source of power (e.g. Appadurai et al., 1994; Flueckiger, 1996); how ‘Untouchable’ women in rural Tamil Nadu critique and challenge local Brahmin élites

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(Kapadia, 1995); sex workers in Chennai (Sariola, 2009); how women’s songs articulate critiques of adult women’s lives (Raheja and Gold, 1994; see also Raheja, 2003); life stories, songs and moral tales (Jeffery and Jeffery, 1996; March, 2002; Narayan with Urmila Devi Sood, 1997); how villagers in Uttar Pradesh − including women − ‘struggle with destiny’(Wadley, 1994); and how Delhi slum women negotiate marital conflicts, often through their natal kin or women-led informal courts (Grover, 2010). Several sources focus on women’s mobilization, e.g. the implications of gender politics for women’s engagement with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in rural West Bengal (Tenhunen, 2008), women’s unionization and collective organization through SEWA (the Self-Employed Women’s Association) in Gujarat (Rose, 1992), and how the differing ‘political fields’ of Mumbai and Kolkata affect women’s capacity to mobilize successfully (Ray, 2000; see also Fruzzetti and Tenhunen, 2006). And lest we romanticize the ‘weapons of the weak’, there are stark reminders of how subaltern insubordination may be dealt with − for instance, in media reports throughout the 2000s of caste-based (extra-legal) courts meting out capital punishment to young people who dare to fall in love across caste and/or religious lines, or against the wishes of their parents, and in Mody’s account of how the legal provision for court marriages − the option taken by many eloping couples − is subverted by the patriarchal prejudices of the court’s staff and other government employees (Mody, 2008). As elsewhere, gender studies in South Asia have generated other interests, of which we would mention just three here: masculinities, emotions and the body. Research that problematizes masculinities, by pointing to the diversity of manhoods or by highlighting how there is nothing natural or inevitable about becoming a man (e.g. Chopra et al., 2004; Osella and Osella, 2006) provides a counterbalance to research on women. Normalized domestic masculinity is addressed by Derné (1995) whilst Caplan (1995)

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explores military masculinity in relation to Gurkhas in Nepal. Research in western Uttar Pradesh focuses on the truncated achievement of manhood among educated but unemployed young men (Jeffrey, 2010; Jeffrey et al., 2008), whilst Alter (1992) focuses on the moral economy of the wrestler’s regimen and its implications for the national character and the body politic. The study of emotions has drawn particular attention from researchers in Nepal: intimacy and affection in everyday family life among Gurungs (McHugh, 2001), love letters and their implications for changing marriage practices and gender relationships in western Nepal (Ahearn, 2001) and emotional distress and the body among the Yolmo Sherpas (Desjarlais, 1992). For India, Addlakha (2008) considers the psychopathological effects on women of their subordination. In respect of the body, Thapan (2009) focuses on embodiment as experienced by young urban women from differing class backgrounds, whilst Banerjee and Miller (2003) explore the diverse meanings of the sari (see also Tarlo 1996 for an account of the diverse uses of clothing − e.g. to hide or heighten identities and to challenge or assert domination). Studies of the body easily segue into forms of medical anthropology, though there are few anthropological accounts of the social meanings of body shapes other than those of the ‘third sex’ (see, e.g. Nanda, 1998 [1989]; Reddy, 2005). Staples (2007) considers lepers, one of India’s most marginalized (but fast disappearing) groups, in south India and Barrett (2008) analyses Aghor healers, who have a reputation for treating leprosy patients (amongst much more). Cohen has written on kidney selling, ‘bioavailability’ and ‘third sex’ (e.g. Cohen, 2004, 2005), whilst Copeman (2009) analyses blood donation in the context of guru-worship. Wilce (1998) explores how patients in Bangladesh express their complaints. How and why medicines are ingested feature in several studies, including pill consumption by Tibetans in India (Prost, 2008), and how Ayurvedic medicines are becoming part of

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consumer culture (Alter, 2005; Banerjee, 2009) (see Bode, 2010 for a historical perspective). Others aim to address public health practitioners as much as other anthropologists (e.g. Nichter, 2008).

WORK AND LIVELIHOODS Discussions of class in South Asia have generally revolved around economists’ debates about the mode of production in South Asia (now well behind us) or more cross-disciplinary debates about the relationships between caste and class as organizing features of social relationships at work (see HarrissWhite, 2003). Barring the work of Béteille (1972 and 2002 [originally published in 1966]), anthropologists played a small role in the early debates. Perhaps (as Chibber, 2008 and Inden, 1990 argue, though in very different ways), the centrality of caste and religion to the intellectual construction of South Asia meant that anthropologists were for a time unwilling to engage with issues of work and labour. Nevertheless, social and economic historians concerned with, say, industrial workers and internal and overseasmigration (e.g. Raj Chandavarkar, Nandini Gooptu, Peter Robb, Burton Stein and David Washbrook) helped to highlight issues of work, class and livelihoods in the 1980s and 1990s. And since 1990, some anthropologists have explored wider notions of intersectionality − how class, caste, gender, religion, region and residence interact in the forging of identities in South Asia. Parry et al. (1999) took this process a step forward by arguing for a rapprochement between studies of caste, kinship and ritual representations and values, and the study of industrial labour. In his overview of economic anthropology in South Asia, Harriss (2006) considers four main themes: the ‘jajmani system’ (a classic theme that has not received attention recently); the commercialization and commoditization of the rural economy; research on the environment (which we deal with in the final section); and

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the economic implications of caste and religion (we consider caste in terms of politics and identity in the next section). Here, we focus on how labour is organized and experienced, and on relationships between workers and employers of various kinds. Whilst anthropologically aware economists such as Jean Drèze have worked on rural development (e.g. his paper in Lanjouw and Stern, 1998), few anthropologists since 1990 have engaged with the transformations of the working experiences of rural populations, whether as landlords, farmers or labourers, perhaps because some major technological changes (e.g. shifts to mechanized ploughing and crop processing) were largely completed in most of the region by the 1980s. Nevertheless, some recent work looks at how ‘local understandings of agriculture … were profoundly shaped by globally and nationally circulating discourses of development’ (Gupta, 1998: 6) and the self-perceptions of farmers as they negotiate new seeds and working practices, often described as biotechnology (see also Assayag, 2005; Vasavi, 1994). Breman’s research on sugar cane workers in Gujarat was largely completed in the 1970s (Breman, 1985) but more recently he has worked on bonded labour (Breman, 2007; Breman et al., 2009) and on labour circulation (Breman, 1996, 2010). Rural class relations − in which caste and social power intertwine − have been addressed for Bihar by Chakravarti (2001), and in biographical statements, such as by Viramma and Racine (1997), which present the labourers’ viewpoints. Ruud (2003) examines the growth of communism in rural West Bengal, whilst Pandian (2010) explores the labour of cultivating crops and virtuous people among the low-caste Kallars in Tamil Nadu (see also Deliège, 1998; Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998). Turning to the urban economy, it is noteworthy that studies of entrepreneurs, or managers more generally, are rare. An exception is Harriss (2003), whose revisiting of Singer’s classic work (Singer, 1972) shows that Weberian debates over value systems,

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religion and development are still relevant for understanding the motivations and work practices of Tamil businessmen. The question of whether jobs in IT or call centres presage new forms of social organization and ‘new workers’ has also recently attracted considerable attention (Fuller and Narasimhan, 2007, 2008; Upadhya and Vasavi, 2007). More work has been carried out on the urban working classes, both in the formal and informal sectors (see e.g. Parry et al., 1999). Parry (e.g. 1999a; 1999b; 2003) has focused on the workforce attached to the Bhilai steelworks in Chhattisgarh whilst De Neve (2005) worked on weavers in Tamil Nadu (see also Chari, 2004) and Ciotti (2010) studied Chamars, the largest Scheduled (or ex-Untouchable) caste in north India, as they moved from rural to urban employment in and around Varanasi. Despite the wellknown demography of Muslims in India (disproportionately urban and industrial workers, usually in the informal sector), few studies focus on Muslims (but see Mann, 1992; Venkatesan, 2009). The domestic workers studied by Ray and Qayum (2009) form an essential but often ignored part of the urban economy, as do child labourers (Blanchet, 2001). Other studies of occupational groups include Doron (2008) on Ganges river boatmen and Bear (2007) on railway workers. Furthermore, anthropologists have studied occupants of religious positions through the lenses of ‘occupation’ − looking at the work they do, how they learn the trade and what skills they transmit to their children (e.g. Fuller, 2003; Parry, 1994; Seneviratne, 1999). In many industrial sectors, the old labour force has lost its relative security, and new forms of employment have become dominant. Heuzé (1996), for instance, explores the dilemmas of coalminers, workers from what some call the aristocracy of labour (with permanent contracts and social benefits), facing the prospect of informalization, if not for themselves, then for their children. Breman (2004) shows how textile-mill closures transformed the lives of the urban working class

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in Ahmedabad as they struggled for alternative work, usually informal and insecure, in the new economy. Studies of women factory and home-based workers in Sri Lanka (Hewamanne, 2007; Lynch, 2007) and Bangladesh contribute to debates around whether or not such employment has been exploitative or has opened new avenues for self-expression and independence − or both (see Kabeer, 2001 for an account of garment work that examines both ends of the value chain in Bangladesh and London). In different ways, South Asia’s economies (especially in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) have been transformed by intense processes of globalization and economic liberalization since the late 1980s. In a polemical attack on accounts based on South Asia’s supposed ‘Otherness’, however, Gupta (2009) insists that understanding the processes that underlie the ‘new’ jobs of ‘India Shining’ also entails exposing the close links between growth in the high-technology sectors, on the one hand, and sweatshops, casualization of labour and rural stagnation, on the other.

RELIGION, IDENTITIES AND POLITICAL CONFLICT Caste and religion have been core preoccupations in anthropological studies in South Asia in which debates about the contributions of Dumont (1980 [1966]) have been central. Bayly (1999) and Dirks (2001) provide useful historical contextualization, whilst the papers in Khare (2009) and Sharma and Chatterjee (1994) critically analyse Louis Dumont’s contribution to understanding hierarchy, caste and pollution. Béteille’s work has often been a more or less explicit dialogue with Dumont’s legacy (see, for example, Béteille, 2001; Béteille et al., 2005). There are also several ethnographic studies from India in the recent period, among them: village Hindu rituals, including mourning rituals, by Clark-Decès (Clark-Decès,

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2005; Nabokov, 2000) and the village temples of the socially weak (Mines, 2005); on Jains (Laidlaw, 1995); accounts of ritual dance re-enactments of the Mahabharata (including subaltern inversions of the conventional relationships between heroes and villains) and the connections between ritual healing and social justice in Garhwal (Sax, 2002, 2009); and religion in Ladakh (Mills, 2002; see also van Beek and Pirie, 2008). For Sri Lanka, recent work includes discussions of sorcery among Sinhala Buddhists (Kapferer, 1997) and Sinhala healing rituals (Scott, 1994). Studies in Nepal include Gray (2006), Kondos (2004) and Ramble (2008). If social anthropologists and sociologists have conventionally studied everyday and relatively stable life, however, the period since the early 1990s has provided a particular set of challenges for researchers working in South Asia. Sri Lanka was embroiled in a violent civil war from the mid-1980s, whilst there was Maoist insurgency in Nepal from the mid-1990s. And India has seen numerous outbreaks of violence and disorder − in particular upper-caste unrest associated with the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations to grant ‘reservations’ in state education and employment to the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs) in 1990, the growing assertiveness and success in electoral politics of the historically dispossessed Scheduled Castes (or Dalits), the rise of organizations associated with Hindu Nationalism, and armed Maoist (or Naxalite) movements in a swathe of eastern India. Throughout the region, religion, caste and ethnicity have increasingly been studied in their politicized forms, heavily influenced by these wider political developments. The accounts of some political scientists (e.g. Christophe Jaffrelot, Paul Brass) and historians (e.g. Mushirul Hasan, David Ludden) build upon ethnographic sources on ethnic and communal politics in South Asia. Among anthropologists, Spencer (2007) and Tambiah (1996) provide overviews, whilst several edited collections examine

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riots, insurgency, violence, lower-caste and Adivasi (‘tribal’) mobilization and their causes and consequences, often with papers about different parts of South Asia and contributors from a range of disciplines (e.g. Chatterjee and Jeganathan, 2000; Das, 1990; Gellner, 2009; Price and Ruud, 2010; Shah and Pettigrew, 2011); others provide a gendered window onto these themes (Hasan, 1994; Jayawardena and De Alwis, 1996; Jeffery and Basu, 1998; Sarkar and Butalia, 1995; Skidmore and Lawrence, 2007). Béteille (1991) argued that family was more important to the reproduction of inequality in contemporary India than caste, though he acknowledges the social importance of caste, for instance in relation to arranging marriages. Yet the politics of caste has continued to attract considerable attention. Fuller, in his introduction to an edited collection, specifically addressed the relevance of anthropological and other academic contributions to the debates over whether (and if so how) to implement the Mandal Commission report (Fuller, 1996: 2). Accounts of a ‘second democratic revolution’ with subordinate castes demanding an equal place at the political table owe much to the work of Yogendra Yadav (2000) and Christophe Jaffrelot (2009), whilst Jodhka (2001) discusses how inter-caste relationships are more often characterized by fission and competition than interdependence (for a general overview, see Jaffrelot, 2003). More general anthropological discussions of caste and politics can be found in Assayag (1995), Bhattacharyya (2010), Rao (2009) and Shah (2001, 2004). Studies focusing on Dalit politics include Deliège (1999), Dube (1998), Gorringe (2004) and Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998); studies addressing Adivasi politics include Froerer (2007) on the rise of Hindutva-inflected schooling for Adivasi children in Chhattisgarh and Shah (2010) on how the appropriation of global discourses of indigeneity inadvertently perpetuates Adivasis’ economic and civic marginalization. Studies of dominant castes in north India, like the Jats (Gupta, 1997) and Yadavs

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(Michelutti, 2008), are matched by Rutten (1995) on Patidars in Gujarat, and Upadhya (in Rutten, 1997) on Kamma Naidus in Andhra Pradesh. Since 1990, communal politics (or the politics of religious community), have also been very prominent, reinvigorating discussions of secularism (Madan, 2009). In India, the increasingly aggressive tactics of the Hindu Nationalists (variously called the Hindu Right, the Hindutva Brigade and the Sangh Parivar) have been crucial in relation to both national/state politics and the everyday lives of India’s religious minorities (Muslims in particular). An early overview is provided by van der Veer (1994), whilst Appadurai focuses on Hindu Nationalist paranoia about the threat posed to India’s integrity by its minority populations (Appadurai, 2006) and an edited volume addresses Hindu ideas about violence (Vidal et al., 2003). Several anthropologists have conducted ethnographic studies amongst groups associated with the Hindu Right, among them Eckert (2003), Hansen (1999, 2001), Mathur (2008), Menon (2009) and Sen (2007). Brosius (2004) focuses on the media and Hindutva mobilization, Kaur (2005) on Hindu nationalist politics and public spectacle, and Harlan (2003) examines hero worship and masculinity in Rajasthan in the context of right-wing Hindu activism. Another strand of Hindutva politics has been the efforts to inflate the numbers of ‘Hindus’: for instance, by trying to draw the not always compliant Dalits into their ambit (Narayan, 2006, 2009). The centrality of caste in the social anthropology of India has meant that rather little ethnographic attention was paid to Muslims (but see Metcalf, 2004, 2009 for anthropologically relevant historical accounts). To Hindutva sympathizers, Muslims are a pampered minority whose patriotism is in doubt − but a recent government report indicated that India’s Muslims are economically and socially marginalized in much of the country (Sachar, 2006). Ethnographies both endorse and complicate this picture through accounts of Muslims located in varied social niches and

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practising Islam in differing ways. Four edited collections examine, respectively, Islamic reformism (Osella and Osella, 2008), ‘lived Islam’ (Ahmad and Reifeld, 2004) and Muslims’ kinship (Ahmad, 2003), whilst Madan (1995) includes papers on a range of topics. Accounts that give a window onto Muslims’ diversity include studies of the Meos of Rajasthan (Jamous, 2003; Mayaram, 1997), portraits of individual Muslims (Banerjee, 2008/2010), Muslims in rural north India grappling with their marginalization (Jeffery and Jeffery, 2006), the maritime culture of Muslims in western India (Simpson, 2006a), and madrasas and the Muslim reform movement, the Tablighi Jama’at (Sikand, 2002, 2005). Other studies focus on the fluidity of communal boundaries (Flueckiger, 2006) and the everyday lives of Hindus, Dalits and Muslims living in a neighbourhood of a north Indian city (Frøystad, 2005). The Partition of British India in 1947 that created independent India also produced the two ‘wings’ of Pakistan; in 1971, the Pakistan civil war resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. These events have left a continuing legacy in contemporary South Asia: several scholars have explored memories of the 1947 Partition in north-west India (see Butalia, 1998; Kaul, 2001/2002; Kaur, 2007; Menon and Bhasin, 1998), as well as of people’s memories of later communal violence (for example Roy, 2004) and the sexual violence perpetrated during Pakistan’s civil war (Mookherjee, 2011) in what became Bangladesh. Punjab has seen considerable inter-religious and political tension, not only during the Partition but also in later political struggles. Conflicts over Sikh identity have attracted recent attention (e.g. Shani, 2008), as have emigration and the violent struggle for an independent Sikh state (Chopra, 2010) and the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 (Das, 1995). Kashmir, a region where the legacy of Partition is highly contested, has not been the subject of much contemporary ethnography (but see Butalia, 2003).

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In Nepal, recent research has been heavily coloured by the Maoist insurgency. After 1996, Maoists gradually extended their hold from the west of the country to other regions, with far-reaching effects on people’s everyday lives. There is now a wealth of volumes addressing various facets of the insurgency (e.g. Adams, 1998; Gellner, 2003, 2007, 2010; Hutt, 2004; Lawoti and Pahari, 2009; Lecomte-Tilouine, 2009; Lecomte-Tilouine and Dollfus, 2003; Pettigrew, 2012). Even more so in Sri Lanka have the violence, suffering and displacement associated with the civil war dominated social science research since the early 1990s. Seneviratne (1999) and Tambiah (1992) approach these issues through accounts of the changing roles of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, highlighting their increasing engagement with politics and violence. A recently reissued edited volume tackles related issues of identity politics, nationalism and violence (Jeganathan and Ismail, 2009). Others have addressed these topics from more specific research sites: for instance, Spencer (1990) examines how Buddhism and Sinhala nationalism played out in a village in southern Sri Lanka, whilst Argenti-Pillen (2002) focuses on how women in southern Sri Lanka dealt with the culture of violence associated with the recruitment of local men to be soldiers in the fight against the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). From the other side, there are accounts of the situation of Tamils − for instance, of Tamil estate workers (Daniel, 1996), of children recruited into the LTTE (Trawick, 2007) and of Tamil-speaking Muslims and Hindus (McGilvray, 2008).

STATE AND GLOBALIZATION Conventionally, the massive changes that came with economic liberalization are dated in India from 1991, with slightly different dates for the other South Asian countries (see Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, for an anthropologically informed account). Changes at the level of the state in South Asia were

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highlighted by Fuller and Spencer (1990: 97) in their assessment that ‘the relationship between state and locality’ was one of ‘the most pressing problems in the region. The challenge for anthropologists is to find culturally sensitive ways of analysing these problems, and such analyses must start from the quotidian experience of life in towns and villages.’ Since 2000 in particular, attention has been paid to the state and its development agendas. The new interest in the state, governmentality and governance as well as in local constructions and discourses around the state can be seen most clearly in the edited collection from conferences in London in 1998 and 1999 (Fuller and Bénéï, 2000). In the introduction, Fuller and Harriss (2000) note that the modern state is central to India’s society (and only slightly less so elsewhere in South Asia) and that, despite the difficulty of studying it ethnographically, the fruits of such efforts make the endeavour worthwhile. New overview work on the state in South Asia includes Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan (2010). Sharma (2008) discusses the impacts of an Indian government-funded agency (Mahila Samakhya, or Women’s Equality) on women’s lives and identities and on gender relations. Many of the developmental activities of the state enter spheres where private and non-governmental actors are significant, and the state is not just a provider but also a regulator and sometimes partner. Education is a prime example, with recent books exemplifying different approaches to schools as sites for nation-building. Srivastava (1998) focused on the Doon School, an influential élite private school, to tease out aspects of its own ideology and its contribution to national ideology, whilst Bénéï (2008), on schools in Maharashtra, provides schoolroom ethnography, amongst much else (see also Thapan, 1991). Anthropologists have also studied electoral politics: the fruits of early work under the direction of M.N. Srinivas and A.M. Shah have recently been brought together (Shah, 2007), and Banerjee has coordinated a

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multi-sited ethnography of the 2009 Indian national elections (Banerjee, 2012), building on her argument on ‘sacred elections’ (Banerjee, 2007). The activities of aid agencies have increasingly attracted the ethnographic attention of anthropologists, partly because many now have insider knowledge of development agencies (governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental): Mosse (2004), for instance, highlights the ethical and political issues that confront anthropologists who work as development consultants. Other studies of development processes from an anthropological perspective, with a focus on South Asia, include Crewe and Harrison (1999) and Gardner and Lewis (1996). States, of course, do many things, are fractured in different ways and engage with the citizenry (and others) coercively as well as developmentally. The state in its coercive roles has been addressed in several places (e.g. Das, 2007), but there has been little anthropological work on the police in South Asia and their relationships with everyday criminality (but see Jauregui, 2010). Work on the state’s role in fomenting as well as controlling riots has, however, come from anthropologically minded political scientists (e.g. Brass, 1997), whilst Jasani (2013) focuses on the rehabilitation of Muslims forced to relocate after the ethnic cleansing in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) in 2002. Anthropological studies of other aspects of coercive state action include work on slum clearance and resettlement programmes carried out in Delhi during the Emergency of 1975−77 and their linkages with the family planning programme (Tarlo, 2003). The long-running sagas of dam-building (Nehru’s ‘temples of modernity’) have generated huge forced population movements and resistance: the best known is the complex of dams on the River Narmada in western India (see, in particular, Baviskar, 1995). More recently, earthquakes and reconstruction programmes have also generated new insights into the transformation of the state (e.g. in Gujarat; Simpson, 2006b), whilst da Costa

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(2009) discusses the popular protests in West Bengal against state acquisition of land for industrial development and Padel and Das (2010) provide an account of the global ramifications of bauxite mining and local resistance to it in Orissa (Odisha). These studies reveal much about the workings of the Indian state as well as the strategies employed by poor people in negotiating and resisting its efforts. For Sri Lanka, the papers in de Alwis and Hedman (2009) on the 2005 tsunami provide ethnographic accounts and case studies of aid, activism and reconstruction (see also McGilvray and Gamburd, 2010). Considerable attention has been paid to the anthropology of the environment, and especially of forests and the state’s role in their management, with anthropological work that spans the colonial and post-colonial worlds being especially prominent (Sivaramakrishnan, 1999; Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal, 2003; Sundar, 1997). Sundar et al. (2001) look at the processes through which the Indian government established ‘participatory’ mechanisms for forestry governance (see also Linkenbach, 2007; Madsen, 1999). Guha − an anthropologist and historian − produced an early discussion of environmental protest movements (particularly Chipko, in Uttarkhand) (Guha, 1989) and a later intellectual biography of Verrier Elwin, an anthropologist who wrote on forest-dwellers in Central and North-East India from the 1930s to the 1950s (Guha, 1999). Other anthropological work on the environment includes Gold and Gujar (2002) on Rajasthan and Jalais (2009) on the Sundarbans in Bengal. The interrelationships between local and global processes and the movement of ideas, people and cultural resources have attracted the attention of sociologists, economists and political scientists for many years, and global products of many kinds travel from, to, through and within South Asia. South Asia has, of course, been integrated into global social, economic, political and cultural flows for many centuries, as the anthropologist-turnednovelist Amitav Ghosh reminds us (1992).

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Distinctly anthropological approaches to globalization in South Asia now include research on discourses and identities, and on material and symbolic consumption. Contemporary globalization was the focus of a large study coordinated from the LSE (Assayag and Fuller, 2005). Several authors examine the cultural impact of the creative industries within South Asia and beyond, looking at Bollywood in particular, but also at other regional film industries, soap operas and music videos (e.g. Dickey, 1993; Dwyer and Patel, 2002; Kaur and Sinha, 2005; Mankekar, 1999). Liechty (2003) looks at the cultural practices of Nepal’s new middle class, examining their consumption of cinema and video, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems and advertising. These products are central to middle-class consumption in South Asia, and Kaur and Mazzarella (2009) show how the state’s efforts to control these changes through censorship also have productive consequences. Some work addresses local understandings of the ‘modernity’ that such consumption promises (Appadurai, 1996; Breckenridge, 1995; Gupta, 2000). Mazzarella (2003) shows how the advertising industry in Mumbai contributes to the construction of consumerist globalization through particular aesthetics and visual representations. Srivastava (2007) addresses sexuality and modernity, and how a particular heterosexual imagination has been established in India, whilst Warrier (2004) focuses on the middle-class devotees of a female guru. Studies focusing on young people include Favero (2005) on young men in Delhi, Lukose (2010) on youth and consumption in Kerala and Nisbett (2009) on young people and the IT industry in Bangalore. Other discussions of the middle classes cover diverse topics related to leisure, cultural politics and consumption: see for instance Brosius (2010), Jaffrelot and van der Veer (2008) and Ray and Baviskar (2011). Fernandes (2006) discusses how the new Indian middle class and older élite groups vie for dominance, and how consumption patterns,

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their associated socio-political positions (such as membership of NGOs) and their related discursive activities also link the middle class with state power. One aspect of middle-class involvement in local politics is engagement with environmental issues: for instance, the transformation of urban settings such as Delhi in the interests of middle-class consumption and politics (Baviskar, 2007). Yet middle-class consumption also produces prodigious quantities of waste, whose processing provides an employment niche for some sectors of the urban poor (Gill, 2009) and which even enters a global market in textile recycling (Norris, 2010). For Nepal, Bista (2008 [1991]) examines how conflicts between the urban classes and other groups in the Kathmandu Valley affect how the local environment is being transformed, and Ortner (1999) discusses how Nepali Sherpa identities are being affected by their work with climbing expeditions (see also Adams, 1995). Globalization also raises issues about social relationships across national boundaries. There is, for instance, a very substantial literature on South Asian migrants in many other parts of the world that we are not covering here. Several scholars, however, have specifically focused on the impact of these current migrations on their sending societies (e.g. in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Kerala: see Gamburd, 2000; Gardner, 1995; and the comparative collection in Osella and Gardner, 2004). For a study exploring the implications of globalization for the elderly, see Lamb (2009). State boundaries are problematized in a rather different fashion by van Schendel (2005) in a study of the Bengal borderlands − between India and Bangladesh − that highlights the porosity of national borders and unsettles people’s relationships to place and identity.

CONCLUSION As can be seen, the body of work by anthropologists and ethnographically inclined

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scholars from cognate disciplines in the past two decades is impressive, wide-ranging and with some outstanding examples that have used South Asian material to advance the development of anthropology well beyond the regional literature. In conclusion, we want to pick out just four issues that will, we think, be increasingly important in the work that is done over the coming decades: • diaspora as a source of social change • the ongoing dynamics generated by the tussles over poverty and affluence, environment and economy • the political implications of these conflicts • and the changing character of those likely to be doing ethnographic writing.

South Asian diasporas are small in comparison with the populations they have left behind − but they are increasingly significant in terms of their impact on what happens in South Asia. For several decades, rural migrants − for instance from Punjab, Kerala and Bangladesh − have sent back substantial remittances. These have funded investments in housing, land and children’s education, aside from assisting with the daily subsistence needs of their relatives. Some emigrants have endowed schools, hospitals or religious buildings; others have returned and established businesses in commercialized farming or transport. More recent migrants, often students and professionals, have also played their part in disseminating new ideas and values, exposing their friends and neighbours to consumer goods that the middle classes − and others too − are coming to regard as essentials, or investing in new ventures such as IT industries and private hospitals that resemble five-star hotels. Others have attempted to draw on their new expertise to foster ‘development’, or have funded religious and political organizations. The cultures and economies of South Asia, then, are not hermetically sealed. To a lesser − but also significant − extent, such processes are also sparked by internal migration, to small towns, cities and the metropolises such as Mumbai,

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Dhaka, Colombo or Kathmandu. These migrations and the social, economic and political links that flow from them serve to underscore the globalizing character of people’s social worlds. The village − its isolation and timelessness always a figment − will be even more likely to be recognized by anthropologists for what it is: a social world tied in numerous and complex ways to the global, even if these links are less obvious and overt than in cities with their shopping malls and multiplex cinemas. Yet the rural and the urban stand in complex relationships, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not with other categories, such as agriculture, industry and services, or poverty and affluence. The dynamism of knowledge-based economic changes sits side-by-side with enduring mass poverty both in the rural areas and in urban slums. Economic liberalization is continuing to undermine state provision of affordable education and health care and facilitates the development of income-generating activities for the urban middle classes in the increasingly competitive markets in private schooling and medical facilities − with complex implications for gender politics, religious and ethnic minorities and the poor in general. Yet new state initiatives − in poverty alleviation, public health or schooling − appear to be trying to stem the tide. Local industrialists and national governments engage in extractive quarrying and mining or infrastructural works that threaten the environments on which the poor depend. In the face of such competition over public goods, the politics of identity will not evaporate: indeed, South Asia seems perfectly capable of ‘modernizing’ at the same time as apparently timehallowed ascribed statuses, far from eroding, morph into new and often politically pernicious forms. Since 1990, anthropologists have been engaging more with these highly politicized aspects of life in South Asia, paying attention to negotiations over economic resources, to struggles over access to democratic institutions, to

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how the powerful exclude the poor from the fruits of ‘progress’ or to popular insurgency in the face of state complicity with powerful economic interests and failure to protect the most vulnerable. Such political engagements are likely to be a central feature of anthropology in South Asia. The growing involvement of anthropologists outside academia − in NGOs and civil rights organizations, and as consultants in donor agencies with poverty alleviation agendas − reflects a more general shift in anthropology as a discipline with a greater willingness to address questions of power and social and economic inequalities that engages more directly with the inter-penetrations of the local and the global. Increasingly, South Asians themselves will be leading the anthropological work on South Asia. Some have travelled abroad for higher education, some are children of the diaspora, some have obtained academic posts outside South Asia, and some have studied and worked abroad and returned to academic positions in South Asia. Their rising numbers will generate important questions, for instance, about the tensions between the statuses of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ for anthropologists from South Asian backgrounds trained overseas and about the impact of training abroad on the directions that anthropology and related disciplines will take within South Asia. How these tensions play out will inevitably be very productive, if sometimes uncomfortable, as anthropologists engage differently with their local interlocutors. Moreover, informants themselves are engaging with anthropological production, interrogating the anthropologist’s web presence or extending Facebook invitations, before, during and after fieldwork. But if anthropologists of South Asia, whether based within the region or beyond, can maintain their engagement with ethnography and fieldwork in their old and new forms and can meet the challenges posed by rapid social and economic change, they will continue to produce exciting and innovative accounts that speak beyond the region to the discipline as whole.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several colleagues kindly provided useful feedback on this chapter: Mukulika Banerjee, Jacob Copeman, Martin Fuchs, Christopher Fuller, Ian Harper, Lotte Hoek, Helen Lambert, Antje Linkenbach, Jonathan Parry, Santi Rozario, Geoffrey Samuel, Alpa Shah, Jonathan Spencer and Susan Wadley.

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Gorringe, Hugo 2004. Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sage. Gray, John 2006. Domestic Mandala: Architecture of Lifeworlds in Nepal. Farnham: Ashgate. Grover, Shalini 2010. Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India. New Delhi: Social Science Press. Guha, Ramchandra 1989. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ramchandra 1999. Savaging the Civilized − Verrier Elwin, his Tribals and India. Chicago IL & New Delhi: University of Chicago Press & Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gupta, Akhil & Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (eds) 2010. The State in India After Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Gupta, Dipankar 1997. Rivalry and Brotherhood: Politics in the Life of Farmers in Northern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Dipankar 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India between worlds. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Gupta, Dipankar 2009. The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly? New Delhi: Penguin Viking. Gutschow, Kim 2004. Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hancock, Mary 1999. Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hansen, Thomas Blom 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom 2001. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harlan, Lindsey 2003. The Goddesses’ Henchmen: Gender in Indian Hero Worship. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriss, John 2003. The Great Tradition Globalises: Reflections on Two Studies of the ‘Industrial Leaders’ of Madras. Modern Asian Studies 37 (2): 327−362. Harriss, John 2006. South Asia, pp. 526−536, in A Handbook of Economic Anthropology (ed.) J.G. Carrier. London: Edward Elgar. Harriss-White, Barbara 2003. India Working: Essays on Society and Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hasan, Zoya (ed.) 1994. Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Heuzé, Gerard 1996. Workers of Another World: Miners, the Countryside and Coalfields in Dhanabad. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hewamanne, Sandya 2007. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hutt, Michael (ed.) 2004. Himalayan ‘People’s War’: Nepal’s Maoist Rebellion. London: Hurst. ICSSR 1975. Status of Women in India: Synopsis of the Report of the National Committee on the Status of Women (1971−74). Indian Council of Social Science Research. Inden, Ronald 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell. Jacobsen, Knut (ed.) 2009. Modern Indian Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Jaffrelot, Christophe 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Jaffrelot, Christophe (ed.) 2009. Rise of the Plebeians? The Changing Face of Indian Legislative Assemblies. London: Routledge. Jaffrelot, Christophe & Peter van der Veer (eds) 2008. Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China. New Delhi: Sage. Jalais, Annu 2009. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. New Delhi: Routledge India. Jamous, Raymond 2003. Kinship and Rituals among the Meo of Northern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jasani, Rubina 2013. Learning to Live after Violence: An Ethnography of Survival after Communal Violence in Urban Ahmedabad. New Delhi: Routledge India. Jauregui, Beatrice 2010. Shadows of the State, Subalterns of the State: Police and “Law and Order” in Postcolonial India. University of Chicago PhD (published by ProQuest/UMI). Jayawardena, Kumari & Malathi de Alwis (eds) 1996. Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Jeffery, Patricia & Amrita Basu (eds) 1998. Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. New York: Routledge. Jeffery, Patricia & Roger Jeffery 1996. Don’t Marry Me to a Plowman! Women’s Everyday Lives in Rural North India. Boulder, CO & New Delhi: Westview & Vistaar.

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Jeffery, Patricia & Roger Jeffery 2006. Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility and Women’s Status in India. Gurgaon (Haryana): Three Essays Collective. Jeffrey, Craig 2010. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jeffrey, Craig, Patricia Jeffery & Roger Jeffery 2008. Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jeganathan, Pradeep & Qadri Ismail (eds) 2009. Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka. New York: South Focus Press. Jodhka, Surinder S. (ed.) 2001. Community and Identities: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage. Kabeer, Naila 2001. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka: The Power to Choose. London & New Delhi: Verso Books & Vistaar. Kapadia, Karin 1995. Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kapadia, Karin (ed.) 2002. The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity, Gender and Social Inequalites in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Kapferer, Bruce 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kaul, Suvir (ed.) 2001/2002. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India. New Delhi/ Bloomington, IN: Permanent Black/Indiana University Press. Kaur, Raminder 2005. Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India. London: Anthem Press. Kaur, Raminder & William Mazzarella (eds) 2009. Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kaur, Raminder & Ajay Sinha (eds) 2005. Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. New Delhi: Sage. Kaur, Ravinder 2007. Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi. New Delhi & New York: Oxford University Press. Kaur, Ravinder 2008. Dispensable Daughters and Bachelor Sons: Sex Discrimination in North India. Economic and Political Weekly 43 (30): 109−114. Khare, Ravindra S. (ed.) 2009. Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s

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Contributions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kondos, Vivienne 2004. On the Ethos of Hindu Women: Issues, Taboos and Forms of Expression. Kathmandu: Mandala Publications. Kotalová, Jitka. 1993. Belonging to Others: Cultural Construction of Womanhood among Muslims in a Village in Bangladesh. Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology No.19. Laidlaw, James 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lamb, Sarah 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lamb, Sarah 2009. Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lanjouw, Peter & Nicholas Stern (eds) 1998. Economic Development in Palanpur over Five Decades. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lawoti, Mahendra & Anup Kumar Pahari (eds) 2009. The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. London: Routledge. Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie 2009. Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival, and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie & Pascale Dollfus (eds) 2003. Ethnic Revival and Religious Turmoil: Identities and Representations in the Himalayas. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Liechty, Mark 2003. Suitably Modern: Making MiddleClass Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lindberg, Anna 2004. Modernization and Effeminization in India: Kerala Cashew Workers since 1930. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Linkenbach, Antje 2007. Forest Futures: Global Representations and Ground Realities in the Himalayas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Lukose, Ritty 2010. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lynch, Caitrin 2007. Juki Girls, Good Girls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Madan, Triloki N. (ed.) 1995. Muslim Communities of South Asia: Culture, Society, and Power. New Delhi: Manohar. Madan, Triloki N. 2009. Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madan, Vandana (ed.) 2003. The Village in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Madsen, Stig Toft (ed.) 1999. State, Society and the Environment in South Asia. London: Curzon. Mankekar, Purnima 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mann, Elizabeth A. 1992. Boundaries and Identities: Muslims, Work and Status in Aligarh. New Delhi: Sage. March, Kathryn 2002. ‘If Each Comes Half Way’: Meeting Tamang Women of Nepal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mathur, Shubh 2008. The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism: An Ethnographic Account. Gurgaon (Haryana): Three Essays Collective. Mayaram, Shail 1997. Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mazzarella, William 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGilvray, Dennis B. 2008. Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGilvray, Dennis B. & Michele R. Gamburd (eds) 2010. Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka. London: Routledge. McHugh, Ernestine 2001. Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming to Know Another Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mendelsohn, Oliver & Marika Vicziany 1998. The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menon, Kalyani Devaki 2009. Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Menon, Ritu & Kamla Bhasin 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Metcalf, Barbara Daly 2004. Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Metcalf, Barbara Daly (ed.) 2009. Islam in South Asia in Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Michelutti, Lucia 2008. The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India. New Delhi: Routledge. Mills, Martin 2002. Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism. London: Routledge.

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Mines, Diane 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mines, Diane & Sarah Lamb (eds) 2010. Everyday Life in South Asia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mines, Diane & Nicolas Yazgi (eds) 2010. Village Matters: Relocating Villages in the Contemporary Anthropology of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mody, Perveez 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. Delhi: Routledge. Mookherjee, Nayanika 2011. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mosse, David 2004. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto Press. Nabokov, Isabelle 2000. Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press. Nanda, Serena 1998 (1989). Neither Man nor Woman: Hijras of India. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Narayan, Badri 2006. Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion: Culture, Identity and Politics. New Delhi: Sage. Narayan, Badri 2009. Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation. New Delhi: Sage. Narayan, Kirin (with Urmila Devi Sood) 1997. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales. New York: Oxford University Press. Nichter, Mark 2008. Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter. Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Nisbett, Nicholas 2009. Growing up in the Knowledge Society: Living the IT Dream in Bangalore. New Delhi: Routledge India. Norris, Lucy 2010. Recycling Indian Clothing: Global Contexts of Reuse and Value. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1999. Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Osella, Caroline & Filippo Osella 2006. Men and Masculinities in South India. London: Anthem Press. Osella, Filippo & Katy Gardner (eds) 2004. Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia. New Delhi & London: Sage. Osella, Filippo & Caroline Osella (eds) 2008. Islamic Reformism in South Asia (Special Issue of Modern Asian Studies), 42: 2/3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Padel, Felix & Samarendra Das 2010. Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Pandian, Anand 2010. Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham, NC/New Delhi: Duke University Press/Oxford University Press. Parry, Jonathan 1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, Jonathan 1999a. Lords of Labour: Working and Shirking in Bhilai. Contributions to Indian Sociology 33: 107−140. Parry, Jonathan 1999b. Two Cheers for Reservation: The Satnamis and the Steel Plant, pp. 128−169, in Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of André Béteille (eds) R. Guha & J. Parry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parry, Jonathan 2003. Nehru’s Dream and the Village ‘Waiting Room’: Long-Distance Labour Migrants to a Central Indian Steel Town. Contributions to Indian Sociology 37 (1−2): 217−249. Parry, Jonathan, Jan Breman & Karin Kapadia (eds) 1999. The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (Contributions to Indian Sociology). New Delhi & London: Sage. Patel, Tulsi (ed.) 2007. Sex-Selective Abortion in India: Gender, Society and New Reproductive Technologies. New Delhi: Sage. Pettigrew, Judith (2012). Ethnography and Everyday Life in Nepal’s Civil War. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pinto, Sarah 2008. Where There is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India. New York: Berghahn. Price, Pamela & Arild Engelsen Ruud (eds) 2010. Power and Influence in South Asia: Lords, Bosses and Captains. New Delhi: Routledge India. Prost, Audrey 2008. Precious Pills: Medicine and Social Change among Tibetan Refugees in India. Oxford: Berghahn. Raheja, Gloria (ed.) 2003. Songs, Stories, Lives: Gendered Dialogues and Cultural Critique. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Raheja, Gloria & Ann Grodzins Gold 1994. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rajan, Irudaya, Carla Risseeuw & Myrtle Perera (eds) 2009. Institutional Provisions and Care for the Aged. London: Anthem Press. Ram, Kalpana 1992. Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Captalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

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Ramble, Charles 2008. The Navel of the Demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in Highland Nepal. New York: Oxford University Press. Rao, Anupama 2009. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rao, Nitya 2008. ‘Good Women do not Inherit Land’: Politics of Land and Gender in India. New Delhi: Social Science Press and Orient BlackSwan. Ray, Raka 2000. Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Ray, Raka & Amita Baviskar (eds) 2011. Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. New Delhi: Routledge. Ray, Raka & Seemin Qayum 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reddy, Gayatri 2005. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rose, Kalima 1992. Where Women are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India. New Delhi/London: Vistaar Publications/Zed Books. Roy, Beth 2004. Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rozario, Santi 1992. Purity and Communal Boundaries: Women and Social Change in a Bangladeshi Village. London: Zed Books. Rozario, Santi & Geoffrey Samuel (eds) 2002. The Daughters of Ha¯ritı¯: Birth and Female Healers in South and Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Rutten, Mario 1995. Farms and Factories: Social Profile of Large Farmers and Rural Industrialists in West India. New Delhi: Sage. Rutten, Mario (ed.) 1997. Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe: Towards a Comparative Perspective. New Delhi: Sage. Ruud, Arild Engelsen 2003. Poetics of Village Politics: The Making of West Bengal’s Rural Communism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Säävälä, Minna 2001. Fertility and Familial Power Relations: Procreation in South India. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Sachar, Rajindar 2006. Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community in India. Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India. Sariola, Salla 2009. Gender and Sexuality in India. London: Routledge. Sarkar, Tanika & Urvashi Butalia (eds) 1995. Women and the Hindu Right. London: Zed Press.

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Sax, William 2002. Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal. New York: Oxford University Press. Sax, William 2009. God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas. New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, David 1994. Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourse on the Sinhala. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sen, Atreyee 2007. Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum. London: Hurst. Seneviratne, H. L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Seymour, Susan 1999. Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shah, Alpa 2010. In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Enviromentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shah, Alpa & Judith Pettigrew (eds) 2011. Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal. New Delhi/Oxford: Social Science Press/ Berghahn. Shah, Arvindbhai Manilal (ed.) 2007. The Grassroots of Democracy: Field Studies of Indian Elections. Delhi: Permanent Black. Shah, Ghanshyam (ed.) 2001. Dalit Identity and Politics. New Delhi: Sage. Shah, Ghanshyam (ed.) 2004. Caste and Democratic Politics in India. London: Anthem Press. Shani, Giorgio. 2008. Sikh Nationalism And Identity In A Global Age. London: Routledge. Sharma, Aradhana 2008. Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Sharma, Ursula & Mary Searle Chatterjee (eds) 1994. Contextualising Caste: Post-Dumontian Approaches. Chichester & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Shehabuddin, Elora 2008. Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh. New York: Columbia University Press. Sikand, Yoginder 2002. The Origins and Development of the Tablighi-Jama`at (1920−2000). New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sikand, Yoginder 2005. Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic education in India. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Simpson, Edward 2006a. Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean. London: Routledge. Simpson, Edward 2006b. The Rituals of Rehabilitation: Rebuilding an Urban Neighbourhood after the Gujarat Earthquake of 2001, pp. 206−231, in The Meaning

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of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India (eds) G. De Neve & F.H. Donner. London: Routledge. Singer, Milton 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes. New York: Praeger. Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan 1999. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan & Arun Agrawal (eds) 2003. Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Skidmore, Monique & Patricia Lawrence (eds) 2007. Women and the Contested State: Religion, Violence, and Agency in South and Southeast Asia. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University. Spencer, Jonathan 1990. A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Spencer, Jonathan 2007. Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Srinivasan, Sharada 2006. Development, Discrimination and Survival: Daughter Elimination in Tamil Nadu, India. Maastricht: Shaker Publishing BV. Srivastava, Sanjay 1998. Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School. London: Routledge. Srivastava, Sanjay 2007. Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Gender, Class and Consumption in India. New Delhi: Routledge India. Staples, James 2007. Peculiar People, Amazing Lives: Leprosy, Social Exclusion, and Community Making in South India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sundar, Nandini 1997. Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854−1996. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sundar, Nandini, Roger Jeffery & Neil Thin 2001. Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in Four Indian States. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1992. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1996. Leveling Crowds: EthnoNationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tarlo, Emma 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. London: Hurst. Tarlo, Emma 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. London: Hurst. Tenhunen, Sirpa 2008. Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India. Kolkata: Bhatkal & Sen (Stri).

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Thapan, Meenakshi 1991. Life at School: An Ethnographic Study. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thapan, Meenakshi 2009. Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage. Trawick, Margaret 2007. Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Unnithan-Kumar, Maya (ed.) 2004. Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformation in Child Bearing. Oxford: Berghahn. Upadhya, Carol & Aninhalli R. Vasavi 2007. In an Outpost of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Outsourcing Industry. London: Routledge. van Beek, Martijn & Fernanda Pirie (eds) 2008. Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuity and Change. Leiden: Brill. van der Veer, Peter 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Van Hollen, Cecilia 2003. Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. van Schendel, Willem 2005. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press.

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Vasavi, Aninhalli R. 1994. ‘Hybrid Times, Hybrid People’: Culture and Agriculture in South India. Man (N.S.) 29 (2): 283−300. Venkatesan, Soumhya 2009. Craft Matters: Artisans, Development and the Indian Nation. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. Vidal, Denis, Gilles Tarabout & Eric Meyer (eds) 2003. Violence/Non-Violence: Some Hindu Perspectives. New Delhi: Manohar. Viramma & Josiane Racine 1997. Viramma: A Pariah’s Life (trans.) W. Hobson. London: Verso. Wadley, Susan 1994. Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925−1984. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Warrier, Maya 2004. Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission. Abingdon: RoutledgeCurzon. White, Sarah 1992. Arguing with the Crocodile: Gender and Class in Bangladesh. London: Zed Books. Wilce, James M. 1998. Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yadav, Yogendra. 2000. Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s, pp. 120−145, in Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (eds) F.R. Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava & B. Arora. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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2.7 Modernization and its Aftermath: The Anthropology of Japan1 D.P. Martinez

Now more than a century in the making, the body of work that comprises the anthropology of Japan documents the process of modernization within a single society in more detail than any other ethnographic tradition. Moreover, as Yamashita notes in an article on the anthropology of Japan, ‘the Japanese anthropological community is one of the largest in the world’, with about 2,000 Japanese members yet it remains widely unknown as an anthropological tradition, and ‘there is still no mention of Japanese anthropology in some of the latest reference works’ (2006: 29). The addition of foreign anthropologists of Japan to the 2,000 or so native anthropologists would bring the number perhaps closer to 3,000 – making Japan one of the most intensively studied societies in the world. Since it has been written by native and foreign anthropologists, Japanese anthropology is also a sustained example both of an anthropology of modernity and of an anthropological discourse that became enmeshed within a form of Orientalism from which it is, apparently, only now emerging. While this essay will focus on the developments in the anthropological study of Japan since 1985, some attention must be given to its roots; for, without an understanding of its

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early origins, the changes that occurred in the discipline from the 1980s onwards make little sense.

THE EARLY YEARS: FROM MINORITIES TO NATIONAL IDENTITY Japanese anthropology was founded in 1884 (Laurent, 2008; Yamashita, 2006; Kelly, 1991; Ishikawa, 1994) at Tokyo University by Tsuboi Shôgorô, who had studied in the United Kingdom and was inspired by E. B. Tylor’s work. The influence of both French and German sociological ideas was also important (Laurent, 2008). Initially, the early native anthropologists worked on ethnic and minority groups, such as the Ainu in Hokkaido, but soon branched out, with the growth of Japan’s colonial empire, to encompass much of the Pacific Rim (Atkins, 2010; Yamashita et al., 2004; van Bremen and Shimizu, 1999; Shimizu and van Bremen, 2003).2 Influenced as well by Yanagita’s (1949) early twentieth-century research in Japanese folklore, the anthropology of Japan came to be largely concerned with documenting Japanese customs in a young nation-state that had not previously

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promulgated a sense of unitary identity. As I have noted elsewhere: for much of the Meiji, Taisho¯ and early Sho¯ wa eras, the core of the problem for unifying Japan remained that of culture. Not only did a Tokyo dweller have a different cultural life from that of someone from Osaka, Kyoto, or Kobe; but farmers’ lives were very different than those of fishermen, or mountain villagers. And even within the cities, the cultural life of the ordinary city dweller was different from that of the elites ... (Martinez, 2007: 4).

This concern with finding and collecting Japanese traditions and customs that the nation could share, much stimulated by the work of James Frazer and Bronislaw Malinowski (Kawada, 1993), meant that Yanagita’s teams of researchers were also involved in a salvage ethnology that was to continue into the 1980s. This must be seen as a distinctive feature of the discipline. Japanese anthropologists of Japan are frequently, as Yamashita has noted (2006: 30), also transnational in their research interests. That is, most are in the main regional experts on Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia and other parts of East Asia,3 as well as frequently continuing to take part in team research at home. Some of this reflects the fact that fieldwork is often a basis for fourthyear research among undergraduate anthropology students in Japan; and trips to the Japanese countryside, Hokkaido and Okinawa are commonly an element in teaching fieldwork techniques. The fact that a large portion of Japanese anthropologists are involved with anthropology at home has also facilitated and directed the work done by foreign researchers, who typically work in collaboration with, or are hosted by, Departments of Anthropology in Japanese universities as well as research institutes such as the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (Minpaku), and frequently enjoy support from the Japan Foundation, or from Japanese Government educational grants (Nakamaki, 2006).

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The study of disappearing Japan, which occupied much of the research done between the 1940s and1980s, was greatly influenced as well by early post-war work done with North American anthropologists (Beardsley et al., 1959), and by Benedict’s wartime ethnography The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946),4 which added concepts from the culture and personality school to the core theoretical tools of Japanese anthropologists. Whereas, the predominant focus before Benedict could be said to have been on collecting and documenting data that helped to create a sense of Japanese identity, afterwards, questions of how this Japanese identity was constituted and how it differed from Western concepts of the person began to surface in the discipline. This engagement with North American models of Japan continues to this day (Revell, 1997; Mathews, 2004a). Nobuhiro Nagashima and Masao Yamaguchi,5 both Africanists, forged links with British social anthropology in the 1970s in an attempt to counter this approach (James, 2007) with semiotic and structuralist (à la Lévi-Strauss) inspired work on Japan. This was not the dominant discourse within the discipline; however, Nakane’s (1973) seminal work on Japanese society, in some ways a very functionalist model of family and work structures (she was at the LSE, consolidating her research on northern India when she wrote Japanese Society) inspired debate and research that, combined with Benedict’s earlier work and the tendency towards identifying Japanese customs, continues into the twenty-first century. Laurent sums up the position before the 1980s succinctly:

From its very beginning, Japanese (cultural) anthropology has been undeniably influenced by western schools of thought, from French sociology à la Durkheim, to the symbolic anthropology of Geertz, it has passed through the historicism of the prewar Vienna School, to British functionalism à la Malinowski, or even the culture and personality school. Nonetheless it maintains its own characteristics. (2008: 244, my translation)

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The distinguishing features of a Japanese anthropology as practised by native anthropologists are to be found, as already noted, in its • transnationalism • concern with a native identity • intensive interest in religious practices (Laurent, 2008) • maintenance of a strong engagement with Japanese sociology and ethnology, while remaining au courant with Western theory (see also Goodman, 2006).

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MODERNITY – BEYOND THE STEREOTYPES By the mid-1980s various long-term processes led to important changes within the study of Japan. Most importantly, the process of urbanization was almost complete (see Umesao, 1986; Berque, 1997a). From a rural population that constituted approximately 80% of the total population in the 1950s, by 1985 less than 10% of Japanese lived and worked in the countryside; in the twenty-first century this has fallen to 7% of the population. As Ivy (1995) aptly argued, research in the countryside was increasingly a study of a discourse of the vanishing, focusing on a Japan that was seen to be disappearing, but which, for non-anthropologists, represented an idealized Japan: a national construction of a unitary culture that, as Yanagita (1949) himself had noted, had never been uniform (see also Nakane, 1967). Now highly urbanized, Japan found itself in a period of economic expansion, becoming the second greatest power in the world with global businesses, a large self-defence force (and associated technology) and a growing presence in various global organizations such as the United Nations. Traditional values, many of which had been invented during the rise of the modern nation-state (Smith, 1995), were being questioned: women began to marry later; some refused to have children and their demands for equality led to changes in the law, creating equal employment

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opportunities (see Fujimura-Fanselow, 2011). Finally, the increasing secularization of society meant that, while new religions remained important, older religious practices were becoming increasingly personal rather than community based, and older religious institutions were struggling to survive (Baffelli et al., 2011). The phrases ‘changing Japan’, and ‘tradition and change’, became ubiquitous in the 1980s and still feature in the titles of anthropological and sociological works. This focus on social change apparently reflected a growing concern amongst Japanese that something essentially indigenous was being lost in modernity; that the process of modernization had led to Westernization and concomitant changes in traditional Japanese models of kinship (Ueno, 2009), work values and ideas about the role of the individual in society (Vij, 2007). In short, just when anthropologists of Japan had thoroughly documented many of the lifestyles of the rural Japanese, cementing perhaps an image of what it meant to be Japanese, it became pertinent to ask how representative these ethnographies of rural Japan were of a modern urban society? A shift in the type of fieldwork conducted by anthropologists occurred in the 1980s. This had its roots in the early post-war period and drew on the work of Vogel (1971), Dore (1963) and Plath (1964) on the new middle classes in urban Japan; De Vos and Wagatsuma (1966) as well as De Vos and Wetherall (1974) on minorities; and Abegglen (1958), Cole (1979), Nakane (1973) and Clark (1979) on the Japanese work place. More research began to be focused on Japanese cities and suburbs, centring on a variety of topics that could be said still to dominate the anthropology of Japan today. It could be argued that this has led to a post-modernist turn within the discipline. In a masterful overview of the anthropology of Japan, William Kelly mapped out the new domains of research being done by a new and expanding generation6 of anthropologists in the late 1980s: (1) sociocentrism and the relational self, building on the previous

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culture and personality school; (2) family form and formation, with an emphasis on generational change and the construction of gender; (3) work and workplaces; (4) education and the school credential society; growing out of these three topics, is an obvious concern with (5) gender and patriarchy; (6) metropolitan Tokyo and the transformation of the urban neighbourhood; (7) regional Japan with a continuing focus on farming, fishing as well as factories; (8) festivals, heritage and cultural tourism; (9) law and crime, politics and protests; (10) minorities and other marginals; (11) religion and the re-enchantment of a secular world and (12) curing and coping, medical therapies and psychotherapies (Kelly, 1991: 401−420). Paradoxically, these categories both evoke older themes of research and expand into the new arenas being explored in the twenty-first century. Goodman has summed up the pre-2000 body of work as one in which the [t]hemes that dominated were ideas of harmony, consensus, the group, loyalty, duty, the kin-tract, dependency, homogeneity and contextual ethical systems. The assumption was generally that these ideas had existed in Japan since time immemorial and that they were particularly suited to the development of a Japanese form of economic capitalism. (Goodman, 2006: 69)

The genealogy of a rising concern with the Japanese self in the anthropology of the 1990s can be traced, by considering the themes of group, loyalty, duty, the kin-tract and dependency that grew out of an acceptance that it was necessary for Japanese to preserve harmony and social consensus in their small rural communities (Moeran, 1984, 1985). Underpinning this research was not only a continuing attempt, 50 years on, to grapple with Benedict’s idea of Japan as a shame rather than a guilt society, in which people acted according to others’ expectations and would fight to the death because it was considered their duty, but also an effort to work with Nakane’s proposal that Japan was not a caste- or class-based society in which individuals had fixed self-identities,

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but one in which frame or context shaped a person’s behaviour.

PERSON AND SELF Hence, much work was done on the Japanese sense of self, beginning with Hendry’s Becoming Japanese: the World of the PreSchool Child (1986), which looked at middle-class childcare practices, through to Lebra’s comprehensive The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic (2004). At the core of this work was its assumption that Japanese selves were somehow more influenced by their relationships with others than Western selves (Kondo, 1990; Rosenberger, 1992) and more prone to changing their behaviour depending on social situations; and, as Benedict had argued, that these concepts were inculcated from babyhood by ever-, and over-attentive mothers (Iwao, 1993; White, 1987). As various social scientists noted (Aoki, 1990; Befu, 2001; Mouer and Sugimoto, 1986; Sugimoto, 1997), such sweeping assertions did not specify which Japanese fit this model – workingclass mothers, for example, did not have the time for such intensive childcare (Roberts, 1994; see also Hunter, 1993) − nor did it distinguish amongst the complexities of Western constructions of the self. Such work tended to assume that American individualism was one concept that stood in for all Western societies and that it could be opposed to Japanese groupism. There were unfortunate readings of Mauss (1985) and Freud (1984) involved, as well as large generalizations that Lebra’s more nuanced work attempted to address. Moreover, much of the research on the Japanese self focused on middle-aged housewives (Lebra, 1984), leaving out large swathes of the Japanese population such as working women (GoldsteinGodini, 1996), young adults and, not the least, men. In response to these studies on the self, new research on masculinities (Allison, 1994; Ogasawara, 1998; Roberson and Suzuki, 2003; Louie and Low, 2003; Hidaka, 2010)

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has been done in which notions of duty and frame are replaced with analyses of subjective experience and the individual’s responding desire to find their reason for being¸ ikigai (Mathews, 1996), although the latter was a return to a concept (Miyagi, 1971; Plath 1980) that had remained largely unexplored by anthropologists. This led to new detailed work on education, to show how, while nurseries tried to substitute for the absence of working mothers (Ben-Ari, 1996), kindergarten and primary school education often focused on weaning children from dependency on their mother (Peak, 1989), thereby countering the self-centredness instilled by intensive child rearing, teaching children about the behaviour suited to different situations (Bachnik, 1992), and fostering a sense of independence and creativity in young students (Miyanaga, 1991; Tobin, 1992; Singleton, 1998; Cave, 2007). This is not to say that group values were ignored (Creighton, 1994; LeVine and White, 1986; McVeigh, 1996, 2000, 2002) in these explorations of Japan’s many and varied educational institutions, but research undertaken since the 1990s has been more aware of the modern class-based construction of such values. Yoder (2004), in particular, has built on Rohlen’s 1983 monograph to show how working-class and middle-class children are raised with entirely different attitudes towards schooling, work and family relationships (see also Kariya, 2009). The potential for conflict and how it is resolved also began to be considered in this era (Befu, 1989). From bullying at school and school refusal syndrome (McVeigh, 2006; Yoneyama, 1999), to workplace, gender (Lo, 1990; Kondo, 1990; Krauss et al., 1984; Pharr, 1990; Kinsella, 1995; Turner, 1995; Matsunaga, 2000) and larger social conflicts (Feldman, 2000; Eisenstadt et al., 1990), anthropologists were having to note that while harmony was an important value in Japan, this did not mean that the self in society found it easy to coexist with their families, colleagues and fellow Japanese (Goodman and Refsing, 1992). A new focus

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on generational conflicts over work and social values also appeared at the turn of the century (Mathews, 2004b; Mathews and White, 2004), while an interest reappeared in the conflict created by those, who, as marginals and minorities, do not fit in (Lunsing, 2001; Valentine, 1990). This research often echoed earlier work on Japanese notions of purity and pollution (Yamaguchi, 1977; Namihara, 1985), which considered the importance of Japanese blood, language and education as the prerequisites for belonging (Goodman, 1990); it expanded to become more concerned with the construction of the very concept of marginality (Yoshida, 1981; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1987) in which even illness might be included (Lock, 1980; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1984; Lock and Norbeck, 1987; Yamaguchi, 1987). The interests in medicine, the self and individual rights eventually combined in new research on technologies of the body (Norgren, 2001; Lock, 2002; Spielvogel, 2003; Miller, 2006). Meanwhile in the 1990s, the purity of the body politic was being challenged by the increasing influx of foreigners (Iranians, South Asians, Europeans, Filipinos and Latin American Japanese) into urban areas, leading to discussions about both new and old ethnic identities in Japan (Sjöberg, 1993; Oblas, 1995; Siddle, 1996; Ryang, 2000; Roth, 2002; Siddle and Hook, 2003; Tsuda, 2003; Weiner, 2004; Ryang and Lie, 2009), as well as to asking whether or not Japan was becoming a more heterogeneous society (Weiner, 1997; Lie, 2001; Lee et al., 2006).

THE MORE HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETY – FACING UP TO DIVERSITY The question of heterogeneity had to be considered in light of the Japanese ideal that it was virtually a classless, as well as an ethnically pure, society. Japanese sociologists (Ishida, 1993; Hashimoto, 2003; Ishida and Slater, 2010) and Marxist researchers (Steven, 1983) had no problem in discussing the predominantly three-tier class system of Japan (elites, the middle class and the working

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class), something which ordinary Japanese also are able to do.7 But if class, as Clammer (1995, 1997; Clammer and Ashkenazi, 2000) would have it, is about consumption and cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense, then most Japanese think they are of middle status since they are able to consume the same sort of socially approved products (Kelly, 1986, 1991, 1992, 2002) – even if every member of the family has to work as opposed to having a white-collar male head of household earning all the income. Conflict between class and status groups, however, has continued to be a theme from the 1980s onwards: from how urban neighbourhood identity is constructed (Bestor, 1989; Robertson, 1991; Ben-Ari, 1991), to how women dress, speak and behave in order to convey appropriate status positions (Allison, 1991; Skov and Moeran, 1995; Lebra, 2007). A few studies of Japanese elites (Hamabata, 1990; Lebra, 1993) also countered the idea that in Japan there was no class, while research done during the continuing Japanese recession had to address the very fact that middle-class ideals were becoming more and more difficult to obtain for everyone, resulting in new work patterns mostly for men (Gill, 2001; Matanle and Lunsing, 2006). Work on Japanese new religions, and the decline of an established community based around religious worship, also hinted at the class system in Japan (Reader, 1990; Reader and Tanabe, 1998). New religious adherents were overwhelmingly working class and female, often women whose life narratives revealed the difficulties inherent in being a dutiful daughter, wife and mother in Japan (Hardacre, 1984, 1986, Staemmler, 2009). New religions also fostered a growing sense of civil engagement in politics (Hardarcre, 2003, 2004; Fisker-Nielsen, 2012; Traphagen, 2004), contributing to debates on whether or not Japan had a public sphere and civil society (LeBlanc, 1999; Goodman, 2002; Schwartz and Pharr, 2003; Nakano, 2005). The role religion continues to play in an increasingly secular Japan has been a theme of several monographs as well: from the

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violence of the Aum sarin attacks (Reader, 1996, 2000; Kisella and Mullins, 2001) to the politics of government ministers visiting the Yasukuni Shrine for the war dead (Nelson, 2003; Namihara, 2004; Schattschneider, 2009), the ways in which religion in Japan has become both personal (LaFleur, 1992; Edwards, 1989; Hardacre, 1997) and contested has been explored. Still important in these discussions were the concepts of old systems of political patronage, the role of exchange (Rupp, 2003) and the relationship with the community (Long, 1999; Nelson, 2000; Covell, 2005). Although Japanese anthropologists, as Laurent argues, have produced more publications on religion than any other topic, foreign anthropologists have tended to focus on the various ways in which the process of secularization has changed religious practices: how pilgrimage merges into tourism (Kato, 1994; del Alisal et al., 2007); rural ceremonies have evolved (Ashkenzai, 1993; Martinez, 2004) and some have become fodder for modern tourism (Schnell, 1999); funeral practices have moved into the hands of businessmen (Suzuki, 2000), and ancestor worship is becoming increasingly individualized (Nelson, 2008).

JAPANESE ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WIDER WORLD The anthropology of Japan’s initial focus on rural Japan, as the locus of an authentic Japanese identity, has itself been re-examined in the light of domestic tourism (Graburn, 1983; Moon, 1989; Guichard-Anguis and Moon, 2009) and the rise of the concept of the furusato (hometown) (Knight, 1993; Robertson, 1988, 1995; Graburn, 1995; Kawamori,1996; Ishimori and Nishiyama, 2001; Brumann and Cox, 2009), which involved the continuing construction of a Japanese nationalidentity. The creation of a real, yet vanishing, Japan (Moeran, 1983; Martinez, 1990; Siegenthaler, 1999), with deep historical roots, was the product of

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advertising and government campaigns (Ivy, 1995) and has depended on the Japanese mass media, another area of growing research by anthropologists of Japan. Some of the first anthropological work on popular culture and mass media (Moeran, 1989; Powers and Kato, 1989; Linhart and Frühstück, 1998; Robertson, 1998; Martinez, 1998; Aoki, 1999; Raz, 1999; Kinsella, 1999; Atkins, 2001; Hendry and Raveri, 2002; Yano, 2002; Kelly, 2004; Frühstück, 2007; Stevens, 2007; Stickland, 2007; Bloustien et al., 2008; Sterling, 2010; Itô, 2011) has come out of this engagement with the question of what constitutes Japanese society and people’s identities. Work on changing attitudes to the environment (Kalland and Moeran, 1990, 1992; Berque, 1997b; Kalland and Asquith, 1997; Knight, 2003; Sumihara, 2003; Røkkum, 2006; Martinez, 2005; Kirby, 2011) and the consequences of rural depopulation for an ageing society (Kelly, 1993; Traphagan, 2000, 2004; Traphagan and Knight, 2003; Coulmas, 2007) has also grown out of this shift in the anthropology of rural Japan. Recently, responses to natural disaster have also drawn the attention of anthropologists. Also important was the debate around what constitutes authenticity which has fuelled much anthropological discussion encompassing both the traditional arts and the concept of aesthetics (Dalby, 1993; Thornbury, 1997; Cox, 2002, 2007; Iida, 2002; Ohnuki-Tierney, 2002; Kato, 2004; Foreman, 2008; Cross, 2009; Chiba, 2010). Sport as a locus for the making of belonging has also been an area of research (Kelly, 2000, 2004; Kelly and Sugimoto, 2007; Horne and Manzenreiter, 2002; Maguire and Nakayama, 2006; Frost, 2010). Such work often examines the elements that make up the discourse of Japaneseness (nihonjinron) and begs the question: Are they any different than the discursive formulations that make up other modern national identities (Aoki, 1990; Yoshino, 1992; Befu, 2001; Wilson, 2002; McVeigh, 2004; Hendry and Wong, 2006)? More interestingly, the suggestion that only Japanese could understand the

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Japanese was mooted in this discussion (see Dale, 1995) as a form of Occidentalism that countered foreign Orientalism. While this debate died down in the 1990s, it has resurfaced in another guise in the twenty-first century: namely, in the discussion of native anthropology (Kuwayama, 2004a). This debate could be said to have two strands: one asks if the only foreign anthropology of Japan that matters is the Anglo-American discipline, and goes on to question whether foreign anthropologists read Japanese (Kuwayama, 2004b). The other asks why, given the large body of anthropology produced by Japanese anthropologists working all over the world, does the general study of anthropology seem to ignore it (Yamashita et al., 2004)? The answers to these questions are intertwined. Most foreign anthropologists of Japan read in Japanese, but perhaps not enough as Robertson (2005) suggests, while most foreign anthropologists of anywhere else do not. Raising the first question, in the early 1980s, led quickly to the foundation in 1984 of the Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) in the UK involving the British anthropologists Joy Hendry and Brian Moeran, the Dutch anthropologist Jan Van Bremen and the Japanese anthropologists Teigo Yoshida, Masao Yamaguchi, Hirochika Nakamaki and Nobuhiro Nagashima. This global organization now includes anthropologists from virtually every part of the world (it might be missing African or South Asian members, but that’s another story) and meets, every 18 months, alternately in Europe, under the auspices of the European Association of Japanese Studies, and in other parts of the world. The numerous publications in the JAWS Routledge Series point both to a remarkable variety of work on Japan, and to the synergy between different anthropological traditions it draws upon. Many of the books I have mentioned in this essay are the outcome of these collaborations. Within Japan, the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) group brings together all foreign scholars working or studying in Japan twice

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a year with their Japanese counterparts for workshops on their research. The answer to the second question − Why the world is not more aware of Japanese anthropology − has led to the publication of the Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology in English (Yamashita, 2006). The strong Anglo-American involvement in the anthropology of Japan remains a point of contention (see Befu and Kreiner, 1992; Mathews, 2004a): perhaps many of the European approaches mentioned above are undervalued in the teaching of the anthropology of Japan to non-Japanese students, but the edited JAWS collections and, increasingly, international conferences are making a difference. However, the question of what has the anthropology of Japan and its corollary, anthropological research done by Japanese, contributed to larger anthropological paradigms remains. Kuwayama (2004a) argues, as did some scholars earlier in relation to the Middle East, that it is Western Orientalism that acts as a barrier to the wider anthropological community’s engagement with the anthropology of Japan. Yamashita’s (and others’) concern is that it is lack of access to a huge body of literature in Japanese that hinders the sharing of Japanese ideas about anthropology. Although not denying that these factors do play a part, I would argue, in addition, that the contribution of the anthropology on Japan to global anthropology is unclear for two reasons. The first is that it hit its stride just as anthropology began to question the idea of models and paradigms. Whereas the anthropologists of Japan laboured to unpack older dominant models (the household, the importance of hierarchy, the necessity of learning how to present oneself appropriately in everyday life, the idea of a singular Japanese identity), they were, and continue to be, leading the way in how to do ethnographic research in a modern society. In their concern with urban communities, the environment, changing patterns of marriage and childrearing, the workplace, economic recession, gender, education, mass media, migration

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and immigration, identity and minority culture within a discourse of national homogeneity, as well as with examinations of Japan’s involvement in global economic and cultural systems, the anthropologists of Japan have long been practising and writing what would be called an anthropology of the modern if not post-modern (White, 1992; Douglass and Roberts, 2000; Hendry, 2000; Eades et al., 2000, Mitsui and Hosokawa, 2001; Befu and Guichard-Anguis, 2003; Goodman, 2003; Bestor, 2004; Allison, 2006; Martin, 2007; Sedgwich, 2007; Martinez, 2009; Adachi, 2010). The latter, however, is not without its problems, for while native anthropologists are and have been comfortable with the use of a broad set of conceptual tools, citing Western social theorists with ease, many foreign anthropologists have, paradoxically, relied on native concepts such as uchi/soto (inside/outside), on/giri (duty/ responsibility), amae (dependency) and ba (frame) in their theorizing. As Robertson diplomatically suggests, Japanese anthropology in Japanese is sophisticated and nuanced, but the foreign anthropology of Japan seems parochial to others in its engagement with this small set of concepts. This would be the second reason for its marginality. That said, in many ways Japanese anthropology provides a model of how to do anthropology in a thoroughly modern society. Numerous research strands support this view. To itemize a few of them: the turn to considering its own transnational and colonial roots; the focus on the heterogeneity of identity, including the complexity of constructing a single Japanese identity (OhnukiTierney, 1993); analyses of the discourses of belonging; the documentation of processes of social change; the consideration of the technologies of the present and future (Brown, 2010); and a focus on subjectivity that has lasted several decades. The anthropology of Japan has long been collaborative with, and has benefited from the work of, native anthropologists, who often have innovated and set the standard in multi-sited, long-term, carefully detailed and nuanced fieldwork. While

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not without its heated debates and issues of contestation, the anthropology of Japan should not be described as an anthropology of fragmentation or glocalization, of conjunctures and disjunctures. It is above all the anthropology of the development of a nationstate, of the long durée; while also possessing the potential to become an anthropology of the material (Daniels, 2010), the visual, foodways, as well as risk, (in)security, the post-human and the future. It is the most complete example of such within the disciple. World anthropology, as Yamashita has it, could learn much from paying more attention to the achievements and arguments of Japanese anthropology.

1988). See also Shannon’s (1995) and Ryang’s (2002) articles on the subject. 5 Professor Nagashima went on to establish the anthropology department at Hitotsubashi University, whereas Professor Yamaguchi is best known for his work as a structural anthropologist. There is a list of his publications at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Masao_Yamaguchi, which gives a good idea of his interests. 6 The 1980s saw a growth in number of foreign students taking up the study of Japan. These numbers stabilized during the continuing recession that began in 1991, and finally peaked with the economic rise of China. The anthropology of China is now the expanding field of study in East Asia (see Eades in this volume). 7 Japanese Government statistics on household income are accessible online and in English at http:// www.stat.go.jp/english/data/index.htm.

NOTES

REFERENCES

1 My thanks go to Richard Fardon who gave me the opportunity − albeit not much time − to consolidate my thoughts on the anthropology of Japan. As always I must thank David Gellner. I am also grateful to the JAWS (Japan Anthropology Workshop) members who immediately responded to my query about what not to forget when writing such a piece, in particular: Nelson Graburn sent references for all the work on tourism by Japanese anthropologists, and Millie Creighton sent some very thoughtful suggestions on why 1985 was a good year to begin such a piece. I have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in a short article and I hope that anyone I have left out will be forgiving. In the main it was necessary to exclude the work I know is in train, but not yet published, especially by some of my own PhD students − next time! 2 Alongside cultural or social anthropology (bunkajinruigaku, shakaijinruigaku) and folklore studies (minzokukenkyû), biological anthropology also became established. 3 There has been less work done on Europe or North America by Japanese anthropologists. Some exceptions are Nagashima’s analysis of the rituals of All Souls College (University of Oxford) and Nakamaki’s (2004, 2010) research on British foundations, charitable concerns and small businesses as part of the work carried out by researchers from the National Museum of Ethnology. 4 There is no space here to outline how the fieldwork for Benedict’s book was conducted, although it is worth noting that it is one of the first examples in which novels, newsreels and films formed part of the empirical data collected (Geertz,

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of self, edited by Nancy Rosenberger. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 152−172. Baffelli, Erica Ian Reader and Birgit Staemmler (eds) 2011 Japanese Religions on the Internet: Innovation, representation, and authority. New York: Routledge. Beardsley, R.K., et al. 1959 Village Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Befu, Harumi 1989 ‘Four models of Japanese society and their relevance to conflict’ in Constructs for Understanding Japan, edited by Yoshio Sugimoto and R.E. Mouer. London: Kegan Paul International. Befu, Harumi 2001 Hegemony of Homogeneity: An anthropological analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Befu, Harumi and Sylvie Guichard-Anguis (eds) 2003 Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese presence in Asia, Europe, and America. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Befu, Harumi and Joseph Kreiner (eds) 1992 Othernesses of Japan: Historical and cultural influences on Japanese studies in ten countries. München: Iudicium. Ben-Ari, Eyal 1991 Changing Japanese Suburbia: A study of two present-day localities. London: Kegan Paul International. Ben-Ari, Eyal 1996 Body Projects in Japanese Childcare: Culture, organization and emotions in a preschool. Richmond: Curzon. Benedict, Ruth 1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese culture, with a foreword by Ezra F. Vogel. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Berque, Augustin 1997a Japan: Cities and social bonds, translated by Chris Turner. Yelvertoft Manor, Northants: Pilkington Press. Berque, Augustin 1997b Japan: Nature, artifice and Japanese culture, translated by Ros Schwartz. Yelvertoft Manor, Northants: Pilkington Press. Bestor, Theodore 1989 Neighborhood Tokyo. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bestor, Theodore 2004 Tsukiji: The fish market at the center of the world. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bloustien, Gerry, Margaret Peters and Susan Luckman (eds) 2008 Sonic Synergies: Music, technology, community, identity. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Brown, Steven 2010 Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese visual culture. New York: Palgrave. Brumman, Christoph and Rupert Cox (eds) 2009 Making Japanese Heritage. London: Routledge. Cave, Peter 2007 Primary School in Japan: Self, individuality and learning in elementary education. London: Routledge.

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Yamashita, Shinji 2006 ‘Reshaping anthropology: a view from Japan’, in World Anthropologies, Disciplinary Transformations Within Systems of Power, edited by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar. Oxford: Berg, pp. 29−48. Yamashita, Shinji, Joseph Bosco and J.S. Eades (eds) 2004 ‘Asian anthropologies, foreign, native and indigenous’ in The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1−34. Yanagita, Kunio 1949 Kaison seikatsu no kenkyu [Research on fishing villages’ lifestyles]. Tokyo: Nihon Minzoku Gakkai. Yano, Christine Reiko 2002 Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the nation in Japanese popular song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center (distributed by Harvard University Press). Yoder, Robert 2004 Youth Deviance in Japan: Class reproduction of non-conformity. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Yoneyama, Shoko 1999 The Japanese High School: Silence and resistance. London: Routledge. Yoshida, Teigo 1981 ‘The stranger as god: the place of the outsider in Japanese folk religion’ in Ethnology 20(2): 87−99. Yoshino, Kosaku 1992 Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A sociological enquiry. London: Routledge.

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2.8 The Emerging Socio-Cultural Anthropology of Emerging China J.S. Eades

A ROAD MAP The anthropology of China presents several problems for the would-be chronicler. First, the sheer size and age of the country: 1.3 billion people in an area the size of the United States, with 55 officially recognized ethnic groups or nationalities (minzu), including the Han Chinese who make up over 90% of the population (themselves a linguistically and culturally diverse group), and a history that is perhaps longer and more complex than that of any other state. Second, there is the problem of the definition of the subject: renleixue, the direct translation of ‘anthropology’ to the Chinese often means biomedical anthropology, while shehuixue (sociology) often means the study of the Han Chinese – even though the Han Chinese themselves are divided into a number of subgroups, with considerable cultural, social and linguistic variation. The study of the minorities is usually described as minzuxue (ethnology) (for a glossary, see Guldin, 1994: 274−277). In the rest of this chapter, I therefore use ‘anthropology’ generally, to include socio-cultural anthropology and sociology, while acknowledging that their boundaries with the other social sciences (social and

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economic history, geography, economics, political science) are highly porous. Some of the most distinguished work in China in recent years has taken place in these gray boundary zones. Third, until recently, Chinese academics themselves employed a distinctive set of officially sanctioned theoretical tools: social evolution derived from Morgan, Marx and Engels, and refracted through the official ideology of Marxist−Leninist−Mao Zedong thought. This underpinned the selection and description of the minorities on the periphery of the country (depending on which historical stage they had reached) (Wong, 1979: 78−92; Guldin, 1994: 105−108), and therefore defined the kinds of problems which these scholars investigated. To complicate matters further, anthropology and sociology were effectively closed down as disciplines in China, from 1957 (Wong, 1979: 57−59). They only restarted in the 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution came to an end, the leading Chinese scholars emerged from years of exile and obscurity, and the country began to open up to foreign scholars once more. Fourth, all societies change, but in the context of China, change takes on a very

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special meaning. In East Asia since the end of the Second World War, both the speed of change − a gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of around 10% per annum) − and the length of time for which it has continued (over 30 years in the case of China at present) may be unique in human history. In the last few years we have gone from books tentatively questioning whether China could possibly be the next superpower (Overholt, 1993, Shambaugh, 1995) to ones which loudly proclaim that not only will China rule the world (Jacques, 2009) but that the West will be forced to adapt its own institutions to accommodate the change (Hutton, 2007). The length of time it takes to complete a PhD (three or four years minimum) or even publish a scholarly article (18 months to two years) is a long time in the context of present-day China, so that many things one reads about the country in books or scholarly journals may already be history. Finally, and as a result of these changes, the literature on China has expanded exponentially, in line with China’s domestic affluence and international influence. Any summary account such as this one is bound to be only partial.1 However, it is possible to see parallels with the kinds of developments that have taken place in anthropological research in other parts of the world: a preoccupation with kinship, lineage, agricultural production in the 1930s and 1940s; a systematic mapping of ethnic groups in the 1950s; research on urbanization, migration and industrialization from the 1960s; a focus on gender and identity from the 1970s; and a preoccupation with modernity and globalization from the 1980s. From the 1990s, we now have the impact of the new information technology and social media, with people increasingly living transnational and virtual lives. All of these phases are visible in the anthropology of China, but with some shifts in timing, due to the revolutionary upheavals from 1949 to 1976. Up to the 1930s, both American and British anthropology exerted strong influence, in addition to Marxism and European anthropology (Guldin, 1994:

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23−24, 30−31). Fei Xiaotong, the leading Chinese anthropologist of the period, was a pupil of Malinowski (Liu, 2004) and published in English (as Hsiao-Tung Fei, 1939), while Radcliffe-Brown also visited China (Guldin, 1994: 42). Some promising work began, but was cut short by invasion, wars, and the Communist takeover. Fei fell from grace, along with many other intellectuals, after the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957, and did not reappear until the 1970s. From the late 1940s to the early 1980s, most anthropologists wanting to study China did so either in library collections outside China, or in the relative safety of Hong Kong and Taiwan. After 1978, with Deng Xiaoping’s authority over the party and the country finally established, the Open Door policies of the government made it possible for foreign scholars to visit the mainland once more. The first generation of studies were mainly of rural communities, carried out by scholars previously based in Taiwan and Hong Kong and their students, and younger scholars from mainland China enrolled in graduate schools in Japan and the West. By the 1990s, urban research was starting to accumulate, as were the studies of ethnic minorities on the Chinese periphery. Some scholars studied urbanization and migration, but others were beginning to look at popular culture and sport, the media, gender and sexuality, and the increasingly post-modern skylines of Beijing and Shanghai. Religion and ritual were also resurfacing, even though regarded with suspicion by the authorities, particularly at times of political tension. The events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 marked something of a watershed for researchers as well: some kinds of work became more difficult to negotiate as a result – though dealing with Chinese bureaucracy has always been something of an adventure (Cooper, 2000) – but new topics for research opened up, as the Chinese became increasingly affluent, and as the effects of the information technology revolution and mobile media became apparent. As a result, an increasing stream of studies has appeared on issues like

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identity, individualism, sexuality, sport and the body, along with the increasingly vibrant urban cultural scene of the major cities, and the artists, intellectuals and young professionals inhabiting it. Other issues included urban redevelopment and the struggles over land, the rights of migrants from the countryside in the city, and the rise and fall of the informal settlements which they have built. Finally, there is the question of the environment, radically transformed by agriculture over the centuries, but now bearing the brunt of much of the development since 1945 – with the result that some question the future of China’s continued development given the present parameters of growth and energy consumption. This inevitably leads to the clichéd questions raised at the end of the chapter: ‘Whither China?’ and ‘Whither the Chinese?’ Some of the answers may lie in the processes of globalization, the spread of Chinese capital overseas in search of resources and the international movement of Chinese migrants to make a living. But they are questions that increasingly affect us all, anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike.

EARLY ACHIEVEMENTS Despite the Japanese invasion of China, the Pacific War and the civil war between the Communists and Guomindang which followed, the foundations of a flourishing school of Chinese anthropology had been laid by 1949, on the eve of the Communist takeover. A number of pioneering monographs had been published, by Fei (1939), M.C. Yang (1945), Lin Yueh-hwa (1947) and Francis Hsu (1949). The studies of some scholars in the field were interrupted when the revolution took place (Yang 1959). As a result, many of the younger social scientists moved to Hong Kong, Taiwan, where the Academia Sinica was re-established, and to the West. Others stayed in mainland China, including Fei and Lin. Both of them later became involved in the survey of Chinese nationalities, carried out in the 1950s (Wong, 1979: 78−92;

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Guldin, 1994: 131−140). This was based on the now official Marxist evolutionary approach, with different minorities seen as exemplifying different historical stages of the scheme. The result was a definitive list of 55 officially recognized nationalities, with minorities that had failed to make the cut classified as belonging to those that had. As for first-hand accounts of the revolution from within, the best were those of William Hinton and David and Isabel Crook. Hinton had worked for the United Nations in China after the war, and stayed on as a tractor technician to help the Communist regime. The Crooks were translators and teachers also sympathetic to the regime (David Crook worked for the Soviets in Spain during the Spanish Civil War). Both Hinton and the Crooks published initial accounts (Crook and Crook, 1959; Hinton, 1966), with followup volumes later on the progress of their respective communes (Crook and Crook, 1966; Hinton, 1983). They later ran into trouble with officialdom for their efforts: Hinton had his passport and papers impounded by the Americans on his return to the United States, and was unable to travel for some years, while David Crook was imprisoned for five years by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Despite this, the Crooks remained in China (David Crook died in 2000).2 Hinton remained loyal to the revolution, and became an outspoken critic of the economic reforms under Deng (Hinton, 1989). But it was due to these reforms that China was once more open for research during the 1980s, when a new generation of researchers began their work.

OUTSIDE THE MAINLAND While the mainland had been closed to mainstream scholars from the West, those wishing to study China did so in Hong Kong and Taiwan, or using historical records. On the plus side, the closure of the mainland led to an extraordinary concentration of research in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Hong

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Kong work took place mainly in the New Territories near the Chinese border, and showed how different the processes of change and development could be in villages close to each other, with shared social networks. A key figure was Maurice Freedman, whose best known work, on Chinese lineages, was based mainly on library sources (Freedman, 1958, 1966; Skinner, 1979). Due to illness, Freedman left field research to his student Hugh Baker, joined subsequently by the American scholars Jack Potter and James and Rubie Watson. Baker worked with Freedman, and James Watson worked with Potter. James Watson later taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, together with Baker, before moving to Harvard. Their major studies were also complementary, looking at the declining importance of the lineage (Baker, 1968), the economic revolution in the Northern Territories and the replacement of rice agriculture by market gardening of vegetables (Potter, 1968), and the outmigration of members of lineages and villages unable to cash in on this transition (J. Watson, 1975) – many of whom ended up as entrepreneurs, running Chinese restaurants in the United Kingdom (J. Watson, 1977). The decline of the lineage, entrepreneurship and outmigration were also major themes in Rubie Watson’s work on the increasing economic inequality in these villages (R. Watson, 1985). Other scholars worked on urban Hong Kong, including Salaff’s study of women working in small businesses (Salaff, 1981). A similar range of studies resulted from the research in Taiwan, including studies of villages (Gallin, 1966; Pasternak, 1972), lineages (Cohen, 1976), women and the family (M. Wolf, 1972), and ritual (Jordan, 1972; Ahern, 1973, 1981). In some cases, the Taiwanese work was able to draw on Japanese archival demographic sources, giving a more detailed picture of the development of the family over time than anything available on the mainland (A. Wolf and Huang, 1980). Other more general works started to appear, synthesizing the results of the work so far (A. Wolf, 1978; Baker, 1979).

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The outlet for scholars unable to work on the mainland was history: after their return to the United States, the Watsons collaborated with the social historians Patricia Ebrey and Evelyn Rawski and others on a series of studies, including kinship organization (Ebrey and Watson, 1986), death ritual (J. Watson and Rawski, 1988), marriage and inequality (R. Watson and Ebrey, 1991), oppression under state socialism (R. Watson, 1994) and gender (Entwisle and Henderson, 2000). Other collaborators in these volumes included Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig, who went on to contribute notable volumes of their own on the history of women and labour, based both on historical records and the oral accounts they gathered as the mainland opened up (Hershatter, 1986, 1997; Honig, 1986; Honig and Hershatter, 1988). Carrying on in the background, of course, was the largest historical project of them all: Joseph Needham’s monumental series, Science and Civilization in China (from 1954), carried on after his death by other authors, including Francesca Bray, who contributed the volume on agriculture, together with a shorter general volume on rice (1984, 1986). Other studies of the Chinese environment and its history included those by Elvin (1973, 2004). Elvin also collaborated in a project on Chinese urban history, which also resulted in a series of large-scale volumes published by Stanford University Press (Lewis, 1971; Elvin and Skinner, 1974; Skinner, 1977).

PEASANTS AND VILLAGES The Stanford urban volumes raised the issue of what was happening on the mainland, and how to research it without actually being able to go there while the country was still mainly closed. In addition to the later volumes by Hinton and the Crooks mentioned above, the best material came from refugees who had made their way to Hong Kong, mainly from the neighbouring province of Guangdong. The accounts which resulted from these interviews were those by Parish and Whyte

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(1978) and Chan et al. (1984) on the rural areas and by Whyte and Parish (1984) on the cities. Jean Oi (1991) based her book on village government on similar sources. Philip Huang based his historical study of peasants in northern China on the data collected by the South Manchurian Railway Company, acting as a surrogate Japanese colonial administration (Huang, 1985). As China opened up, access to data improved, resulting in an updated version of Chen Village (Chan et al., 1992), a second book co-authored by Parish on cities (Tang and Parish, 2000), and a further historical study by Huang of agriculture in the Yangzi basin (Huang, 1990). By this time, the contacts between Chinese and outside scholars were escalating, and the number of publications rose rapidly, with the first generation of studies concentrating mainly on the rural areas. This was a result of the improved climate for research in the 1980s. Soon after Deng became established as the de facto paramount leader in China, the doors began to open, oiled by the diplomatic recognition of the Communist government by the United States, and the removal of recognition from the regime in Taipei. Innovative work in Taiwan continued (e.g. Sangren, 1987; Stafford, 1995), but the main focus of research on China now shifted decisively in the direction of the mainland. For a while, as Croll (2004: 89−93) describes, research opportunities were generally short term, but this enabled her and others to complete a number of studies of women and the rural economy (Croll, 1983, 1994, 1995; M. Wolf, 1985; Judd, 1994). The first scholars able to carry out more sustained field research were those who had previously worked in Hong Kong or Taiwan, such as the Potters (1990), Helen Siu (1989) and Huang Shu-Min (1989). Endicott’s study (1988) came about because he had learned to speak the Sichuan dialect when young. But perhaps the most exciting development in this period was the research by younger Chinese scholars from the mainland, sent to the major departments in the West and Japan for graduate studies in the early years of the Chinese Open Door policy, and who

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generally stayed to work outside China. Those who went to America included Yan Yunxiang, who studied a village in the extreme north of China where he had worked as a peasant during the Cultural Revolution (1996), and Jing Jun, who worked in Shandong (1996). Liu Xin studied at SOAS, before moving to the United States (Liu, 2000). Another group of students studied in Tokyo and wrote in both Japanese and English, including Nie Lili, who worked in Liaoning (Nie, 1992), Han Min who worked in Anhui (2001), and Qin Zhaoxiong, who worked in Hubei (Qin, 2002, 2005). Many of these monographs told a story already partly familiar from the work of Hinton and the Crooks. Their narratives focused largely on the ‘political campaigns’, the revolutionary upheavals that followed the Communist victory in 1949. These began with land reform, in which many of the landlords and rich peasants were humiliated, and in many cases killed, and their land confiscated. A brief period of rising prosperity and cooperation in the 1950s led in 1958 to the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in mass starvation. After another brief period of prosperity, the villages were engulfed by the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966. The Japanese monographs are impressive in their detail of the kinship and lineage systems – Han’s study (2001) provides a genealogy of the entire village, given that the genealogy had survived the Cultural Revolution intact. In the village described by Nie (1992) where the records were more fragmentary, the main political cleavage in the village in the late 1980s was still that between those who had suffered from the Cultural Revolution (in many cases the former landlords and rich peasants), and those that had made them suffer. The monographs written by the Chinese students who went to America and the United Kingdom are rather different, more focused and theoretical in their themes. Yan’s first book (1996) focuses on networks and affinal relationships, taking as its starting point the lists of gifts that people received at weddings and similar occasions, and suggesting that

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these exchange relationships and the networks they create were to some extent replacing the old lineage structures as the basis of social life. Forming and maintaining social relations (guanxi) is another recurring theme in Chinese anthropology (Yang, 1994). Yan updated and widened the picture in his second book (Yan, 2003). Jing’s book (1996) had a different theme − the fortunes of a village supposedly descended from Confucius − which made them prime targets during the Maoist period, resulting in their forced resettlement due to the construction of a dam. The theme of resettlement in the face of development has become a recurring theme during the process of China’s modernization, including some of the urban studies considered below. Indeed, in modern China, the division between ‘cities’ and the ‘rural areas’ with its population of ‘peasants’ is becoming less and less distinct. With economic reform, small businesses and industries soon proliferated in towns and villages outside the main cities (Vogel, 1989; Lin, 1997; Oi, 1999). As Guldin describes (2001), there is a process of ‘townization’ going on in many parts of the country, with the local people being rehoused in new towns on the sites of the old villages, to improve access to services like education, transport and trade. The result is increasing labour mobility and entrepreneurship – but there have also been problems: the privatization and dismantling of the welfare services offered by the old commune system have left many people without access to benefits, particularly the poor and the elderly.

GENDER AND POPULATION Another recurring theme in the rural monographs is that of gender, and the changes in power relations and population resulting from economic reforms. In relation to power, even though some women had important administrative roles in the villages that Judd studied (1994), she concluded that not much priority had been given to women’s equality,

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and therefore little had changed for many of them. In a later volume (Judd, 2002), she examined the role of the official Women’s Federation of China in advancing women’s education and economic status at the local level, despite a continuing shortage of resources. The Japan-based studies by Nie (1992) and Han Min (2001) also provided detailed local information. Han Min found that the take-up of cotton cultivation by the women in the village had increased their incomes. She also pointed to the importance of affinal links in gaining access to, for instance, loans and additional labour during the agricultural season. The added economic value of women had had a dramatic impact on the cost of marrying for the men, many of whom now found themselves with no wives (Han and Eades, 1995). One solution was to import them from the west of China – leading in turn to kidnapping and other dubious practices. In Nie’s village (Nie, 1992), the women had taken up the production of clothing, while many of the men had become seasonal construction workers in the nearby cities. The women’s income was in some cases equal to that of the men, and was more stable. The result was increasing conflict and discord within the village: a rising level of divorce, as the women asserted their independence from their husbands; increasing conflict between brothers as to who should inherit their father’s right to reside in the city; and increasing conflict between elderly parents, with their expectation of life greatly increased (a topic also discussed by Davis 1991), and their children increasingly refusing to look after them. There was also rising inequality, between the entrepreneurs controlling the construction gangs, and building mansions for themselves, and the other villagers working for them who remained comparatively poor. Gender is also related to the ‘one child family’ population policy introduced in 1979 (Greenhalgh, 2008, 2010). The rigour with which the policy was being applied was noted early on by Mosher (1983: 225−261), an account which led to difficulties with the

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Chinese government. As Croll has shown (1994: 198−202, 1995: 164−168, 2001), one effect of the policy has been to increase the sex ratio markedly in favour of males, either through infanticide or (more recently) through selective abortion. The figures cited by Li and Peng (2000) showed that the sex ratio began to increase rapidly around 1979, and by the 1990s the shortage of women had reached epidemic proportions, especially in the richer provinces in the east of the country. How this can be counteracted is an interesting question. Milwertz’s informants could see that having a daughter made it more likely that they would receive care later on, but they also thought that bringing up even one child was a lot of effort, and had little desire for more (Milwertz, 1997: 147).

MINORITY NATIONALITIES In parallel with the work on the Han Chinese from the early 1980s, outside scholars also began to research the various minorities in China once more, mainly in the peripheral areas of the country. Based on their research during the 1950s, the Chinese government determined that there were over 50 officially recognized shaoshu minzu or national minorities in the country: other minorities which had applied for recognition were refused, and were either grouped with one of the official groups, or regarded as Han Chinese. Chinese citizens have their nationality affiliation noted on their identity cards: so it is an important factor in their relations with the state (Harrell, 2001: 33). The official minority nationalities make up about 6% of the total population. They vary considerably in size, from the Zhuang of Guangxi Province with a population of around 16 million in 2000, to the Lhoba of southern Tibet who numbered around 3,000. Other large groups include the Miao of Guizhou and Yunnan (9 million), the Yi of Sichuan (8 million), the Uyghur of Xinjiang (8 million), the Mongols (6 million), the Tibetans (5 million) and the Koreans of Jilin

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(2 million). Two large groups scattered over a large part of China are the Manchu (11 million), originally from the northeast, and the Hui (10 million), classified mainly in terms of their religion, Islam, and concentrated in Ningxia. Five provinces which have large minority populations are classified as ‘Autonomous Regions’: Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Guangxi. Many of the major groups are now represented in substantial monographs, such as the Mongols (Sneath, 2000), the Uyghur (Rudelson, 1998; Beller-Hann, 2007, 2008), the Hui (Gladney, 1991, 1998; Dillon, 1999), the Miao (Schein, 2000), the Naxi and Tai (Hansen, 1999), the Zhuang (Kaup, 2000), the Naosu, officially classified as a subgroup of the Yi (Harrell, 2001) and the Tibetans (Goldstein and Kapstein, 1998). The official lists of minorities, together with the maps of their distribution and the population statistics on their numbers, make the situation look neater than it actually is. Many more minorities applied for official recognition than were actually recognized, leaving those not selected in administrative limbo. Some of the minorities suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution, particularly in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where religious buildings were destroyed and monks and local leaders killed (cf. Goldstein, 1999; Powers, 2004; Jankowiak, 1993: 19). Many non-Han areas have now also been colonized by Han Chinese (Hansen, 2005). By the 1980s, most of the inhabitants of the main city of Inner Mongolia, Huhhot, were Han (Jankowiak, 1993), a pattern repeated throughout the province (Pasternak and Salaff, 1993). Han colonization of the periphery of China has been going on for centuries, but it was never entirely unidirectional. For many centuries in the early Middle Ages, much of western China and central Asia was under the control of Tibet (Beckwith, 1987), and the Mongols and Manchus from the north swept in to establish the Yuan and Qing dynasties and rule the entire country. High rates of intermarriage have resulted in many individuals having choices in their ethnic

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affiliation, and for some there may be advantages of better access to education, jobs and the right to have more children than the Han Chinese as a member of a recognized minority nationality. Sometimes, there are dramatic changes in ethnic affiliation over time, as people opted for minority status. One of the best known cases is that of the Bai in Yunnan. Hsu had described this area as typically Han Chinese in the 1940s (Hsu, 1949), but a generation later, many people claimed to be Bai (Yokoyama, 1995; Liang, 2010). The complexity may be even greater, as Harrell’s account of the Naosu, classified by the government as ‘Yi’, makes clear. Ethnic identity is contextual and always shifting. His book opens with a series of descriptions of scenes in which a kaleidoscope of ethnic identities is on display (Harrell, 2001: 5−15). On occasions involving the government, ‘Yi’ identity, officially recognized by the government, is generally performed. At other times, other identities (of smaller local groups that see themselves as having little to do with the Yi) take over. Even what constitutes minority culture may be contested, as is shown clearly in David Wu’s discussion of ‘ethnic dance’ and who has the right to determine its content: the local people, the expert on ethnic dance, or the state (Wu, 2004). Regional dances are among the major attractions of the burgeoning Chinese tourist industry, both for foreign and domestic tourists (e.g. Oakes, 1997; Schein 2000; cf. Lew et al., 2003; Ryan and Gu, 2009).

RELIGION AND BELIEF SYSTEMS Religion is often a major part of a person’s ethnic identity – and in the case of the Hui, it is primarily religion that differentiates this group, which is found scattered throughout the country, way beyond the officially recognized Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Historically, China had layers of religion imposed one upon another, so that syncretism and multiple affiliations became common: a substratum of animism, divination and ancestor worship,

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with the addition of Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam and various versions of Christianity from the Byzantine Nestorians onwards. However, with the modernization of the state during the Republican period, the Nationalist government saw religion as potentially dangerous superstition, and attempted to counter its influence (Nedostup, 2010). After the 1949 revolution, and the establishment of Marxism−Leninism−Mao Zedong thought as the official ideology, the state was generally hostile to the established religions (Luo, 1991), particularly during the Cultural Revolution when many of the temples, mosques, churches, cultural monuments, genealogies and books were systematically destroyed. Since the economic reforms and Open Door policies began in the late 1970s, religion has made something of a comeback, as has been shown in a number of recent studies (Yang, 2008; Ashiwa and Wank, 2009; Goossaert and Palmer, 2011). Of the traditional belief systems, traditional Chinese medicine has been integrated with modern clinical practice (Farquhar, 1994), while fengshui geomancy has regained popularity in the mainland(Feuchtwang, 1979; Bruun, 2003). Ancestor worship (Han, 2001) and Confucianism have also seen local revivals – and China has now named its international network of language and cultural centres ‘Confucius Institutes’ – a far cry from the anti-Confucian campaigns of the Mao period. Temple festivals are also back in vogue, as in Chau’s study of northern Shaanxi province (Chau, 2005). Christianity has been resurrected (Lambert, 1994), and Protestant Christianity is flourishing, as described in Cao’s study of Wenzhou, known nationally as ‘China’s Jerusalem’, both for its religiosity and its economic development (Cao, 2010). There are also studies of Islam, both in relation to the Hui and Uyghur communities as mentioned above, and more generally (Gillette, 2000). Not surprisingly, the state is worried about the possible links between religion and separatism, both in relation to

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Islam in Xinjiang in the northwest, and Tibetan Buddhism in the southwest. But a major object of state suspicion in the last few years has been a much less likely candidate: Falun Gong, which developed around the practice of qigong exercise, to improve the flow of energy in the body (Schechter, 2000). Falun Gong’s visibility stemmed from successfully staging a large demonstration in central Beijing on 25 April 25 1999, outside the Central Party headquarters. The result has been a crackdown on the group’s members and activities on the mainland ever since. Much more popular officially is the return of the Mao cult, after a period in the 1980s when Mao statues were being removed. Han Min (1997) documented the growth of tourism to Mao’s home town, which had become both a site of revolutionary memory and a capitalist tourist operation. It boasted a new statue of Mao, to which people regularly prayed, and local entrepreneurs from Mao’s lineage, selling Mao plaster casts and photographs, and the Chairman’s favourite foods. This resurgence came after 1989, when the upheavals resulted in work teams being dispatched throughout the country to strengthen party discipline, and the reinforcement of patriotic education in schools.

URBANIZATION AND URBAN LIFE By the 1990s, the anthropologists had started to move from the villages into the cities, along with the migrants that were beginning to create the Chinese industrial miracle. Pioneering general studies of particular cities, based on research in the 1980s, were provided by Jankowiak (1993) and Bruun (1994). Jankowiak described the capital of Inner Mongolia, Huhhot, in the early 1980s, and begins with discussions of ethnicity, social control and dispute settlement (including the aftermath of cycle collisions), followed by chapters on sex, romance and socialist death rituals. Bruun, in contrast, described the rise and difficulties of small businesses in Chengdu, in Sichuan, and the kinds of relations with

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the authorities which the aspiring entrepreneurs had to maintain to stay in business. The problems for the would-be urban migrants in China during this period came from the houkou system, the registration system which officially determined who had permission to live in the metropolitan regions (Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and, later, Chongqing) and other cities, and who did not. The problem for migrants who ignored the rules – as many increasingly did – was that they lacked rights to housing, welfare benefits, education for their children and health services in the cities to which they moved (Solinger, 1999). They also lacked housing – and the result was similar to that in many other developing countries: the growth of informal housing settlements in various parts of the city. The best documented of these was Zhejiang Village in Beijing, which flourished in the early 1990s (Dutton, 1998; Xiang, 2005); but it was not allowed to last − the authorities bulldozed it in 1995. The events in Tiananmen Square generated a large eye-witness literature (e.g. Salisbury, 1989; Pieke, 1996; Chinoy, 1999), given that the city was full of journalists covering the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the preparations for the fortieth anniversary of Liberation later in the year. But while the demonstrations themselves were spectacular and tragic, the roots of disaffection lay in the rapid transformation of the previous decade (Davis and Vogel, 1990). It was clear from the Tiananmen demonstrations, and the support that they received, that urban issues such as wages, prices, housing and urban rights were at the top of the political agenda and were increasingly leading to local mobilization, small-scale demonstrations and resistance to the authorities. This was particularly keenly felt in the older industrial cities in the north of the country, as documented in a monograph by Lee (2007). By this time, the industrial sector of Chinese cities consisted not only of the increasingly obsolete and declining state factories (Steinfeld, 1998) but also the new factories set up by the multinational consumer goods

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producers, and sweatshops set up by the clothing trade. The result, not surprisingly, is a low-level but constant series of disputes over workers’ rights, working conditions, pay, housing and the rights of migrants, amplified by petty corruption and relations with officials (Perry and Selden, 2000). Meanwhile, a professional capitalist business class is also emerging (Pearson, 1997; Guthrie, 1999) to reinforce the growing inequality.

CONSUMPTION AND POPULAR CULTURE In contrast to these gritty stories of urban industrialism, there is also the lighter and more creative side of the city. The 1990s saw the height of the cultural turn in anthropology, and the researchers on China soon followed suit, resulting in a number of studies of sexuality, leisure, popular culture and consumption. There is a link: one of the most obvious features of Beijing, Shanghai and the other major cities in China in the last few decades has been the rapidly changing skyline as the economic reforms have kicked in (e.g. Sit, 1985; Vogel, 1989; Ikels, 1996; Lin, 1997; Broudehoux, 2004; Li et al., 2007). In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, Beijing became a major building site (Broudehoux, 2007), partly to house the events themselves as a grand ‘coming-out party’ for the city (Close et al,. 2007: 121−144) and the ‘new China’ (Price and Dayan, 2008), and partly to house the rest of the infrastructure such as Foster’s enormous Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport. This is only one of a large number of prestige buildings by ‘starchitects’ in the city (Ren, 2010: 341). But building projects of this size require clearing the land – and it is the land and planning processes and their discontents that are a feature of the contemporary Chinese scene (Visser, 2010: 27−84). Signs of the increasing affluence of much of the Chinese population are clear from the growing literature on consumption (e.g. Davis, 2000). One of the most obvious symptoms is a change in diet, symbolized by the arrival in Beijing of McDonald’s (Watson,

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1997; Yan, 1997) and Kentucky Fried Chicken (Lozada, 2000). As Jing notes (2000), changes in diet are linked both to the emergence of a generation of single children, and increasing concern about the medical fallout on the part of the state. Fortunately, some of the children have been taking regular exercise, as shown in the overwhelming success of Chinese athletes at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. There is now a substantial literature on Chinese sport, from the point of view of history (Morris, 2004), education (Riordan and Jones, 2008) and the anthropology of the body (Brownell, 1995). Brownell’s book includes a series of studies, ranging from the organization of socialist public displays to the complex history of Chinese body-building and the contested use of the bikini. Brownell has also contributed to the burgeoning literature on the Beijing Olympics, exploring relations between sports, nationalism and discourses of human rights (Brownell, 2008; cf. Close et al., 2007; Jarvie et al., 2008; Price and Dayan, 2008; Worden, 2008; Askew, 2009). Brownell has also co-edited a volume on femininities and masculinities (Brownell and Sasserstrom, 2002), which ranges from the control of the body by the state to sexuality, another increasingly popular topic in the literature on contemporary China. The Chinese cities have always had a lively sex scene and sex industry, and a number of recent studies have explored these. Dikötter’s study (1995) of changing sexual habits among the emerging urban middle-class population during the republican period is largely based on the popular magazines of the time, and the emergence of new discourses and advice on topics ranging from conception and eugenics to the ‘problems’ of homosexuality and masturbation, while Evans’ study (1997) concentrates on discourses after 1949. They are complemented by Hershatter’s monumental study of the sex industry in Shanghai (1997). This covers not only the republican period but also the efforts of the incoming Communist government to close down the industry and re-educate the workers. Not surprisingly,

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given the inequalities in the sex ratio in the more affluent cities of China and the flourishing of all forms of capitalism, the industry has survived and modernized, as shown by Zheng’s more recent study of sex workers in Dalian, in northern China (2009), focusing particularly on the hostesses in karaoke bars, many of them migrants from the rural areas. The impact of modernization on sexuality is also the subject of Farrer’s study of middle-class singles in Shanghai (2002). Farrer cites Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that, when you open up, ‘a few flies are bound to enter’ and Western ideas of sex, love and freedom have certainly taken off in the clubs and dance halls he describes. Even more varied cultural experiments and encounters are explored in the papers in Lisa Rofel’s Desiring China (2007), based on research in Hanzhou and Beijing. Like Zheng, she is not only interested in the emerging urban cultures but also the integration into it of the migrants from the countryside, and the wider significance of the rapid changes which are taking place for values, identity and individualism. Similar themes are explored in a number of other recent volumes, including Stafford’s Separation and Reunion in Modern China (2000), Yan’s The Individualization of Chinese Society (2010), and Hansen and Svarverud’s iChina (2010).

CONCLUSION: WHITHER CHINA? WHITHER THE CHINESE? It will be clear from the above that research on China, once peripheral in anthropology because of the difficulties of the language, and the difficulties of getting into the mainland, is now clearly established as a major strand within anthropology. The current concerns of anthropologists in China have converged with those of the rest of the world: urbanization, migration, social movements, the growth of capitalism and globalization at the level of the political economy, and ageing, gender, identity, religion, the media and the

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impact of information technology at the level of culture and society. Where, then, are the growth areas in anthropological research on China likely to be in the next few years. Many of the topics already listed will continue to be important: the impact of population policy and the ageing society will be increasingly evident, particularly given the highly skewed sex ratios in some parts of the country. A possible trend could be the arrival of women from other parts of Asia to fill the gap, a trend already visible in the advanced countries of Asia such as Japan. The unparalleled size and growth of the Chinese megacities and the effects of migration from the countryside both on the cities and the children and elderly left behind will also continue to be major issues. Increasingly the migration will also be international, as it is already (Pieke and Mallee, 1999), with the migrants ranging from labourers moving with the help of a shady network of brokers and traffickers, to highly trained professionals, teachers and artists joining the overseas Chinese diaspora, long established in many parts of the world. There is already a substantial movement of Chinese students, living and working in Japan (LiuFarrer, 2011). Interchange between the countries of Northeast Asia, as well as China’s strong relations with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), will speed up, despite continuing historical differences, as the economies of China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea become increasingly integrated (Calder and Ye, 2010). There will also be a growing number of studies of the effects of Chinese capital and industry on other parts of the world, as foreign companies come increasingly under Chinese control, as Chinese goods continue to penetrate foreign markets, and as Chinese companies increasingly tap into natural resources globally, from Africa to Australia. This relates to a final theme, that of the environment. As mentioned above, the environment is an area where the history and anthropology of China have long met. The impact of the state on the environment has

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long been documented (Elvin, 1973, 2004; Edmonds, 1998; Shapiro, 2001; Richards, 2006) – and has long been a cause for concern (Smil, 1983, 1993, 2004). Many agree that the economic growth of China will in the medium term be environmentally unsustainable, so how and when China adapts, through scaling down growth and consumption, changes in lifestyle, the development of new technologies, or all of the above, should provide anthropologistswith rich research material for years to come.

NOTES 1 As will be apparent, in this chapter I am mainly concerned with the English-language literature, though as I mention, there are also a number of Chinese scholars based in Japan who also publish in Japanese. The importance of the Japanese material on China was shown by Skinner’s monumental bibliography (1973) divided into three volumes, covering the materials in Western languages, Chinese and Japanese, respectively. A sample of research by scholars based in Japan from the early 1990s is included in Suenari et al. (1995). 2 Information from http://www.davidcrook.net/ simple/main.html

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Whyte, Martin King and William Parish. 1984. Urban Life in Contemporary China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, Arthur, ed. 1978. Studies in Chinese Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolf, Arthur and C. Huang. 1980. Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845−1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolf, Margery. 1972. Woman and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolf, Margery. 1985. Revolution Postponed: Women in contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wong, Siu-lin. 1979. Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Worden, Minkyed. 2008. China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian human rights challenges. New York: Seven Stories Press. Wu, David. 2004. ‘Chinese national dance and the discourse of nativization in Chinese anthropology,’ in Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco and J.S. Eades, eds, The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 208−252. Xiang, Biao. 2005. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejiangcun: The story of a migrant village in Beijing. Leiden: Brill. Yan, Yunxiang. 1996. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and social networks in a Chinese village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Yan, Yunxiang. 1997. McDonald’s in Beijing: The localization of Americana,’ in J.L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 39−76. Yan, Yunxiang. 2003. Private Life Under Socialism: Love, intimacy, and family change in a Chinese village, 1949−1999. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yan, Yunxiang. 2010. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: Berg. Yang, C.K. 1959. A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yang, Martin C. 1945. A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province. New York: Columbia University. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 1994. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, ed. 2008. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of modernity and state formation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yokoyama, Hiroko. 1995. ‘Uxorilocal marriage among the Bai of the Dali Basin, Yunnan,’ in Michio Suenari, J.S. Eades and Christian Daniels, eds, Perspectives on Chinese Society: Anthropological views from Japan. Canterbury: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, pp. 182−190. Zheng, Tiantian. 2009. Red Lights: The lives of sex workers in postsocialist China. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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2.9 Archipelagic Southeast Asia Roy Ellen

This chapter reviews the work of anthropologists researching the social organization and cultural forms of archipelagic (or ‘island’) Southeast Asia between, approximately, 1980 and 2010. It is not a comprehensive overview, but it is more than an account of regional ethnography, which − as I understand it − would be a systematic description and comparison of empirical studies in particular places. Rather, I have attempted to provide a perspective on the ‘anthropology’ of the area, integrating themes in a more holistic way, while adopting a critical position as to what understanding might be achieved by treating the region as sufficiently coherent for specifically anthropological theorization and synthesis. I refer almost exclusively to monographic studies and collected works. Although journal publications account for an increasing fraction of scholarly output, a review of this length cannot realistically hope to integrate effectively, or even sample, the total output, while one might hope that prominent and enduring themes, at least, tend to be those that find a place in books. Inevitably, this decision discriminates against certain categories of work and groups of researchers, but the alternative would have involved impossible decisions about what to exclude. The review is also mostly devoted to work originally published in English, or which has been translated. Although significantwork continues to

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be published in French, and of course in the major national languages of the region, this decision reflects a continuing international trend. If we compare the periods 1950−1980 and 1980−2010 for Southeast Asia in the broader sense, we can immediately see that there has been a dramatic change in the pattern of anthropological work: considerable growth in its volume, ethnographic coverage, institutional and funding bases, international distribution, approaches to cross-disciplinarity, and in the range of research methods employed. To give some indication of the scale of this change, in the early part of the previous thirty years Dutch government anthropologists were still heavily involved in the administration of West Papua, while British research was still being funded by the Colonial Office. Successor ‘Cold War’ funding initiatives sponsored by the United States and SEATO (the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization) proved to be highly controversial, while in the United Kingdom successive governments (through schemes such as Hayter) encouraged the establishment of university centres of regional excellence for strategic reasons. During this period the legacy of colonialism and of the geopolitical aftermath of the Second World War were still very apparent. Indeed, it was in this context that the idea of ‘Southeast Asia’ was consolidated,

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if not originated. In terms of intellectual content, work described as ‘anthropology’ between 1950 and 1980 was highly diverse. It ranged from the Austrian culture-historical approach of Robert von Heine-Geldern, to the dominant Cornell and Yale-trained research teams in American cultural anthropology. British work was broadly derivative of an approach driven by influential figures working in other parts of the world (paradigmatically, sub-Saharan Africa), though the work of Raymond Firth and his students (including Edmund Leach) had established a strong national brand of recognizably ‘social’ anthropology in the ex-British territories of Burma and Malaysia. Dutch work was, by comparison, eclectic, partly as a result of the sudden loss of empire, but as in France, still managed to pursue recognizable national traditions. By the 1980s, the distinctive colonial and national traditions of ethnography were beginning to give way to more heterogeneous and ‘international’, less hidebound, styles; in the European context, they were certainly influenced by a broad acceptance of the British model of social anthropology, despite still being methodologically diverse and, in some cases, theoretically factionalized. The Dutch school, once strongly associated with Leiden structuralism and the idea of the wider ‘Malay world’ as a ‘field of ethnological study’ (Josselin de Jong, 1984), and with customary law approaches, had largely withered, though the Netherlands remained an important centre and facilitator for the study of Indonesian culture and society. In Britain, Oxford structuralism, primarily associated with Rodney Needham, was under challenge and in decline. Certain themes decreased in terms of publication activity and theoretical significance (e.g. formal studies of ‘prescriptive alliance’ and total structural concordance), while others continued to expand steadily (e.g. the ethnography of development and social change) and new areas emerged to reflect their growing economic and political significance (e.g. environment, identity, gender, media, Islam, tourism and urban). What made these new areas ‘anthropological’

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was the systematic application of participatory ethnographic approaches, the utilization of a body of theory that had developed between 1950 and 1980, and a self-conscious concern for serious cross-cultural comparison. Although the new developments are significant, and will be elaborated upon further below, it is equally important to note the continuities, and how the timelines for particular kinds of research, as well as patterns of training and career development, tend to distort the periodization of intellectual history. Thus, many of the major book-length studies appearing after 1980 were based on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s. For this reason, they are rooted in the history of that period and its academic preoccupations. Many studies published in this period were authored by the students of the dominant figures who emerged from the last phase of colonial work: in particular, in Britain, the students of Firth, Leach and Needham. By comparison, journal literature is produced and disseminated over a shorter time scale, and is therefore likely to reflect more recent research effort and issues that are more current. Consequently, care needs to be taken in generalizing about academic output simply on the basis of publication date. In reviewing research and publication activity here, I have identified a number of foci and themes which, though hardly mutually exclusive, best seem to reflect current preoccupations: issuesrelating to the problemof regionality itself; the peopling of island Southeast Asia (and the study of foraging populations); subsistence systems; kinship and social organization; thought, belief and ritual practice; political structures and political culture; economic and environmental change; identity, ethnicity and nationalism; crossdisciplinarity and new developments; and patterns of institutionalization and publication.

THE PROBLEM OF REGIONALITY Where we draw the boundaries of an ethnographic area is always a matter of contention,

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and no more so than for ‘Southeast Asia’. From a European historical perspective, it is the physical space separating India and China. During the twentieth century it became an increasingly credible framework for comparative anthropological work, as its geopolitical imagination translated into a concrete reality, first through the commonalties imposed by colonialism, and then by strategic Western thinking in the immediate postWorld War Two period, and since 1967 with the ever closer union envisaged by the creation of ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) at the behest of a group of independent nation-states. However, while contemporary anthropologists are correctly wary of essentialist definitions and cultural melting-pot theories of regionality, geography and a history of incoming cultural influences from eastern and southern Asia, and their subsequent hybridization, have provided a plausible foundation for continuing claims favouring the existence of fundamental and recognizably ‘Southeast Asian’ social and cultural characteristics. These find resonances in indigenous ethno-geographies. What has inevitably continued to define Southeast Asia as a physical region has been the barrier presented on its northwestern flank by the Himalayas, and the discontinuity in biogeography evident to the southeast, in the form of Wallace’s Line, which separates the flora and fauna of mainland Asia (Sunda) from that of the Australo-Pacific (Sahul). In between, an area of flat plains and hill lands is unified ecologically through the warm shallow seas of the archipelago and through the (though now much diminished) dominance of rain forest, and a human history that is in large part the history of its transformation. In terms of patterns of human cultural and social difference, this environment has only been partly constraining in evolutionary and historical terms. Thus, Chinese Yunnan is home to a diverse set of language and cultural groups that show considerable affinities and recent historical connections with the upland peoples of Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. Similarly, there are affinities

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with the cultural minorities of northeast India and southern Bangladesh. Rather differently, the oldest populations of Taiwan closely resemble − biogenetically, linguistically and in some other cultural features − the peoples of central Indonesia. To the southeast, the permeability of the Wallacean cline is evident in the presence of Papuan language isolates in parts of eastern Indonesia (such as Tobelo on Halmahera, and Bunaq on Timor), and in precolonial intrusions of Indonesians into the island of New Guinea. Moreover, taking modern Southeast Asia as a whole, there are at least 22 language sub-families grouped into five families (Tai-Kadai, SinoTibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian and Papuan), in addition to the various families that are represented in the groups of recent migrants (e.g. Tamil from South India, and Cantonese from China). Finally, the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal show biogenetic and linguistic affinities with Burma, while the languages and genetics of the Andaman Islands are closer to those of the first human inhabitants of Southeast Asia than to South Asia. From the point of view of human social and cultural patterns, the modern geopolitically defined concept of Southeast Asia might be thought less useful anthropologically than the concept of ‘archipelagic’ (or island) Southeast Asia. This is largely because the archipelago and coasts have long been integrated through sea-borne human dispersal and trade, obscuring the ecological differences between Sunda and Sahul. Linguistically there are only three families (Austroasiatic, Austronesian and Papuan) of which Austronesian is overwhelmingly the most important (and Malayo-Polynesian the dominant sub-family), in terms of numbers of speakers and diversity. However, if we look at the sub-families of Austronesian, ten are now confined to Taiwan (outside the geographic region delineated here), with one sub-family, Malagasy, confined to the African continental mass. Thus, language does not provide an unchallengeable basis for defining a region for comparative purposes.

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Comparative ethnography too can often present a skewed perspective on those patterns that predominate in a particular area, as it tends to emphasize cultural differences and particular themes and places that have preoccupied scholars, but which may confound a model based on ‘descent with modification’, the measurement of common traits, or demographic preponderance. Thus, from a population perspective it is well to remember that while the modern geopolitical region of Southeast Asia comprises 593 million people, the overwhelming majority live in Indonesia (227 million), and of those, 49% on the island of Java. We can find similarities and differences between human populations based on a descent and modification model, or we can find similarities due to convergence within ecological and other kinds of context. The strongest statement of the former model of coherence comes in the form of the Austronesian model, ultimately based on linguistic affinity (Bellwood, Fox and Tryon, 1995; Fox, 1997; Fox and Sather, 1996; Macdonald, 1987). Convergence-context models include those that argue that involvement in a common trading system over the long term has provided the kind of coherence that makes some non-arbitrary concept of region credible, though how that coherence presents itself seems to depend on whether the proponent is adopting an archipelagic or mainland perspective (Lieberman, 1995). Ultimately, of course, socio-cultural coherence will derive from the interplay of these two models along ‘structurational’ lines, as new features are integrated into old contexts and themselves come to define part of some new context. Thus, the emergence of the Hindu-Buddhist state derived from strong trading links with South Asia in the early centuries of the common era, and provided a new context in which older cultural features and social arrangements expressed themselves: likewise, colonial states, and thereafter ASEAN. Degrees of coherence, in addition, reflect the opportunities for periods of longerterm internal stability. The most problematic models of regionality are those which pick

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and choose features that derive from various models but which are somehow treated as ahistorical cultural components: for example, those that seek to combine two or more of the following − bilateral kinship, relative gender equality (or rather marked sex symmetry), flexible and charismatic leadership (heterarchy), exemplary centres, and so on. Ultimately, grand claims for coherence assembled in this way are bound to be contrived. Given this, and the problems of fixing any boundary with certainty, what often seems to characterize scholarly practice in a particular geographic region are less the intrinsic features of the cultural populations studied than the intellectual approaches, shared theoretical questions, models and styles adopted, including their institutional base. Different research traditions have resulted in different kinds of Southeast Asia, whether that coherence stems from common interpretive approaches and comparative culturalhistory (say, of Clifford Geertz and Ben Anderson), from commitment to an Indianized kingdom model, from a focus on the region as part of the Muslim world, or whether it derives from scholars working in Cornell, Yale, Paris or Leiden. While my overall stance on claims of regional coherence for Southeast Asia in the broader sense are sceptical and relative to the problem being examined, ‘archipelagic Southeast Asia’ − while by no means perfect − makes more sense in terms of the comparative issues that have in recent decades concerned anthropologists. I therefore focus on an area that comprises the Malaysian peninsula and extends southwards and eastwards as far as the island of New Guinea. Politically and demographically, this comprises the Philippines (90 million), Malaysia (27 million), Singapore (3 million), Indonesia (227 million), Brunei (0.4 million) and Timor Leste (1 million). Linguistically, these countries are predominantly Austronesian, though with pockets of Papuan and Aslian languages, plus the languages of groups that migrated from South and East Asia in recent times, mainly Chinese and the languages of South India and Europe. Even so, the boundaries of

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archipelagic Southeast Asia as defined here can hardly serve all comparative purposes, and still give rise to some major anomalies. Thus, aboriginal Taiwan shows close cultural affinities with much of island Southeast Asia, having been the centre for dispersion of Austronesian languages. Similarly, Madagascar is linguistically and historically closely related to the peoples of central Borneo, though it is not dealt with at all in this chapter. The island of New Guinea has been separated from the rest of island Southeast Asia sufficiently long for the development of a numerically diverse set of Papuan languages, though the Austronesian speakers of the coast and islands share many similarities with Austronesian speakers more widely, and this has generated an interest in the Austronesian world in general as a productive category of comparative study. Moreover, contact during the precolonial period, and Dutch colonization of West Papua and its subsequent incorporation into the independent state of Indonesia, brings it for some comparative purposes within the frame of Southeast Asia. In order to generalize, compare and interpret, to generate testable hypotheses, and to deliver knowledge in digestible packages, we need to identify regions, and it could be argued that the fact that they are often arbitrary or serendipitous constructions need not be a bad thing as long as we are aware of the limitations. For good discussions of many of the issues considered here, in relation to both the concepts of SoutheastAsia and archipelagic Southeast Asia, see Acharya and Rajah (1999), Bowen (1995, 2000), Emmerson (1984), Hirschman, Keyes and Hutterer (1992), King and Wilder (2003: 1−24), Kratoska, Raben and Schulte Nordholt (2005) and Wolters (1982).

THE PEOPLING OF ISLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE STUDY OF FORAGING POPULATIONS The interdisciplinary study of how successive populations of humans and their cultural

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practices arrived and dispersed throughout archipelagic Southeast Asia had already begun to consolidate by 1980. A sciencedriven approach had long replaced the older racial wave theories of writers such as HeineGeldern (see, e.g., King and Wilder 2003: 52−55), and was rapidly acquiring credibility as a result of new developments in archaeology and allied sciences, through DNA analysis of contemporary populations, human palaeontology (with fossil evidence for the earliest Homo sapiens from about 20,000 BP) and from comparative linguistics. However, the relatively poor conditions for archaeological preservation in humid tropical areas continue to place heavy reliance on ethnographic inference. These combined data are beginning to shed light on the early migration history of Australoid peoples (such as the possibly proto-Austronesian Andamanese) moving eastwards, and Mongoloid peoples (such as the Nicobarese) moving southwards. What has typified recent work on the later Austronesian dispersion are attempts to integrate and reconcile human genetic history in relation to language and culture in order to generalize about population expansion and dispersion between 6,000 and 4,000 BP (Bellwood, 1985; Glover and Bellwood, 2004). The study of the deep cultural and biological history of Southeast Asian populations is inevitably intertwined with research on the region’s remaining hunting and gathering peoples, as these have often provided models for understanding the possible range of pre-agricultural populations and the prehistoric transition to farming. Paradoxically, the period 1980−2010 has yielded some of the finest studies of foraging and proto-agricultural peoples that we have, despite the decline of the populations themselves. This is because of the theoretical and methodological impetus that came with the post Man the Hunter generation of researchers, and also because the populations have remained disproportionately salient anthropologically, in the way they shed light on underlying shared cultural patterns in the region.

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Linguistically, these groups comprise representatives of both Austronesian (e.g. Penan) and Austro-Asiatic (e.g. Semang) families. The Austro-Asiatic groups include the Nicobarese and Aslian sub-families, and it is this association and the evidence for good genetic correlation that provides clues for early population history, the Austro-Asiatic groups being amongst those described as ‘negrito’ in the older literature, e.g. Agta (Luzon). Austro-Asiatic groups are now confined to the Philippines and to the Malaysian peninsula. Austronesian groups are historically distributed throughout the archipelago, including Sulawesi (Toala) and Halmahera (forest Tobelo), but are now mainly found in the Malaysian peninsula (e.g. Chewong), Borneo (Penan) and eastern Sumatra (‘Kubu’). In some cases these groups may have been Austro-Asiatic speakers who adopted the Austronesian languages of surrounding agricultural peoples; leastways, it is clear that all have had complex cultural histories and patterns of interaction with other peoples. Where there is evidence for continuity of non-agricultural strategies, these groups have sometimes been described as ‘primary’, although other groups seem to have specialized in foraging lifestyles in response to some wider regional economic dynamic, following earlier reliance on agriculture − in which case they are evidently ‘secondary’. The main issues addressed in recent ethnographic studies of hunting and gathering populations have been farmer−forager relations, the sufficiency of non-domesticated resources as a subsistence base, and forest peoples in the context of wider exchange economies (e.g. Agta: Early and Headland, 1998; Semai: Gomes, 2004; Menraq: Gomes, 2007; Punan: Hoffman ,1986 vs Sellato, 1989; Penan: Puri 2005, Rousseau, 1990); belief systems (Malaysian Batak: Endicott, 1980; Chewong: Howell, 1984; Ma’Betisék: Karim, 1981); and the position of nonagricultural peoples in relation to the politics of environmental issues, including sustainability and deforestation (Borneo: Sercombe and Sellato, 2007; Palawan Batak: Eder, 1993).

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Studies of isolated non-agricultural populations have often attracted controversy because of the way they have traditionally informed our representation of the ‘other’ or been drawn into contemporary political discourse, and because of ideological expectations as to how such peoples should behave (e.g. Headland, 1992).

SUBSISTENCE SYSTEMS Anthropological work on agricultural systems in Southeast Asia has been historically strongly embedded in ecological approaches, and the models established by Clifford Geertz (1963) and Harold Conklin (1957) continue to be influential, though not uncritically (Dove, 1985). The contrast drawn by Geertz and others between swidden and irrigated rice systems has become more problematic as ethnographers have documented a wider range of systems within these broad categories, while more attention has been paid to agroforestry and arboriculture, and to how swiddening is integrated into social life (Halmahera: Visser, 1989). While the condition for sustainable swiddening appears to be ever disappearing − namely, mature tropical rain forest − in its wider sense it continues to be important in understanding the subsistence realities for large numbers of people in the region. Much attention has been given to the properties of long-fallow systems and the local knowledge that accompanies their successful management: for example, in the context of explaining the problems of rapid environmental change, including the impact of deforestation through over-intensification, logging, burning regimes, resettlement and estate agriculture (Brosius, 1990; Padoch, 1982), often in the context of multi-disciplinary projects (Padoch and Peluso 1996). In the study of irrigated rice cultivation, the ‘agricultural involution’ debate initiated by Geertz has persisted with elaborations, exceptions and critiques informed by historical studies of the role of the market and capitalist forces (general: White, 1983; lowland

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Java: van Neil, 1992; upland Java: Hefner, 1990; Minangkabau: Kahn, 1980). There has also been a focus on wider irrigated landscapes and upon new methodologies for their investigation (Ifugao: Conklin, 1980), an interest in the resilience of complex systems in the face of agricultural modernization (Bali: Lansing, 1991, 2006), and on the impact of Green Revolution technologies given subsequent ecological and economic crises (Ellen, 2007). We can note a conspicuous increase in work conducted on aquatic, coastal and maritime issues over the period. These have partly continued the agenda set by Firth (1946) for the analysis of technical, economic and social change in peasant fisheries, but have expanded to include a wider range of community types dependent on marine extraction (Sama-Bajau: Sather, 1997; artisanal whaling: Barnes, 1996), and the international trade in sea-products (Spyer, 2000). Added focus has come from applied concerns for territorial rights (Riau Orang Laut: Chou, 2009), the effects of industrial marine fishing and fish farming, and for sustainable management (for example, involving traditional forms of resource regulation: Zerner, 1994), and from an appreciation of the environmental pressures of sea level rise and coastal erosion.

KINSHIP AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION By 1980, the preoccupation with formal typological approaches to kinship had been largely superseded by more qualified, processual and critical approaches. The concept of kinship itself was giving way to more fluid studies of ‘relatedness’; there was increasing emphasis on ‘the house’, on kinship as idiom, on how kinship is occluded by notions of community, and on gender relations, especially in those societies that had hitherto been described as ‘cognatic’ (general: Hüsken and Kemp, 1991, Macdonald, 1987; Malay: Carsten, 1997; Philippines: Kikuchi, 1996). However, the framework proposed by Atkinson and Errington (1990), emphasizing

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the distinction between the so-called ‘exchange’ societies of the periphery of archipelagic Southeast Asia (e.g. Minangkabau, Batak and Nusa Tenggara) and the ‘centrist’ societies of the lowland heartland (e.g. Java, Borneo, Malay), has provided an overarching analytical framework and emphasized continuities with earlier traditions of ethnography. While in places the structuralist certainties of prescriptive alliance theorists have been challenged − in the way that cognatic and lineal descent systems seem to coexist in close proximity, and in how actual marriage patterns deviate from the ideal (Seram: Hagen, 2006) − there have continued to be fine ethnographies exemplifying the formal complexities of ‘exchange’ societies (Nias: Beatty, 1992; Sumba: Forth, 1981; Tetum: Hicks, 1990; Tanimbar: McKinnon, 1991). At the same time, studies of kinship and marriage by other social scientists and demographers have been strongly influenced by the extensive body of existing ethnography produced by several generations of anthropologists (e.g. Islamic Southeast Asia: Jones, 1994, Visayas: Yu and Liu, 1980). Although matriliny and dual descent systems are described for other parts of the region (e.g. Flores: Lewis, 1988; Tetum: Hicks, 1990), there continues to be a particular emphasis in the literature on West Sumatra (particularly Minangkabau: see, e.g., Thomas and von Benda-Beckmann, 1985). This is partly due to reasons of demographic salience, but also partly to special sociological features. These latter include the problems raised in relation to an engagement with orthodox Islam (Blackwood, 2000; Sanday, 2002), on how matrilineality articulates with, and has been reinforced through, the vagaries of the world economic system (Kahn, 1980), and in relation to historic patterns of outward migration (Kato, 1982). In Negri Sembilan (the destination since the nineteenth century of large numbers of Minangkabau migrants), the persistence of matrilineages has been observed to result in an underplaying of gender as an organizing concept (Peletz, 1996; Stivens, 1996).

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The post-1980 period has seen a dramatic growth in the study of gender in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, challenging the paradigm of kinship itself and re-evaluating the position of women (van Esterik, 1982, Hainsworth et al., 1981; Karim, 1995; Rudie, 1994; Rutten, 1982). Attention has continued to be paid to the apparent gender distinctiveness of Southeast Asia, and in particular a strong equivalence and gender fluidity in Malay and Bornean gender relations (Karim, 1992, 1995, 2002; Sutlive, 1991), and on the continuing importance of the complementarities evident in the relation between adat (customary law) and Islam. However, a growing focus has arisen around the impact of socio-economic and religious change on gendered practices (general: Nagata and Salaff, 1996; Ong and Peletz, 1995; Java: Brenner, 1998; Malay: Ong, 1987; Toba-Batak: Rodenburg, 1997), and particularly on how gender balance has shifted from the informal to the formal and from the mundane to the secular; on health (Laderman, 1983), on the critical interrogation of gender concepts in the context of idioms of masculinity (R. Rosaldo, 1980; M. Rosaldo, 1982; Siegel, 2000), and on how transsexual behaviour brings into articulation traditional gender concepts and modernity (Johnson, 1997).

THOUGHT, BELIEF AND RITUAL PRACTICE In the area of ritual and belief, the decline in the practice of animism is reflected in the publication record, with much more emphasis on ethnographic approaches to the practices of locally represented world religions. Nevertheless, the classic issues associated with animism still continue to inform our understanding of symbolism and meaning systems more generally, as these are found in: pervasive metaphorical styles and ritual speech (general: Fox, 1980, 1988; Sumba: Kuipers, 1990, 1998), beliefs about head taking (general: Hoskins, 1996; Ilongot: R. Rosaldo, 1980; South Sulawesi: George, 1996), spirit-mediumship and shamanism

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(Karo-Batak: Steedly, 1993; Wana: Atkinson, 1989), witchcraft and sorcery (Watson and Ellen, 1993), cosmologies and symbolism (Nage: Forth, 1998; Keo: Forth, 2001; Ma’Betisék: Karim, 1981; Mambai: Traube, 1986), the organization of time (Sumba: Hoskins, 1993), ritual cycles (Flores: Lewis, 1988; Toraja: Volkman, 1985) and sacrifice (Howell, 1996). Several monographs have focussed on persisting animist societies (Batek Negrito: Endicott, 1980; Brunei Dusun: Kershaw, 2000; Buid: Gibson, 1986; Berawan: Metcalf, 1982; Huaulu: Valeri, 2000). A completely new area that has opened up since 1980 is represented by work on religious change (general: Russell and Cunningham, 1989; Ngaju: Schiller, 1997), conversion, and the ethnography of the different cultures of Christianity in Southeast Asia (general: Kipp and Rodgers, 1987; Bicol: Cannell, 1999). Indian Hinduism has historically influenced ordinary religious practice and traditional state structures in much of Southeast Asia. It survives in a very distinctive form in Bali and in parts of Java (Hefner, 1985), where it is undergoing something of a renaissance. Studies of Hinduism in these areas have moved over the last thirty years towards the fine-grained study of religious change and the accommodation between traditional local practices and codified orthodox global practices (Howe, 2001). The study of Islam has seen considerable expansion, partly reflecting its rising political profile, both within Southeast Asia and globally (general: Hefner and Horvatich, 1997; Indonesia: Hefner, 2000; Malaysia: Peletz, 2002). While most research has tended to focus on Indonesia and Malaysia where Muslims are in the majority, work has continued on the Muslim societies of the southern Philippines and in southern Thailand. Some of these studies are still reacting to the strong Weberian ‘ideal typical’ model instituted by Geertz (1960) in The Religion of Java (e.g. Woodward, 1989) or, while critically engaged, are broadly in general sympathy with the Geertzian project (Beatty, 1999). But we also

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see new trends in the area of discourse (Bowen, 1993), law and cultural politics (Malaysia: Peletz, 2002). The traditional colonial preoccupation with the conflict between adat and Islam has been superseded by more nuanced ethnography, on the relationshipof orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Lombok: Cederroth, 1981), and on Wahabite reformism. Anthropologists have not only shown how Muslim ritual life has a considerable influence on the everyday behaviour of various socio-economic and cultural groupings but also how Muslim beliefs and practices shape legal and national institutions. And because much of the work on Islam overlaps with that on law, politics and identity (e.g. Gayo: Bowen, 2003), many of the relevant monographic studies are referred to under these latter two headings.

POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND POLITICAL CULTURE One strong underlying theme has been the focus of the anthropological lens on the understanding of traditional states (both the great inland agrarian states and the coastal trading states). Again, a looming intellectual presence has been Geertz, not only his work on Bali (1980) but also essays developing his interpretive approach to political involvement. Milner (1982), using the work and conceptual baggage of an earlier generation of social anthropologists, has shed light on the power structure of the precolonial riverine states of Western Malaya, while Andaya (1993) has used anthropological work on symbolic power to understand the seventeenth-century sultanates of the northern Moluccas. Approaches more rooted in ecology and political economy are found in analyses of the pre-colonial political organization of the Sulu (Warren, 1981) and Banda trading zones (Ellen, 2003). Although most local populations in Southeast Asia have now been integrated in one way or another into the political

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organization of the modern state, versions of pre-existing traditions of law and order, and the concepts of power and authority that underpin them, continue to be relevant. Thus, in the same way that classic issues from earlier studies of animism now influence our wider understanding of contemporary belief systems, so studies of traditional states have been shown to shed light on our understanding of contemporary patterns of social interaction and political culture, exploring, for example, the implications of the concept of ‘exemplary centre’, notions of mystical power, traditional authority, patronage, and the state apparatus as theatre. Research has been conducted on how culture is put to work in the political discourse of, say, New Order Indonesia (Pemberton, 1994), or in modern Malaysia (Kahn and Loh Kok Wah, 1992) and on the conflicts between older and emerging political cultures in places as diverse as Malay villages (Shamsul, 1986) and the traditional Buginese states of Sulawesi (Errington, 1989). Such scholarship has been informed by an unusual degree of interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology, history and political science, and two of the most influential figures in recent debates − Benedict Anderson (1972, 1983) and James Scott − are both from political science backgrounds. Much of this analysis has been in reaction to influential Geertzian ideas, such as ‘shared poverty’ in Java (Alexander and Alexander, 1982) or his consensual approach to Balinese political order, which others (e.g. Barth, 1993) have treated to a much more actor-oriented dynamic analysis. There is now more emphasis on class formation and on the differentiation of the peasantry (Kahn, 1980), on rural leadership (Java: Antlöv and Cederroth, 1994; Antlöv, 1995) and the ways in which peasants manage their relations with the state (Scott, 1985), or cope with social security in the context of state structures (Ambon: Benda-Beckmann and BendaBeckmann, 2007). How different versions of the colonial state have continued to have repercussions during the post-colonial period has also been addressed: for example, in relation

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to the implementation of shari’a law; in terms of the vestiges of the title systems and elites of indirect rule; and the continuing relevance of different kinds and degrees of codification of customary law, as between Malaysia and Indonesia. The modern Southeast Asian state is far from being uniform, and the way in which different state structures (neo-liberal, socialist, military dictatorship, modern authoritarian sultanates), and even the effective absence of the state, as in East Timor or the Sulu archipelago, have been matters of anthropological investigation, as has been the accommodation of the notion of civil society and democracy (Lee Hock Guan, 2005). Where the gains of nationalism in the countries of the region are now threatened by geographical and ethnic fragmentation, the strategies developed by local communities to cope with this also now have their ethnographers.

ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE The context of contemporary ethnographic studies of economic relations and development in archipelagic Southeast Asia has been broadly determined by the history of, and the international development consensus established during, the previous 30 years. Research has focused initially on how colonialism first destroyed and then restructured local economic relations, on the years of colonial (under)-development, particularly in relation to estate agriculture, population growth and redistribution, and − in Indonesia at least − the legacy of J. H. Boeke’s concept of dual economy. For the post-colonial period, emphasis has been on the inheritance of the colonial economies, the impact of the international and globalized economy (including tourism), development plans and projects, industrialization and the peri-urban economy, rural−urban migration, the capitalization of the peasant economy, the impact on gender and, increasingly, the interaction between environmental and economic factors.

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By 1980 the dangers of top-down models of economic development were already highly apparent, and critical approaches to these are evident in the work of anthropologists, who were able to demonstrate the value of traditional, particularly ethnoecological, knowledge (Dove, 1988; Lansing, 1991). Despite the benefits of different patterns of cash cropping, Green Revolution technology and other new farming methods, the limitations of the new economics became particularly clear in the wake of the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s and the difficulties faced by small farmers (Breman and Wiradi, 2002; Ellen, 2007). For a useful review of anthropological contributions to the understanding of development in Southeast Asia, see King (1999); for a critical evaluation and theoretical synthesis of the development process focusing on ethnographic data from Sulawesi, see Li (2007). Among the new issues to receive attention have been those of urbanism (Nas, 1986), and in particular rural−urban migration, the growth of capital cities and mega-cities (Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila), and the role of the urban poor in the informal economy (Guinness, 1986; Jellinek, 1991). Such work has not only included ethnographies of urban economic life that contrast squalor and wealth in more conventional sociological ways but also the relationship between urban neighbourhoods, religion and the state (Java: Guinness, 2009), and interpretivist approaches concerned as much with language and hierarchic identities in city contexts (Java: Siegel, 1986; Brenner, 1998). As ethnographies of urban groups have become more common, so has discussion of the new methodologies required to produce them (Li, 1989), and the social implications of increasingly female labour forces in factories have been the subject of critical and innovative scrutiny (Malaysia: Ong, 1987; Java: Wolf, 1992). Indeed, there has been a particular growth in studies of gender and economic change: the shifting role of women in the traditional agricultural economy, and especially the impact of agricultural intensification, monetization

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and state aid (Williams, 1990), and of health service improvement on female emancipation. The ethnographic study of the market place pioneered by Alice Dewey (1962) has been developed further (Alexander, 1987), along with issues of credit and savings, and new household economic strategies (e.g. Palawan: Eder, 2000). There has been work on craft specialization (Rutten, 1990) and ethnographies of estate agriculture (Rutten, 1982; Stoler, 1985). In addition to research on rural−urban migration, there has been some attention paid to population growth and redistribution: spontaneous governmentassisted resettlement, and international migration, as between India and Malaysia, from China to Southeast Asia as a whole, and between Indonesia and Malaysia. Two major areas of theoretical innovation have been (a) Marxist-inspired political economy approaches and (b) moral economy approaches. The former are typified by a focus on local responses, including commodity production, to economic fluctuations at a wider regional and global level (Minangkabau: Kahn, 1980, 1993), and the multi-disciplinary broadly post-Marxist study of agrarian differentiation and transformation in the wider context of both lowland rice-producing areas (Hart, 1986) and the uplands (Li, 1999), focusing on land, capital accumulation, dispossession, state impact and power (Hart, Turton and White, 1989). The latter work has built on the corpus of insights developed by Scott (1976) in relation to traditional sharing and distribution, the idea of everyday peasant dissent and resistance, and the symbolic power of the state. The examination of how villages are connected to the wider world, through what forms of communication (Wilder, 1982), and how this has influenced development have become prominent. In addition to commodity and labour globalization, new emphasis has been placed on the influence of electronic media − especially film, television, telephone and Internet − and on how these are absorbed into continuing, if modified, local cultures of consumption (general: Yamashita and Eades,

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2002; Bali: Rubinstein and Connor, 1999). Both cultural and nature tourism are increasingly important as providing livelihoods and income, and the positive and negative effects of tourism development have been extensively studied (general: Hitchcock, King and Parnwell, 2008; Picard and Wood, 1997; Bali: Howe, 2005; Picard, 1996; Yamashita, 2003). In the area of environment, the main emphasis has been in two areas: on destruction of rain forest through logging, clearance for estate crops (particularly oil palm) and the consequences of this in terms of susceptibility to forest fires and watershed degradation (e,g. Luzon: Wallace, 2006); and on the rights of indigenous resource users. These problems have given rise to new methodologies, which, while rooted in the ethnography of particular places, are connected with increasingly influential, if problematic, theories of political ecology (Vayda, 2010).

IDENTITY, ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM Ethnicity and identity has been a particularly salient area in anthropological research on Southeast Asia since 1980, partly because of the inadequacy of received notions for dealing with a complex and shifting reality, partly as a consequence of attempts by colonial and post-colonial government to make administrative sense of ethnicity, and partly because of the strong emergence of identity politics and ‘indigenousness’ in the late twentieth century (Winzeler, 1997). The ghost of primordialism lingers. The problems of designating cultural groups with particular ethnonyms (King, 1983), and the imposition of different and often contradictory anthropological schemes (Rousseau, 1990), continue to pose unresolved puzzles, as exemplified in the problems of how to describe the foraging peoples of Borneo (Sercombe and Sellato, 2007). The relationship between ethnic and other identities, such

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as kinship, economic class and religion (Kipp, 1993), or national, regional and local (Hitchcock and King, 1997); indigeneity and the consequences of internal diasporas (Minangkabau: Kato, 1982), ethnogenesis and the formation of new subnational ethnic identities through creolization (Malaysian Baba Chinese and Peranakan Indonesian: Clammer, 1980), are all matters that have received attention; as have the consequences of official labelling, imposed versus selfidentities, ethnic identities as roles and forms of boundary maintenance, and how these contribute to understanding the complexities of multicultural societies such as Malaysia (Lee, 1986) and the Philippines (Macdonald and Pesigan, 2000). Nationalism and its connected identity questions have become a major focus: in the context of nation-building and the making of modern Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians (Alexander, 1989; Watson, 2000); in its relationship to hybridity, diaspora and cosmopolitanism (Kahn, 2006), and in terms of how multiculturalism works and is manipulated in modern states (Clammer, 1985). Transnationality has become important, particularly in relation to the overseas Chinese (Ong and Nonini, 1997; Ong, 1999). Given the continuing predisposition of anthropologists to study remote and peripheral groups, it is not surprising perhaps that marginality and the nation-state is also a major theme, though argued less in terms of objective measures of connectedness and deprivation (though, see Benjamin and Chou, 2002 for Malaysia, and Persoon, 1994 for Indonesia), than in the discourses that accompany them, and how that marginality is culturally constructed, whether in remote interiors or along maritime edges (Meratus: Tsing, 1993; Aru: Spyer, 2000; Papua: Rutherford, 2003). In contrast to marginalization is the process of reification, reinvention and commoditization of culture that has accompanied the rise of tourism in parts of the region, notably in Bali (Vickers, 1989), and among the Toraja of Sulawesi (Volkman, 1985).

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CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY AND NEW DEVELOPMENTS Despite the extensive evidence for innovative analysis and originality in the work described thus far, it can at least be placed within certain conventional categories of social behaviour. The core methodology continues to be intensive fieldwork in the context of participant−observation, with augmentation from a suite of other methods as appropriate (e.g. life-history, cultural consensus analysis, textual analysis, archives, questionnaires). Categorization, however, is not so easy for other kinds of work. For one thing, much work is now highly interdisciplinary, involving collaborative work between archaeologists, biological anthropologists and linguists (as reported above), and between a range of social science and humanities subjects. The anthropology of island Southeast Asia has throughout the period under review maintained a productive engagement with other disciplines, not only by virtue of its ethnographic expertise on subjects of interest in other scholarly practices but also because it provides a conceptual and methodological apparatus that has proved useful. Moreover, although sociology in Southeast Asia has a distinct institutional presence, at an international level it has become barely separable from the work of anthropologists working in the region. Meanwhile, writers in other fields have been strongly influenced by the work of anthropology, and it can be said to have entered the social science and humanities mainstream (Purdey, 2004; Sidel, 2006). As well as the close linkage with archaeology through the concepts of ethnographic homology and analogy, common ground and methodologiesare evident in different anthropological approachesto history (Minangkakau: Kahn, 1993; Moluccas: Ellen, 2003; Spyer, 2000; Negri Sembilan: Peletz, 1988), particularly at the interface between textual and oral history (Ilongot: R. Rosaldo, 1980; Gayo: Bowen, 1991), and in the overlap in work on political culture, much of it influenced

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through the work of Anderson and Scott, and on issues of identity and representation (Malaysia: Kahn and Loh Kok Wah, 1992). The problem of representation, reflexivity and anthropology’s literary turn are all strongly present in recent work, and although interpretivist approaches have often drawn their inspiration from Geertz they have in many cases gone beyond his project, or have pursued an independent trajectory. While the categories are hardly mutually exclusive, we can see this in work on: subjectivity, emotion and ethnography as story (Bali: Wikan, 1990; Visayas: Dumont, 1992; Llongot: M. Rosaldo, 1980; Malay: Karim, 1990; Java: Brenner, 1998); on the cultural politics of representation (Karo-Batak: Steedly, 1993) and conceptualizing ‘the other’ (Sumba: Keane, 1997); in the self-conscious post-modernism of Tsing (1993), Spyer (2000) and Pemberton (1994); in performance-based approaches that incorporate verbatim utterance to convey immediacy and authenticity (Ilongot: M. Rosaldo, 1980, Wana: Atkinson, 1989); and in the use of written texts and literature (Marschall, 1994), particularly biography and autobiography(Watson, 2000, 2006). In drawing on certainphilosophical traditions and focusing on issues of problematic analytic categories, Hobart (2000) has challenged the basis for ethnographic comparison. Some themes previously under-represented in work conducted using the approaches of twentieth-century social anthropology have moved to the forefront, for example domains of specialist cultural knowledge, including of the biological world (Nuaulu: Ellen, 1993; Nage: Forth, 2004;Tobelo: Taylor, 1990; Mindanao: Nazarea, 1998), sickness and healing (Taman: Bernstein, 1997; Bali: A. Hobart, 2003; Winzeler, 1995) and maritime navigation (Bugis: Ammarell, 1999); and other themes and analytical categories have connected ethnography in new ways, such as in relation to food (Janowski and Kerlogue, 2005). Such studies often directly address wider general comparative issues in anthropology rather than comfortably connecting with regional ethnographic concerns.

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Once marginal to the core preoccupations of social anthropologists, but always strongly contextualized in regional traditions of scholarship, studies of performance and the plastic arts have become more mainstream. There has been a clear trend away from hard-core museological and art-historical approaches towards the analysis of living traditions in a broader socio-cultural context, employing and integrating a wide repertoire of anthropological techniques. In the area of theatre and dance there is the work of HughesFreeland (2008) on Javanese court dance, and that on shadow puppetry in a modern context (Bali: A. Hobart, 1987; Java: Keeler, 1987); and in the area of material culture, analyses of textiles (Lamalera: Barnes, 1989; Sumba: Forshee, 2001; Batak: Niessen, 1985, 1993) and of vernacular architecture (Waterson, 1990). These studies resonate with the renewed theoretical emphasis on the role of materiality in social relations (Sumba: Hoskins, 1998), and come with the added authority of specialist technical knowledge of the media studied. One of the characteristics of work in this area − again drawing on the interpretivist styles of Geertz and Anderson − has been to show how ethnographies of particular performance practices and artistic representations connect the lives of individuals not only with the local societies of which they are part but also with the wider state. This same repertoire of approaches has been extended to studies of modern and modernizing media, such as film and television (Hobart and Fox, 2008).

PATTERNS OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND PUBLICATION The last thirty years have, effectively, witnessed the disappearance of distinct national traditions emanating from academic institutions in the Global North, and the emergence of a broadly common style of social anthropology forged mainly from a combination of the British tradition and US

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interpretivist approaches. Local anthropologies within Southeast Asia, in so far as they can be clearly demarcated, have become less derivative of the colonial traditions that gave birth to them. Research by local anthropologists, while still often trained abroad, and preserving some of the ex-colonial linkages and stylistic loyalties, is now largely integrated into this generic globalized style. However, although anthropological research is conducted from all major Southeast Asia universities, under-funding and a particular emphasis on the national interest has forced many local practitioners into short-term contract and consultancy work that often seems inimical to the traditional methodologies of the subject. There is some recognition in Southeast Asia that anthropologists can contribute to national development objectives, and for the most part this has been the pattern of employment for local practitioners. For this reason, much of the work is understandably inward-looking and (especially in Indonesia) published in the national language. Despite this, there have been a number of outstanding local researchers who have made a regional and a genuinely international impact. The period 1980−2010 has seen a relative downturn in the appearance of general, more conventional, ethnographic monographs, as a result of the changing economics of publishing, a demise of older organizing categories of ethnographic description and analysis, and, to a lesser extent, the fashions of a particular model of academic audit culture. There are, nevertheless, exceptions (Iban: Sutlive, 1988; Bali Aga: Reuters, 2002), as well as general summaries of particular cultural populations of the kind published in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific (e.g. King, 1993; Hobart, Ramseyer and Leemann, 1996; also Koentjaraningrat, 1985) and The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia (RoutledgeCurzon). The systematic gazetteers of ethnic groups of the region that were popular in the previous phase of ethnographic organization (e.g. Lebar, 1972, 1975; Lebar,

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Hickey and Musgrave, 1964) have not been repeated, no doubt partly because of the logistical demands made on the editors, but also partly reflecting greater uncertainties in delineating identities and codifying cultural difference. Ethnographic coverage throughout the region is now more comprehensive. Few areas are without their ethnographers, though at least as reflected in the monographs, there is a surprising unevenness in distribution. Consider, for example, the concentration of exemplary work on Sumba, compared with the poor coverage for large parts of the Philippines. Multi-authored books reviewing, evaluating and integrating different disciplinary perspectives on a theme have seen a strong growth (e.g. Hefner and Horvatich, 1997); and as the number of students enrolled on courses on the peoples of Southeast Asia has risen, so the textbooks (e.g. King and Wilder, 2003) and collections of readings have appeared which play their own role in maintaining a particular geographical division of labour. Among publishing outlets, University of Hawai’i Press, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) in Copenhagen, the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) and the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde (KITLV), both in Leiden, continue to maintain strong Southeast Asian lists, and there has been a gratifying increase in the volume of academic work published within the ASEAN countries: for example, by University of Singapore Press. The journals in which anthropologists specializing in Southeast Asia publish are still largely those established in an earlier era: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Malay World, Indonesia, Archipel, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, and Journal of Asian Studies. Among the new journals to appear during this period, of special interest to anthropologists have been Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography (Singapore: 1982−97), Moussons: Recherche en Sciences Humaines sur l’Asie du Sud-Est (Marseille: 1999−) and Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues

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in Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore: 1986−). Local journals of note include Jurnal Antropologi Indonesia (Universitas Indonesia, Depak), Philippine Studies (Ateneo de Manila University) and Jurnal Antropologi dan Sosiologi (University Kebangaasan Malaysia, Bangi: 1977−1995).

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Barth, F. (1993) Balinese Worlds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Beatty, A. (1992) Society and Exchange in Nias. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beatty, A. (1999) Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellwood, P. (2007 [1985]) Prehistory of the IndoMalaysian Archipelago. Canberra: ANU E-Press. 2007 edition. Available as a pdf in the ANU E-Press webpage: http://epress.anu.edu.au/pima_citation.html Bellwood, P., J. J. Fox and D. Tryon (eds) (1995) Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Canberra: Australian National University. Benda-Beckmann, F. von and K. von Benda-Beckmann (2007) Social Security between Past and Future: Ambonese Networks of Care and Support. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Benjamin, G. and C. Chou (eds) (2002) Tribal Communities in the Malay World. Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Bernstein, J. H. (1997) Spirits Captured in Stone: Shamanism and Traditional Medicine among the Taman of Borneo. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Blackwood, E. (2000) Webs of Power: Women, Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bowen, J. R. (1991) Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900−1989. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bowen, J. R. (1993) Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bowen, J. R. (1995) ‘The forms culture takes: a stateof-the-field essay on the anthropology of Southeast Asia’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 54: 1047−1078. Bowen, J. R. (2000) ‘The inseparability of area and discipline in Southeast Asian studies: a view from the United States’, Moussons: Recherche en sciences humaines sur l’Asie de Sud-Est, 1: 3−19. Bowen, J. R. (2003) Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breman, J. and G. Wiradi (2002) Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: Case Study of Socio-economic Dynamics in Two Villages towards the End of the Twentieth Century. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Brenner, S. A. (1998) The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth and Modernity in Java. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Brosius, J. P. (1990) After Duwagan: Deforestation, Succession, and Adaptation in Upland Luzon, Philippines. University of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, Michigan Studies of South and Southeast Asia No. 2. Cannell, F. (1999) Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, J. (1997) The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cederroth, S. (1981) The Spell of the Ancestors and the Power of Mekkah: A Sasak Community on Lombok. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Chou, C. (2009) The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory. London: Routledge-Curzon. Clammer, J. (1985) Singapore: Ideology, Society and Culture. Singapore: Chopman. Clammer, J. R. (1980) Straits Chinese Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Baba Communities of Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Conklin, H. C. (1957) Hanunoo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines. Forestry Development Paper 12. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Conklin, H.C. (1980) The Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dewey, A. G. (1962) Peasant Marketing in Java. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Dove, M. R. (1985) Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia: The Subsistence Strategies of the Kalimantan Kantu. Berlin: Mouton. Dove, M. R. (ed.) (1988) The Real and the Imagined Role of Culture in Development: Case Studies from Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dumont, J.-P. (1992) Visayan Vignettes: Ethnographic Traces of a Philippine Island. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Early, J. D. and T. N. Headland. (1998) Population Dynamics Gainesville of a Philippine Rain Forest People: The San Ildefonso Agta. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Eder, J. F. (1993) On the Road to Tribal Extinction: Depopulation, Deculturation and Adaptive Wellbeing among the Batak of the Philippines. Quezon City: New Day. Eder, J. F. (2000) A Generation Later: Household Strategies and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

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Ellen, R. (1993) The Cultural Relations of Classification: An Analysis of Nuaulu Animal Categories from Central Seram. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellen, R. (2003) On the Edge of the Banda Zone: Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ellen, R. ed. (2007) Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies: Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia. Oxford: Berghahn. Endicott, K. M. (1980) Batek Negrito Religion: The World-view and Rituals of a Hunting and Gathering People of Peninsular Malaysia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Emmerson, D. K. (1984) ‘”Southeast Asia”: what’s in a name?’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 25: 1−21. Errington, S. (1989) Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esterik, P. van (ed.) (1982) Women of Southeast Asia. DeKalb, Northern Illinois University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Occasional Paper No. 9. Firth, R. (1966 [1946]) Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Forshee, J. (2001) Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives and Travels from Sumba. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Forth, G. L. (1981) Rindi: An Ethnographic Study of a Traditional Domain in Eastern Sumba. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 93. The Hague: Nijhoff. Forth, G. L. (1998) Beneath the Volcano: Religion, Cosmology and Spirit Classification among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 177. Leiden: KITLV Press. Forth, G. L. (2001) Dualism and Hierarchy: Processes of Binary Combination in Keo Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forth, G. L. (2004) Nage Birds: Classification and Symbolism Among an Eastern Indonesian People. London: Routledge. Fox, J.J. (ed.) (1980) The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fox, J. J. (ed.) (1988) To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, J. J. (ed.) (1997) The Poetic Power of Place: Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality. Canberra: Australian National University, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

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Hefner, R. W. (2000) Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: University Press. Hefner, R. W. and P. Horvatich (eds) (1997) Islam in the Era of Nation States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hicks, D. (1990) Kinship and Religion in Eastern Indonesia. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Hirschman, C., C. F. Keyes and K. Hutterer (eds) (1992) Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America. Ann Arbor, MI: The Association for Asian Studies. Hitchcock, M. and V. T. King (eds) (1997) Images of Malay−Indonesian identity. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Hitchcock, M., V. T. King and M. J. G. Parnwell (eds) (2008) Tourism in South-East Asia: Challenges and New Directions. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Hobart, A. (1987) Dancing Shadows of Bali: Theatre and Myth. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobart, A. (2003) Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. Oxford: Berghahn. Hobart, A., U. Ramseyer and A. Leemann. (1996) The People of Bali. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobart, M. (2000) After Culture: Anthropology as Radical Metaphysical Critique. Yogyakarta: Duta Wacana University Press. Hobart, M. and R. Fox (2008). Entertainment Media in Indonesia. London: Routledge. Hoffman, C. L. (1986) The Punan: Hunters and Gatherers of Borneo. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Hoskins, J. (1993) The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History, and Exchange. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoskins, J. (ed.) (1996) Headhunting and the Social Imaginationin Southeast Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hoskins, J. (1998) Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples Lives. New York: Routledge. Howe, L. (2001) Hinduism and Hierarchy in Bali. Oxford: James Currey; Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Howe, L. (2005) The Changing World of Bali: Religion, Society and Tourism. London: Routledge. Howell, S. (1984) Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsula Malaysia. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Howell, S. (ed.) (1996) For the Sake of Our Future: Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia. Leiden: Research School CNWS.

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Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 150. Leiden: KITLV Press. Niessen, S. A. (1985) Motifs of Life in Toba Batak Texts and Textiles. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 110. Leiden: Foris. Niessen, S. A. (1993) Batak Cloth and Clothing: A Dynamic Indonesian Tradition. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Workers in Malaysia. New York: State University of New York Press. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, A. and D. Nonini (eds) (1997) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Ong, A. and M. Peletz (eds) (1997) Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Padoch, C. (1982) Migration and its Alternatives Among the Iban of Sarawak. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 98. The Hague: Nijhoff. Padoch, C. and N. L. Peluso (eds) (1997) Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Peletz, M. (2002) Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Peletz, M. G. (1988) A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property and Social History among the Malays of Rembau. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Peletz, M. G. (1996) Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pemberton, J. (1994) On the Subject of ‘Java’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Persoon, G. A. (1994) Vluchten of Veranderen: Processen van Verandering en Ontwikkeling bij Tribale Groepen in Indonesië. Leiden: University of Leiden Doctoral Thesis. Picard, M. (1996) Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture. Singapore: Archipelago Press. Picard, M. and R. E. Wood (eds) (1997) Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Purdey, J. (2004) Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996−1999. Leiden: KITLV Press.

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Puri, R. K. (2005) Deadly Dances in the Bornean Rainforest: Hunting Knowledge of the Penan. Leiden: KITLV Press. Reuters, T. A. (2002) Custodians of the Sacred Mountains: Culture and Society in the Highlands of Bali. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rodenburg, J. (1997) In the Shadow of Migration: Rural Women and Their Households in Northern Tapanuli, Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press. Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980) Knowledge and Passion: Llongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosaldo, R. (1980) Ilongot Headhunting, 1883−1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rousseau, J. (1990) Central Borneo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a Stratified Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rubinstein R. and L. H. Connor (eds) (1999) Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rudie, I. (1994) Visible Women in East Coast Malay Society: On the Reproduction of Gender in Ceremonial, School and Market. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Russell, S. D. and C. E. Cunningham (eds) (1989) Changing Lives, Changing Rites: Ritual and Social Dynamics in Philippine and Indonesian Uplands. Michigan Studies in South and Southeast Asia, 1. University of Michigan: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies. Rutherford, D. (2003) Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rutten, R. (1982) Women Workers of Hacienda Milagros: Wage Labor and Household Subsistence on a Philippine Sugarcane Plantation. University of Amsterdam, Anthropology−Sociology Centre, South and Southeast Asia. Rutten, R. (1990) Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the Rural Philippines: Making a Living and Gaining Wealth in Two Commercialized Crafts. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Sanday, P. (2002) Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sather, C. (1997) The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of Southeastern Sabah. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Schiller, A. (1997) Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Watson, C. W. and R. Ellen (eds) (1993) Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. White, B. (1983) ‘Agricultural Involution’ and Its Critics: Twenty Years after Clifford Geertz. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. Wikan, U. (1990) Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago, IL: University Press. Wilder, W. D. (1982) Communication, Social Structure and Development in Rural Malaysia: A Study of Kampung Kuala Bera. London: Athlone Press. Williams, L. B. (1990) Development, Demography, and Family Decision-making: The Status of Women in Rural Java. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Winzeler, R. L. (1995) Latah in Southeast Asia: The History and Ethnography of a Culture-bound Syndrome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winzeler, R. L. (ed.) (1997) Indigenous Peoples and the State: Politics, Land, and Ethnicity in the Malayan Peninsula and Borneo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wolf, D. L. (1992) Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wolters, O. W. (1982) History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program. Woodward, M. R. (1989) Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Yamashita, S. (2003) Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism. Oxford: Berghahn. Yamashita, S. and J.S. Eades (eds) (2002) Globalization in Southeast Asia: Local, National and Transnational perspectives. Oxford: Berghahn. Yu, E. S. H. and W. T. Liu (1980) Fertility and Kinship in the Philippines. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Zerner, C. (1994) ‘Through a green lens: the construction of customary environmental law and community in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands’, Law and Society Review, 28 (5): 1079–1122.

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2.10 Australasian Contrasts Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry

In the history of anthropology, different groups of people have had a central place in the production of anthropological theory at different periods because of the light their social and cultural practices were thought to throw on universal questions relating to the nature of human sociality. Between c.1870 and c.1914 Aboriginal societies and cultures held this position for the light they were believed to shed on social evolution, and between the 1940s and the 1970s the New Guinea Highlands held a focal place not just because of the large, dense populations that had remained unknown to European colonizers for so long, but because they challenged prevailing ideas about the relationship between residence, descent, leadership and the transactional basis of corporate identity. Maori societies and cultures, on the other hand, have not held a similar central place in anthropological theorizing, although in the past New Zealand has been seen as a model of race relations. In this chapter, we cover developments in anthropological work in Melanesia, New Zealand and Australia in separate sections because the trajectories of research and writing in each have been markedly different. No longer are the indigenous cultures of these three countries central to the production of grand social theory, although writing and research in each area engages with, and from time to time, plays a significant role in

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disciplinary-wide anthropological debates and theorizing. Academic anthropology in all three areas was initiated and largely carried out by Anglophone anthropologists trained in structural functionalism. However, from the mid-1970s it has moved into the mid-Atlantic as American-trained scholars took up teaching positions in New Zealand and Australia. Today, anthropology is not organized in terms of particular theoreticalschools, nor is it the home of a distinctive theoretical paradigm, but is as eclectic and fragmented as the world of international scholarship into which it is integrated. In all three areas the politics of research have become increasingly complex but whereas it is increasingly difficult for anthropologists to work in some areas of Melanesia because of a decline in law and order, anthropologists as consultants in Aboriginal land claims are in high demand in Australia. In contrast, anthropology among Maori in New Zealand has declined as Maori claims are founded on historical grievances that require historians more than anthropologists.

AUSTRALIA Nicolas Peterson It is difficult to characterize the foci of social anthropological research over the

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three decades from 1980 to 2010, other than in respect to land, except to say that there has been an increase in publication over the previous decades and a rise in the importance of applied anthropology. Research has been stimulated by two factors. The establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1961 with a remit to encourage the documentation of the distinctive aspects of Aboriginal life ‘before it was too late’, and from the mid1970s, land and heritage legislation that requires detailed anthropological evidence for its implementation, creating in the process a huge increase in applied work. So far with the new century there has been a change in emphasis, away from monographs focusing mainly on aspects of what can loosely be called ‘traditional’ life, or continuity within change, to those that are more directly concerned with contemporary life, policy and understanding the socio-economic situation of Aboriginal people today, and why, in general, their material and health circumstance are so poor. While all of the publications are relevant to understanding the present, demographic factors such as a dramatic change in the ratio of old people to young, because of ill-health, means that life in remote communities, in particular, is undergoing particularly rapid change at present, because over half of the population is under 25 years old. For the purposes of exposition, the literature can be divided into that relating to land and sea issues, that focusing on aspects of distinctive practices that show continuity with the past and usually give the state and the non-Aboriginal world only a small place, studies that may loosely be labelled urban and community studies, and a small group that focuses directly on issues relating to policy and change. In what follows I will focus on published books, with the occasional reference to significant articles. Much excellent work, including unpublished theses, will consequently go unmentioned.

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LAND AND SEA ISSUES Since the late 1970s, anthropologists, especially those working as applied anthropologists, have been in very high demand. This relates directly to the requirements of various pieces of legislation and the changed views of the legal system. It was the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwth) that stimulated the demand for anthropologists to research claims to unalienated crown land, which amounted to around 27% of the Territory. Nancy Williams (1986) analyses the background to this legislation by examining the first test of native title in 1971 on the basis of a case brought by the Yolngu/Murngin people of Yirrkala and provides her own account of Yolngu land tenure to show how the court misconstrued it. Preparing claims required identifying traditional owners as defined by the Act, mapping sites on the claimed land and preparing genealogies. Other heritage protection legislation, some subsequent state statutory land rights legislation, and the Native Title Act of 1993 have also meant the demand for anthropologists has remained high. An overview of the state of play in land rights in 1980 is provided in a volume edited by Nicolas Peterson and Marcia Langton (1983). Land claim research had a huge impact on the study of land tenure and precipitated widespread debate as well as many unpublished local ‘case studies’. Debate focused on whether the Act’s definition of traditional owner was too strongly influenced by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s patrilineal descent model of land tenure and canvassed alternatives. Kenneth Maddock was the first to write about the relationship between the Act and anthropological understandings in a book (1980, see also 1983), but Ian Keen’s analysis (1984) of the concept of traditional owner as it appeared in the Act, in a volume edited by Hiatt (1984) in which Hiatt discusses the relationship between traditional land tenure and contemporary claims, attracted more attention. In 1986 Nicolas

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AUSTRALIA

Peterson contributed to the debate with a monograph, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: a band perspective’, that approached the issues of land ownership from the perspective of the evidence of actual land use. The huge body of information produced in these claims has, inevitably, been influenced by the demands of legislation and very little of it has been published. One exception is Robert Layton’s study of Uluru (1986), and in 2003 Geoffrey Bagshaw published the text he prepared for a native title claim for the Karajarri, which gives a good indication of the structure and nature of such reports. The demand for anthropologists received a second fillip with the High Court Mabo decision in 1992, which after 204 years indicated that the Australian legal system could recognize the existence of Aboriginal property rights from prior to colonization provided they could prove they had not been legitimately extinguished. Peter Sutton, who had published an important book criticizing a new tribal map and book on Aboriginal ‘tribal’ boundaries in 1995, produced the first comprehensive anthropological engagement with native title by formulating a new generalization about the nature of relations to land in settled Australia within the context of a major review of the literature on land tenure (2003). In 1998 Peterson and Rigsby published the first detailed accounts from around the continent on customary marine tenure.

CONTINUITY WITHIN CHANGE Published monographs increased dramatically in number from the 1980s as the impact of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (as it is now called) fundingof social anthropological research began to bear fruit. The great majority of studies were carried out with people in the Northern Territory, despite there being substantial traditionally oriented populations in both Western Australia and Cape York.

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Two studies are of a general nature. There is Les Hiatt’s elegantly written book (Hiatt, 1996) about the place of Australian ethnography in the evolution of social anthropology, in which he brilliantly reviews debates around eight key issues, that is a must read for anybody with a serious interest in the classical tradition of Australian anthropology. Ian Keen’s (2003) comparison of seven groups living in diverse environments across the continent is an extremely thorough empirical analysis that helps answer the question of to what extent there was a commonality in the precolonial way of life. Its masterly summaries are a great resource. Early in this period was Diane Bell’s, Daughters of the Dreaming, the first ethnography written from a feminist perspective (1983), which has been enormously influential but needs to be read in the light of commentary on it (e.g. Merlan, 1988). The most influential book of the decade, however, was Fred Myers’ Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (1986), which was the first fully fledged cultural account of any group, analysing Pintupi life in terms of the tension between autonomy and relatedness. The other major works of this decade mainly came from Arnhem Land. These included Jon Altman’s (1987) detailed study of work and time allocation among an outstation population in central Arnhem Land that obtained almost all of its protein from the bush while buying its carbohydrates with social security monies (see also Betty Meehan’s ethnoarchaeological study 1982); and three books based on research at Yirrkala with Yolngu/Murngin people − Jan Reid’s (1983) medical anthropology study, Howard Morphy’s (1984) study of a mortuary ritual to accompany a film of the ritual and Nancy William’s study of dispute management (1987). In the same decade, Jeremy Beckett (1987) published his ethnography from the Torres Strait in which he recast his earlier doctoral research in the frame of welfare colonialism. In 1988 Australia celebrated its bicentenary. In the anthropological world this was

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marked by the publication of a collection of essays overviewing the main fields of research (see Berndt and Tonkinson, 1988), which is an extremely useful introduction to the literature covered. In the build-up to the celebrations, and in the years since, there has been a great growth of interest in Aboriginal art with the consequence that the 1990s saw several important publications, beyond the many catalogue essays that have appeared and are still appearing. Howard Morphy has published three books on this topic: a foundational ethnography of the place of art among the Yolngu/Murngin at Yirrkala (1991), an overview of Aboriginal art across the continent (1998) and, most recently, a book about the transition of Aboriginal painting from ethnographic to art object (2008). Luke Taylor published an ethnography of western Arnhem Land painters and painting (1996); and Christine Watson a book on women’s painting in the western desert (2003); Fred Myers (2002) has provided a richly detailed account of how desert painting has received recognition in international art circles. Two other publications deal with northern Arnhem Land culture in a rather different way. There is a fascinating indigenous auto-ethnography (book and CD) collected by Les Hiatt from Frank Gurrmanamana, a Gidjingarli speaker (Hiatt and McKenzie, 2002), and a very well illustrated book of Donald Thomson’s time in Arnhem Land from 1935 to 1943, which is important as the best visual ethnography of Aboriginal life of one group from more or less beyond the frontier, from anywhere on the continent (Thomson, 2003). At the same latitude but from just west of Darwin there is Elizabeth Povinelli’s Labor’s Lot (1993), which is an innovative study of women’s work and how sweat and language link them to the land, and a challenge to dividing economy from culture. Other publications relating to the tropical north are two fascinating books on southeast Arnhem Land by Victoria Burbank adding to the literature on women’s lives: the first on female adolescence (1988) and the second on anger and aggression (1994). More recent are two

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ethnographies relating to music and song: Allan Marett’s (2005, with CD) brilliant Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: the Wangga of North Australia, which comprehensively describes a single genre of music from southwest of Darwin, and Fiona Magowan’s (2007) study of emotion, landscape and mourning in Yolngu women’s songs. Despite Aboriginal religious life clearly undergoing rapid change with much to be documented, ethnographic studies are few and far between because concerns about secrecy on the part of both Aboriginal people and anthropologists have made this once common topic increasingly difficult to work on. Eric Kolig (1981, see also 1989) wrote an early and insightful account of the changes taking place in Aboriginal religious life based on research in the Fitzroy Valley in Western Australia. Ian Keen (1994) provides a rich account of Yolngu religion as practised in the 1980s, working in the same location as Lloyd Warner. Three important studies of aspects of desert religious practice have been written by Francophones. Barbara Glowczewski and Francoise Dussart both worked with Warlpiri people, Glowczewski focusing on Aboriginal cosmology (1991; also CD), while Dussart focused on politics in women’s ritual (2000). Sylvie Poirier, who originally published her book on the role of dreams among the Kukatja in French (1996), now has a revised version in English (2005). A book by Father Peile (1997) on Kukatja conceptions of health contains a good deal that is relevant to cosmology and is a useful source book. Following his retirement, David McKnight published four books relating to the lives of people on Mornington Island. While somewhat idiosyncratic, they are all full of rich ethnographic detail. Three deal with aspects of contemporary social and cultural life. The first (1999), deals with systems of classification, the second (2004) with kinship marriage and disputes in which the influence of the mission is much in evidence, and the third (2005) with violence and sorcery − the latter being by far the most detailed account from Australia. These books make the culture

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and social organization of the Lardil, along with that of the Yolngu and the Warlpiri, among the best documented in Australia. Other significant books that have appeared in this period included Deborah Rose’s The Dingo Makes us Human (1992), a highly empathetic general ethnography of people in the Victoria River District; Adam Kendon’s (1988) detailed and technical account of Warlpiri sign language, with its fine concluding chapter on features of Aboriginal communication systems; Veronica Strang’s (1997) comparison of Aboriginal and station owners’ relations to the landscape in western Cape York; and Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s monumental salvage ethnography of the Yaraldi (1993) collected between 1939 and 1943. In the same period as covered by this survey, numerous linguistic studies have been published, many with rich cultural information. Particularly significant is an edited volume, Languages of Kinship in Aboriginal Australia (Heath et al., 1982).

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New South Wales at Kempsey, Domesticating Resistance (1989). A unique study is Marika Moisseeff’s detailed survey of the Davenport community in South Australia, with rich information on most aspects of life there, including what people read and listen to (1999). Gillian Cowlishaw has published two books that fall within this category, the first on race relations in western New South Wales (1988) and more recently a book that uses a journal-like format to describe her fieldwork among one fraction of the Aboriginal population of western Sydney, giving not only an impression of life there, but raising a wide range of issues (Cowlishaw, 2009). Two edited volumes fall within this category: Jeremy Beckett’s Past and Present (1988), looking at the construction of Aboriginality, and Ian Keen’s collection of essay on urban life, Being Black (1988).

CONTEMPORARY SITUATION, POLICY AND CHANGE URBAN AND COMMUNITY STUDIES These have been few and far between. The earliest in this period is Basil Sansom’s highly original ethnography of a fringe drinking camp on the outskirts of Darwin (1980), which is based on an ethnography of speaking. The challenges of working in such urban environments have deterred many researchers and the monographs under this category are limited. Francesca Merlan’s (1998) study of the Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory town of Katherine examines the nature of their use of town space, developing the now influential concept of the ‘intercultural’. David Trigger’s ethnography of a remote mission community focuses (Trigger, 1992) on relations of accommodation and resistance with the missionaries, reminding one of Robert Tonkinson’s earlier study on a similar theme (1974). Barry Morris also wrote in the resistance paradigm in his historically oriented and Foucauldian study of Aboriginal people on the central coast of

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The principal source of data on the presentday economic situation of Aboriginal people, especially in remote Australia, is to be found in the many discussion papers, research reports and monographs published (virtually all available for free on-line) by the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. This Centre is an index of the concern about Aboriginal life circumstances, which are summed up by the fact that their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of other Australians. In From Hunting to Drinking, David McKnight (2002) documents one, but only one, of the root causes for the devastating changes he has seen over a thirty year period, in his study of the impact of the introduction of alcohol to the Mornington Island community. This should be paired with Maggie Brady’s (1992) ethnographic study of petrol sniffing. Gillian Cowlishaw’s (1999) Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas looks at

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shifts in policy and public opinion as they have impacted on a remote Northern Territory cattle station and ask why nothing quite works out as intended. In her interesting but flawed book, The Cunning of Recognition, Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) argues that the state has at last come to recognize Aboriginal rights but it has done so in such a way that it undermines the bona fides of that recognition by imposing a narrow criterion of authenticity. In an innovative study, Tess Lea (2008) provides an ethnography of the culture of the health bureaucracy in Darwin as it deals with Aboriginal health issues, looking at co-dependencies and the situation of the helping Whites (see also the work of Kowal, e.g. 2008). Yasmine Musharbash’s (2008) widelyread ethnography of Warlpiri women’s lives, while not directly dealing with policy, examines how the core values of intimacy, immediacy and mobility underwrite people’s lives. It is unique in dealing with the mundane of the present in a way no other ethnographies do. One that comes close is Diane AustinBroos’s Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past (2009), but the writing strategy here is rather different in skilfully weaving past and present together to provide a series of soundings of change in aspects of the people’s lives. A controversial and brave book dealing with the huge social problems in Aboriginal communities is Peter Sutton’s Politics of Suffering (2009), which has done a great service in making it possible for people to talk about just how bad things have become in the last three decades and address such difficult issues as the place of social and cultural practices in reproducing them. Given the significance of missions to running remote Aboriginal communities up until the 1970s it is surprising how little has been written about Aboriginal Christianity. The only published study is by Heather McDonald (2001) among people who were principally members of an Assemblies of God congregation in a small town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

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CONCLUSION As in other regional anthropologies, much of the theoretical debate has taken place in journal articles. The principal journals in which such material is found are Oceania, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Anthropological Forum, Social Analysis, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal Studies, but, of course, some highly relevant articles are found in the principal international journals also. Space has not left room to mention many books, especially edited collections, nor has attention been paid to the history of anthropology in Australia. MELANESIA Don Gardner The anthropological fortunes of Melanesia (and of ‘Melanesia’) have ebbed somewhat since it last seemed to have a special place in the discipline; its initial association with Malinowski’s and Mauss’s impacts on the way we thought about social life, and then its legendary diversity, which − especially with the opening up of the New Guinea highlands − easily evoked notions of a ‘natural laboratory’, in which general formulations might be put to the ethnographic test, in settings exposed but lightly to Western colonialism, now seems to many to be iconic of anthropology’s darker side: the term ‘Melanesia’, as Lederman puts it, ‘has come to stand for anachronism’ (1998: 437). So, despite the fact that concerns with cultural change, the mechanisms by which it unfolds and what it produces, occupy a prominent place in the discipline at large, detailed studies of globalization’s work among Melanesian peoples that it had hitherto more or less ignored or marginalized, are regarded as ‘unfashionable’, or beside the contemporary anthropological point (Knauft, 1999; Robbins, 2004). Today, most specialists working in the region find Foster’s question both important and

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difficult − ‘How to think about the place of “Melanesia” and Melanesia “the place” in the era of globalization?’ (1999: 141). Nevertheless (and as exemplified by the authors already cited) the anthropology of Melanesia continues to attract ethnographically engaged, theoretically adventurous researchers and, through them, remains an important voice in the conversations of the discipline. Accordingly, publications on the region wax steadily and organizations centred on Melanesian anthropology thrive (even if the tenor is sometimes defensive): for example, the official blog of the Melanesia Interest Group (of the American Anthropological Association) reports that the 2008 AAA meetings featured three panels and thirty papers on Melanesian topics (Bell, 2008). As a corollary to these facts, we should say that this overview has no pretensions to comprehensiveness. We doubt, too, that all readers will find it impartial. We do hope, though, that we can indicate both the main currents in Melanesian anthropology and why opinions about our discussion might be divided. The association of ‘Melanesia’ with colonialism and its values is acknowledged and regretted by most regional specialists (Thomas, 1989). If the name still sometimes evokes arguments about lineage theory, ceremonial exchange, exotic ritual practices, cargo cults, cultural ecology and aggressively egalitarian political processes, one might suggest that essentialism about regional configurations is no less in need of scrutiny than essentialism about ethnonymically designated populations living within them. In truth, and as recent work also implies, ‘Melanesia’ was always better thought of as designating a set of socio-historical processes, inflected by the dynamics of relations within and between localities, rather than a mosaic of culturally distinguishable, internally homogeneous social formations. Indeed, even Malinowski’s pioneering work concerned a ‘total social’ pattern linking quite different culturally definable populations and its place in the dynamics of one of them.

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As Lederman reminds us, the geographical contiguity of culturally identifiable groups implies relationship, not homogeneity (1998: 430), as well as border zones rather than boundaries (Bashkow, 2004; Rumsey, 2009). Lederman could have cited in support the eminent geographer of the region, Harold Brookfield: surprised by his Lorentz curves of the distribution of population densities, he warned that despite the ecological, cultural and linguistic diversity that obtained in Melanesia, ‘we have to … regard the very large number of local small communities as local, open systems, all interconnected and aggregated into a wider system that can only notionally be bounded at the edges of Melanesia, or of any one territory within Melanesia’ (1971: 77). And while ethnographers were restricted to particular and sometimes remote, small-scale Melanesian populations, they invariably developed a perspective on the embeddedness of such populations in larger areal and regional contexts. Local communities were almost always encompassed by networks of general social relations (not just in respect of trade and exchange) that extended through space and time in ways that affected local relations in significant ways and constituted the patterns directing regional flows. A rehearsal of the region’s empirical characteristics − even those of its prehistory − indicate an unusually daunting cultural complexity, but Melanesian anthropology, as much as any other identifiable sub-field, has faced knotty questions of interpretation and reflexivity over the last twenty five years. Fardon’s general introduction to an important collection (1990) on regional traditions in anthropology begins with a consideration of its confusion in the face of what he dubs ‘the critique of representation from power’, which portrayed a discipline that had ‘necessarily reproduced versions of assumptions deeply embedded in a predatory European culture’; while it revealed the extent to which ‘artifices of imagination in the service of power’ had inflected traditional disciplinary

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preoccupations, it left unclear to what extent the world-distorting ‘mists’ could be dispersed or seen through (Fardon, 1990: 5−6). At that point, Fardon referred to Marilyn Strathern’s contribution to that volume, on Melanesia, which gave expression to a perspectivethat has done much to inflect subsequent anthropological research in the region. That perspective can be usefully referred back to the point already made about the mid-Atlanticization of anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century, which was initially an aspect of a shift sometimes characterized as one from ‘function to meaning’ (and which provided an agreeable basis for the rapprochement to both sides). In Melanesia, this shift took a rather particular form, one that raised the region’s profile once more, at a point when pragmatic concerns and the broader ‘historic turn’ of the social sciences looked set to erase it further. The Melanesian turn to meaning, we might say, occurred just as many other regions of social science were embracing historical−critical approaches; the upshot was a productive dialogue about theoretical orientations that also has some sharp edges, which derive from the largely implicit question of what form a properly reflexive anthropology should take. In 1978 (after her work on the Melpa had already attracted considerable attention), Marilyn Strathern was ‘struck sideways’ (Strathern, 1994) by reading Roy Wagner’s The Invention of Culture (1975). By the 1980s, Wagner’s (David Schneider inspired) questioning of the more usual ways of portraying Melanesian societies, formulated in monographs and essays, was already very important to the ongoing research in the region. Nevertheless, Strathern’s reading of his general treatise − in the feminist context of the times − set her on a course that resulted in her highly influential, enigmatic The Gender of the Gift (1988). That book, and subsequent work following the same trajectory, established Strathern as a major anthropological figure and helped Melanesia maintain a general profile that it might have lost. She and Wagner and their colleagues have exercised an

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influence over recent Melanesianist anthropology it would be difficult to exaggerate; their writings have directly and indirectly set the theoretical orientation and analytical tone for a generation of scholars of Melanesia. The distinction between ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’, as Josephides (1991) designated Wagner/Strathern inspired perspectives, and ‘New Melanesian History’, as Foster (1994) dubbed orientations that saw such approaches as too ‘essentialist’ (Thomas, 1991; Carrier, 1992), has animated the anthropology of Melanesia over the last two decades: so while one side worries about the debilitating ethnocentrism implicit in our basic analytical categories, the other is concerned to avoid Melanesian versions of Orientalism. The differences here are aspects or refractions of wider debates and tensions in anthropology since its various turns to meaning and its making, history and power (Lederman, 1998; Foster, 1999; Knauft, 1999;); there are, though, many who consider that there is room for compromise, as is attested by the extent to which Melanesian anthropology has been in dialogue with Sahlins’s various thoughtful efforts to bring together structuralism and sensitivity to historical processes (Robbins, 2004; Robbins and Wardlow, 2005). It is not surprising that differences of perspective concerning the comparative explanatory significance of local versus broader forces should play a prominent role within Melanesian anthropology. In addition to the perennial background issue of ‘structure and agency’ and general but vague anxieties about ‘determinism’, the region’s sheer diversity at the local level and layers of interconnectedness on broader scales tends to encourage some degree of specialization by individual scholars. The conventional picture remains eloquent: of the various identifiable geo-political units conventionally brought under the term Melanesia − New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji − the first mentioned dominates demographically, areally and in terms of the proportion of

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languages found within its borders. If the Indonesian provinces are excluded, Papua New Guinea’s population represents more than five of the roughly seven million Melanesians, but it has the smallest proportion of urban residents (Storey, 2006: 5); more than 90% of the total land area is found within PNG’s borders, as are the great majority of the estimated 1,200 languages of the region (Pawley, 2003). With numerous, often high, mountain ranges the region is topographically very diverse, so that climatic and ecological variation is highly significant despite the region’s proximity to the Equator, a fact reflected in the variation and distribution of subsistence regimes. Connectedly, local populations vary greatly in size and density, as do sizes of settlement across the region; however, perhaps as much as half of New Guinean settlements numbered fewer than 300 residents (Allen, 1983). These numerous and culturally variegated localities were nevertheless connected through social and economic relations of varying scope; while interpersonal links grounded in friendship or enmity, kinship, affinity and ritual relations may have been locally dense and viscous, chains of trade and exchange (in practices and information as well as material items) associated local populations over wide areas. In this context, linguistic and other contrasts at work across an area represent only one dimension of the connections between its component populations. Conversely, but as a corollary of the fact of social (including economic) interaction across zones of cultural contrast, differences between linguistically and culturally identical populations of a local area, in their access to ecological resources, secure alliances, trade partners, etc., were sometimes significant even in the short historical term. Over the medium and longer run, they were invariably relevant to the ebb and flow of a community’s fortunes and its identity. While Lederman is right that concentration on the paradigmatically exotic practices of Melanesia has tended to give others the impression that the anthropology of the region cherishes the

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old view of a ‘mosaic’ of cultures, some of which were literally confined to islands while the majority were sufficiently self-sustaining and autonomous that they too were ‘ethnographic islands’ (1998), she is also right that this is for the most part a misleading impression (it is still prevalent, though, in the popular media, eager for ‘stone-age’ exotica). And while even the sort of incantation about diversity I have just rehearsed − the number of languages, ecological diversity and so on − might also suggest that anthropologists of Melanesia think in terms of ethnographic islands, most would see the linguists’ dialect chain or continuum as a better approximation to socio-cultural reality. Indeed, a regional perspective on areal particularities seems quite general, rather than confined to those parts of Melanesia (e.g. Vanuatu, the Massim, the Wahgi valley, the Eastern Highlands, the Mountain Ok lands, the Sepik, the Angaspeaking territories, Fiji) where colleagues have explicitly addressed the issue. Even within these larger regional configurations, social relations between identity-maintaining units were of great significance to routine life and historical eventualities. As Lederman puts it: ‘Translocal microregionalism is an inescapable ethnographic reality’ (1998: 440). Moreover, in cases where the ethnography is general and deep and based upon different fieldwork trips over extended periods, the absence of cultural homogeneity is as apparent over time as it is across space. Yet, disciplines and sub-disciplines have their histories too, and the heyday of intensive, highly localized study in Melanesia seems behind rather than in front of us. It is a little unfortunate, though, that the rhetoric of cultural flows and the hortatory tones in which regional specialists sometimes urge one other to face the realities of a globalized world can persuade others (including younger Melanesianists) that we have only recently given up thinking of Melanesia as a sort anthropological nursery where delicate, dwarf cultures stood in splendid and variegated isolation waiting to be ethnographically immortalized.

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If the connectedness of local social units in Melanesia has always been significant for their historical trajectories − that it predates the advent of colonialism and other globalizing forces − then it must inflect the particularities of those processes too. As almost everyone who has read Sahlins agrees, the historical events eventuating from a culture’s encounter with a colonial or post-colonial regime are not prefigured by the encounter or the powers of the external forces; the process of ‘encompassing others’ that took place as the West colonized the Pacific was always multi-dimensional and operated in both directions, as LiPuma’s nice title (2000) is designed to indicate. The further point at issue here, though, is that if outcomes are underspecified by the macro-characteristics of colonial power, which are necessary but not sufficient factors for what eventuates from encapsulation, the particularities of time-space distanciation (to use Giddens’s phrase) in Melanesia suggest that the ‘culture in place’ is similarly a necessary but insufficient factor in the generation of specific historical outcomes (Foster, 2002). To phrase this in terms that might be acceptable to the followers of Sahlins and, say, Max Weber or Talal Asad, Melanesian pasts strongly suggest that historical process is a matter of parole and not just langue. Any number of studies, when considered in relation to this issue, demonstrate that position relative to other groups and to sources of valuables (from axes to shells to high-quality foods) was not an external or incidental aspect of social life (Strathern, 1971; Feil, 1987; Hughes, 1978; Roscoe, 1988; Harrison, 1993). These considerations suggest that how Melanesians (among others) construe encapsulating regimes, and how their construals will incline a community to respond, are complex processes contingent upon such circumstances as where and how the community is embedded in existing social fields, as well as how it is located in relation to whatever infrastructural or institutional resources are subsequently set up (roads, airstrips, police posts, mission stations,

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schools, etc): even subgroup affiliation, age and gender may be relevant to how what is sometimes called (misleadingly, perhaps) the ‘cultural logic’ works itself out historically. In short, in neither the pre- nor post-colonial social networks of Melanesia did a shared culture suffice to produce a shared fate. This is made clear time after time, not only in respect of the past and contemporary concerns such as health, schooling and other dimensions of the state’s role, but also in respect of religious congregation, consumption patterns and the quality of social relations between communities, genders and generations (Foster, 2008). As already indicated, the contemporary profile of Melanesia strongly reflects anthropology’s responses to what Lederman calls ‘shifting scholarly alliances and an altered sense of the world’ (1998: 428); research on topics that index concern with transnational flows, global markets, and the ambitions of the state and its partners, focus upon their role in emerging patterns of production, consumption and identity formation (as hybridized or creolized); transformations of personhood and forms of sociality are analysed in relation to the new alignments, possibilities and restrictions associated with intra- and transnational projects (undertaken by governments, international donors, NGO’s and religious organizations as well as by transnational corporations). Analysis is often couched in terms of ‘modernity’, but there are differences between scholars on whether this notion is better used in the plural than the singular (Hirsch, 2001; Foster, 2002; Barker, 2006). Given the extent to which the rest of the world has increased its interest in Melanesia − its mineral and forest resources, its ‘weak governments’, its unsaved souls − it is not surprising that scholars are concerning themselves with broader processes rather than the role of local communities in their encompassment. So, in addition to the strongly interpretive approaches to Melanesia, there are others grounded in questions about the more obviously political economic downstream

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effects of encapsulation; these too are focused at different levels − local, regional, national and international. Here resource exploitation and the transformationof the always difficult health profiles of Melanesian populations present particularly urgent questions. Past, present and future conflicts associated with mining and logging weigh heavily on Melanesia, as do questions about the epidemiology of HIV, and these are reflected in important parts of the academic literature in addition to being a focus for applied anthropology in the region. Studies relating to governance, gender relations and landowner issues are among the most conspicuous foci. In these and related areas, researchers must concern themselves with international treaties, conventions and institutional instruments, and the international political arena they index, as well as with local currents and their histories. Nevertheless, issues such as mining, logging and property rights (real and intellectual), no less than health, education and the possibilities for gender relations, still engage local Melanesian ideas about the constitution of humans and their proper social relations. Accordingly, in Melanesia much of the most striking recent research concerns the interpretive complexities that the commonplaces of contemporary Melanesia embody, and many of the differences between anthropologists and their interests are matters of emphasis rather than substance. It would be wrong, therefore, to divide those who focus on the connections between local and extralocal contexts from those who dwell lovingly on the view − in all its particularity − that the world assumes from a specific Melanesian place. Similarly, though, it would be wrong to ignore the divides that exist in the theoretical orientations of Melanesianists, which, of course, impact upon the pictures researchers construct. Even the new analytical departures and their vocabularies − with their focus on the various ‘routes’ between Melanesian and other destinations − nevertheless have a familiar feel when one considers the ethnographic particulars. One might expect this when

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contemporary specialists address such topics as ‘cargo cults’ (Lattas, 1998; Jebens, 2004; Otto and Thomas, 2009), but the robustness of Melanesian continuities is general. Melanesian life-worlds retain the capacity to discomfit those of us who still take myth for history and do not know, or have forgotten, Mauss’s (Melanesia-inspired) denaturalization of our cherished ideological categories (including those of his famous uncle). Melanesian Christians, landowners, politicians, business leaders and even Melanesian criminals (Reed, 2003; Goddard, 2005) bespeak the particularities of their heritage no less than their connection within globalized networks. It is not that contemporary Melanesian lives still suggest the ubiquity of enchantment, but that they constitute an ironical response to some of the dominant conceits about the disenchanted nature of globalization itself.

NEW ZEALAND/AOTEAROA James Urry All New Zealanders are aware they are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The ancestors of Maori arrived from Polynesia less than 1,000 years ago and sustained European contact began in the late eighteenth century. This contact first involved explorers, then missionaries and finally settlers. The warfare, land confiscations and a dramatic drop in population in the nineteenth century had a devastating effect on Maori communities. Today, New Zealand has a population of about 4.3 million, of whom over 600,000 identify as of Maori descent. The rest of the population are of mainly European descent, although significant populations from other Pacific islands and increasingly from Asia are located mainly in urban areas, especially Auckland. This section will concentrate on recent anthropology of Maori. Maori are spread throughout the rural and urban population and − while some still live within their ‘tribal’ (iwi) areas, especially in

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the North Island − the majority are urban dwellers, some without any or strong affiliation with their ‘tribes’. Maori are also spread throughout the social structure but are overrepresented in lower socio-economic groups. Ethnological studies of Maori began in the nineteenth century and have included academicMaori researchers, notably Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) and Hugh Kawhura. A number of anthropologists were born in New Zealand (Diamond Jenness, Raymond Firth, Reo Fortune, Felix Keesing, Ernest Beaglehole and Derek Freeman), but all except Beaglehole pursued careers abroad as the academic discipline of anthropology was established in New Zealand only after the Second World War. Until recently many academic appointees in anthropology departments came from abroad and older New Zealand-born academics completed their higher degrees overseas. Some of these, most notably Joan Metge, studied Maori, and some new appointments from abroad took up the study of Maori once in New Zealand. The first departments of anthropology contained a Maori aspect in their title and/or emphasis but since the 1980s separate ‘Maori studies’ units have been established (Mead 1997b), staffed mostly by Maori, many without a background in anthropology. This trend, combined with the increased political nature of studying, writing and teaching on Maori (Smith, 1999), has resulted in a decline of research and teaching on Maori in anthropology departments to the extent that courses on the topic are no longer offered and few members specialize on Maori.

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT Linguists and prehistorians view their studies of Maori within wider Pacific/Polynesian contexts, but the Maori’s particular experience of European colonization raises more New Zealand-focused concerns. This reflects how Maori view their condition. For Maori the more recent past is of most relevance in their lives, a past in the present for the future

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involving political, economic as well as issues of identity. Critical to this view are claims before the Waitangi Tribunal, a parliamentary body established by parliament in 1975 to investigate and make recommendations for the resolution of breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 agreement between the Crown and Maori that made Maori full British subjects. As these claims concern mainly historical issues, the research uses mostly historians, unlike in Australia where Aboriginal land claims centre on anthropological issues and involve anthropologists. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that anthropologists have recognized the importance of this connection between past, present and future for Maori (van Meijl, 1995) or that many anthropological studies, in one way or another, have a historical slant. These include studies of particular regional groups conducted through ethnographic research (Sissons, Hongi and Hohepa, 1987; Sissons, 1991, 2001; van Meijl, 1991, 1995, 2006b). Maori emphasis on a rather vague and sometimes idealized past has been criticized in the sense that it posits a non-specific ‘tradition’ which appears to change with circumstances. Since the 1980s the terms for Maori ways/customs has shifted from Maoritanga to taha Maori, with the current term being Maori tikanga, suggesting that nothing changes faster than tradition. The relevance in the present of ‘traditional’ Maori social and cultural forms (Mead, 1997a), however, continues to inform many accounts. Although Metge’s early work was concerned with Maori urban migration, her overview of Maori society (1967, revised 1976) assumes a continuity of tradition base as do her later, more detailed studies of Maori customs (1986, 1995, 2001). Metge’s lifetime’s aim has been to improve crosscultural communication among New Zealanders (see essays in 2010), but emphasizes Maori differences rather than similarities with the larger population. Although Alan Hanson was the joint author of a work that posited timeless Maori customs (Hanson and Hanson, 1983), he later

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controversially critiqued the idea of a traditional society, drawing on Hosbawm and Ranger’s (1983) term ‘the invention of tradition’ (Hanson, 1989; see also the responses by Levine 1991; Linnekin, 1991 and Hanson’s replies). Similar issues concerning tradition have been raised in a number of subsequent papers but with different emphases and consequences without creating quite the same controversy (van Meijl, 1991, 2002; Sissons, 1993, 1998a, 1998b). Anthropological approaches in this area reflect Maori emphases on the past, mainly predicated on issues involving Maori− European settler interactions that help explain the present (Sissons, 2004). Some clearly deal with post-colonization transformations of local groups involving prophet movements (Webster, 1979; Hanson, 1990; Sinclair, 2002). Others involve a wide range of issues, including education, health and identity. Anne Salmond, who in her earlier work (1975) made major contributions to understanding modern Maori society, in recent years has turned to periods of initial contacts between Maori and Europeans (1991, 1997, 2003). In this, she has joined the great anthropological rush back to the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Pacific, encouraged by Marshall Sahlins and others. She selects a variety of early explorer’s accounts to create an ‘ethnography’ of the Maori ‘world’ at contact, which she interrogates as an ethnographer and with a ‘if I were a horse’ approach (here ‘if I were Maori of the period’). While this presents an integrated picture of Maori society, the contrasting ‘European world’ tends to be negative and based on a shallow reading of sources. Furthermore, the strictures of historical interpretation are avoided and the theoretical bases of her writings are weak (see Munz, 1994 and Salmond’s reply, 1994). This emphasis on the past has seen a decline in ethnographic research or writing on contemporary Maori society. While in the 1960s and 1970s a number of ethnographic accounts, often of rural Maori communities, appeared, along with collections of essays

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discussing changes in Maori society, little has appeared since. The work that has been done is often that of non-New Zealand academics who publish much of their work outside the country. As Maori rural communities have declined and increasing numbers of Maori live in urban areas, and are integrated into the class structure of New Zealand society, this lack of research and publication on modern communities is surprising (but see Tapsell, 2002; van Meijl, 2006b).

POLITICAL DIMENSIONS One major focus of anthropological writing on Maori since the 1980s has been concerned with politics and political issues. Maori have long been involved in politics, in the nineteenth century creating their own alternative institutions to colonial government of which the still extant King movement among the Tainui people is the most important. But Maori also became involved in national politics, and since 1887 separate Maori seats have existed in parliament. Sir Apariana Ngata, a minister of Native Affairs in the 1920s and 1930s, was a keen supporter of ethnological research, and the current minister of Maori Affairs and co-leader of the Maori Party, Pita Sharples, has a doctorate in social anthropology from Auckland University. Recent concerns with political issues have largely been influenced from two sources. First, there is the issue of what is often called the Maori renaissance, a rather loose term applied to everything from Maori art and culture (see below) to the emergence of new leaders (van Meijl, 1997) and the reassertion of Maori in economic affairs and local and national politics. Secondly, and closely related to economic and political issues, is the work of the Waitangi Tribunal and the subsequent outcomes of its recommendations involving settlements between the Crown and groups of Maori. One important aspect of this is the early recognition by the Crown of Maori fishing rights (see Levine, 1987; van Meijl, 2006a). Other claims have

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proved more problematic (Goldsmith, 2009; Levine, 2010). Where land, resources and large sums of money have been awarded, they have transformed patterns of leadership, the shape of Maori organizations and economic development; some of these issues have been examined for one group, the Tainui, by the Dutch anthropologist van Meijl (see 1991, 1994, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2003). The politics of identity and use of the term ‘culture’ to suggest an entirely distinctive Maori world in a situation where they are clearly integrated into the structure of modern New Zealand society (as in ‘biculturalism’) have also been examined (van Meijl, 1998; Levine, 2002, 2005; Goldsmith, 2003, 2005; Gershon, 2008). Recently, some Maori Studies units in universities have added the term ‘indigenous’ to their programme’s name to indicate an alignment with the cultural politics of indigenous groups on a global scale (Goldsmith, 2002; Sissons, 2005).

ART AND PERFORMANCE OLD AND NEW An older ethnological tradition that emphasized material culture has continued in museums more than universities. The contextual basis of such research, however, now extends beyond objects, technology and ethnological studies to include social and cultural issues. This is most strongly represented in studies of Maori art, which reveal differences in approach already recognized in other areas involving Maori. There is a ‘traditionalist’ approach, which links ancient, historical and contemporary objects into a continuity based around alleged classical forms. This builds on an earlier wave of neo-traditionalism in Maori society, in part influenced by Ngata in the 1920s and 1930s (Sissons, 2000). A new wave was initiated by an exhibition of Maori art that was toured outside New Zealand in the 1980s (Mead, 1984). The second approach is to examine the creative response in art and building initiated through contact with Europeans, some of which was suppressed

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by neo-traditionalism (Neich, 1993, 1997, 2002). The third combines this historical approach with a consideration of modern Maori art (Thomas, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2009). In terms of Maori performance, studies of Maori music also range from emphasizing the traditional to the creative adoption of new forms and their presentation (McLean, 1996). The role of the kapa haka, or Maori challenge, performed everywhere from schools to international sporting events and Maori cultural events, including competitions, has been discussed (see Murray, 2000; Condevaux, 2009).

A DEARTH OF THEORY Much anthropological writing on Maori appears to be theoretically weak if not devoid of theory. Local writers have used general frameworks of explanation from outside New Zealand effectively (for a recent example, see Sissons, 2010), but others appear merely as followers of anthropological fashion. Some New Zealand anthropologists, spurred more by cultural nationalism than intellectual enquiry, have suggested a need to develop a ‘local’ anthropology (Salmond, 1985; see also the comments of Rimoldi and Rimoldi, 1999) to the exclusion of non-New Zealander ideas and anthropologists. It has even been suggested that local theory be based on Maori instead of Eurocentric concepts. Such views involve not just a dearth of theory but the death of theory. In a number of papers published between the late 1970s and the 1990s Steven Webster criticized how anthropologists portrayed Maori: the lack of theory in much of their work and the need for a more rigorous approach to research (see his collected writings: Webster, 1998). While Webster’s comments caused a reaction and some debate, this has not been sustained, in part because his Marxist emphasis is no longer fashionable but also because he left New Zealand. More recently, in anthropology journals, Elizabeth Rata (2003, 2005) has questioned

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the lack of critical research on Maori, and by Maori, but she works in education not anthropology. With the lack of new ethnographic research and anthropological forums to discuss and debate the study of Maori within New Zealand it would seem that the subject has largely been surrendered to other disciplines. However, there are signs of profitable interaction between anthropologists and historians, and art historians and others, although whether this will lead to any major theoretical contributions to the ‘discipline only time will tell.

CONCLUSION There is a sense of intellectual colonialism in viewing anthropology both of and in New Zealand as being centred on the study of Maori. In fact, ethnographic research and anthropological discussion within New Zealand is mainly concerned with other topics that reflect more general trends in anthropology. For those working at home, these include ‘ethnic’ settlers other than Maori and their descendants (although sometimes including Maori; see Božic´ -Vrbancˇic´ , 2005) and a range of ‘cultural’ aspects of society.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Australia Altman, J. 1987. Hunter-gatherers Today: An Aboriginal economy in north Australia. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Austin-Broos, D. 2009. Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, violence and imagination in indigenous central Australia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Austin-Broos, D. and Macdonald, G. (eds) 2005. Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Bagshaw, G. 2003. The Karajarri Claim: A case-study in native title anthropology. Sydney: University of Sydney, Oceania Monograph No. 53.

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Beckett, J. (ed.) 1988. Past and Present: The construction of Aboriginality. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Beckett, J. 1987. Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, D. 1983. Daughters of the Dreaming. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Berndt, R. and Berndt, C. 1993. A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray river and the lakes, South Australia. Melbourne: Migunyah Press. Berndt, R. and Tonkinson, R. (eds) 1988. Social Anthropology. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Brady, M. 1992. Heavy Metal: The social meaning of petrol sniffing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press Burbank, V. 1994. Fighting Women: Anger and aggression in Aboriginal Australia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burbank V. 1988. Aboriginal Adolescence: Maidenhood in an Australian community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cowlishaw, G. 1988. Black, White or Brindle: Race in rural Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowlishaw, G. 1999. Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A study of racial power and intimacy in Australia. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Cowlishaw, G. 2004. Blackfellas, Whitefellas and The Hidden Injuries of Race. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Cowlishaw, G. 2009. The city’s outback. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Dussart, F. 2000. The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, gender, and the currency of knowledge. Washington DC: Smithsonian Press. Glowczewski, B. 1991. Du rêve à la loi chez les Aborigènes: mythes, rites et organisation sociale en Australie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Heath, J., Merlan, F. and Rumsey, A. (eds) 1982. Languages of kinship in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney, Oceania Linguistic Monograph No. 24. Hiatt, L. and McKenzie, K. 2002. People of the Rivermouth: The joborr texts of Frank Gurrmanamana. Canberra: National Museum of Australia (with CD). Hiatt, L. R. (ed.) 1984. Aboriginal Landowners: Contemporary issues in the determination of traditional Aboriginal land ownership. Sydney: University of Sydney, Oceania Monograph No. 27. Hiatt, L. R. 1996. Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the evolution of social anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Keen, I. 1984. A question of interpretation: the definiton of ‘traditional Aboriginal owners’ in the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act. In L. Hiatt (ed.), Aboriginal Landowners. Sydney: University of Sydney, Oceania Monograph No 27, pp. 24−45. Keen, I. (ed.) 1988. Being Black: Aboriginal cultures in ‘settled’ Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Keen. I. 1994. Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion: Yolngu of north-east Arnhem Land. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Keen, I. 2003. Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the threshold of colonisation. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Kendon, A. 1988. Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, semiotic and communicative perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolig, E. 1981. The silent Revolution. Philadelphia: ISHI. Kolig, E. 1989. Dreamtime Politics: Religion, world view and utopian thought in Australian Aboriginal society. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Kowal, E. 2008. The politics of the gap: Indigenous Australians, liberal multiculturalism, and the end of the self-determination era. American Anthropologist 110 (3): 338−348. Layton, R. 1986. Uluru: An Aboriginal history of Ayers Rock. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Lea, T. 2008. Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hears: Indigenous health in northern Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. Maddock, K. 1980. Anthropology, Law and the Definition of Australian Aboriginal Rights to Land. Nijmegen: Catholic University. Maddock, K. 1983. Your Land Is Our Land: Aboriginal land rights. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books. Magowan, F. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and emotion in northern Australia. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Marett, A. 2005. Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The wangga of north Australia. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. McDonald, H. 2001. Blood, Bones and Spirit: Aboriginal Christianity in an East Kimberley town. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McKnight, D. 1999. People, Countries, and the Rainbow serpent. New York: Oxford University Press. McKnight, D. 2002. From Hunting to Drinking: The devastating effects of alcohol on an Australian Aboriginal community. London: Routledge.

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McKnight, D. 2004. Going the Whiteman’s Way: Kinship and marriage among Australian Aborigines. Aldershot: Ashgate. McKnight, D. 2005. Of Marriage, Violence and Sorcery: The quest for power in northern Queensland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Meehan, B. 1982. Shell Bed to Shell Midden. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Merlan, F. 1988. Gender in Aboriginal social life: a review. In R.M. Berndt and R. Tonkinson (eds), Social Anthropology and Australia Aboriginal Studies. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, pp.15−76. Merlan, F. 1998. Caging the Rainbow: Places, politics, and Aborigines in a north Australian town. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Moisseeff, M. 1999. An Aboriginal Village in South Australia: A snapshot of Davenport. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Morphy, H. 1984. Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest. Canberra: AIAS. Morphy, H. 1991. Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morphy, H. 1998. Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon. Morphy, H. 2008. Becoming Art: Exploring cross-cultural categories. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Morris, B. 1989. Domesticating Resistance: The Dhan-Gadi Aborigines and the Australian state. Oxford: Berg. Musharbash, Y. 2008. Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary life in remote Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Myers, F. 1986. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, place and politics among western desert Aborigines. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Myers, F. 2002. Painting Culture: The making of an Aboriginal high art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peile, A. 1997 Body and Soul: An Aboriginal view. Melbourne: Hesperian Press. Peterson, N. 1986. Aboriginal Territorial Organization: A band perspective. Sydney: Oceania Monograph No. 30. (In collaboration with J. Long.) Peterson, N. and Langton, M. (eds) 1983. Aborigines, Land and Land Rights. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Peterson, N. and Rigsby, B. (eds) 1998. Customary Marine Tenure in Australia. Sydney: Oceania Monograph No. 48. Poirier, S. 1996. Les jardin du nomade: cosmologie, personne et territorie dans le désert occidental australien. Muster: Lit.

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Poirier, S. 2005. A World or Relationships: Itineraries, dreams, and events in the Australian western desert. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Povinelli, E. 1993. Labor’s lot: the power, history and culture of Aboriginal action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Povinelli, E. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reid, J. 1983. Sorcerers and Healing Spirits. Canberra: ANU Press. Rose, D. 1992. The Dingo Makes us Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sansom, B. 1980. The Camp at Wallaby Cross. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Strang, V. 1997. Uncommon Ground: Cultural landscapes and environmental values. New York: Oxford University Press. Sutton, P. 1995. Country: Aboriginal boundaries and land ownership in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal History Monograph No. 3. Sutton, P. 2003. Native title in Australia: An ethnographic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, P. 2009. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Swain, T. 1993. A Place For Strangers: Towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, L. 1996. Seeing the Inside: Bark painting in western Arnhem Land. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomson, D. 2003. Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Tonkinson, R. 1974. The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal victors of the desert crusade. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Tonkinson, R. 1991. The Mardu Aborigines: Living the dream in Australia’s desert, 2nd edn. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Trigger, D. 1992. Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal responses to colonialism in northern Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, C. 2003. Piercing the Ground. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Williams, N. 1986. The Yolngu and Their Land: A system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Williams, N. M. 1987. Two Laws: Managing disputes in a contemporary Aboriginal community. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

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Melanesia Bibliographical note Space is restricted, so many important works are unlisted, but they should appear quickly to anyone following up those listed below. Other important omissions are the works of colleagues writing in languages other than English. As noted, publications on Melanesia appear with increasing frequency, but organizations like the Melanesia Interest Group, the Association for Social Anthropology of Oceania and the European Society for Oceanists run websites, discussion lists or blogs that greatly facilitate the collegial exchange of information. There are also online bibliographies on Melanesia: for example, Terry Hays’s comprehensive (to 2003) and multilingual bibliography of New Guinea is available on Papua Web (http:// www.papuaweb.org/bib/hays/ng/intro.html) and the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies maintains bibliographies and syllabi relevant to Melanesia (http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/psi/index.html). The ANU’s Resource Management in AsiaPacific Program makes its highly topical publications available for download (http:// rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/publications.php); the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia program does the same (http://rspas.anu.edu. au/melanesia/publications.php). Allen, B. J. 1983. Human geography of Papua New Guinea. Journal of Human Evolution 12: 3−23. Allen, M. 1981. Vanuatu: Politics, economics and ritual in island Melanesia. Sydney: Academic Press. Ballard, C. and Banks, G. 2003. Resource wars: the anthropology of mining. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 287−313. Barker, J. 2006. Modalities of modernity in Maisin society. In Sandra Bamford (ed.), Embodying Modernity and Post-modernity: Ritual, praxis and social change in Melanesia. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 179−232. Barker, J. (ed.) 2007. The Anthropological Study of Morality in Melanesia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bashkow, I. 2004. A Neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries. American Anthropologist 106: 443−458.

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Bashkow, I. 2008. The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bell, J. 2008. Papers that engage with Melanesia at the 2008 AAA. Weblog. Melanesian Interest Group. At http://mignet.blogspot.com/2008/11/papers-thatengage-with-melanesia-at.html. Bonnemere, P (ed.) 2004. Women as Unseen Characters: Male ritual in Papua New Guinea. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brookfield, H. with Hart, D. 1971. Melanesia: A geographical interpretation of an island world. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Burt, B. 1994. Tradition and Christianity: The colonial transformation of a Solomon Islands society. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers. Butt, L. and Eves, R. 2008. Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, sexuality, and power in Melanesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Carrier, J. 1992. Introduction. In J. Carrier (ed.), History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Craig, B. and Hyndman, D. 1990. Children of Afek: Tradition and change among the Mountain-Ok of central New Guinea. Oceania Monographs No. 40. Sydney: Oceania Publications. Eriksen, A. 2008. Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu: An analysis of social movements in North Ambryn. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Fardon, R. (ed.) 1990. Introduction. In R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Feil, D. 1987. The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Filer, C. 1998. The Melanesian way of menacing the mining industry. In L. Zimmer-Tamakoshi (ed.), Modern Papua New Guinea. Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press. Filer, C. 2007. Local custom and the art of land group boundary maintenance in Papua New Guinea. In J. Weiner and K. Glaskin (eds), Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs, ANU E Press. Foster, R. J. 1994. Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary ritual, gift exchange, and custom in the Tanga Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, R. J. 1999. Melanesianist anthropology in the era of globalization. The Contemporary Pacific 11: 140−159.

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Foster, R. J. 2002. Bargains with modernity in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. Anthropological Theory 2: 233−251. Foster, R. J. 2008. Coca-globalization: Following soft drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gell. A. 1992. Inter-tribal commodity barter and productive gift-exchange in old Melanesia. In C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds), Barter, Exchange and Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gewertz, D. and Errington, F. 1999. Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The telling of difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gewertz, D. and Errington, F. 2010. Cheap Meat: Flap food nations in the Pacific Islands. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goddard, M. 2005. The Unseen City: Anthropological perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Canberra, Australia: Pandanus Books. Godelier, M. 1986. The Making of Great Men. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godelier, M. and Strathern, M. 1991. Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, S. 1990. Stealing People’s Names: History and politics in a Sepik River cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, S. 1993. The commerce of cultures in Melanesia. Man (ns) 28: 139−158. Hirsch, E. 2001. When was modernity in Melanesia? Social Anthropology 9: 131−146. Hirsch, E. and Strathern, M. 2004. Transactions and Creations: Property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia. New York: Berghahn Books. Healey, C. 1990. Maring Hunters and Traders: Production and exchange in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hughes, I. 1978. Good money and bad: inflation and devaluation in the colonial process. Mankind 11: 308−318. Hviding, E. 1996. Guardians of Marovo Lagoon: Practice, place, and politics in maritime Melanesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hviding, E. 2006. Knowing and managing biodiversity in the Pacific Islands: challenges of conservation in Marovo Lagoon. International Social Science Journal 58: 69−85. Jebens, H. (ed.). 2004. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Jolly, M. 1994. Women of the Place: Kastom, colonialism and gender in Vanuatu. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishing.

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Jorgensen, D. 2005. Third Wave evangelism and the politics of the global in Papua New Guinea: spiritual warfare and the recreation of place in Telefolmin. Oceania 75: 444−461. Jorgensen, D. 2007. Clan-finding and clan-making: legibility and the politics of identity in a Papua New Guinea mining project. In J. Weiner and K. Glaskin (eds), Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs, ANU E Press. Josephides, L. 1991. Metaphors, metathemes, and the construction of sociality: a critique of the New Melanesian Ethnography. Man 26 (1): 145–161. Kelly, R. 1993. Constructing Inequality: The fabrication of a hierarchy of virtue among the Etoro. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Knauft, B. 1999. From Primitive to Post-colonial in Melanesia and Anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Knauft, B. 2002. Exchanging the Past: A rainforest world of before and after. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lattas, A. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing race in bush Kaliai cargo cults. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Lederman, R. 1998. Globalization and the future of culture areas: Melanesianist anthropology in transition. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 427−449. Lemmonier, P. 2004. The hunt for authenticity: stone age stories out of context. The Journal of Pacific History 39: 79−98. Lindstrom, L. 1990. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lindstrom, L.1993. Cargo Cult: Strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Liep, J. 2009. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. LiPuma, E. 2000. Encompassing Others: The magic of modernity in Melanesia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Macintyre, M. 2006. Grass roots and deep holes: community responses to mining in Melanesia. The Contemporary Pacific 18: 215−231. Merlan, F. and Rumsey, A. 1991. Ku Waru: Language and segmentary politics in the western Nebilyer

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Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mosko, M. 2010. Partible penitents: dividual personhood and Christian practice in Melanesia and the West. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 215−240. Otto, T. and Thomas, N. (eds) 1997 Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Pawley, A. 2003. The need for a Pacific languages archive. In L. Barwick, A. Marett, J. Simpson and A. Harris (eds), Researchers, Communities, Institutions, Sound Recordings. The Sydney eScholarship Repository, University of Sydney. At http://hdl. handle.net/2123/1514 Reed, A. 2003. Papua New Guinea’s Last Place: Experiences of constraint in a postcolonial prison. New York: Berghahn Books. Rio, K. 2009. Subject and object in a Vanuatu social ontology: a local vision of dialectics. Journal of Material Culture 14: 283−308. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Robbins, J. and Wardlow, H. (eds) 2005. The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia: Humiliation, transformation and the nature of cultural change. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Roscoe, P. 1988. The far side of Hurun: the management of Melanesian millenarian movements. American Ethnologist 15: 515−529. Rumsey, R. 2009. The articulation of indigenous and exogenous orders in highland New Guinea and beyond. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 17: 47−69. Rutherford, D. 2003. Nationalism and millenarianism in West Papua: institutional power, interpretive practice, and the pursuit of Christian truth. In M. Engelke and M. Tomlinson (eds), The Limits of Meaning: Case studies in the anthropology of Christianity. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Smith, M. F. Village on the Edge: Changing times in Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Stasch, R. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Storey, D. 2005. Urban governance in Pacific Island countries: advancing an overdue agenda. State Society and Governance in Melanesia Discussion Papers No. 2005/7. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. At http://rspas.anu.edu.au/papers/ melanesia/discussion_papers/05_07_dp_storey.pdf

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Strathern, A. 1971. The Rope of Moka: Big-men and ceremonial exchange in Mount Hagen New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, A. and Stewart, P. 2000. Arrow Talk: Transaction, transition, and contradiction in New Guinea. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, M. 1990. Negative strategies in Melanesia. In R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Strathern, M. 1994. Intellectual roots. In R. Borofsky (ed.). Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Thomas, N. 1989. The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division. Current Anthropology 30: 27−41. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tuzin, D. 1997. The Cassowary’s Revenge: The life and death of masculinity in a New Guinea society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wardlow, H. 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality and agency in a New Guinea society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wagner, R. 1967. The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi clan definition and alliance in New Guinea. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, R. 1972. Habu: The innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, R. 1978. Lethal Speech: Daribi myth as symbolic obviation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weiner A B 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Weiner, J. 1988. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The mythological dimension of Foi sociality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

New Zealand (Aotearoa) Božic´-Vrbancˇic´, Senka 2008. Tarara. Croats and Maori in New Zealand: Memory,belonging, identity. Dunedin: Otago University Press. Condevaux, Aurelie 2009. Ma¯ori culture on stage: authenticity and identity in tourist interactions. Anthropological Forum 19: 143−161. Gershon, Ilana 2008. Being explicit about culture: Maori, neoliberalism, and the New Zealand parliament. American Anthropologist 110: 422 −431.

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Goldsmith, Michael 2002. Maori assertions of indigeneity, post-colonial traumatic stress disorder, and holocaust denial. In Erich Kolig and Hermann Mückler (eds), Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific: Recent problems of identity in Oceania. Hamburg: LIT Verlag, pp. 85−94. Goldsmith, Michael 2003. Culture, for and against: patterns of ‘culturespeak’ in New Zealand. Journal of the Polynesian Society 112: 280−294. Goldsmith, Michael 2005. Culture in safety and in danger. Anthropological Forum, 15, 257−65. Goldsmith, Michael 2009. Who owns native nature? Discourses of rights to land, culture, and knowledge in New Zealand. International Journal of Cultural Property 16: 325−339. Hanson, Allan F. 1989. The making of the Maori: culture invention and its logic. American Anthropologist 91: 890−902. Hanson, Allan F. 1990. Christian branches, Maori roots: the cult of Rua. History of Religions 30: 154−178. Hanson, F. Allan and Hanson, Louise 1983. Counterpoint in Maori Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, H. B. 1987. The cultural politics of Maori fishing: an anthropological perspective on the first three significant Waitangi Tribunal hearings. Journal of the Polynesian Society 96: 421−444. Levine, H. B. 1991. Comment on Hanson’s ‘The making of the Maori’ [with reply by Hanson]. American Anthropologist 93: 444−446. Levine, H. B. 2002. The Maori iwi: contested meanings in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In Erich Kolig and Hermann Mückler (eds), Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific: Recent problems of identity in Oceania. Hamburg: LIT Verlag, pp. 73−84. Levine, H. B. 2005. Moving beyond cultural essentialism, In James H Liu, T. McCreanor, T. McIntosh and T. Teaiwa (eds), New Zealand Identities: Departures and destinations. Wellington: Victoria University Press, pp. 104−117. Levine, H. B. 2010. Claiming indigenous rights to culture, flora and fauna. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33: 36−56. Linnekin, Jocelyn S. 1991. Cultural invention and the dilemma of authenticity [comments on Hanson (1989) with a reply by Hanson]. American Anthropologist 93: 446−450. McLean, Mervyn 1996. Maori Music. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

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Mead, Sidney Moko 1984. Te Maori: Maori art from New Zealand collections. Auckland: Heinemann. Mead, Sidney Moko 1997a. Landmarks, Bridges and Visions: Aspects of Maori culture. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Mead, Sidney Moko 1997b. Maori studies tomorrow: te Wananga i te Matauranga Maori. In Sidney Moko Mead (ed.), Landmarks, Bridges and Visions: Aspects of Maori culture. Wellington: Victoria University Press, pp. 21−38. Metge, Joan 1976. The Maoris of New Zealand: Rautahi, revised edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Metge, Joan 1986. In and Out of Touch: Whakamaa in cross cultural context. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Metge, Joan 1995. New Growth From Old: The Wha¯nau in the modern world. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington Press. Metge, Joan 2001. Korero Tahi: Talking together. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Metge, Joan 2010. Tuamaka: The challenge of difference in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Murray, David 2000. Haka fracas? The dialectics of identity in discussions of a contemporary Maori dance. Australian Journal of Anthropology 11: 345−357. Munz , Peter 1994. The two worlds of Anne Salmond in postmodern fancy-dress. New Zealand Journal of History 28: 60−75. Neich, Roger 1993. Painted Histories: Early Maori figurative painting. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Neich, Roger 1997. The emergence of the individual in Maori woodcarving: toward a Maori art History. Baessler-Archiv 45: 181−200. Neich, Roger 2002. Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngati Tarawhai woodcarving. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Rata, E. 2003. Late capitalism and ethnic revivalism, ‘a new middle age’? Anthropological Theory 3: 46−64. Rata, E. 2005. Rethinking biculturalism. Anthropological Theory 5: 267–284. Rimoldi, Eleanor and Rimoldi, Max 1999. The political definition of a discipline. In Eleanor and Max Rimoldi (eds), Backwaters Run Deep: Locating New Zealand social anthropology. Social Analysis 43, 6−32. Salmond, Anne 1975. Hui: A study of Maori ceremonial gatherings. Auckland: Reed. Salmond, Anne 1983. The study of traditional Maori society: the state of the art. Journal of the Polynesian Society 92: 309−331.

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Salmond, Anne 1985. Discourse and ethnicity: towards a local anthropology. Sites 13: 39−48. Salmond, Anne 1991. Two Worlds: First meetings between Maori and Europeans. Auckland and London: Viking Press. Salmond, Anne 1994. Antipodean crab antics. New Zealand Journal of History 28: 76−79. Salmond, Anne 1997. Between Worlds: Early exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773−1815. Auckland and London: Viking Press. Salmond, Anne 2003. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. Auckland: Penguin. Sinclair, Karen 2002. Prophetic Histories: The people of the Ma¯ramatanga. Wellington: Bridget Williams (published in North America as Maori Times, Maori Places. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Sissons, Jeffery (with Wi Hongi, W. and Hohepa, P.) 1987. The Puriri Trees are Laughing: A political history of Nga Puhi in the Inland Bay of Islands. Auckland: The Polynesian Society (Memoir 46). Sissons, Jeffery 1991. Te Waimana, the Spring of Mana: Tuhoe history and the colonial encounter. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Sissons, Jeffery 1993. The systematisation of tradition; Maori culture as a strategic resource. Oceania 64: 97−116. Sissons, Jeffery 1998a. Introduction: anthropology, Maori tradition and colonial process. Oceania 69: 1−3. Sissons, Jeffery 1998b. The traditionalisation of the Maori meetinghouse. Oceania 69: 36−46. Sissons, Jeffery 2000. The post-assimilationist thought of Sir Apirana Ngata. New Zealand Journal of History 34: 47−60. Sissons, Jeffery 2001. Nga Puriri o Taiamai: A political history of Nga Puhi in the Inland Bay of Islands. Auckland: Reed Books. Sissons, Jeffery 2004. Maori tribalism and post-settler nationhood in New Zealand. Oceania 75: 19−31. Sissons, Jeffery 2005. First Peoples: Indigenous cultures and their futures. London: Reaktion Books. Sissons, Jeffery 2010. Building a house society: the reorganization of Maori communities around meeting houses. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 372−386. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books and Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Tapsell, Peter 2002. Marae identity in urban Aotearoa New Zealand. Pacific Studies 25: 141−171.

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Thomas, Nicholas 1995. A second reflection: presence and opposition in contemporary Maori art. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1: 23−46. Thomas, Nicholas 1997. In Oceania: Visions, artifacts, histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thomas, Nicholas 1999. Possessions: Indigenous art, colonial culture. London: Thames and Hudson. Thomas, Nicholas (ed.) 2009 Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori carving, colonial history. Otago: University of Otago Press. van Meijl, Toon 1991. Political Paradoxes and Timeless Traditions: Ideology and development among the Tainui Maori, New Zealand. Nijmegen: Centre for Pacific Studies. van Meijl, Toon 1994. Maori hierarchy transformed: the secularization of Tainui patterns of leadership. History and Anthropology 7: 279−305. van Meijl, Toon 1995. Re-defining ideology in time: Maori crossroads between a timeless past and a new future. Anthropos 90(1−3): 1−16. van Meijl, Toon 1997. The re-emergence of Maori chiefs: ‘devolution’ as a strategy to maintain tribal authority. In Geoffrey M. White and Lamont Lindstrom (eds), Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific leadership and the postcolonial state. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 84−107. van Meijl, Toon 1998. Culture and democracy among the Maori. In Jürg Wassmann (ed.), Pacific answers

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to Western Hegemony: Cultural practices of identity construction. Oxford: Berg, pp. 389−415. van Meijl, Toon 2002. Culture and crisis in Maori society: the tradition of other and the displacement of self. In Erich Kolig and Hermann Mückler (eds), Politics of indigeneity in the South Pacific: Recent problems of identity in Oceania. Hamburg: Lit Verlag, Novara, pp. 47−71. van Meijl, Toon 2003. Conflicts of redistribution in contemporary Maori Society: leadership and the Tainui Settlement. Journal of the Polynesian Society 112: 260−279. van Meijl, Toon 2006a. Who owns the fisheries? Changing views of property and its redistribution in post-colonial Maori society. In Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. WIBER (eds), Changing Properties of Property. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 170−193. van Meijl, Toon 2006b. Multiple identifications and the dialogical self: Maori youngsters and the cultural renaissance. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 917−933. Webster, Peter 1979. Rua and the Maori Millennium. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Webster, Steven 1998. Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, theory and ideology in the Maori renaissance. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

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2.11 Two Indigenous Americas Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong

This chapter comprises two independently written sections: the first on indigenous North America by Pauline Turner Strong; the second dealing with indigenous South America by Kathleen Lowrey. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas share compelling similarities in terms of historical encounters and contemporary situations; however, the two regions have been dealt with in profoundly different ways by anthropology. This chapter illustrates that diversity of approaches to understanding indigenous societies throughout the Americas and their different places in the anthropological imagination. [M.N.]

NORTH AMERICA1 Pauline Turner Strong The communities constituting Native North America remain culturally diverse and politically complex. In 2005, there were 561 federally recognized Indian tribes, including some 200 Alaskan Native villages, in the United States.2 An additional 48 tribes were recognized by states but not by the federal government. Over four million individuals (approximately 1.5% of the total US population) identified themselves as American Indian or Alaskan Native on the 2000 census.

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About two and a half million of these, comprising 1% of the total US population, claimed ‘single race’ status; the remainder reported mixed ancestry. The Native American population is growing quickly, with a third of its members under the age of 18. Almost half of those identifying as Native American live in urban areas (Harvard Project, 2008: 6−7, 79, 351; Wilkins, 2002: 259−271). Native American communities are still recovering from the devastating impact of settler colonialism.3 Although some Native groups remain in their ancestral lands, many were dispossessed. The 110 million acres held by Native tribes and individuals are often scattered and under complicated jurisdiction; many sacred sites are outside tribally controlled areas. Economic growth remains uneven, with the median household income of Native Americans in the lower 48 states comprising only 58% of the overall American median household income. Serious health disparities persist, with elevated rates of depression and high rates of death from liver disease, diabetes, and suicide (Harvard Project, 2008: 6−9, 95−111, 219; O’Nell, 1996: 4−5). An increasing number of American Indians are professionals, but overall rates of educational attainment remain low compared to those of other ethnic groups (Harvard Project, 2008: 199−218). Many Native languages are endangered: only 4% of

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reservation residents report speaking a Native language, and less than a quarter of the 200 indigenous languages still spoken in North America had a significant number of young speakers (Goddard, 1996: 3−4; Harvard Project, 2008: 283; Silver and Miller, 1997). But these statistics present an overly bleak picture. Overcoming historical practices of genocide, dispossession, and assimilation, indigenous peoples have demonstrated considerable resiliency and are now benefiting from decades of political activism (Cobb and Fowler, 2007; Johnson, Nagel and Champagne 1997; Nagel, 1996). Tribal nations are asserting political and cultural sovereignty; working to reclaim land, artefacts, and sacred sites; building sustainable economies; operating their own educational, judicial, health, and social welfare institutions; and revitalizing their languages and cultures (Jorgenson, 2007). Over the last four decades these efforts have been enabled (if also constrained) by hard-won federal legislation governing American Indian civil rights, self-determination, religious freedom, child welfare, gaming, and repatriation.4 In accordance with these developments, current anthropological research centres on sovereignty and self-representation, cultural property and cultural heritage, cultural and linguistic revitalization, and cultural identity and community − topics that are also at the heart of the interdisciplinary field of Native American Studies (Kidwell and Velie, 2005). This chapter offers a selective analysis of innovative ethnographic literature on these topics in the context of dramatically transformed conditions of knowledge production.5

SCHOLARLY KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION Ethnographic research on Native North America has been significantly impacted by indigenous critiques, disciplinary selfreflection, and the increased number and influence of American Indian anthropologists. Following Vine Deloria’s biting critique of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins

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(1969), anthropologists have worked to establish a more relevant and accountable discipline (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997; Strong, 2005a). American Indian anthropologists such as Beatrice Medicine (1972a, 1972b, 2001) and Alfonso Ortiz (1972a, 1972b) were active in reshaping the discipline, pioneering a move towards native ethnography as they conducted research on their own or closely related communities. Among non-Indian anthropologists, Sol Tax developed ‘action anthropology’ (Foley, 1999), Nancy Lurie turned away from the ethnographic present to studies of ‘the American Indian today’ (Levine and Lurie, 1968), and Dell Hymes (1972) coordinated efforts to ‘reinvent anthropology’ as a more critical and liberating discipline (Clemmer, 1972). The appraisals and projects of the 1960s and 1970s were part of a discipline-wide ‘crisis of representation’ that eventually transformed the field.6 As part of renewed claims to political and cultural sovereignty, tribal governments and cultural officials have taken a more active role in directing and regulating ethnographic research. Reservation communities that previously hosted generations of anthropologists without tribal oversight have developed their own Institutional Review Boards; other Native peoples control ethnographic research through tribal councils, colleges, or research centres (Brugge and Missaghian, 2006; Hernandez, 2004). Some indigenous groups restrict research on religious topics (Bucko, 2004), while many direct researchers towards issues of local concern (Field, 2004). In responding to internal and external critiques, and to changed conditions for ethnographic research, anthropologists working in Native North America have developed reflexive, collaborative, dialogical, activist, and multi-sited approaches to research. Reflexive work includes critical analyses of the role that representations of Native peoples have played in colonial and nationalist projects (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997; Strong, 2004), as well as in subversive ones (Whitely, 1998, 2004). Dialogical and collaborative approaches

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(Lassiter, 2005; Tedlock, 1983, 1999) address critiques of ethnographic authority (Clifford, 1983), while activist research responds to demands that anthropologists address issues of concern to Native peoples (Field, 2004; Field and Fox, 2007). Multi-sited research (Marcus, 1998) allows anthropologists to consider pan-Indian and transnational phenomenon. Historians of anthropology have pointed to the seeds of current research trends in the Americanist tradition of narrative-based research with American Indian collaborators.7 Other scholars have emphasized disjunctures, pointing to dramatic shifts in ethnographic research and writing as anthropologists have interfaced with the fields of Native American Studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studies − bringing critical race theory, a heightened concern with power and resistance, and ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (Smith, 1999; Strong, 2005a) to their ethnographic work.8

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH, CULTURAL PROPERTY, AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE The power of collaborative research is exemplified in a number of recent ethnographies, including Les Field’s Abalone Tales (2008), the product of multiple research partnerships that Field established with scholars, elders, and leaders of the Ohlone, Pomo, Karuk, Hupa, Yurok, and Wiyot peoples. This book considers cultural, spiritual, economic, and political meanings of the abalone mollusc, both historically and in today’s cultural revitalization and tribal recognition efforts. Employing a polyphonic writing style, Field and his co-authors discuss the role of abalone and the spirit being known as Abalone Woman in traditional culture; environmental degradation and cultural extinction; and repatriation, tribal recognition, and cultural recovery efforts. Previously a book such as this might have interpreted abalone as a master symbol or trope of Native identity in

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northern California; Field and his collaborators explicitly reject such a totalizing account, offering instead a kaleidoscopic array of interpretations as well as critical reappraisals and appropriations of classical ethnographic research. Multivocality has proven to be an ideal form for collaborative representations, and even makes its way into the title of T.J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh’s History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (2006). An ‘archaeological ethnohistory’ of the San Pedro Valley, this book contains narratives from tribal researchers from the O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and Western Apache tribes, all of whom consider the valley an ancestral place. Another collaborative work, Wiyaxayxt/Wiyaakaa’awn/As Days Go By: Our History Our Land, and Our People − The Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla, has a trilingual title (Columbia River Sahaptin, Nez Perce, and English) befitting its agenda of offering ‘multiple voices, none uniquely authoritative’ (Karson, 2006: vii). Edited by an anthropologist employed by the Confederated Tribes’ cultural centre, the book contains sections written by various tribal officials, elders, and scholars as well as nonIndian scholars, and moves from oral traditions to contact history to modern enactments of sovereignty. Like Abalone Tales and History Is in the Land, it illustrates how a polyphonic style of representation is ideal for conveying multiple perspectives within and between Indian tribes.9 Repatriation is the topic of another important collaborative work, Blessing for a Long Time: The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Tribe by anthropologist Robin Ridington and the Omaha historian Dennis Hastings. Blessing for a Long Time chronicles the repatriation in 1989 of U’mon’hon’ti, or Venerable Man, from the Peabody Museum, where he was deposited a century earlier by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche and his mentor, Alice Cunningham Fletcher. Like other collaborative efforts, this book has an unusual structure: the authors describe the

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book as a ‘circle of stories from the life of U’mon’hon’ti’ (Ridington and Hastings, 1997: xvii), and employ some of the conventions of Native American poetics, such as repetition. The return of cultural artefacts and human remains are the product of a century-long movement that culminated, in the United States, in the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 (Fine-Dare, 2002). Major milestones prior to the passage of NAGPRA include the return of Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) potlatch artefacts from the National Museum of Canada according to an agreement completed in 1967 (Clifford, 1997, 2004; Jacknis, 2002); the repatriation of the Ahayu:da or Twin War Gods from the Smithsonian Institution to Zuni Pueblo in 1987 (Merrill, Ladd and Ferguson, 1993); and the reclamation of 11 sacred wampum belts by the Six Nations from the National Museum of the American Indian in 1988 (Landsman, 1997). These cases and others have been analysed in accounts that problematize previous anthropologists’ collecting practices while at the same time attending to the complexities of culturally appropriate possession and use within indigenous communities. The contested ownership of human remains is explored in ethnographic accounts of the controversy over the Ancient One/Kennewick Man and the remains of the Yahi man known as Ishi. The product of activist anthropology, Orin Starn’s Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last ‘Wild’ Indian (2004) tracks the repatriation and reburial of the remains of Ishi, revered as an ancestor by many Native people in California, and well known to anthropologists because of his work with A.L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir. Starn’s book explores conflicting demands of science and humanity, as well as conflicting indigenous claims to Ishi’s remains.10 While Starn’s story ends with a reburial, the remains of the Ancient One/Kennewick Man, inadvertently unearthed in 1996 near the Columbia River, remain in a university museum. These remains

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were the subject of a NAGPRA claim by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and other tribes, which was denied by the ninth circuit court of appeals in 2004. This case exposed tensions between Native American communities and some archaeologists and physical anthropologists, and led to questions about the adequacy of NAGPRA’s provisions for establishing cultural connections between prehistoric remains and contemporary communities (Burke et al., 2008; Thomas, 2000; Zimmerman, 2004). The question of ownership goes beyond repatriation and reburial, as Michael Brown (2003) discusses expansively in Who Owns Native Culture?, a survey of global disputes over intellectual property, including the copyrighting of indigenous images and ideas (Coombe, 1998), the use of indigenous botanical knowledge (Barsh, 2001), and the protection of indigenous sacred sites and cultural heritage. Arguing for the notion of a global commons, Brown expresses reservations about the commodifying and essentializing effects of cultural protection policies. Brown’s view is contested by others,11 including Peter Nabokov (2006), whose book, Where the Lightning Strikes analyses one of the sites Brown discusses, Devil’s Tower or Bear Butte. In this multi-sited ethnography Nabokov aims to promote greater understanding of and respect for emergence sites, ancestral routes, pilgrimage sites, and ceremonial sites across North America. Adopting the indigenous belief that sacred places are powerful animate beings, Nabokov offers 16 ‘biographies’ of sacred places, and explores the vulnerability of sites from Maine to southern California, despite the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. Nabokov’s book is similar in outlook to Keith Basso’s acclaimed Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996), which demonstrates how indigenous ethical principles are grounded in an intimate knowledge of place names and stories attached to place. Other recent works on language, place, and indigenous knowledge

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include James Collins’s (1998) analysis of the Tolowa’s efforts to maintain their language and lay claim to their lands through place names, narratives, songs, and the bureaucratic technologies of mapping, testimony, and petitions.12 Somewhat similarly, in Do Glaciers Listen? Julie Cruikshank (2005) offers a timely exploration of northern Athapaskan narratives about glacial movement and melting. Cruikshank is particularly concerned with the appropriative practice of translating indigenous stories into bureaucratic notions of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’. Among other recent critiques of subsuming Native environmental knowledges and practices into ecological terms is Shepard Krech’s controversial ethnohistory, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999).13

INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH SITES, SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY The hallmark of traditional ethnographic research − sustained and intensive participant− observation in local communities − remains a significant methodology. Today’s ethnographic fieldwork, however, often takes place in institutional settings, including tribal offices, courts, schools, cultural centres, and casinos. This is due in part to indigenous preferences: these tribally-controlled institutions have come to serve as ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1992) between Native communities and the outside world, and they are sites in which scholars can contribute to communitybased research without intruding on private life. At the same time, tribal institutions are ideal sites for the study of self-determination, economic development, self-representation, and the politics of identity. Research on contemporary tribal institutions often focuses on the politics of inclusion and exclusion, within tribes and in relation to surrounding communities. Thomas Biolsi’s (2001) Deadliest Enemies attributes racial hostility in South Dakota to the adversarial

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relations between the reservation and surrounding communities established by technologies of governance. In Blood Politics, Native American anthropologist Circe Sturm (2002) analyses tribal policies and attitudes regarding the Cherokee Freedmen (descendents of enslaved Africans) through the lens of critical race theory.14 An ethnography by Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert (2007) analyses the increased emphasis on official tribal membership that Choctaw nation-building has entailed. And Loretta Fowler’s ethnohistory of Cheyenne-Arapaho politics (2002) contrasts the conflict and hegemonic individualism apparent in the tribal government with the cooperative and counter-hegemonic discourse characteristic of powwow activities. Other important ethnographies derive from activist work with tribes seeking federal recognition. The politics of identity in the Mashpee tribal recognition case is well known through the work of James Clifford (1988) and Jack Campisi (1991). Gerald Sider’s (2003) ethnography of the Lumbee and Tuscarora focuses on the processes of social differentiation produced through the struggle for tribal acknowledgement as defined by the federal government (which requires a welldefined tribal roll and territory, and continuities in culture, history, and identity). Sara-Larus Tolley (2006) offers an analysis of the Kafkaesque federal acknowledgement process that is grounded in Foucault’s theory of governmentality, Gramsci’s theory of resistance, and Maidu theories about the workings of the trickster Coyote. Tribally-controlled schools, museums, and cultural centres are the subject of a number of institutionally-based ethnographies. Following monographs on identity formation in an Indian boarding school (Lomawaima, 1995) and a tribally-controlled community school on the Navajo Nation (McCarty, 2002), K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa McCarty have written a synthetic account of schooling, citizenship, and sovereignty in To Remain an Indian (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006). Full-length ethnographies on the tribal

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museums and cultural centres of the Makah, the Zuni, and the Mashantucket Pequot consider the representation of identity and authenticity (Bodinger, 2007), the politics of knowledge and secrecy (Isaacs, 2007), the redefining and ‘indigenizing’ of the museum (Erickson, 2002; Isaacs, 2007), and conflicts between indigenous and other institutions (Erickson, 2002), among other issues. A body of scholarship is emerging on the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC in 2004. Recent essays explore the museum as a product of activism and repatriation, a site for indigenous curatorship and community collaboration, and an imperfect expression of cultural sovereignty, indigenous voices and historical memory, and multiple indigenous identities (Lonetree and Cobb, 2008; Sleeper-Smith, 2009). These and other works in museum anthropology have been deeply influenced by Clifford’s (1988, 1997, 2004) work on self-representation in tribal museums in northern California, the Northwest Coast, and Alaska. Tribal museums have a long history (Child, 2009), but many today are part of tribal gaming and tourism enterprises. As of 2004, gaming was allowed by federally recognized tribes in 28 states (only 20 of which permitted casino-style gaming). Gaming brings in substantial revenue that has led to notable improvements in living conditions, education, and governmental services in many communities. Debates about Indian gaming have centred on social, economic, and environmental impacts; cultural authenticity; the uneven distribution of gaming income across tribes; and the implications for sovereignty of the state restrictions on gaming established in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (Cornell, 2008; Darian-Smith, 2004). In one of the few case studies of the impact of gaming, Jessica Cattelino (2008) tracks Seminole economic development from the first high-stakes bingo parlour to the ownership of the international corporation, Hard Rock. Cattelino uses this case to engage critically with leading theories of political

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sovereignty and globalization. Following Iris Marion Young’s (2001) theory of relational autonomy, Cattelino argues that the Florida Seminoles employ gaming to achieve political and cultural distinctiveness through relations of economic interdependency with surrounding settler communities, the state and federal government, other gaming tribes, and the global economy.15 Thomas Biolsi (2005) has offered a broad framework for conceptualizing American Indian struggles for sovereignty, delineating four ways in which indigenous political space is imagined in the United States: (1) the bounded space of the reservation; (2) traditional homelands beyond reservation borders, where tribes seek to share sovereignty over sites and resources; (3) a national indigenous space in which Indians claim pan-Indian rights; and (4) a hybrid political space in which dual citizenship is invoked. While sovereignty is most often framed in terms of the first spatial imaginary, American Indians have confronted the territorial limitations of tribal sovereignty by, for example, asserting fishing rights (Nesper, 2002), rights over water (Lambert, 2007), and rights to offreservation sacred sites (Nabokov, 2006; Tolley, 2006). American Indian activists have seized off-reservation lands, as in the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island (Nagel, 1996), and pursued rights to equal education as citizens under the US constitution (Baca, 2004). Indigenous political space is even more complicated, however. There is a fifth space, the global arena, in which indigenous peoples are shaping a common identity and struggle for common rights, as discussed in Ronald Niezen’s The Origins of Indigenism (2003). Following Cree activists from the reserve to the international arena, this work exemplifies the emerging multi-sited research on the indigenous rights movement.16 Significant ethnographies on contemporary manifestations of traditional practices continue to appear,17 but anthropologists are increasingly focusing on border crossing, indigenous alliances, and hybrid expressions of identity. David Samuels (2004) has considered the

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expression of Western Apache identity in country Western music, while Anthony Webster (2009) has explored the ethnopoetics of English and bilingual poetry by Navajos. Native Americans and the Christian Right by Andrea Smith (2008), a Cherokee scholar in the field of American Studies, explores “unlikely alliances” among indigenous evangelicals, feminists, and prison rights advocates. Finally, in Native Hubs the Winnebago anthropologist Renya Ramirez (2008) analyses the ways in which a transnational urban indigenous community creates a sense of belonging in the face of struggles over recognition and citizenship.18 Multi-sited and transnational research methodologies have clearly joined collaboration, reflexivity, activist anthropology, and native anthropology as productive ethnographic approaches to indigenous North America.

NOTES 1 The author is grateful to Annual Reviews in Anthropology and Blackwell Publishers for permission to incorporate short passages from earlier articles (Strong, 2004, 2005a), and to Hilary Davis for research assistance. 2 Indigenous peoples of Canada and Mexico are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The terms ‘American Indian’, ‘Native American’ (or ‘Native’), and ‘indigenous’ all have slightly different meanings; the first has a political and legal significance, but excludes the Inuit and Aleut peoples of Alaska; the second is prominent in scholarly and activist texts but less salient in everyday life; and the third is an emerging term with an international extension. Like much of the scholarship, this article employs all four terms according to the context. 3 Settler colonialism is a relatively new comparative framework for understanding indigenous histories and political economies. See, for example, Wolfe (1999). 4 The most significant US laws are the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act (1975), the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), the American Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988), and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) (Wilkins, 2002: 301−302). For the impact of the Indian Child Welfare Act on Indian communities, see Brown and Rieger (2001) and Strong (2005b); the impacts of the other laws are discussed below.

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5 This article generally discusses the most recent literature. For earlier examples, ethnohistorical topics, more extended discussions, and (in some cases) contrasting interpretations, see Biolsi (2004), Deloria and Salisbury (2002), DeMallie and Ortiz (1994), Strong (2004, 2005a), and Whiteley (2004). Sturtevant (1976−2008) is an encyclopaedic compilation of ethnographic and historical knowledge, largely produced before the transformations in scholarly knowledge production discussed in this chapter. 6 See Biolsi and Zimmerman (1997), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), and Strong (2004, 2005a). 7 See Behar and Gordon (1995), Bunzl (2004), Darnell (2001), Kan and Strong (2006a), Lassiter (2005), Valentine and Darnell (1999), Visweswaran (1995), and Whiteley (2004). 8 See Bauman and Briggs (2003), Biolsi (2004), Strong (1996, 2005a), Whiteley (1998), and Yanagisako (2005). 9 Other collaborative texts have developed out of the Americanist genre of life history. Correcting the appropriative conventions of authorship characteristic of earlier scholarship, feminist anthropologists such as Cruikshank (1990), Frisbie (Mitchell, 2001), McBeth (Horne and McBeth, 1998), and Schwarz (2003) have published accounts of Native women’s lives under joint authorship. 10 On Ishi, see also Kroeber and Kroeber (2003); on reburial, see Mihesuah (2000) and Zimmerman (1997, 2004). 11 See Jackson (2006) and Simpson (2007), among other reviews. 12 Other important activist work on linguistic revitalization includes Hinton (2002) and Hinton and Hale (2001). For other work on Native American languages, see Collins (2004), Darnell (2002), Silverstein (1996, 1998), and Mithun (1990). 13 On the controversy surrounding Krech’s book, see Hames (2007) and Harkin and Lewis (2007). 14 Other ethnographies concerning race relations include Brooks (2002) and Foley (1995). 15 On the relationship between tribal economies and the world economy, see also Biolsi (1992) and Pickering (2000) on the Lakota, Clemmer (1995) on the Hopi, and Faiman-Silva (1997) on the Choctaw. For other discussions of globalization and sovereignty, see Alfred (2002), Hanson (2004), Harring (2002), and Wilkins and Lomawaima (2001). 16 See also de la Cadena and Starn (2007) and Miller (2003). 17 Space limitations prevent discussing many important works on such topics as religion, gender, kinship, language, and expressive culture, but see Biolsi (2004), DeMallie and Ortiz (1994), Kan and Strong (2006b), Strong (2005a), and Whiteley (2004).

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18 Other research on transnational communities includes Burns (2001), Huhndorf (2009), Menchaca (2001), and Ortiz (2005).

SOUTH AMERICA1 Kathleen Lowrey Estimates of the earliest human presence in South America vary between 12,000 years BP (the ‘Clovis’ hypothesis posits a crossing of the Bering land bridge by hunter-gathering bands that continued a subsequent southerly migration on foot) and 32,000 years BP (a hypothesis suggesting the expansion of maritime-adapted hunter-gatherers edging down the Pacific coast using small watercraft). While ‘Clovis absolutists’ have recently given way in the face of definitive evidence for somewhat earlier settlement (Gilbert et al., 2008; Waters et al., 2011) at present the terms of this scholarly non-consensus do not entertain claims for any dates for human presence in the Americas previous to about 30,000 years ago. All parties to the ongoing inquiry agree that the entire native population of the Americas, South America included, originates from Northern Asia. The trend in estimates of the size of the native population of the Americas immediately before European contact, supported by the best available (and continually expanding) archaeological data, has consistently been upward. Archaeologist William Denevan’s (1976) figure of about 50 million people remains the number most widely cited in the literature. For South America alone, more recent estimates of the pre-Columbian population reach 25 million − which, if correct, would push the number for the entire Americas a good bit higher. As with the question of the original peopling of the Americas, there is at least a point on which ‘high count’ and ‘low count’ investigators agree: it is clear that the epidemiological impact of the European contact was devastating throughout the Americas, with mortality rates exceeding 90% in some areas. The bases (be they genetic, sociological, political,

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or some combination thereof) of variant susceptibility to European disease in different native populations are important but as yet under-studied problems. Certainly, the timing of this impact was uneven. While, for example, populations in the Andes − contacted in the early sixteenth century − began to rebound demographically as early as the eighteenth century, some populations in Amazonia − in many areas only subject to direct contact as late as the nineteenth and early twentieth century − reached their demographic nadirs as late as in the mid-twentieth century. The late twentieth century was for native peoples across the Americas an era of heartening developments: demographic, cultural, and political. Throughout the Americas, native populations are growing. In South America, the indigenous population is counted differently in different national censuses but arrives at more than 12 million people altogether (the total population of South America is around 385 million). Andean indigenous people make up the overwhelming majority of this figure, totalling more than 10 million persons. Lowland indigenous populations − so recently in steep decline − are rapidly growing (McSweeney and Arps, 2005) and very likely exceed one million persons. Quechua and Aymara people compose the majority of the Andean indigenous population; the lowland indigenous population is much more ethnically and linguistically diverse, including several hundred groups, some of which are extremely small and some of which number more than 100,000 people. Different South American countries, of course, have very different ethnic compositions. Bolivia is the one South American nation with a majority-indigenous population; in countries like Brazil and Argentina, the indigenous portion of the population is comparable to that in United States or Canada: well under 5%. Overall, however, in South America, as across the Americas, the trope of the vanishing Indian − still possessed of considerable traction in the popular and cinematic imagination − is well out of date.

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Nation after nation in South America has since the late 1980s implemented ‘multicultural’ policies, adopted bilingual education programmes, and witnessed a surge of transnational activism by indigenous citizens. These cultural and political developments have most spectacularly been marked in Bolivia, which in 2006 elected the first indigenous president in the Americas, Evo Morales. While such national-level ballot-box gains may be uniquely possible in Bolivia, the once-novel presence of indigenous political actors at the regional level and on the global stage is now familiar to South American citizens of all origins. South American native peoples have yet to make similar accomplishments in the economic domain. Throughout South America, being Indian still correlates strongly to living in poverty. The exceptional situations that do exist elsewhere in the Americas (income from casino gambling in the United States; income from oil and gas royalties in Canada and the United States) are viewed with considerable interest by indigenous organizations and politicians in South America but at present are nowhere replicated. Matching the demographic, cultural, and political attainments of the twentieth century with economic gains is likely to be a major twenty-first century challenge for South American native peoples. This chapter uses the terms ‘native’, ‘indigenous’, and ‘Indian’ interchangeably, though they have very different valences in different South American contexts. Shifting among them concedes that there is no single best vocabulary of reference or address regarding identity in the Americas. The term ‘Aboriginal’, frequently employed in Canada, is rarely heard in South America; neither are the phrases ‘American Indian’ or ‘Native American’ − often heard in the United States − used in South America. A fine discussion of the historical and political problems inevitably involved in labelling, self-appellation, and ethnonymy in South America may be found in Schwartz and Salomon (1999: 12−15).

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WHAT ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITIONS HAVE COME TO THE SOUTH AMERICAN MATERIALS? As review essays like those by Salomon (1985) or MacCormack (1999) make clear, many kinds of documents are valuable to understanding the pre- and peri-Columbian period in South America: travellers’ accounts, administrative documents, and in the Andes even a few documents produced by firstgeneration descendants of the Inca imperial system (generally, educated sons of Spaniards and aristocratic Inca women). These are rich resources, but the first systematic, philosophically informed attempts to make sense of native South American culture were by Jesuit, Franciscan, and Salesian missionaries − South America’s proto-ethnographers in that they formed part of a self-conscious tradition of enquiry, scholarly exchange, and speculative exegesis. While the interpretive frames applied (Biblical eschatology and hermeneutics, Catholic theology) do not possess present-day anthropological purchase, the encounter of Old and New World cosmologies animates the documents produced in that tradition and continues to inspire anthropological interest today. This august tradition is not entirely extinguished: Xavier Albó (S.J.) and Bartomeu Meliá (S.J.), for example, are two contemporary representatives whose works are read with serious appreciation by South American anthropologists, not least because these men carry on a long legacy of supreme linguistic competence and long-term fieldwork authority. After a long period of resolute insularity, toward the very end of the Spanish colonial period, the ‘Bourbon reforms’ of the late eighteenth century aimed to modernize administrative practice. To this end, the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt was among the first non-Iberian researchers permitted to visit Spanish South America. The monumental works that resulted (published across many years, from 1805 to 1851) were important both to the formation of ‘Creole’ identity in South America (that is,

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of Iberians born in the New rather than the Old World) and to the consolidation of a nineteenth-century tradition of enquiry that combined natural history with what we would today call ethnography. The first proper ethnographies would not, however, appear until the early twentieth century. What might be called the ‘Germanic’ approach − broadly construed to include Scandinavia − was important in this early period. Scholars like Rafael Karsten, Karl von der Steinen, Erland von Nordenskiöld, Curt Nimuendajú [Unkel], Theodor KochGrünberg, Max Uhle, Max Schmidt, and Branislava Susnik emerged from an intellectual tradition that engaged culture as Herderian Volksgeist. Their exhaustive compilations of oral narrative, material culture, myths, subsistence practices, social organization, history, and folklore generally remain extremely valuable. In several instances, these researchers’ documentary efforts were accompanied by what might be called today ‘advocacy’ on behalf of South American Indian populations. The legacy of this combined commitment can be seen in the work of northern European development organizations like Denmark’s International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and IBIS, Germany’s GTZ, the Netherlands’ SNV, and their project-associated anthropologists to the present day. In the years before the Second World War, French anthropologist Paul Rivet combined ethnography and linguistics with archaeological speculation about the settlement of the Americas and was a crucial institutional figure, helping to found the Musée de l’Homme in 1937. France is, of course, the nation of origin of the most renowned anthropologist of South America, and indeed the most renowned Americanist, anthropologist, and perhaps social theorist of the twentieth century, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss was also, however, a crucial figure in the development of a national school of anthropology in Brazil, of which more below. French anthropology has been important not only in Amazonia but also the Andes: the

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French Institute for Andean Studies, founded in Lima in 1948, is a major centre of regional investigation. An transitional figure − both in terms of generation and in terms of national schools − is Alfred Métraux (1902−1962). This SwissArgentine anthropologist trained in France and Sweden, carried out fieldwork throughout the Americas, spent the bulk of his professional life in the United States and was the major contributing author to the landmark Handbook of South American Indians, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1946. The latter portion of his career was as much devoted to international policy and human rights advocacy, through his work with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), as to pure scholarship. He brought together in his biography and career, then, many of the major strands (‘Germanic’ cataloguing and activism, ‘French theorizing, ‘American’ applied policy-making), of South Americanist anthropology. Although South America’s direct colonization had come to an end by the early nineteenth century, the continent fell under the economic and political influence of the United States for most of the twentieth century. The indigenous peoples of all of the Americas − North, Central, and South − contributed to the self-formation of the major North American schools of anthropology, especially with the expansion of governmentfunded social scientific research after the Second World War. Many of the major traditions are derivative of European schools, but specifically North American approaches honed through South American fieldwork include cultural ecology (pioneering figures include John Murra for the Andes and Betty Meggers for the Amazon) sociolinguistic approaches that concentrated not so much on traditional ‘folklore’ (as in the Germanic tradition) or structuralist ‘mythologiques’ (as in the French tradition) but on the practices and values of everyday life as susceptible to capture in discourse. Dell Hymes is a key influence − not directly as a fieldworker, but

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as an influential supervisor of a generation of South Americanist linguistic anthropologists. Here the missionary tradition is again important − not Catholic this time, but Protestant evangelical. The ‘New Tribes’ mission and associated Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL; founded in 1934) have produced a large number of highly competent practical linguists in ‘small’ – principally lowland – South American languages, and an associated literature including dictionaries and grammars which are invaluable to anthropologists. While the majority of SIL and New Tribes workers geared their efforts at conversion, a few found themselves, instead, transformed by the field experience and have made valuable ethnographic contributions. British social anthropology came to South America after the Second World War, both in consequence of the loss of the British Empire and in reaction to the pre-war ethnographies that were carried out in Britain’s African and Asian colonies. Kinship and social and political organization are the focus of these classic studies. Since the 1960s, South America (along with Melanesia) has been the setting for the development of a series of anti-models to the canonical African and Asian studies of kinship, politics, and social organization. South American kinship is seen in these British models to hinge on alliance rather than lineage and descent, and analysis has notably focused on the affective content of these relationships (friendship and love) and its building-up through everyday practice as opposed to its derivation from social ‘structure’ in the British structural-functional sense. This stands in stark contrast also to ‘French structuralist’ models of alliance that posit rather mathematical exchanges of women, goods, and words to achieve balance, or even ‘negative reciprocity’ as embodied in vengeance and predation. Peter Rivière anticipated many of the problems that the perhaps overmechanical British and perhaps over-elegant French models of structure would encounter in the South American materials, but the key figures here are women with a broad interest in gender. Joanna Overing (sometimes

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Overing-Kaplan) has trained a generation of Amazonian scholars in this vein, and similar themes animate the work of Olivia Harris and her students in the Andes. It should not be supposed that only Western anthropologists have come to South America. Valuable contributions in the field of cultural geography have been made by Japanese scholars interested in comparative ethnology. Shozo Masuda of the University of Tokyo, and colleagues from the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, in collaboration with US-based archaeologist Izumi Shimada, produced a small but rigorous body of Andeanist work. Finally, at least two truly domestic schools of anthropology have by now become established in South America itself. The first, and more important, is the Brazilian. Strongly influenced by the French anthropological tradition (and in fact founded in part by Claude Lévi-Strauss), Brazilian anthropology is a disciplinary force in its own right. Its institutional centres are the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the University of Sao Paulo and its ethnographic focus is Amazonia. The most influential anthropologist of South America is at present a Brazilian scholar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. His ‘perspectival’ theory, first put forward in 1998, has almost single-handedly prompted a revival of general disciplinary interest in the long-standing anthropological problem of ontology and has injected South American ethnographic materials into philosophical debates about epistemology. Like Lévi-Strauss he has managed to stimulate anthropology at large, and even influenced scholarship in philosophy, via the elegant analysis of South American material. The junior counterpart to the Brazilian Amazonianist tradition is the Argentine school, focused around the University of Buenos Aires and the anthropological division of National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigation. The ethnographic production of this tradition has focused on the South America Chaco. Unlike Brazil, Argentina has yet to produce an international scholarly ‘star’ of its own.

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With regard to indigenous scholars of indigenous South America, to date none have achieved more than regional renown. There is as yet no South American Vine DeLoria or Harold Cardinal, though the Bolivian intellectual Fausto Reinaga (1906−1994) might come close. The Bolivian Andean Oral History Workshop, extant since 1983, has produced important work but, as yet, no outstanding single scholar. However, current indicators are promising. Educational reforms implemented in many South American countries across the early 1990s are yielding a generation of university-educated indigenous young people in many South American nations. Although the preference of the majority seems to be for technocratic careers, two decades of consciousness-raising and indigenous political revitalization has prompted considerable interest among indigenous youth in documenting their own history and culture as either a primary or secondary professional focus.

WHAT HAS THE SOUTH AMERICAN ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL BROUGHT TO ANTHROPOLOGY? During the heyday of social evolutionism, South America seemed to offer to anthropology an exemplary ethnographic laboratory. Its documented and in some instances still-extant societies ran the gamut from bands (Chaco hunter-gatherers) to tribes (Amazonian Ge and Bororo), to chiefdoms (Tupinamba polities along the Atlantic Coast, Guaraní polities in the Paraguayan interior, and Arawakan chiefdoms in the Amazon basin), to states (the Inca Empire). Its ecological diversity immediately suggested the possibility of correlating cultural outcomes to environmental conditions: after all, when the Spanish had arrived in the sixteenth century, Andean civilizations coexisted temporally with ‘primitive’ jungle tribes. The seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians (1946), edited by Julian Steward, was topographically organized,

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and conceived along what anthropologists would now terms as ‘evolutionist’ and ‘environmental determinist’ lines. Despite these flaws, the compendium remains a treasury of concrete archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data. If one reads, for example, any of Alfred Métraux’s many contributed chapters it becomes impossible to sustain the notion that the Handbook is a simplistic or de-historicized text in its actual content and execution (though it may well have been in its conceptualization). The South American portion (Volume III) of the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (1999, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz) was self-consciously conceptualized against the Handbook model to be, first, historical and, second, modestly interpretive rather than exhaustively documentary. Though it achieves these laudable conceptual aims, it is in its content and execution much less interesting than the still-irreplaceable Handbook. The very production of the Handbook in important respects exposed its own intellectual underpinning as untenable. Two thematic approaches have replaced its social evolutionist/environmental determinist model: one has structured years of Andean research; the other, years of Amazonian. Both are as much obvious heirs to (as departures from) what went before; in each, ‘nature’ continues to play a critical role but in different guises. In the Andes, ‘nature’ is treated in its avatar as ‘natural resources’. A structuring question for archaeology, ethnohistory, colonial and post-colonial history, and ethnography has been how people living in the Andes (a category that since 1533 has included an ever-expanding number of non-indigenes) manage theAndean ecosystem.Archaeological traces of several pre-Incan empires make clear that this rugged, arid terrain and its western (coastal) and eastern (jungle) flanks have been turned to the ends of a long series of complex societies: the Chavin, Paracas, Moche, Nazca, Tiwanaku, Wari, and Chimu civilizations preceded the Inca Empire encountered by Francisco Pizarro and his

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men in 1532. The Inca Empire, of course, presents a fascinating case of natural resource management: its extensive agricultural terraces, network of roads and bridges, massive storehouses of foodstuffs (Andeans invented freeze-drying of plants and meats; our word ‘jerky’ is from the Quechua charqui), mining and metallurgy, capacity to control human labour, and vertical linkages that brought not only the corn and fruit of the foothills but also coastal Pacific seafood, lowland Amazonian featherwork, and of course high plateau potatoes and llama meat to the capital of Cuzco remain fodder for investigation and comparativist speculation. Was the Inca Empire something like an ‘Oriental despotism’ – a hydraulic empire based on the control of water resources? Was it a slave economy? Or – quite the reverse – an exemplar of ‘primitive communism’? More recent studies have emphasized the ways it was a unique expression of regional dynamics of very long standing that happened to have been captured by the written historical record with the arrival of the Spanish. A fairly shallow sequence of Cuzco-based Inca emperors had expanded their control over almost the entire Andes very rapidly, in just over a century, and was in the grips of a dynastic civil war just when Europeans arrived. As is notorious, the Spanish had interests of their own in controlling Andean ‘natural resources’, precious metals specifically, and the human labour necessary to extract them as rapidly and thoroughly as possible. The encomienda system of grants in labour (as opposed to land) structured colonial society, though it did not entirely restructure preColumbian Andean systems of land tenancy and labour tribute but in fact relied on them to a great extent. By the late eighteenth century, this economic and social system was breaking down: one of the stimuli of the Bourbon reforms was the exhaustion of the gold and silver mines that had funded the Spanish Empire. Meanwhile, demographic rebound set the conditions for a series of indigenous revolts in the Andes: indeed, renowned leaders like Tupak Amaru, Tupak

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Katari, and the latter’s companion Bartolina Sisa remain touchstone figures in contemporary Andean indigenous politics. After the successful Creole-led independence movements and establishment of new South American republics, mining continued to be carried out (but far less lucratively than in the past) in the Andes. In the early part of the twentieth century, tin became the most important metal resource mined in the Andes and Andean tin miners were to become key historical actors in Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution. Meanwhile, peasant populations long rebounded from the initial demographic impacts of contact were amply able − as Andeanist anthropologists documented across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s − to maintain many networks of vertical transaction that predated even the epoch of the Inca. Students of ethnohistorians Tom Zuidema, John Rowe, and John Murra demonstrated the continuing connections between high plateau herding families to kinsmen or ritual associates growing potatoes at slightly lower altitudes, and from there to maize, coca, and fruit cultivators in the foothills of the Andes. Coca cultivation, long important to regional networks of commerce and trade, with the refining of cocaine and (by the 1970s and 1980s) the international market for its illegal consumption, became another Andean natural resource of interest to indigenous peoples and outsiders alike. The collapse of the international price of tin in 1985 drove many miners from the high Andes into the valley regions to become coca-growers. The 2006 election of the Americas’ first indigenous president, Evo Morales, makes a kind of synthesis of this long history. His father, an out-of-work miner, moved the family to a coca-growing region while the young Morales was a teenager; ‘Evo’ went on to become a union leader among coca-growers during the peak of US-funded eradication campaigns during the 1990s. A globally-aware, working-class consciousness was a legacy the miners brought to coca production; at the same time, the status of coca as a centrepiece

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of Andean indigenous practice, ritual, and trade from the pre-Columbian era to the present became a powerful local defence against what could quite persuasively be cast as neo-Imperialist attacks on its cultivation. Since his election, Evo Morales has been famous for never wearing a business suit. At first he often appeared in a working man’s striped sweater; more recently, he has worn specially tailored Nehru-style jackets embroidered with native textiles. Analyses of the history condensed in his person and his selfpresentation have launched a thousand anthropological ships in the first years of the twenty-first century. The anthropological enterprise in the Andes, then, has in many ways turned on the relationship between nature and history. A notorious disciplinary polemic is again illuminating in this respect. In 1991, anthropologist Orin Starn published a scathing critique of what he termed ‘Andeanism’ (a transmutation of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’). He accused Andeanist anthropologists of focusing too much on the continuities between the pre-Columbian past and the present in the Andes, and, particularly, their attention to the manner in which a simultaneously cultural and ecological lifeway had been sustained across centuries. Starn argued that what should instead have engaged anthropologists’ attention were the disruptive relations of exploitation and despoliation that had characterized Spanish colonialism, nineteenthcentury neo-colonialism, and above all the brutal contemporary power relations of the twentieth-century world system. The material realities (and ideological preoccupations) of Andean people were, Starn argued, not at all about harmonious ‘ways of life’ but about living on far too little. What developments in the Andes since have suggested are that both are true. Andean indigenous political movements in the twenty-first century have embraced both the ‘harmonious’, deep-historical, continuity-laden vision of their own experience along with a sharp critique of colonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial global relations of human and ecological exploitation.

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In the Amazon, meanwhile, after the Handbook ‘nature’ has been treated in its avatar as the counterpoint to ‘society’. This opposition has characterized otherwise almost entirely distinct approaches to Amazonian ethnology. The first, of course, is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, predicated on a fundamental ‘nature−culture’ divide that is at once a natural fact and a continuous product of cultural effort. The second, less intuitively, is North American cultural ecology, which posits cultural creativity as at once adaptive to, and limited by, environmental conditions. Structuralist approaches suppose nature to be real but in important senses unknowable; for that reason, close attention is paid to that set of cultural outcomes observable in Amazonia because they tell anthropologists something about the total set of cultural configurations possible in human experience. Cultural ecological approaches, by contrast, pay considerable attention to environmental factors: poor or rich soils, availability or scarcity of dietary protein, the diversity or paucity of plant foods − because these will go a long way toward the anthropological explanation of why cultural outcomes look the way they do, and what kinds of cultural outcomes simply are not and will never be possible in Amazonia. As a result, for each approach, interesting kinds of data and plausible modes of explanation are almost totally at odds: as were, across the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, scholars working in one tradition or the other. French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s 1994 monograph In the Society of Nature was a noteworthy attempt to reconcile the two strains. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s 1996 essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology offers a comprehensive treatment of this productive intellectual tension and its anthropological products over the several decades. The anthropological enterprise in the Amazon, then, has in many ways turned on the relationship between nature and society. A notorious disciplinary polemic is illuminating in this respect. The scandal surrounding

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journalist Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado (2000), his denunciation of the work of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and the fierce disciplinary debate that followed, encapsulates − leaving aside entirely non-academic ethical questions regarding Chagnon’s treatment of Yanomami people − a recapitulation of what might be called the nature−culture wars in Amazonian anthropology. To put it very approximately, on the ‘anti-Chagnon’ side have been arrayed the heirs to the various European traditions and their North and South American legatees, all centrally interested in the documenting and elucidating of culture, structure, and social relations. On the ‘pro-Chagnon’ side have been a primarily North American school of investigators interested in ecology and biology and their determinative effects on observable cultural and social outcomes. Whereas the ethical issues at the heart of the ChagnonYanomami scandal remain very much unresolved, a kind of reconciliation on the research front has come from an entirely unexpected direction − which will be addressed in the third section of this essay (New directions). The vast majority of South Americanist anthropologists working with indigenous peoples identify as either ‘Andeanists’ or ‘Amazonianists’, and this essay reflects that fact. Other important zones are the circumCaribbean region (northern Venezuela, and including the Guiana highlands of Suriname, Guyana, and French Guyana), Patagonia (southern Chile and southern Argentina), and, finally, the Gran Chaco, a vast, sparsely populated, and arid central plain that occupies a zone between Southern Amazonia and the Andes encompassing portions of northern Argentina, western Paraguay, and southeastern Bolivia. In the circum-Caribbean region, there is a good bit of overlap with Amazonian themes but added to these is the historically interesting phenomenon of ‘maroon’ or ‘quilombo’ communities made up of descendants of escaped African slaves who adopted many features of regional Amerindian ways of life. In Patagonia, the Mapuche experience

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in Chile and Argentina is in some ways comparable to that of Métis in Canada or Cherokee in the United States: from having been considered more or less extinguished as a people, their numbers by self-ascription grow each year as does their political and ethnic activism. Finally, regarding the Chaco, most scholars working in the region are Argentine, and − as noted above − Argentina has yet to establish an internationally-known ‘school’ of anthropology. The situation of Chaco indigenous peoples is in some ways analogous to that of their ethnographers. Although they have made several attempts to establish multi-ethnic confederations to protect their collective interests, along the lines of Andean organizations or the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon (COICA), they have yet to establish an effective transnational entity of their own (Combés, Villar, and Lowrey, 2009). Turning now to what might be called the ‘anthropological imagination’, there are several emblematic South American indigenous peoples. In the Andes, Quechua and Aymara people are together conflated as the canonical indigenous peoples ‘with history’ (to reverse Eric Wolf’s famous phrase). In the Amazon, the Tupí-Guaraní have since the seventeenth century been the perennial foils of Western self-critique. In the seventeenth century, French essayist Michel de Montaigne compared Tupinamba savage cannibalism to European brutality in religious wars and found the former at least possessed of a certain superior courage and inherent nobility in their cruelty. In the eighteenth century, Jesuit fathers compared Guaraní amorality to European immorality and judged the former considerably more amenable to spiritual reform and instruction. In the twentieth century, Pierre Clastres declared TupíGuaraní society to be not ‘pre-state’ but ‘anti-state’; that is, not primitive but anarchist avant la lettre. Also in the twentieth century, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) used his fieldwork among Tupian speakers as the springboard for a general argument about Amazonian (and, to some extent, Amerindian)

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peoples: that, unlike Western multiculturalists who believe unquestioningly in the universality of nature, Indians are multinaturalists who believe unquestioningly in the universality of culture. Added to these ‘major’ figures of the anthropological imagination are several ‘minor’ ones. There are the excitingly ferocious Jivaroan headhunters of the Ecuadorian piedmont; Anne-Christine Taylor (1996) has managed to familiarize their exoticism by using their case to demonstrate the universal strangeness of the human condition. There are what David Maybury-Lewis and Joan Bamberger (1979) termed the ‘dialectical societies’ of the Ge and Bororo of central Brazil − dwellers in moiety-matched and concentrically organized villages culturally and politically centred on men’s houses, ringed by the domestic space of women’s homes, and surrounded by wilderness. There are the elusive and disorderly nomads of the central Chaco, Zamucoan and Guaycuruan speakers, perpetual boundary-violators: of national frontiers, of anthropological notions of gender, of self-righteous fantasies about the hunter-gatherer ethos, and of self-righteous denunciations of the same. The anthropological imagination is continually over- and under-conjuring these real peoples’ real experiences: sometimes in ways useful to them, and sometimes in ways not.

NEW DIRECTIONS South American anthropology already knows a little something about three of the many big surprises the twenty-first century will surely bring. The first surprise is in the domain of Amazonian archaeology. A growing trove of evidence is suggesting that the pre-Columbian population of the Amazon was vastly larger than has previously been supposed, and organized into large, complex, agriculturallysophisticated polities. Historical ecologist William Balée has gone so far as to argue that much of the Amazonian ‘wilderness’ is

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in fact anthropogenic: the product of preColumbian manipulation on a grand scale. Archaeologists like Anna Roosevelt (1994) and Clark Erickson (2008) describe massive agricultural earthworks, urban complexes, and networks of roadways and canals linking up a multi-nucleated, highly cultivated, and above all populous Amazonia. If true, this would resolve − by obviating − many of the nature/society debates that animated twentieth-century Amazonianist anthropology. Both sides of the debate were bent on explaining what may have been the wrong set of facts: the existence of small-scale, egalitarian, and fragmentary societies in the Amazon across long historical time. Culturalogical explanations looked to norms, orders, and values; ecological ones to soil, protein, and the putative biological facts of ‘human nature’. It turns out, though, the really interesting bits were on the empirical side, not the analytical one, all along (though − to give credit where it is due − Claude Lévi-Strauss posited a ‘false archaicism’ of certain features of Amazonian society much in advance of the emergence of this recent archaeological evidence). The century is still young, as are these findings: interesting developments are sure to unfold. The second surprise is in the domain of contemporary indigenous experience. An indigenous person is president of an Andean nation; lowland populations are growing and making themselves heard; cultural and linguistic revitalization is seen everywhere; across South America (and indeed the Americas at large), instead of attempting to ‘pass’ as non-Indian, more and more people choose to describe themselves as ‘Indians’ with every passing year. The politics of identity have become less about Indians dying out than about keeping non-Indians out of a highly-valorized cultural and political category. In the space of about 25 years this state of affairs has become the new normal, so much so that in place of the literature remarking it a new meta-literature has grown up to remark the remarks: that is, anthropology has begun to study its own study of what Xavier

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Albó (1991) calls ‘el retorno del indio’ (the return of the Indian). The third surprise is in the domain of indigenous scholarship. Schwartz and Salomon (1999) write of the need for more ‘Indian histories’ in place of ‘histories of Indians’ and the literature is similarly full of anthropological considerations of indigenous experience and nearly empty (particularly in South as opposed to Central or North America) of indigenous reflections on anthropological scholarship. With increasing urbanization of indigenous populations in South America, and the better access to schooling available in cities as opposed to the countryside, one can anticipate that many of the emerging generation of indigenous scholars will be ‘urban Indians’, not rural ones. Beyond that, it is very difficult to make any predictions here, except to anticipate that this will be one of the more interesting anthropological spaces to watch in the twenty-first century.

NOTE 1 The author would like to thank Dr. Pablo Sendón and Dr. Diego Villar of the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council for their bibliographic assistance in the preparation of this essay. Responsibility for all errors and omissions remain, of course, the author’s.

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the present. In Deloria and Salisbury 2002, pp. 175−193. de la Cadena, M. and O. Starn (eds) 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Deloria, P.J. & N. Salisbury (eds) 2002. A Companion to American Indian History. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Deloria, V. Jr 1969. Anthropologists and other friends. In Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian manifesto. New York: Macmillan, pp. 78−100. Demallie, R.J. & A. Ortiz (eds) 1994. North American Indian Anthropology: Essays on society and culture. Norman, OK: Norman University of Oklahoma Press. Erickson, P. with H. Ward & K. Wachendorf 2002. Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah cultural and research center. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Faiman-Silva, S.L. 1997. Choctaws at the Crossroads: The political economy of class and culture in the Oklahoma timber region. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Ferguson, T.J. & C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006. History is in the Land: Multivocal tribal traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Field, L.W. 2004. Beyond ‘applied’ anthropology. In Biolsi 2004, pp. 472−489. Field, L.W. & R.G. Fox (eds) 2007. Anthropology Put to Work. Oxford: Berg. Field, L.W., with C. Seidner, J. Lang, R. Cambra, F. Silva, V. Hailstone, D. Harshall, B. Marshall, C. Lara, M. George, Sr., and the Cultural Committee of the Yurok Tribe 2008. Abalone Tales: Collaborative explorations of sovereignty and identity in Native California. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fine-Dare, K.S. 2002. Grave Injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Foley, D.E. 1995. The Heartland Chronicles. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foley, D.E. 1999. The Fox Project: a reappraisal. Current Anthropology 40: 171−191. Fowler, L. 2002. Tribal Sovereignty and The Historical Imagination: Cheyenne−Arapaho politics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Goddard, I. 1996. Introduction. In I. Goddard (ed.), W.C. Sturtevant (gen. ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 17: Languages. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, pp. 1−16. Hames, R. 2007. The ecologically noble savage debate. Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 177−190. Hanson, R.D. 2004. Contemporary globalization and tribal sovereignty. In Biolsi 2004, pp. 284−303.

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Harkin, M.E. & D.R. Lewis 2007. Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the ecological Indian. Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press. Harring, S. 2002. Indian law, sovereignty, and state law: Native people and the law. In Deloria & Salisbury 2002, pp. 441−459. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development 2008. The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. policies of self-determination. New York: Oxford University Press. Hernandez, J.A.A. 2004. Blood, lies, and Indian rights: TCUs become gatekeepers for research. Tribal College Journal 16 (2): 10–13. Hinton, L. & K. Hale 2001. The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Hinton, L., with M. Vera & N. Steele 2002. How to Keep Your Language Alive: A common-sense approach to one-on-one language learning. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Horne, E.B. & S. McBeth 1998. Essie’s Story: The life and legacy of a Shoshone teacher. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Huhndorf, S. 2009. Mapping the Americas: The transnational politics of contemporary Native culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hymes, D. (ed) 1972. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon. Isaac, G. 2007. Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni tribal museum. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Jacknis, I. 2002. The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl art, anthropologists, and museums, 1881–1981. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Jackson, J.B. 2006. Review: Who Owns Native Culture, by Michael F. Brown. Journal of American Folklore 119: 492−493. Johnson, T., J. Nagel & D. Champagne 1997. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Jorgensen, M. (ed) 2007. Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for governance and development. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Kan, S. & P.T. Strong 2006a. Introduction. In Kan & Strong 2006b, pp. xi−xlii. Kan, S. & P.T. Strong (eds) 2006b. New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, histories, representations. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Karson, J. (ed) 2006. Wiyaxayxt/wiyaakaa’awn/ As Days Go By: Our history, our land, and our people − the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla. Pendleton, Portland, and Seattle, WA: Tamástslikt Cultural Institute and Oregon Historical Society Press, in

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association with the University of Washington Press. Kidwell, C.S. & A. Velie 2005. Native American Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Krech, S., Jr 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and history. New York: Norton. Kroeber, D. & C. Kroeber (eds) 2003. Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Lambert, V. 2007. Choctaw Nation: A story of American Indian resurgence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Landsman, G. 1997. Informant as critic: conducting research on a dispute between Iroquoianist scholars and traditional Iroquois. In Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997, pp. 160−176. Lassiter, L.E. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levine, S. & N.O. Lurie (eds) 1968. The American Indian Today. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books. Lomawaima, K.T. 1995. They Called it Prairie Light: The story of Chilocco Indian School. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Lomawaima, K.T. & T. McCarty 2006. To Remain an Indian: Lessons in democracy from a century of Native American education. New York: Teachers College Press. Lonetree, A. & A.J. Cobb (eds) 2008. The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical conversations. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Marcus, G.E. 1998. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. In G.E. Marcus (ed.), Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 79–104. Marcus, G.E. & M.M.J. Fischer 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCarty, T.L. 2002. A Place To Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the struggle for self-determination in indigenous schooling. Mahwa, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Medicine, B. 1972a. The anthropologist and American Indian studies. In J. Henry (ed.), The American Indian Reader: Anthropology. San Francisco, CA: Indian Historian Press, pp. 13−20. Medicine, B. 1972b. The anthropologist as the Indian’s image maker. In J. Henry (ed.), The American Indian Reader: Anthropology. San Francisco, CA: Indian Historian Press, pp. 23−28. (Reprint, Medicine 2001, pp. 289–294.)

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Ramirez, R.K. 2008. Native Hubs: Culture, community, and belonging in Silicon Valley and beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ridington, R. & D. Hastings 1997. Blessing for a Long Time: The sacred pole of the Omaha Tribe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Samuels, D.W. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and identity of the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Schwarz, M.T., with M.A. Bekis & A.S. Shay 2003. Blood and Voice: Navajo women ceremonial practitioners. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Sider, G.M. 2003. Living Indian Histories: The Lumbee and Tuscarora people in North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Silver, S. & W. Miller (eds) 1997. American Indian Languages: Cultural and social contexts. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Silverstein, M. 1996. Encountering language and languages of encounter in North American ethnohistory. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6: 126–144. Silverstein, M. 1998. Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 401−426. Simpson, A. 2007. On the logic of discernment. American Quarterly 59 (2): 479−491. Sleeper-Smith, A. (ed) 2009. Contesting Knowledge: Museums and indigenous perspectives. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Smith, A. 2008. Native Americans and the Christian Right: The gendered politics of unlikely alliances. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, L.T. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Starn, O. 2004. Ishi’s Brain: In search of America’s last ‘wild’ Indian. New York: Norton. Strong, P.T. 1996. Feminist theory and the invasion of the heart in North America. Ethnohistory 43 (4): 683−712. Strong, P.T. 2004. Representational practices. In Biolsi 2004, pp. 341−359. Strong, P.T. 2005a. Recent ethnographic research on North American indigenous peoples. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 253−268. Strong, P.T. 2005b What is an Indian family? The Indian Child Welfare Act and the renascence of tribal sovereignty. In Indigenous peoples of the United States. Special commemorative joint issue, American Studies 46:3/4 (Fall−Winter 2005); Indigenous Studies Today 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006): 205−231.

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Sturm, C. 2002. Blood Politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sturtevant, W.C. (gen. ed) 1976−2008. Handbook of North American Indians, 15 volumes (and 5 forthcoming). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Tedlock, D. 1983. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tedlock, D. 1999 [1974] Finding the Center: The art of the Zuni storyteller (from live performances in Zuni by Andrew Peynetsa and Walter Sanchez), 2nd edn. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Thomas, D.H. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, archaeology, and the battle for identity. New York: Basic Books. Tolley, S.-L. 2006. Quest for Tribal Acknowledgment: California’s Honey Lake Maidus. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Valentine, L.P. & R. Darnell (eds) 1999. Theorizing the Americanist Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Visweswaran, K. 1995. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Webster, A.K. 2009. Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Whiteley, P. 1998. Rethinking Hopi Ethnography. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Whiteley, P. 2004. Native American Ethnography. In Biolsi 2004, pp. 435−471. Wilkins, D.E. 2002. American Indian Politics and the American Political System. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wilkins, D.E. & K.T. Lomawaima 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian sovereignty and federal law. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Wolfe, P. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. London: Cassell. Yanagisako, S. 2005. Flexible disciplinarity: beyond the Americanist tradition. In D. Segal & S. Yanagisako (eds), Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Essays on the disciplining of anthropology now. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 78–98. Young, I.M. 2001. Two concepts of self-determination. In A. Sarat & T. Kearns (eds), Human Rights: Concepts, contests, contingencies. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 25−44. Zimmerman, L. 1997. Anthropology and responses to the reburial issue. In Biolsi & Zimmerman 1997, pp. 92−112.

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Zimmerman, L. 2004. Archaeology. In Biolsi 2004, pp. 526−541.

South America Albó, Xavier. 1991. El Retorno del Indio. Revista Andina 9: 299–345. Balée, William. 1994. Footprints of the Forest: Ka’apor ethnobotany – the historical ecology of plant utilization by an Amazonian people. New York: Columbia University Press. Combés, Isabelle, Diego Villar & Kathleen Lowrey 2009. Comparative studies and the South American Gran Chaco. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7 (1): 67−100. Denevan, William (ed.) 1976. The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Descola, Philippe 1994. In the Society of Nature: A native ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, Clark. 2008. Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape. In The Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William Isbell, pp. 157–183. Springer, New York. Gilbert, M., Thomas P. et al. 2008. DNA from preClovis human coprolites in Oregon, North America. Science 320 (5877): 786−789. MacCormack, Sabine 1999. Ethnography in South America: the first two hundred years. in F. Salomon and S. Schwartz (eds), Cambridge history of the native peoples of the Americas, Volume III: South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maybury-Lewis, David and Joan Bamberger. 1979. Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McSweeney, Kendra and Shahna Arps 2005. A ‘demographic turnaround’: The rapid growth of indigenous populations in lowland Latin America. Latin American Research Review 40 (1): 3−29. Roosevelt, Anna C. 1994. Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological perspectives. University of Arizona Press. Salomon, Frank 1985. The historical development of Andean ethnology. Mountain Research and Development 5 (1): 79−98. Schwartz, Stuart and Frank Salomon (eds) 1999. Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume III: South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Starn, Orin 1991. Missing the revolution: anthropologists and the war in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6 (1): 63−91. Steward, Julian (ed.) 1946. Handbook of South American Indians. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Taylor, Anne-Christine. 1996. The soul’s body and its states: an Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(2): 201–215. Tierney, Patrick 2000. Darkness in El Dorado: How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo.1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 469−488. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1996. Images of nature and society in Amazonian ethnology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 179−200. Waters, Michael R. et. al. 2011. The Buttermilk Creek complex and the origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas. Science 331 (6024): 1599−1603.

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2.12 North and Latin American National Societies from a Continental Perspective John Gledhill and Peter Wade

THINKING ABOUT ‘THE AMERICAS’ We often think about the ‘New World’ created by the colonizing efforts of societies located in the landmass that marks the northeastern boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean in terms of a division between ‘North’ and ‘Latin’ America. Yet the northern frontiers of the Spanish Atlantic Empire extended well into the territory of the contemporary United States, which annexed almost half of newly independent Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, Mexico itself is often described as being part of ‘North’ rather than ‘Middle’ America. Such classifications have more than geographical significance. Mexico’s relations with the United States and Canada have been transformed over the past quarter century by governments that have promoted economic integration at the price, many Mexicans feel, of the country’s economic sovereignty and subservience to the interests of the United States in foreign policy as well. The emerging economic and geopolitical hegemony of the Englishspeaking United States was, however, already a major preoccupation of intellectuals in

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‘Latin’ America as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In his celebrated essay ‘Our America’, the Cuban independence martyr José Martí (1891) urged the Latin American republics to adapt their institutions to the ‘nature’ of their own peoples to counter the threat posed by ‘the formidable neighbour who does not know us’. Looking northwards to a United States in which, in contrast to Brazil (Fry, 2000), racial discrimination was to remain legal until the second half of the twentieth century despite the end of slavery, Martí insisted that there could be no racism in Latin America’s future ‘because there are no races’. Yet his vision of biological and cultural mixing (mestizaje) privileged indigenous−European fusion in an island from which even a revolution made in the name of socialist class universalism failed to eradicate discrimination against black citizens (Fernandes, 2003). Other Latin American intellectuals, such as the Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, looked at ‘enlightened’ Europe and North America as models to be emulated, and elites throughout the Americas dreamed of ‘whitening’ their countries through new immigration

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in the nineteenth century. Yet, in most of the region, history ended up producing even more diversified multi-ethnic societies that are the products of transregional connections across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic oceans. For Argentine-born postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, the history of the Atlantic world has been shaped by a series of ‘global designs’ (Mignolo, 2000: 725). After the ‘Christian mission’ of the Iberian empires came the ‘civilizing mission’ of French and British colonialism. The ‘modernizing mission’ of a twentieth century dominated by the United States and transnational capital was in turn replaced by the transnational ideology of market society and neoliberalism. Yet Mignolo’s point is that transatlantic relations were mutually constitutive of the social worlds that they connected. Both advocates and critics of imperial projects become trapped within the same assumptions about the transcendent value of a ‘Western’ modernity whose construction was dependent, materially and ideologically, on the existence of these ‘other’ colonial worlds. Although no movement of ‘resistance’ can be entirely ‘outside’ these frameworks, Mignolo looks to Mexico’s indigenous Zapatistas as an example of the possibilities of moving beyond the ‘coloniality of power’ that they establish. Jorge Klor de Alva (1995) has, however, rejected the application of postcolonial theory to Latin American societies, arguing that only the indigenous peoples of the Americas were colonized. Observing that ‘one does not have to be colonized to suffer’, and emphasizing that national independence did not reduce the possibility of suffering amongst ‘non-Indian locals’ at the hands of anyone who happened to hold sway over them, be they mulattoes, mestizos, ‘white’ criollos or, indeed, Indian elites, Klor de Alva argued that everything still remained to be done to decolonize regional societies, a point that indigenous people in countries like Bolivia today would probably endorse. Yet Klor de Alva ignores the issue of what the ‘coloniality of power’ did to the consciousness of these

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‘non-Indians’, both ‘white’ elites and the ‘mixed’ descendents of Africans, Europeans and indigenous people themselves, particularly those who came to see themselves as embodying a ‘progressive’ movement of history by valorizing their ‘whiter’ side against the ‘inferior’ racial identities which the notion of mixture itself continued to reproduce (Wade, 2005). Not only are such people the vast majority of the population of the Americas as a whole but also, even in those countries where there has been an ‘indigenous resurgence’ in recent years, the promises of recognition and inclusion offered by contemporary ‘multicultural’ politics can hardly be satisfied unless the non-indigenous come to see more value in indigenous cultures and languages, as Bret Gustafson (2009) points out for what Nancy Postero (2006) terms ‘postmulticultural’ Bolivia. This chapter therefore focuses on what anthropologists have to say about these other inhabitants of the Americas, north and south of the Rio Grande. One thing that the anthropology of the Americas as a whole contributes to the broader discipline is extensive discussion of what is at stake in ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ categories as complex historical constructions. Marisol de la Cadena (2001), for example, shows that in the case of Peru, a country that neither followed Bolivia, Guatemala, Ecuador and Mexico in producing powerful ‘ethnic’ social movements from the 1970s onwards, nor replicates the colour discrimination of the United States, lower-class actors who reject assimilationist state projects and seek to defend and practise ‘indigenous culture’ may define themselves as mestizos rather than adopt the economically, socially and culturally stigmatized identity of an indio. The second half of this chapter reviews in depth the way that ideas about race, ethnicity and class have been interwoven in the construction of nations in the Americas, emphasizing the value of looking at these issues from a continental perspective. Although there is a tradition of strongly contrasting ‘North’ and ‘Latin’ America in much of the literature, the assumptions behind such contrasts have

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been subject to critical scrutiny in both the North and the South, with increasing attention paid to the fact that all the national formations of the Americas developed within a wider, transnational, Atlantic network. A further reason for adopting a transregional perspective that ‘provincializes’ the United States is that many assumptions about its ‘difference’ from Latin America are the normative legacy of the hegemony of the global North (Chakrabarty, 1992; Shukla and Tinsman, 2007). The issue of ‘Northern hegemony’ in anthropology itself has become a major concern of anthropologists from Latin American countries (Krotz, 1997; Restrepo and Escobar, 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar, 2006). Yet although there are often differences of interests and orientation between anthropologists working ‘in’ and ‘on’ the different countries of the region, there is enormous scope for fruitful comparative work on many thematic issues that crosscut the anthropologies of the different nations that inhabit the geographical Americas. These include the study of neoliberalism and state transformations, crime, violence and human rights, new forms of urbanism, poverty and inequality, new religious movements, and the cultural as well as political-economic dimensions of ‘globalization’. The first part of this chapter will therefore focus, in an inevitably selective way, on these issues. Once again, the fact that the countries of the Americas are strongly bound together by transnational relationships encourages approaches that seek to transcend the limitations of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002).

TRANSFORMING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA In one of the canonical texts of the ‘postmodern turn’ in US anthropology of the mid1980s, Marcus and Fischer (1986) argued that a collapse of dominant paradigms in the human sciences was conducive to a productive

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‘experimental moment’. Their call for the ‘repatriation’ of ‘anthropology as cultural critique’ to the analysis of the United States itself was followed by arguments for a renewed engagement with ‘public’ and ‘collaborative’ anthropology (Borofsky, 2000; Lassiter, 2005; Marcus, 2005). Yet anthropologists working on the ‘non-Indian’ part of US society still felt professionally disparaged, as recalled by attendees at the packed meeting that set up a Society for the Anthropology of the United States and Canada at the American Anthropological Association Meeting of 1990 in New Orleans (Maskovsky, 2006). Transformed three years later into a Society for North American Anthropology (SANA) that now included Mexico, following ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the ethos of this large group of scholars has been sharply critical, not only of much of the public debate about social problems in the United States but also of anthropology’s tendencies, when defined as the study of ‘cultural difference’, to ‘other’ its objects of study without regard to the wider political and economic context of their lives and the historical forces, including US imperialism, which have shaped them (Di Leonardo, 1998). This made SANA anthropologists critics of the limitations of postmodernist approaches, and the United States and Canada fertile terrain for studies of the social impacts of the restructuring of advanced capitalist economies and urban transformation through gentrification, achieved through ethnographic studies that reflect convergence between social anthropology in the British tradition and cultural anthropology in the North American tradition (Nash, 1989; Goode and Maskovsky, 2001; Schneider and Susser, 2003). The new US ‘farm crisis’ of the 1980s and awareness that growing poverty was not a purely urban phenomenon as rural manufacturing jobs also disappeared, along with concern with environmental issues and suburbanization, also led to a renewal of interest in the anthropology of rural North America not seen since the New Deal era (Winson and

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Leach, 2002; Adams, 2007). Some of these developments could be seen as a renewal of earlier traditions of ‘community studies’ of non-Indian North America. Yet their theoretical approach was radically different from the functionalist positivism and ‘urban ecology’ of ‘ethnic succession’ in lower-class residential areas premised on social mobility and ‘cultural assimilation’ that had characterized the work of the Chicago School of urban sociology from the 1920s onwards (Low, 1996). Di Leonardo (1994: 171) notes the Janusfaced concept of ‘community’ that underpinned Chicago School studies of new industrial cities being populated by European peasants, seen as both the bearers of a ‘community’ tradition of face-to-face relations that retained positive value in the anomic context of an urban world of strangers, and a negatively perceived ‘backwardness’ to be erased by modernization and assimilation. The transformation of ‘huddled masses’ into ‘white ethnics’, ascribed an ongoing sense of ‘community’ in the positive sense, took place in the 1970s, in the wake of the black civil rights movement, and of the anti-war and feminist movements that drew inspiration from it, alongside a series of socio-economic trends that included ‘white flight’ to the suburbs and inner-city impoverishment and rising participation of married working-class women in the labour force (ibid.: 173–174). The newly valorized ‘white ethnics’ mimicked the language of the black civil rights and cultural nationalist movements as their resentments were channelled into the construction of a ‘multicultural’ United States that celebrated a politics of identity premised on the ideological representation of ‘shifting American class divisions’ as ‘caused by proper or improper ethnic or racial family and economic behavior rather than by the differential incorporation of immigrant and resident populations into American capitalism’s evolving class structure’ (ibid.: 176). Di Leonardo’s critique of identity politics, which is equally scathing of related efforts to place an essentialized notion of ‘women’s culture’ on the moral high ground, also

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exemplifies how anthropological work on the United States in the 1990s challenged the ‘blaming the victim’ approach to urban poverty associated with the notion of an ‘underclass’ (Leacock, 1971; Vincent, 1993; Kowarick, 2003). Scholars such as Di Leonardo who began their careers with studies of ‘hyphenated American’ populations (Di Leonardo, 1984) therefore not only challenged the obliteration of their internal diversity and inequalities by careful ethnographic work but also insisted on the need for a more holistic perspective on race, class and gender that focused on the shifting relations between these constructed ‘communities’ within a US society subject to historical waves of capitalist restructuring (Goode and Schneider, 1994). That contextualization was also important in modern ethnographies focused on smaller segments of ‘ethnic’ populations, such as Philippe Bourgois’s best-selling study of Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York City (Bourgois, 1995). It provided new perspectives on phenomena such as gangs: anthropologists challenging the essentialist cultural and racial models that pervade public debate seek to demonstrate how the behaviours that they describe are the product of the relationships in which the actors’ lives are inscribed and meaning-making practices in which they engage (Conqergood, 1994) as they interact with people from other ethnic groups and classes within the larger society. Earlier understood in terms of processes of socialization associated with culturally distinct populations outside the Anglo-American ‘mainstream’, the persistence of gangs defied the Chicago School expectation that they would vanish with the social ascent of their ethnic communities, a conundrum that some analysts resolved by explaining gangs as a response to the new forms of social exclusion suffered by a ‘post-industrial’ underclass. Yet, as criminologists engaged in critical rethinking of this argument have suggested (Hagedorn, 2005), it neglects the kinds of (informal) economic agency and politicization revealed in some anthropological studies

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of this global phenomenon in a context in which neoliberal states focus on making cities safe and desirable for the middle and upper classes. Nevertheless, as Dennis Rodgers (2006) observes on the basis of long-term fieldwork in Nicaragua, under conditions of deepening social crisis a growing individualization of the collective forms of violence associated with neighbourhood gangs also facilitates recruitment of gang members by organized crime.

FROM IMMIGRATION TO TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONS The past quarter century has produced major paradigm shifts in the study of migration as the model of ‘assimilation’ within the ‘melting pot’ failed to conform with reality. More attention has been paid to segmentation and conflict within and between groups of recent immigrants. This has included attention to the relations between Latino and East Asian immigrants (Ui, 1991), between Latino immigrants from different countries and, in the case of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, citizen and non-citizen Latinos (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas, 2003), and between different generations of migrants from single countries. In the latter case it is important to bear in mind that some ‘Mexican-Americans’ are the descendents of people who lived in the territories annexed by the United States (Menchaca, 1995), that Mexican American citizens who are middle class are often antagonistic to new immigrants (Foley, 1988), and that there is a complex pattern of social and spatial diversification of the Mexican immigrant population over time, shaped by both labour market changes and changes in immigration laws (Gledhill, 1995; Malkin, 2007). A second consequence of the emergence of ‘unmeltable’ ethnicities and ‘indigestible’ incomers (Kearney, 1991) has been the adoption of transnational perspectives on migration, often based on multi-sited ethnographic research (Marcus, 1995) in both the

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places of origin and destinations of migrants, further extending the race, class and gender framework of the critical anthropology of North America (Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc, 1992). Examining how people live lives that cross the borders of different national states makes it possible to study the complex social and political effects on life in different countries of the changes in class, gender and ethnic relations and individual subjectification that take place within transnational processes. A transnational perspective does not make the ethnographic study of particular urban and rural ‘localities’ redundant, since their social, cultural and political particularities affect processes of change and their consequences. Nor is it restricted to the study of migration: the flow of goods, ideas and images through transnational migrant circuits (Kearney, 1996) has a clear impact on the informal economies and politics of contemporary multi-ethnic cities (Stoller, 1996), while religious congregations have long been one of the most important manifestations of transnational processes (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Nor should we forget the importance the transnational circulation of the products of the different American music, television and film industries, consumer styles (including ‘ethnic’ styles), and political and social movement projects has in the configuration of all the societies of the Americas (Mato, 1997; Wade, 2000; Sansone, 2003). The study of South−North migration in the Americas has become increasingly important not only because of the continuing growth of the Latino population of the United States and the role of migrant remissions in sustaining populations south of the Rio Grande but also because of the social, cultural and political implications of transnationalism, although we should remember that Latin Americans also migrate to Europe and that there is labour migration between Latin American countries (Salman and Zoomers, 2002). Although the main emphasis in studies of migration to the United States has been

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on the movement of relatively poor, but still ethnically and socially heterogeneous, migrant workers, many Central Americans who arrived in the United States in the 1980s were originally refugees fleeing civil wars for which the United States government bore a heavy responsibility that it subsequently sought to slough off by repatriating many of these exiles back to the ‘low intensity democracies’ created by peace accords (Mahler, 1995; Kruit, 2001). Some attention has also been paid, however, to the circulation of technical professionals and corporate executives in transnational space (Pérez Lizaur, 2005). Another recent preoccupation has been research on corporate power and US empire studied in both ‘the belly of the beast’ and in terms of its effects on Latin America. This has opened up new ethnographic locales such as Chicago trading floors and Wall Street investment banks to anthropological scrutiny (Zaloom, 2006; Ho, 2009) and also produced major transnational (and gendered) studies of manufacturing production such as Jane Collins’s study of garment production for global brands in the United States and Mexico (Collins, 2003). North American anthropologists have ventured into the study of the military apparatus in the United States (Lutz, 2006) and its extensions in Latin America (Gill, 2004). Attention to the continuing ‘hardness’ of the exercise of state and corporate power in the United States has provoked many to argue that enthusiasm for Foucaultderived models of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ should be tempered by attention to the limits of these techniques of rule (Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008), although they have proved useful for understanding the apparent lack of ‘resistance’ that has accompanied much of the remaking of the North American working classes in the era of downsizing and workfare (Dunk, 2008). Other anthropologists of North America have tempered the emphasis on fluidity and mobility that characterizes much of the literature on transnationalism and globalization by focusing on militarized international borders as central

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aspects of global power relations (Dunn, 1996; Cunningham, 2004). Yet the study of transborder relations has also embraced patterns of consumption and cultural and religious life within the Mexican diaspora (Mummert, 2009). Despite an emphasis on poverty, homelessness, public health issues and the impacts of deindustrialization, US and Canadian anthropologists interested in their society’s social inequalities have not focused exclusively on the lower classes: in addition to the spread of class positions represented in most ‘ethnically’ defined groups, including Latinos and Afro-Americans, George Marcus, for example, has worked on wealthy elite dynasties (Marcus and Hall, 1992), whereas Setha Low (2003) has studied middle-class lives in gated communities in the United States and also extended her research on this theme to Latin America. There is, however, still scope for more ethnographic research on middleand upper-class people throughout the region.

LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN AN ERA OF CRISIS AND CHANGE Latin American societies offer opportunities for anthropologists to act as public intellectuals by writing in quality newspapers and even to occupy positions in government. A number have written essays that seek to define the foundational dilemmas of their national societies (subsequently translated into English), such as Brazil’s Roberto Da Matta (1991), and Mexico’s Roger Bartra (1992). Da Matta’s ideas about relational personhood and the vulnerability of being an ‘individual’ travel well to other Latin American countries, although his suggestion that Carnival could even momentarily suppress the contradictions at the heart of the ‘Brazilian dilemma’ was contested in an important analysis of the everyday violence of urban life by Daniel Touro Linger (1992). A seminal contribution to the anthropology of Mexico by Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992) was even more strongly critical of Bartra’s essay on Mexican

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‘national character’ along with Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s (1996) account of a ‘deep Mexico’ built on indigenous roots whose reality was denied by ideologies of progress through whitening and Europeanization. What Lomnitz-Adler offered instead was a series of regional perspectives on the processes involved in the historical construction of modern Mexico more attuned to the perspectives of social anthropology, focused on local ‘intimate cultures’ of class and power relations. His work reflected a trend within Mexican anthropology towards looking at regions rather than ‘communities’ or the nation as units of analysis (De la Peña, 1988), and on understanding processes of nation and state formation ‘from below’ through a Gramscian conception of hegemony and ‘the negotiation of rule’ (Joseph and Nugent, 1994). Similar ‘decentred’ approaches have been adopted in the study of state formation in other ‘Latin’ American countries, as exemplified by David Nugent’s work on Peru (Nugent, 1997). Another virtue of this perspective was that it rescued nonindigenous Mexicans from relegation to the generic ‘mestizo’ category to which nationalist ideologies in that country consigned them as bearers of a ‘national’ culture, making it possible to consider the particular identities, culture and social practices of different kinds of mestizos, urban and rural. As a result of the privatization of the communal lands of colonial ‘Indian communities’ in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, many Mexicans had ‘mestizo’ identities thrust upon them by a process of dispossession that was followed, after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, by state-sponsored attempts to promote a national identity by assimilating the remaining self-defining ‘Indians’ to a mestizo mainstream and persuading rural people to adopt the ‘class’ identity of ‘peasants’. Much of the anthropology of mestizo Mexico has focused on the vicissitudes of the rural communities formed by the country’s land reform programme, although anthropologists have also worked on the private property-based ‘rancher’ sector

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of Mexican rural society and Afro-descendent communities (Barragán López, 2005). In addition to work focused on rural development issues, study of the relationships between Mexico’s land reform peasantry and government bureaucracies also inspired innovative work on the anthropology of the state, such as Monique Nuijten’s analysis of the culture of the state as a ‘hope generating machine’ (Nuijten, 2003). Redistributive land reform was ended by the neoliberal government of Carlos Salinas at the start of the 1990s, and subsequent work focused on the implications of further neoliberal institutional reforms and efforts to promote free-market solutions (Snyder and Torres, 1998), including the impacts of the NAFTA on rural society. Although there have been different patterns of adaptation to the new scenario, including eco-tourism projects, efforts to create markets for ‘quality’ artisan foods, and some success stories in export agriculture, many rural areas have not only become increasingly dependent on international migrant remissions, and therefore vulnerable to recession in the United States, but also on a growth of drug production and trafficking that has penetrated deeply into the fabric of society and politics. ‘Peasant’ movements and a multi-class farmers’ anti-debt movement remained significant topics of study after the debt crisis of the 1980s. Non-indigenous rural Mexico produced episodes of ‘resistance’ to the transformation of rural areas by big business, notably the successful revolt of the farmers of Atenco against expropriation of their lands to build a new Mexico City airport (Stolle-McAllister, 2005), which became a project of local political autonomy in alliance with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, severely repressed in 2006. Nevertheless, broad protest campaigns against the destruction of peasant agriculture faltered in Mexico, while urbanization engulfing farmland and other economic changes towards a ‘post-rural’ countryside did little to stem out-migration. As William Roseberry (1995) argued, defending the approach pioneered by Sidney Mintz

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and Eric Wolf, ethnographic studies of particular rural regions hardly become less relevant simply because the wider forces and relations with which they are entangled change, and participation of local farmer movements in transnational network organizations such as Vía Campesina (Borras, 2008) suggests that adaptation to twenty-first century conditions remains possible. Yet even the main poster child of changing agrarian politics in Latin America, the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers, seems to have lost much of its former momentum, and Marc Edelman (2008) suggests that the possibilities of consolidating strong transnational peasant organizations in Central America had reduced a decade after the first regional networks formed in the 1990s. Although there are examples of convergence between indigenous, Afro-descendent and mestizo rural movements in Latin America, the territorial demands of the former two groups frequently provoke conflict with the latter in Mexico, another legacy of the agrarian reform. Turning to the cities, one focus in Mexico has been on how urban households responded to successive economic crises and the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, looking particularly at how women bore the burdens of adjustment and at the growth of the informal economy even where regular salaried jobs were available to working-class people. Although ‘informal’ economic activity had long been the preferred option of those available for many people, Mercedes González de la Rocha (2004) has argued that the 1990s marked a watershed in which absolute poverty of resources made it difficult for households to continue to practise past forms of adjustment and networks of mutual aid and reciprocity declined. These conclusions about the ‘new poverty’ produced by neoliberal capitalism echoed those of Argentine anthropologist Javier Auyero (2000). Auyero was influenced by Loïc Wacquant’s (2007) model of the ‘advanced marginality’ of the ‘hyperghetto’, although Teresa Caldeira (2009) is one of a number of Latin American anthropologists

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who have questioned the bleakness of Wacquant’s efforts to reinstate a concept that was abandoned in this region in the 1960s and 1970s, suggesting that ‘marginality’ must always discount the inventiveness and agency, for good or ill, of the inhabitants of the ‘urban peripheries’. Nevertheless, although the Argentine political crisis of 2001 provoked a flurry of anthropological attention to the new movements of the unemployed, neighbourhood assemblies and worker-occupied factories that emerged in its wake, with hindsight Auyero’s (2007) emphasis on the continuing significance of political patron−client networks proves helpful for understanding how the authority of the Argentine state was rebuilt by combining strategic use of social programmes with an increasing transformation of independent social movements into legally constituted and state-recognized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in some sectors of the popular movement. In the case of Mexico, ‘regime change’ from the seventy-year rule of a single party brought the political right to power in 2000 (the centre-left alternative was not merely defeated in the next electoral contest in 2006 but also increasingly replicated the vices of the established political class) and this dampened interest in the kinds of class-based urban social movement politics traditionally seen, not always realistically, as bases for left politics. Attention refocused on lower-class efforts to deepen the enjoyment of rights of citizenship promised by neoliberal democratic states, not simply in Mexico but throughout Latin America (Assies, Calderón and Salman, 2005). In the case of Brazil, James Holston (2008) has argued that the ‘insurgent citizenship’ practised by residents of the urban periphery around issues of illegal tenure, land conflict, housing, impunity and social stigmatization challenges the emptiness of a liberal model of citizenship in cities whose developmental dynamics are more class-biased than ever in the neoliberal era. In Mexico, Deborah Poole (2007) has examined the potential of new kinds of

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‘popular’ politics of contention that unite groups with different political, ethnic and class agendas as exemplified by the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). Although APPO itself suffered repression and subsequently fragmented, struggles to make ‘democracy’ real continue to figure prominently in Latin American political scenarios. There has also been innovative work on other aspects of urban ‘popular culture’ in Mexico, including that of Néstor García Canclini on ‘cultural hybridization’, new urban identities, globalization, mass culture, consumption and the media industries (García Canclini, 1995, 2001). The growth of Pentecostal and other non-Catholic churches has also been significant in urban as well as rural Mexico (Garma, 1999), although less so than in some Central American countries and, above all, Brazil (Martin, 1990; Kremer, 2005). Although the proselytizing efforts of organizations based in North America have played some role in these developments (Stoll, 1990), transnational influences are much less direct in the case of Pentecostal churches founded by Mexican nationals, such as the Guadalajara-based Luz del Mundo (Fortuny, 1995), and one of Brazil’s ‘native’ neo-Pentecostal churches, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has itself become a powerful transnational organization, using a ‘prosperity theology’ message to build new congregations not only in other Latin American countries, including Mexico, but also in Africa and the United States and Europe (Lehmann, 1996). Yet also of significance in Mexico is the growth of heterodox religious cults that retain some affinity with Catholicism, notably that of ‘Saint Death’. Mexico City is also now witnessing localized movements of ‘resistance’ to urban restructuring in mestizo neighbourhoods that are appropriating the language of indigenous rights and autonomy in a way that replicates the responses to the black movement of ‘white ethnics’ in the United States, mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, as a bleak economic situation is made worse by mounting

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insecurity, the contradictory aspects of grassroots urban politics highlighted by Matthew Gutmann (2002) are likely to remain salient. Gutmann’s (1996) ethnography of a workingclass neighbourhood of Mexico City originally established by land invasion has also made an important contribution to the study of masculinities in Mexico. Latin America in general has proved fertile ground for rethinking gender issues and exploring the social construction of gender itself over the past quarter century (see, for example, Jelin, 1990; Lancaster, 1992, Melhuus and Stølen, 1996; Kulick, 1998; Archetti, 1999). The social problems facing young men and women in the poorer neighbourhoods of the region’s socially divided metropolitan cities have produced a considerable convergence of work throughout the Americas in areas such as reproductive health and domestic and sexual violence, as well as similar kinds of NGO interventions and ‘rights-based’ projects to transform gender relations (Molyneux and Lazar, 2003). The latter have attracted scrutiny from anthropologists interested in the effects and limits of neoliberal governmentality and the adaptability of feminist politics to different social and cultural settings (Stephen, 1997; Alvarez, 1998). Work by foreign anthropologists has sometimes proved controversial within the national anthropological community in countries such as Brazil, as illustrated by some reactions to Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s analysis of how the structural violence of poverty in the Brazilian northeast obliges mothers to practice a ‘morality of triage’ with respect to those children whom they deem too weak to survive (Scheper-Hughes, 1992; Sigaud, 1995). Yet anthropologists from Latin America have achieved considerable recognition in the North. In addition to making path-breaking contributions to the study of social movements (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar, 1998) and transnational networks of anti-capitalist activism (Escobar, 2008), Arturo Escobar from Colombia has remained a powerful voice for his colleagues working in Latin American

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universities in the debates about creating alternatives to the ‘hegemonic’ anthropologies of the North. Teresa Caldeira’s equally path-breaking contributions to understanding the social dilemmas of São Paulo’s ‘city of walls’ (Caldeira, 2000), working-class attitudes towards crime and human rights, and Brazil’s experiments in ‘popular participation’ in urban planning have made her work significant beyond the boundaries of her discipline. Caldeira’s work responds to the goal of trying to create anthropology ‘of’ rather than simply ‘in’ the city (Low, 1996) by comparing the forms of sociality of upper-class residents of closed condominiums with that sought by other social classes in her study of the impacts of neoliberal models of urbanism and the privatization of public power on the fabric of city life. This extension of ethnographic vision to all the social groups struggling for space in the modern megalopolis seems an essential complement to a still valuable and vibrant tradition of research in slum neighbourhoods (see, for example, Goldstein, 2003; Cavalcanti, 2009). The holistic urban anthropology of Brazil also includes James Holston’s (1989) critical study of the modernist utopia of the country’s capital, Brasília, neatly complemented by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro’s ethnographic study of the workers who built it (Ribeiro, 2008). As Brasília celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2010, surrounded by satellite settlements with the same social problems as other Brazilian cities, utopia still seemed unattainable, despite advances in poverty reduction and combating racism. Yet if much of the recent anthropology of the cities of ‘Latin’ America has inevitably focused on suffering, insecurity and violence and the extent to which it remains difficult for many citizens to enjoy their citizenship rights fully, such issues seem equally relevant north of the Rio Grande, while southern efforts to transcend the coloniality of power, democratize democracy and become more equal partners in shaping the future of the Americas may make the next twenty-five years very different from

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the last. As the remainder of this chapter shows, there is much to be gained by abandoning binary oppositions such as ‘North’ versus ‘Latin’ America, and ‘colonist’ versus ‘indigenous’, in favour of more complex accounts of ‘difference’ and greater attention to commonalities in the development of the Americas as a whole (Fine-Dare and Rubenstein, 2009).

FORMATIONS OF RACE, CLASS AND NATION IN THE AMERICAS As noted in the introduction to this chapter, race and ethnicity have been central to the formation of the concept of ‘the Americas’ and of the ‘imagined communities’ of the nation-states within this geographical area (Anderson, 1991). So we now turn in more depth to anthropological studies of the interweavings of ideas of race, class and nation across the American continent, bringing together ideas of blackness, indigeneity, mixedness and whiteness. It makes sense to address this theme from a continental perspective because, while Latin America and North America have sometimes been presented as contrasting formations of race, class and nation − the former racially integrated but class divided, the latter less class divided but racially segregated − these regions (and the Caribbean) have always formed part of a wider Atlantic network, built on European colonization, the domination of indigenous American societies and African slavery. National formations anywhere in the continent must always be seen in the context of this transnational network. The intellectual background for anthropologists studying race, class and nation in the Americas in the last twenty to thirty years contained several key elements. First, there was the study of comparative socio-racial systems, much of it done by historians looking at slavery and abolition. The central question here was based on a North−South contrast.

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In Latin American slave societies − the focus was usually on Brazil − there had been the growth of a large class of freed people prior to the general abolition of slavery in the midto late-nineteenth century. Also by this time, national societies had emerged based on the demographic predominance of people socially categorized as ‘mixed’ (i.e. neither black/African, nor indigenous, nor white/ European). In the United States, freed people had been a tiny minority during slavery and social recognition of mixture was more restricted and became more limited during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century: people of mixed parentage were classed as black or Native American. A number of explanations were debated − the proposition that elites in Latin American slave societies were simply more racially tolerant was controversial and not generally accepted − which need not detain us here (Skidmore, 2003). Suffice to say that, in the United States, a large white working-class population helped to draw strict lines of racial segregation to keep control over black populations; after the Civil War, internal divisions among whites were salved by the promise of a society in which whites were united against non-whites. In Latin America, the small conquistador white class could not segregate or control indigenous and slave populations in the same way, while the emergence of a class of freed, mixed people did not threaten them as it did the white working class in the North American slave states. Abolition did not provoke civil war and a national society could form around the idea of class hierarchy and − supposedly − racial inclusion. In the non-Hispanic Caribbean islands, tiny white colonizer populations confronted huge numbers of slaves: the elites generally recognized mixed people (‘mulattoes’) as socially distinct, as a way of creating an intermediate, buffer class. The importance of this tradition of scholarship was that it played into an assumed opposition of national identity in which the United States and Latin America (usually Brazil)

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emerged as polar opposites − racially segregated hell versus racially integrated paradise − with the Caribbean islands somewhere in the middle, characterized by their ‘plural societies’, in which different ethnic groups lived alongside one another (Smith, 1965). In the United States, anthropologists carried out studies of ‘caste’ relations in strictly racially segregated towns in the ex-slave states of the ‘Deep South’ (Powdermaker, 1939; Davis, Gardner and Gardner, 1941). They also looked at northern cities such as Chicago where black ghettoes had formed (Warner, Junker and Adams, 1941). In Brazil, after the Nazi racism of the Second World War, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) sent social scientists to the country to discover the secrets of its supposed ‘racial democracy’. They found many cracks in that façade, but their work at least partly supported a continued United States−Brazil contrast. A second main component of the intellectual background was the study of Africanisms, pioneered in the 1930s by Melville Herskovits, who searched contemporary black American regions for assumed traces of African cultural origin (Herskovits, 1941). Critiques of his sometimes rather speculative approach led to the so-called creolization model of Mintz and Price (1976), which argued against a focus on specific Africanisms and for the rapid emergence of new black American cultures, shaped however by underlying African cultural principles. Debates have continued about the exact influence of Africa on American cultures, but the importance of this background is its interest in black culture in a trans-Atlantic frame, rather than racial and ethnic relations in a national frame, even if Herskovits used his work for anti-racism in the United States, arguing for black resilience, cultural creativity and historical continuity. A third component of the intellectual background was the tendency to separate studies of blackness from studies of indigeneity, often understood as the difference between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ (Wade, 2010).

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Across the continent, studies of indigenous people tended to be the classic terrain of anthropology, carried out through in-depth, rural community studies. These studies were often underlain first by functionalist assumptions about the social integration of cultural units and later by ideas about indigenous people as colonized and exploited people on the bottom rungs of a national and global system driven by capitalism. Studies of black people − which, in Latin America at least, were much less common than those of indigenous people − were more urban and were located as much in sociology as anthropology. Classic functionalist approaches were less common and the emphasis was more on black people’s adaptation to a plantation and post-plantation globalized political economy, characterized by great social inequality, poverty for black people, racial discrimination and economic instability for the poor, linked to chronic geographical mobility and migration. Such adaptation might be seen to involve the supposed integration of black people into a class society (Latin America), their nonintegration in a segregated society (United States), their coexistence with other ethnic groups in a plural society (Caribbean), or the formation of new national societies based on blackness or at least brownness (Caribbean). Overall, this intellectual component with its division between black and indigenous tended to militate against a holistic view of race, class and nation. Finally, approaches to black and indigenous people during the early twentieth century had been grounded to a large extent in the scientific racism and eugenics of that and earlier times, which tended to class these people as a ‘problem’ for the nation, even if some nations celebrated their pre-colonial indigenous ancestors. Later studies reacted against such racist views, with the upshot that anthropology − typically for the discipline − tended to be defensive about black and indigenous people, while also speaking on their behalf, and setting the scene for later postcolonial debates about who had the ‘right’ and authority to study and speak for whom.

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RACIAL DEMOCRACY, RACISM, AND MULTICULTURALISM In the wake of the Second World War, powerful processes changed national formations in the Americas, reshaping structures of race and class. Reactions against Nazi racism in Europe provoked an increasingly self-reflexive stance on race among governments and intellectuals: UNESCO issued several statements on race, which, although debated, claimed to represent a common, and anti-racist, view. As noted above, social movements espousing the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, while they had important antecedents, enjoyed a period of growth and influence first in North America (e.g. the US’s National Indian Youth Council, 1961, American Indian Movement, 1968, and black Civil Rights movement, from the 1940s; Canada’s National Indian Brotherhood, 1968); and then in Latin America (e.g. Bolivia’s Movimiento Indio Tupac Katari, 1962; Mexico’s National Council of Indigenous Peoples, 1975; Brazil’s Movimento Negro Unificado, 1978; the AfroColombian rights organization, Cimarrón, 1982). In the United States, formal desegregation took off in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that segregated schooling was unconstitutional, although in practice segregation continued or even increased in some respects. In Brazil, the government passed a 1951 law criminalizing racial discrimination, while a series of studies in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the idea that the country hosted a ‘racial democracy’, suggesting that the racism they uncovered was reproducing the obvious racial dimensions of the grossly unequal class system. In the United States, as mentioned above, after a hiatus of forty years, mass immigration began again in 1965: the new immigrants came mainly from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, changing the ethnic demography of the country, with Hispanics forming 12.8% of the national population in 2000, overtaking African Americans as the country’s largest minority. All over the continent, multiculturalism, in varied forms, became

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part of the political and social landscape. In Canada, the federal government adopted multiculturalist policies in 1971 (mainly directed at English- and French-Canadian differences) and passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988 (which, by then, had also to address a wider spectrum of ethnic difference); in 1985, it also revised its 1876 Indian Act. The US version of multiculturalism has not been enshrined in federal law − although affirmative action legislation to actively promote racial equality began in 1961 and has periodically been legally contested ever since − but the idea of recognizing racial and ethnic diversity is well entrenched and shapes local and national politics (Di Leonardo, 1998). In Latin America, official multiculturalism dates from the 1988 Brazilian constitution and has become part of the legislation and/or constitutions of many countries. The reasons for this shift are complex and include the pressure applied by black and indigenous activism, international moves towards recognition of ethnic minorities (for example, in the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169 on indigenous peoples), and the possibilities for enhanced governance offered by institutionalizing relationships with minorities which often occupied peripheral areas where the state had a weak presence. Meanwhile, anthropologists began to take a greater interest in race, a concept they had fought shy of, with its baggage of colonial anthropology and scientific racism, leaving it mainly to sociologists or to anthropologists who worked on the disciplinary borders with sociology. In the United States, these included Lloyd Warner et al. (1941), John Dollard (1937), and, later, Lee Rainwater (1970) and Elliot Liebow, with his classic study of ‘Negro streetcorner men’ (1967). A small number of US anthropologists encouraged their profession to address the matter head on (Smedley, 1993; Gregory and Sanjek, 1994; Shanklin, 1994; Harrison, 1995, 1998; Mukhopadhyay and Moses, 1997) and the American Anthropological Association

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issued a ‘Statement on Race’ in 1998. Studies of Native Americans, while they retained some of the established model of focusing on the history and culture of specific peoples, also became increasingly infused with broader perspectives of domination and resistance, and sovereignty and citizenship in the national frame (Sider, 1993; Jaimes, 1994; Strong, 2005). These trends allied with a growing tendency in anthropology more widely to include areas definable as ‘home’ in the purview of the discipline’s interest (Messerschmidt, 1981; Jackson, 1987). In the US context, there was also a reaction against the ‘race- and class-evasive discourse’ of the 1960s and 1970s (Frankenberg, 1993: 14−15; Harrison, 1995: 58), which departed from earlier assimilationist models of the nation, but only by turning a blind eye to structural divisions of race and class. Anthropologists working in Latin America, whether ‘at home’ or not, also began to take more interest, to begin with, in the location of indigeneity in national and transnational frames and, later, in questions of race, racism, and blackness. In both cases, they were strongly influenced by black and indigenous social movements in Latin America and internationally. We have already seen that, from the 1980s, anthropologists engaged in ‘community studies’ in the United States, with an eye to urban racial and ethnic diversity and identity politics in the context of multiculturalism. One key concern was the persistence of segregation, and the possibilities of transcending racial and ethnic divisions, in the light of the influential view that the ‘significance of race’ was declining (Wilson, 1978), a view in some ways reinforced by Ortner’s study of the fortunes of her contemporaries in the graduating high-school class of 1958: while race clearly mattered in terms of identity and the impact the black civil rights movement had on improving opportunities for blacks, most of the graduates had experienced significant upward class mobility, compared to their parents (Ortner, 2003). Gailey’s study of adoption pointed in both directions: the

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federal government seemed determined that race should not matter in matching parents to adoptees, whereas white adoptive parents of black children varied a great deal in their ideas about the significance of race for their families: some denying its importance, others very aware of the effect of racism (Gailey, 2010). The idea that race was beginning not to matter, however, was hardly borne out in deprived contexts such as that of Bourgois’s study of East Harlem, in which his mere presence as a white (non-police) man violated the ‘apartheid’ of the city (Bourgois, 1995). In contrast, Sanjek (1998) was more optimistic about the Elmhurst-Corona district in New York City, where non-whites began to outnumber whites in the 1970s, a transition which Sanjek saw as being ‘the future of us all’ in the United States. He focused on district-level politics (broadly defined to include civic associations and public rituals, such as the Colombian Independence Festival), where established white residents still dominated. However, initial resistance by these residents to the newcomers was not accompanied by white flight or a hunkering down into a generic whiteness. Instead, there emerged common concerns with keeping up basic infrastructure and standards in the neighbourhood, concerns that cross-cut ethnic and racial lines and in which some non-whites took positions of influence: ‘lines of race and ethnicity had become crossable’ (Sanjek, 1998: 330). Still, local African Americans remained highly segregated and this undermined some of Sanjek’s optimism. While recognizing the persistence of racial segregation and inequality, there was also a concern to destabilize the idea of the ghetto, as a space for a stereotyped ‘culture of poverty’. Wilson, Bourgois, and Sanjek, in different ways, all linked inner-city spaces into wider structural dynamics of deindustrialization, the spatialization of class, political decentralization and city-level fiscal belttightening, seeking to avoid a ‘blame the victim’ approach to black and Latino innercity disadvantage. Gregory (1999) also challenged the idea of the ghetto by focusing on

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middle-class as well as working-class African Americans. The role of racialized difference in the United States was being complicated by nonwhite immigration: Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and Jamaicans − who might be ‘black’, ‘brown’ and ‘white’ − unsettled US racial divides (Rodríguez, 1994; Duany, 1998; Foner, 2001a; England, 2006), not to mention the large cohorts of Asian migrants (Foner, 2001b). Black Puerto Ricans in Chicago did not necessarily identify with a US-style blackness, seen as being more racially segregated and exclusive, as well as undermining Puerto Rican nationalism (Ramos-Zayas, 2003). Dominicans in the United States generally avoided identification as black − as they did in the Dominican Republic − but this didn’t mean identifying straightforwardly as white, which would collude with US imperial history. Instead, Dominican women spent a long time in beauty parlours cultivating a ‘Hispanic’ look (Candelario, 2007). The apparent simplicity of US black−white divides was also being complicated by historical and anthropological attention to whiteness (Kolchin, 2002). Frankenberg (1993) noted that ‘white’ was an unmarked, taken-for-granted category, which women occupied in diverse ways, some more cognizant of racial difference than others, which evaded ideas of race and power difference. If, in the United States, desegregation and immigration and a concern with how class intersected with race was revealing a growing complexity around race, class and nation, in Latin America things were, in the view of some, moving in the opposite direction. A host of studies, in various disciplines, challenged the idea of a Latin American racial democracy and highlighted the importance of racial difference, despite the overriding national ideologies of mixedness and a tendency, even among blacks, to deny racism (Dzidzienyo and Oboler, 2005). In many cases − as in the United States − there was a strong correlation between race and class, but this did not mean that race could be explained away in terms of class. In Colombia and

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Ecuador, blackness was associated, even among black and brown working-class people, with poverty, violence, crime and (sexual) immorality; race also shaped class structures of employment and housing (Whitten, 1986; Wade, 1993; Streicker, 1995; Rahier, 2008). Despite a majority mestizo identity and the ambiguity of racial classifications, the category negro existed and had social effects. In Brazil, statisticians found that people who self-identified in the census categories of pardo (brown) and preto (black) were socio-economically very similar compared to those classed as branco (white): they argued for a single non-white category (for details, see Telles, 2004). Anthropologists mapped the operation of racism, even when racial identities continued to be ambiguous (Burdick, 1998; Fry, 2000; Goldstein, 2003; Sansone, 2003; McCallum, 2005), while some also highlighted white−black oppositions. Sheriff, for example, by focusing on the black inhabitants of a Rio de Janeiro favela (low-income settlement) and their experiences outside the favela in mainly nonblack contexts, gave a sense of black−white opposition, despite the fact that some 25% of the favela inhabitants were white (Sheriff, 2001). While recognizing the flexibility of racial categories, Twine’s analysis of ‘white supremacy’ also created an impression of black−white confrontation (Twine, 1998). Black social movements all over Latin America favoured an encompassing black identity, leading some to conclude that Brazil, and Brazilian academics, had been colonized − and thus its sui generis reality distorted − by US racial models, an argument contested by many, without denying the idea that many black Latin Americans looked to the United States for inspiration (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999; Hanchard, 2003; Sansone, 2003; Norvell, 2009). The creation of legislation aimed at ‘black communities’ in Colombia and at quilombo communities (descended from fugitive slaves) and at ‘black’ university applicants in Brazil seemed to reinforce these singular categories

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(Wade, 1995; Arocha, 1998; French, 2009; Schwartzman, 2009). Meanwhile, there was an increasing willingness on the part of some anthropologists to talk about indigeneity in terms of race and racism (Nelson, 1999; Warren, 2001; Hale, 2006; Wade, 2010). The apparent convergence of the United States and Latin America (Skidmore, 1993, 2003), however, hides the complexities of US racial identities prior to desegregation and oversimplifies the complexity of Latin American racial identities, where ambiguity coexists with clarity (Wade, 2006). Ultimately, the idea reproduces a north−south comparative contrast that (a) masks the common grounding of the United States and Brazil (and other American nations) on a history of slavery and the oppression of black and indigenous peoples; (b) masks the way in which Brazilian and US ideas about race and nation were in a constant dialogue with each other, constructing the contrast as a strategic tool for both anti-racist critiques and nationalist ideologies (Seigel, 2009); and (c) tends to homogenize Latin America as the opposite of the United States. It is not illegitimate to compare social contexts, of course, but the dangers of reifying and isolating the units of comparison must be recognized. A broader, continental approach reveals important commonalities across the region. First, racial categories in general were being rethought and complicated − by reference to gender and sex. Ideas about the black ghetto, for example, involved stereotypes of the welfare-dependent black woman, the overly fertile Latina and the irresponsible black or Latino father − ideas that had resonances throughout the Americas in relation to stereotypes of black male and female sexuality. Black rights movements had, noted some black feminists, been too much about vindicating black masculinity. Ideas about racial democracy in Brazil were founded in part on the image of interracial sexual relations, which, in fact, were not generalized but highly patterned by race and gender − wealthy white men having relationships, often informal, with poorer, darker women; or successful

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black men having sex with, or preferably marrying, whiter women. The image of the cholo − an urbanized indigenous person, perhaps of mixed ancestry − also had to be unpacked as the chola (market woman, national icon, sexually alluring and ambiguous) and the cholo (tough, virile emblem of national masculinity) (Martinez-Alier [Stolcke], 1989 [1974]; Bourgois, 1995; Collins, 2000; Weismantel, 2001; Viveros Vigoya, 2002; Goldstein, 2003; Wade, 2009). Second, as noted above, increasing emphasis was being given by anthropologists and others, often working in inter-disciplinary modes, to transnational relations. This trend was driven largely by the dynamics of migration, but its wider implications entailed thinking about the United States and Brazil (and other Latin American and Caribbean nations) as linked nodes in the same network, rather than as contrasting cases. It also implied thinking in terms of the ‘Black Atlantic’, loosening the shackles of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) and paying attention to the long-standing movements of people, things and ideas across continents and oceans, sometimes in unexpected directions, rather than the one-way Africa-to-America traffic that Herskovits had examined several decades previously (Gilroy, 1993; Yelvington, 2001, 2006; Matory, 2005; Sansi-Roca, 2007). In the late nineteenth century, some black Brazilians travelled to Africa, where they were educated in Englishspeaking Presbyterian schools, became Freemasons and often visited England; they were proud of their English connections and adopted Anglicized names. At the same time they imbibed Yoruba culture and religion in Nigeria and, when back in Brazil, passed that concern on to Afro-Brazilian religious practices of Candomblé in Bahia (Matory, 1999). Things that seemed to have simple, unidirectional ‘roots’ were actually constructed in complex circulations via multiple ‘routes’. A further aspect of this broadening of conceptual horizons has been in the growing tendency to consider blackness and indigeneity within the same national frame, rather

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than treating them separately. This has been, in part, a result of (a) legislative reform in which governments, struggling to legislate rights for ambiguously defined ‘black’ minorities, tended to conceive of them as similar to indigenous communities; and, relatedly, (b) a tendency for some black and indigenous groups to cooperate in social movements (Greene, 2007; Ng’weno, 2007; Escobar, 2008; Anderson, 2009; Asher, 2009; French, 2009; Wade, 2010). It also obeyed an intellectual tendency to cross divisions that, after all, were fundamentally colonial in origin.

MESTIZAJE, CREOLIZATION AND BROWNING The challenges to received notions of Latin American racial integration questioned national ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture (mestiçagem in Brazil), but they could not displace them: there was no denying their continued importance all over Latin America, even after 30 or more years of mobilization by black and indigenous social movements and shifts towards official multiculturalism in many countries. Part of the specificity of Latin American race−nation formations lay precisely in the coexistence of racism and race mixture (England, 2010; Wade, 2010) and in the particular gender dynamics that mestizaje involved − for example, the idea that the roots of the nation lay in sexual encounters between European men and African and indigenous women (Hale, 1996; Smith, 1997; Rahier, 2003; Wade, 2009). Such ideologies are being reproduced most recently in scientific studies of genetic ancestry (Santos and Maio, 2004). However, anthropologists also began to think about mestizaje as more than a nationalist ideology, imposed from above, construed ideally as a process of whitening and modernization, and functioning as an ‘ideology of exclusion’ behind a mask of inclusion (Stutzman, 1981). As, in many places, the identity of mestizo, or at least the idea of

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mixed origins, was familiar to much of the non-elite population, it became evident that mestizaje was multivalent and could function as a subaltern identity that did not necessarily conform to elite notions of whitening. Thus in Peru − unusual anyway in that mestizaje never really took hold as a national ideology and was subordinated to ideas of a ‘pure’ indigenous Andean region coexisting with a dominant mestizo coastal region − many indigenous highlanders thought of themselves as ‘indigenous mestizos’, who were ‘mixed’ but also ‘indigenous’ at the same time, thus unsettling standard notions of mestizaje, in which becoming a mestizo meant leaving the indigenous behind (De la Cadena, 2000). In Guatemala, some young urban dwellers recognize their indigenous origins, while also rejecting identification as either Ladino (the dominant white-mestizo class) or Maya (the main indigenous ethnicity): interestingly, they may identify as cholos (Hale, 2005). In north-east Brazil, peasants seen by others as mixed and who recognize their own mixed origins may nevertheless create new identities as ‘black’ or ‘indigenous’, depending on very local conjunctures: these identities are linked to legal categories and struggles for land, but they also complicate notions of mixture and purity (French, 2009). Generally, being mestizo does not necessarily mean obliterating black and indigenous elements from one’s own embodied personhood (Wade, 2005). In the Caribbean, literary figures wrote up créolité (creole-ness) as a space of postcolonial identification: it encapsulated processes of mixture and hybridity that undermined colonial categories of control (Guilbault, 1994; Glissant, 1995). Such views were used more widely to propose a liberatory potential for hybridity (Gilroy, 2000). Some critics, however, saw celebrations of hybridity as an intellectual project that ran the risk of glossing over real inequalities of class and race (Friedman, 1997; Hale, 1999). Perhaps the most explicit expression of mestizaje as resistive and contestatory came out of the Latino experience in the

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United States, where the very category mestizo challenged US racial classifications. Chicano studies scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) glorified the ‘new mestiza’ as a boundary-breaking figure. As part of the shift in US racialized demography, there has been an increasing interest there in what Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez (2002) has called ‘browning’, in ‘the hidden history of mestizo [North] America’ (Nash, 1995) and in mixed-race people (Ifekwunigwe, 2004). Sociological data, however, indicate that racial difference has the power to divide Latinos, qualifying the idea of the mestizo as a force for defusing race (for details, see Wade, 2009: 233). More generally, we should remain aware that mestizos and racism have long coexisted in Latin America, suggesting that mestizaje is no easy antidote to racial division and discrimination (Wade, 2004). This chapter has sought to show how the anthropology of the Americas has proved paradigm shifting in ways that advance thinking in the discipline more broadly and enable it to engage critically with fundamental social and political questions. In comparison with the study of small-scale societies as ‘laboratories’ for understanding how culture shapes ways of being human, analysis at a continental scale with the historical depth that distinguishes much of the work on this region is challenging for anthropological methods and conceptual frameworks, but it is also richly rewarding.

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Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Anderson, Mark. 2009. Black and Indigenous: Garifuna activism and consumer culture in Honduras. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Archetti, Eduardo. 1999. Masculinities: Football, polo, and the tango in Argentina. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Arocha, Jaime. 1998. Inclusion of Afro-Colombians: An unreachable goal. Latin American Perspectives 25 (3): 70−89. Asher, Kiran. 2009. Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, development, and nature in the Pacific lowlands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Assies, W, Marco Antonio Calderón, and Ton Salman, eds. 2005. Citizenship, Political Culture and State Transformation in Latin America. Amsterdam: Dutch University Press. Auyero, Javier. 2000. The hyper-shantytown: Neoliberal violence(s) in the Argentine slum. Ethnography 1 (1): 93−116. Auyero, Javier. 2007. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The gray zone of state power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barragán López, Esteban, ed. 2002. Gente de campo: Patrimonios y dinámicas rurales en México. 2 vols. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán. Bartra, Roger. 1992. The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and metamorphosis in the Mexican character. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1996. México Profundo: Reclaiming a civilization. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Borofsky, Robert. 2000. Commentary: Public anthropology. Where to? What next? Anthropology News 41 (5): 9−10. Borras Jr, Saturnino M. 2008. La Via Campesina and its global campaign for agrarian reform. Journal of Agrarian Change 8 (2−3): 258−289. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture and Society 16 (1): 41−58. Bourgois, Phillipe. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burdick, John. 1998. Blessed Anastácia: Women, race, and popular Christianity in Brazil. London: Routledge. Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, segregation and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 2009. Marginality, again?! International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (3): 848−853. Candelario, Ginetta E. B. 2007. Black Behind the Ears: Dominican racial identity from museums to beauty shops. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cavalcanti, Mariana. 2009. Do barraco à casa: Tempo, espaço e valor(es) em uma favela consolidada. Revista Brasileira De Ciências Sociais 24 (69): 69−80. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts? Representations 37: 1−26. Collins, Jane L. 2003. Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel industry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the Politics of empowerment, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Conquergood, Dwight. 1994. How street gangs problematize patriotism. In After Postmodernism: Reconstructing ideology, critique, edited by Herbert W. Simon and Michael Billig. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Cunningham, Hilary. 2004. Nations rebound? Crossing borders in a gated globe. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11 (3): 329−350. Da Matta, Roberto. 1991. Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. 1941. Deep South: A social anthropological study of caste and class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. De Genova, Nicholas and Ana Y Ramos-Zayas. 2003. Latino rehearsals: Racialization and the politics of citizenship between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2): 18−57. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, 1919−1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2001. Reconstructing race: Racism, culture and mestizaje in Latin America. Nacla Report on the Americas 34 (6): 16−23. De la Peña, G. 1988. Poder local, poder regional: Perspectivas socio-antropológicas. In Poder local, poder regional, edited by Jorge Padua and Alain Vanneph. Mexico City: CEMCA. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1984. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, class, and gender among California Italian-Americans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1994. White ethnicities, identity politics, and baby bear’s chair. Social Text 41: 165−191. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, others, American modernity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dollard, John. 1937. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Duany, Jorge. 1998. Reconstructing racial identity: Ethnicity, color and class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico. Latin American Perspectives 25 (3): 147−172. Dunk, Thomas. 2008. Remaking the working class: Experience, class-consciousness, and the industrial adjustment process. American Ethnologist 29 (4): 878−900. Dunn, Timothy J. 1996. The Militarization of the U.S.−Mexico Border, 1978−1992: Low-intensity conflict doctrine comes home. Austin, TX: CMAS Books, University of Texas at Austin. Dzidzienyo, Anani and Suzanne Oboler, eds. 2005. Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, AfroLatinos. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Edelman, Marc. 2008. Transnational organizing in agrarian Central America: Histories, challenges, prospects. Journal of Agrarian Change 8 (2−3): 229−257. England, Sarah. 2006. Afro Central Americans in New York City: Garifuna tales of transnational movements in racialized space. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. England, Sarah. 2010. Mixed and multiracial in Trinidad and Honduras: Rethinking mixed-race identities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (2): 195−213. Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo and Sonia Alvarez, eds. 1992. The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, strategy, and democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fernandes, Sujatha. 2003. Fear of a black nation: Local rappers, transnational crossings, and state power in contemporary Cuba. Anthropological Quarterly 76 (4): 575−608. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. and Steven L. Rubenstein. 2009. Introduction: Towards a transnational anthropology. In Border Crossings: Transnational Americanist anthropology, edited by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Steven L. Rubenstein. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Foley, Douglas E. 1988. From Peones to Politicos: Class and ethnicity in a South Texas town, 1900−1987. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Foner, Nancy, ed. 2001a. Islands in the City: West Indian migration to New York. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foner, Nancy, ed. 2001b. New Immigrants in New York, 2nd edn. New York: Columbia University Press. Fortuny Loret de Mola, Patricia. 1995. Origins, development and perspectives of La Luz del Mundo church. Religion 25 (2): 147−162. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The social construction of whiteness. London: Routledge. French, Jan Hoffman. 2009. Legalizing Identities: Becoming black or Indian in Brazil’s northeast. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Friedman, Jonathan. 1997. Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an era of de-hegemonisation. In Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism, edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood. London: Zed Books. Fry, Peter. 2000. Politics, nationality, and the meanings of ‘race’ in Brazil. Daedalus 129 (2): 83−118. Gailey, Christine Ward. 2010. Blue-ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, class, and gender in U.S. adoption practice. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 2001. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and multicultural conflicts. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Garma, Carlos. 1999. La situación legal de las minorías religiosas en México: Balance actual, problemas y conflictos. Alteridades 9 (18): 135−144. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race. London: Penguin Books. Gledhill, John. 1995. Neoliberalism, Transnationalization, and Rural Poverty: A case study of Michoacán, Mexico. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda G. Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, eds. 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Glissant, Edouard. 1995. Creolisation in the making of the Americas. In Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A new world view, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Gill, Lesley. 2004. The School of the Americas: Military training and political violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldstein, Donna M. 2003. Laughter Out of Place: Race, class, violence and sexuality in a Rio shantytown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. González de la Rocha, Mercedes. 2004. De los ‘recursos de la pobreza’ a la ‘pobreza de los recursos’ y a las ‘desventajas acumuladas’. Latin American Research Review 39 (1): 192−195. Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky. 2001. New Poverty Studies: The ethnography of power, politics, and impoverished people in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Goode, Judith and Jo Anne Schneider. 1994. Reshaping Ethnic and racial relations in Philadelphia: Immigrants in a divided city. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Greene, Shane. 2007. Entre “lo indio” y “lo negro”: Interrogating the effects of Latin America’s new Afro-indigenous multiculturalisms (special issue guest edited by Shane Greene). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12 (2). Gregory, Steven. 1999. Black Corona: Race and the politics of place in an urban community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gregory, Steven and Roger Sanjek, eds. 1994. Race. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Guilbault, Jocelyne. 1994. Créolité and the new cultural politics of difference in popular music of the French West Indies. Black Music Research Journal 14 (2): 161−178. Gutmann, Matthew C. 1996. The Meanings of Macho: Being a man in Mexico City. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gutmann, Matthew C. 2002. The Romance of Democracy: Compliant defiance in contemporary Mexico. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gustafson, Bret D. 2009. New Languages of the State: Indigenous resurgence and the politics of knowledge in Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hagedorn, John M. 2005. The global impact of gangs. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21 (2): 153−169. Hale, Charles R. 1996. Mestizaje (special journal issue). Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1). Hale, Charles R. 1999. Travel warning: Elite appropriations of hybridity, mestizaje, antiracism, equality, and other progressive-sounding discourses in highland Guatemala. The Journal of American Folklore 112 (445): 297−315. Hale, Charles R. 2005. Neoliberal multiculturalism: The remaking of cultural rights and racial dominance in

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Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta. Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Mahler, Sarah J. 1995. American Dreaming: Immigrant life on the margins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malkin, Victoria. 2007. Reproduction of gender relations in the Mexican migrant community of New Rochelle, New York. In Women and Migration in the U.S.−Mexico borderlands: A reader, edited by Denise A Segura and Patricia Zavella. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 95−117. Marcus, George E. 2005. The passion of anthropology in the US, circa 2004. Anthropological Quarterly 78 (3): 673−695. Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, George E. and Peter Dobkin Hall. 1992. Lives in Trust: The fortunes of dynastic families in late twentieth-century America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Martí, José. 1891. Our America. La revista ilustrada de Nueva York, January 1. http://www.historyofcuba. com/history/marti/America.htm. Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Martinez-Alier [Stolcke], Verena. 1989 [1974]. Marriage, Colour and Class in Nineteenth-century Cuba: A study of racial attitudes and sexual values in a slave society, 2nd edn. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Maskovsky, Jeff. 2006. Rethinking North America: The state of the section. North American Dialogue 9 (1): 12−14. Mato, Daniel. 1997. On global and local agents and the social making of transnational identities and related agendas in ‘Latin’ America. Identities 4 (2): 167−212. Matory, J. Lorand. 1999. The English professors of Brazil: On the diasporic roots of the Yorùbá nation. Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1): 72−103. Matory, J. Lorand. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCallum, Cecilia. 2005. Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia. American Ethnologist 32 (1): 100−117.

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Melhuus, Marit and Kristi Anne Stølen, eds. 1996. Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the power of Latin American gender imagery. London: Verso. Menchaca, Martha. 1995. The Mexican Outsiders: A community history of marginalization and discrimination in California. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Messerschmidt, Donald A., ed. 1981. Anthropologists at Home in North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. The many faces of cosmopolis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism. Public Culture 12 (3): 721−748. Mintz, Sidney and Richard Price. 1976. An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean perspective. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Molyneux, Maxine and Sian Lazar. 2003. Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-based development and Latin American NGOs. London: ITDG Publishing. Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. and Yolanda T. Moses. 1997. Reestablishing “race” in anthropological discourse. American Anthropologist 99 (3): 517−533. Mummert, Gail, ed. 2009. Fronteras fragmentadas, 2nd edn. Zamora and Morelia, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán and Centro de Investigaciones y Desarrollo del Estado de Michoacán. Nash, Gary. 1995. The hidden history of mestizo America. Journal of American History 82 (3): 941−964. Nash, June C. 1989. From Tank Town to High Tech: The clash of community and industrial cycles. Albany: SUNY Press. Nelson, Diane M. 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body politics in quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Ng’weno, Bettina. 2007. Turf Wars: Territory and citizenship in the contemporary state. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Norvell, John M. 2009. Racing across borders in the Americas: Anthropological critique and the challenge of transnational racial identities. In Border Crossings: Transnational Americanist anthropology, edited by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Steven L. Rubenstein. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Nugent, David. 1997. Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, individual, and nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885−1935. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nuijten, Monique. 2003. Power, Community and the State: The political anthropology of organisation in Mexico. London: Pluto Press.

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Ortner, Sherry B. 2003. New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, culture, and the class of ‘58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pérez Lizaur, Marisol. 2005. Ejecutivos de alto nivel: ¿Una élite global? Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana. Poole, Deborah. 2007. The right to be heard. Socialism and Democracy 21 (2): 113−116. Postero, Nancy Grey. 2006. Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous politics in postmulticultural Bolivia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1939. After Freedom: A cultural study in the Deep South. New York: Viking Press. Rahier, Jean Muteba. 2003. Introduction: Mestizaje, mulataje, mestiçagem in Latin American ideologies of national identities. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (1): 40−50. Rahier, Jean Muteba. 2008. Soccer and the (tri-) color of the Ecuadorian nation: Visual and ideological (dis-) continuities of black otherness from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism. Visual Anthropology Review 24 (2): 148−182. Rainwater, Lee. 1970. Behind Ghetto Walls: Black families in a federal slum. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2003. National Performances: The politics of class, race and space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Restrepo, Eduardo and Arturo Escobar. 2005. ‘Other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise’: Steps to a world anthropologies framework. Critique of Anthropology 25 (2): 99−129. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2008. O capital da esperança: A experiência dos trabalhadores na construção de Brasília. Brasília: Editora UnB. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2006. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary transformations within systems of power. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Rodgers, Dennis. 2006. Living in the shadow of death: Gangs, violence and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996−2002. Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2): 267−292. Rodríguez, Clara E. 1994. Challenging racial hegemony: Puerto Ricans in the United States. In Race, edited by Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rodriguez, Richard. 2002. Brown: The last discovery of America. New York: Viking. Roseberry, William. 1995. Latin American peasant studies in a ‘postcolonial’ era. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1 (1): 150−177. Salman, Ton and Annelies Zoomers, eds. 2002. The Andean Exodus: Transnational migration from

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Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Amsterdam: Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA). Sanjek, Roger. 1998. The Future of Us All: Race and neighborhood politics in New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sansi-Roca, Roger. 2007. Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian art and culture in the 20th century. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Sansone, Livio. 2003. Blackness without ethnicity: Constructing race in Brazil. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Santos, Ricardo Ventura and Marcos Chor Maio. 2004. Race, genomics, identities and politics in contemporary Brazil. Critique of Anthropology 24 (4): 347−378. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities: Destruction and reconstruction in a globalized world. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Schwartzman, Luisa Farah. 2009. Seeing like citizens: Unofficial understandings of official racial categories in a Brazilian university. Journal of Latin American Studies 41 (02): 221−250. Seigel, Micol. 2009. Uneven Encounters: Making race and nation in Brazil and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shanklin, Eugenia. 1994. Anthropology and Race. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Sheriff, Robin E. 2001. Dreaming Equality: Color, race, and racism in urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shukla, Sandhya R. and Heidi Tinsman, eds. 2007. Imagining Our Americas: Toward a transnational frame. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sider, Gerald M. 1993. Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, ethnicity and Indian identity in the Southern United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sigaud, Lygia. 1995. ‘Fome’ e comportamentos sociais: Problemas de explicação em antropologia. Mana 1 (1): 167−175. Skidmore, Thomas. 1993. Bi-racial USA vs. multi-racial Brazil: Is the contrast still valid? Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (2): 373−386. Skidmore, Thomas. 2003. Racial mixture and affirmative action: The cases of Brazil and the United States. American Historical Review 108 (5): 1391−1396. Smedley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Smith, Carol A. 1997. The symbolics of blood: Mestizaje in the Americas. Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture 3 (4): 495−521. Smith, M.G. 1965. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Snyder, Richard and Gabriel Torres. 1998. The Future Role of the Ejido in Rural Mexico. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Stephen, Lynn. 1997. Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from below. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Stoll, David. 1990. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The politics of evangelical growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stolle-McAllister, John. 2005. What does democracy look like? Local movements challenge the Mexican transition. Latin American Perspectives 32 (4): 15−35. Stoller, Paul. 1996. Spaces, places, and fields: The politics of West African trading in New York City’s informal economy. American Anthropologist 96 (4): 776−788. Streicker, Joel. 1995. Policing boundaries: Race, class, and gender in Cartagena, Colombia. American Ethnologist 22 (1): 54−74. Strong, Pauline Turner. 2005. Recent ethnographic research on North American indigenous peoples. Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (1): 253−268. Stutzman, Ronald. 1981. El mestizaje: An all-inclusive ideology of exclusion. In Cultural transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, edited by Norman E. Whitten. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Telles, Edward E. 2004. Race in Another America: The significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Twine, France W. 1998. Racism in a Racial Democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ui, Shiori. 1991. Unlikely heroes: The evolution of female leadership in a Cambodian ethnic enclave. In Ethnography Unbound: Power and resistance in the modern Metropolis, edited by Michael Burawoy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vincent, Joan. 1993. Framing the underclass. Critique of Anthropology 13 (3): 215−230. Viveros Vigoya, Mara. 2002. Dionysian blacks: Sexuality, body, and racial order in Colombia. Latin American Perspectives 29 (2): 60−77. Wacquant, Loïc. 2007. Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality. Thesis Eleven 91: 66−77. Wade, Peter. 1993. Blackness and Race Mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Wade, Peter. 1995. The cultural politics of blackness in Colombia. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 342−358. Wade, Peter. 2000. Music, Race and Nation: Música tropical in Colombia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wade, Peter. 2004. Images of Latin American mestizaje and the politics of comparison. Bulletin of Latin American Research 23 (1): 355−366. Wade, Peter. 2005. Rethinking mestizaje: Ideology and lived experience. Journal of Latin American Studies 37: 1−19. Wade, Peter. 2006. Afro-Latin studies: Reflections on the field. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 105−124. Wade, Peter. 2009. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Wade, Peter. 2010. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edn. London: Pluto Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams. 1941. Color and Human Nature: Negro personality development in a northern city. Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Warren, Jonathan W. 2001. Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian resurgence in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Weismantel, Mary. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of race and sex in the Andes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Whitten, Norman. 1986. Black Frontiersmen: A South American case, 2nd edn. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Wilson, William J. 1978. The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nationstate building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 2: 301−334. Winson, Anthony and Belinda Leach. 2002. Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives: Labour and community in the new rural economy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Yelvington, Kevin. 2001. The anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic dimensions. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 227−260. Yelvington, Kevin, ed., 2006. Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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2.13 Migration and Other Forms of Movement Vered Amit

In 1994, in the course of a study of expatriacy and development in the Cayman Islands,1 I interviewed a banker of British origins, in Georgetown, the capital of Grand Cayman. ‘Donald’2 had spent years in the Bahamas as well as long periods, on and off, in the Cayman Islands. I asked him what, in his view, had prompted the dramatic transformation of the Cayman Islands, from a small maritime economy to an international finance centre and tourist destination. Donald explained that the early impetus for development in the Cayman Islands had been prompted by changes in banking regulations during the 1960s; bankers’ concerns with developments in the Bahamas during the same period and … a resolution of the ‘mosquito problem’. Solving the mosquito problem had been crucial, he said. When he had visited Grand Cayman during the 1960s, you couldn’t walk around, the mosquito problem was so bad. ‘You can ask [Geoff Maxwell]’ − a long-term British expatriate working in nature conservancy − Donald said, ‘and he’ll tell you that Cayman apparently has more mosquitoes per square foot than any other place in the world. You went into your hotel room and you had to brush the mosquitoes from your arm. You just couldn’t encourage tourism with that kind of problem.

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Tourists and bankers aren’t going to come to a place where it’s so unpleasant, so solving the mosquito problem was a very important thing.’ If changes in banking regulations and political transitions in the Bahamas had a particular affect on the capacity of the Cayman Islands to attract foreign money, resolving the mosquito problem had a more direct and probably larger impact on their growing ability to attract a wide range of visitors: tourists, business travellers, and foreign workers hired on shorter- and longerterm work contracts. In other words, if changes in banking regulations might have had a greater global impact, in time helping to establish Cayman as one of the world’s largest offshore financial centres, local infrastructure development, which included the alleviation of the mosquito problem and the eventual construction of roads, hotels, office and condominium complexes, was more directly oriented towards attracting people, as opposed to the more abstract3 movement of money. According to John Urry, different types of travellers overlap, ‘with one category dissolving into another, giving rise not just to the travelling of peoples but also to diverse, complex and hard to categorize “travelling

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cultures” ’ (Urry, 2003: 61−62). In this chapter, I pursue the question of this overlap or convergence between different categories of movement. But I have opened it with reference to the mosquito issue in the Cayman Islands because this relatively mundane development issue reminds us that while there is an important dialectic between globalization and mobility, the two are not homologous. Instances of convergences between different forms of travel therefore need to be systematically examined in the particular, rather than treated as a spinoff of general global connectedness.

THE ‘NEW’ MOBILITIES PARADIGM? According to John Urry, a mobilities paradigm, which had been initiated over a century ago by Georg Simmel but had been little developed during much of the twentieth century, is now emerging with renewed strength, transforming the social sciences. ‘It enables the “social world” to be theorized as a wide array of economic, social and political practices, infrastructure and ideologies that all involve, entail or curtail various kinds of movement of people, or ideas, or information or objects’ (Urry, 2007: 43). While a call for attention to movement is, in principle, welcome, the claim that this constitutes a recent ‘turn’ is rather more problematic. Population movement has been a formative and consistently central strand in much of the twentieth century history of disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. As Urry (2007: 26) himself acknowledges, the efforts of Georg Simmel (and his contemporaries, Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies) to account for social transformations in an urbanizing and industrializing Europe at the turn of the twentieth century inspired − among other later work − the urban studies of the Chicago School in the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Urry’s characterization of subsequent twentieth-century sociology as a wasteland of static or structural theories in which studies of mobility

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were restricted to isolated examinations of transport or tourism disregards the continuing attention paid to movement, particularly in the context of immigration and urbanization. The work of anthropologists such as J. Clyde Mitchell and A.L. Epstein who were studying the impact, during the 1950s and 1960s, of migration to the colonial Copperbelt cities in southern Africa, or of sociologists such as Janet Abu-Lughod who was studying urbanization in Egypt during the same period, or the numerous cross-disciplinary studies of movement between country and city in Latin America (e.g. Butterworth, 1962; Long and Roberts, 1984; Mangin, 1970) are but a few examples of the persistence, over the course of the twentieth century, of a wide-ranging scholarly interest in movement, well after the pioneering work of the Chicago School under Robert Park. This metropolitan research contributed theoretical innovations that continue to reverberate today in the literature on globalization, movement and space. If one of the earliest conceptualization of social networks was in a rural Norwegian parish (Barnes, 1954), it was through its application in urban contexts that this form of analysis truly developed, catalysed, J. Clyde Mitchell contended, by dissatisfaction with structural functionalism (Mitchell, 1974: 285). In her overview of urban sociology, Janet Abu-Lughod has argued that if social networks could be ‘thought of as the paths through which people move in social space, activity patterns could be thought of as the paths through which people move over time through geographic space’ (1991: 318). AbuLughod noted that the linkages between these two treatments of movement had tended to come especially from urban geographers and city planners. In particular, Abu-Lughod credited the pioneering work of F. Stuart Chapin, Jr and Henry Hightower in their study of ‘human activity patterns’ in Durham, North Carolina during the mid 1960s. Later work by the anthropologist Ruth Finnegan (1989), however, treated the concept of pathway as an even more explicit

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means of conceptualizing the purposive and collective movement of city dwellers through urban space. In her study of a variety of grassroots musical practices in the English town of Milton Keynes, Finnegan traced the movements of amateur musicians, who travelled from work or home to take part in these activities (1989: 305). She noted that through these involvements, these musicians often acquired a new sense of their urban landscape as they moved towards and became familiar with sites that they might otherwise have not known in the same way or at all. In short, concepts like network or pathway, which have been taken up in contemporary studies of transnational mobility, were being used and developed throughout the second half of the twentieth century by researchers attempting to make sense of movement to and within cities. So it does not seem altogether plausible to argue that the contemporary interest in movement is new or even resurgent after an extended interregnum. Indeed, in some respects one could argue that rather than simply expanding attention to movement, current scholarly preoccupations have displaced a concentration on certain forms of movement with a focus on others. So the earlier focus on regional movements and especially on processes of urbanization that were occurring within state borders has, to some extent, been marginalized by the current priority given to transnational movement. It is thus noteworthy that in spite of the broad brush with which John Urry frames the mobility turn, his list (2007: 10−11) of ‘twelve main mobility forms in the contemporary world’ − including refugees, business and professional travel, young people on their ‘overseas experience’, medical travel, military mobility, transnational retirement travel, ‘trailing travel’ of children, partners, diasporic travel and migration, travel of service workers around the world and especially to global cities, tourist travel, visiting friends and relatives and work-related travel such as commuting − appears heavily weighted towards forms of transnational movement.

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Oddly, this displacement has been happening just as the global pace of urbanization has increased. Indeed, in 2007, for the first time in world history, the global population became more urban than rural (Science Daily 2007). Nor has the considerable scholarly attention being paid to global cities (i.e. international financial and business centres like New York or London) made up for this displacement. By definition, the conceptualization of global cities has emphasized their role as ‘command centres’ in the global economy, their disconnection from the immediate region and state in which they are located, and the role of transnational migration in constituting their residential population (Sassen, 1998, 2006). But most people are migrating within state borders rather than across them and/or moving to and from less commanding urban centres. Thus, like the focus on transnational movement more generally, the focus on movement to global cities is more likely to deflect attention away from, than to highlight, the broader range of movements to and from other kinds of cities.

A WORLD IN MOTION So what if anything has become more comprehensive about scholarly consideration of mobility? In some senses, what has changed most has been the tendency, in some quarters, to assert mobility as a fundamental characteristic of the contemporary world. However, the notion of a world in motion seems to have emanated from a preoccupation with a particular treatment of globalization, rather than with a focus on mobility itself. During the 1990s, a range of crossdisciplinary scholarly work (Appadurai, 1996; Bhabha, 1994; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Lash and Urry, 1994; Luke 1995) depicted a fluid world of hyperspaces, hybridity, border crossings and global connectedness. And the movement of people was portrayed as one element of this broader fluidity, one more type of flow (or, in Appadurai’s term, ‘ethnoscape’).

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This kind of depiction has, however, been heavily criticized, in one aspect or another. Scholars such as Aihwa Ong have reminded us that the ‘structural logic of globalization […] has resulted in the proliferation of differentiated sovereignty within and across borders’ (1999: 232) rather than undermining the continued power of the state as an important locus of sovereignty (1999: 239). Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan cautioned against allowing the notion of ‘borderlands’ as a metaphor for cultural connection to be embraced at the expense of considering questions of political economy in the ways in which state power operates at borders (1998: 3). Other writers cautioned that bundling together many different categories of travellers − asylum seekers, labour migrants, tourists, students, professional or business travellers − as one undifferentiated flow of moving humanity ‘conflates disparate experiences’ (Grillo, 2007: 205) and stretches the ‘range of an expansive term like “travel” past the point of comparative utility’ (Amit, 2007: 7). In her study of European expatriates in Indonesia, Meike Fechter pointed out that the metaphor of global flows obscures the active construction of boundaries of race, nationality, class and gender among populations living outside their ‘home country’ (2007: 35). One of the most unfortunate aspects of the ubiquitous lists of contemporary travellers is that even as they enumerate many different types of journeys, they avoid considering them in relationship to each other. Thus, while some 20 years ago, Arjun Appadurai aptly noted the disjunctures as well as convergences between flows of capital, ideologies, media images and people, he did not apply the same presumption of possible discrepancies in mobility between different types of travellers. But it is the increasing interest in doing just that − i.e. the effort to redress this kind of lacuna among earlier renderings of global flows, by considering different forms of travel in relationship to each other − that points us towards one of the

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most important shifts in scholarly interrogation of mobility. It is in this respect that John Urry’s claim of an extended interregnum following the Chicago School in which ‘the study of mobilities turned into the professional examination of “transport” and to a lesser extent of “tourism”, that were taken to be differentiated and specific domains’ (2007: 26) becomes more intelligible. If this does not accurately describe the actual range of attention being paid to mobility by earlier periods of scholarship, it does reflect the relative segregation, until recently, between the study of different forms of movement. Not so very long ago, researchers of transnational labour migration or of urbanization would be unlikely to be conferring with each other and even less so with scholars studying tourism. But today, among the various exchanges about different forms of mobility can be counted a number of anthologies bringing together scholarship on a variety of different kinds of journeys (Amit, 2007; Conradson and Latham, 2005;4 Hall and Williams, 2002) as well as the launch of a new scholarly network for ‘Anthropology and Mobility’. But this recognition of the potential for fruitful exchanges between researchers concerned with different forms of travel has also been associated with an increasingly frequent acknowledgement of the need to differentiate between different forms of mobility (Larsen et al., 2006: 50). In short, what has shifted in our attention to mobility is not so much the extent of attention to movement in general, or to movement of a specific kind or range, but the increasing willingness to consider the convergences as well as disjunctures between different forms of mobility. And these overlaps and breaks occur not only between moving objects, capital, ideas and people but also between travellers moving in different circumstances. In the remainder of this chapter, I therefore explore a few examples of the areas in which explorations of intersections as well as disjunctures between different forms of travel are being productively examined.

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INTERSECTIONS OF MOBILITY I began this chapter with a reference to some of the larger and smaller aspects of infrastructure development that, from the 1970s onwards, facilitated the movement of different kinds of visitors to the Cayman Islands. This kind of convergence, however, went beyond the simple construction of facilities to involve an interaction between different forms of consumption by various categories of sojourners. Thus, many of the condos and townhouses leased by expatriates who were resident in Cayman, or by tourists as shorterterm holiday lets, were owned by absentee landlords who had bought them as investments and/or as a holiday home. Similarly, the range of services available in Grand Cayman occupied a metropolitan scope that went far beyond the needs of a very small population of settled residents, which had developed in response to the thousands of visitors that poured into the island for holidays that ranged from a few hours on a cruise stopover to several weeks. Many foreign sojourners were also recruited to provide services in the tourist and banking sectors, so a European or North American tourist might well be served by someone from the same region of origin, working in Cayman on a short-term contract. Many expatriate professionals were working in Cayman because it provided well-paid, interesting employment but quite a few were also excited by the chance for an adventure abroad. Younger expatriates were often explicitly seeking to combine tourism with employment in a variant of the ‘working holidays’ that have become common in many tourist destinations. In addition, expatriates, as well as Caymanians, hired domestics, who were often recruited from elsewhere in the Caribbean. Thus, the development of infrastructure not only made the Cayman Islands a more attractive destination for tourists but also entailed the creation of jobs that, in turn, attracted other categories of visitors. In other words, one kind of mobility might well serve

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as a catalyst for or facilitate other forms of mobility. Similarly, Francis Leo Collins (2008) noted the interaction between the growing settlement of South Koreans in Auckland, New Zealand, the rising flow of tourism between South Korea and New Zealand and the choice of South Korean students to attend educational institutions in Auckland. South Korean migrants to New Zealand have settled predominantly in Auckland. Many of these South Koreans were accepted through the skilled or business migrant categories, but on arrival faced considerable discrimination in the New Zealand labour market. As a result, they established businesses that primarily served the temporary and permanent Korean populations in Auckland. Among these businesses were yuhakweon, agencies that offered a broad range of services to assist the movement and settlement of South Korean students, tourists and migrants. Among the 29 Korean international students who Collins interviewed, all had, at some point in the process of deciding on New Zealand as a destination to pursue further education, been influenced by Koreans who were either living in or had visited New Zealand as tourists or students. Intersections of various forms of mobility can also occur at different periods in the life course of the same travellers. Williams and Hall (2002) have used the term ‘tourisminfluenced migration’ to describe the ways in which touristic experiences at one age may influence the choice of a destination for longer-term migration at another age, for example on retirement. And this kind of sequential and categorical overlap can produce a complex intersection of different types of travellers in some locales. Thus, the Spanish coastal town on the Costa del Sol where Caroline Oliver (2007) conducted her fieldwork was the destination for both shortstay and longer-stay tourists (snowbirds in other parlance), retirement migrants, casual workers and people on sabbaticals. The shortstay tourist of one year might at another time

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return for a longer stay or even seek to settle in the town. As in the Cayman Islands, the combined presence of these visitors, of longer and shorter durations, can cumulatively shape the provision of services and facilities available in the town. Mobility as a possible sequence of types of moves can also be intergenerational rather than situated in the life course of one individual. In her study of three dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, Karen Olwig reports that for the Muir and Gaston families, who originated in Jamaica and Dominica, respectively, migration to a metropolitan centre outside the Caribbean was part of a sequence of earlier moves that previous generations had made in the local Caribbean context. The mother in the Muir family, moved from Refuge, one of the oldest free villages in Jamaica, to Falmouth where she married into a family of fairly recent immigrants from Scotland. The members of the Muir family strongly identified with their urban background rather than with their roots in Refuge and ‘[w]hen they emigrated, they saw their journey as a continuation of the family tradition of moving for upward mobility’ (Olwig, 2007: 278). The Gaston family had a background as peasant proprietors in one of the oldest French Creole villages in Dominica. But the family left this peasant way of life behind when the father left his natal village to train as a schoolteacher and head his own school in another French Creole village. While members of this family eventually moved away from their adopted home, they did so to pursue further education, ‘as a way to heed the call, instilled in the children by their father, to seek self-improvement in order to serve the community’ (Olwig, 2007: 279). Olwig’s ability to trace these sequences of moves through the life histories recounted to her by the transnationally dispersed offspring of the Muir and Gaston family is a testament to the importance of being able to relate migration across state borders to migration within state borders. Without being able to trace these kinds of relationships, Olwig

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might well have missed the contextual significance of the intergenerational sequence of moves that framed the eventual emigration of members of these families beyond their islands of origin and the Caribbean region. At the same time Olwig was able to observe the very different implications of migration for the Smith family who had moved directly from a small African Caribbean village in the Leeward Islands to urban centres in Great Britain or the Virgin Islands. For this family, migration involved a far more drastic change of environment than for their Jamaican and Dominican counterparts, which was reflected in their subsequent responses to settlement abroad. Similarly, in his study of ‘body shopping’, i.e. the transnational movement of Indian information technology consultants, Xiang Biao noted that the development of towns such as Tanuku and Bhimavaran in Andra Pradesh − an important locus for information technology training − was fuelled by the efforts of wealthy farmers seeking to secure a good education for their children. To advance the education of their children, farmers bought houses in town to settle their families. ‘While the father moved from village to town, the son aimed to move from town to metropolitan cities and beyond, the West’ (Biao, 2007: 32). In other words, a form of migration that is usually identified as quintessentially transnational needs to be contextualized with respect to a sequence of moves that is catalysed by the investment of agricultural profits in an urban, technical education within India.

REGULATED AND IMPROVISED CONVERGENCES A recurrent emphasis in the literature on transmigration has been on the institutionalization of particular pathways through which people, money, goods and information repeatedly flow over time, so much so that, according to Roger Rouse, they have come to constitute

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self-reproducing ‘transnational circuits’ (2002: 162). Similar kinds of regularities have come to attend other circuits of mobility, in major part through the establishment of the kind of institutional, commercial and physical infrastructure that, as I noted earlier, has facilitated tourism, expatriacy and business travel to the Cayman Islands. I will have more to say about the canalizing effects of certain types of arrangements for mobility in the next section. But in this section, I want to consider two other very different kinds of influences encouraging convergences between different forms of travel: official regulations and travellers’ improvisations. Some of the most familiar aspects of state regulations over movement are the stipulations intended to explicitly circumscribe various forms of travel and to insist on differential statuses, rights and obligations for various classes of travellers and residents. For example, foreign tourists may be restricted in the duration of their stay but have access to refunds of sales taxes that residents are required to pay; international students might well face differential tuition fees as well as restrictions on (or prohibition of the right to) waged work while completing their studies; temporary foreign workers may be restricted in their capacity to switch employers or to stay on in their host country past the termination of their employment contract; asylum seekers may face temporary or enduring restrictions on their rights of mobility or work; and, in some countries, certain classes of internal migrants may face restrictions in their access to residence rights within cities in their own country and so on. But state regulatory bodies may also intervene to enable or even to encourage overlaps between different forms of movement. The European Union provides the most comprehensive framework for this kind of overlap since it enables citizens of member states to live and work anywhere in the EU. As such, a citizen of an EU member state who initially makes a cross-border foray for a brief tourist visit can legally shift the initial

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premise of his/her visit to take up a more extended opportunity for employment, study or residence. But other more limited interstate agreements have also provided for this kind of overlap. Working holidaymaker visas are the product of reciprocal, bilateral agreements between a number of European, North American and Australasian countries, which explicitly allow for the combination of tourism and work. Specifically oriented towards youthful travellers, these visas usually stipulate age limits and/or student status as well as varying restrictions on the duration of stay and work entitlements. Working holidaymakers often find employment in the very sectors in which they are also clients: i.e. seasonal tourist services such as hotels, resorts and/or restaurants. As such, working holidaymakers provide a well-educated but expendable workforce that also consumes the very hospitality services − food, drink, touring and accommodation − they might also have been hired to provide. In 2005−6, the New Zealand government introduced a number of changes in its student immigration policy in order to ‘make New Zealand a more competitive destination for international students’ by easing work restrictions both during and post study (New Zealand Department of Labour, 2010, page 3 of 8). While residence policies are not specifically targeted towards international students, applicants to the Skilled Migrant Category can gain bonus points if they have a recognized New Zealand qualification and at least two years of study in the country. In explaining these changes, a publication by the New Zealand Board of Trade explicitly identifies foreign students as an attractive source of immigration to New Zealand: Internationally, foreign students have become an increasingly important target of immigration policies that aim to attract and retain talented migrants. For many students, the prospect of gaining residence in the host country plays a role in their decision to study abroad. Over the last few years, many countries have introduced measures that encourage students to work and settle. (ibid.)

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Indeed, Canada has recently introduced very similar measures to ease work restrictions on international students. But Canada has also made study experience in Canada an explicit basis for permanent residence applications. The Canadian Experience Class is a special immigration category directed at skilled temporary foreign workers with work experience in Canada as well as foreign students who have graduated in Canada. Like the working holidaymaker programme, the efforts of some governments to deliberately overlap international students, temporary foreign workers and permanent residents programmes has the potential to ‘kill two birds with one stone’: it provides an edge in competition for the lucrative international student market and it facilitates access to potential immigrants with host educational credentials that have been paid for by the sending, rather than the receiving, country. The fact that examples of official stateenacted convergences between different categories of travellers appear to be easier to identify among well-educated, relatively affluent sojourners than among humbler migrant labourers is not coincidental. In part, it reflects a growing emphasis in the immigration selection policies of major receiving countries such as Canada on educational qualifications for information economies. In part, it also reflects the mapping of a continuum from explicit to tacit recognition onto a prestige hierarchy of credentialism. Many ‘unofficial’ immigrants are people who arrive with one kind of status − for example, a tourist visa − and then clandestinely assume a different immigration status. These clandestine migrants are in effect implementing convergences that are not so very different from the overlaps that are being officially encouraged through programmes like working holidays or student work permits. But what can be subjected to punitive sanctions at one level in this hierarchy is being lauded as an asset at the other. Yet at high and low ends in this hierarchy of valorization, convergences between traveller categories have the potential to allow receiving countries to offset

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some aspect of their labour costs, whether by reaping the benefits of an expensive ‘international’ education paid for by outside sources or by exploiting the lower labour costs of a clandestine immigrant workforce. The calculations of governments in developing immigration policy may not be altogether or even partially consonant with the motivations of travellers. Thus, in a study of student and youth mobility I conducted in collaboration with Noel Dyck,5 we discovered that what attracted young travellers to opportunities for foreign university exchanges or working holidays often had relatively little to do with the official rhetoric of internationalization used to promote these forms of travel. Far from the calculated development of international career skills or credentials touted in the promotional literature, many of these young travellers appeared to be rather more simply interested in taking time out from career and study paths in Canada to which they intended to return (Amit, 2010a). Both the motivations of these young travellers and the official rationales for visa programmes might, however, be at odds with some of the unexpected and unplanned outcomes of this as well as other forms of travel. The Homo economicus model of immigration has been much criticized for reducing migrants to ‘an aggregate of rational, individual calculi’ (Silverstein, 2005: 371). But at the same time, scholars of travel and mobility have not always given sufficient prominence to the important role that serendipity and improvisation can play in shaping pathways and outcomes of movement. As I have noted elsewhere (Amit, 2010b), many of us can personally attest to the unexpected consequences of trips undertaken with one objective in mind, becoming unexpectedly intertwined with others. Falling in love, creating new friendships, chancing across an unexpected job or study possibility and suffering an illness: these and other unplanned occurrences can serve as catalysts for improvised responses, with smaller or more comprehensive impacts on travel and life-course trajectories.

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Thus, many of the very mobile professionals that I met in the course of my study of international consulting6 had deliberately sought out opportunities for a career involving work outside Canada, their country of residence. In contrast, Keith, a hydroelectric engineer, hadn’t planned on such a career. He had been trained and worked on domestic projects in his native Australia before emigrating to Canada when a Canadian consulting group offered him a job there. But soon after he started working for his new employers, he was sent on international projects and ‘[…] I enjoyed it; I think I was good at it. I didn’t set out to get into the international field, but once I was working in it, I was very happy doing that’ (Amit, 2010b: 203). Nearly three decades later, when I interviewed him, he was still engaged in a highly peripatetic career although he had subsequently changed employers. On the other hand, Marina, a Canadian hydroelectric engineer, had from the outset of her career actively sought out opportunities to work overseas but eventually became ‘fed up’ with constant travel. In her quest for a job in her field that would allow her to ‘settle down’, she eventually moved across Canada and changed employers (Amit, 2010b). The lives and careers of Keith and Marina had thus been shaped by intersections between various regimes of mobility − immigration, intrastate migration and business travel − but in ways that they had not always planned or expected.

DISJUNCTURES It would, however, be a mistake to read these various intersections as producing an unbroken stream of mobilities, so intertwined that it would be difficult or unnecessary to trace the points of disjuncture between them. For contemporary forms of mobility are often pursued through highly circumscribed circuits of travel. At one point in their respective careers, Keith and Marina, like most of the international development consultants that I interviewed,

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had accepted a project that required their residence abroad for one or even several years. However, for the most part, the careers of these consultants comprised a series of relatively short trips abroad, usually only a few weeks at a time, even though in total these successive trips could take up a large portion of the yearly round. But if the careers of so many of these international consultants had featured both longer-term assignments as well as the more common shorter visits, this did not eliminate the important distinctions between longer- and shorter-term assignments abroad. According to Christine, who had at one time worked with Marina and Keith: I think when you’re on long term [assignment], you really rebuild your life around different circumstances, different environment, different culture, different values, different lifestyle. So you live there. When you’re short term, you’re travelling. It’s very different. Living here means you know where to get a bath, it means that you know how much to tip people, it means that you know where you can go at night and where not. When you travel, you just rely on those who are there long term. It’s like a tourist versus local people who live there.

Expatriate professionals living abroad for an extended period were usually accompanied by their families. They lived in houses or apartments rather than hotels; their children attended schools, more often than not special ‘international’ institutions; they shopped locally for their daily needs; in short, their stays abroad involved domestic chores, family obligations and leisure networks in addition to their work obligations. Consultants paying short visits usually lived in hotels and ate in restaurants. The brevity of their sojourns abroad often necessitated very intensive schedules with long workdays and little time off. That and the fact that their family members had obligations (work, school, etc.) elsewhere meant that they were rarely accompanied by their spouses or children. Resident expatriates and travelling consultants thus made use of different services and facilities and were engaged in very

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different domestic and work routines while abroad and as a result their pathways did not necessarily intersect unless they were working on the same project. Canadian students on an academic exchange abroad are international students, but their time abroad may be very different from their counterparts who are completing a full degree at a university outside their home country. Exchange students are paying fees to their home institution, so they are not subject to the frequently much higher fees paid by other international students. They are often on a simple pass/fail system, so they face less strenuous academic demands than either fulldegree international or local students. As a result, they have more time available for touring their host locale. Indeed, the opportunities for combining study with tourism are often an important part of the attraction of academic student exchanges. The particularity of the institutional arrangements involved in exchange programmes, the relatively limited stays abroad and the tendency to combine study with tourism therefore means that exchange students often have their most intensive contacts with other exchange students. By definition, working holidaymaker programmes are opportunities to combine work with tourism, but they still constitute rather different circuits than the ‘tourist-workers’ described by Raoul Bianchi (2000). Bianchi noted that among the tourists, migrant workers and retirement migrants flocking into the resort areas of the Mediterranean can also be discerned another kind of mobile worker who does not conform either to notions of tourists, more conventional notions of labour migrants, or to the temporary summer resort workers from northern Europe who return to their home countries in the winter (Bianchi, 2000: 121). These ‘migrant tourist-workers’ as Bianchi refers to them, tend to be EU citizens with the privilege of living and working elsewhere in the European Union. But as short-term, casual workers, they are usually not registered in official immigration records. Bianchi suggests that these mobile resort workers may have forged familiarity with these

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tourist destinations in the Mediterranean on previous holiday experiences. Their pattern of work mobility continues to feature significant hedonistic, recreational elements, distinguishing them from asylum seekers or economic migrants. And they often move seasonally from resort to resort, shifting from popular destination areas in the Mediterranean onto the Canary Islands, before continuing onto the Caribbean and then back again to the Mediterranean. So while for young people travelling on a working holidaymaker visa, their ‘overseas’ work experience is usually just a temporary interlude − from home, longer-term career and/or study routines − for the tourist-workers described by Raoul Bianchi, a round of mobility between tourist resorts has become an ongoing nomadic way of life. Hence, even if the paths of working holidaymakers and ‘tourist-workers’ might occasionally cross, these are circuits shaped by quite distinct life-course trajectories, social networks, durations and governmental regulations. The larger the number of people involved in any one form of travel, the more likely it will be that at least some specialized services, resources, organizations and regulations will develop to accommodate and encapsulate them. So the ‘alternative’ travel of backpacking has now evolved into a large, mainstream tourist industry of its own, with a circuit of hostels, websites, travelogues, agencies and iconic destinations, making it easier to pursue so-called ‘off the beaten path’ journeys but also harder to avoid the hordes of fellow travellers following the same trails (O’Reilly, 2006). Hence, convergences between different forms of travel can produce distinct, identifiable and circumscribed circuits rather than signalling the development of an all-purpose, permeable regime of mobility.

CONCLUSION One can argue that, in many respects, the study of movement has been foundational in

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the historical development of disciplines such as sociology or anthropology. Seminal theorists such as Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel were concerned with conceptualizing processes of urbanization and industrialization, which were associated with massive social and physical dislocations at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And one can track phases in the history of anthropology through the attention paid in these periods to different kinds of movement, from the Kula Ring of the Trobriand Islanders to global ‘body shopping’ today. But this long-standing attention to various forms of movement has been repeatedly limited by its own ‘successes’. On the one hand, certain kinds of mobility, once viewed as requiring special attention, have in time come to be viewed as so pervasive that they have come to be taken for granted. So the study of migration to cities, the subject of so much attention during the 1960s and 1970s, has slid from focus altogether or been folded into examinations of transnational movement. On the other hand, certain forms of movement, such as tourism and labour migration, became entrenched as distinct fields of inquiry so that not enough attention was paid to possible intersections between them and/or other forms of mobility. Mobility has also sometimes been treated as a general metaphor for contemporary developments, heightening its symbolic importance but undermining its analytical focus. It is these ‘successes’ that are being gradually deconstructed, with at one and the same time, increasing willingness to consider associations between different forms of movement but also a greater abundance of caution about overly generalized invocations of contemporary mobility. This may therefore comprise not so much a ‘new’ paradigm as a more scrupulous and open-minded version of a long-standing set of preoccupations.

NOTES 1 This study was made possible by bridge funding from the Associate Vice-Rector, Academic of

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Concordia University as well as by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. 2 In the interests of confidentiality, pseudonyms are used in place of the actual names of the people who participated in the research projects on which I am drawing in this chapter. 3 Contemporary international banking transactions are more likely to be measured in electronic inputs than in the trading of cold hard cash. 4 This was a special issue on transnational urbanism that paid specific attention to ‘middling’ forms of transnationalism. 5 This study, entitled ‘Coming of Age in an Era of Globalization: Achieving Cultural Distinction through Student Travel Abroad’ was made possible by an SSHRC grant. 6 This study, entitled ‘Itinerant Consultancy: An Anthropological Study of Transnational Travel, Work and Social Location among Mobile Professionals’ was made possible by an SSHRC grant.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Janet (1991). Changing Cities. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Amit, Vered (ed.) (2007). Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Amit, Vered (2010a). ‘The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travelers’. In Human Nature as Capacity: An Ethnographic Approach, Nigel Rapport (ed.), pp. 54−71. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Amit, Vered (2010b). ‘Serendipities, Uncertainties and Improvisations in Movement and Migration’. In The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory into Ethnography, Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat (eds), pp. 200−214. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Barnes, J.A. (1954). ‘Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish’, Human Relations, 7: 39−58. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bianchi, Raoul V. (2000).‘Migrant Tourist-Workers: Exploring the ‘Contact-Zones’ of PostIndustrial Tourism’, Current Issues in Tourism, 3(2): 107−137. Biao, Xiang (2007) Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Butterworth, Douglas (1962). ‘A Study of the Urbanization among Mixtec Migrants from Tilantongo in Mexico City’, América Indígena, 22: 257−274. Collins, Francis Leo (2008). ‘Bridges to Learning: International Student Mobilities, Education Agencies and Inter-personal Networks’, Global Networks, 8(4): 398−417. Conradson, David and Alan Latham (2005). ‘Transnational Urbanism: Attending to Everyday Practices and Mobilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31(2): 227−233. Fechter, Meike (2007). ‘Living in a Bubble: Expatriates’ Transnational Spaces’. In Going First Class? Vered Amit (ed.), pp. 33−52. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Finnegan, Ruth (1989). The Hidden Musicians: MusicMaking in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grillo, Ralph (2007). ‘Betwixt and Between: Trajectories and Projects of Transmigration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(2): 199−217. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1992). ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 6−23. Hall, C. Michael and Allan M. Williams (eds) (2002). Tourism and Migration: New Relationships between Production and Consumption. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Larsen, John, John Urry and Kay Axhausen (2006). Mobilities, Networks, Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lash, Scott and John Urry (1994). Economies of Signs and Spaces. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Long, Norman and Bryan Roberts(1984). Miners, Peasants and Entrepreneurs: Regional Development in the Central Highlands of Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luke, Timothy W. (1995). ‘New World Order or NeoWorld Orders: Power, Politics and Ideology in Informationalizing Glocalities’, In Global Modernities, Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), pp. 91−107. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mangin, William (ed.) (1970). Peasants in Cities: Readings in the Anthropology of Urbanization. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Mitchell, J. Clyde (1974). ‘Social Networks’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 3: 279−299. New Zealand Department of Labour (2010). ‘International Students: Studying and Staying on in New Zealand’. At: http://www.dol.govt.nz/publications/

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research/international-students/internationalstudents_03.asp (accessed 15/08/2010). Oliver, Caroline (2007). ‘Imagined Communitas: Older Migrants and Aspirational Mobility’. In Going First Class? Vered Amit (ed.), pp. 126−143. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Olwig, Karen Fog (2007). Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Reilly, Camille Caprioglio (2006). ‘From Drifter to Gap Year Tourist: Mainstreaming Backpacker Travel’, Annals of Tourism Research, 33(4): 998−1017. Rouse, Roger (2002). ‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism’. In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (eds), pp. 157−171. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Sassen, Saskia (1998). Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press. Sassen, Saskia (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Science Daily (2007). ‘Mayday 23: World Population Becomes More Urban than Rural’. Retrieved July 31, 2010 from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/ 2007/05/070525000642.htm Silverstein, Paul A. (2005). ‘Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration and Immigration in the New Europe’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 34: 363−384. Urry, John (2003). Global Complexity. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Urry, John (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Williams, Allan M. and C. Michael Hall (2002). ‘Tourism, Migration, Circulation and Mobility: The Contingencies of Time and Place’. In Tourism and Migration: New Relationships between Production and Consumption, C. Michael Hall and Allan M. Williams (eds), pp. 1−60. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan (1998). ‘Nation, State and Identity at International Borders’. In Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds), pp. 1−30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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2.14 The Cosmopolitan World Nigel Rapport

Cosmopolitanism is a very old concept. It has, however, again found favour, in recent decades, as a means to describe and to analyse aspects of the human condition, especially as these pertain to relations between societies and their constituent units, and relations between levels or ranges of human society, from local to global. Cosmopolitanism compasses, too, a normative vision of society: it is a political and moral programme, offering an alternative to multiculturalism, for instance, in a conceptualization of identity, social integration, rights and justice focused upon the individual citizen. As Richard Werbner (2008: 194) phrases it, cosmopolitanism encourages a ‘thinking of the unthinkable’, a global humanity without frontiers. This chapter provides an introduction to the ways in which cosmopolitanism makes anthropological sense of the human condition, in particular entering into debates on globalization, diaspora, transnationalism, transculturation, hybridity and ecumenism. First, however, it is important to acquire an overview of the concept’s history.

HISTORICAL VOICES ‘Cosmopolitanism’ derives from a bringing together of two Greek words: cosmos, meaning

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the whole world or globe or universe, and polites, meaning a member of a local polity or society or community (a polis). A ‘cosmopolitan’ is someone whose polity, society or community is global: he or she is a ‘world citizen’, a member of the world entire. In Classical Greek philosophy, cosmopolitanism amounted to a dissenting stance. Diogenes claimed for himself the title of ‘Kosmou polites’ (world citizen) as a critique of the ‘polites’ − those who were mired in the arbitrary customs and traditions of a particular polis − and to mark an impatience with communitarianism. Human life need not be conducted and directed under the aegis of merely local cultural traditions and social structures, for any individual existence was an instantiation of a general human condition. To be ‘civilized’ was to see beyond local community and place: to refuse to be defined by local origins and particular group memberships. Diogenes and his fellow so-called Cynics remained, however, social outsiders, marginals in the Greek status hierarchy, and their ideas foundered (Stade, 2006). Even though taken up a century later (in the third century BC) by Stoics, who similarly claimed that they were first and foremost human beings, living in a world of human beings, and only incidentally members of local polities, the credo of ‘cosmopolitanism’ was disparaged as ‘metic’ (belonging to Semites or resident

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foreigners) rather than ethnically Greek. Homeric notions of primordial Greekness were brought to bear to paint Stoic philosophy as ‘heartless’ in its transcendence of the ‘timeless’ law and tradition of the clan. The Stoic credo that all ‘wise men’ should recognize that humanity constituted a single moral community, a ‘city of the world’ which was not spatially delimited or anchored, offered what was felt to be a lonesome vision of selfdiscipline, and a remove from the rousing props of habit and locale. Cynic and Stoic ideas did make an occasional reappearance among Roman statesmen and philosophers, but it was not until the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that one met a concerted effort to re-engage with Classical Greek cosmopolitan notions. Foremost among the Enlightenment voices was that of Immanuel Kant (1724−1804), in four main texts: • ‘Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view’ (1784) • ‘On the common saying “This may be true in theory but it does not apply in practice”’ (1793) • ‘Towards perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch’ (1795−1796) • ‘International right’ (1797).

These texts came to represent the single most significant source of later theories of global civil society and remain important for appreciating a ‘cosmopolitan world’. Kant begins by identifying three kinds of right. ‘Republican right’ entails domestic laws within a state; ‘international right’ entails treaties between nations; and ‘cosmopolitan right’ entails the relations of persons anywhere −‘global citizens’ − to one another and to states. Cosmopolitan rights were held by individuals by virtue of their humanity not their community memberships, and were to be regarded as superior to those pertaining to states; cosmopolitan rights overrode claims of national sovereignty and could bend the will of communities since these latter were intrinsically sentimental manifestations: particularistic, arbitrary and non-rational.

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Kant exemplified cosmopolitan right in terms of hospitality. An individual had the right to present himself or herself before others without harm, both within and across different communities, and to be heard. Whether a local or a stranger, the individual had the right not to be treated with hostility even though he placed himself placed himself in the home space of another with a view to local interaction (such as commerce). Two duties attached to this right: not to harm the guest; and not to exploit the host. In our own terms, Kant can be seen to foreshadow a critique of identity politics: interaction not separation or the preservation of cultural integrity is the norm to be enshrined as a right, and visiting is not to be hedged about with restrictions or quarantine. The logic of Kant’s argument derived from the limited space of the globe. We must accommodate one another, and put up with being near one another, because as a species we possess in common the surface of the globe − and no other. All human individuals were attached equally to the globe. One was a world citizen, a member of the Commonwealth of Nature, and entitled to enter into dialogue with any human others in an open and uncoerced fashion. Kant envisaged a world where all of humanity would be participants in a globallegal order of civil coexistence. ‘Cosmopolitan right’ here came to sit alongside ‘cosmopolitan law’ in a ‘cosmopolitan order’. The arbitrarily defined local society or polis gave way to a global polis or ‘cosmopolis’: a world state or federation, with universal law and rational governance. Its practices would be ‘enlightened’, eschewing dogma and unvindicated authority. Predominant would be the public use of reason to generate critical vantage points from which to scrutinize and improve civil relations. Even the status of states would depend on their behaviour in terms of common human values and democratic and legal principles. The so-called ‘Westphalian’ political ordering, where states were sovereign over their territories and people, and engaged only in voluntary relations with

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one another on an ideal basis of equal might, gave way to a notion of liberal internationalism. Here, cosmopolitan law guaranteed the rights of every individual human being, whether or not these individuals and these rights were originally or traditionally respected by their ‘own’ communities. Ius cosmopoliticum amounted to binding principles of collective-international engagement which recognized all humanity as a single, universal political community, and respected that universal humanity which came to be embodied in each individual human being. The cosmopolitan order provided a matrix within which all the potential capacities of humanity for creative expression might find fulfilment. The global society of equal citizens would represent a ‘kingdom of ends’ whose fundamental principle could be enunciated thus: always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and of moral judgement in every human being. Kant’s writings were coeval with the rise of nationalism in Europe, and were intended as a critique and antidote: insisting on the universal over the particular, the human as against the local community, the individual as end not means. Esteeming the cosmopolitan, for Kant, was not a matter of abstracting human beings from history and society but of recognizing the human capacity, disposition indeed, to transcend present and past in reaching for forms of life better informed by current scientific knowledge and better accommodating of individual needs and desires. It was not true, claimed Kant, that every existing tradition, culture, nation, or society was equally deserving of respect: some were better placed to deliver the ‘kingdom of ends’, while some were more expressive of human sentimentalism, arbitrariness, cruelty and caprice than others. Progress could be slow and painful, notwithstanding, and it was made not by violent revolution but via the spirit of enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’ was that stage − an adolescence − when humanity broke free from nature and tradition alike and used reason to deliver law. ‘Critique’ was another name

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Kant gave to this turning point; and ‘autonomy’ a third. One adjudicated legitimate from illegitimate cognitive claims and critiqued those, such as religious superstitions, that based themselves on sentiment or sloth. One bound oneself, as a rational being, only by laws which reason had delivered. Cosmopolitanism was an idealistic project for Kant. He had written an outline, an intellectual ethic, but it was open-ended and it would be improved upon by its readers in historical course. He was confident, however, that knowledge and morality could alike be formulated beyond the polis or state, beyond tradition and sentiment, on a global human scale, by individual human beings, so as to give rise to a real political enterprise. Was not international trade a form of sociability between states? Was not the stranger in the midst, the alien, the trader and refugee, evidence of the universal capacity for hospitality and guesthood, for existing beyond the ontological security of the given? To guarantee peace, however, and to secure the cosmopolitan right of individuals to venture out as strangers and sojourn hospitably in other territories, one needed a ‘league of peace’: a constitutional universalism alongside localism. One needed universal procedures by which the rule of law could be seen to operate equally everywhere. What was called for was a world federation of states whose constitution transcended ethnic and racial values. This was the balance that might deliver universalism without despotism.

REACTION TO KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM Kant saw his audience as humanity in general; he took pains to avoid Eurocentrism, and to distinguish between global rights to travel, interact and trade on the one hand, and colonialism on the other. The atmosphere of nationalism in which he wrote, however, quickly delivered reactionary responses. Johann Herder and Joseph de Maistre wrote

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against Kant’s extolling of a humanistic holism by claiming that there was no such thing to know as ‘Man’ or humankind, only Germans and Frenchmen and Persians, and so on, in their ideal cultural-territorial primordialism (Maistre, 1797: 102). For Georg Hegel, the cosmopolitan was an exile from the ‘family of nations’, that natural, human place in the world embodying an unconscious, organic and singular totality with a place; eschewing local contingencies and relativities and aspiring to global truths amounted to an alienation from self and from humanity − from love, trust, family and community, the natural and necessary environmental dwelling (cf. Steiner, 1997: 304−324). Despite Kant’s hopes for the discipline of anthropology − despite social science as such being born in the context of what Bryan Turner (1990: 344) has described as the ‘universalistic’ revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century − the study of distinct particularities (tribes, villages, communities, societies, ethnicities and nationalities) came to predominate over a focus on a single and universal human condition, or the individual as manifestation of a human nature (Rapport, 2010). What many have taken (and do take) to be the appropriate anthropological perspective is coloured by distrust for that which would claim to transcend the local and the communitarian. Anthropologists have not been cosmopolitans, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed (2007: 14), because they spurn universalist discourse. Few are convinced of the ‘rational-universalist grounding’ to cosmopolitanism (Cheah, 1998: 291). Cosmopolitanism can seem to be embedded in European notions of world consciousness that are those of an elite, remote from anthropology’s subjects and not to be artificially imposed on them. Any talk of human rights and world citizenship must be re-anchored to the real politics of countries and communities and the concerns of their local members. Anthropology must needs theorize global politics from the perspective of the post-colony.

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Anthropological critique of cosmopolitanism develops along two main avenues, epistemological and real-political, which I shall describe in turn.

Epistemological critique of cosmopolitanism Following Foucault, explains Joel Kahn (2003: 404), we know that the category of ‘the human’ is a construct, not independent of cultural symbologies. We can further see Kantian constructions of ‘humanity’ to be exclusionary of those who do not demonstrate a particular version of mature reason. Women, the working European masses and non-Europeans are all variously disparaged or excluded from elitist Eurocentric notions of ‘reason’: likewise for the ‘human being’. The Kantian (and Cartesian) slogan was ‘Sapere aude’: have the courage to use your intelligence instead of blindly following traditional authority. But the so-called enlightened individual who transcends the boundaries of socialization and tradition and gazes as if from nowhere is impossible − albeit that this figure plays an inextricable role in European modernity from the eighteenth century onwards. The universalist vision, reach and aspiration have been sham universalisms: a mask for white male privilege. Maila Stivens elaborates (2008: 88−89): Kant’s privileging of the mobile individual cosmopolitan, with the ability to travel and live anywhere, is inexorably masculinist. Where is the female, contextualized in the domestic and vernacular? Singular personhood may be the fetishized icon of liberal individualism but feminist scholarship has identified the systemic nature of culture and social solidarity as something other than the mere coincidence of individual wills. Indeed, many of the key terms of cosmopolitan discourse − ‘universal’, ‘theoretical’, ‘abstract’ and ‘conceptual’ − are implicitly masculine, eliciting properties of mastery, distance from experience, indifference to specifics and fixation on absolutes in

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human life. Stivens’ preferred terminology to ‘cosmopolitan’, after Nira Yuval-Davis, is ‘transversal’: here is a taking into account of interactants’ different socio-cultural and historical positionings so that one aspires to move towards a mutuality of acceptable agendas but without effacing one another’s inevitably positioned identities. No universalizing project can ever be culture-free, Kahn concurs (2008: 271). Projects emerge in history and are applied by grounded cultures. Classical cosmopolitanism claimed to be ‘open to the other’, but its aim was a universalizing transformation of difference such that cultural specificity might be transcended in favour of a deculturalized, secular public and polity. But this is merely the imposition of one cultural construction: all universalizing humanism fails to apprehend the impossibility of culturally neutral practices, institutions and values.

Real-political critique of cosmopolitanism Any cosmopolitan project must in practice be autocratic, hegemonic and violent, for cosmopolitanism is an outgrowth and ideological reflection of global capitalism, which remains its enabling condition, according to Danilo Zolo (1997: 40). Cosmopolitanism is the latest phase of capitalist modernity, operating on a global scale; here is a new term to disguise an old form of Western engagement with the Rest. Overtly critical of the nationstate and nationalism, of the Westphalian dispensation concerning statal sovereignty, cosmopolitanism is yet tied to it: one of two poles in a dialectical relationship which emerged together in the context of the capitalistic world-system. Cosmopolitanism is but another face of a universalizing hegemony whose ethos is neo-imperialist: bringing enlightenment to natives through colonialism. Its opposition to so-called provincialism is a refusal to countenance local sovereignty and rooted, radical otherness.

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Cosmopolitanism makes him uneasy, Stuart Hall elaborates (2008: 349), because, underpinned by Enlightenment conceptions of reason, it has never really understood or accepted difference and treated the alien simply as ‘the childhood of Mankind’ (John Locke). It is an ethnocentric conception, partisan and self-serving. Richard Fardon (2008: 253−254) expresses similar anxieties, concerning who is purportedly addressed by advocates of cosmopolitanism when they insist that cultures are not essences, that individuals’ affiliations are plural and complex, that personal responsibilities do not end at national borders, and so on. In wanting to make the globe a ‘better place’, the great danger is the production of a Manichean world in which the other is excluded or disparaged as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘uncivil’. But these are the cultural traditionalists or else aspiring modernists whom anthropologists are most likely to meet on the ground. However unimpeachable in principle may be the philosophical argument against cultural relativism, the latter might still be necessary in practice as an enabling rhetoric. Political exigency and the social logics of action may call for strategies of identity politics and strategic essentialism. Cosmopolitanism is an elite concern, in short, of those with the security and wherewithal to pursue a refined global consumption, including a commodified ethnicity (Hage, 1998: 212). For 99% of ‘world peoples’ and ‘world communities’, cosmopolitanism threatens a deterioration in their welfare: deracination, depaysment and cultural detachment are less called for than ‘durable cultural industries centred in their own life-worlds’ and supported by international law (Legros, 2008: 506−507). These peoples have nothing to learn from the West in regard to moral programmes, Scott Malcolmson concludes (1998: 241). One can show a so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ concern for all humanity without ignoring difference or instituting a secular jihad which is Eurocentric, rationalist and Parliamentarian. More than 1.3 billion people

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now live in extreme need, while the gap widens between rich and poor. Individualistic notions of identity, human belonging and human rights do not sufficiently address the questions of social justice and institutionalized exclusion which this situation represents (Bok, 1996: 41). Cosmopolitanisms A point of overlap in the above epistemological and real-political critiques, as Malcolmson has observed, is the assertion that ‘cosmopolitan’ values and orientations characterize other cultural traditions in their own right. There is more than one way of being and doing the cosmopolitan, and non-anthropological literatures on cosmopolitanism have not taken sufficient account of this. This is the explicit intent of Arjun Appadurai’s statement (cited in Robbins, 1998: 1) that contemporary ‘cosmopolitan’ experiences do not necessarily derive from Western models or authority, and also James Clifford’s claim (1998: 363−365) that there are ‘plural discrepant cosmopolitanisms’. Cosmopolitanism can be loosed from Eurocentric and universalist moorings to become a travelling signifier, in the company of other partial equivalents such as ‘exile’, ‘immigration’, ‘diaspora’, ‘pilgrimage’ and ‘tourism’. One might ask, nevertheless, what the point might be of separating ‘cosmopolitanism’ from a European, Enlightenment heritage? What is left of the term and the concept if stripped of this history and inheritance and taken to be synonymous with ‘pilgrimage’ or ‘tourism’, or even an anodyne ‘respect for cultural difference’? But for a number of anthropological commentators, the concept is sufficiently powerful and prevalent to make such a translation worthwhile. Or perhaps the very point is to defuse the concept by making it so commonplace. Cosmopolitanism is not so different even to nationalism, then, Bruce Robbins can conclude (1998: 2−3), because it, too, is shaped by particular collectivities, and is socially

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and geographically situated in its conceptual usage. In short, anthropologists have anticipated, described and welcomed various versions and provenances of cosmopolitanism: ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, undeveloped and unprivileged, as pertaining to imagination and experience, to detachment and reattachment. This diversity of cosmopolitanisms will, as with any cultural discourse and trait, be likely formulated dialectically in relation to others within the class: one cosmopolitanism (one culture, one nation) is but a mirror of what it is not. Amid this diversity is also to be found a way for the Left to counter capitalist globalism, as Robbins phrases it (1998: 12−13): a ‘cosmopolitan’ version of the global might recognize rooted belongings while still yet genuinely striving for common norms and mutual translatability. The anthropological practice of field research is often to meet cosmopolitanism of a ‘popular’ kind as part and parcel of everyday local life, Kahn explains (2003: 409−411). Albeit that it is permeated by time, place and culture, here is genuine ‘cosmopolitan praxis’: an attempt to mediate grounded and particularistic prejudices via universalizing aspirations; and here, too, is ‘cosmopolitan knowledge’ − that which emerges out of encounters between representatives of different cultures. In her edited volume, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, Pnina Werbner (2008b) offers a compendium of studies in which anthropologists discover indigenous cosmopolitanisms. Indeed, indigenous activism is itself a form of ‘cosmopolitics’, according to Dorothy Hodgson (2008: 215), since it is located both within and outwith the nation-state. Or again, Melanesia is home to a ‘defensive, cultural cosmopolitanism’, Eric Hirsch (2008: 210) explains, where emphasis on difference coexists with its opposite, the surmounting of difference, in a process that continually creates the grounds for new distinctivenesses. There is stay-at-home cosmopolitanism in Cape Town, meanwhile, where African urbanites wait for the world to come to them while accepting that, universally,

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they are their brother’s keeper (Sichone, 2008: 310−312). All these examples evidence a ‘cosmopolitan transcending of boundaries’ (Colson, 2008: 34). Pnina Werbner’s own contributions exemplify and justify this pluralizing ethos towards cosmopolitanisms. She begins (2008a: 18) by asserting that a differentiation which Ulf Hannerz would urge between true ‘cosmopolitans’ and mere ‘transnationals’ does not bear analytical scrutiny, and hides a class bias. That only cosmopolitans celebrate a hybrid in-betweenness (while transnationals put up with it until they can escape it) was an elitist construction which obscured the stratificatory dimensions to identity: where essentialism and ghettoization occurred, as for the urban poor, it was a matter of political economy not an orientation to difference and movement. Notwithstanding, working-class migrants could still ‘open up to the world’ in a cosmopolitan way. Take the example, Werbner suggests (2008a: 19−29), of Pakistanis in the United Kingdom. By moving brides, food, jewels, clothes and cosmetics along global pathways, Pakistani migrants are successful in making their home places ‘travel’ the world, reconstituting moral, ethnic and social spaces ubiquitously. These unskilled and semi-skilled labourers learn foreign languages and also how to manipulate their foreign bosses. Should the women not learn English − remaining surrounded by kin, and engaging in rounds of Muslim rituals − then, still, the clothes they wore represented gifts from relations far away (thereby brought closer), and they acquired the cosmopolitan knowledge of how to browse in British department stores, becoming expert in British commercial-material culture. Marriage in Britain between Pakistani Muslims of different castes and classes also represented a kind of cosmopolitanism; likewise, there was the cosmopolitanism of middle-class Muslims of different nationalities intermarrying − hybridizing a shared set of moral and cultural assumptions. In short, for Werbner, cosmopolitanism − which might be defined as ‘rootedness plus openness to cultural difference’ − is something that arises plurally and vernacularly.

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Cosmopolitanism is always historically and spatially positioned, and politically contested, but it is not an exclusively Western idea or value. In our ‘late modernity’ one finds many different local cosmopolitan practices, each with its own distinctive world-view. Hence, working-class cosmopolitanism need not result in the same modalities as middle-class cosmopolitanism. As well, one finds ‘proletarian cosmopolitanism’: the transcending of divisions of ethnicity, caste and nation by workers intent on uniting with trade unionists internationally. And one finds ‘localactivist cosmopolitanism’: that which would remake local, post-colonial worlds by engaging with post-liberal ideas and global rightsbased movements (indigenous, multicultural and feminist). And one meets ‘Marxist cosmopolites’, who seek a brotherhood of workers, alongside ‘gentlemanly cosmopolites’ who oppose vulgar nationalism, alongside ‘liberal cosmopolites’ who intend universal moral standards, alongside ‘Islamist cosmopolites’ who would export a global ummah, alongside ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ who are rooted to a home culture but also take pleasure in others. And one may anticipate ever more versions: further ‘critical’, ‘comparative’, ‘national’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘situated’ and ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanisms. In short: anthropological engagement with ‘cosmopolitanism’ has often entailed a critical, indigenizing or localizing of the concept such that it becomes detached from a Western heritage and Enlightenment provenance deemed insufficiently sensitive to its own cultural biases, also to radical difference, to history, to the masses, to realpolitik, and to the social logics of community solidarity (Hollinger, 2000: 228). Due to a discomfort with the concept and an abiding disquiet over the name, ‘cosmopolitanism’ comes to be multiplied and imaginatively reapplied, rendered vernacular, mundane, even banal (Vertovec and Cohen, 2000: 4−16). Eschewing a ‘cosmopolitanism from above’ (Hall, 2008: 346), an elite conception consequent upon pathways of global corporate power and circuits of global investment, one recognizes

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‘cosmopolitanism from below’: people led through different indigenous practice similarly to come to terms with global otherness.

THE COSMOPOLITAN PROJECT OF ANTHROPOLOGY There is another possible version of ‘writing the cosmopolitan’, however, which returns in part to the way in which Kant was responsible for introducing ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘anthropology’ into modern intellectual parlance as a corresponding pairing. Anthropology was to ‘write the human’ in order to furnish a global knowledge: cosmopolitanism was the scientific and moral programme which deployed that knowledge in the securing of universal betterment for humanity, both in its collective (that is species-wide) manifestation and in its local (that is individual) manifestation. On this view, attempts to reconstitute cosmopolitanism and extend the term’s provenance are misguided. Its meaning is both precise and ethical. Nor is there any guilt or shame that necessarily attaches to such a conception, albeit that its provenance is Western and ‘enlightened’. The Enlightenment prescribed a rational freedom from the merely customary and traditional: from revelational and other sources of knowledge that did not bear critical scrutiny; also a liberal freedom from social structuration and classification that ascribed individuals fixed, unequal and impersonal names and positions in closed communities. Here is cosmopolitanism as an asseveration of human identity and dignity and of individual integrity and liberty. The cosmopolitan project of anthropology on this view is scientifically to elucidate the nature of human capacity, the workings of individual consciousness, creativity and accomplishment; morally to clarify the conditions whereby individuals may execute their humanity to the optimum, live out their potential for experience and expression to the fullest; and aesthetically to promote an appreciation of the dignity of human identity and

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individual integrity. It is a fact that human beings are everywhere capacitated to make sense of the world, to form world-views, in their own individual way: it is an aspiration that human beings everywhere should be afforded the space and the opportunity to fulfil this potential for sense-making, to live out the capacity to formulate individual life projects. It would be my view that the cosmopolitan project of anthropology is still one that Kant would recognize: one imagines the individual human being looking out on the world from anywhere, rationally capacitated and legally sanctioned to view his or her life in the context of human life, indeed planetary life, as a whole. Also, from anywhere, here is the individual human being looked upon as a thing-initself, an instantiation of the whole class of humankind. And yet ... in a world of unequal power relations, even idealistic intervention in others’ affairs runs the risk of being construed as Western hegemonic expansion (cf. Beck, 2006: 154). If an emancipatory cosmopolitanism risks being constructed as imperialistic, then what do the social logics of action call for here? How does one argue the cosmopolitan world-view in this context? That is also the cosmopolitan project of anthropology, and it draws on the strengths of the anthropological method: the way in which ethnography provides insight into an empirical reality in which one is able to distinguish between ideology or rhetoric and the true nature of the human. A cosmopolitan anthropology denies the notion of primordial or essential cultural identities, whether based on territory or religion. The Volk and the ummah − organic, inviolable and constitutive of overarching collective identities and values − are ideological constructs. Appiah (1998: 99) has called them ‘fantasies’; for Robert Pinsky (1996: 86): ‘insofar as the chauvinist refers to any human group or making as a static purity, the chauvinist elevates an illusion’. But such illusion and fantasy are by no means harmless. Whether couched in terms of the romantic nationalism of Johann Herder or Joseph de Maistre, or the historic organicism of Georg

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Hegel, or the racial ideology of the Nazis, or the religious dogma of Irish bishops or Iranian mullahs, or the political expediency of Soviet or Chinese Communists, such ‘organismic diversitarianism’ (Stocking, 1992: 214) delivers a pernicious mixture of relativism and absolutism: a cultural apartheid where ‘members’ are constrained to accept a common sense of the meaning of life and each collective is its own unique centre of gravity and experience. By contrast, cosmopolitanism defines experience as intrinsically hybrid. This is the nature of experience, for individuals inexorably and inevitably find themselves in different moments of being, different moods and motivations, different world-views and identities (Rapport, 1993). It is not that these differences bespeak individuals ever acting and interpreting as less than themselves − as the pawns of contexts and situations, discourses and epistemes, which cast them hither and thither − but rather that individual interpretations are momentary creations, even random creations (Rapport, 2001). Between these interpretations there can be enormous diversity. Aggregated together they amount to a hybrid consciousness. There may be radically different evaluations of this hybridity and orientations towards it. On an individual level, reactions span an arc from a celebration of internal contrariety to an embarrassment and attempts to eradicate any inconsistency of behaviour (Rapport, 1997). In terms of collective ideology, Hannerz (1990: 241) suggests the polar terms ‘transnational cultures’ and ‘territorial cultures’ to describe the arc from rhetorical acceptance of hybridity and an opening up to global difference, to denial and attempted negation of contrariety in favour of consistency of world-view and homogeneity of lifeway. Hannerz’s thesis is that cosmopolitanism as a global social condition now entails these opposed orientations becoming themselves more closely intertwined: transnational cultures supervene upon territorial cultures such that the dialectic of their difference is more an everyday feature of life everywhere.

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There now exists a ‘world culture’ (Hannerz, 1990: 237) which operates as an ‘organization of diversity’: there is one global conversation between all structures of meaning and expression distributed round the world which accompanies the one global movement of people, meanings and goods. ‘Territorial’ and ‘transnational’ orientations become themselves subcultural characteristics within a wider whole. The absolutist denial of contrariety and hybridity, in other words, exists as an ideology within a cosmopolitan world. There was a time, Hannerz elaborates (1990), when territorial cultural orientations predominated. He recalls a famous study by American sociologist Robert Merton of small-town North America in the 1950s. Those orientated towards living their lives within the broad ambit of the nation as a whole were outnumbered by those who lived their lives according to far more circumscribed and localized social structures. The value of transportable knowledge and expertise − a decontextualized cultural capital − was overshadowed by the value of knowledge grounded in the locale. Since the 1950s two things have changed, according to Hannerz. First, the scale of human social exchange: those orientated towards not living ‘local’ lives now see their stage as a transnational or supranational one rather than a merely national one. Second, the preponderance of orientation has changed. The smalltown Americans − and to which one might add the ‘romantic authochthonists’ (Malkki, 1995: 52) who trade in organicist notions of nationalism, race and religion − now find themselves in less of a majority, even a minority. There are more globalists today than ever before, Hannerz considers, because of the growth and proliferation of transnational social connexions; close and direct involvement in more than one nationalcultural sphere is now not merely an idiosyncratic aspect of biography or a by-product of war, famine or oppression. Furthermore, a transnational orientation has, in recent decades, been more institutionally promoted and legitimated. The West, for instance, has had a

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need to know more about Japan or the oil-rich Middle East. One implication of the temporal shift which Hannerz describes is that one might anticipate − hope for − a change in the general awareness concerning culture as a concept. If there is a preponderance of ‘transnationalism’ as an orientation on a global scale − a desire to move, a liberty to move, and with no necessity to rejoin a bounded community − then the ideology that culture is something innate, tacit, taken for granted, unconscious, implicit and irrevocably habituated ought to be an exploded rhetoric and should be widely challenged. In a cosmopolitan world it should become clear that closing off individuals as culture members in totalized social worlds is a rhetorical stance, a strategy of essentialism and socio-cultural determination. It should become clear that cultural differentiation is actually formed as part of an inexorable dialectic of boundary making and marking which is contingent and contextual: an invention of difference and a simulation of essential identity. Cultural distinction is, in Ulrich Beck’s words (2002: 7), transparent not ontological. Reflecting ironically on the transparent, translatable and transportable nature of cultural knowledge and difference can be an emancipatory practice, Beck continues (2002: 67). Individuals are set free by the plural possibilities, even the competing demands, of differently constructed communitarian identities, albeit that from small-town America, say, and small-town Arabia, individuals enter into this emancipation with different resources at their disposal. But even the subaltern has his or her new-found opportunities, as Benedict Anderson (1998: 131−132) observes: here is the young Javanese girl, for instance, now able to imagine herself escaping identitarian conceptions of her gender and ethnicity and enrolling herself in the unboundedness of the world; here is the working-class Jamaican able to imagine effecting an adventure of travel and reinvention (Wardle, 2000: 84).

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The situation may remain one of ‘mixed feelings’ (Clifford, 1998: 362): of ‘complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments’. Tensions remain between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘territorial’: hence the so-called ‘culture wars’ and the rise of identity politics. Cultural fundamentalism is a reaction to the cosmopolitan, and an often violent response, forcibly re-institutionalizing and imposing a home space of ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ absolutes. Even the ironist, willing to reflect on the arbitrariness of cultural norms, can find himself or herself nostalgic for the ‘remembered’ simplicity and the innocence of boundary. Indeed, the clash between radically different orientations to hybridity of experience, both at the level of the individual and the collective − the nationstate, the pressure-group, the profession, the church − can manifest itself as crisis (‘war’) on a global scale. Experience is hybrid and incoherent, individual, but we are party to one global human community of risk and fate (Beck, 2002: 7). A cosmopolitan order delivers hybridity of experience as a possible emancipation for all, but an accompaniment of this freedom is that, ‘nothing is guaranteed, except contamination, messy politics and more translation’ (Clifford, 1998: 369).

COSMOPOLITAN HOPE If nothing is guaranteed by freedom, then cosmopolitanism has its expectations nevertheless. In Martha Nussbaum’s phrasing (1996: 133), the cosmopolitan hopes for a society in which ‘the Norm of the Righteous Gentile’ is realized as widely as possible: legally and institutionally promoted − i.e. one promotes the factual and imaginative prerequisites whereby the human is recognized in the significant other, the neighbour, the stranger and alien alike. A cosmopolitan world is one where the particularism of communitarian attachment is routinely superseded by a universal humanism.

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Particular memberships dissolve, to be replaced by a global public which rules itself democratically, interacts civilly, and recognizes Anyone as an individual embodiment of a human whole. Individualism becomes an ethic of global social integration and cohesion. A global liberal-cosmopolitan democracy is, according to Beck (1998: 28), a realistic ideal. But why should cosmopolitan hope be taken seriously? As Caroline Humphrey (2004: 138) observes, however enlightened and utopian, cosmopolitanism has, from the time of its founding, referred to ‘persons not yet known in the world’. Indeed, they exist in an ‘unattainable’ political order, for to free oneself from classificatory and essentialist identities, from socio-political boundedness and emplacement, and to manifest an infinite openness and universalism is a conceptual imaginary which bears an ‘inverse analogy with the real space of society’ (Humphrey, 2004: 152). Notwithstanding, three portents are commonly cited of cosmopolitanism as a living hope: • the spread of human rights as a global discourse • the emergence of ‘world cities’ • the rise of worldwide ‘issues’ that eventuate in global moral campaigns and protest movements, and the spread of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Human rights In the past few decades the spread of international human rights law, as well as a wider public discourse of rights, have been rapid. ‘International human rights is the world’s first universal ideology’, David Weissbrodt (1988: 1) suggests. Normatively, human rights law disconnects the holding of rights from membership of nation-states (which are no longer the sole subjects of international law) and ‘holds out the promise of a global language that is capable of commanding loyalties in a post-national political environment’ (Turner, 2002: 46). One does not deny the difficulties involved: the issues over enforcement; the

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association of a set of Western ideas and institutions with elitism and interventionism; and the purported foreignness of individualism as value. One believes, however, that the moral arguments carry their own weight and exist over against the difficulty in implementing them. One recalls the Enlightenment certainty (after David Hume) that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’: if a state of affairs is one which a moral requirement would seem to demand, then the very conceptualization implies that it is possible to create that state. This is the essence of cosmopolitan hope. Human rights have been described by anthropologists as one of the most globalized political values of our time. They challenge the fantasy or illusion that humanity is divided into essential collectivities with clear frontiers of culture and hold out the promise of a ‘post-cultural’ world of liberal openness (Wilson, 1997: 10). They offer a vital ingredient for a post-national, global cohesiveness. World cities The ethos of citizenship as against subjecthood, slavery and alienage was originally a product of the European Renaissance and its humanism: part and parcel of an urbanism which was open and inclusive. The ‘citizen’ of the Renaissance city-state possessed rights to equal treatment and self-expression whether he or she was originally native-born or an asylum seeker and refugee (Kwon, 2008: 23−25). Only with the rise of nationstates in the nineteenth century, after a long period of rivalry, did the autonomous city come to be subordinated to national sovereignty, and the urbane cosmopolitan ethic of hospitality was replaced by a communitarian one of exclusiveness and closure. Nationalism effected a separation between the local and global. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a buffeting, even withering, of nation-states under the influence of global capital and global crisis (environmental and governmental). With the inability of the nation-state to engender

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consensus, deliver democratic demands or end violence, commentators have seen the return to prominence of the city as a global social form. For Verena Conley (2002: 127), then, the ‘cosmopolis’ emerges: the world city (or world-as-city, city-as-world) which exceeds the state and circumvents the national by way of a global net of alliance and exchange. Rather than bounded territorial units, here are urban spaces that act as points of interaction in a network of global processes which transcend boundaries. The world city is a site where hybrid or contrarian and diasporic identities find refuge (Rapport, 2006). World cities have, according to Conley, the power to resist economic, social and political forces that would tend towards totalitarian structures, and remain flexible and open. Beck agrees (2006: 88): globalism becomes an everyday reality in world cities, with people becoming more sceptical about the rhetoric, the pretensions and the myopia of cultural fundamentalism, communitarianism and the nation-state. Living in world cities − working transnationally or for global companies and institutions or merely existing in the shadow of global markets and international trade − inculcates a self-consciousness which is global, or at least post-national. People get used to the pervasiveness of dealings across state boundaries: such dealings become ordinary and everyday, as if already instantiations of a supranational framework. Out of the ‘demotic dailiness’ of interaction in world cities, Jeffrey Waldren concludes (2006: 97), ‘cosmopolitan norms’ of according the alien reciprocity and respect, recognizing all human beings as equal repositories of certain entitlements, gradually crystallize. Worldwide issues A new global sociability and societalism has already emerged, according to Beck, which includes a sense of responsibility for the whole world, and a concomitant openness and civility. Witness, he writes (1998: 28−30), the moral and political passions with which

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members of the purported ‘me-generation’ have prosecuted worldwide ethical issues, from gender and racial inequality, to the environment, AIDS, Third World debt, and human and animal rights. These issues originally bypassed the agendas of nation-based politics and politicians, but people globally have transcended national apathies, working together to bring about certain global futures. Moreover, there are new political players − NGOs, lobby groups and campaigners and grassroots voluntary associations − that might be regarded as precursors of a worldwide civil society and participatory democracy. Not implicated in a state nexus, and outwith present government structures, these new political entities engage globally with structures of authority and demand global accountability. Here is a ‘globalization from below’ (Falk, 1996: 58). It is people- and natureorientated, ethically motivated and generative of a new global public sphere of debate and advocacy. According to Beck, we already live in a cosmopolitan world, one which is more moral than we might realize; he pens a manifesto for those he dubs ‘Freedom’s children’ (1998: 29). The indications that we are uniting globally and effectively to create a politics of human concerns suggest that we are living under the preconditions of a radically new democracy, Beck claims. A next step might be transnational political parties which will represent transnational issues. Working, initially at least, within the arenas of national politics and polities, these parties could be multinational in their organization. They would appeal to human responses to worries over universal problems. The task of opening out a transnational electoral domain will be difficult, as will the organizing of global campaigns between people of different political traditions over sensitive issues to do with food, hygiene and disease, and with liberty, diversity and toleration. But the very difficulty of conceptualizing problems and solving them − the act of proclaiming that ‘culture is change, it is movement’ (Pinsky, 1996: 90) and not essence − can itself be alluring.

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Cosmopolitanism possesses an allure, an Eros as well as an ethos. It is the allure of a post-national, cosmopolitan world order: secular, individualistic, amid global communications and consumptions. It is also the allure of the new, of potential futures for both self and other which are there to be created. Released from both tyrannies of material want and ghettoes of imposed identities, one can hope for passionate commitment to the possibilities of becoming.

MANIFESTO FOR A COSMOPOLITAN WORLD Cosmopolitanism remains a site of tension: cosmos is dialectically related to polis; global and local are brought together while insisting that one aspect cannot be conceived of except in relation to the other. One cannot comprehend a human condition except that local lives are regarded as versions of universal potentials, and give onto the possibility of global futures. One cannot be a world citizen except that one inhabits an individual consciousness which belongs both to localized settings and to global possibilities. Locality and globality, individual human being and humankind, are mutually constitutive and mutually implicated. A manifesto for the cosmopolitan project is also provided by Martha Nussbaum (1996: 133, 136): The accident of being born a Sri Lankan, or a Jew, or a female, or an African-American, or a poor person, is just that − an accident of birth. It is not and should not be taken as a determinant of moral worth. Human personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth, and this worth is equal (…). Make liberty of choice the benchmark of any just constitutional order, and refuse to compromise this principle in favour of any particular tradition or religion.

The universal human condition is an ontological reality, but admitting it as universal practice is, Nussbaum allows, a habit, a practice, a skill and a strength. This is the reason

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that The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, ‘Yad Va’shem’, remains such a key trope. It is a commemoration, Nussbaum explains (1996: 131−132), to those who saved or defended the human other, the stranger, at the risk of everything. Imaginatively, they recognized and responded to the human and did not allow themselves to be overcome by powerful and pervasive local ideologies, categories and norms. They evince the possible moral basis of global citizenship, of world society, whose touchstone is not loyalty and communitarian allegiance but justice. The righteous recognition and the courage are, moreover, embodied qualities, Nussbaum suggests, which signal the individual-bodily nature of the process by which the universally human may be encountered and engaged. The human body offers a basis of community beyond locality, also of life lived beyond the exclusively rational. The universal is practicable and liveable through an educated everyday recognition of Anyone: the embodied nature of the human condition and the bodily capabilities and liabilities of the human individual.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. 1998 ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K. A. 1998 ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K. A. 2007 Cosmopolitanism. New York: Norton. Beck, U. 1998 ‘The Cosmopolitan Manifesto’, New Statesman, March 20: 28−30. Beck, U. 2002 ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies’, Theory, Culture and Society 19 (1−2): 17−44. Beck, U. 2006 Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. Bok, S. 1996 ‘From Part to Whole’, in J. Cohen (ed.), Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Cheah, P. 1998 ‘Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds) 1998 Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clifford, J. 1998 ‘Mixed Feelings’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, J. (ed.) 1996 Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Colson, E. 2008 ‘The Founding Moment’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Conley, V. 2002 ‘Chaosmopolis’, Theory, Culture and Society 19 (1−2): 127−138. Falk, R. 1996 ‘Revisioning Cosmopolitanism’, in J. Cohen (ed.), Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Fardon, R. 2008 ‘Cosmopolitan Nations, National Cosmopolitans’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Hage, G. 1998 White Nation. Sydney: Pluto. Hall, S. 2008 ‘Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Hannerz, U. 1990 ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society 7 (2−3): 237−251. Hirsch, E. 2008 ‘Paradoxes of the Cosmopolitan in Melanesia’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Hodgson, D. 2008 ‘Cosmopolitics, Neoliberalism and the State’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Hollinger, D. 2000 ‘Not Universalists, Not Pluralists’, in S. Vertovec and R.Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, New York: Oxford University Press. Humphrey, C. 2004 ‘Cosmopolitanism and Kozmopolitizm in the political life of Soviet citizens’, Focaal 44: 138−154. Kahn, J. 2003 ‘Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Practice?’, Anthropological Theory 3 (4): 403−415. Kahn, J. 2008 ‘Other Cosmopolitans in the Making of the Modern Malay World’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Kwon, H. 2008 ‘The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism’, History of Religions 47 (4): 22−42. Legros, D. 2008 ‘0.45% Cosmopolitan’, St. Thomas Law Review 20 (3): 490−512.

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Maistre, J. de 1797 Considérations sur la France. London: Bâle. Malcolmson, S. 1998 ‘The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Malkki, L. 1995 Purity and Exile. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, M. 1996 ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in J. Cohen (ed.), Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Pinsky, R. 1996 ‘Eros against Esperanto’, in J. Cohen (ed.), Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Rapport, N. 1993 Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rapport, N. 1997 ‘The “Contrarieties” of Israel: An Essay on the Cognitive Importance and the Creative Promise of both/and,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (4): 653−672. Rapport, N. 2001 ‘Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual, Society and Anthropology’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12 (2): 190−220. Rapport, N. 2006 ‘Diaspora, Cosmopolis, Global Refuge: Three Voices of the Supranational City’, in S. Coleman and P. Collins (eds), Locating the Field. Oxford: Berghahn. Rapport, N. 2010 ‘Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going Beyond’, in N. Rapport (ed.), Human Nature as Capacity: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berghahn. Robbins, B. 1998 ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sichone, O. 2008 ‘Xenophobia and Xenophilia in South Africa’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Stade, R. 2006. ‘Cosmos and Polis’, in J. Scholte and R. Robertson (eds), Encyclopedia of Globalization. London: Routledge. Steiner, G. 1997 No Passion Spent: Essays 1978−1996. London: Faber. Stivens, M. 2008 ‘Gender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Stocking, G. 1992 The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Turner, B. 1990 ‘The Two Faces of Sociology?’, Theory, Culture and Society 7 (2−3): 343−358.

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Turner, B. 2002 ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory, Culture and Society 19(1−2): 45−63. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds) 2000 Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press. Waldron, J. 2006 ‘Cosmopolitan Norms’, in S. Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press. Wardle, H. 2000 An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. Lampeter: Mellen. Weissbrodt, D. 1988 ‘Human Rights’, in P. Davies (ed.), Human Rights. London: Routledge.

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Werbner, P. 2008a ‘The Cosmopolitan Encounter’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Werbner, P. (ed.) 2008b Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Werbner, R. 2008 ‘Responding to Rooted Cosmopolitanism’, in P. Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. ASA Monographs 45. Oxford: Berg. Wilson, R. (ed.) 1997 Human Rights, Culture and Context. London: Pluto Press. Zolo, D. 1997 Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government. Cambridge: Polity.

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2.15 The Indigenous World Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli

The world’s indigenous peoples are facing numerous challenges, including rapidly changing social, political, and economic situations, some of them a result of globalization, climate change, energy resource exploitation, and struggles for human rights and cultural identity. Indigenous peoples, who number between 400 million and 600 million (some 4−6% of the world’s population), are found in over half of the world’s countries. Numbering some 5,000−6,000 groups, indigenous peoples make up the largest percentage of the world’s cultural diversity (Davis and Soefestad, 1995; Maybury-Lewis, 1997; Bodley, 2008; Daes, 2008; Department of Social and Economic Affairs [DESA], United Nations, 2009). Indigenous peoples include groups that range from small communities of hunters and gatherers to sedentary agricultural villagers and from agropastoralists to peri-urban factory workers in the industrial economies of nationstates. The vast majority of indigenous peoples have diversified socioeconomic systems and are involved in both the formal and informal sectors of the global economy. Increasingly, these groups are seeking a voice in world politics and are protesting their impoverishment at the hands of nationstates and transnational corporations (Wilmer, 1993; Hall and Fenelon, 2009; Mikkelsen, 2010). A sizeable number of the world’s

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indigenous peoples are found in biodiversity hotspots, places where there is high biological diversity, such as tropical rain forests (e.g. the Amazon, Central Africa), savannas, mountain ecosystems, and islands (e.g. New Guinea, the Indonesian archipelago, Micronesia) (Durning, 1992; Miller, 1993; DESA, 2009). Durning (1992: 6, 16) has referred to indigenous peoples as ‘guardians of the land’ and as ‘native stewards’. Indigenous peoples have been, and are innovative managers of natural resources. While there are ongoing debates over the degree to which indigenous peoples actively seek to conserve the environment (see, for example, Cox, 1997; Hames, 2007), many of the areas where indigenous peoples have resided for lengthy periods of time exhibit less environmental degradation than do more heavily populated areas occupied by non-indigenous populations. It is paradoxical, but understandable, that some indigenous peoples may be driven by poverty to agree to the locating of nuclear waste sites and other environmentally hazardous land uses in their territories, or to allowing transnational corporations to mine mineral resources, explore for oil, or exploit timber or other natural products on their lands. While some indigenous peoples have undoubtedly maintained their habitats in innovative ways, there are indications that some indigenous

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groups have over-exploited resources and have been willing to sell off rights to land and natural resources to non-local people. The past several decades have witnessed an intensification of efforts at the international, national, and grassroots levels to promote human rights for indigenous peoples (Cohen, 1998; Daes, 2008; Anaya, 2009). Yet these populations continue to be vulnerable to oppression and exploitation. International conventions and declarations on the rights of indigenous peoples have often gone unenforced. As a result, the members of these groups have had their rights violated with impunity by states, international agencies, private companies, groups, and individuals. Conflicts between states and non-state actors, some of them indigenous peoples, have led to tensions, forced displacement, the destruction or decimation of indigenous communities, and increased stress on vulnerable populations; at the same time, there has been an expansion of discriminatory practices against indigenous peoples and minorities in many regions (Minority Rights Group International, 2010: 10). In many parts of the world ‘indigenousness’ has taken on added political and economic significance because it is used to claim title over blocks of land, certain types of resources, development assistance, or recognition from states and intergovernmental organizations (Niezen, 2003). Land rights, compensation, and development are related closely to one another and they have specific relevance to indigenous peoples worldwide (Tauli-Corpuz, 2006; DESA, 2009; Mikkelsen, 2010). In a number of countries around the world, a combination of war, economic depression, environmental degradation, and poorly framed development policies have left many people, especially the poor, worse off over the past few decades (Miller, 1993; MayburyLewis, 1997; Bodley, 2008). While indigenous peoples make up 4−6% of the world’s people, they represent 10% of the world’s poor (Hall and Patrinos, 2010). Structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank

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have led to cutbacks in spending on health, education, and welfare. Livelihood support systems have eroded along with the social and physical infrastructure in some countries.

INSTITUTIONS RELATING TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL The Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which was in existence in the United Nations from 1982 to 2006, drew up a draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with the participation of indigenous representatives. A draft of this declaration was completed in 1993. The following year, 1994, the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and forwarded to the Commission. In 1995, the Human Rights Commission (which later was reorganized by the United Nations and renamed the Human Rights Council) established an open-ended inter-sessional working group, the sole purpose of which was to elaborate on the Declaration. In 2000, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) was established by the United Nations. This organization held its inaugural session in May 2002 and has had meetings every year since then. The goals of the UNPFII included the following: strengthening of international cooperation aimed at solving problems facing indigenous peoples; coordinating development and human rights efforts involving United Nations agencies and indigenous peoples; and serving as a focal point for discussions relating to indigenous peoples and states. The Permanent Forum is unique within the United Nations in that it is the only forum in which indigenous peoples have seats as equals alongside government-appointed members. An example of an area in which the Permanent Forum has played a role is that involving the health and well-being of indigenous peoples, coordinating

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their efforts with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN agencies that are attempting to address health inequities. The Permanent Forum has also focused attention on crucial issues including land rights, indigenous women, and the impacts of climate change on indigenous peoples and their habitats. In 2001, the Human Rights Council established the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples. The Commission appointed Dr Rodolfo Stavenhagen as Special Rapporteur for a three-year period. In 2004, it renewed the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for three more years. In 2007, after the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the new Human Rights Council renewed again the Special Rapporteur’s wide mandate and decided to add the task of ‘promoting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and international instruments relevant to the advancement of the rights of indigenous peoples’, thus establishing a clear legal framework for the different activities of the UN Special Rapporteur. Professor S. James Anaya assumed the mandate from Dr Stavenhagen on 1 May 2008. A recent visit (March 2009) by the Special Rapporteur to Botswana raised issues about the need for resolution of the issues relating to indigenous peoples and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the second largest protected area in Africa, from which San and Bakgalagadi had been relocated, most of them against their will, between 1997 and 2002, and where they have been denied access to water (Anaya, 2010). Unlike the UN Permanent Forum and the new UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Special Rapporteur is authorized to take complaints from indigenous individuals, groups, or communities, including requests for urgent action, to investigate them, to make visits to the countries where the complaints originate, and to make recommendations to the country violating indigenous human rights and to the various

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human rights organs of the United Nations as to steps they should take to remedy the violations or to prevent future violations. In 2006, the Human Rights Council created the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNEMRIP), which consists of a group of experts. These experts examine specific issues and offer advice. This is the third of the three-pronged indigenous peoples’ rights institutions at the international level. Together, the organizations working at the international level on indigenous rights issues benefit from extensive interaction with indigenous peoples groups and organizations at the regional level (e.g. Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, the Pacific), and at the local level.

‘INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ AND ‘INDIGENEITY’ The concepts of ‘indigenous peoples’ and ‘indigeneity’ have been the focus of much deliberation and debate in recent years (Kuper, 2003; Niezen, 2003; Kenrick and Lewis, 2004). As pointed out by various scholars and organizations, there is no single, agreed definition of the term ‘indigenous peoples’. The Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (1987) argues that four elements are included in the definition of indigenous peoples: (1) pre-existence; (2) non-dominance; (3) cultural difference; and (4) self-identification as indigenous. Often, the term indigenous refers to those individuals and groups who are descendants of the original populations (i.e. the ‘first nations’ or ‘first comers’) residing in a country. An important criterion for ‘indigenousness’ is the identification by people themselves of their distinct cultural identity. Most indigenous people prefer to reserve for themselves the right to determine who is and who is not a member of their group. Indigenous peoples across the planet share a common experience that includes dispossession of land and natural resources, impoverishment,

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discrimination, and human rights abuses (Martinez Cobo, 1987; Daes, 2008). Some of them have also faced efforts by nation-states of assimilation − the process whereby societies are incorporated or integrated into dominant social systems, often involving changes in culture, language, economic systems, political structures, and ideology. While there are some indigenous peoples who have given up their customs and traditions and have been incorporated into the dominant society or into other groups, there are also numerous groups that wish to continue to practise their cultures and maintain their identity and who wish to hold tightly to their beliefs, values, and customary practices. There is much debate in the academic literature and among indigenous peoples about the goals and objectives of their struggles. Some of this debate focuses on whether or not peoples who are seen as distinct from the dominant society by themselves, other groups, or by the governments of the nationstates in which they reside should characterize themselves as indigenous and whether, by so doing, they should have human rights accorded to them. Adam Kuper (2003) has questioned the concept of indigeneity; he maintains that the term ‘indigenous’ is a euphemism for what used to be termed ‘primitive’. He says that the advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights have a paternalistic attitude which sees some people as different from others in their lifestyles and attitudes and whose ‘fragile’, ‘primordial’, ‘ancient’ life should be protected. He expresses concern about the fact that, ‘The initial assumption is that descendants of the original inhabitants of a country should have privileged rights, even exclusive rights, to its resources.’ In thinking about ‘indigenousness’ as the ‘rebirth of the primitive’, the ‘Other’ − that is to say, the indigenous individual − is all too often seen as a ‘passive victim’. Such a perspective does not take into consideration the local strategies of active resistance that the category of ‘indigenous’ not only represents but also makes possible.

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ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES There is heightened concern for the social, economic, and environmental impacts on indigenous peoples of projects undertaken by governments, transnational corporations, and multilateral development banks. The implementation of large-scale hydroelectric projects such as the James Bay Project in Canada of Hydro-Quebec has had significant impacts on the Cree and the habitats upon which they depend, while the Sadar Sarovar and other dams along the Narmada River in India have resulted in the forced relocation of tens of thousands of tribal people (World Commission on Dams, 2000). Oil exploitation and mining activities have led to habitat destruction and the displacement of indigenous groups in many parts of the world, including the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Oriente region of Ecuador, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and northern Canada (O’Faircheallaigh, 1998; Gedicks, 2001). Biopiracy, the exploitation of indigenous natural resources, for example, by pharmaceutical companies, has become a major issue of concern to indigenous peoples. The cutting of timber in tropical forests has been a particularly sensitive issue among indigenous peoples and others living in these regions, in part because it has resulted in serious losses of crucial subsistence resources. Logging has been protested at the local level, as seen in the case of the Penan of Sarawak, Malaysia, who have mounted roadblocks and destroyed logging equipment in the late 1980s and 1990s, actions which were met with force both on the part of the state and by gangsters (samseng) hired by timber companies (Davis, 1993). The problems were compounded by the fact that many indigenous groups lacked legal control over their areas, and they did not have the right to establish their own environmental regulations or to eject the timber companies. In response, indigenous groups have sought to protect their territories by a variety of means, ranging from active territorial control to information

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dissemination and from land-mapping to registering claims officially with governments (Chapin et al., 2005; Gilbert, 2006; Bodley, 2008). A major turning point in the history of interactions between indigenous groups and environmental organizations was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 1992. A Global Forum was held parallel to that meeting which included representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), indigenous peoples’ organizations, and coalition groups made up of indigenous peoples and resource users such as rubber tappers. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Natural Resources Defense Council had taken note of the numerous problems involving abuse of human rights and the environment (Sachs, 1995). Indigenous groups were being exposed to state and private actors’ destruction of both habitats and the people who occupied them. What was especially disconcerting to them was the fact that this destruction was taking place with impunity. States, companies, and individuals were not being brought to justice for having engaged in socially and environmentally harmful practices. Members of indigenous groups were being victimized for having protested against abusive actions of governments and companies (Durning, 1992; Wilmer, 1993; Sachs, 1995). The latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium have been characterized by what might be described as ‘indigenous eco-politics’, with indigenous organizations and conservation NGOs attempting to promote environmental justice, purposely linking human rights and the environment (Westra, 2008). Indigenous and environmental groups have enhanced their impacts through their collaborative efforts, which ultimately could lead to international recognition of a communal right to a healthy environment. No longer satisfied with being at the bottom of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic

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hierarchy, indigenous peoples are seeking to change the policies of their governments and are lobbying for more equitable and socially just policies at the international level (Daes, 2008; Anaya, 2009). The United Nations, the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) are also investing more heavily in environmentally and socially sustainable development projects and are engaged in capacity-building at the local level in indigenous communities (Wali and Davis, 1992; Davis and Soefestad, 1995). The problem is that some of these projects are not as environmentally sustainable as they are made out to be, and indigenous peoples bear many of the costs. An example of an area that is being promoted by the World Bank and the various regional banks (the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank) is eco-tourism, seen as a way of promoting ‘green development’ but often having negative implications for indigenous peoples (Butler and Hinch, 1996; Chambers, 2000). Some examples of eco-tourism include the promotion of Club Meds (self-contained tourist destinations) on indigenous lands in Central America which have resulted in the dispossession of local indigenous groups, as well as the setting up of a safari lodge at Deception Valley in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve of Botswana by Wilderness Safaris, a place where international tourists can enjoy a dip in a swimming pool and consume iced drinks while local Bushmen and Bakgalagadi are refused water by the safari lodge staff. Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world are coping directly with the effects of global climate change, which is resulting in their having to shift subsistence and land-use strategies. In some cases, indigenous peoples are experiencing severe stress and are having to move out of places they had occupied for generations or they are transforming their adaptive strategies (Mihlar, 2008; Crate and Nuttall, 2009). In many ways, indigenous peoples are more affected by climate change

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than other groups, in part because they live in fragile ecosystems (the Arctic or tropical coasts, for example) and because they depend relatively extensively on natural resources. The ecological footprints of indigenous groups tend to be relatively small; as a result, they have contributed less than other peoples to greenhouse gases. Emphasis has been placed by indigenous peoples on impacts of global climate change, adaptations to climate change, and documenting mitigation measures that are being attempted (Mihlar, 2008). Some indigenous peoples have built on traditional drought responses, for example, in coming up with ways to cope with higher temperatures, lower rainfall, and more frequent periods of deficient rainfall in some of the areas where they reside. Indigenous peoples have been concerned that they were being left out of some of the discussions of climate change, although there are efforts now to include indigenous organizations in planning regarding REDD, the United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (Schroeder, 2010). A major problem is that indigenous peoples have relatively little say in the decisions of governments that are involved in making decisions about land use and in some cases are being forced to leave areas such as state forests that have been set aside under the REDD programme. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, indigenous peoples have already experienced pressures brought to bear on them by state forestry agencies to change their agricultural and land-use practices and to cease exploiting wild resources on which they have depended for generations. Heritage rights include those rights to culturally and ideologically significant property such as sacred sites, places on the landscape that are viewed by local peoples as important (Battiste and Harrison, 2000) and as having far more significance than simply as a material or economic good or a source of tourism benefits. Some indigenous spokespersons have argued vociferously for the

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protection of sacred sites. They have also suggested that these places should be under the direct control of indigenous communities, who should be allowed to conserve them for future generations. There are conflicts between indigenous groups and other people (e.g. between Native Americans in western South Dakota and ‘new age’ groups that want to use Bear Butte, a site of great significance to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other American Indian groups) (see www.defendbearbutte. org, accessed 27 July 2010). Intellectual property rights (IPR) are those rights of groups to their unique knowledge and cultural information, much of which is informal and is transmitted orally from one generation to the next (Axt et al., 1993). Indigenous peoples have sought to get governments, international organizations, and transnational corporations to recognize their intellectual property rights and compensate them for the exploitation of culturally significant knowledge (Daes, 1993; Yamin and Posey, 1993). For example, there are discussions concerning intellectual property rights for Hoodia spp. (e.g. Hoodia pilifera), a succulent plant that has thirst and hunger-allaying properties and which is used by indigenous and other peoples in southern Africa. This plant is the subject of a benefit-sharing agreement between San and Khoekhoe peoples, transnational corporations, research institutions, and members of growers associations in southern Africa (Wynberg et al., 2009). Indigenous groups throughout the world are seeking to ensure that their children are able to benefit from indigenous knowledge systems, have culturally relevant curricula, and learn mother tongue languages in non-formal as well as formal educational settings in which they have a substantial say. In the 1970s and early 1980s, indigenous peoples sought to be recognized by the United Nations as a category of peoples with particular characteristics and who faced specific constraints, not the least of which was cultural survival (Daes, 2008; Anaya, 2009). One of the biggest issues with which many indigenous peoples are concerned is that of

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sovereignty, or, as many indigenous leaders put it, ‘self-determination’. An examination of the sociopolitical statuses of indigenous peoples around the world reveals that very few of them are in control of the governments of the countries where they reside, and most of them lack political power even at the regional level (Maybury-Lewis, 1997). A major reason for this situation is that indigenous peoples were designated by colonial governments as ‘wards of the state’, without legal rights to participate in political decisionmaking or to control their own futures (Bodley, 2008). Indigenous peoples worldwide have long had to contend with institutionalized discrimination and the lack of recognition of basic civil, political, and socioeconomic rights. Indigenous organizations, local leaders, and advocacy groups all maintain that it is necessary to gain not just de facto control over land and resources but also de jure legal control. One way to do this is to negotiate binding agreements with states, while another is to seek recognition of land and resource rights through the courts. Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Kenya, and South Africa have had some success in gaining state recognition of land and resource rights (Young, 1995; Westra, 2008). Obtaining greater civil and political rights, especially the right to participate in decisionmaking and policy formulation, however, remains a yet-to-be-realized goal for most indigenous peoples. As colonization proceeded in the indigenous world, efforts were made by colonizing agencies to change the basis of land holding. Arguing that the land was unoccupied (the doctrine of terra nullius, land belonging to no-one), colonizing states said that the existing land could be divided among groups, companies or individuals designated by the state (Young, 1995; Bodley, 2008; DESA, 2009). African, Asian, Pacific Islander, Australian, New Zealand and North and South American indigenous peoples have sought to register land and gain title over it. In order to do this, they had to go through

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adjudication, the process by which decisions are made about claims to land (e.g. determining prior claims). This is similar to a kind of title search in contemporary real estate law. The regularization of land includes establishing areas that are recognized legally. To make this possible, careful surveys must be done of areas that take into account individuals’ and groups’ claims to land. These surveys include interviews of local people, assessments of archival materials, and evaluations of records in the Attorney General’s Chambers of the various governments and in the ministries relating to local government and lands. Consultation with all affected parties occurs in which people are informed of the proposed boundaries. In some cases, indigenous mapping efforts have been undertaken that have enabled indigenous groups to participate extensively in the identification and demarcation of their areas (Chapin et al., 2005). A problem is that the process of turning common property rights into federally recognized legal rights is far from easy. The length of time taken in demarcation, the problem of enforcement of the boundaries, and the slowness in recognizing aboriginal title all present major problems to indigenous peoples. Even when the demarcation and titling is done, it can be overturned by a state or federal court, as was the case in Brazil, where land rights of Indians were called into question in 1996 by a decree signed by the President of Brazil (Presidential Decree 1775) which allowed farmers and ranchers to contest demarcations of indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands. This decision could reverse previous presidential decrees and national laws in Brazil that gave Indians rights over their lands (Moore and Lemos, 1999). Governments, such as that of Peru, may pass directives allowing transnational corporations and companies from the state to have access to indigenous lands for prospecting purposes, something that has led to major demonstrations on the part of indigenous peoples and their supporters. In some cases, land rights are designated in loan agreements between donor agencies

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and borrower countries in relation to indigenous components of projects. Examples include projects sponsored by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (Wali and Davis, 1992; Davis and Soefestad, 1995). A major problem is conditionality, in which donor agencies place conditions on the borrower countries; in many cases, the various clauses tend to be general; they are not accompanied by fixed timetables, and all too often the stipulations go unenforced. Many indigenous peoples feel that they have essentially been left out of the debate on promotion of indigenous rights, in spite of some of the successes in the United Nations. They also feel that they are experiencing more costs than benefits from the world’s development programmes. Leaders and members of indigenous groups called for greater recognition of their social, economic, and cultural rights and for their being granted the opportunity to determine for themselves the kinds of policies that would affect them. By doing local, national, regional, and international networking and by increasing their involvement in civil society, indigenous peoples have taken some important steps towards gaining recognition of their social, economic, and cultural rights. They have also been able to make some progress in legal matters, taking cases (e.g. on land rights) to the high courts of countries or to regional organizations, two examples being the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). Many indigenous groups have resisted state and transnational corporation efforts to exploit them and their resources. Some indigenous groups have pioneered indigenously-based development models that are sustainable and geared toward communities as well as individuals. It is hoped that the lessons learned from the diverse strategies that have been employed will enable indigenous peoples worldwide not only to survive but also to prosper over the long term.

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REFERENCES Anaya, S. James (2009) Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Aspen Publishers. Anaya, S. James (2010) The Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Botswana. Geneva: Human Rights Council. A/HRC/13, 22 February 2010. Axt, J.R., M.L. Corn, M. Lee, and D.M. Ackerman (1993) Biotechnology, Indigenous Peoples, and Intellectual Property Rights. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, US Congress. Battiste, Marie and Hames (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Harrison (2000) Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada: Purich Publishing. Bodley, John H. (2008) Victims of Progress, 5th edn. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Butler, Richard and Thomas Hinch, eds (1996) Tourism and Indigenous Peoples. London: International Thompson Business Press and New York: Routledge. Chambers, Erve (2000) Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Chapin, Mac, Zachary Lamb, and Bill Threlkeld (2005) Mapping Indigenous Lands. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 619–638. Cohen, Cynthia Price, ed. (1998) The Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers. Cox, Pal Alan (1997) Indigenous Peoples and Conservation. In Biodiversity and Human Health, Francesca Grifo and Joshua Rosenthal, eds, pp. 207−220. Covelo, CA: Island Press. Crate, Susan A. and Mark Nuttall, eds (2009) Anthropology and Climate Change: from encounters to actions Walnut Creek, CA, Left Coast Press. Daes, Erica-Irene (1993) Study of the Protection of the Cultural and Intellectual Property and Indigenous Peoples. Geneva and New York: United Nations Commission on Human Rights. /CN.4/sub2/1993/28 Daes, Erica-Irene (2008) Indigenous Peoples: Keepers of Our Past, Custodians of Our Future. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Davis, Shelton H. and Lars T. Soefestad (1995) Participation and Indigenous Peoples. Environment Department Papers No. 021. Washington, DC: World Bank. Davis, Wade (1993) Death of a People: Logging in the Penan Homeland. In State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger, Marc S. Miller, ed. with Cultural Survival, pp. 23−32. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Department of Social and Economic Affairs, United Nations (2009) State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. New York: United Nations. Durning, Alan Thein (1992) Guardians of the Land: Indigenous Peoples and the Health of the Earth. WorldWatch Paper 112. Washington, DC: WorldWatch Institute. Gedicks, Al (2001) Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Gilbert, Jeremie (2006) Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights under International Law: From Victims to Actors. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers. Hall, G. and Harry A. Patrinos, eds (2010) Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank. Hall, Thomas D. and James V. Fenelon (2009) Indigenous Peoples and Globalization: Resistance and Revitalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Hames, Raymond B. (2007) The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate. Annual Reviews of Anthropology 36: 177−190. Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (1987) Indigenous Peoples: A Global Quest for Justice. London: Zed Books. Kenrick, Jason and Jerome Lewis (2004) Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and the Politics of the Term Indigenous. Anthropology Today 20 (2): 4−9. Kuper, Adam J. (2003) The Return of the Native. Current Anthropology 44 (3): 389−411. Martinez Cobo, Jose R. (1987) Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations. Volume V: Conclusions, Proposals, and Recommendations. New York: United Nations. Maybury-Lewis, David (1997) Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups, and the State. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Mihlar, Farah (2008) Voices that Must be Heard: Minorities and Indigenous Peoples Confronting Climate Change. London: Minority Rights Group International. Mikkelsen, Caecelie, ed. (2010) The Indigenous World. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Miller, Marc S., ed. with Cultural Survival (1993) State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Minority Rights Group International (2010) State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2010. London: Minority Rights Group International. Moore, Sara Gavney and Maria Carmen Lemos (1999) Indigenous Policy in Brazil: The Development of

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Decree 1775 and the Proposed Raposa/Sierra do Sol Reserve, Roraima, Brazil. Human Rights Quarterly 21 (2): 444−463. Niezen, Ronald (2003) The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. O’Faircheallaigh, Ciaran (1998) Resource Development and Inequality in Indigenous Societies. World Development 26 (3): 381−394. Sachs, Aaron (1995) Eco-Justice: Linking Human Rights and the Environment. WorldWatch Paper 127. Washington, DC: WorldWatch Institute. Schroeder, Heike (2010) Agency in International Climate Negotiations: The Case of Indigenous Peoples and Avoided Deforestation. International Environmental Agreements 10: 317−332. Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria, ed. (2006) Good Practices on Indigenous Peoples’ Development. Baguio City, Philippines: Tebtebba Foundation and New York: United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Wali, Alaka and Shelton Davis (1992) Protecting Amerindian Lands: A Review of World Bank Experience with Indigenous Land Regularization Programs in Lowland South America. Latin America and the Caribbean Technical Department Regional Studies Program Report No. 19. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Westra, Laura (2008) Environmental Justice and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications. Wilmer, Franke (1993) The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. World Commission on Dams (2000) Dams and Development: A New Framework for DecisionMaking. The Report of the World Commission on Dams. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications. Wynberg, Rachel, Doris Schroeder, and Roger Chennels, eds (2009) Indigenous Peoples, Consent, and Benefit Sharing: Lessons from the San-Hoodia Case. Dordrecht: Springer. Yamin, F. and D. Posey (1993) Intellectual Property Rights, Indigenous Peoples, and Biotechnology. Review of European Community and International Environmental Law 2 (3): 141−148. Young, Elspeth (1995) Third World in the First: Indigenous Peoples and Development. London: Routledge.

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Name Index

Abashin, S. I-358 Abbink, J. I-317 Abbot, J. II-194 Abedi, M. I-74 Aboul-Ela, H. I-327 Abramson, A. II-316 Abramson, D.M. I-355 Abu-Laban, Y. I-329 Abu-Lughod, J. I-512 Abu-Lughod, L. I-73–4, 78–9, 82–3, 174, 189, 251, 324, 327–30, 333–5, 348, 512, II-411, 415 Acharya, A. I-426 Acheson, J. I-157 Adams, J. I-490 Adams, L. I-349, 356 Adams, R.N. II-396 Adams, R.B., Jnr. II-245 Adams, V. I-374, 376, II-347 Adams, W.M. II-290 Adams, W.A. I-497 Adams, W.Y. I-139, 298 Addlakha, R. I-369 Adelkhah, F. I-354, 358 Adenzato, M. II-252 Ades, D. II-95 Adler, J. II-391 Adolphs, R. II-245 Adorno, T.W. II-413 Afable, P.O. I-201 Agamben, G. I-175 Agar, J. I-299 Agar, M.H. II-57–8, 65, 301, 366 Agarwal, B. II-301 Agelopoulos, G. I-299 Agha, A. II-50 Agrawal, A. II-279, 293, 321–2 Agustín, L. II-345 Ahearn, L. I-20, 369 Ahern, E. I-408 Ahissar, M. II-249 Ahmad, I. I-373 Ahmed, A. II-426, 429 Ahmed, L. I-329 Ahmed, S. II-378

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Aisher, A. II-276 Aizura, A. II-383 Akrich, M. I-96 Alam, M. I-358 Albala-Bertrand, J.M. II-330 Albert, B. II-294 Albro, R. II-317 Alcorta, C. II-239 Alexander, C. I-16, 122, 276, 299, 343, II-315 Alexander, J. I-430, 432 Alexander, P. I-430, 433 Ali, K. I-329, 352 Ali, N. I-353 Alia, V. I-275 Allen, B.J. I-451 Allen, C. II-372 Allen, L. II-417 Allen, S. I-83 Allen, T. I-228, II-6, 168–70, 172–5, 177–9, 232 Allison, A. I-391, 393, 395 Alon, Y. I-330 Alper, K.R. II-368 Alpizar, F. II-295 Alston, M. II-321 Alter, J. I-369–70 Altieri, M.A. II-302 Altman, D. I-221 Altman, J. I-6, 445, II-316 Alvarez, R. I-299 Alvarez, S.E. I-495 Ambady, N. II-245, 248 Ames, M.M. I-207 Amit, V. I-268, 375, 514, 518–19 Ammarell, G. I-434 Amselle, J-L. II-429 Anaya, S.J. I-539–40, 542–3 Andall, J. I-299 Andaya, L. I-430 Anderson, B. I-130, 425, 430, 434, 496, 532, II-347, 414 Anderson, D.G. I-274–6, 280, II-279, 291–2, 370, 373 Anderson, J.W. I-329, 334–5, II-417 Anderson, K.M. I-143

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548

Anderson, M.D. I-502 Anderson, M.L. II-244 Anderson, P. I-122, 124 Anderson, R.E. II-401 Anderson, S. II-315 Andrews, G. I-149 Andrijasevic, R. I-299 Ang, I. II-415 Antes, P. I-187 Anthias, F. I-299 Antlöv, H. I-430 Antze, P. II-147, 149 Aoki, T. I-391, 394 Apffel-Marglin, F. II-290, 294 Appadurai, A. I-60, 75, 83, 96, 115, 156, 241, 299, 324, 340–1, 368, 373, 376, 513–14, 528, II-11, 102–4, 106, 108–9, 111, 280, 315, 343, 358, 417, 424–5, 429 Appel, W. I-79–80, 473 Appiah, K.A. I-526, 530 Applbaum, K. I-160 Apter, A. I-309–10, 317 Aquili, E.G. II-244 Arbib, M.A. II-268 Archer, J. II-250 Archer, M. I-20 Archetti, E.P. I-254, 495 Ardener, E I-213, 315 Ardener, S. I-213 Arendt, H. II-142, 149 Arens, W. I-5 Aretxaga, B. II-346–7 Argenti, N. I-130, 227–8, 242, 317 Argenti-Pillen, A. I-374 Aristotle II-143, 225, 232 Arkin, W. I-99 Armbrust, W. I-329, II-415 Arnason, A. I-299 Arnett, J.J. II-246 Arnfred, S. II-380 Arno, A. I-73, 237 Arnold, D. I-237, 243 Aron, A. II-248 Asad, T. I-131, 169, 172, 184, 187, 191, 252–3, 309, 326, 330–2, 334–5, 452, II-141, 150, 289 Asano-Tamanoi, M. II-347 Asch, M. II-414 Asch, T. II-85, 94 Ascher, M. II-404 Ascher, R. I-143–4, II-414 Ashforth, A. II-144 Ashley, K.M. I-254–5 Askew, D. I-414 Askew, K. I-78, 82, 317, II-411, 413 Asmussen Frank, V. II-366 Assayag, J. I-370, 372, 376 Assmuth, L. I-299 Astuti, R. I-35, 38 Atkins, E.T. I-388, 394

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 548

NAME INDEX

Atkinson, J.M. I-428–9, 434 Atran, S. II-241, 291 Attwood, B. II-316 Auerbach, E. I-61 Augé, M. I-299 Auslander, M. II-378 Austin, B. II-303 Austin, J.L. I-13, 18, 21, 23, II-43, 142, 149 Austin-Broos I-448 Auyero, J. I-494, II-301 Axel, B.K. I-80, 130, 132–3, II-25, 30, 220 Axtell, R. II-401 Baca, L. I-470 Bachelard, G. II-313 Badiou, A. II-138 Baer, H.A. II-320, 358, 402 Bagshaw I-445 Bailey, F. II-150 Bailey, R.C. II-384 Baird, D. II-394 Baker, F. II-263–4 Baker, H. I-408 Bakhtin, M.M. I-20, 231, II-44 Bakic-Hayden, M. I-295, 299 Bakker, K. II-316 Balée, W. I-480, II-290 Balibar, E. I-297–8 Ballard, C. II-277 Ballinger, P. I-299–300 Bamberger, J. I-480 Banbera, T. II-73 Banerjee, M. I-352, 357, 369–70, 373–5, 378, II-359 Banfield, E.C. I-292 Banks, L.J. I-312 Banks, M. I-298–9, II-92, 96–7, 212, 401 Barba, E. I-79–80 Barber, K. I-250, 259, II-4, 71, 73–5 Bardhan, P. II-315 Barker, J. I-452, II-4, 66, 367, 371–2 Barkey, K. I-335 Barkow, J.H. II-244 Barkun, M. II-330 Barley, N. I-250 Barnard, A. I-5–6, 308, 318, II-232 Barndt, D. II-300 Barnes, J. II-134 Barnes, R. I-428, 434, 512 Barrett, J.C. I-149, 187 Barrett, L. II-227, 231–2, 251 Barrett, R. I-369 Barrientos, S. II-304 Barry, T. II-302 Barth, F. I-xxx, xxxiv–xxxv, 67, 130, 299, 342, 350–1, 430 Barthes, R. II-37, 429 Bartra, R. I-492 Basch, L. II-344 Bashkow, I. I-449

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Basso, K.H. II-42, 55, 313 Basu, P. I-65, 67, 368, 372 Batalla, G.B. I-493 Batchelor, D. I-66 Bates, R.H. I-308 Bateson, G. II-40, 49, 243, 413–14 Battaglia, D. I-299 Baudrillard, J. I-83, 159 Bauman, G. I-13, 298, 471 Bauman, R. I-13, II-46, 48–9, 71, 73, 75 Bauman, Z. II-417 Baviskar, A. I-375–6 Bayart, J.F. I-233–4, 242, 315 Bayefsky, A.F. I-111 Baylies, C. II-342 Bayly, C.A. I-243, 357 Bayly, S. I-341, 371 Bazenguissa-Ganga, R. I-317 Beaglehole, E. I-454 Bear, L. I-371 Beatty, A. I-428–9 Beaudry, M.C. II-102, 108, 112 Beck, H. I-58–9 Beck, U. I-47, 52–3, 530, 532–4 Becker, A.L. I-255, II-78 Becker, H. I-58–9, II-366 Beckett I-445, 447 Befu, H. I-391–2, 394–5 Behal, R.P. I-358 Behrend, H. I-229–30 Beirne, P. II-323 Belasco, W.J II-301, 303 Bell, C. I-83, II-69, 262–4 Bell, D. I-445 Bell, J. I-207, 449, II-109, 112 Beller-Hann, I. I-411 Bellier, I. I-299 Bellwood, P. I-425–6 Belting, H. I-59, 66 Ben-Ari, E. I-392–3 Ben Slimane, F. I-299 Ben-Ze’ev, E. II-307 Benda-Beckmann, F. von I-108, 430 Benda-Beckmann, K. von I-108–9, 428, 430 Bender, B. II-313 Benedict, R. I-389, 391, 396 Benedikt, M. II-402 Bénéï, V. I-175, 228, 240, 374 Bengtsson, S.L. II-249 Benjamin, G. I-433 Benjamin, W. I-61–2, 64, 175, II-21, 27–8, 32, 36–7, 85, 87, 89, 96, 121, 429 Bennett, J. II-124 Bensaude-Vincent, B. II-392, 394 Benzing, B. II-319 Berdahl, D. I-299 Bereczkei, T. II-230 Beresford, Q. II-319 Berger, H. I-13, 22

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 549

549

Berglund, E. II-279, 291–2 Bering, J.M. I-39 Berlant, L. II-348–9 Berman, P.S. I-110 Bernard, H.R. II-55, 57–8 Bernard, R. I-175 Bernd, H. II-319 Berndt, R. I-446–7 Bernstein, J.H. I-434 Bernstein Sycamore, M. II-383 Berti, A. II-269 Besnier, N. II-70 Besterman, C. I-98, 100 Bestor, T. I-393, 395 Béteille, A. I-370–2 Beuchat, H. I-271 Bewley-Taylor, D.R. II-372 Beynon-Davies, P. II-402 Bhabha, H.K. I-290, 300, 513 Bharadwaj, A. I-368, II-357 Bharucha, J. II-248 Bhasin, K. I-373 Bhattacharyya, H. I-372 Bianchi, R. I-520 Biao, X. I-516 Biehl, J. II-282, 361–2 Bielawski, E. I-276, 280 Biersack, A. II-275 Binford, L.R. I-144–6 Biolsi, T. I-110, 466, 469–71 Birket-Smith, K. I-272 Bishara, A. II-415 Bishop, M. II-278 Bjørklund, I. I-281 Black, S.P. I-14 Blackwood, E. I-428 Blais, C. II-245 Blanc, S. I-491 Blanchet, T. I-371 Blaser, M. II-125–6, 290, 316 Blatter, J. II-318 Blau, D. II-96 Bledsoe, C. II-348 Bliss, F. I-347 Bloch, E. II-87 Bloch, J. II-11 Bloch, M. I-35, 39, 129, 162, 191, 299, 318, II-9, 11, 237, 244 Blok, A. I-292–3 Blomley, N. I-106 Bloom, P. II-235 Boakye Yiadom, A.K. II-70 Boas, F. I-76, 141–2, 145, 204, 208, 271–2, II-39, 66, 211, 225, 237, 252 Boddy, J. I-191, 318, II-379 Bode, B. II-331 Bode, M. I-370, II-359 Bodenhorn, B. I-274 Bodinger de Uriarte, J.D. I-470

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

550

NAME INDEX

Bodley, J.H. I-538–9, 542, 544, II-318 Bodo, S. I-203 Boeck, F. I-242–3, 317 Boellstorff, T. I-81–3, 221, 223, II-60–1, 411, 416 Bogoras, W. I-271–2 Bohannan, L. II-9 Boissevain, J. I-289, 299 Boivin, N. II-103, 313 Bok, S. I-528 Bonaccorso, M.M.E. I-299 Bond, G.C. I-315 Bond, M.H. II-247 Bonnichsen, R. I-145 Borneman, J. I-96, 132, 299, II-14, 150 Borneman, M.M. II-29 Bornstein, K. II-377 Borofsky, R. I-125, 489 Borras, S.M. II-302 Bouquet, M. I-198, 205–7 Bourdieu, P. I-xxviii, 2, 14, 17–18, 20–1, 38, 73, 122, 129, 159, 175, 179, 191, 219, 327, 393, 501, II-107, 252 Bourgois, P. I-490, 500, 502, II-360, 362, 370, 372 Bourne, E.J. II-245 Bourriaud, N. I-56, 58 Bouysse-Cassagne, T. II-28–9 Bovarnick, A. II-295 Bowden, M. I-140 Bowden, R. I-58 Bowen, D.L. I-326 Bowen, E.S. I-249, II-9, 144 Bowen, J.R. I-426, 430, 433 Bowman, G. I-266, 299, 328, 332, 335 Boyarin, J. I-251, II-414 Boyd, R. II-77, 239, 247 Boyd, S. II-315 Boyer, P. I-38–9, 82–3, 187, II-220, 235, 239–41, 243, 414–18 Bradbury, H. II-186 Bradby, H. II-303–4 Bradley, R. I-140, 147 Bradshaw, C. II-316 Brah, A. I-299 Brandt, A. I-64 Brannon, E.M. II-249 Brass, P. I-352, 372, 375 Bråten, S. I-39 Breckenridge, C.A. I-376 Bredekamp, H. I-66 Breman, J. I-370–1, 431 Brenner, S.A. I-429, 431, 434 Brent, E.E., Jnr. II-401 Brettell, C. II-312 Breusers, M. II-301 Bridger, S. I-299 Briggs, C.L. I-471, II-40, 42, 46, 49, 55, 71, 75, 416 Briggs, J. I-272, 275, II-145 Brightman, R. I-189 Brisebois, D. II-415

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 550

Brockington, D. II-278, 291–2 Brody, H. I-272–3, 275 Brooker, S. II-173 Brookfield, H.C. II-294–5 Brosius, A. II-294 Brosius, J.P. I-373, 376, 427, II-279, 287, 291, 294 Broudehoux, A-M. I-414 Brown, C.L. I-471 Brown, K.S. I-132, 299, 333 Brown, L. I-46 Brown, M. I-468 Brown, S. I-395 Brown, W. I-204, 296 Brownell, S. I-414 Browner, C.H. II-354 Browning, A. I-16 Brubaker, R. I-179 Bruck, G. I-329 Bruhn, H. II-406 Brunton, R. II-367 Brush, S. II-293–4, 323 Bruun, O. I-412–13 Bryceson, D.F. II-300 Brydon, A. I-67, 77 Buchli, V. I-148–9, 343, II-107–8 Bucholtz, M. I-13 Buck-Morss, S II-85, 346 Bucko, R.A. I-466 Buddensieg, A. I-59 Budka, P. II-417 Bühler, K. I-17 Bujra, J. II-342 Bukowski, T. I-81 Bulag, U. I-355–6 Bull, M. II-313 Bunt, G. I-83 Bunzel, R. I-67 Bunzl, M. I-178, 299, 471 Burawoy, M. I-293–4, 299 Burbank, V. I-446 Burch, E.S. I-275 Burdick, J. I-501 Burke, E. I-326, 328–30 Burke, H. I-468 Burke, J. I-240 Burke, T. I-317 Burns, A. I-472 Burns, C. II-70 Bush, G.W. I-91, 95, 97–8, 326 Butalia, U. I-372–3 Butler, J. I-13, 213, 219–20, 290 Butler, R. I-542, II-315 Buxton, J. II-372 Caillon, S. II-291 Caldararo, N. II-323 Caldarola, V. I-78 Caldeira, T. I-494, 496 Calder, K. I-415

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Caldwell, J.T. I-81 Caldwell, K.L. II-378 Caldwell, M.L.. II-301, 303, 306 Califia, P. II-382–3 Callon, M. I-96, 156, II-104, 116, 126, 403 Cameron, M. I-368 Camp, C. II-302 Campbell, B. I-123, 290, 299 Campbell, B.C. II-250, 252 Campbell, C. II-98 Campbell, J.K. I-186, 290, 299 Campbell, L. II-291 Campos, M. I-335 Canclini, G. I-62, 495 Candea, M. I-175–6, 298, 300, II-124, 126 Candelario, G.E.B. I-500 Canfield, R. I-342 Cannell, F. I-429 Cannizzo, J. I-199, 206–7 Cantlon, J.F. II-249 Cao, N. I-412 Caplan, P. I-254, 369, II-138, 303 Capo, J. I-299 Caramazza, A. II-235 Carey, S. II-235 Carr, E.S. II-47 Carrier, J.G. I-77, 156, 450, II-291–3, 322 Carruthers, P. II-244 Carson, C. II-403 Carsten, J. I-148, 428, II-4, 6, 8–10, 12–13, 65, 204 Carter, P. II-88 Casagrande, J.B. I-250 Casey, J. II-370 Cassady, J. I-280 Cassidy, R. I-298, II-16–17 Cassirer, E. I-139 Castells, M. I-83, 155, 172 Caton, S. II-313, 324 Caton, S.C. I-14, 330 Cattani, A.D. I-164–5 Cattelino, J. I-470 Caulfield, R. I-274–6 Cavalcanti, M. I-496 Cavell, S. II-142, 144, 149 Cederroth, S. I-430 Cerwonka, A. II-62 Chabal, P. I-228, 358 Chakrabarty, D. I-124, 240, 299–300, 489 Chakravarti, A. I-370 Chalfen, R. II-414 Chalfin, B. I-93 Chalmers, D. II-248 Chambers, R. II-185 Champagne, D. I-466 Chance, N. I-273, 277 Chandavarkar, R. I-353, 370 Chao, A I-222 Chapin, S. I-512, 542, 544 Chari, S. I-344, 371

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 551

551

Charles, M. II-369 Chatterjee, P. I-124, 237, 240, 242–3, 344, 371–2, II-347 Chatty, D. I-329–30, II-279 Chau, A. I-300, 412 Chaudhuri, N. I-300 Chayes, A.H. I-112 Cheah, P. I-526 Chee, M.W.L. II-245, 270 Chen, K-H. II-212 Chen, M.A. I-368–9 Chernoff, J.M. I-317 Chevalier, S. I-160 Chevannes, B. II-369 Chhattisgarh I-371–2 Chiao, J.Y. II-245–6, 248, 251 Chibnik, M. II-401 Childe, V.G. I-141–3 Chinoy, M. I-413 Chomsky, N. I-12, 23, 38, II-244 Chopra, R. I-369, 373 Chou, C. I-428, 433 Choudhury, S. II-244, 246–7 Chua, H.F. II-245, 250 Chua, L. II-5, 104–5 Cicchetti, D. II-251 Ciekawy, D. I-315 Ciotti, M. I-371 Clammer, J.R. I-393, 433 Clark, A. II-248 Clark, D. I-146 Clark, E.A. I-252 Clark, G. I-143–4 Clark, J. II-275 Clark, M. I-329 Clark-Decès, I. I-367, 371 Clarke, A. I-47 Clarke, C. II-401 Clarke, D.L. I-146, 390 Clarke, J. I-97 Clarke, K.M. I-112, 114 Classen, C. I-63, II-107, 249 Clayman, S. I-16 Clement, C. II-288, 291 Clemmer, R.O. I-466, 471 Cleveland, D.A. II-305 Clifford, J. I-59–60, 74, 83, 131, 142, 149, 172, 199, 207, 249, 299, 328, 467–71, 528, 532, II-11, 39, 57, 60, 66, 101, 131–2, 154, 400 Clinton, H. I-15 Closs, M.P. II-404 Cobb, D.M. I-466, 470 Cochrane, G. I-89 Cody, F. II-414 Coe, C. I-317 Coetzee, J.M. I-xxxi, xxxiv Cohen, C. I-539 Cohen, D.J. II-251 Cohen, L. I-368–9, II-246, 250, 345, 359

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

552

NAME INDEX

Cohen, M. I-408 Cohen, R. I-529 Cohn, B. I-9, 121–2, 125, 131–2, 183, 238, 243 Cohn, S. II-362 Cole, D. I-330 Cole, D.M. II-288 Cole, J. I-130, 290, 299, 317, 343, II-349 Cole, M. I-36, 38 Cole, R.E. I-390 Colebatch, H. I-91 Coleman, E. II-411, 416 Coles, A. II-321 Collard, M. II-241 Collier, J. I-45, 216–17, II-10, 349, 414 Collier, P. II-154, 162, 281 Collier, S.J. I-114, II-321, 342, 358 Collignon, B. I-273, 276 Collingwood, R.G. II-24, 30 Collins, F.L. I-515 Collins, J. I-469, 471, 492 Collins, K. I-350 Collins, R. II-156, 158, 165 Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C. I-207, 467 Coman, M. I-72, 79, 83 Comaroff, J. and J. II-25, 207, 315, 346 Comaroff, Jean I-xxviii–xxxviii, 111, 126, 132, 172, 174, 241, 316, 318 Comaroff, J.L. I-xxviii, xxxviii, 6, 106, 109, 111, 126, 131–2, 172, 174, 228, 230, 241–2, 315–18 Combés, I. I-479 Comitas, L. II-369 Condon, R. I-278 Conklin, B.A. I-299 Conklin, H. I-427–8 Connor, L.H. I-432 Conrad, D.C. II-73 Conrad, K. I-23 Conradson, D. I-514 Cooke, B. II-192 Coombe, R.J. II-416 Coomber, R. II-367, 370 Coombes, A. I-207 Coombes, R. I-468 Cooper, D. I-171 Cooper, F. I-179, II-25, 294 Cooper, G. I-406 Corbett, K. II-354 Corbridge, S. II-332 Cornell, S. I-470 Cornwall, A. II-220 Correll, S. II-402 Corsin Jimenez, A. II-86–7, 92 Corson, C. II-278, 292–3, 295 Cosmides, L. I-32, 39, 184, II-244 Costanza, R. II-295 Cotula, L. II-277 Couldry, N. I-79, 83 Coulter, C. II-166 Coupez, A. II-281

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 552

Court, E. I-208 Courtwright, D. II-368 Coutin, S.B. I-106, 109 Coveney, J. II-303 Cowan, J. I-9, 109, 112, 132, 175, 292, 299 Coward, R. I-44 Cowen, M. II-294 Cowlishaw, G. I-447 Cox, P.A. I-538 Cox, R. I-62, 393–4, II-5 Coxshall, W. I-114 Coy, M.W. II-263 Craig, B.L. II-24 Craig, S.R. II-355 Craighero, L. II-244 Cramer, C. II-159 Crapanzano, V. I-252, 254, 334, II-59–60 Crate, S. I-275, 542, II-282, 322 Crawford, M. II-263 Crawford, R. II-413 Creed, G.W. I-294 Crehan, K.A.F. I-318 Creighton, M. I-392, 396 Crewe, E. I-375 Croll, E. I-409, 411 Cromwell, J. II-382–4 Crook, D. I-407–9 Crook, I. I-407 Crosby, A.W. II-306 Cruikshank, B. I-95 Cruikshank, J. I-281, 469, 471 Cruise O’Brien, D.B. I-316 Crump, T. II-404 Crush, J. II-294 Cruz-Torres, M. II-317 Csibra, G. I-38 Csordas, T. I-38, 184, II-106, 250, 313 Cullen, B.S. II-195 Cummings, S. I-349 Cunningham, C.E. I-429 Cunningham, H. I-492 Curran, J. I-79 Curtis, J. I-10, 177 Curtis, R. II-365, 370 Cushing, F.H. II-264 Cushman, R. I-249 Cusicanqui, S.R. II-367 Cusset, F. I-172 Da Costa, D. I-375 Da Matta, R. I-492 Daes, E-I. I-538–9, 541–3 Dahl, G.B. I-207 Dahl, J. I-274–5 Daloz, J. I-358 Daly, H. II-293 Damas, D. I-272 Damasio, A. I-38, II-250 D’Ambrosio, U. II-404

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

D’Amico, S. II-314 D’Andrade, R. I-29, 38 D’Andrade, R.G. II-243, 247, 250 Daniel, E.V. I-254, 374 Daniel, G. I-138 Daniels, I. I-396 Danto, A. I-58–9 Darian-Smith, E. I-470 Darnell, R. I-471 Darwin, C. I-48, 140, II-225–6, 229, 232 Das, R.K. II-355 Das, S. II-277 Das, V. I-73, 114, 130, 175, 232, 238, 348–9, 367, 372–3, 375, II-30, 60, 150, 348–9, 354, 356, 360 Daston, L. II-392 Davey Smith, G. II-354 Davidson, R. I-325 Davidson, R.J. II-251 Davies, C. I-6 Dávila, A. II-415 Davis, A. I-497 Davis, B. II-382 Davis, D.S. I-410, 413–14, II-383 Davis, E. II-407 Davis, M. II-345 Davis, N.Z. I-125, 252 Davis, W. I-67, II-366 Davis-Floyd, R. II-357 Davison, C. II-173, 354 Dawkins, R. I-184 Dawson, A. I-73 Day, S. II-16, 18, 220, 342 Dayan, D. I-414 De Alwis, M. I-372, 375, II-331 De Boeck, F. I-242–3, 317 De Certeau, M. I-127–9, 132, 172, 317 De Coppet, D. I-299 De Costa Kaufman, T I-59 De Fina, A. II-42 De la Cadena, M. I-471, 488, 503, II-125, 290 De la Peña, G. I-493 De la Rocha, M.G. I-494 De Maistre, J. I-525–6, 530 De Neve, G. I-228, 232, 239, 371 De Rios, M.D. II-368 De Rothschild, L. II-26 De Saussure, F. I-13 De Silva, P. I-191 De Sola Pool, I. I-83 De Soto, H.G. I-299 De Vault, M.L. II-299 De Vos, G.A. I-390 De Vries, H. II-417 De Waal, A. II-299 De Waal, C. I-228, 299 De Waal, F.B.M. II-235 Deacon, T. II-243 Debord, G. I-172 Deeb, L. I-324–5, 330

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 553

553

Deetz, J. I-146 Degeorges, P. II-291 Deger, J. II-96 Del Alisal, M. I-393 Del Negro, G.P. I-13–14 Delamont, S. I-299 Delaney, C. I-45, 174 DeLeon, P. I-92 Deleuze, G. I-172, 175, II-85, 87, 116, 121, 124 Deliège, R. I-370, 372 DeLind, L.B. II-305 Deloria, P.J. I-471 Deloria, V. I-130, 466, 476 DeMallie, R.J. I-471 Dembour, M-B. I-112, 114, 175 Demsetz, H. I-157 Dennett, D. I-22 Derluguian, G. I-352 Derné, S. I-369 Derrida, J. II-23, 26, 57, 65, 426, 429 Desai, V.K. II-427, 429 Descola, P. I-253, 299, 478, II-125, 275, 290 Desjarlais, R. I-369, II-354 Devisch, R. I-243 Devji, F. I-340, 342 Dezalay, Y. I-115 D’Hertefelt, M. II-281 Di Pellegrino, G. II-244 Díaz, A. II-34–5 Dickey, S. I-376 Dilley, R. I-318, II-263 Dinse, H.R. II-249 Dirks, N. II-11, 25 Dirks, N.B. I-131, 238–9, 243, 357, 371 Dixon, S. II-267 Djati, A. II-61 Doezema, J. II-345 Dogan, M. II-321 Dolan, C. II-304 Dollard, J. I-499 Dollfus, P. I-374 Domínguez Duque, J.F. II-80, 243, 247–8, 251 Donham, D.L. I-317 Donnan, H. I-299, 326, 514 Donner, H. I-368 Doostdar, A. I-84 Doron, A. I-371 Dos Santos, G. I-60 Douglas, M. I-xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv, 77, 125, 160, 184, 191 Douglass, M. I-395 Douny, L. I-64 Dove, M.R. I-427, 431 Dowty, D.R. I-20 Dracklé, D. I-296, 299 Drew, P. I-16 Drobnick, J. I-207 Du Bois, J.W. I-21 Duara, P. I-342

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

554

NAME INDEX

Dube, S. I-372 Dubisch, J. I-292 Dubuisson, D. I-189 Duchamp, M. I-57 Dudoignon, S. I-357 Dudwick, N. I-299 Dumont, J.P. I-253, 434 Dumont, L. I-191, 240, 371 Duncan, C. I-207 Durán, L. II-72 Durand, C.A. I-62 Duranti, A. I-11–16, 20–2, II-45, 73 Durham, D. I-316 Durkheim, E. I-xxxi, xxxv, xxxix, 1–2, 142, 164, 184, 189, 389, 512, 521, II-124, 126, 157–8, 161, 163–4, 225, 237, 264 Durning, A.T. I-538, 542 Durrans, B. I-11, 207 Dussart, F. I-446 Duvell, F. I-299 Dwyer, K. I-334 Dwyer, R. I-376 Dybbroe, S. I-278 Dye, T. I-92 Dyk, W. I-253 Dynes, R. II-330 Dzidzienyo, A. I-500 Eades, J.S. I-267, 395–6, 410, 432 Ebrey, P. I-408 Eckert, J. I-373 Ecks, S. II-358 Edeline, J-M. II-249 Edelman, L. II-342 Edelman, M. II-244, 302 Eder, D. II-65 Eder, J.F. I-427, 432 Edgar, I. I-6, 296 Edgar, L. I-353, 356 Edgerton, R. II-366 Edgeworth, M. I-149 Edmonds, R. I-416 Edwards, D. I-345, 351, 354 Edwards, E. I-207 Edwards, J. I-299 Edwards, W. I-393 Eggerman, M. II-361 Eglash, R. II-220, 404, 406, 408 Ehrenreich, B. II-344 Eickelman, D.F. I-326, 329–30, 333–5, 356, II-417 Eiselein, E.B. II-412 Eisenberg, L. II-354 Eisenlohr, P. II-417 Eisenstadt, S.N. I-392 Eisenstein, E.L. II-414 El-Zein, A.H. I-326 Eliade, M. I-186–7 Ellen, R.F. I-5–6, 163, 267, 428–31, 433–4, II-77, 101, 291, 294

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 554

Elliot, M. II-105, 269 Ellison, K. II-295 Elman, R.A. I-31, 33, 38, 299 Elson, D. I-214 Elvin, M. I-408, 416 Elwin, V. I-375 Elyachar, J. I-329 Ember, M. II-166 Endicott, K.M. I-427, 429 Endicott, S. I-409 Enfield, N.J. I-34–5 Engel, D. I-107, 113 Engelke, M. II-417 Engels, F. I-44, 405 Englund, H. I-xxix, 113, 228, 231, 242, 317 Enguix, B. I-178 Ensminger, J. I-157 Epprecht, M. II-384 Epstein, A.L. II-8 Erickson, P. I-470, 480 Erickson, P.H. II-280 Ericson, D. I-58 Eriksen, T.H. I-xxviii, xxx, 5–6, 83, 155, 175, II-316, 429 Errington, S. I-60, 216, 428, 430 Escobar, A. I-81, 314, 489, 495, 502 Evans, C. II-361 Evans, J. I-139–40 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. I-xxv, xxix, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv–xxxvi, 89, 125, 170, 183, 235, 310–11, II-8, 144, 150, 161, 169, 212, 426 Evens, T.M.S. I-311, II-109, 144 Everett, A. I-81 Ewick, P. I-108, 113 Eyo, E. I-207 Fabian, J. I-73–4, 78–9, 83, 131, 254, 288, II-40, 66, 81, 85, 341 Fadriga, L. II-268 Fahle, M. II-249 Faiman-Silva, S.L. I-471 Fairhead, J. I-xxv, 132, 313, II-173, 219, 276–7, 280–1, 356 Falk, R. I-108, 310, 534 Fanon I-xxviii, 242 Farah, M.J. II-235 Fardon, R. I-xxvii Faris, J.C. I-309, II-415 Farley, J. II-293 Farne, A. II-269 Farnham, T. II-291, 294 Farquhar, J. II-304 Fassin, D. II-342, 345 Faubion, J.D. I-174–5, 299, II-138 Fausto-Sterling, A. II-382 Favret-Saada, J. I-290 Fechter, M. I-514 Fee, E. I-213 Feest, C.F. I-207

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Fei, H.T. I-406–7 Feil, D. I-452 Feld, S. I-63–4, II-36–7, 55, 86, 89–92, 95–7, 244, 249, 313, 345 Feldman, D.E. II-244, 249 Feldman, E.A. I-392 Feldman, G. I-89, 94, 96, 101 Feldman, I. I-132, 329, II-36–7, 345 Felstiner, W.L.F. I-107 Fenelon, J.V. I-538 Ferdinand, P. I-13, 83, 512, 521 Ferguson, B. II-277 Ferguson, F. I-220 Ferguson, J. I-xxxiii, 83, 139, 169–70, 179, 228, 241, 312, 314, 317–18, 513, II-11, 40, 170, 218, 277 Ferguson, R.B. II-160, 343 Ferguson, T.J. I-467–8 Ferme, M.C. I-130, 228, 243, 315, 317, II-161 Fernandes, L. I-376 Fernandes, S. I-487 Fernandez, J. II-293, 368 Ferry, E.E. I-208 Fewster, K. I-145 Fienup-Riordan, A. I-272, 274–6 Filer, C. II-286 Fillmore, C.J. I-15, 20 Findlen, P. I-208 Fine-Dare, K.S. I-468, 496 Finestone, H. II-370 Finkler, K. I-50 Finley, M. I-255 Finnegan, R. I-6, 251, 512–13, II-72, 78 Finnström, S. I-317, II-166 Firth, R. I-xxvii, 6, 89, 184, 423, 428, 454, II-8–9, 217–18, 235 Fischer, F. I-91 Fischer, M.D. I-6 Fischer, M.J. I-11, 39, 74, 201, 361, 401 Fischer, M.M. I-83, 288, 297, 309, 313, 471, 489 Fisiy, C. I-232, 234, 242, II-279 Fiske, A.P. II-240, 245–6 Fiske, S.T. II-245 Fisker-Nielsen, A. I-393 Fitzgerald, T. I-188–9 Flannery, K.V. I-144 Fleck, L. I-43 Fleming, F.M. II-173 Fleming, K.E. I-299 Fletcher, R. II-293 Flick, U. II-205 Flueckiger, J.B. I-368, 373 Flyvbjerg, B. I-96, II-289 Fodor, J.A. I-32, 35, 38, II-244 Fogelson, R.D. II-79 Foley, D.E. I-466, 471, 491 Foner, N. I-500 Fontana, A. II-56–9, 65 Fontein, J. I-227, 233 Forbess, A.I. I-299

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 555

555

Forester, J. I-91 Forshee, J. I-434 Fortes, M. I-xxv, 170, 311, II-9, 161, 212, 234 Fortun, K. II-125 Fortune, R. I-454 Foster, G. I-156 Foster, H. I-65 Foster, R.J. I-76, 448, 450, 452 Foucault, M. I-3, 48, 52, 74, 76, 94, 131, 171–5, 220, 236, 243, 293, 314, 327, 469, 492, 526, II-22, 26, 121, 124, 143, 293, 381 Fowler, C. I-144 Fowler, L. I-466, 469 Fowler, N. I-96 Fowles, S. II-111 Fox, A. II-27 Fox, J.J. I-425, 429 Fox, K. II-368 Fox, L. I-140 Fox, R. I-83, 434, 467 Frankel, S. II-354 Frankenberg, R. I-123, 499–500, II-358 Frankenstein, S. I-147 Franklin, S. I-11, 42, 44, 46–7, 49–50, 52–3, 93, 142, 299, II-344, 357 Frazer, J.G. I-61, 75, 254–5, 389 Freedman, M. I-408 Freeman, D. I-454 Freeman, M.M.R. I-274 Freitag, S. I-237–8 French, J.H. I-106, 503 Freud, S. I-187, 216, 290, 391, II-23, 26, 59, 65, 237 Frey, J.H. II-56–9, 65 Frey, S.H. II-249 Friedl, E. I-171, 290–1 Friedlaender, J.S. II-402 Friedman, J. I-207, 299, 503 Froerer, P. I-372 Frøystad, K. I-373 Frühstück, S. I-394 Fruzzetti, L. I-369 Fuentes, A. II-247, 252 Fujimura-Fanselow, K. I-390 Fukui, K. II-291 Fuller, C. I-175, 191, 228, 238–40, 242–3, 367, 371–2, 374, 376, 378 Fumanti, M. I-241–2 Funk, N. I-299 Furst, P.T. II-367 Fyfe, G. I-207, 300 Gadamer, H-G. II-22, 150 Gaffney, P.D. I-251, 335 Gagné, P. II-381 Gal, S. I-287, 292, 299, II-4, 46, 51–2, 55, 64 Galaskiewicz, J. II-401 Gallese, V. II-164, 244, 397 Gallin, B. I-408 Gambetta, D. I-292–3

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

556

NAME INDEX

Gamburd, M.R. II-331 Gamburd, R. I-375–6 Ganguly,K. II-369 Garbarini,F. II-252 Garcia, A. II-371 Garcia, J.R. II-250 García Canclini, N. I-495 Gardner, B.B. I-497 Gardner, D. I-268, 448 Gardner, H. II-243 Gardner, K. I-250, 375–6, II-11, 15, 277 Gardner, M.R. I-497 Gardner, R. II-85, 94, 414 Garrigan, P. II-249 Garrow, D. I-148–9 Garsten, C. I-299 Garth, B. I-115 Gaser, C. II-249 Gates, H.L. I-242 Gazdar, G. I-13 Gearing, F. I-291 Gedicks, A. I-541 Geertz, C. I-xxix, 91–2, 106–7, 125–6, 148, 156, 158, 172, 174, 184, 187, 190–1, 231, 252, 327, 389, 396, 425, 427, 429–30, 434, II-10, 55, 57, 66, 78, 150, 239, 275 Gefou-Madianou, D. I-299 Geismar, H. II-109, 112 Geissler, P.W. II-356 Gell, A. I-56–8, 61–2, 65, 67, 204, II-76, 104–5, 108–9, 125, 249, 378, 392 Gellner, D. I-191, 372, 374, 396, II-347, 429 Gellner, E. I-xxxix, 331, II-239 Gelman, A. I-32 Gengenbach, H. II-378 George, K.M. I-xxix, 57, 66, 81, 91, 94, 97, 201, 275, 492, 511 Gerbrands, A. I-63 Gerdes, P. II-404 Gergely, G. I-38 Gershon, I. I-456, II-64 Gerstein, M.B. II-244 Gerstle, C.A. II-74 Geschiere, P.L. I-75, 232, 234, 242, 315, 317 Geurts, K.L. II-249 Geva-May, I. I-92 Geyer, M. I-98 Gezon, L. II-321 Ghannam, F. I-329 Ghose, G.M. II-247, 249–50 Ghosh, A. I-375 Gibbon, S. I-42, 50, II-354 Gibbs, K. I-203 Giblett, R. II-313 Gibson, E.J. II-249 Gibson, K.R. II-245 Giddens, A. I-xxix, xxxiv, 20, 452 Gifford, S. II-354 Gilbert, A.N. II-330

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 556

Gill, K. I-376 Gill, L. I-492 Gill, T. I-393 Gillespie, S.D. I-141, 147 Gillette, M.B. I-412 Gilroy, P. I-74, 76, 502–3 Gilsenan, M. I-324–5, 331, 333–5, 345 Gingrich, A. I-xxx, xxxiv, 298–9, II-6 Ginsburg, F.D. I-74, 77–8, 82, II-86, 411, 415 Ginzburg, C. I-125, 252 Giri, S. I-241 Gislén, A. II-250 Giustozzi, A. I-351 Gladney, D.C. I-411 Glasner, P. I-368, II-357 Glassner, R. I-351 Gledhill, J I-xxv, xxx, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxix, 5–6, 268, 491, II-133, 138–9 Glick Schiller, N. I-489, 491, 502 Glissant, E. I-503 Glowczewski, B. I-446 Gluckman, M. I-xxv, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvi, 122, 230, 235, 311, II-161, 236 Goddard, I. I-466 Goddard, M. I-453 Goddard, V. I-287, 299, II-347 Godelier, M. I-147, II-212 Goethe, J. II-31, 391 Goffman, E. I-14, 17, II-40, 48 Gogtay, N. II-251 Goh, J.O. II-245, 249–50 Gold, A.G. I-243, 369, 375 Goldin-Meadow, S. I-35 Goldman, M. II-315 Goldmann, L. I-258, 299 Goldschmidt, W. II-238 Goldsmith, M. I-456 Goldstein, D.M. I-496, 501–2 Goldstein, M. I-411 Goldsworthy, V. I-299 Golestani, N. II-249 Golub, A. II-411, 416 Gomes, A.G. I-427 Gonzalez, R. I-350, II-139 Good, M. I-42, 47 Good, T. I-6 Goodale, M. I-112, 114 Goode, J. I-489–90 Goodenough, W. I-23 Goodhand, J. I-351 Goodin, R. I-91 Goodman, M. II-97 Goodman, R. I-390–3, 395 Goodwin, C. I-15, 19–20 Goody, E. II-263 Goody, J. I-125, 198, 251, 310–11, II-414 Gootenberg, P. II-367 Gordon, D. II-355 Gordon, D.A. I-471

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Gordon, R.J. I-310, 312 Gorringe, H. I-372 Gosden, C. I-138, 143, 147, 149, 207, II-102 Gottlieb, A. I-317, II-276 Gottweis, H. I-91 Gough, K. II-138 Gourgouris, S. I-299 Graburn, N. I-59, 272, 393, 396, II-415 Graeber, D. I-162, II-103 Graef, D. II-288 Grafton, A. II-24 Grafton, S.T. II-268 Gramsci, A. I-21, 74, 76, 108, 122, 173, 227, 233, 236–7, 242–3, 469, 493 Grasseni, C. I-63, 65, 300, II-89, 107, 249, 267 Grätz, T. I-228 Graves-Brown, P.M. I-148 Gravlee, C.C. II-252 Gray, A. II-74 Gray, C. II-402 Green, A. I-220 Green, N. I-83, 279, 299, 354, 358 Green, S. I-266, 295–6, 298–9 Greenfield, P. II-244, 251, 263, 403 Greenhalgh, P. I-201 Greenhalgh, S. I-96, 410, II-342 Greenhouse, C. I-107, II-299, 347 Gregory, C. I-6, 156 Gregory, S. I-499–500 Griaule, M. I-235, 250, II-60 Grice, H.P. I-21, 23 Griesemer, J.R. II-121–2, 407 Griffiths, G. II-313 Griffiths, P.E. II-401 Grillo, R.D. I-299, 514 Grima, B. I-344, 356 Grimshaw, A. I-67, 83, 249, 253, II-85, 89, 94, 97, 346, 426, 429 Grodzins, A. I-251 Grossberg, L. I-74 Grover, S. I-369 Gruber, J.W. I-139 Guattari, F. I-172, 175 Gubrium, J.F. II-55, 59, 64 Gudeman, S. I-156–7 Guerrero, A. II-21, 26 Guha, R. I-237, 243, 375, II-290 Guha-Khasnobis, B. I-159 Guichard-Anguis, S. I-393, 395 Guilbault, J. I-503 Guinness, P. I-431 Guldin, G.E. I-405–7, 410 Gullette, D. I-350 Gummerman, G.J. I-147 Gumperz, J.J. I-12, II-40 Gunn, W. I-64–6, II-33–4, 107 Guo, Y. II-304 Gupta, A. I-83, 175, 240, 341, 370–2, 374, 376, 513, II-11, 40, 218, 343

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 557

557

Gurrmanamana, F. I-446 Guss, D. I-67 Güss, D. II-249 Gustafson, B. I-488 Gusterson, H. I-xxxv, 93, 98–100 Gutchess, A.H. II-245 Guthman, J. II-303 Guthrie, D. I-414 Gutmann, M. I-495 Gutschow, K. I-368 Guyer, J. I-162–3, 308–9, II-125, 293 Habermas, J. II-65 Hackenschmidt, S. II-394 Hacking, I. I-38 Hadj-Moussa, R. I-83 Haenn, N. II-312 Haeri, S. II-348 Hage, G. I-527 Hagedorn, J.M. I-490 Hahn, E. I-73 Hainsworth, G. I-429 Hakken, D. I-81 Halbmayer,E. II-209 Halbwachs, M. II-35, 237 Hale, K. I-471, 501–3 Hall, C. I-123, 514–15 Hall, G. I-539 Hall, M. I-205, II-315 Hall, P. I-160 Hall, P.D. I-492 Hall, S. I-13, 63–4, 74–6, 79, 172, 227, 527, 529 Hall, T.D. I-538 Halpern, J.M. I-290–1, 293, II-314 Hamabata, M.M. I-393 Hames, R I-471, 538 Hamilton, W.D. II-229 Hammersley, R. II-372 Hammond-Tooke, W.D. I-312 Hammoudi, A. II-15, 150 Han, M. I-410 Han, S. II-245–6 Hancock, M. I-368 Handelman, D. I-311, II-144 Handler, R. I-252 Hanks, W.F. I-15, 17–19, II-69 Hann, C.M. I-157, 165, 287, 290, 299, 343, 346–8, II-315, 411, 415, 417 Hannerz, U. I-73, 77, 83, 299, 529, 531–2, II-11, 212, 411, 415, 417 Hansen, K.T. I-318 Hansen, M. I-411, 415 Hansen, T.B. I-175, 352, 373 Haraway, D. I-43, 49, 208, II-57, 121, 124, 126, 276, 319, 357, 401, 403 Hardacre, H. I-393 Hardin, G. I-157 Harding, S. II-42, 347 Hardon, S. II-358

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

558

NAME INDEX

Harkin, M.E. I-471 Harkness, S. II-247 Harlan, L. I-373 Harman, G. II-117–18, 125 Harner, M.J. II-367 Haroon, S. I-344 Harper, I. II-173 Harper, K. I-299, 378, II-292 Harrell, S. I-411–12 Harring, S. I-471 Harris, C. I-344 Harris, M. II-102 Harris, O. I-xxvii, 5–6, 475, II-4, 10, 18, 21, 28–9, 149 Harris, P. I-35 Harrison, E. I-375 Harrison, F.V. I-499 Harrison, G. II-312 Harrison, R. II-304 Harrison, S. I-452, 543 Harriss, J. I-370, 374 Harriss, O. II-275 Harriss-White, B. I-370 Hart, D.G. I-188 Hart, G. I-432 Hart, J.K. I-311 Hart, K. I-xxx–xxxii, xxxvii, 10, 83, 92, 154–5, 157–9, 161–5, II-343, 346, 426, 429 Hart, L. I-67 Hart, L.K. I-299 Hartigan, J. II-404 Hartley, J. I-79 Hartley, L.P. I-125 Harvey, P. I-74, 83, 208 Hasan, M. I-372 Hasan, Z. I-372 Hasbullah, S. I-176 Haslam, N. II-240 Hassard, J. II-104, 126 Hassner, P. I-299 Hastings, J. II-156 Hastrup, K. I-128, 273, 289, 299, II-85, 93–5, 202, 204–6, 209, 212, 294 Hasty, J. II-415 Hathaway, O.O. I-111–12 Hautzinger, S.J. I-107 Havelock, E.A. II-413 Hay, C. II-251–2 Hayden, C. II-125 Hayden, R.M. I-299 Hazare, A. I-240–1 Headland, T.N. I-427 Heath, D.B. II-365 Heath, J. I-447 Heathershaw, J. I-341, 345, 347, 349, 358 Heatherton, T.F. II-246 Hebdige, D. I-74–6, II-378 Hedden, T. II-245 Hefner, R.W. I-179, 428–9, 435 Heidegger, M. II-57, 118, 425, 427–8

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 558

Heine, S.J. II-245 Heininen, L. I-273, 280 Helgason, A. I-280 Hellin, J. II-300 Helman, C. I-297 Helmreich, S. II-124 Helms, E. I-299 Henare, A. I-62, 75, 149, II-102, 107, 109–10, 126 Henderson, G. I-408 Henderson, M. I-220 Hendry, J. I-6, 391, 394–5 Henley, P. II-95 Henning, A. II-322 Henrich, J. I-157–8, II-239 Henrich, N. II-239, 246, 250 Herder, J. I-525, 530 Herdt, G. II-377, 385 Heritage, J. I-16 Herle, A. I-201, II-103, 269 Hernandez, J.A.A. I-466 Hernandez, M.T. I-128 Hernandez-Reguant, A. II-411 Hernlund, Y. II-384–5 Hershatter, G. I-408, 414 Herskovits, M. I-497, 502 Hertz, E. I-xxxiii, 93, 163 Hertz, R. II-59, 264 Herzfeld, M. I-6, 129, 251, 288, 292–4, 297, 299, 309, II-263, 342 Hewamanne, S. I-371 Hiatt, L. I-444–6 Hick, J. I-187 Hickey, G.C. I-435 Hickey, S. II-192 Hicks, D. I-428, II-102–3, 107–8, 112 Higman, S. II-300 Hill, J. I-21, 146 Hiller, S. I-60 Hillis, A.E. II-235 Hine, C. I-81, 299 Hinrichs, C.C. II-302 Hinton, W. I-407–9, 471 Hirsch, E. I-79, 83, 108, 128, 148, 295, 452, 528, II-313 Hirsch, F. I-356 Hirsch, J. I-223 Hirsch, M. II-349 Hirsch, S. I-112–13, II-49 Hirschfeld, L.A. I-32, II-244 Hirschkind, C. I-329, 332, 335, II-150, 414 Hirschman, C. I-426 Hirshleifer, J. II-162–3 Hitchcock, R.K. I-268, 432–3, II-316 Ho, E. I-335 Ho, H I-341–2 Ho, K. I-93, 163, 329, 492 Hobart, A. I-173, 434–5 Hobart, M. I-434 Hobbes, T. II-164

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Hobsbawm, E.J. I-122, 129, 299 Hochschild, A. II-344 Hockey, J. I-73 Hockings, P. II-90, 96 Hodder, I.R. I-143–4, 147–8, II-102, 107 Hodges, B.D. II-360 Hodges, E. II-26 Hodgson, D. I-528 Hodgson, M. I-326 Hoffman, C.L. I-427 Hoffman, K.E. I-329 Hoffman, S.M. II-330 Hogle, L. II-384 Hohepa, P I-454 Holbraad, M. II-107, 109–10, 112, 429 Holden, C.J. II-232 Hollinger, D. I-529 Holloway, L. II-305 Holm, G. I-271, 298–9 Holmes, N. II-269 Holstein, J.A. II-55, 59, 64 Holtorf, C. I-148 Holtzman, J. II-307 Hongi, W. I-454 Honig, E. I-408 Honigman, J.J. II-413 Honwana, A. I-317 Hoodfar, H. I-329 Hook, G. I-392 Hooks, B. I-217 Hooper-Greenhill, E. I-139, 207 Hopkins, B. I-345, 347, 351, 357 Hopkinson, N. II-395 Hopp, S.L. II-305 Hoppe, R. I-91 Horkheimer, M. II-413 Horne, E.B. I-471 Horne, J. I-394 Horowitz, A. I-139 Horrocks, C. II-56, 58–9, 65 Horst, H. I-75, 83, II-411 Hoskins, J. I-429, 434, II-103 Houtman, G. II-13, 401 Hovelsrud-Broda, G. I-274 Howard, A. II-302 Howard, L.E.M. II-302 Howe, A. I-178 Howe, L. I-429, 432 Howell, N. II-401 Howell, S. I-5, 427, 429, II-289 Howes, D. I-63, II-107, 249, 313, 393 Hsu, F. I-407, 412 Huang, C. I-408–9 Huang, C-M. II-245 Huang, P. I-409 Hugh-Jones, S. I-148, II-10, 367 Hughes, I. I-452 Huhndorf, S. I-472 Hull, B. II-320

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 559

559

Hull, M. II-418 Hulme, M. II-276, 293 Humphrey, C. I-299, 343, 353, 355, 358, 533, II-315, 323 Humphreys, M. II-163, 166 Humphreys, S.C. I-255 Hunt, R. I-157 Hunter, J. I-391 Hunter, M. I-317 Huntington, S. I-345 Hüsken, F. I-428 Husserl, E. I-22, 37, 57, 186, 229 Hutchins, E. I-36, II-157, 165, 243, 270 Hutchins, S.E. I-232–3, 242, 310–11 Huxley, T. I-140 Hymes, D.H. I-12–13, 130, 466, 474, II-40, 413–14 Ifekwunigwe, J.O. I-503 Igoe, J. II-292 Ilbery, B. II-305 Ilkhamov, A. I-352 Iloliev, A. I-347 Ilongot I-433–4 Inciardi, J.A. II-370 Ingold, T. I-xxviii, xxxiv, 6, 38, 63–6, 125, 149, 290, II-88–9, 93, 106–10, 126, 248–9, 266–8, 275–6, 290 Ingram, H. II-319 Innis, H. II-413 Iqtidar, H. I-352 Irvine, J.T. I-287, II-46, 49–50 Irving, A. II-91 Isherwood, B. I-77, 160 Ishida, H. I-392 Ishikawa, E. I-388 Ito, M. II-402 Izzetoglu, M. II-249 Jablonka, E. II-247 Jacknis, I. I-208, 468 Jackson, A. I-499 Jackson, J. I-109, 112 Jackson, J.B. I-471 Jackson, M. I-318, II-85, 106, 150, 250 Jackson, P. I-221–2, II-385 Jackson, R. I-64, 97 Jacobs, K. I-201 Jacobs, S. II-269 Jacobsen, K. I-367 Jaffrelot, C. I-372, 376 Jaimes, M.A. I-499 Jains, R.K. I-372 Jakobson, R. I-14–15 Jalais, A. I-375 Jalal, A I-357–8 James, W. I-6, 38, 73, 96, 132, 169, 174, 185, 188, 247, 254, 256, 268, 277, 310, 318, 389, II-30, 384 Jamous, R. I-373 Janes, C. II-354

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

560

Jankowiak, W. I-411, 413 Janowski, M. I-434 Jansen, S. I-299 Jarvis, D.I. II-295 Jasanoff, S II-276, 282 Jay, M. II-85, 150, 366 Jayawardena, K. I-372 Jebens, H. I-453 Jedamski, D. I-251 Jedrzej, G.F. II-321 Jeffery, P. I-267, 369, 372–3 Jeffery, R. I-267, 369, 373 Jeffrey, C. I-369 Jeganathan, P. I-372, 374 Jelin, E. I-495 Jellinek, L. I-431 Jensen, C.B. II-27, 116, 124 Jensen, E. II-366 Jensen, S. I-317 Jepson, A. II-8, 13, 18 Jespersen, O. I-15 Jessa, P. I-357 Jing, J. I-409–10, 414, II-303–4 Joachim, C. II-395 Jochelson, W. I-271–2 Jodhka, S.S. I-372 Jöhncke, S II-371 Johns, A. I-161, II-414 Johnson, K. II-393 Johnson, L.L. II-348 Johnson, M. I-220–2 Johnson-Hanks, J. II-348 Johnston, B. II-313–14, 316 Johnston, H. II-317 Jolly, D. I-281 Jones, A.L. I-207 Jones, G.W. I-139, 428 Jones, R. I-414 Jones, S. I-81, 83, 149 Jordan, B. I-299 Jordan, D. I-408 Joshith, D. I-6 Joyce, K.A. II-244 Joyce, R.A. I-141, 147 Judd, E. I-409–10 Kabatereine, N.B. II-173–4 Kabeer, N. I-371 Kafarowski, J. I-280 Kahn, J.S. I-428, 430, 432–4, 526–8 Kahraman, S. I-299 Kalland, A. I-274, 277–8, 394 Kamat, V.R. II-358 Kamp, M I-343 Kan, S I-299, 343, 471 Kanaaneh, R. I-329 Kandiyoti, D. I-330, 343–4, 356–7 Kaneff, D. I-299 Kant, I. I-524–6, 530

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 560

NAME INDEX

Kapadia, K. I-368–9 Kapchan, D. I-329 Kapferer, B. I-372 Kaplan, F.E.S. I-200, 207 Kaplonski, C. II-35 Kapstein, M. I-191, 411 Karakasidou, A. I-132, 299 Karim, W.J. I-427, 429, 434 Kariya, T. I-392 Karmiloff-Smith, A. I-33, 38 Karp, I. I-207 Kato, T. I-393–4, 428, 433 Kaufert, P.A. II-354–5 Kaufman, S.R. I-42, 52–3 Kaul, S. I-373 Kaup, K. I-411 Kaur, R. I-368, 373, 376 Kaw, E. II-379 Kawada, M. I-389 Kay, C. II-302, 408 Keane, A. II-303 Keane, W. II-46–7, 142, 416–17 Kearney, M. I-491, II-11 Kearns, T. I-106 Keck, M.E. I-107, 115 Keeler, W. I-434, II-74, 76 Keen, I. I-444–7 Keenan, J. II-154 Kehl-Bodrogi, K. I-347, 357 Keita, L. I-309 Keith, H. II-55 Keller, E.F. I-42, 53, II-279 Kellert, S. II-292 Kellman, P.J. II-249 Kelly, A.H. II-119 Kelly, T. I-106, 114 Kelly, W. I-388, 390–1, 393–4 Kelsall, T. II-158 Kelty, C. II-411, 416 Kemper, T.D. II-250 Kendrick, T.D. II-331 Kennedy, B. I-83 Kennedy, J.C. I-273, 278–9 Keough, L.J. I-299 Kepel, G. I-168 Kerlogue, F. I-434 Kershaw, E.M. I-429 Keshavarzian, A. I-357 Kessel, I.v. I-317 Kessen, W. I-38 Ketay, S. II-245 Ketzis, J. II-188 Keyder, Ç. I-299 Keyes, C.F. I-426 Khagram, S. II-314 Khalid, A. I-346 Khan, N. I-353, 358 Khanna, A. II-383, 385 Khare, R.S. I-371

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Khazanov, A. I-352 Khosrav, S. I-329 Khouri-Dagher, N. II-301 Khoury, P. I-330 Khron-Hansen, C. I-95 Khumalo, V. II-70 Kideckel, D.A. I-291, 293, 299, II-314 Kidwell, C.S. I-466 Kikuchi, Y. I-428 Kilcullen, D. II-153, 165 Kim, M.G. II-391 Kimbrell, A. II-299 Kindon, S. II-186 King, A. I-276 King, C.A. II-138 King, N. II-56, 58–9, 65 King, V.T. I-221, 426, 431–3, 435 Kingsolver, B. and C. II-305 Kinsella, S. I-392, 394 Kipp, R. I-429, 433 Kirmayer, L.J. II-243, 251 Kirsch, S. II-125, 277, 318 Kirsch, T. I-228 Kirshner, D. I-39 Kisella, R.J. I-393 Kishigami, N. I-279 Kitayama, S. II-245–6 Klaits, F. I-232 Klein, A. II-150, 220, 319, 368, 372 Klein, A..N. I-171 Klein, J.A. II-219, 299, 303 Klein, N. II-335–6 Klein, U. II-392 Kleinman, A. II-150, 303, 354, 360–1 Klem, B. I-176 Kligman, G. I-290, 299 Klindt-Jensen, O. I-139 Klor de Alva, J. I-488 Knappett, C. I-67 Knauft, B.M. I-74, 448, 450, II-160 Kneafsey, M. II-303, 305 Knibbe, K. II-107 Knorr Certina, K. I-xxix, 93, II-119 Knox, H. II-125–6 Knudsen, A. I-293, 351 Knysh, A I-357 Kobayashi, C. II-245 Koh, H.H. I-111 Kolchin, P. I-500 Kolind, T. II-366 Kondo, D.K. I-391–2 Kondos, V. I-372 Kong, T.S.K. II-65 Kopenawa, D. II-294 Kopytoff, I. I-156, 204, II-102, 315 Kostiner, J. I-330 Kotalová, J. I-368 Kothari, A. II-289 Kothari, U. II-192

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 561

561

Kourtzi, Z. II-250 Kowal, E. I-448 Kramer, F. I-61 Kratoska, P.H. I-426 Krauss, R. II-95 Krech, S. I-469, 471 Kreps, C.F. I-200 Kreps, G.A. II-330 Kresse, K. I-318, 342 Kreutzman, H. I-341, 347, 356 Kripke, S. I-331 Kroeber, A. I-131 Kroeber, C. I-468, 471 Kroeber, D. I-471 Kroskrity, P.V. I-14, II-45 Krotz, E. I-489 Krupnik, I. I-273, 276, 281, II-313 Kubler, G I-57 Küchler, S. I-57, 63, 83, II-101, 108–10, 125, 220, 313, 392–3, 402 Kuhl, P.K. II-249 Kuhn, T. I-43, 184 Kuipers, J.C. I-251, 429 Kuklick, H. I-xxviii, xxxvi, xxxix, 310 Kulick, D. I-13, 73, 495, II-135, 301, 385 Kulish, N. I-240–1 Kumar, N. I-238 Kumar, P. II-293 Kummer, C. II-305 Kunin, S.D. I-187 Kunreuther, L. II-411 Kunstadter, P. II-401 Kuper, A. I-xxv–xxvi, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvi, 288–9, 299, 312, 330, 540–1, II-18, 218, 247, 360 Kurimoto, E. I-316 Kurin, R. I-342, 345 Kürti, L. I-293–4, 299 Kurtz, D.V. I-170 Kushner, G. I-146 Kuwayama, T. I-394–5 Kwon, H. I-340, 356, 533 La Barre, W. II-365–6 La Fontaine, J.S. II-378 Laakso, L. I-318 Labov, W. I-13 Ladavas, E. II-269 LaFleur, W.R. I-393 Lahiri-Dutt, K. II-321 Laidlaw, J. I-174, 372, II-138, 142–3 Lakoff, A. II-313, 358 Laland, K.N. II-248 Lama, T.N. II-225–6, 232, 355 Lamarque, P. I-257 Lamb, M. I-367, 376, II-247 Lamb, S. I-368, 376 Lambek, M. I-128, 149, 318, II-5, 142–3, 147, 150

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

562

NAME INDEX

Lambert, H. II-220, 357, 361 Lambert, T. I-412 Lambert, V. I-469–70 Lamphere, L. I-213 Lan, D. II-8, 281 Landecker, H. I-42 Landsman, G. I-468 Lane, P. I-145 Langton, M. I-444 Lanjouw, P. I-370 Lanouguère-Bruneau, V. II-291 Lansing, J.S. I-428, 431, II-276, 314–15 Laqueur, T. II-384 Larick, R. I-147 Larkin, B. I-73–4, 78, 82, 317, II-415, 429 Lash, S. II-29, 87 Lassiter, L.E. I-467, 471, 489, II-184 Latham, A. I-10, 73, 514 Latham, K. I-10, 73 Latour, B. I-43, 57, 62, 96, 114, 199, 297, II-50, 104–5, 107–9, 116, 119–21, 124–6, 293, 316, 347, 392, 403, 425 Lattas, A. I-453 Laudan, R. II-305 Laughlin, C.D. I-39, II-244, 250, 252 Laurent, E. I-388–90, 393 Lave, J. I-36, II-126, 263 Lavie, S. I-63 Lavine, S.D. I-207 Lawoti, M I-374 Lawrence, C.M. I-300, 372 Lawrence, G. II-321 Lawrence-Zuniga, D. II-313 Layne, L.L. I-329 Layton, R. I-6, 56, 58, 445, II-166, 313 Lazaridis, G. I-299 Lazarsfeld, P. II-413 Lazarus-Black, M. I-107–8 Leach, B. I-490 Leach, E.R. I-xxviii–xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv–xxxvi, 23, 67, 132, 147, 149, 423, II-203, 235, 239 Leach, M. I-313, II-161, 173, 219, 275, 278, 280–1, 356, 378 Leakey, M.D. II-263 Leap, W. I-220 Lears, T.J. I-227 Leavis, Q.D. I-251 Lebar, F.M. I-435 Lebra, T.S. I-391, 393 LeClair, E. I-155 Lecomte-Tilouine, M. I-374 Lederman, R. I-341, 448–52 Lee, C.K. I-413 Lee, H. I-83 Lee, R.B. I-318 Lee, R.L.M. I-433 Lee, S.i. I-392 Lee Hock Guan I-431

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 562

Leemann, A. I-435 Leertouwer, L. I-185 Lefebvre, H. I-172 Lefèvre, W. II-392 Legros, D. I-527 Lehman, D.R. II-246 Lehotay, V.A II-401 Leiris, M. I-66 Leitch, A. II-305 Lemos, M.C. I-544 Lende, D. II-251–2 Lenk, L.S.C. I-299 Leonard, L. II-348 Leonard, P. I-299 Leslie, A.M. II-21, 235 Lessig, L. I-83 Levenstein, H.A. II-303 Lévi-Strauss, C. I-xxxiii, 23, 184, 191, 215, 290, 389, 474–5, 478, 480, II-22, 30–1, 39, 96, 109, 125, 144–5, 150, 208, 212, 234, 238–9, 243, 313, 392, 396 Levin, H.B. I-455–6 Levin, S.C. I-466 Levin, T. I-358 Levine, H.B. I-456 LeVine, M. I-324 LeVine, R.A. I-392 Levinson, S.C. I-13, 15–16, 34–5, II-270 Levitt, P. I-112, 115, 491 Lewin, E. I-220 Lewis, D. I-375, 471 Lewis, E.D. I-428–9 Lewis, G. II-76 Lewis, I.M. I-38, 191, 318 Lewis, J. I-540 Lewis, J.S.C. I-149 Lewis, J.W. I-408 Lewis, O. I-253 Lewis, R.S. II-245 Lewontin, R. II-247 Li, F. II-279, 290 Li, S-C. II-247–8, 251 Liang, Y. I-412 Lickliter, R. I-39 Lieberman, V. I-425 Liebes, R. I-79 Liebow, E. I-499 Liechty, M. I-376 Lien, M.E. I-79, 160, 251, II-240, 303 Lienard, P. II-240 Light, N. I-358 Lightfoot-Klein, H. II-384 Liikanen, I. I-296, 299 Lim, L. II-344 Lindberg, A. I-368 Lindesmith, A. II-370 Lindholm, C. I-326–30, 332–5, 351 Lindisfarne, N. II-280, 282, 348 Linkenbach, A. I-375, 378 Lipsett-Rivera, S. II-348

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Litman, J. I-83 Liu, C. II-293 Liu, M. I-342–3, 357, 406, 409 Liu, W.T. I-428 Liu, X. I-409 Liu-Farrer, G. I-415 Llorente, A.M. II-267 Llosa, V. I-250 Lloyd, T. II-306 Lo Piparo, F. I-21 Lock, M. I-42, 47, 52–3, 392, II-212, 345, 355, 360 Locke, J. I-138, 527, II-46, 336 Lockyer, J. II-281, 290 Loeve, S. II-395 Loker, W.M. II-330 Lomawaima, K.T. I-469, 471 Lomnitz-Adler, C. I-492–3 Lonetree, A. I-470 Longacre, W.A. I-146 Lora-Wainwright, A. II-304, 307 Lord, A.B. I-204, 250 Lord, G.D. I-204 Lotfalian, M. I-83 Loudon, J.B. I-172 Louette, D. II-294 Louw, M. I-347–8 Low, S.M. I-106, 110, 391, 490, 492, 496 Lowe, A. II-159, 243, 266, 300, 322, 369 Lowi, M. II-320 Lowie, R. I-272 Lowrey, K. I-268, 465, 472, 479 Lozada, E. I-414 Lubbock, J. I-139–40, 149 Lubkemann, S.C. I-317, II-166 Lucas, G. I-141, 146, 148–9 Lucy, J.A. I-20, II-41, 49, 51, 217, 402 Luetchford, P. II-304 Lukose, R. I-376 Lull, J. I-83 Lumley, R. I-207 Luning, S. II-275 Lunsing, M. I-392–3 Luo, Z. I-412 Lupton, D. II-303–4 Lutz, A. II-251 Lutz, C.A. I-93, 98–9, 174, 492 Lybarger, L. I-335 Lydon, G. I-341 Lyell, C. I-139 Lyman, R.L. I-141, 143 Lynch, C. I-371 Lyon, S.M. I-351 Lyons, J. I-15 Lyson, T.A. II-305 McAllister, W. II-372 McAndrew, F.T. II-250, 366

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 563

563

McBeth, S. I-471 McBrien, J. I-346–8 McCann, M. I-107 McCarty, T. I-469 McCauley, R.N. II-235 MacClancy, J. I-6, 67, 206, 250 McClintock, A. I-299–300 McCloskey, M. II-235 McClure, S. II-245 McColl, J. II-316 MacCormack, C. I-45–6 MacCormack, S. I-473 Macdonald, C. I-425, 428, 433 MacDonald, D. II-369 MacDonald, K.I. II-292 MacDonald, M. II-357 McDonald, M. II-365 Macdonald, S. I-65, 67, 198, 207–8, 299–300, II-13 MacDougall, D. II-80, 85, 87–9, 92–5, 97 McFate, M. I-99, II-138–9 MacFayden, D. I-358 McFeat, T. II-157 MacGaffey, J. I-317 McGaughey, D. II-381 McGilvray, D.B. I-374–5, II-331 MacGregor, A.G. I-208 MacGregor, H. II-173 MacGregor, S. II-371 Macintyre, M. I-258 Mackay, E. II-316 McKey, D. II-290 McKinnon, A. I-189 McKinnon, S. I-428 McKnight, D. I-446–7 McLagan, F. I-83 McLean, M. I-456 McLelland, M. I-223 McLuhan, M. II-412–13 McMaster, G. I-201 McMichael, P. II-300 McNaughton, P. I-318 McNeill, J.R. II-347 Macpherson, C.B. I-161 McVeigh, B. I-392, 394 Mace, R. II-232 Mack, J. I-207–8, 242, 247 Madan, T.N. I-373 Madan, V. I-367 Maddock, K. I-444 Madeley, J. II-300 Madsen, S.T. I-375 Mafeje, A. I-309–10, 312, 318 Maffi, L. II-294 Magowan, F. I-446 Magubane, B. I-309, 312 Maguire, E.A. II-249 Mahadevia, D. II-332 Mahmood, S. I-169–71, 175, 179, 224, 330, 332

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

564

NAME INDEX

Makovicky, N. II-263 Makris, G. I-326 Malafouris, L. I-67, II-243 Malcolmson, S. I-527–8 Malik, J. I-345, 357 Malinowski, B. I-xxx–xxxiii, xxxv–xxxvi, 1, 10, 44–5, 76, 81, 111, 142, 149, 155–6, 162, 172, 183, 206, 249, 389, 406, 448–9, II-8–9, 131, 144–5, 153–4, 183, 236, 425–6, 429 Malkin, V. I-491 Malkki, L.H. I-228, 243, 314–15, 342, 531, II-60, 62 Mamdani, M. I-100, 229–30, 347 Manalansan, M. I-220–1 Mandel, R.E. I-299–300, 341, 343, 355 Manganaro, M. I-254 Manger, L. II-212 Mangin, W. I-512 Mankekar, P. I-73, 376, II-415 Mann, E.A. I-371 Mannheim, K. II-348 Mansfield, D. II-372 Mantz, J.W. II-277, 429 Marchand, T.H.J. I-xxvii, 5, 64, 230, 318, II-102, 219, 244, 249, 252, 261–3, 313, 429, 433 Marcus, G.E. I-xxix, xxxiv, 56, 61, 65–7, 73–4, 81, 83, 93–4, 115, 131, 160, 172, 199, 249, 288, 297, 309, 313, 467, 471, 489, 491–2, II-9, 11–12, 14, 16, 39, 66, 85, 101, 131, 154, 201, 204, 343, 400, 415 Marcus, J. I-73, 123 Mareschal, D. II-244 Marett, A. I-446 Markowitz, F. I-299 Markus, A. II-316 Markus, H.R. II-245 Marranci, G. I-191, 330 Marriott, M. I-191 Marsden, M. I-267, 341, 344–5, 347, 355, 357–8, 366 Marsden, T. II-305 Marshall, J. I-84, II-85, 414 Martell, C. I-92 Martí, J. I-487 Martin, D. I-495 Martin, E. I-94, II-244, 248, 268, 384 Martin, N. I-344, 351 Martin, P. I-351 Martin, R. I-395 Martindale, C. I-258 Martinez, D.P. I-77, 267, 389, 393–5 Martinez-Alier, J. II-290, 293 Marx, K. I-xxviii, xxxiii, xxxix, 2, 77, 108, 122–6, 133, 147, 155, 158–9, 163, 165, 171–2, 183, 191, 214–15, 217, 227, 247, 290, 311–12, 358, 369, 392, 405–7, 412, 432, 456, 529, II-228, 345 Marx, U. II-21, 28 Marzke, R.F. and M.W. II-263 Mascia-Lees, F.E. I-219, II-11 Maskovsky, J. I-489, 492 Masquelier, A.M. I-232, 242, 318 Masselos, J. I-236, 243

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 564

Massey, D. I-299 Massicard, E. I-353 Masuda, T. II-245–6 Mathews, G. I-389, 392, 395 Mathur, H. II-277 Mathur, S. I-373 Mato, D. I-491 Matory, J.L. I-317, 502 Mattei, U. I-108 Matthiasson, J.S. I-275 Mattson, M. II-58, 65 Maurer, B. I-114, 163 Maurer, D. II-303 Maurya, D. I-241 Mauss, M. I-xxxiii, xxxix, 57, 76, 155–6, 164–5, 271–2, 391, 448, 453, II-107, 165, 377 Maxwell, S. II-300 Mayaram, S. I-373 Mayblin, M. II-16–17 Maybury-Lewis, D. I-480, 538–9, 544 Maye, D. II-305 Mayer, P. I-312 Maynard, A. II-263 Mayr, E. II-226 Mazumdar, S. II-306 Mazzarella, W. I-77, 160, 376, II-411, 415–17, 428 Mbembe, A. I-230–2, 236, 242 Mead, A. II-413 Mead, M. II-243, 262, 413–14, 428 Mead, S.M. I-454, 456 Meadow, A. II-413 Mearns, R. I-313 Measham, F. II-369, 371 Medin, D. II-291 Meeker, M. I-251 Megoran, N. I-345, 349, 358 Meinhof, U.H. I-299 Meiselas, S. II-86–7 Melhuus, M. I-253, 495 Melossi, D. I-296 Menary, R. II-248 Menchaca, M. I-472, 491 Mendelsohn, O. I-370, 372 Mendoza, G. II-33–4 Meneley, A. I-329, II-301 Menon, K. I-373 Menon, R. I-373 Mercer, H.C. II-268 Merlan, F. I-445, 447 Merleau-Ponty I-37, 63 Merlin, M. II-368 Merry, S.E. I-10, 107–8, 110–13, 115, II-294 Mertz, E. II-46–7 Mesoudi, A. I-38 Messerschmidt, D.A. I-499 Messick, B. I-192, 329–30, 332, 335 Metcalf, B.D. I-373 Metcalf, P. I-253, 429 Métraux, A. I-474, 476

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Meyer, B. I-80, 315, 317–18, II-417 Michaels, E. II-195, 411, 414–15 Michelutti, L. I-373 Miescher, S.F. II-70 Mignolo, W.D. I-488 Mikkelsen, C. I-538–9 Mill, J.S. II-25, 331, 336, 415 Miller, B. I-471 Miller, C.A. II-280 Miller, D. I-62, 75–7, 81, 83, 95, 125, 148, 156, 160, 199, 369, II-104, 108–9, 293, 379, 411, 415–17 Miller, L. I-392 Miller, M.S. I-538–9 Miller, P. I-95 Miller, W. I-466, 471 Millie, J. I-251 Mills, D. I-xxvii, xxx, II-8, 13, 18 Mills, J. II-369 Mills, M.A. I-10, 191, 372 Milner, A.C. I-430 Milton, J. II-46 Milton, K. II-282, 320 Milwertz, C. I-411 Minangkabau I-255, 428, 432–3 Mines, D. I-367, 372 Mines, M. I-232, 239 Mintz, S.W. I-126, 493, 497, II-11, 56, 58, 70, 212, 299–300, 303, 306–7, 372 Mishra, P.K. II-332 Mitchell, J. I-228, 290, 299, 512 Mitchell, R. I-471 Mitchell, T. I-327, 329, 335, 350, II-126 Mitchell, W.J.T. I-66, 95, 252, II-85–6, 92, 429 Mithun, M. I-471 Mitra, A. I-83 Miyamoto, Y. II-245 Miyazaki, H. I-93, 114 Moberg, M. II-300 Modi, N. II-332, 334 Mody, P. I-369 Moeran, B. I-76–7, 391, 393–4, II-415 Mohan, G. II-192 Mohanty, C.T. I-123, 217 Moisseeff I-447 Mokuwa, E. II-159, 163 Mol, A. II-121–3, 126, 358 Mol, M. I-299 Molyneux, M. I-214, 495 Monsutti, A. I-354 Montanari, M. II-299 Montesquieu, C de S. I-139 Mookherjee, N. I-373, II-5, 64, 131, 135, 138 Moon, O. I-393 Moore, A. II-93, 417 Moore, D. II-365–6, 370 Moore, H.L. I-xxviii, xxx, 6, 10, 73, 123, 148, 155, 214, 216, 218–19, 242, 544, II-276 Moore, S.F. I-108, 111, 310, 313, 315, 318, II-31 Moors, A. I-80, 329

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 565

565

Moraes Farias, P.F. II-73 Morales, E. I-473, 477–8 Moran, E. II-312 Moran, M. I-91, II-160 Moran-Thomas, A. II-361 Morgan, J.P. I-93 Morgan, K.P. II-305, 381 Morgan, L.H. I-42, 44, 140, 405 Morgan, L.M. I-52–3 Morley, D. I-74–5, 79 Morphy, F. II-316 Morphy, H. I-56, 58, 65, 67, 203, 445–6, II-92, 96–7, 312, 316, 392 Morris, A. I-414 Morris, B. I-447 Morris, E. II-382 Morris, R. I-219, II-60, 415 Morsink, H. II-169 Morsy, S. II-358 Moser, S. I-207 Mosher, S. I-410 Mosse, D. I-95, 375, II-171–2, 177, 179–80, 279, 293, 320, 361 Mossmann, S. II-394 Mouer, R.E. I-391 Mudimbe, V.Y. I-309–10 Mueller, M. I-299 Muir, E. I-252 Mukherjee, S. II-161 Mukhopadhyay, C.C. I-499 Mulhall, S. II-149 Müller, M. I-185 Mummert, G. I-492 Mundy, M. I-114 Munger, F.W. I-107, 113 Munn, N. I-57 Muradian, R. II-293 Murdoch, G.P. I-xxix, xxxix Murdoch, J. II-305 Murra, J. I-474, 477 Murray, D. I-456 Murray, S.C. II-304–5 Murzakulova, A. I-349 Musgrave, J.K. I-435 Musharbash, Y. I-448 Muthu, S. II-428 Myers, F.R. I-56, 59, 61, 67, 445–6 Myrivili, E. I-299 Nabhan, G.P. II-291, 294, 305 Nabokov, P. I-372, 468, 470 Nadasdy, P. I-277–8 Nader, L. I-93, 99, 101, 108, 111, 130, II-64, 202 Nagashima, N. I-389, 394, 396 Nagata, J. I-429 Nagel, J. I-466, 470, II-342 Naji, M. I-64 Nakamaki, H. I-389, 394, 396 Nakamura, L. II-402

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

566

Nakane, C. I-389–91 Namihara, E. I-392–3 Nan, Y. II-245 Nanda, S. I-369, II-385 Narasimhan, H. I-371 Narayan, B. I-373 Narayan, K. I-63, 369 Nash, G. I-503 Nash, J.C. I-160, 315, 489, II-317 Nash, S.E. I-207 Nast, H. II-313 Nataf, Z. II-383–5 Naumkin, V. I-341, 345–6 Navaro-Yashin, Y. I-175, 296, 299–300, 329, II-107, 111, 342 Nazarea, V. II-291, 302 Neale, J. II-366 Nedostup, R. I-412 Needham, J. I-408, 423 Needham, R. II-264 Neeman, R. I-299 Nehamas, A. II-147 Neich, R. I-207, 456 Nelson, D.M. I-100, 501 Nelson, E. I-271 Nelson, J. I-393 Nerlich, B. II-303 Nestle, M. II-303 Neumann, R. II-279 Newmann, M. II-392 Newmeyer, F.J. I-14 Nguyen, V.K. I-53, II-345, 359 Nicholls, A. II-304 Nichols, D.L. I-141, 147, 346 Nichols, R. I-354 Nichter, M. I-370, II-358 Nicolau, L. II-81 Niedenthal, P.M. II-250 Niehaus, I.A. I-242, 316 Nielsen, F.S. I-xxviii, xxx Nielsen, L.B. I-107 Niessen, S.A. I-77, 434 Niranjana, T. II-205 Nisbett, N. I-376 Nisbett, R.E. II-245–6 Nkwi, P.N. I-242, 318 Nöe, A. II-250 Nolin, C. II-312 Nonini, D. I-433 Noordegraaf, M. I-91 Nordholt, H. I-252 Nordmann, A. II-395 Nordstrom, C. II-154, 160, 166 Norgaard, R.B. II-286 Norman, D.A. II-244 Norris, D.A. I-299 Norris, L. I-376 North, D. I-157 Northoff, G. II-245–6

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 566

NAME INDEX

Norvell, J.M. I-501 Novas, C. I-42, II-354, 359 Novellino, D. II-275 Ntarangwi, M. I-318 Nugent, D. I-493 Nugent, S. I-75–6, 93, 299, II-96, 321 Nuijten, M. I-493 Nuku, G. I-201 Nussbaum, M. I-38, 258, 532, 535 Nustad, K. I-95 Nuttall, M. I-xxvii, 5, 266, 271, 273–6, 278–82, 356, 542, II-13, 282, 322 Nyamnjoh, F. I-230–1, 242 Nyce, J.M II-402 Oakes, T. I-412 Oberhardt, S. I-204 Obeyesekere, G. I-125, 191 O’Brien, D.B. I-317 O’Brien, M. I-141, 143 O’Connor, E. II-263 O’Connor, J. II-292 O’Faircheallaigh, C. I-541 O’Hanlon, M. I-149, 243, II-313 O’Neill, J. II-294, 354 O’Regan, J.K. II-250 O’Reilly, C.C. I-520 Ochs, E. I-18–19, II-43 Ochsner, K.N. II-251 Odendahl, T. II-65 Odling-Smee, F. II-248 Ogasawara, Y. I-391 Ogden, J. I-232, 234, 242 Ohnuki-Tierney, E. I-392, 394–5, II-306 Oi, J. I-409–10 Okely, J. II-85 Oliver, C. I-515 Oliver-Smith, A. II-330–1 Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. I-318 Olkes, C. I-63 Olsen, S.H. I-257 Olszewska, Z. I-354 Olujic, M.B. I-299 Olukoshi, A.O. I-318 Olwig, K. I-516 Ong, A. I-114, 160, 174–5, 429, 431, 433, 514, II-11, 321, 342, 344, 358, 413–14 Ong, W. I-251 Onians, J. I-59 Oppenheim, R. II-126 Orlove, B. II-189, 293, 313, 318, 322–4 Orrantia, J. II-91 Ortiz, A. I-466, 471–2 Ortiz, H. I-163–4 Ortner, B. I-9 Ortner, S. I-11, 20, 76, 125, 133, 171, 191, 213, 215, 376, 499, II-144, 347, 349 Osanloo, A. I-357 Osborne, R. I-56, 67

5/18/2012 11:55:41 AM

NAME INDEX

Osella, C. I-74, 168, 239, 243, 346, 354, 369, 373, 376 Osella, F. I-74, 179, 239, 243, 346, 354, 369, 373 Östberg, W. II-186 Ostrom, E. I-157, II-322 Otto, R. I-186–7 Otto, T. I-453 Ouroussoff, A. I-160–1 Overing, J. I-59, 475 Overing-Kaplan, J. I-475 Owen, E. I-67 Owen, R. II-305 Owusu, M. I-309 Oyama, S. I-38, II-248 Oyserman, D. II-246 Özyürek, E. I-299, 346 Paavola, J. II-322 Packard, R. II-294 Padoch, C. I-427, II-295 Pagliai, V. I-14 Paige, J. II-162 Paine, R. I-281 Palen, L. II-270 Paley, J. I-175 Pálsson, G. I-50, 273–4, 280, 299, II-356, 402 Pandey, G. I-352, 357 Pandian, A. I-370 Panter-Brick, C. II-361 Paredes, A. II-42 Parish, W. I-408–9 Park, M J. I-79 Parker, M. II-6, 168–9, 173–7, 180 Parker, R. I-220 Parkes, P. I-255 Parkin, D. I-75, 318 Parkin, R. I-75, 310, II-275 Parman, S. I-287, 299 Parnwell, M.J.G. I-432 Parry, J. I-156, 162, 240, 242, 370–1, 378 Parry, M. I-250 Partridge, E. I-93 Pascual-Leone, A. II-244 Pasternak, B. I-408, 411 Patel, D. I-376 Patel, R. II-299, 332 Patel, T. I-368 Paternosto, C. I-63 Patra, P.K. II-357 Patterson, T.C. I-142 Peabody, N. I-357 Peacock, J.L. II-134, 218, 429 Pearce, F. II-349 Pearce, S.M. I-207 Pearson, G. II-370 Pearson, H. I-164 Pearson, M. I-414 Pearson, R. I-214 Peck, J.M. I-254

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 567

567

Pedelty, M. II-415 Pedersen, M. I-343 Peel, J.D.Y. I-316, 318 Peel, R. I-93 Peeters, R. II-263 Pegg, S. II-321 Peirce, C.S. I-xxxi, 14–15, II-41, 47 Peletz, M.G. I-345, 428–30, 433 Pelkmans, M. I-299, 346–8 Pellizzi, F. I-66 Pels, P. I-175, 232, 235, 242, 310, 315 Pelto, P.J. and G.H. II-77, 173 Peluso, N.L. I-427, II-160, 277 Pemberton, J. I-430, 434 Perez, O. I-110 Perkins, M. I-56 Però, D. I-96 Perry, E. I-414 Perry, W I-141 Peschard, K. II-345 Pesigan, G.M. I-433 Peters, B.G. I-91 Peters, K. II-156, 166 Peterson, N. I-78, 82, 268, 443–5, II-96, 411, 415 Petryna, A. II-125, 356, 358–9 Pettigrew, J. I-372, 374 Pharr, S. I-392–3 Philips, H. II-429 Philips, S.U. II-47 Phillips, D.A. I-67, 142, 147 Phillips, R.B. I-207–8 Piaget, J. I-37–9 Picard, M. I-432 Piccini, A. I-148 Pick, J. I-93 Pickering, A. II-64, 403 Pickering, K. I-471 Pieke, F. I-413, 415 Pierre, J. I-91 Pietrykowski, B. II-305 Piggott, S. I-139 Pijpers, R. I-299 Pina-Cabral, J.d. I-293, 299 Pine, F. I-299, II-8 Pinedo-Vázquez, M. II-295 Pink, S. II-85–6, 249, 417–18, 429 Pinker, S. II-244 Pinney, C. I-56, 65, 67, 73, II-94, 96, 103, 109–10, 125, 220, 411, 428 Pinsky, R. I-530, 534 Pinto, S. I-368 Piot, C. I-311, 341 Pirie, F. I-372 Piscatori, J. I-330 Pitt Rivers, A.L.F. I-140, 149, 203 Plath, D.W. I-390, 392 Platt, J.R. II-228 Platt, T. II-4, 28–9, 33, 207 Plattner, S. I-58

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

568

Plenderleith, K. II-302 Pleyers, G. II-348 Plissart, M.F. I-317 Plot, R. I-138, 255, 257, 312, 357 Pocock, D. I-6, 191, 251 Poggio, T. II-249 Polanyi, K. I-155–7, 162, 164–5, II-302 Pollan, M. II-303 Pool, R. II-356 Poole, D. I-175, 349, 494, II-30, 96 Porcello, T. II-107 Portes, A. II-343 Portisch, A. I-344, 358, II-263 Porto, N. I-199, 207 Posey, D. II-286, 292, 302 Postero, N. I-488 Postill, J. I-83–4, II-412, 414, 416 Pottage, A. I-114 Potter, J. I-408–9 Pottier, J. II-219, 299, 301 Povinelli, D. II-235 Povinelli, E. I-22, 446, 448, II-318, 347 Powdermaker, H. I-249, 497, II-413 Powell, R. I-64 Prakash, G I-243 Prasad, P. II-65 Pratt, J.C. I-299–300 Pratt, M.L. I-469 Pratten, D. I-127–8, 266 Preble, E. II-370 Preiss, D. II-262 Premat, A. II-302 Preston, S.D. II-235 Price, D.H. I-99, 325, II-135, 138–9, 208 Price, M. I-414 Price, P. I-239–40, 372 Price, R. I-497 Price, S. I-60 Priest, D. I-99 Prince, S.H. II-330–1 Prost, A. I-369 Pugel, J. II-166 Pun, N. I-77 Purdey, J. I-433 Putz, F.E. II-294 Pyysiainen, I. I-187 Qayum, S. I-371 Quarantelli, E.L. II-330 Quinn, N. I-29, 38, II-241, 244 Quizon, C.A. I-201 Rabinow, P. I-42–3, 47–51, 93, 174, 297, 299, 334, II-52, 119, 354, 356, 426 Rabinowitz, D. I-329, 333 Racine, J. I-370 Radcliffe, P. II-366 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. I-xxv, xxx–xxxiii, xxxvi, 1, 6, 142–3, 170, 406, 444, II-211, 425

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 568

NAME INDEX

Radford, C. I-257 Radin, P. I-253 Raein, M. I-67 Rafael, V. II-411 Raffles, H. II-125 Ragone, H. II-344 Raheja, G. I-243, 251, 369 Rahier, J.M. I-501–2 Rainwater, L. I-499 Rajagopal, B. I-107, 112 Rajah, A. I-426 Rajan, K.S. II-358 Rajotte, T. II-305 Ram, P. I-299, 368 Raman, P. I-299 Ramble, C. I-372 Ramos-Zayas, Y I-491, 500 Rancière, J. I-175 Ranger, T.O. I-129, 236, 247, 299, 315, 455 Ransom, J.E. II-413 Rao, A. I-372 Rao, N. I-368 Rapp, R. I-43, 50–1, II-122–3 Rappaport, R. I-184, II-313 Rapport, N. I-250, 268, 526, 531, 534 Rasanayagam, J. I-347–8 Räsänen, M. II-402 Rashid, A. I-345 Rasmussen, K. I-271 Rata, E. I-456 Ratzel, F. I-140–1 Ravetz, A. I-67 Rawski, E. I-408 Ray, I. II-315 Ray, R. I-369, 371, 376 Raymond, R. I-60, 62, 247 Raynolds, L. II-302, 304 Raynor, W. II-368 Read I-6, 250, 257, 272, 367, 393 Reaumur, R. II-407 Rechtman, R. II-345 Reczkiewicz, M. II-150 Redden, E. II-136 Reddy, G. I-369 Reddy, L.R. II-332 Redfield, R. I-156, 187, 191 Redford, K.H. II-279, 287, 294 Reed, A. II-416 Reeves, M. I-345, 349–50, 352, 354–6 Reeves, S. II-360 Reibold, M. II-407 Reichard, G. I-67 Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. II-368 Reichertz, J. II-208 Reifeld, H. I-373 Rein, M. I-91 Reinharz, S. II-65 Reinhold, S. I-94 Reisner, M. II-320

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

NAME INDEX

Renfrew, C. I-142, 146, II-243 Restivo, S. II-406 Restrepo, E. I-489 Reuters, T.A. I-435 Revell, L. I-389 Reyna, S. II-243–4, 247, 250 Reynolds White, S. II-358 Rheinberger, H-J. I-65 Rhodes, R. I-91 Rhodes, T. II-25, 33, 366, 370 Ribeiro, G.L. I-489, 496 Ricard, A. II-75 Richards, A.I. I-235, 313, 317 Richards, P. II-5, 156, 158, 162, 165, 293, 314 Richerson, P.J. II-239, 247 Riches, D. I-272 Ridington, R. I-467–8 Riegel, H. I-199 Rieger, L. I-471 Rigby, P. I-309 Riles, A. I-93, 99, 111, 114–15, II-122, 126 Rilling, J.K. II-243, 245, 248, 251–2 Rimoldi, E. I-456 Rimoldi, M. I-456 Ring, L. I-353 Riordan, J. I-414 Risolatti, G. II-268 Risse, T. I-115 Ritzer, G. II-306 Rival, L.M. II-219, 286, 288, 290, 292–3, 295 Rivers, W.H.R. I-141 Rivkin-Fish, M. II-348 Rizzolatti, G. II-244 Robb, P. I-370 Robbins, B. I-448, 450, 528 Robbins, J. I-21–2, II-150 Roberson, J.E. I-391 Roberts, B. I-512 Roberts, C. I-50, 52 Roberts, G. I-391, 395, II-48 Roberts, S. I-108, 111 Robertson, A.F. I-38 Robertson, C. II-379, 384 Robertson, J. I-140, 393–5 Robins, K. I-83 Robinson, I. I-178–9 Robotham, D. I-165 Roche, S. I-347 Rockhill, K. I-275 Rodenburg, J. I-429 Rodgers, D. I-429, 491 Rodriguez, J I-220 Rodriguez, R. I-503 Rodriguez-Garavito, C.A. I-107 Roepstorff, A. II-243, 246–8, 252 Rofel, L. I-74, 415, II-349 Roitman, J. I-341 Rojek, R. I-5 Roldán, A. I-299

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 569

569

Romann, M. I-333 Rony, F.T. II-94 Roosevelt, A. I-480 Roosevelt, F. I-142 Rosaldo, M. I-21, 63, 213–14, 217, 429, 434 Rosaldo, R. I-429, 433 Roscoe, P. I-452 Roscoe, W. II-382 Rose, D. I-129, 447 Rose, K. I-369 Rose, N. I-42, 95 Rose, W. II-261 Roseberry, W. I-126, 493 Rosen, L. I-21 Rosen, M.S. I-106 Rosenberger, N.R. I-391 Rosenfeld, A. I-144 Rösler, M. I-299 Rosset, P. II-302 Rossler, G. II-392 Rothenbuhler, E.W. I-72, 79, 83, II-411, 417–18 Rottenburg, R. I-105 Rouch, J. II-85, 89, 95, 414 Rouse, R. I-74, 516 Rousseau, J. I-44, 427, 432 Rowlands, M. I-147, 227 Roy, B. I-373 Roy, O. I-168, 345 Rozario, S. I-368, 378 Rozin, P. II-247 Rübel, D. II-394 Rubel, P. II-218 Rubin, G. I-213, 215–16, 220, 290 Rubin, V. II-369 Rubinstein, R. I-432 Ruby, J. II-85, 92–3, 96, 411, 414–15 Rudelson, J. I-411 Rudgley, R. II-373 Rudie, I. I-429 Ruggiero, G. I-252 Ruggiero, V. II-366 Rumsay, A. I-39 Rumsey, A. I-21–2, 449, II-318 Russell, C. II-87, 93 Russell, S.D. I-429 Rustemova, A. I-349 Rutherford, D. I-433 Rutten, R. I-373, 429, 432 Ruud, A.E. I-236, 240, 242, 370, 372 Ryang, S. I-392, 396 Rydell, R.W. I-201 Ryen, A. II-65 Sabbatucci, D. I-189 Sabloff, J. I-141–2 Sachar, R. I-373 Sacks, H. I-17 Sacks, K. I-213–14, 217 Sadato, N. II-250

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

570

Sagi, D. II-250 Sahadeo, J. I-348, 356, 358 Sahlins, M. I-76, 125–6, 156, 172, 174, 450, 452, 455 Said, E. I-258 St-Croix, E. I-50 Saktanber, A. I-330 Salaff, W. I-408, 411, 429 Salamandra, C. II-415 Salemink, O. II-154 Saler, B. I-188 Salimjanova, L. I-344 Salisbury, N. I-413, 471 Sallnow, M.J. II-275 Salman, T. I-491, 494 Salmond, Amiria I-60, 62, 204, 299, II-5, 109 Salmond, Anne I-455–6, II-109 Salomon, F. I-36, 473, 476, 481, II-27, 31 Samuel, G. I-187, 191, 368, 378 Samuels, D. I-470 Sanabria, H. II-367 Sanday, P. I-428 Sanders, T. I-242, 315, II-281 Sangren, P.S. I-76, 409 Sanjek, R. I-249, 499–500 Sansi, R. I-57, 62 Sansi-Roca, R. I-502 Sansone, L. I-491, 501 Sant Cassia, P. I-300 Santos, A.M.S. I-318 Santos, B de S. I-107, 110 Santos, R.V. I-502 Sapignoli, M. I-268 Sapir, E. I-14, 468 Sapolsky, R.M. II-251 Sarat, A. I-106 Sardar, Z. I-80 Sariola, S. I-369 Sarkar, T. I-372 Sasaki, Y. II-250 Sassen, S. II-349 Sather, C. I-425, 428 Saunders, D. II-94 Savarese, N. I-80 Sawyer, R.K. I-14 Sax, W. I-372 Saxe, A.A. I-145 Schafer, J. II-166 Schaffer, S. II-125, 429 Schama, S. II-314 Schanbacher, W.D. II-305 Schapera, I. I-235 Schattschneider, E. I-393 Schatz, E. I-350 Schechner, R. I-79–80 Schechter, D. I-413 Scheele, J. I-329, 341–2 Schegloff, E.A. I-16 Schegloff, I. II-51

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 570

NAME INDEX

Schein, L. I-411–12 Scheper-Hughes, N. I-174, 495, II-150, 345, 358 Schetter, C. I-349, 351 Schieffelin, B.B. I-14, II-43, 414 Schiller, A. I-429, 489, 491, 502 Schiller, N. II-343, 346, 416 Schivelbusch, W. II-366, 368 Schlanger, N. II-165 Schlatter, R. I-188 Schlaug, G. II-249 Schmidt, J. II-385 Schmitt, C. I-xxxii, 175 Schneider, A. I-11, 56–7, 61, 64–7, II-105, 107 Schneider, D. I-45–6, 450 Schneider, H. I-155, 157 Schneider, J. I-293, 489–90, II-201, 347–8 Schneider, P. I-293, II-201, 348 Schnell, C. II-295 Schoeberlein-Engel, J.S. I-352 Schomerus, M. II-178 Schonberg, J. II-362 Schoonmaker Freudenberger, K. II-190 Schram, K. I-227 Schulte Nordholt, H. I-426 Schumaker, L. I-311 Schummer, J. II-395 Schwalbe, M.L. II-65 Schwartz, S. I-38, 91, 393, 473, 476, 481 Schwartzman, L.F. I-501 Schwarz, M.T. I-471 Schwegler, T. I-93 Schweitzer, P. I-271–2, II-316 Scoones, I. II-280 Scopetea, E. I-299 Scott, D. I-129, 172, 174, 372 Scott, J. I-96, 341, 349, 430, 432, 434, II-279 Scott, L. II-27 Scranton, P. II-301 Seabright, P. I-299 Searle, J. I-13, 21, 279 Sebald, W.G. II-144, 150 Seddon, T. II-366 Sedgwick, E. I-220 Segal, R.A. I-187 Segall, M.H. II-250 Seidensticker, E. II-331 Seigel, M. I-501 Seitz, A.R. II-249 Sejersen, F. I-274, 277–8 Sekula, A. II-92 Seligman, R. II-243, 248, 250–1 Sellato, B. I-427, 432 Seneviratne, H.L. I-371, 374 Senft, G. II-270 Sennett, R. II-266, 270 Sercombe, P. I-427, 432 Seremetakis, C.N. II-107, 306 Serpell, J. II-319

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

NAME INDEX

Serres, M. II-121, 124 Seymour, S. I-368 Shah, A.M. I-372, 374, 378 Shah, G. I-372 Shah, P. II-187 Shahrani, N. I-344, 351, 354, 357 Shalinsky, A. I-354 Shani, G. I-373 Shannon, C. I-396 Shannon, J. I-330, 335 Shannon, K.A. I-274 Shapin, S. II-125 Shapiro, J. I-416 Sharma, A. I-371, 374 Sharma, U. II-359 Sharp, J.S. I-312 Sharp, L.A. I-317–18 Sharp, T. I-99 Shaw, A.M. II-65, 173 Shaw, R. I-130, 228, 242, 247, 317 Sheffield, P. I-60 Shehabuddin, E. I-368 Shell-Duncan, B. II-384–5 Sheller, M. II-368 Shelton, A.A. I-60, 200, 205, 207–8 Shenton, R.W. II-294 Shepherd, W.C. I-184 Sherrat, A. II-367 Shilling, C. II-379 Shimizu, A. I-388 Shipley, J.W. II-416 Shore, B. II-243, 252 Shore, C. I-xxvii, xxxv, 5, 11, 29–30, 38, 75, 90, 93–4, 96, 99, 299, II-8, 15, 64, 218, 321, 382, 426, 429 Shrum, W. II-80 Shukla, S.R. I-489 Shuy, R.W. II-60 Shweder, R.A. I-30, 38 Shyrock, A. I-129, 330 Siddle, R. I-392 Sidel, J.T. I-433 Sider, G.M. I-126, 170, 469, 499 Siegel, A.W. I-252 Siegel, J.T. I-429, 431, II-61–3, 66 Siegenthaler, P. I-393 Sigal, P. II-378 Siikala, J. I-207 Sikand, Y. I-373 Sikkink, K. I-107, 115 Silbey, S. I-108, 113 Sillitoe, P. II-6, 166, 197, 199 Silverman, E. II-379–81, 383 Silverstein, M. I-15–17, 23, 471, II-40–1, 45, 49, 51, 69, 71 Silverstein, P.A. I-16, 299, 329, 518 Silverstone, R. I-79, 83 Silvio, T. I-84 Simmel, G. I-xxxiii, 163, 512, 521, II-72, 87 Simmons, B. I-112 Simonse, S. I-316

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 571

571

Simpson, A. I-232, 471 Simpson, B. I-299 Simpson, C.R. I-58 Simpson, E. I-342, 373, 375, II-15, 134, 219, 329, 332 Simpson, M.G. I-207 Simpson, R. II-134, 137, 356 Sinclair, S. II-263 Singer, M. I-370, II-320, 358, 360, 402 Singerman, D. I-329 Sinnott, M. I-222–3 Sissons, J. I-454–6 Sivaramakrishnan, K. I-374–5 Sjöberg, K. I-392 Sjöberg, Ö. I-299 Skalník, P. I-299 Skeggs, B. II-11 Skidmore, M. I-372, 497, 501 Skinner, G.W. I-408, 416 Skinner, Q. I-258 Skirvskaja, V. I-355, 358 Slater, D.H. I-75, 77, 81, 83, 392 Slaughter, A-M. I-112 Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. II-356–7 Sleeper-Smith, A. I-470 Slezkine, Y. I-352, 357 Slingerland, T. II-241 Slyomovics, S. I-112, 329, 332 Smart, N. I-186–8 Smil, V. I-416 Smith, A. I-471, II-281 Smith, C. II-407 Smith, E.A. II-281 Smith, G. I-126–7, 141, II-150, 343 Smith, H. II-379 Smith, J.H. II-429 Smith, J.Z. I-193 Smith, M.F. I-454 Smith, R. I-390, II-394 Smith, T. II-184, 197 Smith, W.C. I-189, 467, 497, 502, 516 Smith, Z. I-xxviii Sneath, D. I-299, 351, 411, II-323 Soares, B.F. I-168, 179, 318, 346 Sobal, J. II-303 Sobo, E. II-303 Soefestad, L.T. I-538, 542, 545 Sökefeld, M. I-353, 358 Sollas, W.J. I-143 Solway, J. II-149–50 Somerset, F.R. II-217 Sood, U.D. I-369 Sørensen, B.W. I-279 Sorokin, P.A. II-329–30, 336–7 Sosis, R. II-239 Southall, A. I-308 Southcott, C. I-273, 280 Spedding, A. II-367 Speed, S. I-109, 112 Spelke, E. I-31

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

572

NAME INDEX

Spencer, H. II-226, 232 Spencer, J. I-xxvi, xxviii–xxx, xxxiv, xxxix, 6, 10, 76, 171, 175–6, 227, 238, 254, 367, 372, 374, 378, II-8, 11–13, 18, 218, 232, 289, 429 Sperber, D. I-32–3, 39, 199, II-241, 243–4 Spiegel, A.D. I-312 Spinetti, F. I-358 Spiro, M.E. II-429 Spitulnik, D. I-73–4, 78, 82–3, II-411 Spivak, G.C. I-124, 237, II-60 Sponsel, L.E. II-291 Sprague, S.F. I-73 Spriggs, M. I-144 Spyer, P. I-428, 433–4, II-125 Srinivas, M.N. I-368, 374 Srinivasan, S. I-368 Srivastava, S. I-374, 376 Ssorin-Chaikov, N. I-275, 356 Stacey I-49 Stacey, J. II-378 Stacul, J. I-300 Stade, R. I-207, 523 Stafford, B.M. II-89 Stafford, C. I-409, 415, II-148 Stage, C.W. II-58, 65 Ståhlberg, P. II-415 Stallman, R. I-83 Stammler, F. I-275–6, 280 Stanton, G. I-74, 83 Staples, J. I-369 Star, S.L. II-121–2, 125, 407 Starn, O. I-468, 471, 478 Starrett, G. I-329, 332 Steckley, J. I-272 Steedly, M.M. I-300, 429, 434 Steedman, C. II-24, 26, 35 Stefansson, A.H. I-299 Stefansson, V. I-271 Steiner, C. I-59, 62, 67 Steiner, G. I-59, 62, 67 Steinfeld, E. I-413 Stengers, I. II-120, 124 Stephan, M. I-347 Stepputat, F. I-175 Sterelny, K. II-248 Stern, N. I-370 Stern, P. I-277 Stern, R. I-112 Sternberg, R. II-262 Sterne, J. I-81 Stevens, A. II-366 Steward, J. I-145, 476 Steward,J. II-313 Stewart, C. I-128–9, 242 Stewart, K. II-88, 347 Stewart, M. I-247, 299, II-349 Stewart, P. II-313 Stirling, A. II-281 Stivens, M. I-428, 526–7

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 572

Stocking, G.W. I-207–8, 213, 300, 531 Stokes, M. I-330 Stolcke, V. I-298–9, 502 Stølen, K.A. I-495 Stoler, A.L. I-123, 131, 297, 299–300, 432, II-11, 25, 32 Stolle-McAllister, J. I-493 Stoller, P. I-63–4, 235, 297, 317–18, 491, II-89, 106–7, 249, 263, 313 Stone, A.R. I-83 Storey, D. I-451 Stout, A. I-140–1, 143 Strachey, J. II-27 Straker, J. I-317 Strang, V. I-xxvii, 5–6, 447, II-18, 55, 112, 125, 185, 219, 312–14, 316, 320 Strathern, M. I-xxvii, 5, 11, 43, 45–7, 49, 57, 93, 96, 149, 156–7, 206, 217–18, 289–90, 299, 450, 452, II-11, 64, 95, 101, 103–5, 110, 121, 125–6, 130, 203, 212, 219, 250, 313, 323, 344–5, 354, 379, 383, 394, 428 Strauss, C. I-38, II-244 Strauss, S. II-241, 244, 322 Strawson, P.F. II-148 Street, B.V. I-251 Streicker, J. I-501 Striffler, S. II-300–1 Strobel, M. I-300 Stroeken, K. I-229–30 Strohschneider, S. II-249 Strong, P.T. I-268, 272, 465–7, 471, 499 Sturm, C. I-469 Stutzman, R. I-502 Subrahmanyam, K. II-263 Suchman, L. II-126, 402 Sud, N. II-335 Suenari, M. I-416 Sugimoto, Y. I-391, 394 Sui, J. II-245–6 Sullivan, G. II-385 Sullivan, S. II-287, 292 Šumi, I. I-299 Sundar, N. I-375 Sunstein, C. I-83 Susser, I. II-358 Sutlive, V. I-429, 435 Sutton, D.E. II-306–7 Sutton, J. II-252 Suzuki, H. I-393 Suzuki, N. I-391 Svarverud, R. I-415 Svašek, M. I-56, 59, 67, 299 Svoboda, M. I-299 Sweeney, A. I-250 Swinehart, K.F. I-73 Swyngedouw, E. II-313 Szabó, P. II-291 Szanton, S. I-356

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

NAME INDEX

Tabb, B. II-315 Taghioff, D. II-417–18 Takacs, D. II-287, 291–2 Takahashi, C. II-267, 269 Tamari, S. I-335 Tambiah, S.J. I-191, 232, 352, 372, 374 Tang, Y. II-249 Tanner, J. I-56, 67 Tansey, G. II-305 Tapper, N. I-344 Tapper, R. I-342, 350 Tapsell, P. I-455 Tarde, G. II-124, 126 Tarlo, E. I-77, 369, 375 Tauli-Corpuz, V. I-539 Taussig, M. I-61–2, 64, 126, 184, 191, 315, II-85, 89–90, 125 Tayler, D. I-207 Taylor, A.C. I-480, II-31 Taylor, H.A. II-24 Taylor, J. II-261 Taylor, L. I-446, II-31, 85, 92–7, 411 Taylor, P.M. I-434 Taylor, W.W. I-18–19, 65, 142 Tedlock, D. I-191, 467 Tedre, M. II-406 Tehindrazanarivelo, E. II-150 Teitel, R. I-113 Telles, E.E. I-501 TenHouten, W. II-244, 264 Tenhunen, S. I-369 Terrio, S. I-116 Teshome, H. I-67 Tett, G. I-93, 163 Thapan, M. I-369, 374 Theidon, K. I-114 Theodosiou, A. I-299 Thomas, A. I-228 Thomas, J.M. I-11, 138, 228, 247, 468–70, II-407 Thomas, K. I-125, 132, 252 Thomas, L.L. I-428 Thomas, L.M. I-317 Thomas, N. I-56, 61, 67, 207, 449–50, 453, 456, II-11, 125 Thomas, R. II-8 Thompson, C. I-47 Thompson, E.P. I-xxxv, 32–3, 36–8, 47, 122, 127, 140, 171, 279 Thompson, M. I-140 Thompson, N. I-279 Thomsen, C. I-139 Thomson, D. I-446 Thornton, R. I-232, 242 Thornton, T. II-313 Thrift, N. II-107, 110 Throop, J.C. I-22, 39 Thrower, J. I-188 Thuesen, S. I-278 Ticktin, M. II-345

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 573

573

Tiezzi, G. I-14 Tilley, C.Y. I-62, 148, II-106, 108 Tilley, H. I-310 Tinbergen, N. II-226–8, 231–2, 239 Tiravanija, R. I-58 Todd, H. I-111 Todorova, M.N. I-299 Toledo, V.M. II-291 Tolley, S I-469–70 Tomas, P. II-85 Tomasello, M. I-35, 37, II-243 Tonkin, E. I-124, 311 Tonkin, J.E.A. II-51 Tonkinson, R. I-446–7 Tooby, J. I-32, 39, 184, II-244 Toren, C. I-5, 10, 37–9, II-204 Torrens, H.S. I-208 Torry, W.I. II-330 Toumey, C. II-402 Touraine, A. I-172, 179 Toussaint, S. II-316 Towle, P. I-97 Townsend, C. II-291 Townsend, P. II-323 Traphagan, J. I-394 Traube, E.G. I-429 Traweek, S. II-119 Trefon, T. II-301 Tremlin, T. I-38 Trevarthen, C. I-39 Trevisani, T. I-353 Triandis, H.C. II-245 Trigger, B.G. I-139, 141, 144 Trigger, D. I-447 Trivers, R. II-230 Trouillot, M-R. I-95, 299 Tryon, D. I-425 Tsing, A.L. I-77, 115, 341, 433–4, II-125, 277, 279, 293, 343, 348 Tuan, Y.-F. II-313 Tupper, K. II-373 Turkle, S. I-81 Turner, B.S. I-526, 533, II-303 Turner, L. I-271 Turner, R. II-247 Turner, S.E. II-248 Turner, T. II-86, 411, 415 Turner, V. I-xxxii–xxxiii, 63, 125, 191, 237, 255, 271, 392, 526, 533, II-243 Tweed, T.A. I-189 Twine, F.W. I-501 Ucko, P.J. I-144, II-313 Umilta, M. II-269 Unnithan-Kumar, M. I-368 Upadhya, C. I-371, 373 Upawansa, G.K. II-188 Urla, J. II-416 Urry, J. I-511–13

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

574

Urton, G. II-27, 404 Uskul, A.K. II-252 Utas, M. I-317 Valentine, D.E. I-220 Valentine, J. I-392 Valentine, L.P. I-471 Valeri, V. I-429 Valverde, M. I-106 Van Beek, M. I-372 Van Beek, W. II-276 Van Binsbergen, W. I-75, II-315, 428 Van Bremen, J. I-388, 394 Van Damme, W. I-59–60 Van der Geest, S. II-358 Van der Linden, M. I-358 Van der Veer, P. I-232, 373, 376 Van Dijk, R. I-232, 235, 242 Van Dijk, T.A. I-15 Van Gennep, A. I-191, II-378 Van Hollen, C. I-368 Van Houtum, H. I-296, 299 Van Meijl, T. I-454–6 Vance, C. I-219 Vansina, J. I-251 Varela, F.J. II-250 Varisco, D. I-326 Vasavi, A.R. I-370–1 Vaughan, M. I-123, 313, 318 Vayda, A.P. I-432, II-166 Velie, A. I-466 Venbrux, E. I-60 Venkatesan, S. I-371, II-109 Venkatesh, S. II-370 Verdery, K. I-293–4, 299, 343–4, II-315 Verhoeven, J. II-407 Verkaaik, O. I-352–3 Vermeulen, H. I-299 Vertovec, S. II-11 Veteto, J.R. II-281, 290 Vickers, A. I-433 Vicziany, M. I-370, 372 Vidal, D. I-373 Vigh, H. I-317–18 Vigoya, V. I-502 Villar, D. I-479, 481 Vincent, J. I-170, 173, 490 Vines, G. II-383 Viramma I-370 Virtanen, P. I-296, 299 Visser, R. I-414, 427 Visweswaran, K. I-213, 249, 471, II-11 Vitebsky, P. I-275, II-275 Viveiros de Castro, E. I-60, 299, 475, 478–9, II-109, 429 Vogel, E.F. I-59–60, 390, 410, 413–14 Vogeley, K. II-243, 247 Volkman, T.A. I-429, 433 Von Kardorff, E. II-205

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 574

NAME INDEX

Vul, E. II-249 Wacquant, L. I-494, 501, II-263, 345 Wade, P. I-268, 488, 491, 497, 501–3, II-125, 362 Wadley, S. I-369, 378 Wagachchi, R. II-188 Wagmister, F. I-67 Wagner, M. I-63 Wagner, R. I-57, 63, 450, II-126, 428 Waldby, C. I-83 Wallace, A. II-396–7 Wallace, B. I-424, 432 Wallace, M.A. II-235 Wallace, T. II-321 Walley, C. II-379 Wang, Z. II-293 Waquant, L. II-358 Ward, H. II-342–4 Ward, P. I-76 Wardle, H. I-532 Wardlow, H. I-223, 450 Warne, R.R. I-187, 446 Warner, L. I-446, 497, 499 Warner, M. I-220, II-416 Warren, C.A.B. II-59, 65 Warren, J.F. I-430, 501 Warrier, M. I-376 Washburn, S. II-263 Wasserman, S. II-401 Wastell, S. I-75, 149, II-107, 109–10 Watenpaugh, K. I-335 Waterson, R. I-434 Watson, C.W. I-10–11, 48, 250, 256, 429, 433–4, 446 II-8, 15, 301 Watson, J.L. I-48, 250, 256, 408, 414, 429, 433–4, II-303, 306 Watson, R. I-48, 250, 256, 408, 414, 429, 433–4 Watt, I. I-251 Watts, D.C.H. II-305 Watts, M. II-160, 267, 277 Weakland, J.H. II-413 Weber, M. I-xxxix, 2, 158, 175, 183, 370, 429, 452, II-23 Weber, R.J. II-267 Weber, S. II-417 Webster, A. I-471 Webster, F. I-83 Webster, P. I-455 Webster, S. I-456 Wedeen, L. I-329, 350 Wedel, J. I-90, 95, 100–1 Weeks, J. I-220 Weibel, P. I-59 Weil, S.E. I-207 Weilenmann, M. I-105 Weinberger, E. II-95 Weiner, A. I-214 Weiner, J. II-85–6, 96, 154, 277, 318, 415 Weiner, M. I-392

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

NAME INDEX

Weingrod, A. I-333 Weinstein, J.M. II-163, 166 Weismantel, M. I-502 Weiss, B. I-229–30, 317 Weiss, M.G. II-355 Wells, M.J. II-301 Welsch, R. I-60 Wendel, T. II-370 Wendl, T. I-299 Wenger, E. I-36, II-126, 263 Wenger, G. II-65 Wenzel, G.W. I-274–5, 280 Werbner, P. I-528–9 Werbner, R. I-xxxix, 11, 227–8, 230, 233, 242, 247, 311, 341, 354, 523 Wergin, C. II-211 Werner, C. I-342, 344 West, H.G. I-242, 247, 299, 315, II-219, 296, 299, 315, 322, 332, 343–4, 348, 359, 367–9, 379, 381–4, 404–5, 407, 413, 415 West, P. II-279, 291–3 Westermann, G. II-244 Westermann, M. I-56 Weston, K. I-220, II-344 Wexler, B.E. II-245 Wheeler, M. II-248 White, B. I-432 White, J. I-138 White, L. I-132, 145 White, M. I-391–2, 395, 427 White, S. I-368 Whitehead, H. I-215 Whitehead, N.L. II-160, 378 Whitehouse, H. I-38, 191, II-219, 243–4 Whiteley, P. I-471 Whitley, E.A. I-83 Whitmarsh, I. II-358 Whitson, J.A. I-39 Whorf, B.L. I-20 Whyte, F. II-58 Whyte, M.K. I-409 Whyte, S.R. I-232, 234, 247, 317, 408, II-173 Wiessner, P. I-147 Wikan, U. I-434, II-348 Wilbert, J. II-366 Wilder, W. I-426, 432, 435 Wilk, R.R. I-78, 299, II-301, 306, 312, 411, 413, 415 Wilkins, D.E. I-465, 471 Wilkinson, J. II-304 Willard, D. II-230 Willerslev, R. I-274–5, II-86–7, 125 Willey, G.R. I-141–2 William, N. I-445 Williams, A.M. I-514–15 Williams, B. I-258, 432 Williams, L.B. I-237, 247, 258, 432, 514–15, II-87 Williams, N. I-444

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 575

575

Williams, R. I-74–5, 126, 157, 171, 237, 247, 258, 514–15, II-416 Willis, P. I-74, 76 Willmer, A. II-188 Willner, D. I-89 Willson, M. I-73 Wilmsen, E.N. I-312 Wilmut, I. I-42–3, 47, 53 Wilson, D.S. II-240 Wilson, E.O. I-48, II-290, 292, 294 Wilson, F.M. II-262–3, 265–6, 329 Wilson, G. I-xxxiii, 312 Wilson, J. I-499 Wilson, K. II-294 Wilson, R.A. I-xxvii, 5, 23, 99, 112–14, 175, 228, 247, 299, 317, 500, 533, II-218 Wilson, S. I-67, 394 Wilson, T. I-299, 514, 533 Wimmer, A. I-489, 502, II-343, 346 Winegar, J. I-324–5, 330, 335 Winer, M. II-313 Winson, A. I-489 Winter, I. I-58 Winzeler, R.L. I-432, 434 Wiradi, G. I-431 Wisnewski, J. II-314 Wittfogel, K. II-27, 314 Wittlin, A.S. I-207 Wolbert, B. I-58 Wolf, A. I-408 Wolf, D.L. I-431 Wolf, E.R. I-9, 125–6, 312, 479, 494, II-11, 207, 212 Wolf, L. I-294 Wolf, M. I-76, 249, 288, 290, 299, 408–9 Wolf, N. II-379 Wolf, P. I-471 Wolfenstein, M. II-413 Wolff, J. II-87 Wolff, L. I-294, 299 Wolin, R. I-172–3 Wolters, O.W. I-426 Wong, H.W. I-394 Wong, S.L. I-405, 407 Woodward, M.R. I-190, 429 Woolard, K.A. I-14, II-45 Woolgar, S. I-43, II-116, 119 Worby, E. I-232, 247 Worden, M. I-414 Wortham, S. II-44, 50 Wright, C. II-5, 94 Wright, S. I-56–7, 64–7, 90, 94, 96, 99, II-64 Wright Mills, C. I-98 Wu, D. I-412 Wulff, H. I-299 Wylie, A. I-138, 143 Wynne, B. II-276, 279 Xiang, B. I-516

5/18/2012 11:55:42 AM

576

Yadav, Y. I-372 Yamaguchi, M. I-389, 392, 394, 396 Yamashita, S. I-388–9, 394–6, 432 Yan, Y. II-16–17, 306 Yanagisako, S. I-45, 174, 216–17, 471 Yanagita, K. I-388–90 Yaneva, A. II-126 Yang, C.K. I-407 Yang, M.C. I-407 Yang, M.M-h. I-410, 412 Yanow, D. I-91, 95 Yarrow, T. I-148–9, 228, 247 Yearley, S. II-320 Yngvesson, B. I-106 Yoder, R. I-392 Yokoyama, H. I-412 Yonan, T.A. I-187 Yoshida, K. I-242, 247 Yoshida, T. I-392, 394 Yoshino, K. I-394 Young, D. II-149–50 Young, E. I-544

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Names.indd 576

NAME INDEX

Young, I.M. I-470, II-316, 319 Young, K. I-214 Young, W.C. I-330 Yuval-Davis, N. II-342 Zaloom, C. I-93, 163, 492 Zaman, B.Q. I-345 Zamindar, V. I-358 Zanca, R. I-348 Zaslavsky, C. II-404 Zeitlyn, D. II-81 Zenger, B. II-250 Zerner, C. I-428, II-294 Zhang, J. II-250 Zheng, Y. II-103 Zhu, Y. II-245 Zijlmans, K. I-59–60 Ziker, J. I-276 Zimmerman, L. I-466, 468, 471 Zižek, S. I-331 Zolo, D. I-527 Zureik, E. I-329

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Subject Index

INTRODUCTORY NOTE References such as “178–9” indicate (not necessarily continuous) discussion of a topic across a range of pages. Wherever possible in the case of topics with many references, these have either been divided into sub-topics or only the most significant discussions of the topic are listed. Because the entire work is about ‘social anthropology’ the use of this term (and certain others which occur constantly throughout the book) as an entry point has been restricted. Information will be found under the corresponding detailed topics.

AAA, see American Anthropological Association Aboriginal people I-443–7, 473 aboriginal title I-277, 544 abstractions I-xxxii, 145, 328 abuse II-49, 124, 203, 301, 368 academic anthropology I-197–9, 202–4, 443 accents II-41, 44–5, 78 accommodation I-29, 429, 431, 447, 517 accountability II-6, 133, 135, 137, 360 actants II-117–18, 125 activism I-81, 83, 172, 241, 375, 470, 474, II-342, 360, 384, 435 ethnic I-479 human rights I-112, 114 indigenous I-269, 499, 528 political I-80, 216, 466 activist anthropology I-468, 471 activists I-107, 112, 123, 172, 178, 220, 353, 466 activists, transgender II-382–3 actor-network theory (ANT) I-57, 96, II-5, 104–5, 107, 109, 115–18, 121, 126 scholars II-117–19, 121, 125–6 actors I-xxxv, 10, 58, 60, 90, 95–6, 100, 115, II-48, 73, 115–18, 121–2, 124, 191, 304, 431 political I-234, 350, 473 rational I-91–2 social I-10, 51, 57, 59, 230 adaptations I-62, 343, 493–4, 498, 543, II-306, 312, 323, 368, 416 addictions II-47, 368, 370 adharma I-243 administration I-93, 238, 422 Bush I-95, 97, 326

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 577

advocacy II-195, 280, 316, 357, 360, 384 aesthetics I-xxxvi, 14, 56, 58–9, 66, 204–6, 208, 394 cross-cultural I-57–8 Afghanistan I-97, 99–100, 267, 325–6, 335, 343–5, 350, 354–8, II-135, 137, 369 Afghans I-345, 354–6 Africa I-109, 227–8, 241–2, 266, 291, 308–10, 313–18, 540, II-8, 11, 136, 159, 162, 168, 202, 379–80 East II-169, 173, 175, 354 sub-Saharan I-4, 266–7, 308–9, 423 West I-130, 132, 250–1, 311, 317, II-158, 201–2, 205, 211, 277, 368 African anthropology I-266, 308–19 societies I-308–9 women II-379–81 Africanist anthropology I-266, 308–10, 312–13, 315, 317–18 Africans I-xxxiii, 199, 230, 236, 312–13, 315–16, 488, 502 aftermath II-135, 219, 329–37, 434 ageing society I-394, 415 agency I-10–12, 20, 22, 56–8, 66–7, 95–7, 224, 229–32, II-3–6, 103–8, 117, 170, 177–8, 185, 263, 314 human II-3, 165, 314, 320 of individuals I-96–7, II-360–1 moral I-11, 232 non-human II-3, 117, 120, 392, 408 social I-10, 57 agentive approaches II-104, 106 turns II-103–4 agents I-20, 90, 96, 177, 200, 215, 231, 233, II-26, 105, 236, 432

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

578

SUBJECT INDEX

agricultural knowledge II-280, 302 production I-313, 406 agriculture I-47, 139, 316, 366, 370, 377, 407–9, 427, II-55, 185, 278, 292, 299–302, 304, 317, 319 estate I-427, 431–2 organic II-282, 302 agrobiodiversity II-287, 291, 294, 434 aid agencies II-168, 170, 177–8 aid, international II-159, 168, 361 Alaska I-270–2, 274–5, 277, 279–80, 470 northern I-271, 274 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) I-277 alcohol II-365–6, 369 Aleuts I-274 Algeria I-325 alienation I-214, 526 alliances I-147, 243, 272, 275, 451, 475, 493, 534, II-117–18, 121, 125–6, 172, 243, 277, 280–1, 288 allusions II-28, 77–9, 429 Amazonia I-472, 474–6, 478–80, 538, II-96, 367 ambivalence I-xxx, 47, 52–3, 240, 298 self-other I-290, 294, 296 America, Latin, see Latin America American Anthropological Association (AAA) I-45, 449, 499, II-84, 92, 135–6, 138, 218 statement II-84–5 American Indians I-465–7, 470–1, 473, 543 Americas, indigenous, see indigenous Americas amniocentesis II-122–3, 126, 355 analytics of power I-173–4 anatomy II-219, 227, 239, 248, 262–3 ancestor worship I-393, 412 ancestors I-2, 32, 39, 329, 453, 468, II-28, 48, 122, 237, 368 Andes I-63, 472–9, II-21, 27–9, 31 animations II-48–9, 81, 90, 394 animism I-190, 412, 429–30 anonymity II-133–4, 178, 184 ANT, see actor network theory anthropological archaeology I-147–8 imagination I-xxxii, 272–3, 465, 479–80 anthropology/anthropologies/anthropologists see Introductory Note and detailed entries antiquity I-129, 139, 242 anxieties II-73, 94, 141–3, 149, 275, 320, 322, 333 Aotearoa see New Zealand I-453–7 apartheid I-xxxiv, 114, 177, 309, 312, 500 applied anthropology I-xxxv, 89–90, 444, 453, II-181, 185, 197, 402 appropriation I-56, 60–3, 112, 160, 222, 372, 467, II-277, 316 Arab world I-332–5, see also Middle East Arabian Peninsula I-325–6, 333 archaeological

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 578

evidence I-139–40, 144, 480 record I-144, 146 sites I-145–6, 149 archaeologists I-3, 20, 143–5, 147–9, 155, 433, 468, 480, II-154–5, 262 American I-145, 147 British I-141, 144, 148 archaeology I-xxv, 3, 9, 11, 56, 60, 62, 138–49, II-243, 262, 270 anthropological I-147–8 British I-143–4 culture-historic I-142, 146 New Archaeology I-143, 145–8 arché II-23, 36 archipelagic Southeast Asia I-422–36 architecture II-108, 404, 408 archival II-10, 14, 22, 28, 134 documents II-27, 31 research II-4, 22, 31 archives I-xxxviii, 5, 34, 130, 132, 204, 332, 335, II-4, 80, 82, 132, 396 colonial I-132, 252, II-25, 33 as field event II-21–37 General II-21, 25, 29 moiety II-21, 28–30 Arctic I-266, 270–83, 543 peoples I-270–3, 278 societies I-272, 274, 278 area studies I-265, 334–5, 356 Argentina I-114, 472, 475, 479 art I-56–67 historians I-59, 199, 457 history I-56, 62, 66, 156, 198, 200, 205 Maori I-455–6 visual arts I-59–60 artefact-oriented anthropology II-102, 110–11 artefacts I-20, 34, 59–60, 140–1, 143–5, 148, 159, 204–6, II-5, 101–12, 118, 236, 238–9, 265, 268, 404 cultural I-36, 468 artifice I-49, 198, 449 artists I-57–8, 62, 64–5, 201, 277, 279, 407, 415, II-88, 97–8 artworks I-57–9, 335 artworlds I-56, 58–9, 61 global I-59–60 ASA, see Association of Social Anthropologists ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) I-415, 424–5 Asia I-11, 109, 141, 255, 287, 411, 415, 453, II-9, 11, 136, 202, 277, 359 archipelagic Southeast I-422–36 Central I-267, 325–6, 340, 342–9, 351–8 East I-223, 356, 389, 396, 406, 425 South I-4, 223, 267, 270, 340, 358, 366–78, 389, 424–5 Southeast II-246, 277 Southwest I-340–58, 366 Asians II-246, 252

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

aspirations II-4, 75, 294 assemblages II-87–8, 104, 117–18, 121, 275, 279 assimilation I-29, 61, 234, 466, 490–1, 541 reciprocal I-233–4, 241–2 Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) I-xxv–xxvii, xxxix, 2, 5–6, II-101, 125, 130, 133–4, 136–8, 170–1, 218, 423–4 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) I-415, 424–5 assumptions cultural I-272, 529 theoretical I-16, 221, 274 Western I-216, 218, 221, 357 Athapaskans I-274, 281 atherosclerosis II-122, 126 atrocities II-155–8 audiences I-13–14, 23, 79, 202–3, 205, 248, 255, 525, II-73–5 audit culture I-96, II-3, 64, 130, 141 audits, and ethics II-130–9 Australasia I-270, 443–57 Australia I-59, 65, 207, 268, 415, 443–9, 451, 453–4, II-210, 316, 318, 320 Austronesians I-424–5, 427 authenticity I-59, 129, 222, 252–3, 257, 294, 394, 434 autobiography I-183, 253, 259, 434 autonomy I-xxxviii, 2, 5, 28, 237, 277, 445, 495, II-27, 133–4, 144–5, 288 personal I-223–4 autopoiesis I-28–9, 37 ayahuasca II-367–8 Aymara I-472, 479 babies I-31, 47, 50–1, II-7, 26, 380 newborn I-28, 31 Bahamas I-511 Bahrain I-325, 333 Bai I-412 Bali I-252, 428–30, 432–4 Balkans I-295 banality of power I-230, 236 Bangladesh I-250, 267, 366, 368–9, 371, 373, 376–7 barbarism I-139–40 battles II-24, 155–6, 158, 164–5, 236, 279, 403 bazaars I-156, 158, 342, 357 Beijing I-406, 413–15 being there II-39, 57, 60–2, 65 Belfast I-177–8 beliefs I-16, 21, 23, 39, 255, 277–8, 330–1, 429 religious I-32, 145 betrayal II-145–7, 177 Bhuj II-332–5, 337 binary comparison II-201–2, 212 biocultural diversity II-291, 294 biodiversity I-280, II-319 conservation II-219, 286–95, 434 bioethics II-356–7 biographies I-96, 156, 204, 328–9, 434, 468, 474, 531, II-17–18, 69, 102, 361

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 579

579

biological anthropology I-xxv, 158, 396, 433, II-243 control, age of I-42, 47, 50, 52–3 differences I-214–16 diversity II-286–7, 290–1, 294, 323 facts I-44, 49 identities I-45, 51 reproduction I-44–6, 216 biologists II-94, 225–6, 229, 232, 236, 288, 292 evolutionary II-229, 231, 236 biology I-11, 27, 30–2, 34, 36–7, 42–6, 48, 215, II-219, 225, 231, 247–8, 252, 290, 384, 404 evolutionary II-232, 234, 433 human I-33, 43–4 intuitive II-235, 237 biomedicine I-3, 11, 42–53, 93, II-173, 353–6, 359, 435 biophilia II-292 biosciences I-3, 42–53, II-353, 355, 357–8 biosociality I-43, 47–52 biotechnology II-132, 402 birds II-92, 121, 415 bisexuality I-178, 219–20 black Civil Rights movement I-490, 498–9 blackness I-496–9, 501–2 blades II-155, 266, 407 boats II-55, 57, 106, 175 bodily health II-303–4 integrity II-381, 385 states II-122–3 body modifications II-355, 377–81, 384 politics II-383–4 shopping I-516, 521 transformations II-378, 380, 383–4 Bolivia I-472–3, 477, 488, II-21, 28, 30, 33, 317, 323, 367 border crossings II-120–2 borderlands I-349, 514 borders I-xxxiv, 296, 298, 326, 341, 349–50, 513–14, 516, II-162, 170, 174, 320, 335, 347, 357 botany II-404, 408 Botswana I-230, 242 boundaries I-xxv, xxx, 12, 81–2, 190–1, 425, 532, 544, II-14, 51, 122, 145–6, 149, 220, 330, 335 communal I-368, 373 national I-110, 115, 355, 376, II-321, 357 political I-80, 341, 356 boundary objects II-120–2, 126, 293, 407 brain I-28, 32–3, II-219, 243–5, 247–8, 250, 252, 261–7, 269, 379 development II-248, 251 research II-243, 433 sciences II-219, 243–4, 247, 252, 433 brain–hand connection II-261, 264 Brazil I-xxvii, 62, 159, 472, 474–5, 494–8, 501–2, 544 Britain I-xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxiii, 142, 146–7, 298–9, 423, II-16–17, 108, 303, 315, 380

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

580

SUBJECT INDEX

British anthropology I-xxv–xxvi, xxix–xxxvii, xxxix, 89, 142–3, 206, II-8, 70, 211–12 British archaeology I-141, 143–4, 148 British India I-130, 227, 325, 344, 352, 357, 373 British Library II-24–5, 80 broadcast communications II-413–14, 416 broadcasting II-413, 415–16 Buddhism I-412–13 bureaucracies I-93, 95, 101, 108, 158–9, 329, II-36–7, 132, 137, 162, 333, 361, 418 Burma I-423–4 Bush administration I-95, 97, 326 Bwiti II-368 CAD (computer-aided design) II-395 cameras II-71, 84, 86–90, 94–5, 102, 191, 195 Cameroon I-162, 230–1, 242, 315 Canada I-12, 270–2, 275, 277, 279, 471–3, 498–9, 518–19, II-63, 316, 330 northern I-274–5, 279, 541 cannabis II-369, 372 capital I-xxx, xxxiv–xxxvi, 108–9, 158, 200, 214, 274, 514, II-28, 33, 292, 332, 335–6, 341, 345 cultural I-17, 96, 393 capitalism I-155–6, 158–9, 161, 164, 171, 214, 292–3, 415, II-207, 212, 220, 424, 427 industrial I-158, 316, 332 one-world I-155, 159 capitalist societies I-xxxiii, 156 carbon capture II-278–9 careers I-123, 161, 201, 207–8, 251, 279, 474, 518–19, II-168, 170, 180, 243, 289 Carnival Strippers II-86–7 carpenters II-261, 266–7, 282 castes I-228, 237–9, 243, 367–72, 391, 529 catastrophe I-232–3, II-282, 330–1, 335, 337 categories cultural I-89, 106, 217–18, 333, II-40, 44 gender I-46, 219, 222, 224 political I-123, 179, 480 racial I-268, 488, 501 social II-236–7 cattle I-311, 314, II-35, 232 caves II-30–1, 33 Cayman Islands I-511–12, 515–17 CBD, see Convention on Biological Diversity Central Asia I-267, 325–6, 340–58, 366 Islam I-344–8 post-Soviet I-340, 347–8, 355 Central Intelligence Agency, see CIA Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) I-61, 123, 141, 222, 448, II-125 change climate I-266, 273, 280–1, 538, 540, 542–3, II-124, 202, 205, 219, 280–1, 286–7, 319, 322 economic I-278, 280, 378, 431 environmental I-268, 281, 313, 423, 431 historical I-94, 110, 258, 291 political I-222, 315–16

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 580

social I-xxxiii, 23, 81, 98, 121, 129, 272, 310–12 technological I-138, 140 channels II-37, 250, 266 chaos I-11, 222, 257, 317, II-24, 329–30 Charcas II-28, 36 chemistry II-391, 393, 408 Chicago School I-186, 512, 514 children I-19, 33–5, 37–8, 50–1, 371, 410–15, 516, 519, II-7, 32, 168–9, 173–4, 177–9, 288, 344, 349 China I-155, 159, 172, 267, 355, 396, 405–16, 424, II-103, 303–6, 369, 424 cities I-413–14 mainland I-406–7 Chinese I-50, 249, 405–9, 413, 415–16, 425 Han I-405, 411–12 Christianity I-177–8, 315–16, 318, 348, 412, 429 Christians I-176–7 churches I-124, 177–9, 193, 412, 532 churinga II-30–1 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) I-97, 99–100, 356, II-135 circulation I-10, 57, 66, 115, 147, 217, 251, 332, II-50, 70, 102, 134, 343, 411, 416 circumcision II-379–80, 383 circumpolar North I-266, 270–83 cities I-115, 158–9, 278–9, 291, 354–5, 409–11, 413–15, 512–13, II-43, 248, 318, 329, 345, 424, 429 Chinese I-413–14 global I-115, 513 major I-116, 407, 414 North Indian I-373 northern I-279, 497 world I-533–4 citizens I-94–5, 106, 108–9, 129–30, 229–30, 240, 357, 517, II-25, 30, 161, 175, 335, 337, 346, 348 world I-523–4, 535 citizenship I-15, 96, 106, 108, 175, 222–3, 354–5, 494 civil rights I-107, 213, 466 society I-xxxvi, 98, 139, 237, 343, 393, 431, 545 wars I-175, 177, 309, 311, 317, 345, 372–4, 497, II-62, 155–6, 161–2, 165–6, 299 civility I-11, 232, 234, 355, 534 class conflict I-xxxii, 164 class structures I-222, 455, 490, 501 classes I-122–3, 217–18, 368, 370, 393, 490–1, 496–500, 528–30, II-9, 16, 59, 131, 143, 147, 163–4, 235 middle I-217, 376–7, 392, 491 political I-240, 494 social I-11, 21, 496 working I-241, 393, 492 classic ethnographies I-312, 344 classical Greece I-291–2 classifications I-xxxiii, 125, 139–40, 215–16, 276, 288, 314, 446, II-23–4, 39, 204, 362, 366–7, 392–4, 398 climate I-xxvi, 98, 281, II-282, 313 clinical practice II-355–6, 435 clinical trials II-354, 356, 358

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

clinics II-169, 176–7 clitoris II-381, 385 cloning I-42–3, 47, 52–3 clothing I-77, 83, 160, 369, 410, 414 co-production II-79, 185, 192 coca II-367, 372 cognition I-xxxvi, 5, 32–4, 36, II-234–41, 243, 433 motor II-267–8 cognitive anthropology I-27, 29, 32 modules I-32, 35 processes I-29, 33–4, 63 schemes I-29, 37–8 sciences I-27, 32, 34, 187, II-241, 243–4 systems I-32, 215 coherence I-xxx, 9, 90, 101, 255, 425, II-48, 54–5, 205, 239 Cold War I-100, 121, 155, 286–7, 293, 295, 340–2, 344–5, II-346 collaborative approaches II-183–5, 187, 189, 191–3, 195, 197, 199–200 research I-60, 467, II-184, 186, 188, 196–8, 200, 248 work I-157, 165, 282, 433, 467 collective identities I-354, 530 memory II-35, 237 Colombia I-495, 500–1, II-367, 372 northern II-91 colonial archives I-132, 252, II-25, 33 contexts I-131, 144, 311 era I-109, 308, 312 governments I-xxv, 455, 544 history I-199, 236, 308, 325 India, see British India legacies I-227, 233–4 period I-236, 308, 310 powers I-78, 237, 279, 287, 452 rule I-123, 237, 310–11 states I-230, 234, 237, 242, 352, 425, 430 colonialism I-xxxiii, 89, 108, 110, 130–2, 138, 171, 308–9 settler I-465, 471 coloniality of power I-488, 496 colonies I-xxx, 109–10, 235, 287, 325, 342 colonization I-189, 275, 278, 316, 445, 454, 496, 544 colonizing structure I-309–10, 313 coltan wars II-425, 428 commercial interests II-321–2, 373 commercial research organizations (CROs) II-358 commodities I-xxxiv, 2, 10, 49, 156, 160, 162, 432, II-74, 102, 302, 344, 373 commoditization II-276, 315, 358, 434 commoditize II-312, 316 common ground I-xxx, 107, 122–3, 204, 433 communal boundaries I-368, 373 politics I-178, 372–3, II-332 violence I-237–8, 373 communicational media II-220, 411–12, 416, 418

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 581

581

communications broadcast II-413–14, 416 mass II-183, 413 technologies I-80, 297, II-195, 220, 416–17 communism I-370 primitive I-272, 477 communities I-xxxiii–xxxiv, 17–18, 21–2, 81–3, 94–6, 110–11, 331–3, 523–6, II-80, 133–5, 164–6, 183–5, 188–9, 191–8, 219–20, 230–1 ethnic I-353, 490 imagined I-xxxvi, 130, 496 indigenous I-273–4, 280–2, 468, 502, 539, 542–3, II-220, 289, 315–16, 321, 400, 405 Islamic I-331–2 local I-xxxviii, 113–15, 157, 273, 280–2, 431, 449, 452, II-6, 72, 77, 82, 186, 193, 196–8, 360 northern I-273, 278, 280 quilombo I-479, 501 religious I-10, 191, 368, 373 rural I-xxxiii, 232, 267, 391, 406, 455, 493 community video II-194 comparative analyses II-163, 201, 206–7, 211–12 ethnography II-173, 235 historians I-3, 237 methods II-201–13, 232 compassion II-251, 345 compensation II-333–4, 356 complex societies I-2, 250, 344, 476 complexities I-xxxv, xxxix, 78, 274, 328–9, 344–5, 356–8, 501, II-118, 175, 195, 197, 226, 235, 241, 264 compliance I-113, 218 complicity I-130, 204, 236 compromises II-146, 168, 171–2, 179, 418 computed tomography (CT) II-25, 355 computer-aided design (CAD) II-395 computers II-30, 35–6, 101, 234, 334, 400–2, 405 condensed symbols I-92, 100 conflict zones II-5, 137 research in II-153–66 conflicts I-xxxiii, 110–14, 161, 176, 276–7, 295, 352–3, 392–3, II-5, 32, 135–6, 153–66, 171–2, 236, 316, 337 armed II-155, 165 class I-xxxii, 164 ethnic I-275, 353 political I-267, 351, 367, 371 religious I-130, 352 social II-82, 161 violent I-342, 345, 352 connivance I-230–1, 242 consciousness I-10, 28, 36–9, 105, 174, 229, 237, 243 individual I-113, 530, 535 legal I-105–8 subaltern I-123, 243 conservation I-198, 278, 281 policies I-276 conservation, biodiversity II-219, 286–95, 434 consultants I-95, 268, 378, 443, 519

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

582

SUBJECT INDEX

consumers I-xxxvi, 159 consumption I-75–7, 82–3, 156–60, 165, 199–200, 221–2, 376, 414, II-219, 280, 305, 312, 331, 365–6, 368–9, 371–3 mass I-75, 77, 83 contextualization I-xxx, 10, 94, 125, 310, 371, 490, II-4, 40, 47, 50, 73, 81, 188, 199 continuity I-xxvi, xxxii, 29–30, 37, 141, 275, 289, 444–5 control I-20, 44, 47, 106, 110, 273–4, 477, 544, II-35, 57–8, 168–9, 192, 314, 316, 365–6, 398 environmental II-281 social I-14, 105, 204, 234, 329, 413 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) II-286, 292 conventions I-111, 113, 197, 212, 255–6, 282, 342, 453 convergences I-159, 174, 425, 489, 494–5, 512, 514–15, 517–18 conversion I-236, 316, 318, 348, 429, 475 conviviality I-230–1 coordination, hand–eye II-266–7 Copperbelt I-311–13 corporate power I-93, 98, 492 corporations I-108, 158–61, 163, 165, II-37, 134–6, 244, 323, 424 transnational I-452, 538, 541, 543–4, II-305, 316, 321 corruption I-240–1, 349 cosmopolitan knowledge I-528–9 cosmopolitan law I-524–5 order I-524–5, 532 rights I-524 world I-523–35 cosmopolitanism I-xxxvi, xxxix, 4, 268, 433, 523–35 cosmopolitans I-xxxvi, 342, 353, 523–30, 532–3 counter culture I-171 countryside I-243, 329, 390, 407, 415, 481 courts I-xxxv, 97, 105–7, 113, 121, 189, 208, 235 creation of scientific knowledge II-119–20 creativity I-13–14, 56, 62–4, 66, 116, 133, 219, 278, II-4, 70, 95–6, 105–7, 121, 148, 373, 383 cultural I-478, 497 CRESC, see Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change crime I-xxxv, 96, 107, 114, 391, 489, 496, 501, II-372 organized II-201–3 crises I-73–5, 78, 82, 163, 198, 231, 317–18, 492 crisis of representation I-73, 75, 83, 198, 235, 466 critical anthropology I-309, 314, 491 critical race theory I-131, 467, 469 CROs, see commercial research organizations cross-cultural aesthetics I-57–8 communication I-22, 454 comparison I-212, 423, II-241, 401 interviewing II-65 psychology II-245–6, 252, 433 research II-245–6

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 582

cross-disciplinarity I-82, 422–3, 433 CT, see computed tomography cults II-158, 161 cultural analysis I-16, 190, 334, II-125, 402 anthropology I-6, 23, 30, 325, 330, 489, II-51, 62, 138, 154, 211, 217, 235–7, 241 appropriation I-61, 63, 222 areas I-271, 293, 326, 341 artefacts I-36, 468 assumptions I-272, 529 capital I-17, 96, 393 categories I-89, 106, 217–18, 333, II-40, 44 centres I-412, 467, 469–70 change I-61, 141, 222, 448 construction I-30, 38, 527, II-153, 382 creativity I-478, 497 differences I-xxxiv, 75, 126, 212, 217, 312, 315, 425, II-65–6, 144, 198, 245–8, 288–9 diversity I-352, 538, II-243, 248, 287–8, 291, 293–4, 319–20, 322, 433 ecology I-272, 449, 474, 478 flows I-60, 375, 451 forces I-xxxvi, 11, 42, 98 fundamentalism I-298, 532, 534 heritage I-268, 291, 297, 466, 468 history I-124–6 homogeneity I-258, 342, 451, II-343 identities I-159, 268, 274, 466, 530, 538, II-195, 246, 313, 337, 414 integrity I-110, 524 knowledge I-16, 51, 99, 184, 434, 532, II-40, 42, 44–5, 137, 369 life I-256, 389, 446, II-27, 103 logic I-49, 311, 391, 452 materials I-61–2 meaning I-31, 125, II-39, 93–4, 378 models I-29–30 neuroimaging II-246–8 neurophenomenology II-252 neuroscience II-245 politics I-235, 241–2, 376, 430, 434, 456, II-359, 379 of everyday life I-228, 233 practices I-22, 77, 80, 108, 112, 141, 376, 443, II-147, 290, 318, 405 popular I-74, 83 processes I-91, 112, 126, II-51, 226 production I-80, 334, II-11, 411 products I-42, 59, II-106 property I-268, 466–7, II-101, 108 psychology I-27, 30, 38 relativism I-10, 111, 183, 252, 527, II-203, 379 relativity II-191, 194, 199 rights I-277, 545 sovereignty I-466, 470 specificities I-xxxii, 46, 333, 527, II-289, 323 studies I-72–84, 189 survival I-274, 278, 282, 543

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

tourism I-391 traditions I-330, 528, II-237, 404 traits I-140–1, 328 turn I-91, 125, 156, 158 values I-332, 342, 344, 351 Cultural Revolution I-405, 407, 409, 411–12 culture contact I-xxxiii, 131, 311 culture-historic archaeology I-142, 146 culture wars I-184, 532 cultures I-30–4, 36–8, 42–6, 48–9, 62–3, 124–6, 141–3, 215–19, II-4, 39, 49–50, 69–70, 132, 246–9, 286–90, 382–4 digital II-416–17 indigenous I-61, 268, 271, 275, 342, 443, 488, II-403, 408 legal I-105–8 local I-160, 432 material I-11, 19, 75–8, 145, 147–9, 202–3, 205–6, 208, II-101, 107–8, 112, 155–6, 164, 247, 262, 367–8 minority I-395, 412 national I-43, 107, 349, 493 political I-234, 236, 279, 423, 430, 433 popular I-72–4, 77–8, 82, 98, 223, 237, 251, 414 writing II-11, 14, 101, 131, 154, 426 curators I-198–9, 201–3, 205, 207–8 customary law I-xxxii, 266, 357, 429, 431 cyborgs II-357, 425 dams I-142, 375, 410, 541 Darwinian approach II-225–7, 229, 231–2, 239 data gathering II-12, 184, 236 decolonization I-xxxiii, 121, 171, 242, 278, 311 decomposition I-317–18, 340, 354 Deep Ecology II-428–9 deforestation I-427, 543, II-294 degradation environmental I-273, 467, 538–9, II-136, 319–20 identity I-234–5, 241 deictic field I-17–18 deictic terms I-15, 17 deixis I-14–15, 17 demarcation I-106, 544 democracy I-xxxvii, 98, 109, 113–14, 165, 168, 175, 241 racial I-497–8, 500–1 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) II-76, 161, 170 demographics I-xxxiv, 5, 329, 472–3 demography II-220, 341–9 demonstrative field I-17 Denmark I-96, 270, 474 depoliticization I-169, 314 depth II-14–16, 84, 88, 94, 138, 266 descendants I-43, 243, 453, 457, 479, 540–1, II-429, 434 descent I-146, 310–11, 425, 443, 475, II-235, 239, 424 descriptions, thick II-93–4, 153, 155, 165 design II-61, 88, 159, 176, 210, 267, 333, 391–3 factors II-210–11 intelligent II-236, 240

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 583

583

designers II-393–4 destinations I-256, 428, 453, 491, 515 tourist I-511, 515, 520 destruction II-37, 105, 165, 289, 292, 318, 322, 423–4 developing countries II-292, 300–1, 304, 359 development brain II-248, 251 cultural II-264, 291 economic I-277, 282, 311, 412, 431, 456, 469–70 energy I-280–1 historical I-59, 521 human I-18, 37, 44 international II-169–71, 192, 292–3, 300, 380 interventions I-169, 179 projects I-169, 314 resource I-273, 280, 282 social I-139, 142 studies I-3, 9, 154–65, 367 developmental history I-33–4 dharma I-240, 243 diagrams II-26, 126, 188 dialogue I-66, 89, 91, 105, 116, 121–2, 127, 281, II-14, 39–40, 115, 131–3, 243, 407 political I-281–2 diasporas I-268, 353, 377–8, 433, 523, 528 Gujarati II-333 Soviet I-354–5 diet I-313, 414, II-305, 307 differences biological I-214–16 cultural I-xxxiv, 75, 126, 212, 217, 312, 315, 425, II-65–6, 144, 198, 245–8, 288–9 gender I-215, 221, II-377–9, 381, 383, 385 racial I-500, 503 differentials, power I-61, 214, II-38, 59, 192 differentiation I-29, 34, 37–8, 217, 290, 430, 529 diffusionism I-140–1, 143 digital culture II-416–17 media I-73, 80, 82 revolution I-155, 161 technologies II-79, 81, 417, 436 video II-91, 96 dignity I-525, 530 Dinka I-232–3 disasters II-198, 219, 329–37, 347, 434 anthropology of II-329–30, 335 natural II-219, 330–1, 336, 345, 354 discoveries I-44, 48, 50, 99, 139, 141, 229, 273, II-24, 65, 75, 106, 119, 217, 240–1, 243–4 discrimination I-178, 487, 503, 515, 539, 541 racial I-106, 487, 498 discursive practices I-61, 218–19 diseases II-23, 126, 175, 179, 263, 341–2, 355, 361 tropical II-168, 174–5 disjunctures I-214, 219, 236–7, 396, 514, 519 disorder I-11, 228, 372 displacement I-46, 230, 314, 374, 513, 541, II-431

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

584

SUBJECT INDEX

disputes I-115, 162, 252, 255, 276, 281, 331, 414, II-43, 49, 121, 228, 276 dissociation II-147–8, 251 distant comparisons II-202–4, 206, 210, 212 distinctiveness I-xxx–xxxi, 5, 9, 269, 347 distribution I-xxxviii, 23, 36, 38, 147, 160–1, 164, 358, II-89, 142, 219, 301, 335, 366, 368, 396–7 diversity I-110, 123, 265, 267, 270, 293, 368–9, 528, II-15, 109, 124, 185, 193, 202, 287–8, 293–4 biocultural II-291, 294 biological II-286–7, 290–1, 294, 323 cultural I-352, 538, II-243, 248, 287–8, 291, 293–4, 319–20, 322, 433 DNA II-226–7 domestic schools of anthropology I-268, 475 spaces I-90, 148, 480 violence I-113 domination I-xxxviii, 126, 173–4, 230, 241, 243, 274, 368–9 Dominicans I-500, 516 donation, organ I-43, 45, 52–3, II-355, 359 DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) II-76, 161, 170 dreams I-xxxii, 127, 129, 282, 446, II-22, 27, 65, 188 drivers II-227, 373 drug users II-370–2 drugs I-159, II-173–5, 220, 251, 358, 365–73, 435 anthropology of II-220, 365–73 duties I-185, 229, 391–2, 395, 524 dynamic systems approaches I-38 dynamics I-16, 29, 37, 96, 238, 316, 351, 449 developmental I-494 political I-276, 345, 351 earthquakes II-219, 331–7, 345 EASA, see European Association of Social Anthropologists East Africa I-147, 310, II-169, 173, 175, 354 East Asia I-223, 356, 389, 396, 406, 425, II-306 Eastern Europe I-95, 109, 291, 293, II-343, 434 eco-tourism I-542 ecology II-219, 238, 275, 277, 282, 289, 302, 304 cultural I-272, 449, 474, 478 natural II-302, 304 political II-160, 277, 279 economic anthropology I-154–9, 163–5, 370, II-103, 280 change I-278, 280, 378, 431 development I-277, 282, 311, 412, 431, 456, 469–70, II-219, 286–95, 434 inequalities I-60, 267, 315, 378 institutions I-115, 157, 162 liberalization I-367, 371, 374, 377 life I-155, 165, 279 reforms I-267, 407, 410, 412, 414 relations I-126, 158, 431, 451 economics I-xxxiv, 2–3, 9–10, 72, 91–3, 98, 154–65, 315, II-115, 119, 162, 172, 208, 228–9, 277, 295 mainstream I-92, 155–6, 162

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 584

primitive I-xxxii, 156 economies I-xxxv, 6, 143, 154, 156–8, 162–5, 343, 377, II-17, 277, 286, 317, 333–5, 346, 348, 434 global I-131, 280, 470, 513, 538, II-18, 35, 193, 220, 300, 305 informal I-155–6, 158–9, 268, 431, 491, 494, II-429 moral I-311, 314, 369 national I-159, 242 political I-xxxiii, xxxvii, 34, 82, 163–4, 216–17, 346–7, 355–7, II-25, 160, 172, 219, 275, 277–8, 330–1, 360–1 scriptural I-127–8 subsistence I-143, 268, 309, 423, 427, II-316, 318 urban I-370–1 economists I-xxxii, xxxvii, 10, 92, 155–8, 160, 162–5, 370, II-158, 162, 176, 229, 293 ecosystems II-276, 286–7, 290–1, 293–5, 304, 319–20, 322 Ecuador II-26, 288, 292–3 education I-11, 36, 90, 98, 377–8, 391–2, 412–14, 515–16, II-162, 218, 230, 238, 247, 280, 301, 355 effectiveness II-84, 174, 336, 359–60 effervescence II-156, 161, 163 efficacy II-23, 106, 112, 371 Egypt I-79, 168, 296, 324–5, 333, 512, II-27, 37, 126 elders I-35, 121, 467, II-42, 76–7, 163, 201–2, 408 elections I-168, 179, 233, 477–8, II-25, 29 electronic media II-74, 401, 413 electronic mediation II-413–14 elites I-93, 101, 129, 132, 191, 236–7, 497, 526–7, II-249, 275, 321, 361, 367, 404 political I-236, 277, 346, II-424 emancipation I-232, 532 embedded interviews II-55–6 embeddedness II-4, 54–7, 60–5, 76, 302 social II-56, 304, 370 embedding I-17–18, 61 embodied knowledge II-195, 247 embodiment II-235, 248, 250–2, 306 gender/sexual difference II-377–85 emerging technologies II-220, 252, 400–5, 407–9, 435 emigration I-373, 516 emotions I-38, 125, 368–9, 434, 446, II-86, 154, 248, 250, 262, 337, 413 empathy I-22, 37, 257, 328, II-16, 212, 228, 384, 392, 397, 435 empires I-xxx–xxxi, xxxiii–xxxiv, 227, 287, 292, 423, II-23, 25, 225, 346, 426 Inca I-476–7 empirical questions II-58, 117, 228–9 empirical research II-244, 355 empiricism II-120, 403 employers II-5, 135–6, 344 employment I-178, 252–3, 344, 371–2, 435, 501, 515, 517, II-301, 345, 402 crisis II-170, 423 empowerment I-95, 198, II-193, 195, 381 enculturation II-219, 246–7, 249–51 sensory II-248

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

energy development I-280–1 enforcement I-91, 112–13, 115, 533, 544 engineered materials II-391, 393–4 engineers II-33, 64, 118 Enlightenment I-138–9, 200, 525, 527, 530, 533, II-88, 366, 428 ENP, see European Neighbourhood Policy environment I-32–3, 63–4, 273–4, 313–14, 375, 377, 394–5, 415, II-88, 105–6, 186, 219, 251–2, 261–2, 264, 294 material II-248, 312–13, 320 and society II-275–82 environmental anthropology II-277, 279–82 change I-268, 281, 313, 423, 431, II-282, 320, 322–3, 354 conditions I-143, 476, 478 degradation I-273, 467, 538–9, II-136, 319–20 factors II-188, 251–2, 294 protection II-277–8 environmentalism, global II-277, 279, 434 epidemiology II-172–3, 176, 180, 356, 365 lay II-354 epigenetics II-355, 358 epistemologies I-9, 11, 27, 37, 131, 133, 251–3, 526, II-27, 30, 39, 45, 55, 153, 196, 288 equality I-178, 223, 330, 345, 390 eroticized genders I-221–2 essentialism I-449, 529, 532 estate agriculture I-427, 431–2 Estonia I-96, 299 ethical challenges II-130, 165, 287 criteria II-5, 142 guidelines II-6, 130, 132–3, 138, 179, 218 responsibilities II-136–7 ethics I-5, 65, 174, 192, 202, 212, 533, II-3, 5–6, 64, 150, 158, 171, 291, 356 of anthropology/anthropological II-5, 141–2, 149, 383 anthropology of II-138, 141–2 and audit II-130–9 committees II-133–4, 137, 171, 356, 360, 435 ethnic activism I-479 communities I-353, 490 conflicts I-275, 353 groups I-233, 298, 353, 406, 435, 465, 490, 497–8, II-62, 231, 346, 367–8 identities I-228, 233, 352–3, 392, 412, 433, II-367 ethnicity I-42, 218, 233, 267–8, 312–13, 351–2, 432, 496–7 ethnicization I-353 ethnoarchaeology I-143–7 ethnobotany II-287, 404, 408 ethnocentrism II-66, 305, 379 ethnocomputing II-404–6 ethnographers I-xxx, xxxviii, 142–3, 155–7, 159–60, 213, 235–6, 328–9, II-4, 11–13, 15–17, 40–1, 47–52, 56–60, 63–5, 145–7

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 585

585

ethnographic analogy I-143–4 analyses I-36–7, 115, II-110, 160, 203, 435 approaches I-10, 81, 124, 132, 429 authority I-75, 467, II-54, 65, 86 contexts II-126, 301 coverage I-422, 435 data I-213, 254, 431, 476 description I-xxix, 3, 294, 435 evidence I-22, 144, II-38–9, 207 fieldwork I-3, 65, 74, 208, 356, II-11, 40, 109, 205–7, 211, 267 filmmaking II-84–5, 94 interviews II-4, 54–66 material I-143, 271, 289, II-81–2, 166, 367 methods I-115, 149, 156, 291, II-8, 38–9, 41, 43, 45, 49, 51, 131–2 particularism I-xxxi, xxxiii practice II-85, 101, 111, 132–3, 184 record I-252, 310, II-6, 163, 199 research I-xxxvi, 6, 112, 290, 395, 454–5, 457, 466, II-5, 16–17, 25, 48, 77, 101, 124, 173–4 traditions I-312, 388 work I-105, 223, 256, 272, 327, 334, 345, 366–8, II-82, 149, 206, 218, 359 ethnographies, historical II-306, 396 ethnography I-xxxviii, 78, 131–3, 252–4, 428–9, 431–2, 445–8, 469–71, II-14–18, 101, 106–9, 130–2, 154–5, 392, 400–3, 433 comparative II-173, 235 experimental II-87, 98 ethnoknowledge II-401, 404 ethnomathematics II-404–5, 435 ethnomedicine II-404, 408 ethnoscience II-39–40, 281 EU, see European Union Eurasia I-267, 270, 340, 356 Europe II-17, 25, 136, 305, 343–4, 346, 368–9, 378 anthropology of I-286–7, 297, 299 Eastern I-95, 109, 291, 293 replacement I-4, 286–99 southern I-292–3, II-424 European anthropology I-272, 288–9, II-426 colonization I-189, 454, 496 context I-266, 286–8, 294, 423 Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) I-296 regions I-286–7, 289–90, 292, 294–5, 297–8 European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) I-xxvii, 289 European Union (EU) I-xxvi, 96, 108, 286, 295–6, 517, 520, II-44, 169, 300, 423 policies I-296–7 everyday life I-105–6, 174, 228, 231–2, 234–5, 328–9, 348–9, 356–7, II-30, 47, 70, 88, 142, 341, 348, 367 cultural politics of I-228, 233 politics of I-172, 235

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

586

SUBJECT INDEX

evidence II-11–13, 38–9, 51, 162–3, 172–4, 249, 359–60, 404–5 archaeological I-139–40, 144, 480, II-373 ethnographic I-22, 144, II-38–9, 207 evolution I-xxvi, 33, 36, 38, 48, 140, 142, 258–9, II-184, 191, 225–6, 228, 232, 234–41, 244–5, 263 social I-139–40, 145, 148, 405, 443 theory of II-226–7 evolutionary biologists II-229, 231, 236 biology II-232, 234, 433 explanations II-226–8, 240 history II-226, 232, 234–5, 240, 264 processes II-229, 234, 236 psychology I-32, 38, II-231 theory II-219, 227, 230, 239, 243 evolutionism I-125, 140, II-207 excavations I-142–3, 149 exchanges I-10–11, 92, 126, 147, 163, 214–15, 217, 514, II-60, 85, 102, 108, 122, 266, 289, 411–12 exclusion I-106, 115, 123, 192, 213, 317, 332–3, 456, II-12, 25, 184, 290, 346–7, 384–5, 435 exegesis I-192, 473, II-39, 76–7, 414 exemplary ethnography II-14, 16, 18 fieldworks II-15 exhibitionary practice I-198–9 exhibitions I-60, 64, 197–202, 204–7, 456 exotic ethnography I-155, 164 experimental ethnography II-87, 98 practice, and knowledge II-115–26 procedures I-33–4, 43 spaces II-118–19 visual anthropology II-91, 98 experimentation II-70, 93, 97, 157, 373, 397 experiments I-65–6, 114, 254, II-5, 60, 82, 93, 95–6, 115, 119–20, 122 expert knowledge II-39, 51, 126, 185, 412 extraction II-32–3, 46, 275, 279, 302 extractivism II-279, 293 extraversion I-266, 308–9, 315, 317–19 face-to-face interaction II-40, 59–60 Facebook II-417 factories I-161, 173, 366–7, 391, 431, II-348–9, 396 fair trade II-280, 304–5, 307 faith I-xxxvi, 178, 188–9, 193, 241 Falun Gong I-413 familiarity II-13–14, 16–17, 73, 78, 86, 172 families I-44–5, 214–15, 232–3, 274–5, 392–3, 408, 424, 516, II-9, 13, 17, 146, 157, 211, 344–5, 348 family members I-18, 114, 519, II-211, 348 famine II-307, 329–30 fans II-21, 33, 36–7 fantasies I-219, 530, 533, II-48, 59, 149, 239, 428 FAO, see Food and Agriculture Organization

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 586

farmers I-313, 370, 389, 431, 493, 516, 544, II-55, 64, 301, 304–5, 314, 342, 360, 372–3 fathers I-18–19, 140, 410, 477, 516, II-59, 425 federal government I-98, 465, 469–70, 499–500 federations I-176–7, 524 feedback II-80, 125, 161, 266, 416 feeling, structures of I-126, 128 female body II-377, 379 female genital modification II-379–80, 384 femininity I-123, 212, 214, 217–18, 221, 223, 414, II-377, 380–1, 383 feminism I-13, 122, 124, 131, 155, 165, 171, 217–20, II-8–10, 66, 344, 357, 379 feminist anthropologists I-45–6, 123, 171, 219, 471, II-11 movements I-123, 490 Ferghana Valley I-343, 350 fertility II-275, 357, 382 fertilizers II-276, 302, 318, 324 festivals I-178–9, 237, 239, 391, II-70, 72, 369 fieldsites II-103–4 fieldwork I-4–5, 34, 132, 235, 265, 356, 378, 389–90, II-4–5, 8–18, 39–42, 131, 142–8, 175–7, 205–7, 209–10 discipline I-249–50 ethnographic I-3, 65, 74, 208, 356, II-11, 109, 205–7, 211 multi-sited II-13, 18, 64, 131, 134, 204 since 1980s II-7–18 village II-10, 15, 17 fieldwork-based ethnography I-154–5 fieldworkers I-235, 265, 474, II-12, 15, 39–40, 43, 45, 51, 143 Fiji I-114, 451 films II-71, 75, 84–7, 92–4, 97, 108, 195, 413–15 fingers II-7, 110, 262, 265–6 finished products II-69–70, 74 Finland I-270, 277, 283, 290, 295 first language II-244, 249 First World War I-132, 141, 155, 243, 295, 325, II-346 fishing I-267, 274–6, 279–81, 391 fitness II-226–31, 238 floods II-33, 133, 320, 345 Flores I-428–9 flowers II-28–9, 37, 101, 289 pressed II-29, 31, 37 flows, cultural I-60, 375, 451 fluid identities I-230, 242 fluidity II-72, 349, 435 folklore I-127, 474 food I-5, 35, 81, 129, 256, 274, 311, 434, II-29, 44, 170, 219, 249, 279, 289, 434 anthropology of II-299–307 memories II-306–7 miles II-304–5 processing II-291, 300–1 security II-277, 279, 301–2, 307, 319 sovereignty II-305, 307

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

supplies II-302–3, 307 systems II-291, 300, 302–7 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) II-300–1 foodways II-302–3, 305–7 forearm II-262, 265–6 foreign anthropologists I-388, 393–5, 495 policy I-100, 487 workers I-511 temporary I-517–18 foreskins II-379–81, 385 forests II-157, 186, 249, 276–7, 288, 318 rain II-277–8 forward panic II-156–7, 164 Foucauldian theory I-xxviii, 123, 171, 173–4, 216, 314, 447, II-22, 26, 121, 124, 143, 293, 359, 427–8 four-field anthropology I-141, 146 fragmentation II-87, 123, 218 social II-353, 369 France I-147, 172, 176, 185, 286, 290, 423, 474, II-24–5, 210, 237–8, 263, 407 free trade II-300–2 freedom II-26, 46, 142, 149, 413 freshwater II-318–19 friends II-56, 135, 191 friendships II-27, 72, 148, 369 functional explanations II-227–8, 231 functionalism II-236, 238, 240, 365 structural I-xxx, 1–2, 44, 140, 142, 171, 311, 443 functions I-xxix–xxx, 28–9, 32, 35, 159, 202–3, 207–8, 330, II-42–3, 226–7, 234, 236, 238, 268, 367–8, 392–3 fundamentalism II-320 cultural, I-298, 532, 534 funding agencies II-143, 176–7, 181, 186, 197–8, 356, 360, 371 galleries I-59, 198–9, 201, 203–4, II-98 games I-19, 157–8, 326, II-16, 155, 365, 404, 406 gaming I-466, 470 gangs I-317, 490 gays I-177–8, 219–21 GDAT, see Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory gender I-45–6, 106–7, 123, 191, 212–25, 367–8, 391–2, 410, II-10, 16–17, 59, 123, 131, 220, 357, 381–3 categories I-46, 219, 222, 224 differences I-215, 221 differences, embodiment II-377–85 eroticized I-221–2 expression II-379, 382, 384 identities I-217–18, 220–1, II-377–8, 382 politics I-368–9, 377, II-357 relations I-123, 126, 144, 213–14, 216–17, 292, 344, 453, II-45 historical specificity I-214–15 social construction of I-215, 220, 495 studies I-212–25, 368

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 587

587

systems I-212–13, 216 third I-218, 220 gendered bodies II-378, 383 meaning II-381, 384 persons I-215–16 genealogy I-xxxi, 92, 169–71, 274, 335, 391, 409, 412 generalizations I-xxxi, 18, 328–30, 334, II-160 genes I-38, 43, 49, 51, 53, II-226–7, 229, 244, 248, 251–2, 287, 291, 355 genetic modification II-276, 278 geneticists I-50–1 genetics II-225, 244, 354–6, 363 new I-48, 51, II-353 genital modifications II-379–80 genomics II-132, 355 genres I-11–13, 16, 64, 124, 255–6, 259, II-4, 14, 39, 42–3, 49, 70–1, 74–8, 431 geographical information system (GIS) II-194–6 geographical regions I-34, 333 geography I-72, 271, 310, 340, 405, 424, II-88, 132, 277 Germany I-xxvii, 354–5, II-156–7, 226, 282, 346 gestures II-40–1, 58, 71–2, 262, 267 gifts I-6, 155–6, 164, 217, 409, 450, II-72, 102, 426 GIS (geographical information system) II-194–6 global artworlds I-59–60 cities I-115, 513 climate change I-266, 542–3, II-282 crises II-202, 204, 212 cultures II-369, 373 economy I-131, 280, 470, 513, 538, II-18, 35, 193, 300, 305 environmental discourses II-278, 281–2 environmentalism II-277, 279, 434 food system II-300, 302, 304–5, 307 food trade II-219, 300–1 health II-220, 354, 359 legal pluralism I-108, 111 markets I-309, 376, 452, 534, II-358, 392, 434 Global Environmental Facility (GEF) I-542 Global North II-301, 303–4, 307 religions I-309, 351 scale I-241, 344, 456, 527, 532 Global South II-212, 279, 300–5, 358, 424, 434 globalization I-xxxvi–xxxviii, 75, 221–2, 267–8, 275–6, 280–1, 376, 512–14, II-11, 28, 51, 54, 60, 300, 302–3, 319–20 age/era of I-317, 449, II-54, 60, 64–5 globalized world I-61, 265, 451, II-195 glottography II-27 gods I-32, 186, 232, 235, 243, 495, II-48, 62, 332, 373 gossip II-32, 36, 48–9, 70 governance I-90, 94–7, 101, 109–10, 115, 170, 255, 327, II-26, 275, 321–2, 359, 372 technologies of I-101, 469 top-down II-30 government agencies II-135, 197, 372

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

588

SUBJECT INDEX

governmentality I-95–6, 175, 212, 374, 469 neoliberal I-xxxvii, 95, 492, 495 governments I-89–93, 95–6, 98–101, 160–1, 174–5, 242–3, 412, 541–4, II-25, 36, 135–7, 321, 323, 336, 342–3, 367–8 colonial I-xxv, 455, 544 federal I-98, 465, 469–70, 499–500 Indian I-240, 375 nationalist I-412 tribal I-466, 469 Grand Cayman I-511, 515 grandchildren II-228, 230–1, 349, 435 Great Lakes II-281 Greater Middle East I-326, 335 Greece I-132, 254, 291–2, II-263, 306 Greeks I-139, 258, 291–2, 294, 523–4, II-424 Greenland I-270–2, 274–5, 277–9 Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) I-xxxiv, 76, 83, 125 group interviews II-56, 65 groups I-xxv–xxvi, 121–3, 329–32, 424–5, 427, 443–6, 538–41, 543–4, II-22, 72, 138, 161–3, 188–9, 211–12, 219–20, 247 cultural I-424, 432 ethnic I-233, 298, 353, 406, 435, 465, 490, 497–8, II-62, 231, 346, 367–8 indigenous I-277, 456, 466, 502, 541–3, 545 local I-162, 412, 455 small II-37, 157, 211 social I-xxix, 23, 159, 350, 496, II-62, 117, 121, 186, 237, 290, 347 growth I-74, 158, 367, 370–1, 413, 415–16, 493–5, 497–8, II-239, 269, 302, 312, 317, 319, 331, 348 economic I-416, 465 rapid I-39, 42, II-301, 331 Guangxi I-411 Guatemala II-288–9 Guinea II-281 Gujarat I-369–70, 373, 375, II-332–7 habitats I-538, 540–2, II-57, 63, 275, 319, 322 hackers II-36–7, 416 hair II-26, 378–9 hairstyles II-22, 378–9 hallucination II-89, 330, 368 hallucinogens II-365–6, 368, 371, 373, see also drugs Han Chinese I-405, 411–12 hand–eye coordination II-266–7 handedness II-264 hands II-261–7, 269–70 dominant II-263, 266 handtools II-219, 261–2, 264, 266–9 harmony I-353, 391–2, 478 HCI, see human-computer interaction health I-44, 158, 318, 429, 446, 452–3, 455, 539, II-9, 168, 174–5, 275–6, 313–14, 318–19, 353–5, 357–9 bodily II-303–4 care II-359–61

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 588

global II-220, 354, 359 inequalities II-358, 360, 435 mental II-353, 358, 372–3 professionals II-355, 359, 361 public I-90, 370, 377, 492, II-353–4, 356, 368, 380, 435 hegemony I-21, 76, 97, 108, 114, 174, 231, 237 heritage, cultural I-268, 291, 297, 466, 468 heroin II-369–70 heterogeneity I-127–8, 267, 341, 345, 355, 392, 395, II-78, 104, 237, 246, 383 hierarchies I-98, 122, 159, 171, 235, 238, 240, 518, II-26, 134, 161 Hindu congregational orders II-334 Hindu Nationalism I-372–3 Hindus I-176, 239, 373, II-329, 332 historians I-48, 65, 121–6, 129–32, 155, 159, 251–2, 352, II-21–2, 24, 32, 43, 48, 102, 207, 384–5 comparative I-3, 237 cultural I-125–6 social I-122, 125–6 subalternist I-237, 243 historic patterns I-276, 354, 428 historical accounts I-289, 293, 373 actuality I-11, 27–8, 34 anthropology I-126, 128, 133, II-24, 207 change I-94, 110, 258, 291 comparison II-207, 210 construction I-62, 493, II-379 contextualization I-xxx, 371 depth I-162, 268, 273, 325, 331, 503 ethnography II-306, 396 memory I-317, 470, II-55, 304 economy approaches I-122, 126 processes I-28, 30, 33, 37–8, 43, 109, 125–6, 139, II-11, 69, 425 roots I-335, 393 sources II-11, 14 specificity I-31, 36, 148 gender relations I-214–15 historicism I-131, 389 historicity I-126, 128–9, 229, 234, II-22, 30–1, 418 historiography I-xxix, 123, 236, 252, 310, II-60, 241 history I-xxxiv–xxxvi, 2–4, 28–9, 121–3, 125–33, 170–1, 184–6, 309–13, II-11, 22–5, 30–1, 46–8, 69, 94–6, 125–6, 330–1 of anthropology I-203, 310, 443, 448, 521, II-38, 198, 208 colonial I-199, 236, 308, 325 cultural I-124–6 evolutionary II-226, 232, 234–5, 240, 264 official I-127–8 oral I-122, 124, 132, 281, 317, 433, II-21, 35, 146 of religions I-185, 190, 192 social I-122, 124, 127, 157, 212 world I-154–5, 165, 513 HIV/AIDS I-315, 317, II-16, 91, 170, 176, 179, 342, 370, 384

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

holidays, working I-515, 517–18, 520 holism II-12, 14, 18, 86 Homo economicus I-157, 164 homogeneity II-189, 246 cultural II-343 homogeneity, cultural I-258, 342, 451 Hong Kong I-406–9, II-210 hormones II-381–3 horse racing II-16–17 hospitality I-330, 524–5, 533, II-21, 148 hospitals II-157, 169, 177, 179–80, 332, 336 hotels I-511, 517, 519 households II-49, 157, 188, 307, 323 houses I-128, 248, 414, 480, 516, 519, II-7, 10, 63, 132, 191, 270, 332, 345 housing I-158, 377, 413–14, 494, 501, II-266, 270, 281, 333 how-type questions II-234 HRAF, see Human Relations Area Files HTS, see Human Terrain System programme huddled masses I-490 human action II-103, 392 agency II-3, 165, 314, 320 beings I-20, 27–8, 34, 38, 67, 148, 523, 530, II-117, 123, 149 unified model of I-10, 27–9, 36–8 biology I-33, 43–4 bodies I-14, 216, 535, II-264, 366–7 –computer interaction (HCI) II-401–2 condition I-xxvi, 53, 268, 480, 523, 535, II-93, 164, 218, 329 development I-18, 37, 44 –environment relations I-275, 277, 283, II-219, 312, 323, 434 experience II-11, 123–4, 299, 413 genes I-49, 53 Human Genome Project I-48–9 historical actuality I-11, 27 history I-139, 199, 249, 406, 424, II-207, 305–6, 414 life I-xxxi, xxxv, 42, 90, 170, 189, 265, 523, II-102, 107, 123, 148, 286, 313 Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) II-207–8 human rights I-99, 105–9, 111–14, 132, 172, 175, 533, 538–42, II-132, 134, 138, 316, 345, 365, 372 activism I-112, 114 discourses I-357, 414 international I-10, 533 system I-109–10, 113, 116 Human Rights Council I-539–40 human sciences I-xxxix, 27, 130, 148, 164, 489, II-235, 241, 412, 414, 416 human sociality, see sociality human societies I-21, 48, 140–1, 143, 145, 149, 170, 213–14, II-27, 212, 217, 286 Human Terrain System programme (HTS) II-135–6, 138–9 human world I-272–3 humanism I-163, 533, II-108, 123, 234

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 589

589

humanitarian industry II-345, 348 humanities I-xxvi, 3, 6, 138–9, 188, 198–9, 524–7, 530, II-103, 106, 110, 137, 154, 185, 204–5, 237 Hungary I-290, 299, II-230–1, 349 hunting I-139, 274–6, 279–81, 426–7, 447 hybrid political spaces I-349, 470 hybridity I-62, 234, 268, 433, 503, 513, 523, 531–2, II-104, 343 human-technology II-357 political I-233–4, 241 Hyderabad I-352 hydrological cycle II-313, 319 hyper-consumption II-331, 336 hyphen, impossible/untenable II-347–9 ICC, see International Criminal Court; Inuit Circumpolar Council Iceland I-270, 273, 280, 286, 296, 299 iconography II-28, 96 iconophobia II-85, 92–3 identification I-76, 138, 143, 163, 222–3, 239, 329, 354–5, II-30, 85, 121, 202, 211, 268, 305, 329 identities I-xxxiii–xxxiv, 16, 80–3, 105–6, 218–23, 230–6, 267–8, 469–70, II-43–5, 59, 121–2, 146, 148–9, 236–7, 289–90, 417–18 biological I-45, 51 collective I-354, 530 cultural I-159, 268, 274, 466, 530, 538, II-195, 246, 313, 337, 414 disciplinary I-3, 186, II-112 distinctive I-159, 273 ethnic I-228, 233, 352–3, 392, 412, 433, II-367 fluid I-230, 242 gender I-217–18, 220–1, II-377–8 individual I-49, 160 issues of I-434, 454 Japanese I-389, 393 mestizo I-501–2 multiple I-231, 236 national I-62, 314, 343, 348–9, 351, 353, 388, 493, II-306, 331 native I-390, 467 new I-61, 81, 278, 503 personal I-218, 347 racial I-488, 501 religious I-348, 352, 357 sexual I-220–1, 223, II-220 social I-13, 18, 21, 42, 147, 160, 242, 274, II-41, 56, 58–60, 147, 301, 307, 378 subcultural II-378 transnational I-4, 355 tribal I-236, 330 identity degradation I-234–5, 241 formation I-22, 100, 354, 452, 469 politics I-171, 179, 221, 233–4, 241, 279, 352–3, 469 critiques I-490, 524

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

590

SUBJECT INDEX

ideologies I-xxxi, 15, 19, 22, 59, 79, 273, 530–2, II-45–7, 60, 64, 142, 199 language II-4, 38, 40, 42, 44–7, 49–52, 64 legal I-108 national I-374, 500, 503 nationalist I-493, 501–2 referentialist II-46 of temporality II-48 idioms I-49, 231, 239, 428–9, II-78, 121, 125, 343–4, 348–9, 407, 431 illusions I-xxxvi, 216, 258, 310, 530, 533, II-87, 92, 144, 250, 378, 400 image production II-85, 87, 89 images I-xxxiv, 65, 67, 75, 98, 273, 341–2, 501–2, II-5, 7, 21–2, 60–1, 80–1, 84–93, 95–7, 415 imaginary occult I-234, 241 transnational I-222–3 imaginary, alternative II-279 imagination I-221, 223, 231, 257, 449, 528, II-4, 26, 35–6, 79, 90, 92, 149, 270 anthropological I-xxxii, 272–3, 465, 479–80 imagined communities I-xxxvi, 130, 496 IMF, see International Monetary Fund imitations I-61–2, 64, 256 immediacy II-4, 60, 63, 65, 306, 413 immediation II-417, 428 immersion I-2, 4–5, 358, II-4–5, 63, 73, 153, 248 total II-4, 7–18 immigrants I-94, 268, 354, 453, 490–1, 516, II-25, 305 immigration I-xxxv, 172, 395, 491, 500, 512, 517–19, 528, II-138, 342–3, 346, see also migration impressionism II-87–8, 92 in-depth interviews II-56, 251, 366, 370 in vitro fertilization (IVF) I-46–8, 52–3 Inca Empire I-476–7, II-25, 27 inclusion I-200, 280, 282, 317, 325, 333, 469, 488, II-123, 141, 288, 429 incomes I-393, 410, 432, 473, II-180, 300–2, 356 incommensurability II-356, 416, 425 incontinence II-148–9 incorporation I-62, 426, II-185, 193, 268, 366, 414 indexes I-15, 18, 57, 105, 447, 452–3, II-41, 43, 45, 102, 143, 232, 367 indexical meaning I-15, 18, 21 indexical values I-16–18 indexicality I-12, 14–16, 18, 21–2, II-40, 42–3, 51 India I-130, 155, 227–8, 236–8, 352, 366–9, 371–4, 376, II-93, 109, 137, 171, 177, 335, 369, 423–4 British I-130, 227, 325, 344, 352, 357, 373, II-25 government I-240, 375 north I-371–3, 389, II-333 village I-238 western I-95, 373, 375, II-219, 332 indigeneity I-372, 433, 496–7, 499, 501–2, 540–1, II-86, 290 indigenous activism I-269, 499, 528 Americas I-465–81

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 590

communities I-273–4, 280–2, 468, 502, 539, 542–3, II-220, 289, 315–16, 320–1, 400, 405 cultures I-61, 268, 271, 275, 342, 443, 488, II-403, 408 groups I-277, 456, 466, 502, 541–3, 545, II-405, 409 knowledge II-220, 282, 404, 406–9 media II-85, 415 North America I-268, 465, 471 organizations I-473, 542–4 peoples I-109–10, 270, 274–9, 281–2, 465–6, 479, 498–9, 538–45, II-207, 403, 408 rights I-109, 266, 278, 495, 539–40, 545, II-280, 316 voices I-184, 190, 193, 470 world I-538–45 indigenousness I-432, 539–41 individual consciousness I-113, 530, 535 transferable quota (ITQ) I-280 individualism I-230, 315–16, 407, 415, 533 methodological I-xxxv, xxxix, 2 individuals I-107–8, 113, 157–60, 218–20, 252–4, 524–5, 530–2, 544–5, II-37, 55, 72, 82, 133, 135, 163, 228–9 agency of I-96–7, II-360–1 individuation II-347, 395–6, 398 Indonesia I-106, 158, 259, 424–6, 429, 431–3, 435, II-61 industrial revolution II-300, 345, 396–7, 435 industrialization II-299–300, 302–3, 317, 335, 345, 418 industrialized foods II-303–4 industry I-89, 192, 277, 280–1, 376–7, 410, 414–15, II-278, 303, 323–4, 329, 332, 335, 393, 396 inequalities I-98, 105, 108, 164, 169, 171, 177, 489–90, II-78, 132, 142, 186, 192, 304, 346, 358 economic I-60, 267, 315, 378 health II-358, 360, 435 social II-124, 342 infants I-28, 31–3, II-47, 145, 150 infection II-168, 173, 176, 384 influence cultural II-401, 403 political I-185, 474 informal economy I-155–6, 158–9, 268, 371, 431, 491, 494, 538, II-342–3, 429 informants I-50, 74, 78, 169, 213, 253, 256–7, 354, II-5, 56–8, 101–2, 109–12, 131, 134–5, 154–6, 432–3 information technologies I-222, 415, II-355, 361, 392, 402 inheritance II-225–6, 232, 247 Inner Mongolia I-411, 413 innocence II-30, 149, 334, 336 innovations I-xxxviii, 115, 139–40, 193, 282, 311, II-70, 121, 361, 393, 396, 406, 416–17 inscriptions II-22, 27, 119, 378–9, 382 insecurity I-91, 98, 495–6 insiders I-10, 154, 378, II-131, 135, 184, 195 institutionalization I-423, 434, 516

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

institutions I-xxv–xxvi, xxx–xxxii, 89–90, 98, 100–1, 157, 173–4, 254–7, II-4, 13, 16, 45–7, 116–17, 236, 238, 411–14 economic I-115, 157, 162, II-303 international I-112, 115, 132, 519, II-302 legal I-105–8, 115–16, 190 political I-115, 165 religious I-243, 390, II-236 social I-21, 44, 155, 198, 202–3, 220, 255, 257, II-236 traditional I-58, 345 tribal I-469 instruments of power I-90, 94, 174 integrity, bodily II-381, 385 integrity, cultural I-110, 524 intellectual backgrounds I-356, 496–7 histories II-218, 346, 418 property rights (IPR) I-543, II-82, 172, 408 traditions I-xxviii, 162, 189, 286–8, 292, 294–7, 474 intelligence II-137, 238, 263 intelligent design II-236, 240 intelligibility I-202, 212–13, 225 intensity II-10, 15, 145, 173, 317 intensive farming II-300–1, 324 intentional worlds I-30, 38 intentionalist theory I-21–2 intentionality II-62, 103, 105 intentions I-20–2, 96, 224, 239, 250, 253, 256, 259, II-16, 26, 41, 105, 117, 126, 134, 262–3 interactions, social II-45, 57, 70, 211, 220, 247, 264 interdisciplinarity I-xxvi, xxxiv, 3, II-3, 218–19, 357, 361 interfaces II-121, 125, 172, 179–80, 217, 373 material II-392–3 intermediaries I-112, 238, 310–11, II-10, 118 international agencies II-169, 171, 174, 368, 372 aid II-159, 168–9, 361 development II-169–70, 292–3, 300 development agencies II-171, 192, 380 human rights I-10, 533 institutions/organizations I-xxvi, 112, 115–16, 132, 519, 543 law I-10, 97, 105, 108–11, 116, 527, 533 NGOs II-170, 177–9 political actors I-281, 341 political regions I-273, 281 students I-517–18, 520 trade I-90, 428, 525, 534 International Criminal Court (ICC) II-177–8 International Monetary Fund (IMF) I-539 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) II-289, 294, 319 International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) I-474 Internet I-59, 72–3, 80–3, 155–6, 160, 355, 432, II-63, 101, 145, 177–8, 181, 280, 402, 416–17 interpretive approaches II-40, 160

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 591

591

interpretivist approaches I-431, 434–5 intersections II-89, 123, 132, 138, 205, 212, 407–9, 417–18 intersex people II-380, 382, 385 intersubjectivity I-28–9, 34, 36–7, 39, 229, 231, II-142, 397, 414 interview process II-58–9 interviewees II-7, 42, 55–6, 59–60, 62–5 interviewers II-55–60, 63, 65 interviewing II-38, 42, 55–8, 64–5 ethnographic II-55, 64–5 semi-structured II-57–8 interviews II-4, 13, 21, 33, 40, 42, 54–65, 84 embedded II-55–6 ethnographic II-4, 54–66 group II-56, 65 in-depth II-56, 366, 370 one-to-one II-56, 61 unstructured II-57–8, 60 intimacy I-223, 238, 317, 366–7, 369, 448, II-145, 150, 171, 307, 435 intonation II-41, 71 intricate relations II-219, 262 introversion I-266, 308–9, 312, 318 intuitive biology II-235, 237 intuitive psychology II-235, 237 Inuit I-271–5, 277–80, II-196, 249 Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) I-282 inventions II-50, 121, 234, 394, 425 investment II-4, 206, 230–1, 331, 334, 371 IPR, see intellectual property rights Iran I-100, 325–6, 332–5, 341–3, 354, 357 Iraq I-99, 325, 341, 350, II-135–7, 165, 212 Ireland II-324 irony II-42, 144, 147, 244, 400, 423 anthropological II-150 irrigation II-318–20, 324 Islam I-61, 100, 168–9, 177, 190, 259, 266–7, 315, 318, 324–6, 328–32, 344–8, 353, 356–7, 411–13, 423, 429–30, II-136, 380, see also Muslims anthropology of I-191, 318, 331–2, 346 Central Asia I-344–8 public I-347–8 Islamic communities I-331–2 Middle East I-326, 332 reform I-346, 348 tradition I-331, 334 Islamization I-346, 357 Israel I-296, 325, 333, 335, 354–5 Italy I-96, 252, 292, 325, II-24, 63, 305 itan II-76–7 ITQ, see individual transferable quota IUCN, see International Union for Conservation of Nature IVF, see in vitro fertilization IWGIA, see International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

592

SUBJECT INDEX

Jamaica I-516, II-372 Japan I-6, 189, 207, 258, 267, 388–96, 406, 415–16, II-168, 212 elites II-74 foreign anthropology of I-388, 394–5 National Museum of Ethnology I-389, 396, 475 rural I-390, 393–4 Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) I-394, 396 Japanese anthropologists I-389, 393–4, 396 Java I-425, 428–31, 434, II-10 JAWS, see Japan Anthropology Workshop Jews I-354–5, 535 justice I-60, 97, 111, 114, 229, 346, 350, 523, II-30, 32, 112, 146, 179, 193, 197, 361 criminal II-168, 371 social II-320, 342, 360 transitional I-105–6, 111, 113–14 juxtapositions II-12, 74, 86, 88, 90, 92, 96, 247 Kampala II-177–8 Karachi I-352–4 Karo-Batak I-429, 434 Kashmir I-373 Kattankudy I-176–7, 179 kava II-367–8 Kazakhstan I-344, 355, 357 Kenya I-147, 159, 310, 544, II-49, 169–70 Keo I-429 Kerala I-239, 243, 368, 376–7 khipus II-27, 29, 33 kin selection II-219, 229 kingship I-121, 221, 230, 238–9, 243, 255 kinship I-2, 43–6, 49–50, 214–16, 274–5, 297–8, 349–51, 428–9, II-8, 10, 13, 16–17, 39, 70, 235, 239 friction I-50 organization I-291, 408 relations I-215, 275, 350, 354 knowledge I-xxix–xxxii, 44, 50–2, 114, 202–4, 276, 281–2, 313–14, II-15–17, 38–9, 54–5, 76–8, 155, 194–6, 404–5, 426–7 agricultural II-280, 302 anthropological I-10, 89, 99, 130, 174, 224, 310, II-21, 84, 92–3, 101, 144, 153, 184–5 cosmopolitan I-528–9 cultural I-16, 51, 99, 184, 434, 532, II-40, 42, 44–5, 137, 369 economy II-77, 120 and experimental practice II-115–26 indigenous II-220, 404, 406–9 local II-102, 196, 198, 404, 408, 426–7, 435 political economy of I-xxxv practices II-115, 118, 137 production I-xxxi, xxxvii, 66, 78–9, 164, 219, 313, 466, II-85, 132, 199 religious I-191, 224 systems II-184, 291, 302 indigenous II-404, 406–7 traditional II-287, 407–8 transfers II-220, 356, 372, 427 knowledges, embodied II-195, 247

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 592

Kolkata I-367–9 Koryak I-272, 276 Kutch II-332–5 Kuwait I-325, 333 Kyrgyzstan I-344, 347–8, 350, 352, 357 labels II-8, 39, 41, 44, 47, 241, 418 labiaplasty II-380–1 laboratories II-38, 55, 57, 118–20, 251, 330, 397, 400 labour I-108, 130, 159, 189, 313, 354–5, 358, 370–1, II-11, 39, 106, 161, 188, 301, 345, 396 division of II-101, 237 migrants I-354, 514, 520 migration I-xxxiii, 311, 329, 491, 521 sexual division of I-45, 143, 214–15 land II-28–9, 32, 34, 156, 160, 277–8, 300–1, 312–24 grabs II-277–9, 307 rights I-444, 539–40, 544–5 tenure I-444–5 titles II-28–9 landlords I-351, 370, 409 landscapes I-140, 148, 273, 281, 313, 446–7, 468, 543, II-35, 55, 111, 267, 277, 282, 313–14, 320 language acquisition I-37 devices I-35, 38 language ideologies II-4, 38, 40, 42, 44–7, 49–52, 64 socialization I-14, 18 usage I-256, 258 languages I-10–23, 92–4, 224, 257–9, 286–7, 424–6, 451, 468–9, II-4, 38–41, 43–7, 49–51, 78, 87–8, 141–2, 188, see also linguistics first II-244, 249 minority II-78 national I-113, 435 native I-31, 259, 465–6, II-79, 404 new II-121, 335 Papuan I-424, 426 role in ethnographic method II-38–52 role of I-13, 16 Laos I-424 Latin America I-109, 124, 389, 487–503, 512, 540, 543, II-289, 291, 300, 316–17 laughter II-9, 75, 143–4, 289 law I-9–10, 43–4, 48, 105–16, 185, 240, 430, 525, II-22, 26, 45, 101, 104, 116, 121, 126 anthropology of I-10, 105, 115–16 cosmopolitan I-524–5 customary I-xxxii, 266, 357, 429, 431 enforcement II-372–3 international I-10, 97, 105, 108–11, 116, 527, 533 martial II-158 shari’a I-346, 431, II-61 lawyers II-46–7, 64 leaders I-94, 177, 239, 347, 358, 409, 467, 545, II-158 political I-100, 279 religious II-136 leadership I-238, 240, 272, 347, 443, 456 left politics I-213, 494

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

legacies I-47, 109, 130, 173, 186, 227, 344, 373, II-101, 123, 161, 203, 211, 275, 278, 288 colonial I-227, 233–4 legal anthropology I-105, 114, 116 consciousness I-105–8 culture I-105–8 institutions I-105–8, 115–16, 190 orders I-110–11 pluralism I-105–6, 108–11, 116 regimes I-110–11, 357 systems I-97, 107–10, 113, 346, 444, II-47 technologies I-106, 114–15 legitimacy I-90, 108, 111, 176, 239, 241, 330–1, 347, II-44, 60, 211, 289, 342, 411 lesbians I-178, 220, 222 Lesotho I-169, 314 liberalization, economic I-367, 371, 374, 377 liberation movements II-289, 348 liberty I-5, 193, 530, 532, 534–5 life histories I-124, 471, 516, II-131, 186, 188 lifestyles II-280–1, 335, 370, 434 lifeways II-192, 196, 302, 305, 323 lineages I-192, 311, 406, 408, 475, II-226, 433 lingua franca I-133, 287 linguistic anthropologists II-48–9, 51, 79 anthropology I-12–16, 20–3, 138, 475, II-39–40, 45, 51, 243 expressions I-14–15 practices II-38, 40, 45, 50–1 revitalization I-268, 466, 471, 480 skills I-193, 259 structures I-11–12 variants II-44–5 linguistics I-xxxiv, 3, 9, 11–23, 27, 34, 474–5, II-51, 233 listeners II-41, 44, 50, 73–5, 81 literacy I-250–1, 316, II-23, 413–14 scientific II-123 literary critics I-184, 242, 251–2 literature I-248–59 anthropological I-189, 206, II-146, 166, 290, 330 popular I-249, 257, 259 livelihoods I-267, 317, 349, 354, 367, 370, 432, II-180, 190, 193, 219, 289, 293, 302, 304 living traditions I-273, 326, 434 local anthropologies I-435, 456 communities I-xxxviii, 113–15, 157, 273, 280–2, 431, 449, 452, II-6, 72, 77, 82, 186, 193, 196–8, 360 contexts I-10, 112, 170, 329, II-69 cultures I-160, 432, II-306 foods II-306–7 groups I-162, 412, 455 knowledge II-102, 196, 198, 404, 408, 426–7, 435 societies I-236, 242, 316, 434, II-138, 201 the I-222, 340 locales I-xxxvii–xxxviii, 4–5, 105, 326, 515, 524, 531, II-63, 280, 300

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 593

593

localities I-4, 223, 265, 268, 353, 374, 449, 535, II-3, 65, 276, 279–80, 305–6, 357 locations I-15, 99, 106, 108, 115, 173, 287–8, 292–5, II-11–12, 15, 17, 82, 169, 186, 247, 267 relative I-286–8, 291–2 locavores II-305 logistical support II-169, 177 Loikop I-147 London School of Economics (LSE) II-4, 8, 10, 170 London sex work II-341–6 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) II-169, 177–8 loyalty I-190, 330, 391, 535, II-136, 146, 170, 396 LRA, see Lord’s Resistance Army LSE, see London School of Economics Ma’Betisék I-429 Macha II-21, 28–30, 34–5, 37 Madagascar I-130, 426, II-146, 277 Madrid I-178 magic II-89–90, 428–9 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) II-243, 268, 362 mainland China I-406–7 Malays I-428–9, 434, II-7, 9 Malaysia I-84, 354, 423, 425, 429–34, 541, II-7–9, 14, 18 urban II-14–15 male bodies II-377–9 male sexuality II-93, 95, 383 Mali II-133, 262 Mambai I-429 management I-xxx, 95, 159, 188, 203, 234, 278, 281, II-13, 23, 123, 187, 288, 302, 316, 382 Manchester School I-xxxii–xxxiii, xxxviii, 311, II-429 manipulation II-80, 180, 192, 265, 407, 413 Maoris I-201, 453–7, II-196–7, 264, 288 art I-455–6 societies I-443, 454–6 mapping cultural II-3, 14 participatory II-186, 189 maps II-18, 21, 26, 108, 126, 155, 176, 186–9 marginality I-xxxi, 133, 391–2, 395, 433, 494, 523 marginalization II-37, 279, 321, 342, 359, 371, 434 markers II-29, 44, 205, 211, 236 market economy I-18, 157, II-315 marketing I-159–60, 329, II-202, 304–6, 357–8, 381, 429 markets I-xxx, xxxvii, 10, 156–8, 162–5, 173, 256, 310, II-37, 186, 203, 276–7, 302–4, 336, 342, 358 global I-309, 376, 452, 534, II-358, 392, 434 marriage I-44, 213, 216–17, 223, 256–7, 346, 368, 372, II-235, 239, 369, 401 martial law II-158 Marxism I-2, 124, 147, 171–2, 214, II-8–9 Marxists, British I-122, 126 masculinity I-217, 223, 357, 368–9, 373, 391, 414, 429, II-250, 377, 381, 383 idealized II-380, 383 mass communications II-183, 413 consumption I-75, 77, 83 media I-74, 79–80, 223, 394–5, II-303, 414, 417

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

594

SUBJECT INDEX

material culture studies I-67, 148, 197, 202, 204 cultures I-11, 19, 75–8, 145, 147–9, 202–3, 205–6, 208, II-101, 107–8, 112, 155–6, 164, 247, 262, 367–8 environment II-248, 312–13, 320 interfaces II-392–3 objects I-75, 96, 156, 161, II-37, 103 properties II-268, 394, 407 worlds II-41, 55, 57, 104, 106, 126, 393, 397–8 materialities I-xxxviii, 5, 56, 62–3, 116, 130, 353, 434, II-4, 10, 63–4, 102, 104, 107–8, 155–6, 159 of war II-155–6 mathematical knowledge II-404 mathematical modelling II-404–5 mathematics II-228–9, 331, 404–6 emic II-405 etic II-405 matriliny I-257, 428, II-232 Mauritania I-325–6, 333, 335 Mayan numerals II-405 McDonald’s II-305–6 meaning I-21–3, 52–3, 92–3, 105–7, 114–15, 126, 146–8, 530–1, II-23, 31, 39, 46, 76–7, 92–4, 267–8, 280–2 cultural I-31, 125, II-39, 93–4, 378 gendered II-381, 384 indexical I-15, 18, 21 social I-345–6 Mecca I-341 mechanics II-36, 265, 269, 396, 435 media I-3, 9–10, 72–84, 98, 164, 184, 222, 241, II-85, 88–9, 91, 95–7, 108, 280–1, 411–13, 415–18 analysis II-415–16 anthropology of I-72, 74, 78–81, 83, II-86, 220, 411–12, 414–18, 435–6 communicational II-220, 411–12, 416, 418 digital I-73, 80, 82 electronic II-74, 401, 413 indigenous II-85, 415 mass I-74, 79–80, 223, 394–5, II-303, 414 new I-xxxvi, 73, 80–4, 251, II-85, 417 practices I-78–9, II-88, 93, 411, 418 visual II-84, 86, 93–4, 97 mediation II-31, 48, 54, 59, 61–5, 411–13, 415–18, 435–6 anthropology of II-412, 417–18 cultural II-60, 415 electronic II-413–14 social II-412, 418 medical anthropology I-174, 297, 368–9, II-205, 220, 251, 353–62, 371, 404, 435 interventions II-220, 353, 355, 361, 371, 435 research II-6, 133, 169, 360 sociology II-354, 359, 365 technologies I-52–3, II-355, 357, 361–2 tourism II-359

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 594

medicines I-xxxv–xxxvi, 47, 52, 316, 369, 392, II-174, 185, 269, 365, 383, 404, 406 traditional II-353, 359 Mediterranean I-287, 289, 293, 520 Melanesia I-144, 156–7, 217, 268, 270, 443, 448–53, 475, II-212, 368 Melanesian anthropology I-449–50 memories I-17, 21, 57, 127–30, 199, 251, 253, 281, II-4, 9, 21–4, 27–9, 31, 35, 37, 237–8 collective II-35, 237 food II-306–7 historical I-317, 470, II-55, 304 public II-131, 134 mental health II-353, 358, 372–3 mental representations I-30, 38, 149 motor-based II-268–9 meso scale II-395–6 Mesopotamia II-27 messaging II-54, 416, 424 mestizaje I-487, 502–3, II-28 mestizos I-488, 493–4, 501–3 meta-discourse II-185, 199 metacommunication II-40–3, 45, 51 metaphors I-32, 48, 97, 110, 162, 232, 278, 514, II-22, 33, 35, 46, 50, 78, 85, 103 metaphysics II-57, 60, 64 metapragmatics II-40–1, 43, 45, 51 methodological individualism I-xxxv, xxxix, 2 nationalism I-242, 489, 502 methodologies I-xxx, xxxvii, 10, 89–90, 101, 105, 140, 144, II-3, 5, 21, 95–7, 101, 109, 153, 392 new I-116, 428, 431–2 metropoles I-xxx, 109, 131, 342 Mexico I-93, 141, 487–9, 492–5, 498, II-25, 29, 33, 302, 317, 372, 404 microhistorical processes I-28, 37 Micronesia II-368 middle classes I-217, 376–7, 392, 491, II-32, 44, 132, 301 new I-376, 390 Middle East I-168, 249, 266–7, 324–35, 340, 343, 356, 367, II-277, 320, 369, 381, 407 Greater I-326, 335 Islamic I-326, 332 migrants I-109, 115, 287, 312, 354–5, 377, 413–15, 491, II-174, 306, 342–4, 346, 348 labour I-354, 514, 520 retirement I-515, 520 migration I-4, 278–80, 353–5, 376–7, 406, 415, 491, 511–21, II-11, 174, 186, 306, 341, 343–5, 367, 412 internal I-267, 377 labour I-xxxiii, 311, 329, 491, 521 rural–urban I-267, 431–2 militarism I-97–9, 101 militarization I-98–9, 232 Millennium Ecological Assessment II-276, 280, 286 mimesis I-56, 60–2, II-89

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

mimetic faculty I-61–2 juxtaposition II-90 Minangkabau I-428, 432–3 mind-altering substances II-365–6, 371 mind, theory of I-32, 35, II-245 mining II-32–3, 36, 264, 276–8, 280, 314, 318–19 minorities I-81, 132, 177, 390–2, 405, 407, 411, 539, II-10, 208, 235, 369–70 minority culture I-395, 412 missionaries II-9, 46–7, 198, 367 mobile phones I-73, 80, 82–3, 160, II-15, 63, 334, 361, 416 mobilities paradigm I-512 mobility I-109, 268, 311–12, 317, 341, 354–5, 492, 512–21, II-116, 174, 211, 220, 301, 323, 343, 347 social II-342, 348, 353, 434 mobilization I-317, 325, 330, 332, 355, 372, 502, II-77, 282, 287, 413 modernism I-4, 205 modernity I-73–4, 223, 292–4, 296, 312–13, 317–18, 345–6, 376, II-46, 282, 368, 425, 432 late I-47, 52–3, 529 modernization I-289, 316, 335, 412, 415, 490, 502, II-185, 299 and Japan I-388–96 modes of production II-8, 312, 323 modifications body II-355, 377–81, 384 genital II-379–80 modularity I-33–5, 38 modules I-32, 34–5, 39, II-244 moiety archives II-21, 28–30 Moken II-250 money I-10, 98–9, 114–15, 155, 159–64, 316, 456, 511, II-72–3, 122, 174, 176, 288, 333, 370, 402 Mongolia I-355, II-35 Inner I-411, 413 moobs II-381, 385 moral agency I-11, 232 economy I-311, 314, 369 futures II-275–82 morality I-xxxviii, 192, 232, 525, II-16–17, 45, 149, 275–6, 282, 344–5 Morocco I-296, 325–6, 333 mortuary practices I-145 Mosque Federations I-176–7 mosques I-176–7, 412 mothers I-19, 33, 38, 50–1, 146, 392–3, 495, 516, II-59, 230, 245–6, 344, 370, 406 motivations I-201, 371, 518, 531, II-17, 227–8, 231, 250–1, 381 motor cognition II-267–8 cortex II-269–70 mourning II-330–1, 334, 427 MQM, see Muhajir Qawami Movement

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 595

595

MRI, see magnetic resonance imaging Muhajir Qawami Movement (MQM) I-352–3 multi-sited ethnographies I-xxxviii, 59, 94, 115, 375 fieldwork II-13, 18, 64, 131, 134, 204 multicultural societies I-105, 433 multiculturalism I-60, 192, 498–9, 523 official I-499, 502 multilateral treaties I-109, 111 multiple realities II-118, 121, 194 multiplicity I-65, 116, 218–19, 286, 289, 291, II-11, 118, 122–6 ontological II-122, 126 Mumbai I-160, 369, 376–7 museology I-60, 67, 202, 205, 207 museum anthropology I-206, 470 period I-205–6 museums I-58–60, 139, 197–208, 297, 456, 469–70, II-101–2, 108, 294, 417 tribal I-470 university I-198, 468 music I-22, 59, 330, 335, 349, 446, II-37, 51, 70–2, 165, 249 musicians I-13–14, 22, 64, 277, 279, 358, 513, II-70, 249 Muslim societies/world I-325–6, 331, 343, 345, 356, 425, 429 Muslims I-176–7, 179, 243, 331, 345–8, 354, 357, 368, 371, 373, 375, 429, II-332, see also Islam mutilation II-156, 379–80 myths I-xxxiii, 2, 94, 138, 233, 250–1, 272, 279, II-21, 24–5, 39–40, 239, 368 NAFTA, see North American Free Trade Agreement Nage I-429, 434 NAGPRA, see Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act nanosciences II-220, 394–7, 407 nanotechnology II-392, 395, 402, 407–8 narrativity II-40, 47, 51 nation-building I-96, 374, 433, II-346 nation-states I-109, 111, 129, 233, 341–2, 353–6, 527–8, 532–4, II-24, 45, 278, 321–2, 341, 344, 346–9, 357 modern I-273, 317, 390 national anthropologies I-xxxiii–xxxiv, 310, 474 borders/boundaries I-105, 110, 115, 349, 355, 376, 513, 516, II-321, 346, 357 control programmes II-174–5 cultures I-43, 107, 349, 493 economies I-159, 242 histories I-98, 114 identities I-62, 314, 343, 348–9, 351, 353, 388, 493, II-306 ideologies I-374, 500, 503 institutions II-168, 171, 177 order of things I-314, 342

5/18/2012 11:56:11 AM

596

SUBJECT INDEX

national (Cont'd) parks II-279, 314 politics I-177, 455, 499, 534 security I-90, 97, 100 societies I-4, 492, 497 traditions I-xxxiv, 155, 346–7, II-212 of ethnography I-267, 423 National Museum of Ethnology, Japan I-389, 396, 475 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) I-468, 470 nationalism I-xxxvii, 123, 175, 179, 287–8, 431–3, 525, 527–8, II-24, 346–7 methodological I-242, 489, 502 nationalist ideologies I-493, 501–2 nationality I-42, 355, 405, 514, 526, II-131, 235 nationhood I-xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 97, 357 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) I-201, 207, 468, 471 native Americans I-138–9, 141, 143, 250, 253, 465, 468–9, 471, see also indigenous Americas languages I-31, 259, 465–6, II-79, 404 North America, see North America, indigenous peoples I-131, 466–7, 472–3, 476 natural disasters II-219, 330–1, 336, 345, 354 ecologies II-302, 304 environments II-236, 288, 302 facts I-44–6, 52, 216 history I-44, 48, 141, 204, 271 resources I-276, 415, 476–7, 538–41, 543, II-186, 287, 307 sciences II-22, 117, 125, 264, 287 selection II-226–7, 229 world II-237–8, 287 naturalism II-57 nature–cultures I-47, 49, 478 negotiations I-92, 111, 267, 282, 296, 377, II-43, 116–17, 120, 122, 133, 372 neighbourhoods I-58, 106, 353–4, 495, 500, II-10, 74, 144, 211 urban I-115, 391 neighbours I-129, 296, 353, 377 neo-Darwinism II-219, 225–33, 433 neoliberal globalization I-155, 159 governmentality I-xxxvii, 95, 492, 495 neoliberalism I-xxxvi–xxxvii, 94–5, 159, 315, 488–9, 493–4, II-341, 344 neoliberalization I-xxxv, 94 neonates, see newborn babies neotraditionalism I-456 Nepal I-366, 368–9, 372, 374, 376, II-137 nervous system II-219, 247–8, 250–2, 262, 264 Netherlands I-185, 423, II-157, 313 networks I-2, 74, 94–6, 128, 149, 197, 409–10, 477, II-5, 32, 56, 89, 104, 117–22, 241, 397 sexual II-169, 176 social I-115, 329, 343, 452, 512, 520 transnational I-495–6

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 596

neuroanthropology II-243–52, 433 neurobiology I-5, 27, 37 neuroconstructivist model I-33–4, 36 neuroethnography II-248, 251 neuroimaging, cultural II-246–8 neurology II-243, 248, 262 neurophenomenology I-27, 31, 36 cultural II-252 neurophysiology II-243–4, 251 neuroplasticity II-244 neuropsychology II-243, 250 neurosciences II-89, 234, 244–5, 248, 262, 362 cultural II-245 New Archaeology I-143, 145–8 new genetics I-48, 51 New Guinea I-141, 291, 424–6, 448, 450, 538, II-277, 345 New Left I-122–3, 213 new materials II-392–8, 435 new media I-xxxvi, 73, 80–4, 251 anthropologists of I-73, 82 new middle classes I-376, 390 new technologies I-5, 53, 81, 201, 297, 416, II-54, 63, 195, 220, 344, 392–3, 397–8, 435 New Zealand I-xxvi, 207, 443, 453–7, 515, 517, 544, II-138, 196, 316 newborn babies I-28, 31–3, 50 Newfoundland I-279 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) I-10, 90, 113, 228, 241, 344, 533–4, 542, II-170, 177–8, 185, 197–8, 292, 294, 320, 345 international II-170, 177–9 Nicaragua I-100, 491, 544, II-304 niche construction II-247–8 Niger Delta II-162 Nigeria I-162, 502, II-156, 162 Ningxia I-411 NMAI, see National Museum of the American Indian noise II-395, 428–9 nomadism I-276, 330 non-anthropologists I-390, 407, II-130, 360 non-governmental organizations, see NGOs non-human agency II-3, 117, 120, 392, 408 non-human species II-312, 319–20 non-human worlds II-118, 122–3, 220 non-Indians I-480, 488–9 non-literate societies I-124, 259 non-places II-62–3 non-Western societies/world I-xxxi, 2, 57, 76, 121, 157, 171, 251 non-whites I-497, 500 normalization II-194, 371–2, 382 norms I-xxxii, 11, 90, 97, 105–7, 111, 480, 524 North Africa I-168, 266, 287, 324–35 North America II-201–2, 246, 300, 355, 382 from a continental perspective I-487–503 indigenous I-268, 465–72 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) I-489, 493, II-300, 302 North, circumpolar I-266, 270–1, 273–4, 276, 278, 282

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

North, Global II-301, 303–4, 307 north India I-371–3, 389, II-333 north-western Uganda II-173–4 northeastern Siberia I-272, 274 northern Alaska I-271, 274 northern Canada I-274–5, 279, 541 northern China I-409, 415 northern Colombia II-91 Northern Ireland I-178–9 northern regions I-271–2 Northern Territories I-408, 444–5, 447 northern Uganda II-169–70, 177–8 northwest Amazonia II-367 Norway I-270, 277, 287, 296, 299 nostalgia I-98, 227, II-305, 307, 332, 337, 423 notation I-64–5 noumenal technology II-394–7 Nuer I-175, 232, 310, II-169 Nunavut I-277, II-316 nutrition I-44, 123, II-303–4, 367 obesity II-303, 354 objectification I-57, 62, 73, 77, 148, II-107–9, 117, 142, 396 objectivity II-130, 145, 164 bogus II-184 observation, participant II-4, 8–9, 21, 55, 80, 84, 130–1, 133–4 observational filmmaking II-94, 97 observers I-10, 16, 20, 61, 199, 252, 266, II-45, 85, 87, 89, 91, 146, 368, 435 occult I-234–5, 241, 315 Oceania I-21, 265, 448 official history I-127–8 official multiculturalism I-499, 502 offline world I-81–3 Oil Age II-426–7 omissions I-206, 265, 294, 481 one-to-one interviews II-56, 61 one-world capitalism I-155, 159 ontogeny I-28, 31, 33–4, 37–8, II-226, 232 ontological domains II-235–6, 239 multiplicity II-122, 126 status I-xxxvii, 90, 214 ontologies I-60, 81, 475, II-5, 45–6, 109, 123, 125, 153, 196, 276 Open Door policies I-406, 412 open-ended interviews II-54, 58 openness I-29, 80, 190, 193, 529, II-32, 54–5, 57–62, 64–5, 79, 82, 134, 251–2 opium II-103, 366, 369, 372–3 opposition I-11, 20, 156–7, 159, 236–7, 243, 310, 332, II-39–40, 92, 96, 98, 137, 236, 265, 302 oppositional models II-92–3 oppression I-213, 224, 235, 242, 408, 501, 531, 539 oral history I-122, 124, 132, 281, 317, 433, II-21, 35, 146 performances II-72, 79 texts II-38, 81

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 597

597

orality II-413–14 order, original II-22, 24, 29, 33 organ donation I-43, 45, 52–3, II-355, 359 transplantation I-42, 52, II-356 organic agriculture II-282, 302 organics II-302–5, 307 organisms II-228–9, 231, 238, 319, 355 organized crime II-201–3 oriental studies I-333–4 orientalism I-131, 174, 185, 191, 235, 293, 326–7, 329, II-28, 131 critiques I-327, 334 oriki II-76 Orissa II-277 othering strategy I-73–4 otherness I-121, 131, 315, 371, II-62–3, 66 others I-73, 78, 199, 223, 291, 348, 427, 489, II-62, 131, 146, 202, 277 representation of II-40, 66 Ottoman Empire I-325 Ottoman histories I-292, 296 out-there status II-32, 70, 112 outsiders I-4, 127, 229, 273, 275, 378, 477, II-9, 45, 78, 131, 188, 194–6 overlapping interests I-74–5, 239, II-117 ownership I-82, 198, 277, 281, 468, 470, II-70, 80, 82, 176, 178, 197, 312, 315–16 Pacific I-63, 98, 435, 452, 488, 540, II-36, 46, 369 Western I-44, 81, 155 Pakistan I-100, 130, 326, 346–7, 350–4, 356–8, 366, 373, II-137, 159, 335 Palestine I-106, 132, 335 panic II-342, 346 forward II-156–7, 164 Papua New Guinea I-156, 541, II-90, 95, 160, 199, 288 Papuan languages I-424–6 Paraguay II-29 parents I-47, 369, 410, 499–500, II-122, 227, 230–2, 237, 288, 304, see also fathers; mothers parks, national II-279, 314 partiality II-125, 132 participant-collaboration, and participant-observation II-183–200 participant–observation I-95, 142, 186, 433, II-4, 8–9, 21, 55, 80, 84, 130–1, 133–4 and participant-collaboration II-183–200 participant-observers II-30, 154, 195, 198, 384 participatory mapping II-186, 189 particularism I-xxxi, xxxiii, 94, 532 parties, political I-90, 168, 177–9, 333, 534 partners I-65, 223, 374, 452, 513, II-145, 192, 197, 402 equal I-205, 496, II-184, 196 passage, rites of II-15, 30, 373, 380 Patagonia I-479 paternity I-44

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

598

SUBJECT INDEX

path-breaking contributions I-495–6 patients I-52, 57, 95, 369, II-59, 172, 176, 179, 252, 336, 355 patriarchy I-330, 391 patron–client relationships I-238, 351 patronage I-239, 430 patrons I-204–5, 243 pauses II-58, 63, 78–9 payment II-72–3, 78, 158 peace II-5–6, 32, 155, 160–1, 164–5, 236 peasants I-351, 408–10, 430, 493, 503, II-28, 304, 347 pedagogy I-2, 38, 330–1, 333, II-84 peer-reviewed journal articles II-97, 181, 198 perceptions I-17, 33, 38, 63, 95, 140, 235–6, 280–1, II-76, 88, 90, 95, 107, 123, 178, 246 performances II-4, 26, 51, 69–77, 79, 81–2, 108, 141 interpretation II-71–3 performative verbs I-13, 18, 23 performativity I-13, 224, 334, II-4, 89, 98 performers I-13, 201, 349, II-72, 74–7, 79 peripheries I-188, 288, 295, 297, 405, 411, 428, II-160, 277–9 urban I-494 permaculture II-281 Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) I-539–40 persistence I-278, 312, 428, 490, 499–500, 512, II-6, 23, 28, 31, 79, 240 personal autonomy I-223–4 identities I-218, 347 personality I-159, 250, 253, 358, 389, 391, II-70, 336 personhood I-82, 144, 156, 217, 266–7, 275, 311, 452, II-5, 16, 105, 123, 147, 149, 361, 408 Peru I-488, 493, 503, 544, II-29, 31, 331, 367 PET, see positron emission tomography PFII, see Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues pharmaceuticals II-125, 358, 378, 383, 408 anthropology of II-358 phenomena I-xxxii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 17, 29, 37, 106, 116, 144, II-5, 16, 50, 202, 211–12, 226, 236, 395 cultural II-225, 241 domain of I-11, 42 religious I-184, 187, 194 social I-xxxvii–xxxviii, 21, 170, II-56 sociocultural II-235, 239–40 phenomenology I-14, 27, 37–8, 56, 63, 175, 186, 189, II-234, 250 of religion I-186–7 Philippines I-222, 425, 427–8, 433, 435 Southern I-222, 429 philosophers I-xxxvii, 22, 258, 524, II-48, 142, 149, 246 philosophy I-xxix, xxxii–xxxiv, xxxix, 2, 12, 27, 72, 188, II-43, 46, 108–9, 123, 133, 141, 203, 228 phones, mobile I-73, 80, 82–3, 160, II-15, 63, 334, 361, 416 photographers II-92, 362, 429

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 598

photographs I-128, 132, 413, II-14, 22, 81, 88, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 179 photography I-73, 230, II-80, 91–6, 108, 411, 414, 429 phylogeny II-226, 232, 239 physical objects II-5, 101–2 piety I-18, 169, 224, 345 movement I-170, 332 pilgrimages I-341, 528 place-based societies II-315, 318 plants II-117, 286–7, 289, 319, 324, 368, 404, 408 plasticity II-245, 249, 383, 435 plural societies I-497–8 pluralism II-204, 211 legal I-105–6, 108–11, 116 plurality I-51, 108, 164, 221, 230, II-184, 362, 417 PNG, see Papua New Guinea poetry II-50, 74, 76–7, 96, 154 policy analysis I-91–2 anthropology of I-11, 89–90, 92, 94–6, 98–9, 101 makers I-89, 91, 97, 278 professionals I-89–90, 93–5 public I-xxxv, 3, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99–101 political activism I-80, 216, 466 actors I-234, 350, 473 international I-281, 341 agencies I-93, 242 agenda I-199–200, 413, II-154 anthropology I-90, 98, 169–71, 173, 175, II-138, 417 boundaries I-80, 341, 356 categories I-123, 179, 480 change I-222, 315–16, II-193 conflict I-267, 351, 367, 371 context I-168, 219, 238, 352, 355, II-111, 131 culture I-234, 236, 279, 423, 430, 433 dialogue I-281–2 discourse I-427, 430, II-44 dynamics I-276, 345, 351 ecologies II-160, 275–82 new II-279 economy I-xxxiii, xxxvii, 34, 82, 163–4, 216–17, 346–7, 355–7, II-25, 160, 172, 219, 275, 277–8, 330–1, 360–1 historical I-122, 126 of knowledge I-xxxv elites I-236, 277, 346, II-424 forms I-179, 350, 352 hybridity I-233–4, 241 movements I-277, 352, 478 organizations I-xxxii, 170, 341, 357, 377, 475 parties I-90, 168, 177–9, 333, 534 power I-108, 159, 353, 544, II-37, 212, 314 practices I-172, 174, 512 processes II-38, 120, 302, 353, 366, 372 realities I-169, 179, 314, II-198 science I-xxxiv, xxxvii, 82, 91, 168, 179, 349–50, 357, II-132, 137, 158, 162–3, 208, 401 status II-335–6

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

structures I-171, 286, 423, 430, 541 the I-168–79, 355 violence I-130, 175, 232–3, 241, 243 politicians I-79, 95, 161, 177, 231, 239–40, 453, 473 politicization I-275, 351, 372, 490 politics I-2–3, 9–10, 93, 168–79, 200, 219–20, 240–1, 372–4, II-39, 64, 115–17, 132–4, 281–2, 342–3, 379–80, 383–4 communal I-178, 372–3, II-332 cultural I-235, 241–2, 376, 430, 434, 456, II-359, 379 of everyday life I-172, 235 gender I-368–9, 377 left I-213, 494 national I-177, 455, 499, 534 of research I-268, 443 polity I-xxxvii, 93, 523, 527, 534, II-281, 335 pollution II-125, 286, 314, 318–19 Polynesia I-144, 453, II-207, 368 popular culture I-72–4, 77–8, 82, 98, 223, 237, 251, 414, II-210 popular literature I-249, 257, 259 positionality II-276, 282 positron emission tomography (PET) II-243, 362 post-earthquake reconstruction II-332, 334–5 post-socialism I-267, 293, 342–4, 348 post-Soviet Central Asia I-340, 347–8, 355 postcolonial anthropology I-227, 229, 232, 234–40, 243 states I-109–10, 227–8, 232, 242 subjection I-11, 232 the I-227–43 world II-160 postcolonialism I-3–4, 110, 249, 267, 342, 344, II-199 postcoloniality I-227, 231, 242 postcolonies I-228, 230–5, 241–2, 526 postmodernism I-3, 52, 74, 76, 81, 110, 219, 236, II-11, 160, 191 postmodernities I-73–4 posture II-261–3, 265–8 poverty I-xxxv, 169, 228, 241, 314, 366, 377, 473, II-124–5, 136, 141, 159, 193, 295, 342 power I-94, 96–100, 107–8, 171–5, 217–20, 227–30, 235–6, 238–43, II-35–6, 43–4, 46–7, 60, 76, 110, 123–4, 134–5 analytics of I-173–4 banality of I-230, 236 coloniality of I-488, 496 corporate I-93, 98, 492 differentials I-61, 214, II-38, 59, 192 grips II-265 instruments of I-90, 94, 174 political I-108, 159, 353, 544, II-37, 212, 314 relations I-73, 110, 124, 173, 343, 410, 493, 530, II-51, 59–60, 65, 192, 194, 196–7, 264, 403 state I-94, 97–8, 168, 234, 242, 347, 349, 358, II-303, 348 symbolic I-349, 430, 432

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 599

599

unequal relations I-110–530 workings of I-171, 173, 175, 219 pragmatics I-xxxv, 13 Prague School II-39 praise poetry II-76–7 pre-capitalist societies I-147, 214, II-27 precision grips II-265–6 precolonial period I-236, 426, II-27–8, 281 pregnancy I-39, 44, 47, 50–1, II-123 prehensility II-270 prehistory I-44, 449 premotor cortex II-268, 270 preservation II-37, 80, 287–8, 290–1, 306 pressure I-xxxv, 113, 115, 232, 243, 313, 344, 499, II-170–1, 174, 180, 185, 192, 265, 281, 322–3 prestige I-21, 147, 213, 314 prices I-145, 161, 165, 413, 487, II-73, 79 primitive communism I-272, 477 economics I-xxxii, 156 societies I-44, 155, 171, 213, II-404 prisons I-21, 173 private property I-44, 105, 161 privatization I-95, 110, 410, 493, 496, II-301, 323, 346 water II-316, 320, 434 productivity II-103, 275, 278, 280–1, 317 professional associations II-133, 157, 184 professions I-20, 149, 154, 249–50, 327, 499, 532, II-143, 157, 164, 261 profits I-159, 161, II-79, 229, 278, 358 progress I-47, 52–3, 343, 378, 407, 493, 525, 545, II-70, 97, 156, 198, 239, 307, 316, 343 prosperity I-230, 409, II-275, 280, 334 prosthetics II-377–8, 381, 383 prostitution II-342–6 protests I-xxxiv, 127, 178, 192, 241, 243, 391, II-135, 149, 314, 320–1, 370 political II-331, 367 popular I-122, 375 proverbs I-78, 250, 258, II-73, 75 psychic unity II-252 psychoanalysis I-123, 127, 219, II-36, 59, 62, 147, 150, 392, 427 psychology I-2–3, 9–10, 27–39, 186, 188, 198, II-116, 227, 239–40, 246 cross-cultural II-245–6, 252, 433 cultural I-27, 30, 38 developmental I-32, 34 evolutionary I-32, 38 intuitive II-235, 237 psychopathology II-248, 251 public engagement I-201, 205, 208 health I-90, 370, 377, 492, II-353–4, 356, 361, 368, 380, 435 memories II-131, 134 occasions I-239–40

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

600

SUBJECT INDEX

public (Cont'd) policy I-xxxv, 3, 89–101 policy, research at the interface II-168–81 sphere I-161, 186, 213, 241, 393 publicity II-342, 416 Puerto Ricans I-490, 500 punishment I-111, 113, 178, II-238, 346 Punjab I-351, 373, 377 purity I-314, 332, 392, 503, II-73, 144, 146, 282 Qatar I-325, 333 qualitative methods II-173, 251 qualitative research II-181, 366, 372 quantitative limitations II-208–9, 212 Quechua I-472, 479, II-21, 27–30, 34 Queensland II-315, 318–19, 408 queer theory I-215, 220, 300 quilombo communities I-479, 501 race I-11, 81, 98, 106–7, 213, 217–18, 490–1, 496–501, II-59, 131, 135, 247, 252, 402 relations I-443, 447, 471 racial categories I-268, 488, 501 democracy I-497–8, 500–1 difference I-500, 503 discrimination I-106, 487, 498 identities I-488, 501 racism I-310, 487, 496, 498–503 scientific I-498–9 radio I-73–4, 193, II-64, 72, 138, 411–13 RAI, see Royal Anthropological Institute rain forests I-424, 432, II-277–8, 290, 307 Rajasthan I-373, 375, II-369 ram festival II-93, 95 rapid growth I-39, 42, II-301, 331 rapid prototyping (RP) II-395–6 raw material II-81, 305, 394 re-enactments II-32, 49–50 readers II-81, 144, 150, 154, 219–20, 235, 263, 431 real woman II-379–80, 383 realism II-90, 92, 94, 119, 149 realities I-30, 76, 169, 198, 230–1, 241, 257–8, 281–2, II-106, 341, 418 multiple II-118, 121, 194 political I-169, 179, 314, II-198 rebellions I-xxxiii, 227, 243, II-25, 33, 162 reburial I-468, 471 receivers II-40, 70, 415–16 reception II-70, 75, 148, 303, 411, 415–16 reciprocal assimilation I-233–4, 241–2 reciprocity II-72–3 reconciliation I-113–14, 479, II-138 reconfiguration II-4, 28, 103, 106, 111, 262, 359, 425 reconstruction I-160, 239, 258, 375, II-79, 132, 156, 292, 331–2, 334, 336–7 recontextualizations II-46, 50

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 600

Red Period II-220, 427 REDD, see Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation redistribution I-431–2, II-106, 415 Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) II-277, 280, 290, 294 reductionism I-xxxix referentialist ideology II-46 referentiality II-40, 42–3, 51 reflexive anthropology I-6, 46, 205, 253, 450 reflexivity I-14, 22, 43, 45, 73, 205, 229, 327–8, II-11, 39, 66, 282, 426 reforms I-97, 140, 349, 407, II-237, 344, 346 China’s market II-304 economic I-267, 407, 410, 412, 414 Islamic I-346, 348 refugee camps I-100, 314, 317 refugees I-313–14, 345, 354, 408, 513, 525, 533, II-162, 169, 345 environmental II-322 regional comparisons II-203, 212 configurations I-449, 451 contexts I-308, 342, 449 perspectives I-451, 493 specialists I-449, 451 traditions I-434, 449 regionality I-423–5 registers II-4, 44–5, 78, 124 regularities II-22–3, 250, 424 regulation I-xxxii, xxxiv, 46, 95, 106, 109–10, 112, 170, II-156, 158, 280, 320–2, 346, 357 reintegration II-157, 162, 178, 203, 323 relatedness I-350, 428, 445, II-13 relationality I-56–7, 66, II-115–16, 356, 428 relations economic I-126, 158, 431, 451 gender I-123, 126, 144, 213–14, 216–17, 292, 344, 453 human–environment I-275, 277, 283, II-219, 312, 434 kinship I-215, 275, 350, 354 power I-73, 124, 173, 343, 410, 493, II-59–60, 65, 192, 264 race I-443, 447, 471 social I-xxx, xxxiii, 31, 33–4, 36–7, 57–8, 311, 451–3, II-38, 44, 47–8, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 104–5 subject–object II-103, 108 relativism I-105, 531 cultural I-10, 111, 183, 252, 527, II-203, 379 relativity, cultural II-191, 194, 199 religions I-2, 178–9, 183–94, 267–8, 315–16, 348, 370–2, 411–12, II-17, 115, 147–8, 158, 241, 292, 331–2, 367 anthropology of I-183, 191, 316, 348, II-125, 417 global I-309, 351 phenomenology of I-186–7 world I-315–16, 348

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

Religions, History of I-185, 190, 192 religiosity I-186–7, 190, 412 religious beliefs I-32, 145, II-241, 264 buildings I-377, 411 claims I-186–7 communities I-10, 191, 368, 373, II-304 conflicts I-130, 352 congregations I-452, 491 experience I-186–7 identities I-348, 352, 357 institutions I-243, 390 knowledge I-191, 224 leaders II-136 life I-187, 189, 267, 345, 492, II-329 movements I-316–17, 348, 489 organizations I-176, 178, 452 phenomena I-184, 187, 194 practices I-xxxii, 110, 256, 390, 446, 502 studies I-183–94 traditions I-184, 186–90, 192, 357 renewed engagement I-147, 172, 489 repatriation I-466–8, 470, 489, II-346, 433 representational equity I-200, 202 representation(s) I-29–30, 61, 64–6, 73–5, 197–201, 218–19, 253–4, 434, II-5, 48, 52, 64–6, 94–5, 184–5, 188–9, 194 anthropological I-131, 309, 312, 314 crisis of I-73, 75, 83, 198, 235, 466, II-11, 39 ethnographic II-66, 131, 218 mental I-30, 38, 149 visual II-5, 188 repression II-35, 347 reproduction I-11–12, 16, 21, 43, 45–6, 161–2, 214–16, 290, II-105–6, 241, 292, 305, 357, 411 biological I-44–6, 216 sexual I-44–5, 214, 216 social I-214, 223, 317, II-238, 343, 349, 435 reproductive rights II-123, 357 reproductive technologies, new I-43, 46–7, 93, II-123 research agendas II-145, 203, 219, 281, 418 councils II-3, 135–6 residence I-146, 443, 517, 519, II-17, 29, 202, 305–6 residents I-83, 328, 451, 494, 500, 515, 517, 523 resistance I-65, 97, 108–9, 124, 161, 173–6, 243, 492–3, II-95, 97, 199, 279, 281–2, 293, 322, 377–9 resource development I-273, 280, 282, II-290 exploitation II-317, 322 management I-90, 278, II-294, 321 mapping II-188 resources I-16, 18, 46, 98, 213, 275, 277, 544–5, II-96–7, 160, 276–7, 281, 288, 312, 315–16, 318–22 natural I-276, 415, 476–7, 538–41, 543 water II-286, 314, 316, 320

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 601

601

responsibilities I-13, 20, 94, 161, 212, 234, 242, 278, II-49, 54, 73, 82, 85, 142–4, 147–8, 321 ethical II-136–7 retirement migrants I-515, 520 retroversion I-266, 308–10, 318 revirgination II-381 revitalization II-288, 343, 359 revolutions I-xxx–xxxi, xxxiii, 158, 171, 316, 407, 412, 487, II-23, 25, 28, 30, 37, 234, 243, 329 digital I-155, 161 rhetoric I-91, 99, 235, 249, 254, 279, 335, 451, II-25, 92, 192, 293, 343 rice II-7, 104–5, 263, 355 right hand II-264, 266 rights I-113, 268–9, 277, 356–7, 413–14, 470, 498, 517 civil I-107, 213, 466 cosmopolitan I-524 cultural I-277, 545 human I-99, 105–9, 111–14, 132, 172, 175, 533, 538–42, II-132, 134, 138, 316, 345, 365, 372 indigenous peoples I-109, 266, 278, 495, 539–40, 545, II-280, 316 land I-444, 539–40, 544–5 reproductive II-123, 357 water II-316–17 women’s I-109, 344 riots I-227, 237–8, 243, 372, 375 risk society I-52–3 rites II-15, 30, 236, 368 funeral II-122 of passage II-15, 30, 373, 380 ritual contexts I-16, 128, II-49 practices I-174, 187, 190, 423, 429, II-306 processes II-69, 161, 243 rituals I-xxxiii, 61, 79–80, 125, 130, 145, 188–9, 289, II-28, 30–1, 69–70, 76, 161, 188, 239–40, 378 women’s I-368, 446 romance I-223, 259, 413, II-48 Romania I-299 Rothschild Archive London II-21, 25–6 Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) I-xxv, xxvii, 168 RP, see rapid prototyping ruins II-88, 336–7 rural areas I-377, 409–10, 415, 493 communities I-xxxiii, 232, 267, 391, 406, 455, 493 Japan I-390, 393–4 people II-300–1 rural–urban migration I-267, 431–2 Russia I-270–1, 274, 277, 279, 283, 287, 296, 354–5 Rwanda I-114, 228, II-79, 161, 166, 301 Saami I-277, 281 sacred sites I-465–6, 468, 470, 543 sacrifice I-243, 429, II-158 safety II-118, 132, 303 Samburu I-147, II-307 Samoa I-18, II-385, 428

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

602

SUBJECT INDEX

sampling II-56, 74, 154, 246–7 San Francisco I-45, 178 saris I-160, 369 satellite broadcasting II-414–15 Saudi Arabia I-325, 333 savagery I-139–40 savages I-xxxii, 44, 138–40, 154, 310, II-198, 217, 277 Scandinavia I-283, 474, II-210 scenes I-14, 127, 133, 412, 498, II-40–2, 48, 80, 245 Schengen Zone I-296, 299 schistosomiasis II-173–4 school children II-173–4 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) I-356, 408–9 schooling I-176, 334, 377, 392, 452, 469, 481 schools II-75, 104, 168, 288–9, 332, 335 science and technology studies (STS) II-5, 104, 115–26, 357 scientific facts I-43, 45, 51, 53 knowledge I-44–5, 525, II-286 creation of II-119–20 racism I-498–9 scientism II-85, 94 scriptural economy I-127–8 scripture I-185, 187 seal hunting I-274, 278 Second World War I-2, 91, 121, 154–5, 272, 406, 474–5, 497–8, II-13, 135, 157, 208 secularism I-169, 179, 373, II-347 secularization I-224, 393 security I-97, 349, 355, 396, 527, II-36, 136, 277–8, 334 food II-301, 319 national I-90, 97, 100 segmentation I-324, 491, II-413 segregation I-497, 499–500 self I-218–19, 224–5, 266–7, 288, 290–2, 294–5, 297–8, 391–2, II-86, 245–6, 250, 426 techniques of the I-94–5 self -consciousness, new I-202–3, 253 -determination I-xxxvi, 109, 219, 266, 273, 277, 466, 469, II-199, 371 -government I-95, 266, 277–8 -organization II-342, 408 -other ambivalence I-290, 294, 296 -realization I-219, 223 -regulating transformational system I-37–9 -representation I-268, 466, 469–70 -reproducing societies I-xxx, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvi, 517 selfhood I-37, 223 semantics I-21, 93, II-40 semi-structured interviewing II-57–8 semiotic fields I-19–20 sensations II-24, 250–1, 262 sensory awareness II-93–4 sensory enculturation II-248 settlement I-253, 273, 275, 277, 451, 455, 472, 515–16, II-161, 211 patterns I-146, 271, 279

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 602

settler colonialism I-465, 471 settler societies II-316 sex/gender systems I-215–16, 223 sex work II-16, 341–6, 348 workers I-369, 415, II-16, 220, 341–4, 348, 434 sexed bodies I-212, 216, 220 sexes I-46, 213–16, 219–20, 222, 225, 290, 317, 501–2, II-16, 93, 176, 230, 344, 380–2 sexual difference I-123, 216, 218, 221, II-342 embodiment II-377–85 sexual division of labour I-45, 143, 214–15 identities I-220–1, 223, II-220 networks II-169, 176 practices I-216, 219–23 relationships II-135, 145 reproduction I-44–5, 214, 216 selection II-226, 229, 232 violence I-373, 495, II-131, 134, 138, 342 sexualities I-98, 172, 178–9, 215–16, 218–23, 297–8, 406–7, 414–15, II-135, 269, 380, 382, 384 male II-93, 95, 383 shamanism I-186, 189, 271, 429 shame I-111, 113, 344, 391, 530, II-196, 348–9 Shanghai I-93, 163, 406, 413–15, II-133 shari’a law I-346, 431, II-61 shock II-178, 301, 336 Siberia I-271–5, 356 Sichuan II-304, 307 Sierra Leone I-315, II-155, 157, 162–3, 166 signals II-40–1, 51, 97, 197, 249, 265, 267, 428–9 silences II-60, 72, 131, 150 Silk Road I-341–2 simulations II-249, 401, 405–6 Singapore I-425, 435–6, II-63, 210, 245, 334 singularity II-87, 119, 123 situated learning I-36, 235 skill acquisition II-155, 244, 249, 433 skilled vision II-89, 267 skills I-35, 56, 63–4, 371, 535, II-17, 58, 75, 94, 106–7, 138, 155, 261–3 linguistic I-193, 259 slametan I-190 slave trade I-130, 311 slavery I-177, 487, 496–7, 501, 533, II-26, 345 white II-346 Slowmediation II-426–8 SMA, see supplementary motor area small-scale societies I-xxxi, 63, 158, 308, 503, II-237, 426–7 smells II-7, 249, 261, 267, 306–7 smoothness II-109, 266–7 SOAS, see School of Oriental and African Studies social action I-10, 12, 19, 46, 58, 89, 164, II-40, 103, 105, 142, 322, 366, 384 actors I-10, 51, 57, 59, 230, II-38, 41, 48, 432 agency I-10, 57, II-105 analysis I-xxxii–xxxiii, 231, 448, II-111, 401

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

anthropologists II-125, 130, 170, 172, 232, 234–5, 432, 436 categories II-236–7 change I-xxxiii, 23, 81, 98, 121, 129, 272, 310–12, II-335 classes I-11, 21, 496, II-304 conflicts II-82, 161 construction I-30, 37, 45–6, 205, II-148, 293 of gender I-215, 220, 495 control I-14, 105, 204, 234, 329, 413, II-378 development I-139, 142 embeddedness II-56, 304, 370 evolution I-139–40, 145, 148, 405, 443 facts I-xxxvii–xxxviii, 2, II-50, 122, 426–7 forces I-312, 316, 331–2 groups I-xxix, 23, 159, 350, 496, II-62, 117, 121, 186, 237, 290, 347 history I-122, 124–7, 157, 212 identities I-13, 18, 21, 42, 147, 160, 242, 274, II-41, 56, 58–60, 147, 301, 307, 378 institutions I-21, 44, 155, 198, 202–3, 220, 255, 257 interactions II-45, 56–7, 70, 211, 220, 247, 264, 307 justice II-320, 342, 360 life I-6, 10, 12, 22–3, 45, 57, 105–6, 190–1, II-11, 22, 38, 40–1, 45, 48, 50–1, 88 of things I-75 logics I-527, 529–30 meaning I-345–6, II-280, 314 mediation II-412, 418 mobility I-317, 490, II-342, 348, 353, 434 movements I-107, 112, 172, 415, 495, 498–9, 502, II-8, 280, 303 new I-171, 179 networking II-54, 280, 417 networks I-115, 329, 343, 452, 512, 520, II-70, 121, 401 order I-xxxii–xxxiii, 116, 190, 213, II-46, 161 organization I-xxxiii, 11, 100, 144, 162, 274–5, 422–3, 474–5, II-165, 282, 301, 330, 365 practices I-80, 82–3, 105, 112, 146–7, 224, 493, II-57, 153, 281 pressure I-111 processes I-xxxi, xxxvii, 10, 28, 98, 124, 126, 130, II-3, 11, 45, 48, 51, 70, 124, 217 relations I-xxx, xxxiii, 31, 33–4, 36–7, 57–8, 311, 451–3, II-38, 44, 47–8, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 104–5 reproduction II-238, 343, 349, 435 solidarity I-164, 344, 526 spaces I-108, 202, 512, 529 status II-186, 188, 264, 366–7 structures I-xxviii–xxix, 11, 43–5, 160, 165, 215, 217, 224 theory I-12, 14, 46–7, 52, 172, 290, 300, 443, II-108, 111, 237–8, 357, 370, 418 transformations I-212–14, 216, 222–4, 344, 512, II-106, 219, 287 worlds I-230, 259, 275, 377, 488, 512, II-45, 47, 55–6, 86, 117, 229, 235, 237

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 603

603

socialism I-154, 213, 290, 293, 343, 352, 414, 431, II-16, 341, 424 socialist states I-294–5 sociality I-10, 33–4, 36–7, 81–2, 205, 224, 236, 348, II-61, 70, 103, 108, 245, 275, 354, 396 socialization I-2, 18, 22, 218, 490, 526 language I-14, 18 sociobiology I-48 sociocultural anthropology II-101, 244, 247 comparative methods II-201–13 methodological agenda II-203 sociocultural phenomena II-239–40 sociology I-xxix, xxxv, xxxvii, 188, 366–8, 405, 498–9, 512, II-87, 116, 125, 132, 137, 208, 226, 330 medical II-354, 359, 365 sodalities II-157–8 software II-194, 405, 407 soldiers II-105, 135, 157–8, 165 solidarity I-164, 343–4, 526, II-10, 43, 146, 237, 282 networks II-304 Somalia I-326, 333 songs I-124, 248, 250, 369, 446, 469, II-76, 368 sorcery I-63, 308, 372, 429, 446, II-264 South Africa I-xxxi, 114, 143, 312, 316, 544, II-25, 210, 267 South America I-270 from a continental perspective, see Latin America indigenous I-268, 465, 472–81 South Asia I-4, 223, 267, 270, 340, 358, 366–78, 424–5, II-10, 348 South, Global II-212, 279, 300–5, 358, 424, 434 South India I-238–9, 243, 369, 424–5, II-320 South Koreans I-515 Southeast Asia I-223, 267, 389, II-246, 277 archipelagic I-422–36 southern Africa I-312, 512, 543, II-380 southern Europe I-292–3, II-424 southern Guyana II-290 southern Sudan II-169–70, 178 Southwest Asia I-340–58, 366 sovereignty I-xxxii, xxxiv, 94, 109, 237–8, 243, 466–7, 469–71, II-158, 280, 346, 348 cultural I-466, 470 food II-305, 307 tribal I-470 Soviet Union I-95, 100, 267, 273, 276, 340–4, 346–9, 353–8, II-343 diasporas I-354–5 policies I-343, 346, 348 Spain I-295, 325, 407, II-24 spatial distances II-91, 204 speech I-14–16, 18–19, 224, 250, II-40–1, 43, 46–8, 51, 65, 91, 239 events II-21, 40–2, 47–8 spirit mediums II-146, 148 spirit possession II-147–8 sports I-394, 406–7, 414, II-249, 269

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

604

SUBJECT INDEX

Sri Lanka I-175–7, 366, 371–2, 374–6, II-188 stability II-86, 117, 236, 238, 286, 353, 372 stakeholders II-155, 193–4, 197 state formation I-96, 311, 332, 351, 493 power I-94, 97–8, 168, 234, 242, 347, 349, 358 retreat of the I-241 the I-xxxii, 175, 348, 351–3 violence I-114, 233 state-created domains I-233, 241 state, power II-303, 348 statistical analysis II-186, 401 status political II-335–6 social II-186, 188, 264, 366–7 stem cells I-42–3, 45, 47, 52–3, 368, II-356–8 stereotypes/stereotyping I-234, 241, 293, 329, 352, 390, 501, II-44, 131, 185, 202, 212, 237 storytelling I-13, 250, II-47–9, 415 strangers I-15, 52, 242, 490, 524–5, 532, 535, II-56, 186, 193, 281 structural functionalism I-xxx, 1–2, 44, 140, 142, 171, 311, 443 structuralism I-2, 389, 450, 474, II-39, 109 structures class I-222, 455, 490, 501 colonizing I-309–10, 313 of feeling I-126, 128 linguistic I-11–12 political I-171, 286, 423, 430, 541 social I-xxviii–xxix, 11, 43–5, 160, 165, 215, 217, 224 STS, see science and technology studies student movements I-171–2 students foreign I-396, 517–18 international I-517–18, 520 studying up I-93–4, 130 style I-57, 128, 147, 204, 230, 253–4, 423, 425, II-11, 18, 49, 58–9, 70, 87 sub-Arctic I-266, 270–83 sub-Saharan Africa I-4, 266–7, 308–9, 423 subaltern classes I-21, 236 consciousness I-123, 243 studies I-122–4, 174, 236, 238, 243, 366 the I-123 voices II-60, 320 subalternist discourse I-237–8 subalternists I-237–8, 243 subject–object relations II-103, 108 subjectification I-95, 218, II-117 subjection I-224, 229, 231, 234 postcolonial I-11, 232 subjectivity I-11, 37, 92, 94, 218–19, 224, 228–32, 234–5, II-130, 144, 321, 361, 378, 416 subjugation I-228–9 subordination I-97, 213, 369 universal I-213–14

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 604

subsistence economies I-143, 268, 309, 423, 427, II-316, 318 substantivists I-155–6, 161 Sudan I-310, 318, 325–6, 333, 335, II-168–9 southern II-169–70, 178 Sulawesi I-427, 430–1 Sumba I-428–9, 434–5, II-46 supermarkets II-299, 301, 304, 334, 427 supplementary motor area (SMA) II-268, 270 surgery II-377–8, 381–2 survival I-143, 242, 272, 279, 317, 328, II-30, 220, 229, 241, 287, 427 cultural I-274, 278, 282, 543 of the fittest II-229, 232 sustainability I-281–2, 427, II-277–8, 280–1, 301, 322–3 Sweden I-270, 277, 295, 474, II-407 Switzerland I-185, 286, 296, 299 symbolic action I-30, 237 anthropology I-274, 389 field I-17 power I-349, 430, 432, II-264 systems I-17, 214–15, II-432 symbolism I-2, 99, 101, 147, 237–8, 349, 429, II-24, 330 cosmological II-406 political I-96, 349 symbols I-xxxiii, 45, 148, 155, 206, 278–9, 349, II-39, 103, 105–6, 188, 247, 368 condensed I-92, 100 syncretism I-62, 242, 412 taboos II-60, 145 Tainui I-455–6 Taiwan I-222, 406–9, 424, II-210 Tajikistan I-326, 341, 345, 347–8, 356, 358 Taliban I-100, 345 Tamil Nadu I-239, 370–1 Tamils I-176–7, 374, 424 Tanzania I-xxvi, 230, 314, II-81, 169, 175, 304 task groups II-155, 157 tastes II-21, 300, 303, 307 teachers I-xxv, 4, 18, 124, 155, 176, 243, 407, II-9, 174, 184, 435 teaching hospitals II-169, 177, 179–80 technical rationality II-220, 427 technological change I-138, 140 materiality II-109, 392, 395 technologies I-xxxv–xxxvi, 42, 46–7, 52–3, 73–5, 80–1, 114, 142–3, II-59–60, 123, 165, 194–5, 400–1, 403, 408, 411–12 communications I-80, 297, II-195, 220, 416–17 digital II-79, 81, 417, 436 of governance I-101, 469 information I-222, 415, II-355, 361, 392, 402 legal I-106, 114–15 medical I-52–3, II-355, 357, 361–2 new I-5, 53, 81, 201, 297, 416, II-194

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

SUBJECT INDEX

noumenal II-394–7 political I-94, 100 teleological reasoning II-236, 240 television I-10, 73–4, 78–9, 335, 432, 434, 491, II-70, 74, 411–14 temporalities I-57, 139, II-28, 30, 40, 47–8, 51, 63, 348, 416 temporary foreign workers I-517–18 tenure, land I-444–5 territory I-295, 332, 350, 444, 449, 469, 487, 524–5, II-219, 312, 314, 321–3, 349, 434 terror I-98–100 war on I-90, 98, 100, 324, II-137 terrorism I-xxxv, 97, 100, II-136, 156 texts interpretation II-69–71, 75–7 oral II-38, 81 printed II-74, 79 published II-46, 71, 210 recorded II-78, 81 written II-49, 71, 92 textual analysis I-252, 433 textures II-7, 14, 93–4, 105, 107, 307, 394, 414 Thailand I-110, 221–2, 424, II-63 the museum I-197, 207 theatre I-72, 78–9, 177, 254, 430, 434, II-73, 75, 156 theology I-xxxix, 185–8, 192–3 thick descriptions II-93–4, 153, 155, 165 thinginess II-108 thinness II-85 third genders I-218, 220, 369, II-385 thumbs II-265–6 Tiananmen Square I-406, 413 Tibetan Buddhism I-413 Tibetans I-369, 411 timber II-261, 266–7, 277, 293 tools I-11, 14, 19–20, 36, 49, 79, 98, 100, II-51, 94, 155–6, 165, 236, 261–9, 357, 400–2 analytical I-12, 19, II-361 conceptual I-221, 395 handheld II-266, 269 new II-402–3 total immersion II-4, 7–18 totalitarianism II-413 tourism I-xxxvi, 11, 113, 281, 511–12, 514–15, 520–1, 528, II-315 cultural I-391 tourist destinations I-511, 515, 520 tourist-workers I-520 tourists I-511, 513–15, 517, 519–20 towns I-176–7, 234, 236, 239, 243, 278, 314, 516, II-10, 28, 61–2, 73, 177, 332–6, 368, see also cities trade I-83, 157, 162, 254, 317, 371, 410, 477–8, II-25, 154–5, 229, 263, 301–2, 305–6, 434 fair II-280, 304–5, 307 free II-300–2 international I-90, 428, 525, 534

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 605

605

trade unions I-178, 352 traders I-121, 163, 271, 347, 357, 525, II-304–5, 372–3 traditional authority I-430, 526 institutions I-58, 345 knowledge II-407–8 medicine II-353, 359 societies I-94, 310, 455 traditions I-128, 189–93, 223–4, 275–6, 330–2, 343–5, 454–5, 523–6, II-47, 50, 57, 72, 78–9, 84, 211, 237 anthropological I-207, 287, 388, 394, 473 anthropology’s II-219 cultural I-330, 528, II-237, 404 ethnographic I-312, 388 intellectual I-xxviii, 162, 189, 286–7, 294–5, 474 Islamic I-331, 334 living I-273, 326, 434 national I-xxxiv, 155, 346–7, II-212 oral I-6, 281, 467, II-76, 195 religious I-186–8, 190, 192, 357 trafficking II-344–6, 370, 372 training II-8–9, 16, 51, 138, 193, 235, 263, 266–7 technical II-94, 97 transcriptions II-77–9, 81, 97 transculturation I-268, 523 transference II-59, 64–5, 145 transfers, knowledge II-220, 356, 372, 427 transformations I-30, 37–8, 61–2, 222–4, 328–30, 344–5, 355–6, 375–6, II-5, 9, 23, 28, 116, 204, 377–9, 396 body II-378, 380, 383–4 social I-212–14, 216, 222–4, 344, 512 transgender activists II-382–3 transitional justice I-105–6, 111, 113–14 transitions I-198, 251, 267, 275–6, 292, 343, 368, 408, II-281, 343, 368, 377, 381–3, 403, 414–15 translations I-96, 106, 112–13, 115–16, 172, 174, 252, 333, II-26, 39, 77–9, 117–19, 121–2, 125, 356, 404 transmen II-382–3 transmigration I-516 transmission II-195, 341–2, 349 transnational corporations I-452, 538, 541, 543–4, II-305, 316, 321 identities I-4, 355 imaginaries I-222–3 labour migration I-354, 514 movements I-513, 516, 521 networks I-495–6 spaces I-115–16, 492 systems I-109, 112 transnationalism I-80, 221, 267–8, 353, 390, 491–2, 521, 523 transparency II-131, 205, 212, 341, 429 travellers I-473, 511, 514–15, 517–18 travelling theories I-227, 237

5/18/2012 11:56:12 AM

606

SUBJECT INDEX

treaties, multilateral I-109, 111 treatment programmes II-47, 173–5, 371 tribal governments I-466, 469 identity I-236, 330 museums I-470 societies I-xxxiii, 350–1 sovereignty I-470 tribes I-148, 164, 228, 324, 330, 345, 350–1, 468–70 Trinidad I-83, 156 Trobrianders I-44, 81, 111, 252, 521, II-154, 196 tropical diseases II-168, 173–5 trust I-257, 526 trustees I-177, 204 truth-and-reconciliation processes II-158–9 tsunami II-23, 61–2 Tunisia I-172, 325 Turkey I-287, 296, 332–5, 346, 354 Turkmenistan I-326, 347, 356 Uganda I-310, II-73, 169, 173–5, 178 north-western II-173–4 northern II-169–70, 177–8 UNCED, see United Nations Conference on Environment and Development underclass I-312, 490 UNDP, see United Nations Development Programme UNESCO, see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) II-168–9, 178 unified model of human being I-10, 27–9, 36–8 United Kingdom I-186, 190, 207, 325, 388, 408–9, 422, 529, II-16, 125, 132, 168, 176, 280–2, 323–4, 342–4 United Nations I-390, 538–40, 542–3, 545, II-169, 291, 295 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) I-542 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) II-169, 291, 295 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) I-474, 497–8 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) II-368–9, 371–2 United States I-xxix, 97–100, 334–5, 407–9, 472–4, 487–93, 497–501, 503, II-23, 44, 47, 63, 123, 303, 380, 423–4 Agency for International Development, see USAID universal history I-139, 524 subordination I-213–14 universalism I-105, 111, 154, 525, 533, II-203, 211, 347, 356–7 universality I-19, 204, 480, II-244 UNODC, see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime unstructured interviews II-57–8, 60

5709-Fardon-Vol-I_Index_Subject.indd 606

urban agriculture II-302 anthropologies I-312, 496 economies I-370–1 neighbourhoods I-115, 391 sociology I-58, 490, 512 spaces I-278–9, 355, 513, 534 urbanism I-278, 431, 489, 496, 533, II-70 urbanization I-xxxiii, 267–8, 278, 310, 329, 390, 406, 512–14, II-11, 369 USAID (US Agency for International Development) II-169, 178, 292, 295 utterances I-13, 15, 19–20, 23, 35, II-41, 43, 149–50, 262 Uyghurs I-411 Uzbekistan I-326, 346, 348–50, 352, 358 vaginas II-380, 382–3 variants, linguistic II-44–5 ventriloquation II-48, 50 verbal forms II-69–70 verbs, performative I-13, 18, 23 vernacularization I-106, 115, 352 victims I-112, 114, 125, 130, 163, 199, 272, 317, II-35, 138, 154, 158, 160, 185, 330, 345 of trafficking II-345, 370 video I-10, 73, 79, 376, II-75, 81, 194–5, 245, 411 digital II-91, 96 participatory II-194–5 Vienna I-116, 178, II-212 Vietnam I-100, 424, II-135, 154 viewers II-74, 76, 80, 82, 90, 97 village fieldwork II-10, 14–15, 17 India I-238 life II-12–13, 70 villagers I-240, 314, 347, 366–7, 369, 410, II-17, 91, 288, 293, 332 villages I-108, 111, 115, 240, 277–9, 351, 374, 408–10, II-7–8, 10–12, 15–17, 28, 61, 288–9, 332, 368 violence I-98–9, 107, 113–14, 130, 191, 232–3, 351–3, 372–4, II-60, 91, 132, 134, 141, 144, 161, 346–8 communal I-237–8, 373 domestic I-113 political I-130, 175, 232–3, 241, 243 sexual I-373, 495, II-131, 138, 342 state I-114, 233 violent conflict I-342, 345, 352 virtual worlds II-60–1, 402 virtualism I-156, II-293 virtuality I-81–2 visual anthropology I-56, 64–7, 253, II-84–98, 165, 411, 414–15 experimental II-91, 98 arts I-59–60 culture II-85, 97 material II-90, 94, 96

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SUBJECT INDEX

media II-84, 86, 93–4, 97 representations II-5, 188 the II-85–6, 90–2, 94, 96–7 visualism II-85 visuality I-5, 201, II-5, 85–7, 94 vulnerability I-xxxviii, 162, 231, 233, 253, 344, 468, 492, II-97, 175, 251, 329, 332, 354, 425 war crimes II-154, 158–9, 163 war on terror I-90, 98, 100, 324 war zones I-5, 200 research in II-153–66, 177 wars I-xxxii, 98–100, 155, 176, 192, 213, 406–7, 531–2, II-5, 23, 32, 131, 134–5, 137–8, 153–66, 329 anthropological knowledge of II-155, 164 anthropology of II-153–5, 159–61, 164–5 civil I-175, 177, 309, 311, 317, 345, 372–4, 497, II-62, 156, 161, 166, 299 culture I-184, 532 materialities of II-155–6 water II-104, 186, 202, 205, 219, 312–23, 434 privatization II-316, 320, 434 resources II-286, 314, 316, 320 users II-314, 318–19, 321 water rights II-316–17 Watergate scandal I-97, 100 Waterworlds II-202, 204–5, 209, 212 WCC, see World Conservation Congress wealth I-160, 193, 271, 281, 289, 315–16, 351, 374, II-304, 314, 319, 337, 385 mineral II-162, 277 weapons I-96, 140, 214, II-60, 155, 165, 367 weather I-64, 276, 281, II-108, 169, 282, 313, 323, 365 web-based archives/repositories II-81 weddings I-83, 409, II-50 West Africa I-130, 132, 250–1, 311, 317, II-158, 201–2, 205, 211, 277, 368 West Bengal I-369–70, 375 West, the I-332, 345, 355, II-109 western India I-95, 373, 375, II-219, 332 western intellectual traditions I-292, 297 Western Pacific I-44, 81, 155 Westernization I-224, 390 wetlands II-316, 318 whaling I-267, 274, 428 white ethnics I-490, 495 white flight I-490, 500 whitening I-487, 493, 502–3 why-type questions II-234

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607

wild thought II-22, 31 wildlife management I-276–7 witchcraft I-xxxii, 2, 125, 127, 234–5, 242, 266, 315–16, II-125, 144 accusations I-127, 315 women I-112–13, 122–3, 169–70, 212–18, 232–4, 343–4, 367–9, 408–11, II-9–10, 49, 60, 134, 341–4, 347–9, 379–81, 383–4 African II-379–81 bodies II-347–8, 380 indigenous I-502, 540 lives of II-8–9, 17 real II-379–80, 383 woodworkers II-262, 267 workers I-366, 370–1, 414, 496, 520, 529, II-33, 118, 343–4, 397, 434–5 sex II-220, 341–4, 348, 434 working classes I-241, 393, 492 working holidays I-515, 517–18, 520 workplaces I-108, 391–2, 395, II-13, 301, 373 workshops I-122, 287, 395, II-155, 191, 261 World Bank I-539, 542, 545, II-150, 172, 176, 278, 323, 332, 337 world cities I-533–4 citizens I-523–4, 535 economy I-155, 159–61, 164, 471 history I-154–5, 165, 513 religions I-315–16, 348 World Conservation Congress (WCC) II-289, 291, 294 World Health Organization (WHO) II-169, 175, 354 World Vision II-169–70 written texts II-49, 71, 92 Xinjiang I-411, 413 Yemen I-332, II-262, 324 Yi I-411–12 Yolngu/Murngin I-444–6 Yoruba II-76 youth I-230, 309, 316–17, 347, 376, II-132 YouTube II-417 Yugoslavia I-286, 295 Yukaghir I-272, 274 Yunnan I-412 Zaire I-78, 242 Zambia I-123, 311 Zande II-150, 169, 426 Zimbabwe I-xxvi, 233, 242, 311

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The SAGE Handbook of

Social Anthropology

Volume 2

5709-Fardon-Vol-II_FM.indd i

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The SAGE Handbook of

Social Anthropology

Volume 2

Edited by

Richard Fardon, Olivia Harris, Trevor H. J. Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang and Richard A. Wilson Published with the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth

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SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura RoadA New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Editor: Robert Rojek Editorial assistant: Alana Clogan Production editor: Katherine Haw Copyeditor: Cenveo Publisher Services Proofreader: Cenveo Publisher Services Marketing manager: Michael Ainsley Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by: Cenveo Publisher Services Printed by: Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, India

VOLUME 1 Preface © John Gledhill and James Fairhead 2012 Foreword © John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff 2012 Introduction © Richard Fardon 2012 Part 1 Introduction © Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson 2012 Chapter 1.1 © Alessandro Duranti 2012 Chapter 1.2 © Christina Toren 2012 Chapter 1.3 © Sarah Franklin 2012 Chapter 1.4 © Arnd Schneider 2012 Chapter 1.5 © Kevin Latham 2012 Chapter 1.6 © Cris Shore 2012 Chapter 1.7 © Sally Engle Merry 2012 Chapter 1.8 © Jane K. Cowan 2012 Chapter 1.9 © Julian Thomas 2012 Chapter 1.10 © Keith Hart 2012 Chapter 1.11 © Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer 2012 Chapter 1.12 © Martin Mills 2012 Chapter 1.13 © Brian Durrans 2012 Chapter 1.14 © Henrietta L. Moore 2012 Chapter 1.15 © Richard Werbner 2012 Chapter 1.16 © C.W. Watson 2012 Part 2 Introduction and Chapter 2.1 © Mark Nuttall 2012 Chapter 2.2 © Sarah Green 2012 Chapter 2.3 © David Pratten 2012 Chapter 2.4 © Glenn Bowman 2012 Chapter 2.5 © Magnus Marsden 2012 Chapter 2.6 © Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery 2012 Chapter 2.7 © D.P. Martinez 2012 Chapter 2.8 © J.S. Eades 2012 Chapter 2.9 © Roy Ellen 2012 Chapter 2.10 © Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry 2012 Chapter 2.11 © Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong 2012 Chapter 2.12 © John Gledhill and Peter Wade 2012 Chapter 2.13 © Vered Amit 2012 Chapter 2.14 © Nigel Rapport 2012 Chapter 2.15 © Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli 2012 VOLUME 2 Part 3 Introduction © Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang 2012 Chapter 3.1 © Janet Carsten 2012 Chapter 3.2 © Tristan Platt 2012 Chapter 3.3 © Susan Gal 2012 Chapter 3.4 © Joshua Barker 2012 Chapter 3.5 © Karin Barber 2012 Chapter 3.6 © Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright 2012 Chapter 3.7 © Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond 2012 Chapter 3.8 © Penelope Harvey 2012 Chapter 3.9a © Nayanika Mookherjee 2012 Chapter 3.9b © Michael Lambek 2012 Chapter 3.10 © Paul Richards 2012 Chapter 3.11 © Tim Allen and Melissa Parker 2012 Chapter 3.12 © Paul Sillitoe 2012 Chapter 3.13 © Andre Gingrich 2012 Part 4 Introduction © Trevor H.J. Marchand 2012 Chapter 4.1.1 © Robin I.M. Dunbar 2012 Chapter 4.1.2 © Harvey Whitehouse 2012 Chapter 4.1.3 © Greg Downey 2012 Chapter 4.1.4 © Trevor H.J. Marchand 2012 Chapter 4.2.1 © James Fairhead and Melissa Leach 2012 Chapter 4.2.2 © Laura M. Rival 2012 Chapter 4.2.3 © Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West 2012 Chapter 4.2.4 © Veronica Strang 2012 Chapter 4.2.5 © Edward Simpson 2012 Chapter 4.3.1 © Sophie Day 2012 Chapter 4.3.2 © Helen Lambert 2012 Chapter 4.3.3 © Axel Klein 2012 Chapter 4.3.4 © Andrea Cornwall 2012 Chapter 4.4.1 © Susanne Küchler 2012 Chapter 4.4.2 © Ron Eglash 2012 Chapter 4.4.3 © Dominic Boyer 2012 Chapter 4.4.4 © Christopher Pinney 2012 Afterword © Marilyn Strathern 2012 First published 2012 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937785 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84787-547-1

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

xi

VOLUME 2 PART 3 METHODS Edited by the late Olivia Harris and Veronica Strang Introduction − Issues of Method Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang 3.1 Fieldwork Since the 1980s: Total Immersion and its Discontents Janet Carsten

1

3

7

3.2 Between Routine and Rupture: The Archive as Field Event Tristan Platt

21

3.3 The Role of Language in Ethnographic Method Susan Gal

38

3.4 The Ethnographic Interview in an Age of Globalization Joshua Barker

54

3.5 Interpreting Texts and Performances Karin Barber

69

3.6 Blurred Visions: Reflecting Visual Anthropology Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright

84

3.7 Artefacts in Anthropology Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond 3.8 Knowledge and Experimental Practice: A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies Penelope Harvey

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101

115

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CONTENTS

3.9a Twenty-first Century Ethics for Audited Anthropologists

130

Nayanika Mookherjee 3.9b Ethics Out of the Ordinary Michael Lambek

141

3.10 Researching Zones of Conflict and War Paul Richards

153

3.11 Conflicts and Compromises? Experiences of Doing Anthropology at the Interface of Public Policy Tim Allen and Melissa Parker

168

3.12 From Participant-Observation to Participant-Collaboration: Some Observations on Participatory-cum-Collaborative Approaches Paul Sillitoe

183

3.13 Comparative Methods in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Today Andre Gingrich

201

PART 4 FUTURES Edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand

215

Introduction – Anthropologies to Come Trevor H.J. Marchand Section 4.1

Neo-Darwinism, Biology and the Brain Sciences

217

223

4.1.1 Anthropology and Neo-Darwinism Robin I.M. Dunbar

225

4.1.2 Cognition, Evolution and the Future of Social Anthropology Harvey Whitehouse

234

4.1.3 Neuroanthropology Greg Downey

243

4.1.4 Knowledge in Hand: Explorations of Brain, Hand and Tool Trevor H.J. Marchand

261

Section 4.2 After Development − Environment, Food, Energy, Disaster

273

4.2.1 Environment and Society: Political Ecologies and Moral Futures James Fairhead and Melissa Leach

275

4.2.2 Anthropological Encounters with Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation Laura M. Rival

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4.2.3 New Directions in the Anthropology of Food Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West

299

4.2.4 Water, Land and Territory Veronica Strang

312

4.2.5 The Anthropology of Disaster Aftermath Edward Simpson

329

Section 4.3

339

Demographics, Health and the Transforming Body

4.3.1 Demographies in Flux Sophie Day

341

4.3.2 New Medical Anthropology Helen Lambert

353

4.3.3 The Anthropology of Drugs Axel Klein

365

4.3.4 Transforming Bodies: The Embodiment of Sexual and Gender Difference Andrea Cornwall

377

Section 4.4

389

New Technologies and Materialities

4.4.1 New Materials and New Technologies: Science, Design and the Challenge to Anthropology Susanne Küchler

391

4.4.2 Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Science, Subject and Symbiosis Ron Eglash

400

4.4.3 From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation Dominic Boyer

411

4.4.4 Anthropology in the New Millennium Christopher Pinney

423

Afterword: A Last Word on Futures Marilyn Strathern (Life President of the ASA)

431

Name Index Subject Index

437 467

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CONTENTS

VOLUME 1 Preface: The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth John Gledhill (Chair of the ASA 2005–2009) and James Fairhead (Chair of the ASA 2009–2013) Foreword: Thinking Anthropologically, About British Social Anthropology John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff Introduction − Flying Theory, Grounded Method Richard Fardon (Chair of the ASA 2001−2005) PART 1 INTERFACES Edited by Cris Shore and Richard Wilson Introduction − Anthropology’s Interdisciplinary Connections Cris Shore and Richard A. Wilson

xxv

xxviii

1

7

9

1.1 Anthropology and Linguistics Alessandro Duranti

12

1.2 Anthropology and Psychology Christina Toren

27

1.3 Anthropology of Biomedicine and Bioscience Sarah Franklin

42

1.4 Anthropology and Art Arnd Schneider

56

1.5 Anthropology, Media and Cultural Studies Kevin Latham

72

1.6 Anthropology and Public Policy Cris Shore

89

1.7 Anthropology and Law Sally Engle Merry

105

1.8 Anthropology and History Jane K. Cowan

121

1.9 Anthropology and Archaeology Julian Thomas

138

1.10 Anthropology, Economics and Development Studies Keith Hart

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CONTENTS

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1.11 Anthropology and the Political Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer

168

1.12 Anthropology and Religious Studies Martin Mills

183

1.13 Anthropology and Museums Brian Durrans

197

1.14 Anthropology and Gender Studies Henrietta L. Moore

212

1.15 Anthropology and the Postcolonial Richard Werbner

227

1.16 Anthropology and Literature C.W. Watson

248

PART 2 PLACES Edited by Mark Nuttall

263

Introduction − Place, Region, Culture, History: From Area Studies to a Globalized World Mark Nuttall

265

2.1 The Circumpolar North: Locating the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Mark Nuttall

270

2.2 Replacing Europe Sarah Green

286

2.3 Retroversion, Introversion, Extraversion: Three Aspects of African Anthropology David Pratten

308

2.4 Refiguring the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Glenn Bowman

324

2.5 Southwest and Central Asia: Comparison, Integration or Beyond? Magnus Marsden

340

2.6 South Asia: Intimacy and Identities, Politics and Poverty Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery

366

2.7 Modernization and its Aftermath: The Anthropology of Japan D.P. Martinez

388

2.8 The Emerging Socio-Cultural Anthropology of Emerging China J.S. Eades

405

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x

2.9

CONTENTS

Archipelagic Southeast Asia Roy Ellen

2.10 Australasian Contrasts Nicolas Peterson, Don Gardner and James Urry

422

443

Australia Nicolas Peterson

443

Melanesia Don Gardner

448

New Zealand/Aotearoa James Urry

453

2.11 Two Indigenous Americas Kathleen Lowrey and Pauline Turner Strong

465

North America Pauline Turner Strong

465

South America Kathleen Lowrey

472

2.12 North and Latin American National Societies from a Continental Perspective John Gledhill and Peter Wade

487

2.13 Migration and Other Forms of Movement Vered Amit

511

2.14 The Cosmopolitan World Nigel Rapport

523

2.15 The Indigenous World Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli

538

Name Index Subject Index

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547 577

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Notes on Contributors

Tim Allen is Professor in Development Anthropology at the Department of International Development, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has carried out long-term field research in Sudan and Uganda and has also researched in Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. His books include Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army (2006); Culture and Global Change (1999, edited with Tracey Skelton) and Poverty and Development (2000, 2nd edition, edited with Alan Thomas). Vered Amit is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University. She has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Canada and the Cayman Islands. Much of her research has featured an ongoing preoccupation with the workings of and intersections between different forms of transnational mobility. Recent publications include Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Migration (edited 2006) as well as Young Men in Uncertain Times (2011, edited with Noel Dyck). Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She specializes in the anthropology of verbal arts and popular culture, focusing on the Yoruba-speaking area of western Nigeria. Among her more recent books are The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000) and The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (2007). Joshua Barker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include urban anthropology and the social anthropology of new media. His earlier research focused on policing and vigilantism in the city of Bandung, Indonesia. More recently he has published several articles focusing on new media and the making of Indonesian urban imaginaries. Glenn Bowman has researched in Jerusalem, between 1983 and 1985, and since then in the mixed Christian−Muslim town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. He taught at University College London, before moving to Kent in 1991 where he is Senior Lecturer, and convenes the MA in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity. Bowman is past editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and serves on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory and Focaal.

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Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He has written widely on intersections of media and knowledge, including Understanding Media (2007). His next book, The Life Informatic, concerns the transformation of news journalism in the era of digital information. He is currently researching the politics of energy transition in Latin America and Europe. Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997), and After Kinship (2004), and editor of Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000) and Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (2007). Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. Her research interests include religious conversion, ethnic citizenship, materiality, and human−environment relations in Malaysian Borneo. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship and the Matter of Religion in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (2012), and is currently co-editing, with Mark Elliott, a volume on Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Their current research in postapartheid South Africa is on crime, policing, and the workings of the state, on democracy and difference, and on the nature of postcolonial politics. Their recent co-authored books include Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), Zombies et frontières à l’ère néolibérale. Le cas de l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid (2010), and Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011). Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex where she works mainly on the anthropology of democracy, sexualities, rights and gender. Recent publications include Development With a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development (2009, edited with Sonia Corrêa and Susie Jolly) and Men and Development: Politicising Masculinity (2011, edited with Jerker Edström and Alan Greig). Jane K. Cowan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (2000), and Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (2001, edited with Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson). Her research interests include gender, embodiment and performance, culture and rights, and histories of transnational engagements around minority and human rights, from activism to international monitoring, with a current focus on petitions to the League of Nations. Rupert Cox is a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at Manchester University whose interests revolve around the relationships between technology, the senses, and media practices, both as

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subjects of study in themselves and as the means to link artwork with anthropological enquiry. In Japan, he researches into such areas as the representation and practice of the Zen arts, the cultural history of the idea of copying, and the political ecology of aircraft noise. His latest publication is Beyond Text: Critical Practice and Sensory Anthropology (forthcoming, edited with Christopher Wright and Andrew Irving). Jennifer Curtis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles based on her doctoral research in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which traced relationships among grassroots activism and transnational norms regarding human rights and conflict resolution. She is currently writing a monograph on Northern Ireland’s transformation into a model for peace-making, incorporating prior research and her current work on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activism. Sophie Day is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has conducted research in both South Asia (Ladakh) and Europe (mostly London). She is author of On the Game: Women and Sex Work (2007), and co-editor of Lilies of the Field (1999, with Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Michael Stewart), and Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe (2004, with Helen Ward). Greg Downey is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. His research has focused on martial arts and rugby in Brazil, the United States, Australia and Oceania, focusing especially on biological, behavioural, perceptual and neurological adaptations to diverse training regimens. He is author of Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (2005) and editor of the forthcoming volume, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (with Daniel D. Lende). Robin (R.I.M) Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and co-Director of the British Academy’s Centenary Research Project whose focus is on what makes us human and how we came to be that way. His broader research interests lie in the evolution of sociality in mammals (with particular reference to ungulates, primates and humans). Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and in the United States, where he studied political discourse, verbal performance, and human universals such as greetings. He has written on intentionality, agency, linguistic relativity, and, more recently, the role of improvisation in jazz and everyday interaction. He is a past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Brian Durrans was until 2007 senior curator of Asian ethnography in the British Museum. He has curated many exhibitions, most recently Posing Questions: Being & Image in Asia & Europe (Brunei Gallery, the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS], 2010), part of a major Asia-Europe museum initiative which he co-led with a Japanese colleague. His writings have ranged over museology, collecting, representations and Asian material culture. He is

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currently pursuing further research on portraiture, and leads a long-term collaborative project on the anthropology of time capsules. Jerry (J. S.) Eades is Professor and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent. His current research interests include migration, urbanization, tourism and the environment in the Asia Pacific region. Ron Eglash received his BS in Cybernetics, his MS in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. A Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship enabled his field research on African ethnomathematics, published as African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (1999). His later work, funded by the NSF, used computational simulations of cultural practices in African American, Native American and Latino communities for STEM education. He is now a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Roy (R.F.) Ellen is Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at the University of Kent. He has written extensively in the fields of environmental anthropology, cultural cognition and ethnobiology, as well as having conducted fieldwork in various parts of island Southeast Asia. He was editor of the inaugural volume of the ASA Research Methods Series, Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (1984), and Honorary Secretary of the ASA (1982−85). Recent books include On the Edge of the Banda Zone (2003), The Categorical Impulse (2006), and two edited volumes: Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies (2007) and Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind (2006, Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute). He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2007 to 2011. James Fairhead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex and current Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2009−2013). His research has considered agricultural and environmental knowledge and practices in West and Central Africa and their encounters with the world of science, international development and conservation. A trilogy of books from this includes Misreading the African Landscape (1996, with Melissa Leach). More recently he has expanded in taking an ethnographic approach to the conduct of medical science, published as Vaccine Anxieties (2007, with Melissa Leach). Richard Fardon, Professor of West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2001−2005). His recent books have been about art and ritual in Cameroon and Nigeria, where he has researched − via fieldwork, archives and museum/art collections − since the mid-1970s: Column to Volume (2005, with Christine Stelzig), Lela in Bali (2006), Fusions (2007) and Central Nigeria Unmasked (2011, with Marla C. Berns and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir). Sarah Franklin is the Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and the author of numerous publications concerning kinship and new reproductive technologies. Her most recent book is Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007). With Margaret Lock she

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co-edited Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of Biomedicine (2003). Her current work concerns the history of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer and is forthcoming with Duke University Press under the title Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship. Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Language Shift (1979), co-author of The Politics of Gender After Socialism (2000), and editor of Gender and Circulation a Special Issue of Eastern European Politics and Societies (2006). As co-editor of Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (2001), and in numerous articles, she has written about the political economy of language. Her continuing ethnographic work in Europe explores the relationship between linguistic practices, semiotic processes and the construction of social life. Don Gardner recently retired from the Australian National University and teaches part-time at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He has conducted fieldwork among Mian people, of central New Guinea, since 1975. His interests focus on social theory and the naturalistic analysis of socio-historical change. His most recent publication is ‘The scope of “meaning” and the avoidance of sylleptical reason: a plea for some modest distinctions’, Ethnos, 75 (2010). Andre Gingrich directs the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) and has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago and at the Santa Fe School for Advanced Research. He co-authored One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology (2005, with F. Barth, R. Parkin, and S. Silverman). His field research in Southwestern Arabia and Central Europe led to Anthropology, by Comparison (2002, edited with R. G. Fox) and recently, to ‘Warriors of Honor, Warriors of Faith’, in Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss (eds), Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach (2011). John Gledhill, Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2005−2009). His extensive fieldwork in Mexico and Brazil is currently focused on security issues. Publications include Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo (1991); Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty (1995); Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics (2nd edition, 2000); and Cultura y Desafío en Ostula: Cuatro Siglos de Autonomía Indígena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Michoacán (2004). Sarah Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has studied location, borders and spatial relations throughout her career. She has carried out research in various parts of Europe, including the Balkan region, particularly the borders of Greece, and has also researched issues in London and Manchester. She is author of Notes from the Balkans (2005) and Urban Amazons (1997). Olivia Harris was Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she moved from Goldsmiths, University of London. Following fieldwork in Bolivia, she wrote on gender, the family, exchange, labour and temporalities. She published To Make the Earth Bear Fruit (2000) and many articles. With Tristan Platt and

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Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne she authored Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas (2006). Future research would have included the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is Co-Director of the Human Economy Group, University of Pretoria; Hon. Professor of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban; and Founder, Open Anthropology Cooperative (http://openanthcoop.ning.com). His recent books include Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (2009, edited with C. Hann), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010, edited with J-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani) and Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique (2011, with C. Hann). Penelope Harvey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester and co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Her ethnographic research in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom has focused on engineering practice, state formation, information technologies and the politics of language. With Jeanette Edwards and Peter Wade she edited Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies (2010) and Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice (2007, ASA Monograph 43). Robert K. Hitchcock is an anthropologist and a faculty member in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University. He is also an adjunct professor of Anthropology at MSU and at the University of New Mexico, and a board member of the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF). His work focuses on human rights and development among indigenous peoples in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. His most recent book is The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa (2011, with Megan Biesele). Patricia Jeffery, Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, has held several visiting positions in Delhi, including at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the University of Delhi. She has been conducting fieldwork in north India and Pakistan since 1970. She is a member of the British Association for South Asian Studies Council and of the British Academy South Asia Panel. Her recent publications include Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (2005, edited with Radhika Chopra) and Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility and Women’s Status in India (2006, with Roger Jeffery). Roger Jeffery, Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also Dean for India, has held visiting positions at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Institute for Economic Growth, in New Delhi. He has carried out fieldwork in rural north India several times since 1982. He is President of the European Association for South Asian Studies. His most recent books are Change and Diversity: Economics, Politics and Society in Contemporary India (2010, edited with Anthony Heath) and Degrees Without Freedom (2008, with Craig Jeffrey and Patricia Jeffery). Axel Klein is a Lecturer in Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Kent, and has particular interest in the social role of ‘peculiar substances’. He has studied the regulation, celebration

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and condemnation of drugs in different countries and contexts. He has worked at the interface of academia, policy and practice, and with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, UN and EU agencies. He is the author of Drugs and the World (2008), the editor of Drugs and Alcohol Today, and he has written on cannabis and cocaine in the Caribbean, the globalization of khat, and diverse policy issues. Jakob A. Klein is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has carried out fieldwork in the southern Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Kunming, and has published journal articles and book chapters on Chinese regional cuisines, food consumption and food activism. He is the editor, with Kevin Latham and Stuart Thompson, of Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China (2006). Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. She has worked on issues of material culture since her doctoral research on the Malanggan sculptures of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and published widely on art, memory and political economies of knowledge. Her research during the last decade, which originated within a comparative project on the uptake of cloth and clothing across the Pacific, has extended to Euro-American knowledge, specifically of new materials and new technologies, and their impact on concepts of innovation and of the future in society. Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto and previously professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of three ethnographic monographs of the Western Indian Ocean, including The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (2002) and editor of several collections, including From Method to Modesty (a special section of Culture, 1991); Illness and Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture (2004, with Paul Antze) and Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (2010). Helen Lambert is Reader in Medical Anthropology at Bristol University. Her current research focuses on the pasts, presents and futures of medical formations in India and on public health issues, including HIV and suicide. She has also worked on kinship, gender and corporeality and on notions of ‘evidence’ in medicine and anthropology. Her most recent book-length publication is Social Bodies (2009, edited with Maryon McDonald). Kevin Latham is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has researched extensively on Chinese media, consumption and popular culture, most recently focusing on new media and communications technologies, as well as newspaper and television journalism in Guangzhou and Beijing. He is the author of Pop Culture China! Media, Arts and Lifestyle (2007). His earlier research was on Chinese theatre and its audiences in Hong Kong. Melissa Leach is a social anthropologist and a Professorial Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, where she directs the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to

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Sustainability) Centre. Her research focuses on knowledge, power and policy in relation to environmental and health issues, especially in West Africa. Recent books include Vaccine Anxieties (2007, with James Fairhead); Epidemics: Science, Governance and Social Justice (2010, edited with Sarah Dry), and Dynamic Sustainabilities (2010, with Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling). Kathleen Lowrey is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Since 1997 she has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia and Paraguay with Guaraní-speaking communities of the Gran Chaco region. Her previous publications, based on that research, are concerned with ethnohistory, political and economic anthropology and the anthropology of science. At present she is at work on a book manuscript, Native Science Fictions: Experimental Anthropology in the North and South American Heartlands. Trevor H. J. Marchand is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Previously a practising architect, he has undertaken fieldwork with masons in South Arabia and West Africa, and most recently with woodworkers and furniture makers in London. He is the author of Minaret Building & Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001), The Masons of Djenné (2009) and The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (forthcoming), the editor of Making Knowledge (2010), and co-producer of the documentary film Future of Mud. He was Publications Officer of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2004−2008). Magnus Marsden is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has conducted fieldwork in northern Pakistan, and, more recently, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. His recent publications include Living Islam (2005) and Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (2011, with Benjamin Hopkins). Dolores (D.P.) Martinez, Reader in Anthropology with Reference to Japan at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, has written on such diverse topics as religion, gender, tourism, sports, popular culture and film. Her recent publications include Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema (2009), Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village (2004), Documenting the Beijing Olympics (2010, edited with Kevin Latham), and Football: From England to the World (2008, edited with Projit Mukharji). Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology at New York University and President-elect of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai’i (2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (2009) and The Practice of Human Rights (2007, edited with Mark Goodale). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai’i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to socio-legal scholarship in 2007, and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. Martin Mills is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. His interests include the institutional and ceremonial life of monasticism and state in Tibet and the Himalaya, with a particular

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focus on the constitution of personhood. He is author of Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism (2003). Nayanika Mookherjee is Reader in Social Anthropology at Durham University, and the Ethics Officer (2007−2012) of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA). She has published extensively on the anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics, including The Aesthetics of Nation (2011, edited with Chris Pinney, Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) and The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War (forthcoming). Henrietta L. Moore holds the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is a leading theorist of gender in social anthropology and has developed a distinctive approach to the analysis of the interrelations of material and symbolic gender systems, embodiment and performance, and identity and sexuality. Her long-term research programme with Africa has focused on gender, livelihood strategies, social transformation and symbolic systems. She was Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) from 1991 to 1994. Mark Nuttall is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has carried out extensive fieldwork and research in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Scotland and Finland. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of the Arctic (2005), co-editor of Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (2009), and author of Pipeline Dreams: People, Environment, and the Arctic Energy Frontier (2010). Melissa Parker is Director of the Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. She has undertaken anthropological research in Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana and the UK on a wide range of global health issues including HIV/AIDS, tropical diseases, female circumcision, and health and healing in the aftermath of war. Her publications include Learning from HIV/AIDS (2003, edited with George Ellison and Cathy Campbell) and The Anthropology of Public Health (2006, edited with Ian Harper, Special Issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science). Nicolas Peterson is Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He has a long-standing interest in Australian Aboriginal anthropology, land and sea tenure, economic anthropology, Fourth World people and the state and the history of the discipline in Australia. His most recent book is The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (2008, edited with Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby). Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. He has been conducting ethnographic research in central India intermittently since 1982. His most recent book is Photography and Anthropology (2011). Tristan Platt is Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of St Andrews. He has written on State, mining and rural society in the Andes, and present uses of the Andean

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past. With Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and Olivia Harris he authored Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas (2006). Recent research topics include Bolivian negotiations with nineteenth-century globalization as represented by the Rothschilds’ quicksilver monopoly. Johan Pottier is Professor of African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He specializes in the social dynamics of food security; media representations of conflict; and humanitarian intervention. Book-length publications include Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late 20th Century (2002), and Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security (1999). His current research addresses aspects of urban food security in Lilongwe (Malawi) and Kampala (Uganda). David Pratten is Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Africa; and Fellow of St Antony’s College. He is the author of The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (2007) and is current co-editor of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies; he has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He served as Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists (1994−1998), and as President of the Anthropology and Archaeology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2001−2002). His most recent books are Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (2008), and the edited volumes Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification (2010), and Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place (2010, with Solrun Williksen). Paul Richards is an Emeritus Professor of Wageningen University. In 2011 he was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Formerly he was Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has carried out extensive field research in Sierra Leone, and is author of Fighting for the Rain Forest (1996). His current research on the origins of civil wars in Upper West Africa is trans-boundary and inter-disciplinary in character. Laura M. Rival, University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Nature, Society and Development at Oxford University, pursues research interests in Amerindian conceptualizations of nature and society, historical and political ecology, indigenous peoples, development, and environmental and conservation policies. Her writings include Trekking through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (2002), Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière (2001, edited) and The Social Life of Trees. Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (1998, edited). She is preparing a book on Latin American food systems. Amiria Salmond is a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland and International Co-Investigator on the Artefacts of Encounter project at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. A former curator at the Museum, she has written

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books and articles on artefact-oriented theory and methods in anthropology, including Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (2005), and was co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (2007). Maria Sapignoli is an Italian anthropologist who is finalizing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on indigenous peoples, identity, and the politics of indigenous organizations at the local and global level, with particular reference to the San and Bakgalagadi of the Central Kalahari, Botswana. She is the author of ‘Indigeneity and the expert: negotiating identity in the case of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve’, Law and Anthropology (2009). Arnd Schneider is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His books include Futures Lost: Identity and Nostalgia Among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (2000), Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (2006), and as editor (with Chris Wright) Contemporary Art and Anthropology (2006) and Between Art and Anthropology (2010). He co-organized the international conferences Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology (2003, Tate Modern) and Performance, Art and Anthropology (2009, Musée du Quai Branly). Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His research interests include political anthropology, the European Union, and the anthropology of policy and organizations. He is author and editor of numerous books including Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000), Elite Cultures (ASA Monographs 38, 2004, edited with Stephen Nugent), Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (2005, edited with Dieter Haller) and Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Power (2011, edited with Susan Wright and Davide Pero). His current project is a study of university reform, neoliberalism and globalization. Paul Sillitoe is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University and Shell Chair of Sustainable Development at Qatar University. A champion of social anthropology in development, he seeks to further its incorporation into programmes, particularly focusing on environmental issues in the context of sustainable livelihood initiatives and appropriate technologies, and has experience of working with several international development agencies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Pacific region and is involved in projects in South Asia, and is currently working in the Gulf region on sustainable development initiatives. Edward Simpson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research interests are in politics, natural disasters and social change in western India. He is the author of Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean (2006), editor with Kai Kresse of Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (2008) and with Aparna Kapadia of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (2010). Jonathan Spencer is Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of many articles on politics, nationalism, religion and history,

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especially in Sri Lanka where he has carried out research since the early 1980s. His most recent book is Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia (2007). Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Specializing in human−environmental relations, she has written extensively on water, land and resource issues in Australia and the United Kingdom. Her publications include The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water (2009); and Ownership and Appropriation (ASA Monographs 47, 2011, edited with Mark Busse). Marilyn Strathern, DBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, is Life President of the ASA. Her interests have long been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. Projects over the last two decades are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, and intellectual and cultural property rights, while ‘critique of good practice’ has been the umbrella under which she has written about audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity. Some of these themes are brought together in the volume Kinship, Law and the Unexpected (2005). Pauline Turner Strong is Director of the Humanities Institute and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on historical and contemporary representations of American Indians in popular culture, policy debates, and social movements as well as scholarship. Her books include Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (1999), American Indians and the American Imaginary (2012), and a co-edited volume, New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations (2006). Julian Thomas is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester. His principal research interests are in the Neolithic of Britain and Europe, the theory and philosophy of archaeology, and the relationship between archaeology and anthropology. He is a Vice President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His recent authored books are Understanding the Neolithic (1999), Archaeology and Modernity (2004), and Place and Memory: Excavations at the Pict’s Knowe, Holywood and Holm Farm (2007). Christina Toren is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is trained in both psychology and anthropology, does her fieldwork in Fiji, and has published widely on many aspects of contemporary Fijian life, including ethnographic studies of ontogeny. Her recent work includes What is Happening to Epistemology? (2009, edited with João de Pina Cabral, Special Issue of Social Analysis) and Culture Wars. Contexts, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts (2010, edited with Deborah James and Evie Plaice). James Urry is a Senior Research Associate and previously Reader in Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His interests include the history of anthropology and Mennonite society. His books include None But Saints: The Transformation of

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Mennonite Life in Russia 1789−1889 (1989, 2007), Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British Anthropology (1993) and Mennonites, Politics and Peoplehood. Europe – Russia – Canada 1525−1980 (2006). Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His more recent publications include Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Pluto Press, 2002), Race and Sex in Latin America (2009), and Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (2nd edition, 2010). His current research focuses on issues of race and new genomic technologies. He is directing an ESRC-funded project on ‘Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparative approach’. Bill (C.W.) Watson, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of the University of Kent, currently teaches at the School of Business and Management of the Bandung Institute of Technology. He has carried out fieldwork extensively in Indonesia, particularly Kerinci in Sumatra, and has written about Islam, politics and modern Indonesian literature. He is the author of Multiculturalism (2000), and, most recently, Of Self and Injustice. Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia (2006). Richard Werbner, Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology and Honorary Research, Professor in Visual Anthropology (University of Manchester) and research fellow (National Humanities Center), is a long-term ethnographer of séances, charismatics and faith-healing in Botswana. His most recent films, Holy Hustlers (2009), Counterpoint One (2011), Counterpoint Two (2011), and Counterpoint Botswana (2011) accompany his monograph, Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy (2011). As series co-editor of Zed’s Postcolonial Encounters Series, he published Postcolonial Identities in Africa (1996, co-edited), Memory and the Postcolony (1998, edited), and Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (2002, edited). Harry G. West is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is author of Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (2005) and Ethnographic Sorcery (2007), and co-editor of several collections, including Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (2003, edited with Todd Sanders) and Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa (2005, edited with Tracy Luedke). Harvey Whitehouse studies the causes and consequences of religion and ritual. His recent books have included Arguments and Icons (2000) and Modes of Religiosity (2004). He was founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology of Mind. He currently holds a Chair in Social Anthropology at Oxford University and a Professorial Fellowship at Magdalen College. From 2006 to 2009 he served as Head of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Richard A. Wilson is Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology and Law, and Director of the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute, which he founded in 2003. He taught previously at the universities of Essex and Sussex in the UK. His work focuses

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on international human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals. Writing History in International Criminal Trials (2011) was completed during a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is current Chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Christopher Wright teaches visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written on the creative possibilities for collaborations between artists and anthropologists, most recently Between Art and Anthropology (2010), and on the connections between anthropology and photography. He has pursued fieldwork in the South Pacific and is currently involved in research on the connections between First Nation/Aboriginal communities and digital media in Canada.

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PART 3

METHODS Edited by the late Olivia Harris and Veronica Strang

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Introduction − Issues of Method Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang

Part 3 of this Handbook discusses a selection of methodological issues that have become particularly prominent since the mid-1980s. We did not intend a practical manual on how to carry out research; nor is it possible to be comprehensive (to include particular techniques, like cultural mapping, digitization of genealogical records, photo elicitation and so forth). In any case, specialist works meet those needs. Our focus is rather on those particular aspects of methodology that have become pressing concerns for anthropology and ethnography as a consequence of the changes to conceptions of inter-disciplinarity and locality described in Parts 1 and 2. Some are specific to particular subfields of anthropology, and we touch upon a few of them, but others raise concerns across the subdisciplines, so we have concentrated on these. For instance, in theoretical terms, anthropology has adopted an increasingly phenomenological interest in social processes, with a related focus on agency. Initially, agency was understood to refer to human agency, but latterly it has expanded to pay broader attention to the effects of the material settings of human activity, drawing in areas such as non-human agency, aesthetics, consumption, and studies of science and other discursive frames. At the same time, there have been changes in the

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uses of anthropological research, which has always been amenable to ‘application’ but is now increasingly commissioned for that purpose. The funding of academic research itself has altered, with preferential direction of funds towards the thematic priorities of research councils, the shortening of permissible doctoral registrations, and unrelenting challenges to the ability of universitybased scholars to pursue research. All this has occurred subject to an audit culture that is ever more minutely concerned with research ethics, not least in order to foresee, and disown, any conceivable liabilities for research outcomes. Research environments have transformed in ways too complex to be captured by a distinction between academic and applied research: in part, these changes represent global shifts of political and economic power. Yet, there is general agreement that the ethnographic legacy of local studies is not played out. This is not simply a matter of mining past ethnographic records, or of observing that much research continues in relatively restricted contexts. Local research is now conceived with an understanding of the connectedness and permeability of localities, and of the conscious efforts that go into place-making. In this sense, local research remains important precisely because the

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4

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

study of localization has become one of the purposes of intensely experienced fieldwork. How then, should anthropologists draw selectively on their disciplinary precedents and predilections − for intensively experiential research, wide contextualization, and the theoretically unconventional − in ways that help them meet the methodological challenges of contemporary research? More than half of the contributors to this Part of the Handbook were invited by Olivia Harris, some following their participation in an LSE seminar. As far as possible, we have retained Olivia’s direction, including her encouragement to contributors to draw upon their own research experiences. Discussion begins with two chapters concerned with how our materials accrue: Janet Carsten frames her account of fieldwork by considering the durability of the notion of experiential immersion in local lives as the hallmark of anthropology’s method of participant observation. As Carsten argues, a disciplinary period of (at least representationally) localized research proposed a holistic approach, to be realized through an ideal of total immersion in fieldwork and isolation from the researcher’s own cultural comforts and certainties. Though it generated a somewhat romanticized image of heroic sojourners, this underwrote an aspirational image productive of a particular kind of knowledge. If multiple factors have rendered even this aspiration problematic, then what remains? In reviewing recent outstanding works, Carsten suggests the need for an investment of time, which involves patience, both with ourselves and from our institutions and funders. This temporal emphasis connects with Tristran Platt’s engagingly phenomenological account of working in archives. For an anthropologist, archives are not, as they are sometimes analogized, a form of memory, but rather a systematized record of past routines that has departed its practical life for an afterlife (or quiet retirement) in storage, while remaining in more or less working order. The relevance of retired working records to the ethnographic investigator lies

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not only in their factual reference to a community’s past but also in the work of imagination they encourage into how societies archive, both actually and by analogy. As Platt puts it, archival research allows ‘reading of a chronotopic landscape’. Burrowing through superimposed archival layers, the ethnographer learns to perceive the present as a moment of ‘current history’, and the ‘fieldsite’ as one node in a ‘ramifying historical phenomenology’. Carsten and Platt simultaneously preserve our sense of the diverse lifeworlds that we encounter through fieldwork, while evoking the challenges of extending the immediacy of this experience with temporal and spatial ramifications that will take us time to discover and, by doing so, will partly reconfigure our local constructions. The next three chapters focus on situated language practices. Susan Gal shows how the constitutive role of language in the making of culture can be translated from theory into research. She suggests, for example, that rather than using language as an analogy for culture, ethnographers need to attend to metacommunicative expectations, which allow for recognition of genres as well as identifying the language ideologies that inform people’s choices of language and registers. Her analysis encourages us to examine language practices more closely, as does Joshua Barker’s account of the importance of the interview to ethnographers. Barker sets the variability of interview practices against an idealized description of specifically ‘ethnographic’ interviews. Critiquing an ideal that both assumes and creates an aspiration for embeddedness, he encourages creativity in the way interviews are performed in changing times. This close attention to language practices is extended to a wider range of events by Karin Barber’s elegant traversal of the movement between texts, or entextualization, and performance, or performativity, in a variety of genres that can be studied experientially: that is to say, through ‘fieldwork’. The following three chapters connect aesthetics, materiality and agency with

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INTRODUCTION

implications for methodology. Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright ask how a concept of the visual can be rendered meaningful for ethnographic research. They show, through examples, how investigator, subject, medium, and a body of theory are conjoined in the production of visual representations: for instance, when a photographic image is intentionally manipulated to depict experiences of transformation. Images, moving or still, are not ancillary to words, and producing and interpreting them involves particular skills that have to be learned and can be deepened through application and experiment. Their account realigns the importance of visuality, both in research and in report. By arguing that knowledge may consist of artefacts, as well as verbal propositions, Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond similarly expand the range of research and representation. Their conception of artefacts is broad, including many material forms other than the physical objects which shape people’s lives. Inevitably such artefacts lead beyond the local sites in which they may be first encountered, and we need to trace their processual entanglements in time and space. Chua and Salmond invite us to discuss the various senses of agency which, in the 1980s, became a pressing concern for anthropologists. Penny Harvey picks up the theme of agency in a different way, examining Actor Network Theory (ANT), its application to Science and Technology Studies, and the attempts this has generated to surmount what some have seen as its shortcomings. ANT shifts agency from an exclusive locus in human subjects, and proposes a flatter ontology of agency which is located and dispersed throughout a network of relations. As Harvey’s theoretical analysis reminds us, agency is relational, and whether it is presumed to be located in people, things or ephemera, it often reflects diverse forms of personhood. Consideration of anthropological ethics is embedded, where it needs to be, at the centre of our coverage. Two chapters come at this from different angles. Writing as the current Ethics Officer for the Association of Social

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Anthropologists, Nayanika Mookherjee addresses both her own experience of fieldwork, which was unusually intimate even by the standards of this experience-near research mode, and the more general challenge that immersion poses to increasing (and increasingly audited) demands for ethical accountability. How can research aims be made transparent to informants? What, in practice, does informed consent mean? These are challenging questions even without the intense concerns raised periodically about particular issues: for instance, the application of anthropology in counter-insurgency. Michael Lambek takes an independent path, approaching ethical concerns not from the perspective of the codifications which, for better and worse, are demanded by funders and employers, but as a form of everyday consciousness that becomes heightened by the new and unfamiliar circumstances of fieldwork. Seen this way, aspiring to behave in ways we might consider virtuous, however imperfectly, requires a continuous exercise of bringing circumstances, consequences, and ethical criteria into consciousness as we assess our changing relations to courses of action. This conclusion provides an appropriate bridge to Paul Richards’ envisioning of the conditions for an anthropology of zones of conflict and war. Other than in quite exceptional circumstances, the conventional anthropological methods of immersion and participation, and the creation of witnessed case histories, will not be viable in wartime, and may well be unethical. This is not, however, to argue that wars cannot be analysed anthropologically (in the same way that anthropologists extend understanding to other phenomena they have not witnessed). There are material, technological, organizational, and cosmological aspects of war that are amenable to indirect study, particularly by anthropologists familiar with the conventions of behaviour in peacetime. Richards encourages anthropologists to embrace a project of understanding societies both in times of peace and war, not least so as to engage with other disciplines that claim

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insight into the causes of warfare, and the preconditions of peace. The next pair of chapters examines commissioned anthropological research where ethical issues are heightened in particular ways. Tim Allen and Melissa Parker draw upon long experience of working in the fields of development and medical research to explore the practical relationships between anthropologists and the agencies for which they work. As they note, in these contexts ethical guidelines have latent, as well as explicit purposes that are to do with maintaining consensus within complex research communities. Investigators are well advised to adopt a pragmatic calculus informed by their sense of disciplinary ethics. Paul Sillitoe contributes a particularly robust version of the participatory approach to research, the only mode he believes now viable, that seeks to work coevally with local communities, not just in undertaking the research but in its planning and presentation.

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Andre Gingrich’s discussion of the different kinds of comparison used in current anthropological research provides Part 3 of the Handbook with a recursive loop. Comparison might seem most relevant to writing and dissemination, but in most of its forms it has to be built into project design. Hence, a reader of all these chapters intending research could as well begin here as with Carsten. But placing this chapter as a conclusion serves to underline Gingrich’s point that thinking comparatively relies on a rich ethnographic record, and is important in reaching wider audiences and thereby increasing the uptake of anthropological research. Together, these chapters demonstrate both the persistence of anthropologists’ disciplinary ideals about research (that it be embedded, long duration, experience-near, close-up, holistic …) and their abilities to adjust to changing theories, and to a world changed particularly by technology and by expectations of enhanced collaboration and accountability.

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3.1 Fieldwork Since the 1980s: Total Immersion and its Discontents Janet Carsten

Ideals, discussions, and images of fieldwork in anthropology are, I suspect, always and inescapably suffused and framed by one’s own experience.1 Thinking about fieldwork thus inevitably transports me to the Malay village where I worked in the early 1980s, to the house I lived in, and the Malay family of which I became an adopted member. Without effort, thirty years on, I can recall with visceral intensity the textures, smells, and sense of being inside that family house: the enveloping heat of the early afternoon when women and children took a daytime nap, propped on cushions strewn across the floor; the exhilaratingly loud drumming of the morning monsoonal rains on the zinc roof; the many tasty rice and fish meals eaten with fingers in the kitchen; the sociability of the evening when neighbours might drop by after their meal to chat and smoke or chew betel together while a baby was rocked to sleep in its crib suspended from a roof beam. Such images, and many more, have an overpowering immediacy still after the decades that have passed. And always the first that come to mind are of being inside a house, so that ‘fieldwork’ carries for me a somewhat ironic sense of being a misnomer

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for ‘housework’. Although there was actual fieldwork in the paddy fields and vegetable gardens too, mostly, fieldwork was firmly tied to the activities that went on inside houses. And with it came a sometimes suffocating sense of enclosure; here, immersion was definitely total and, on less good days, it was easy to imagine that it might become permanent. Nearly two decades after this formative experience (and several return visits that proved escape was in fact possible), I was engaged in fieldwork of a very different kind: research on a self-selected set of adult adoptees in Scotland who had agreed to be interviewed on their experiences of searching for and finding their birth kin, entailed setting off by car on journeys to destinations that seemed in many ways just as unnervingly unfamiliar as my first encounter with rural life in Malaysia. If travelling in one direction to meet these interviewees in their homes was an anxious experience because I had no idea whom I might find at the other end, the return was often marked by a dazed exhaustion that comes from receiving an intense and sometimes emotional entry into a stranger’s life. In fact, I came to value the peaceful suspended animation of the car journey as a first

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chance to assimilate the dense narratives that, far from my having difficulty eliciting, interviewees seemed ready to relate without any undue skill or encouragement on my part. I have chosen an autobiographical frame through which to consider anthropological fieldwork, not only because I find it difficult to do otherwise but also because thinking of these two experiences partly from the perspective gained by fieldwork of a third kind (which I discuss below) they seem almost to conform to ideal types. This, however, is more in terms of being types than of anything one might want to label ‘ideal’. In both cases, I was all too aware of the downsides of working in the particular way sketched here. If one was a rather extreme case of total immersion of the classic, village, kind, the other encapsulated the disadvantages of very little immersion at all. In what follows, I use the trope of ‘total immersion’ to consider how the nature of anthropological fieldwork has changed over the last two to three decades, and the methodological and more general implications of this for the discipline. My discussion, which foregrounds British social anthropology, is informed by having participated directly in these shifts as well as having taught students for the last two decades as they prepared for and returned from fieldwork. I also draw on the literature on fieldwork, including research conducted for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on UK anthropology PhDs completed between 1992 and 2003 (Spencer, Jepson and Mills 2005). I begin with a brief consideration of issues that seemed particularly salient to fieldwork in the early 1980s before going on to discuss more recent trends, and drawing connections to wider disciplinary changes that have informed how anthropologists conduct research.

TOTAL IMMERSION AND ITS DISCONTENTS An exhilarating spirit of social critique pervaded the intellectual atmosphere of graduate

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students in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Marxism, anti-colonialism, and feminism provided a heady mix on which to draw when writing research proposals and, for many who were planning fieldwork in this era, these social movements directly inflected both the topics they were planning and how they hoped to undertake their work. In my own cohort at the London School of Economics (LSE), there were thus several projects framed in terms of Althusserian ‘modes of production’ (all of which had been transformed into quite different kinds of study by the time the ethnographer returned from the field), one that was to document the last throes of anti-colonial struggle in Africa (Lan 1985), as well as some carried out during that period which focused on the lives of women, domestic relations, and kinship (Carsten 1997; Pine 1999, 2007). In spite of the radical vision that inspired them, it seems remarkable in retrospect that, as far as I can recall, all of these projects were planned in the conventional way as village studies. The interesting exception was Rosie Thomas’s pioneering work on the Indian film industry (Thomas 1985, 1995), which was, however, the butt of considerable comment as to whether it really constituted anthropology. In terms of training, it seemed generally agreed that there was little methodological material that could usefully be imparted. The LSE was − and remains − the heartland of the classic Malinowskian tradition of participant observation (Spencer 2000). A lack of formal training in ethnographic methods was not then regarded as a serious impediment to research. Methodological texts were sparse − the only one I recall being directed to was A.L Epstein’s The Craft of Social Anthropology (1967) to underline the importance of acquiring quantitative data. Fieldwork, as Raymond Firth wrote to me in a kind letter of advice before I embarked on my fieldwork in Malaysia, was ‘really a matter of common sense and sensitivity to the feelings of others’ (see also EvansPritchard 1976; Shore 1999; Watson 1999). Some practical matters were covered, including

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the importance of keeping field notes in a particular type of notebook with three copies of each page (two detachable), interleaved with two sheets of reusable carbon paper. Such gems were supplemented by a oneweek course on health in the tropics undertaken at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This was apparently mainly directed at (male) missionaries and colonial functionaries, and concentrated heavily and in graphic detail on the dangers of contracting venereal disease in the tropics. In this veritable desert, I recall the sense of engagement and excitement generated by a series of lively and highly relevant impromptu ‘fringe meetings’ on different aspects of fieldwork convened by Maurice Bloch with an entire class of research students crowded into his tiny office. In retrospect, the high standards for fieldwork set by the studies of Malinowski, Firth, Fortes and others, that students were set to read as part of their preparation for research (Marcus 2007: 1128), together with the political idealism inspired by the particular blend of feminism, Marxism, and anti-colonialism which was the intellectual atmosphere of the time, constituted not so much a training as a dangerous admixture for fieldwork. The combination of idealism and naïveté with which I approached fieldwork was directly inspired by a strong reaction to the accounts I had read of Rosemary and Raymond Firth’s fieldwork at the end of the colonial era in 1930s British Malaya (Raymond Firth 1966; Rosemary Firth 1966, 1972), as well as other descriptions of fieldwork by women, such as Laura Bohannan’s (under the pen name Elenore Smith Bowen) Return to Laughter (1954) and Peggy Golde’s (1970) edited collection on Women in the Field. Participating in the hierarchical trappings of colonial relations, employing Malay servants or interpreters, being addressed in terms appropriate for colonial dignitaries, and processions of porters carrying vast quantities of supplies all seemed antithetical to the tenets of proper participant observation. (Formal dress for dinner on one’s own in the bush, as

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memorably described by Laura Bohannan, was already regarded as quite eccentric.) Since Malaysia had gained independence in 1957, and the rural economy had for a long time been heavily commercialized, my expectations were to some extent reasonable. Nevertheless, memories of colonial times were more immediate, particularly for academics and civil servants, than I had realized in preparing for research. Occasionally one might receive a sharp reminder of this in the form of a hostile reaction from government officials when negotiating necessary research permits. But such sensitivities were not part of village relations. There, absorption into a Malay family was part of an encounter that one might describe as over-determined. On my side, it was shaped by a wish to create relations of fieldwork on a more equal basis than those of the generation that had taught me (or how I imagined these), even more so, than those of their teachers. It was inspired by a feminist concern with the lives of women in a region where women were known to be economically active and to have relatively high status in relation to men − in contrast to other parts of Asia. As it turned out, and unexpectedly, the Malay villagers I got to know were equally keen to integrate newcomers into their lives, and gave great importance to my conforming to local manners and customs for young women. These included at least some of the demands of household labour that were placed on young, rural, Malay women. In time, I came to understand these incorporative processes in historical and cultural terms (Carsten 1997), but while conducting fieldwork I was surprised at the lack of struggle necessary not to be treated as a white outsider, and often, when engaged in what seemed trivial household tasks, doubted that I was behaving like a proper anthropologist. Meanwhile, the family I lived with, and many others with whom I spent time, were content − and often quite amused − at the transformation they were effecting. This was then total immersion of a somewhat different kind from what I had expected.

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And it seems hardly surprising in retrospect that I often felt overwhelmed by circumstances, or that standards for fieldwork were difficult to meet. Perhaps part of the problem was a scarcity of role models for this idealistic approach to fieldwork. Here gender was absolutely central. On the one hand, it affected the course of fieldwork: first, from the point of view of initial research interests, and second, the focus on women’s lives made it more likely that one’s movements in the field would be more restricted than those of a male anthropologist. But also, as Olivia Harris (2000: 13) has described for fieldwork undertaken in the Bolivian Andes about eight years earlier (also as a graduate student at the LSE inspired by feminist concerns), one did not embark with the sense that these matters were really important to senior figures in the department. This had methodological implications for fieldwork in that it exacerbated feelings of isolation, and made one unsure of the intellectual worth or anthropological legitimacy of focusing on women and processes of domesticity. Living with a three-generational family in a two-room village house had the undoubted advantages of fostering close familial ties and gaining access to everyday relations in a more intimate register than would otherwise have been possible. In these circumstances, the intermediaries employed by an earlier generation of anthropologists − servants, assistants, or even interpreters − were either unavailable or would have seemed out of place. An interest in gender, it very rapidly became clear, required a proper understanding of kinship (Collier and Yanagisako 1987). The intensity of immersion in a particular physical environment fostered an engagement with its materiality as well as its sensory, aesthetic, and emotional aspects. The multi-faceted qualities of the house thus emerged as a topic of enquiry (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). And so a kind of symmetry developed between the methods through which one worked and the topic under study. This symmetry is of course, in different shapes and forms, a normal part of

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fieldwork, although, as I discuss below, the direction of the causal relation is not necessarily clear. In any case, my ambivalence about total immersion was a reflection of the particular historical moment in anthropology (especially in terms of the study of gender in the early 1980s) as well as the outcome of what transpired in the field.

THE ABANDONED VILLAGE I have already remarked on the conventional framing of many anthropology PhD projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s as village studies, which seems in retrospect contrary to the intellectual spirit of the time. A current snapshot of research undertaken by cohorts of doctoral students in the twenty-first century would reveal something different. Judging by the postgraduate projects from Edinburgh and elsewhere with which I am familiar, it seems that only a minority of students today undertake village studies. So, when did this shift occur, and why? In fact, we can trace the beginnings of this abandonment to an earlier era. As Clifford Geertz famously remarked, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods …); they study in villages’ (Geertz 1973: 22). The Modjokuto project undertaken in Java in the 1950s, of which Geertz’s Religion of Java (1960) was part, exemplified his point, while for South Asia, Chris Fuller (1996: 58) has classified the heyday of the ‘village studies era’ as lasting for about twenty years from the mid-1950s. Certainly, by the early 1980s, it had been clear for some time that villages were not generally the objects of study, in the sense of searching for holistic, functional systems of social solidarity. Rather, villages were a means of coming to understand particular questions or themes – religious or economic practices, gender, caste, or class relations, and the anticolonial struggle. And where these topics were historically inflected, village fieldwork was increasingly supplemented by archival and textual sources.

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But while this generation of students was writing up (or quite soon after), something seemed to have happened to the intellectual zeitgeist. The spirit of intellectual certainty that had animated preparation for fieldwork was being replaced by one of critical uncertainty. Discussions about ‘writing culture’ (Clifford 1983, 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986) undermined any sense of holistic unity to the objects of anthropological study and emphasised the multivocal and dialogic nature of social life. Much of this discussion focused on new ways of writing ethnography to introduce explicit recognition of the multiplicity of positions from which any given social situation was experienced and spoken about. A new kind of authorial voice, in which the experience of the ethnographer was made part of the account, seemed a necessary concomitant to this attention to polyphony. This replacement of what Jonathan Spencer has called ‘ethnographic naturalism’ (2001: 448) − in which the position of the author was somehow written out of the account and his or her authority was rendered unchallengeable by the homogeneous depiction of social situations as well as a lack of separation between evidence and interpretation − was in many respects to be welcomed. There were, however, some pitfalls. Reflexivity was not a panacea for the problem of evidence claims, or the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986), and it sometimes invited what could seem a distasteful self-indulgence in authorial style. Perhaps more significantly, as others have commented, the non-unitary nature of human experience that was rightly emphasised by post-modernists, had already been powerfully put by feminist anthropologists (see Gardner 1999; Mascia-Lees et al. 1989; Skeggs 2001; Strathern 1987; Visweswaran 1994). If much of the debate centred on styles of writing, the methodological implications of all this for fieldwork, which are the concern of this essay, were less clear. But one could certainly see a confluence between the emphasis on styles of

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writing and a more general shift towards the use of textual and archival sources in fieldwork and in its written products in the mid to late 1980s. An increased use of textual sources was also the outcome of a sustained attention to historical processes in anthropology − a move that was not attributable to post-modernism. This arose partly from a theoretical critique of the ahistoricism of structuralist and structural-functional accounts, and also reflected wider political concerns with processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia. A more historically inflected anthropology, which paid close attention to how colonialism shaped social forms, and which in many cases preceded or ignored post-modern theorizing, resulted in some of the best work to appear in this period (see, for example, Bloch 1986; Dirks 1987; Mintz 1985; Stoler 1985; Thomas 1991; Wolf 1982). But partly because of its coincidental conjunction with post-modern developments, this attention to history and historical sources may have further encouraged a deflection away from ethnographic fieldwork. Taking all the above into account, the unitary village study as the principal object or even mode of fieldwork seemed for many by the late 1980s to have passed its intellectual shelf-life. But it was clear too that, outside the academy, social processes in the places anthropologists studied mitigated in favour of this shift. Trends towards the globalization of labour and economic processes, urbanization, and migration meant that, while villages continued to be part of what anthropologists studied, increasingly, research focused on these global processes (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Hannerz 1996; Kearney 1995; Ong 1999; Vertovec 2009). Fieldwork necessarily moved away from villages, becoming more urban and more dispersed across different sites and locations. As George Marcus suggested, ‘multi-sited ethnography…’ was a ‘response to empirical changes in the world and therefore to transformed locations of cultural production’ (Marcus 1995: 97).

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That new ways of conducting research were required for new contexts of global economic processes and conditions seems indisputable, but this also raised methodological questions about the way different sites should be selected within any particular study. Such research, Marcus stated, Is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. (1995: 105)

But how might such chains or threads be picked out? While in some research contexts it would perhaps be possible to follow particular participants or objects from one site to another in an apparently obvious ‘logic of association’, in others this might only be possible to a very limited degree. Access to some sites might simply be unavailable to researchers, or limitations of time and energy might severely circumscribe the scope or range of sites. Some locations might be selected mainly on grounds of feasibility or convenience; others might remain undiscovered or off limits to the researcher. As if to underline these potentialities and limitations, there was a growing awareness and acknowledgement of a wider range of methods as well as sites in the collection of data. But when writing up, serendipitous factors could come to ‘define the argument of the ethnography’ because only those sites that have been selected can be linked together in a particular ‘logic of association’. And so the danger of such a logic being imposed retrospectively on the data (which is of course always present) may be heightened in such studies. It is precisely the ‘holistic’ basis of anthropological fieldwork that is challenged here. Thus, ethnographic claims to holism were seriously undermined by different aspects of the writing culture critique. And even those who kept their distance from this would agree that any ethnographic study (including one conducted over a long period in a

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village) is necessarily incomplete (Carsten 1997: 29). Nevertheless, it is methodologically significant that the close-knit nature of village life necessarily imposes a constant check on data gathering. Here the pathways between different locations, activities, or perspectives are likely to be more seamlessly joined, and their navigation to be steered as much by participants as by the researcher. Urban life, however, proceeds in a more disrupted way, with contexts more separated by distance, personnel, or function. In many situations, fieldworkers must proactively arrange formal appointments or meetings with research participants in advance. The selection of particular sites or participants by researchers may then have unanticipated consequences, exaggerating these disjunctions or unwittingly creating gaps or exclusions, which later become difficult to correct or compensate for even once they have been acknowledged.

PROBLEMS WITH FIELDWORK The developments I have sketched above, together with institutional and funding pressures, have apparently left their mark in the form of professional academic unease about the changing nature and form of fieldwork since the 1980s. It is not, however, clear that expressions of concern were necessarily accurate reflections of the changes taking place. For example, recent pressures on completion rates for PhDs have led to worries that periods of fieldwork for UK postgraduate students are today shorter than in the past. But this seems not to be borne out by the available evidence (Spencer 2006). As Jonathan Spencer suggests, however, the idea that fieldwork has been diminished may in itself be revealing. And this may reflect unease about the changing nature of fieldwork rather than the length of time for which it is carried out. Similarly, there is evidence of concern that anthropological research closer to ‘home’ − in the United Kingdom and Europe − was

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becoming more common from the 1980s onwards (Houtman 1988: 19−20). But comparison of evidence (Kappers 1983: 207−208; Macdonald 2001; Mills 2006) does not clearly support such a conclusion, and may even indicate a small decline in the proportion of research carried out in the United Kingdom and Europe between the 1981 ASA figures and the cohort of anthropology PhDs completed in 1992−2003 analysed by Spencer, Jepson, and Mills.2 Sharon Macdonald, commenting on the 1961 ASA Directory figures on members’ fieldwork, suggests that a rise in European and UK research actually occurred earlier, after the Second World War (Macdonald 2001: 63). Space does not allow me to consider here the significance of regional traditions for anthropological approaches (see Fardon 1990 and Nuttall this volume), but I would link some of the unease about fieldwork to wider disciplinary changes in this period. Rather than questioning the value either of urban or multi-sited fieldwork (wherever it may be undertaken), my purpose here is to probe the different methodological issues raised by conducting fieldwork in particular ways or in particular contexts. I suggest that there is a strong connection between the village study and the idea of fieldwork as total immersion − and this may also be what underlies the professional concern about fieldwork. I would not argue that something like total immersion, or at least ‘thick fieldwork’, can only be achieved in a small community, but rather that full participation for a year or more in village life is likely to result in a more all-round knowledge of at least some of its inhabitants and their preoccupations (and probably with less active initiative required from the ethnographer) than the same amount of time based in an urban setting or moving between sites to study a particular institutional nexus or set of activities. The research on adult adoptees that I conducted at the end of the 1990s in Scotland, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, could be taken as a case in point. This was designed to be carried out through

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interviews, where possible conducted in respondents’ homes. While it yielded extremely rich narratives from which certain patterns of experience emerged, when writing up this material I was highly conscious of the limited way in which I had got to know the participants, and the lack of information and knowledge I had about how members of their families had experienced the events they described, or about other aspects of their lives. Instead, I relied on the exact words of participants with an immense fidelity to their precise locutions as recorded and transcribed, which I think is typical of studies that are heavily reliant on interviews (Carsten 2000). Of course, for a longer or more extensive study, one might have attempted to overcome these limitations in various ways. But simply moving in with a number of participants and getting to know them, their families, friends, and their working lives over many months was not a realistic option. It may be that studies of kinship and relatedness make special demands since, ideally, for anthropologists, they rest on a close familiarity with qualitative aspects of the relationships of participants that are difficult to acquire through interviews or in highly circumscribed observational contexts. But in fact I would suggest that these issues are likely to recur in different forms for other topics too. And in part this difficulty can be traced to the sharp conceptual and practical distinction that is drawn between work and home in many urban contexts − especially, but not exclusively, in Western ones. So, research access to a particular workplace or institution (often negotiated through its management or administrative bureaucracy) is unlikely to smoothly yield access to participants’ homes, or vice versa. Nevertheless, I suspect that many anthropologists would regard knowledge of work and family or home life as important complementary components of an anthropological investigation focusing on either of these two facets of contemporary existence. Even where research is on themes that do not neatly fit within the home−work

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divide − for example, investigations of forms of medical treatment, religious activity, or legal institutions and processes − issues of access are likely to determine and limit the contexts in which research participants can be met and become familiar. These matters were highlighted for me while recently conducting fieldwork based in hospital blood banks and clinical pathology labs in urban Malaysia. Although entry into these workspaces could be negotiated via the hospital administration, the nature of much urban sociality in Malaysia (which tends to take place outside the home), as well as institutional hierarchies, set limits and boundaries to the pathways of fieldwork away from the hospital sites. In these circumstances, it seemed that immersion in these field sites was considerably less total than during my earlier village fieldwork in Malaysia. The discontinuities between different aspects of life that are undoubtedly experienced by many contemporary citizens can, under such circumstances, be all too easily reproduced or even exaggerated in ethnographic accounts. The effects of the postmodern rejection of anthropological claims to holism have thus been reinforced by thematic and methodological shifts that often make a well-rounded familiarity with research participants’ lives difficult to achieve. Innovative ways of collecting data (e.g. through photographs, discourse analysis or cultural mapping) may be strategically deployed as if to acknowledge or compensate for the fragmented nature of ethnographic knowledge. An enhanced use of different kinds of data can then become a way of performing the sense of its arbitrary incompleteness.3 These shifts can be compounded by current fashions in presenting ethnography. The tendency to rely on textual, visual or historical material (discussed above), and to present it spliced together with selected fragments of dialogue or carefully chosen ethnographic vignettes, may make it difficult for readers to assess the quality, depth, or texture of the fieldwork on which it is based.

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The innovative and experimental presentation of ethnography in what George Marcus termed ‘messy texts’ (Marcus 1994) offered the opportunity to undermine authorial conventions in social science writing. In a recent overview of ‘Ethnography two decades after Writing Culture’, however, Marcus (2007) suggests that what was once ‘messy’ has now become ‘baroque’ in form: ‘Exemplary ethnographies − the ones that stylistically call attention to themselves for their originality − are certainly still messy. But, in my view they are not experimental’ (Marcus 2007: 1229). Marcus gives a number of different interwoven ‘symptoms’, or stylistic modes, of what he calls the ‘ethnographic baroque’. These comprise ‘a tale of fieldwork’; ‘a theory exercise’; some kind of topical event drawn from public culture; material drawn from archival or historical research (which, Marcus notes, is what in this genre is used to give depth to the ethnography); ethnography from ‘the realm of ordinary life’; and, finally, ‘argument that is avowedly moral or moralizing in nature as a sign of “the critical”.’ As Marcus points out, such ethnographies ‘are effective in establishing dynamic tableaus, but they are not particularly good to think with’ (Marcus 2007: 1129−1130). Others, less sympathetic to such mannered ways of presenting ethnography, might just feel tired or irritated, and wonder why ethnographies or their authors need to ‘call attention to themselves’ in the first place. Significantly, Marcus’s sense that something has been lost − that such ethnographies are ‘in some sense, an alibi for the ethnography from the classic fieldwork process that they no longer produce’ (2007: 1130−1131) rather than being models for students − suggests to him that the remedy is not textual but rather in fieldwork. As he puts it, what is needed is a ‘return to this source of entanglement with fieldwork itself more so than to historical sources’ (2007: 1131). That fieldwork is at issue − or might be the solution to current shortcomings of ethnography − is echoed by authors of quite different theoretical persuasions. Thus, John Borneman and

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Abdellah Hammoudi have recently launched a forceful critique of ‘the anthropological embrace of textualism’ (2009: 11), and a defence of the fieldwork ‘encounter’. Thinking of my own most recent research project in the light of these concerns (and in relation to my earlier village study), I have been led to reflect on how one might deepen or enrich the knowledge gained from particular sites or contexts in an urban and/or multi-sited ethnography.

EXEMPLARY FIELDWORKS? While an increased reliance on texts has been seen by some as detrimental to the presentation of ethnography and to the relative importance of fieldwork itself, I have suggested that it is only one of several culprits for an emerging sense that ethnography might not be quite what it used to be, and that the nature of fieldwork itself may be partly at issue. Here I have connected the declining frequency of village fieldwork to different kinds of relations and knowledge that the ethnographer may establish. This is not only a reflection of the more rounded awareness of participants’ lives that can be relatively easily achieved in a village but also has to do with how the ethnographer herself experiences fieldwork. Fieldwork in its classic era was famously characterized as a rite of passage, and this was of course an anthropological cliché (Gardner 1999: 49; Shore 1999: 33; Watson 1999:2). But what made it a rite of passage was partly the sense that it involved breaking ties with home; it was an enforced period of isolation − a point memorably underlined for me by a question from a fellow-graduate student after I returned from my first fieldwork: ‘How does it feel to no longer have a home?’ It is no accident that such phrases as ‘rite of passage’ and ‘total immersion’ (however wryly used) have religious resonances. It was generally understood that, in undertaking fieldwork, the neophyte (who more often than not was thought of as male) was cutting

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himself off and, in so doing, also put himself at risk. In this respect there was a recognition that the experience of all fieldworkers was in some basic sense alike (whereas, today, there is a more pervasive acknowledgement of its diversity). The intensity of this experience was undoubtedly heightened by the age at which most doctoral research is undertaken as well as the relatively slow pace at which it proceeded – often dictated by the requirements of language-learning. In practice, there was obviously a great deal of variation in the extent to which researchers were isolated in the field. Nevertheless, there was an expectation that one would return profoundly changed by the experience and, at least implicitly, a perceived correlation between the process of breaking familiar ties and the depth of engagement in one’s field site. This underlines that what has transformed fieldwork over the last two decades is not just that it is differently located or relies on different methods but also the nature of communications to and from these sites. As well as often taking place in urban contexts and in locations that may not be geographically far from home, email, skype, mobile phones, and cheap travel mean that, for many − though not all − researchers, fieldwork does not entail being isolated in the way that it did for an earlier generation of anthropologists. As my recent experience in urban Malaysia made clear, this sense of remaining connected to home changes the nature of fieldwork. Although sometimes the demands of communication may be intrusive and cause interruptions to concentration (Simpson 2009), there is much to be said in favour of these changes. Not only do they generally make life less difficult but also they have contributed to a gradual weakening of the quasireligious notion of fieldwork as an ordeal, which placed considerable strains on PhD students as well as contributing to a rather questionable and self-regarding (if heroic) anthropological romance (Gardner 1999: 49). Rather than viewing the inevitably changing nature of fieldwork as indicative of a lack

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of moral fibre on the part of a current generation of researchers, I think it is worth considering what features of fieldwork under contemporary conditions facilitate writing good ethnography. Here I use a notion of ‘exemplary ethnography’, not in Marcus’s sense of those ‘that stylistically call attention to themselves for their originality’, but instead, and in a more modest spirit, as ones which convey a depth of knowledge and well-rounded sense of the lives and institutions that are being described. Exemplary ethnographies (or just good ones) should open up a world for the reader that was previously closed – even if they are about phenomena that are located close to home. Any selection is by its nature invidious, and it goes without saying that there are many quite different examples of the kinds of quality I consider here. My intention is to examine particular cases for what they can teach us about fieldwork itself. Working back from good ethnographies, can we find anything exemplary about the actual fieldwork on which they are based? I have chosen four studies published since the millennium to stand for many others. The first two − Rebecca Cassidy’s The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket (2002) and Sophie Day’s On the Game: Women and Sex Work (2007) − were conducted in the United Kingdom in worlds that are not easily known to those who do not directly participate in them. The second two are village studies − Yunxiang Yan’s Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949−1999 (2003) and Maya Mayblin’s Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives (2010). The latter two reinforce the point that fieldwork conducted in villages continues to have much to teach us − both ethnographically and, indirectly, about the process of fieldwork itself. These studies are all impressive for the very rich ethnography they provide, and for the ways they combine the best of new and old ways of doing ethnographic research.

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Rebecca Cassidy’s study of the world of horse racing in Newmarket, and how this impinges on English class and kinship more generally, reveals a world unto itself. This is a very specialized zone of roles and activities. We are introduced to the trainers, the stable lads, the punters, the breeders and the jockeys, and the racing, training, pedigree breeding, betting, mucking out and grooming in which they engage. The fieldwork demanded a particular empathy for, and familiarity with, this world of horses, which few ethnographers could have achieved. Cassidy’s sustained involvement with the life of Newmarket over many months makes it possible for the reader to get a sense not just of what this enclosed world involves but also of how it speaks to processes of class and kinship in Britain more generally. Sophie Day’s On the Game is the product of 14 years of research on the lives of sex workers in London, initially in the context of a study of HIV/AIDS risks in a genitourinary clinic attached to a London teaching hospital. A collaborative study begun in 1986 was supplemented by two periods of followup in the period up to 2000 (Day 2007: 2−13). Day’s ethnography deals with issues that are absolutely central to the capitalist economy: the division of public and private; work and sex; notions of personhood; and, of course, gender. It draws both on material obtained from the collection of data from several hundred women, and on personal, individual, biographical material which documents the life course of particular women. Throughout, Day pays close attention to the sedimented effects of state practices and institutions – the criminal justice system, public health initiatives, legislation, and other kinds of state control – on the lives of sex workers, and equally close attention to the way individual women perceive and manage their own lives. Yan’s Private Life under Socialism is unusual in at least two ways – it focuses on the personal and emotional aspects of family life in rural China, and it places these in the context of the profound political and economic

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FIELDWORK SINCE THE 1980s

changes that occurred there in the second half of the twentieth century. The story of the effects of these changes on the small, everyday intimacies of family life is not only very moving but also sets up extremely high standards for ethnographic research that draws on historical and sociological studies of the family in Europe. Yan puts the intimate and long-term knowledge gained through more than three decades of close experience of the community he studied to work in a way few ethnographers could hope to emulate. Finally, Maya Mayblin’s ethnography of gender, morality, and Catholicism in Northeast Brazil is a wonderfully economical unfolding of the lives of women and men in the village of Santa Lucia. Mayblin’s ethnography paints an unusually intimate picture of the motivations and desires of these villagers as well as the constraints and moral dilemmas that shape their lives. This cuts across the traditional analytic domains of kinship and religion to illuminate marital relations and personal trajectories. The fieldwork for this study involved living with a local family, and Mayblin (2010: 36−40) carefully points out the strengths and limitations of this attachment in ways that I find immediately recognizable. These are four very different projects. What can be generalized about the fieldwork on which they are based? They are each the product of their author’s particular career path, biography, and individual skills as well as the circumstances of fieldwork. Two of these works, those of Cassidy and Mayblin, are the rewritten, published versions of PhD projects that involved a year or more of immersion in their chosen field sites. Mayblin’s research conforms perhaps most closely to the classic model of village fieldwork. One senses that the jewel-like qualities of this study might be extended in other directions by further research in the future. Cassidy’s was conducted closer to home, and involved the investigation of several different sites and different categories of participants. It thus conforms to the

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multi-sited model, but Cassidy’s engagement with these locations is unusually strong, and the ethnography reflects her full participation in different aspects of the labour process of the world of horse racing. Both Day’s and Yan’s studies arise from a very long-term engagement with their research subjects. In Yan’s case an original PhD project begun in the village of Xiajia in 1989 was supplemented by further fieldwork there over a number of years in the 1990s. But it turns out that Yan’s engagement with the village began much earlier, when his direct experience of the upheavals of Chinese history involved taking up residence there for seven years in the 1970s as a seventeenyear-old destitute migrant. So, 11 years of research were built on a long familiarity with this site (Yan 2003 xi−xiv). A longitudinal engagement is also crucial to Day’s ethnography. Here, fieldwork did not involve co-residence, but amongst other skills, an extraordinarily acute attention to the nuances of personal narratives, combined with a layering of the issues that arose into a very wide sociological and historical scholarship of the broader context of economy, family, and society in Britain. In different ways, these ethnographies underline the importance of a temporal dimension to fieldwork – whether in fully concentrated form over a year or more, or carried out in phases over a much longer period. And this connects to the story of total immersion in a Malay village with which I began this chapter, and to the accretions of knowledge that result from a continued engagement with field sites − sometimes over many years. Perhaps it is not coincidental that none of these ethnographies makes extensive use of textual or archival material. But the qualities of engagement in the field can be discerned clearly in each of them. Such qualities may be achieved through a full participation in participants’ lives, but it is also possible to compensate for limitations imposed by the circumstances of fieldwork through a layering of different kinds of investigation over a much longer time span.

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This suggests that my own dissatisfaction with the interview-based project on adoption reunions, and uncertainty about more recent urban, multi-sited fieldwork in Malaysia, might potentially be resolvable through cumulative forays that would permit different kinds of knowing and cross-checking over time.

CONCLUSION The stories of ambivalence about total immersion and the unattainable quest for holism with which I began this essay do not precisely map onto each other. I have tried to show how they intertwine to illuminate the ways that all investigations are necessarily partial and incomplete. For most anthropologists, the period of doctoral research is their longest and most intense experience of fieldwork – underlining the interconnections between the biographies of researchers and those whose lives they investigate. But, as in my own case, graduate students are particularly liable to regard their own undertakings in the light of unachievable ideals. Nevertheless, the period of doctoral research remains a protected zone that permits a special kind of concentrated endeavour − notwithstanding the ways in which intellectual styles, the global economy, and modes of communication have changed the conditions of fieldwork. If it is true that time − both for fieldwork itself and for reflecting carefully on its products − is the single most important requirement for producing good ethnography, it may turn out that an everincreasing pressure to publish quickly is its most significant threat. The works discussed here demonstrate that maintaining anthropology’s strong commitment to sustained fieldwork, which is the first requirement for exemplary ethnography, requires us to continue to think creatively about the implications of undertaking research in new contexts and situations. Above all, such fieldwork demands time – sometimes many years of engagement.

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Different ways of collecting material and different styles of engagement to suit new circumstances are inevitable. We should remain critically aware of what these involve – and what they preclude.

NOTES 1 I am very grateful to Sophie Day and Jonathan Spencer for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and for continuing conversations about experiences of fieldwork. I am also indebted to Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang for their helpful comments. Jonathan Spencer generously made available unpublished material from ESRC-funded research on UK anthropology PhDs (Spencer, Jepson and Mills 2005). This seems the appropriate place to record my debts to Olivia Harris whom I got to know soon after returning from my first fieldwork in Malaysia. Over many years, Olivia provided that much-needed figure of an intellectual role model. She is profoundly missed for that, and for much else. 2 A note of caution here: the ASA membership and the PhD cohort of 1992−2003 are not directly comparable populations. Furthermore, it is likely that the 1981 ASA figures analysed by Kappers (1983) include members who were simply stating an interest in these regions − as distinct from having actually conducted fieldwork there (see Kuper 1983: 191). 3 I am grateful to Veronica Strang for her insight here.

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun 1990 ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture 2 (2): 1−24. Bloch, Maurice 1986 From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borneman, John and Abdellah Hammoudi 2009 ‘The fieldwork encounter, experience, and the making of truth: an introduction’, in Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi (eds), pp. 1−24. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bowen, Elenore Smith 1964 [1954] Return to Laughter. Natural History Library Edition. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Carsten, Janet 1997 The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Carsten, Janet 2000 ‘”Knowing where you’ve come from”: ruptures and continuities of time and kinship in narratives of adoption reunions’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S) 6: 687−783. Carsten, Janet and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds) 1995 About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, Rebecca 2002 The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, James 1983 ‘On ethnographic authority’, Representations 1: 118−146. Clifford, James 1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds) 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Collier, Jane F. and Sylvia J. Yanagisako (eds) 1987 Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Day, Sophie 2007 On the Game: Women and Sex Work. London: Pluto Press. Dirks, Nicholas 1987 The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, A.L. 1967 (ed.) The Craft of Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1976 ‘Appendix IV: Some reminiscences and reflections on fieldwork’, in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (abridged edn with an introduction by Eva Gillies), pp. 240−254. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fardon, Richard 1990 ‘Localizing strategies: the regionalization of ethnographic accounts’, in Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, Richard Fardon (ed.), pp. 1−29. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press and Smithsonian Institution Press. Firth, Raymond 1966 Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy, 2nd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Firth, Rosemary 1966 Housekeeping among Malay Peasants, 2nd edn. LSE Monographs in Social Anthropology No.7. London: Athlone Press. Firth, Rosemary 1972 ‘From wife to anthropologist’, in Crossing Cultural Boundaries, S.T. Kimball and J.A. Watson (eds). San Francisco, CA: Chandler. Fuller 1996 ‘Asia: South’, in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds), pp. 57−59. London: Routledge. Gardner, Katy 1999 ‘Location and relocation: home, “the field” and anthropological ethics (Sylhet,

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Bangladesh)’, in Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology, C.W. Watson (ed.), pp. 49−73. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Geertz, Clifford 1960 The Religion of Java. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, Clifford 1973 ‘Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Golde, Peggy (ed.) 1970 Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. Chicago: Aldine. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (eds) 1997 Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hannerz, Ulf 1996 Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harris, Olivia 2000 To Make the Earth Bear Fruit: Ethnographic Essays on Fertility, Work and Gender in Highland Bolivia. London: University of London, School of Advanced Study, Institute of Latin American Studies. Houtman, Gustaaf 1988 ‘Interview with Maurice Bloch’, Anthropology Today 4 (1): 18−21. Kappers 1983 ‘Appendix’, in Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (completely revised edn), pp. 206−210. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kearney, Michael 1995 ‘The local and the global: the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547−565. Kuper, Adam 1983 Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (completely revised edition). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lan, David 1985 Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Currey; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Macdonald, Sharon 2001 ‘British social anthropology’, in Handbook of Ethnography, Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn Lofland (eds), pp. 60−79. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Marcus, George E. 1994 ‘On ideologies of reflexivity in contemporary efforts to remake the human sciences’, in Ethnography Through Thick & Thin, George E. Marcus (ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George 1995 ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95−117. Marcus, George E. 2007 ‘Ethnography two decades after writing culture: from the experimental to the baroque’, Anthropological Quarterly 80 (4): 1127−1145. Marcus, George E. and Michael Fisher 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Mascia-Lees, Frances E., Patricia Sharpe and Colleen Ballerino Cohen 1989 ‘The post-modernist turn in anthropology: cautions from a feminist perspective’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1): 7−33. Mayblin, Maya 2010 Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, David 2006 ‘Briefing document for the International Benchmarking Review of Social Anthropology’, April 2006 (unpublished). Mintz, Sidney 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Ong, Aihwa 1999 Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pine, Frances 1999 ‘Incorporation and exclusion in the Podhale’, in Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment, Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Michael Stewart (eds), pp. 45−60. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Pine, Frances 2007 ‘Memories of movement and the stillness of place: kinship memory in the Polish highlands’, in Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, Janet Carsten (ed.), pp. 104−125. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shore, Cris 1999 ‘Fictions of fieldwork: depicting the “self” in ethnographic writing (Italy)’, in Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology, C.W. Watson (ed.), pp. 25−48. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Simpson, Bob 2009 ‘Messages from the field’, Anthropology Today 25 (5): 1−3. Skeggs, Beverley 2001 ‘Feminist ethnography’, in Handbook of Ethnography, Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn Lofland (eds), pp. 426−442. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Spencer, Jonathan 2000 ‘British social anthropology: a retrospective’. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 1−24. Spencer, Jonathan 2001 ‘Ethnography after post-modernism’, in Handbook of Ethnography, Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and

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Lyn Lofland (eds), pp. 443−452. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Spencer, Jonathan 2006 ‘How long is a PhD?’. Unpublished paper for the International Benchmarking Review of Social Anthropology, April 2006. Spencer Jonathan, Anne Jepson and David Mills 2005 ‘Career paths and training needs of social anthropology research students’, ESRC Research Grant RES-000–23–0220. Stoler, Ann Laura 1985 Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation History, 1870−1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1987 ‘An awkward relationship: the case of feminism and anthropology’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Special Issue, Reconstructing the Academy 12 (2): 276−292. Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Rosie 1985 ‘Indian cinema: pleasures and popularity’, Screen 26 (3−4): 116–31. Thomas, Rosie 1995 ‘Melodrama and the negotiation of morality in mainstream Hindi cinema’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Vertovec, Steven 2008 Transnationalism. Oxford: Routledge Visweswaran, Kamala 1994 Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Watson, C.W. 1999 ‘Introduction: the quality of being there’, in Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology, C.W. Watson (ed.), pp. 1−24. Sterling, VA.: Pluto Press. Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yan, Yunxiang 2003 Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949−1999. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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3.2 Between Routine and Rupture: The Archive as Field Event1 Tristan Platt

He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside − that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. (Walter Benjamin)2

When I first ‘did fieldwork’ in the Andes, I believed that anthropological knowledge could only be produced through ‘participant observation’. I did wonder – pre-anthropologically, no doubt – in what form the ‘descendants of the Incas’ might persist in the twentieth century. Still, my research project was a linguistic approach to moral

and political decision-making, focused on Quechua rhetoric, for which I needed language training. While attending the course, however, I met an ethnohistorian who persuaded me not to abandon my earlier curiosity. So in the field I collected texts, asked (and answered) questions, learned phrases, compiled vocabularies, made censuses and maps. I participated in productive routines and fiesta calendars, listened to myths, interviews and shamanic sessions. I noted how writing was interwoven with speech events, and taped fragments of debates, memories and ‘oral history’. But I still found myself led inexorably towards the Archive. For years I tried to keep field and archive in balance, revisiting each in turn, as though they were two distinct methodologies,

1 I thank Olivia Harris for inviting me to write this piece shortly before her untimely death in April 2009; also Richard Fardon, Andrés Guerrero and Mark Harris for helpful conversations and comments. I have received inspiration from the students taking my ‘Anthropology and History’ course at St Andrews in autumn 2009. Thanks, too, to the staff at the Bolivian National Archive, the Historical Archive of Potosi, and the General Archive of the Indies (Seville); to Melanie Aspey and the staff of the Rothschild Archive London; and to the late Curaca of Macha (Anansaya), Agustín Carvajal, and his sons Santiago and Gregorio, who in 1971 gave me hospitality and access to the moiety Archive in their care. A Fellowship in 2010−11 at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, allowed me to complete the text, and I am grateful to the University of St Andrews for enabling me to take up the Fellowship. 2 Selected Works 2: 2 (p. 597). Reprinted in Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Images, Texts, Signs (trans. Esther Leslie). London/New York: Verso, 2007 (p. 49). Citations in this chapter are given in the historian’s rather than the social scientific style, to mark its transdisciplinary nature.

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although, at each act of writing, they tended to merge into mentally associated notes and images. I interrogated my field notes from historical perspectives. Documents from the archives were read, conversely, in the light of my memories of living relationships. Exercise-books, tapes, photographs and photocopies combined like complementary traces to form a holograph of a changing, collective presence, spread out in time. People stepped through doors between segments, walked across groups of years, sometimes reappearing after death with different clothing, mien and hairstyles. To disentangle what has become fused, reordering the layered sequences according to the levels at which their accompanying memories are situated, seems to me now an almost impossible task. But I still sometimes dream of a ‘total’ Archive, in which everything finds its place by dint of excavation, ordering and linkage. Of course, such an archive would be, first, impossible, and second, only the first step. I would then have to create a system of transversal catalogues, perpendicular to the branching structure of sections, series, files and documents: ‘artificial series’, such as some archival traditions recommend. These catalogues link traces relating to specific people, places or themes, without being bound by ‘original order’. As well as digitization, this might require the creation, spider-like, of a web of polysemic links, an archival equivalent to those nebulae of ‘wild thought’ that Lévi-Strauss evokes in the ‘Overture’ to The Raw and the Cooked,

but with historical and eventful, as well as mythematic cross-referencing. This chapter concerns history and anthropology, whose relationship may be imagined as the warp and weft of social life. Other specialized knowledges from the human and natural sciences cluster and group themselves under the aegis of society and historicity.3 Here, however, I focus on processes of receiving, ordering and reading material traces that, interpreted imaginatively, can give rise to certain kinds of historical understanding. I follow the ethnographic path in my approach to archives; I allow archives to present me with the object of my search. Archives contain documents and statements which record, first, the event of their own inscription (they are often signed and dated), and second, references to other events (including other inscriptions), through the signs that compose them. It is this double inscription, evoked by Ricoeur, that provides the foundation for archival writing, both that which inscribes the documentary support, and those yarns which are later spun by historians and anthropologists at various removes from their ‘primary sources’.4 Archives speak to us in several ways, while generally remaining at the edges of our awareness. I distinguish modes and metaphors of working in archives, while keeping a sense of the worlds beyond the texts. Soaring above local experience, some ancient documents may appear to shine more brightly than other, more recent ones.5 But archival research also reveals more modest patterns

3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. London: Continuum Publishing, 1989 [1975]. 4 Michael Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing’, French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 1 (47−53). 2005. 5 The astronomical metaphor is Foucault’s: The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from far off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale. (The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge 1972 [1969])

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THE ARCHIVE

of repetition, from the iteration of daily procedural formalities, notarial phrases and documentary formatting, to the annual presentation of accounts and reports. Filingsystems and archives are linked to the management of everyday social events: they select them, grouping them by date and purpose, reducing them through classification to regularities, to membership of a series, confirming the persistence of social routines. The regularities break off when a major interruption – war, disease, revolution, tsunami, invasion – destroys the social knowledge that produced the archive. The interruption of archival practice may accompany the collapse of a State or the fall of an empire, but also any brusque interruption of procedural continuity: some archives have fed bonfires to keep troops warm at night; others have been deliberately destroyed to get rid of incriminating evidence. A different kind of discontinuity is introduced with transformations in the underlying technologies of communication, such as the shift from paper, pen and ink to telegram, telephone or email: changes which introduce new routines that leave different kinds of trace, or no trace at all, thereby transforming the sorts of history that can be written.6 Archives exist between routine and rupture. As routine, they make up complex hierarchies of ‘statements’, configured in temporal patterns, which infuse social lives silently with unobserved stabilities of meaning, while themselves changing gradually in tune with longer discursive and technological transformations. In what follows, I do not offer a ‘researchers’ guide’ to archives, which can easily be found on the web.7 I simply

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alternate memories of archival experiences with more tentative reflections on their status and implications.

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD Let us begin at the beginning, with the arché.8 A system for storing current records is a standard tool of State and corporate governance. Files, as Max Weber observed, are a necessary part of any modern bureaucracy. The filing cabinet, invented in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, has replaced other ways of storing notes, letters, bills and documents: on shelves, in piles and bundles, desks, secret cupboards, strongboxes, pouches and décolletés. In cabinets, first wooden, now metallic and diversified into a range of forms and functions, lie stored the springs of an institution’s continuity, efficacy and legal power. Complemented by digital methods of computerized filing, some now imagine we are moving towards a paperfree age.9 In any event, systems of files in current use may be thought of as ‘living’ archives. But an archive, strictly speaking, is the set of remaindered files and documents which have been selected as worth preserving, although no longer current, and therefore, in some sense, de-personalized and ‘dead’. They may be sent for reshelving in the central archive of the State or organization, for the word means, both the remaindered files themselves, and the buildings in which they are rehoused, like entombed mummies whose diagnostic traces persist long after they have vanished from daily life. Such archives render

6 Cf. The Disappearance of Writing Systems, Perspectives on Literacy and Communication (eds John Baines, John Bennet and Stephen Houston). London: Equinox Publishing, 2010. 7 For archives in the UK, see http://archiveshub.ac.uk/. For a general introduction, see Peter C. Mazikana, Archives and Records Management for Decision Makers: a RAMP Study. Paris: UNESCO, 1990. Online at: http://www.unesco. org/webworld/ramp/html/r9008e/r9008e00.htm#Contents 8 The double meaning of arché, ‘beginning’ and ‘command’, ‘ontological principle’ and ‘nomological principle’, occupies the early pages in Jacques Derrida, Archival Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1995]. 9 Terry Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift’, Archivaria 47, 1997. http://www.mybestdocs.com/cook-t-pastprologue-ar43fnl.htm

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accessible traces from the past which may be reconstituted as evidence for persons, actions, ideas and events, when interrogated from a horizon in the present.10 Since before the eighteenth century, a shared feature of State and other administrative archives is the ‘aura’ projected by their august buildings and reading rooms, adorned like mausoleums with statues of dead ideologues and lettered ancestors, where documents speak softly and are handled delicately, fragile fetishes that place us, through new experiences of touch, in an uncanny relation with the past.11 Recent trends in the UK have been to desacralize archives, making them more accessible in the name of ‘outreach’, due to the demand from local and family history seekers, and to the linking of funding to a market ideology based on ‘cost−benefits’, ‘impact’, ‘footfall’ and numbers of ‘customers’. More constructively, websites too are now remaindered and archived: in 2010, the UK National Archive took copies of the outgoing Labour government’s official web pages for online storage as a publicly available historical resource.12 The ideas of provenance and original order denote, first, the office from which the papers (or fonds) have come, and second, the order in which they were filed before arriving at the archive.13 This distinguishes archives from libraries, and also from the manuscript

collections held by some libraries. The only archive which is a necessary part of the British Library is the archive of the Library’s own administration, although it has acquired MSS collections and, in 1982, the conservation of the India Office papers as an additional mission.14 But archives are conceptually prior to libraries: if libraries embrace the infinite variety of the world, as Borges fantasized, archives are emblematic of a primal struggle of order against chaos. Archives existed in the ancient world, but the early modern drive to centralize diplomatic papers in chanceries came from Italy: ‘A new world of paper had come into existence some fifty years before Columbus’ encounter with the ‘New World.’15 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many remaindered government files were being centralized, organized and sometimes published by historians, as part of efforts to inspire new national and political histories. The discovery and classification of archives revolutionized the business of history making, turning it into the creation of well-sourced narrative charters purporting to show (teleologically) the ‘formation’ of nation-States.16 As part of these new nationalisms, archive buildings became goals of pilgrimage, oracular sources of patriotic truth parallel to the construction of other historical monuments.17 The Archives Nationales were established in

10 RG Collingwood, The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Carlo Ginzburg. Clues, Myths and the Historical Method. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 11 Jules Michelet experienced intensely the sensation of communing with the dead, before resurrecting them in his writing. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Carolyn Steedman, Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. 12 See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/ 13 Michael Roper, ‘The Development of the Principles of Provenance and Respect for Original Order in the Public Record Office,’ in Barbara L. Craig, ed., The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor. Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992 (pp. 134−149). 14 http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelpregion/asia/india/indiaofficerecords/indiaofficehub.html 15 Paul Marcus Dover, ‘Deciphering the Diplomatic Archives of Fifteenth-century Italy’, Archival Science 7, 2007 (pp. 297−316). Centralization of chancery papers was carried out by Elizabeth I in England, by Colbert in France, and in Spain by Philip II. 16 The footnote appeared together with the modern archive. See Anthony Grafton, The Footnote. A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Cf. Brian Keith Axel, From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002 (Introduction). 17 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle. Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789−1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1992].

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revolutionary Paris from 1790, following the Spanish installation of the Archive of the Indies in Seville (1785). Both initiated a new era in public record keeping, which in France was accompanied by intense archive burning as many tried to destroy the papers of bondage. But the new French Archive fixed a founding moment, a documentary organization which would serve to compose a new collective consciousness with a before-andafter centred in the myth of the Revolution. In neighbouring Britain, by contrast, the Public Record Office was founded in 1838 to preserve the tissues of a society based on an inverse myth of ‘constitutional monarchy’. Of particular interest to anthropologists are, no doubt, the colonial and imperial archives, such as the General Archive of the Indies at Seville, the India Office Papers in the British Library, the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House Oxford, the French Archives d’Outre-Mer at Aix-en-Provence, or the Dutch Ministry of Colonies papers in the Rijksarchief at The Hague. To these might be added many others, including several Business Archives containing worldwide yet localized information on trade and political economy from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.18 All occupy positions in an archival network which has extended its reach to embrace postcolonial and new national archives too. An intricate problem here is the difference between a colonial archive and the archive of

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a State trying to incorporate or constitute ‘a nation’. Contrast the Spanish Constitution of Cadiz, which in 1812 declared (too late) that all Amerindians under the Crown were Spanish citizens enjoying universal male suffrage, with the British exclusion of subcontinental Indians following the 1857 rebellion, when ‘ethnographic research’ constructed Caste as an essential feature of an Indian society inherently unreceptive (it was supposed) to ‘liberal democracy’. Following the defeat of the Andean Rebellions of the Amarus and Kataris in 1780−82, and the explosions in North America and France, the Spanish intensified policies of enlightened Hispanization, provoking resistance after Independence from postcolonial créoles and Amerindians alike. With the crushing of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857, by contrast, the British ‘orientalized’ and created an ‘ethnographic State’, such as had existed previously in the Inca and Spanish empires (and was maintained by some indian communities within the Bolivian Republic until the beginning of the twenty-first century).19 Filing systems do not merely reflect the societies which have produced them, and of whose past administrations they store traces.20 Rather, they contain records of fiscal or other categories by which populations are classified and administered, as well as copies of the legislative documents by which these categories are suspended or replaced. Populations may be silenced, or words put into their mouths through a process described

18 For example, the Rothschild Archive London at: http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ta/, or the Jardine, Matheson Archive at: http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD/GBR/0012/MS%20JM. 19 For the Constitution of Cadiz of 1812, which enabled Andean and Mexican Indians to vote in municipal elections, see Marie-Danièle Demelas, L’invention politique. Bolivie, Equateur, Pérou au XIXème siècle. Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1992. For Mexico, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. Newhaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003. For the ‘ethnographic State’ in British India, I follow Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; also ‘Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History’, in Axel, From the Margins … (2002: pp. 47−65). Cf. the views of James and John Stuart Mill on citizenship outside Europe, discussed in Uday Mehta, ‘Liberal Strategies of Exclusion’, in F Cooper and AL Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. British racist rhetoric merged with class prejudice: for the middle and upper classes, missionizing in South Africa and among the London poor became part of a single ‘civilizational’ project. See John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992 (p. 289). 20 Peter Burke queries views of archival organization as a ‘reflection’ of the relations of government in his ‘Commentary’, Archival Science 7, 2007 (p. 395).

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by Andrés Guerrero as ventriloquism, which operates not so much by translation of meanings as through a process of ‘trans-writing’ (transescritura), in which scribes and notaries transmute witnesses’ intentions into the literate catechisms of courts and State. The structure and hierarchy of the archives may even be said to determine the kinds of historical narrative that can be written.21 Nevertheless, different techniques of reading, as well as the dialectic of order and disorder, reveal unforeseen constellations in their holdings. Carolyn Steedman tells of a reference for a serving maid tucked in amidst unrelated papers from eighteenth-century England.22 Or take the description of a crew’s experiences on board the lugger ‘Morning Star’, out from Ramsgate on a cold January night in 1846 to rescue the sailors of the ‘Tesoro of Venice’, an Austrian ship carrying coal from Newcastle to Leghorn, which had run aground on the Goodwin Sands. (Once they got them into the lugger, the lifeboat men gave the Austrians hot coffee to warm them up.) This little vignette, which might have inspired a Turner painting or a Dickens ‘set piece’, turns up between dry letters to Baron Rothschild from his agent in Southampton, the P&O representative Thomas Hill, reporting new shipments of Spanish quicksilver and Cuban cigars.23 Lockets of hair, a baby’s knitted sock, maps and knives, sketches and diagrams – the most surprising things turn up out-of-place in archives to jolt the imagination into indeterminate channels.

At the same time, archives exist in a sort of limbo with respect to the world outside, which is barely aware of them. Only rarely – perhaps when applying for a ‘certified copy’ of a certificate – will most people catch a glimpse of innumerable dusty files on endless shelves holding other, unseen stacks of records. In the great archives, these lines of shelves can reach tens, hundreds, even thousands of kilometres in length,24 together with websites and URLs in constant multiplication. Given the secular temples in which they may be housed, it may seem paradoxical to say that archives exist ‘at the margins’ of a social formation, which nevertheless shows signs of their governance. But their strange power stems precisely from this ex-centricity (unless openly installed as Kafkaesque centres of power). Archives may constrain what ‘statements’ can be made: that is, what thoughts can be thought in a society at different historical periods. Foucault sees them functioning ‘at the frontier’ of each discursive régime, empowering certain kinds of statement within an emergent order. Archives may select for linguistic statements and performances that express thoughts and actions beyond people’s conscious awareness, as part of their taken-for-granted normality.25 From here it is a short step to seeing archives operating at a subconscious level, like parts of the Law, as invisible templates for sanctioned (or subversive) thoughts and actions.26 Archives are found in colonial, national, postcolonial and regional societies; but they

21 Andrés Guerrero, Administración de poblaciones, ventriloquía, y transescritura. FLACSO Sede Ecuador – Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Lima, 2010. 22 Steedman, Dust. 23 Rothschild Archive London, Sundry Correspondence, XI/119/8A (1846). The series is organized alphabetically by year: this document appears under ‘H’ for 1846. It is accompanied by a cover-note written by Edward Hodges to Lionel de Rothschild, Consul for Austria, requesting help for the sailors. 24 Between national (367 km), departmental (2,111 km) and communal (441 km) archives, the Archives de France comprise almost 3,000 km of shelving. See ‘Chiffres-clefs 2005’ at http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ 25 In old Spanish, for example, amor (‘love’, sc. of the sovereign) was opposed to libertad (‘freedom’ = disobedience, subversion). The antonym ‘freedom’/‘slavery’ had become dominant by 1800, expressing the shift to a liberal discursive régime, and the impact of the Black Revolution in Haití. 26 Derrida suggests that the unconscious works like an archive, where the infinite impressions of individual memory are stored – and may speak out of turn. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1995]. Freud rarely uses the word ‘archive’, so Derrida’s key texts

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also existed in ancient, precolonial and precapitalist States. However, they do not seem to require the existence of an ‘archival State’, any more than communal irrigation systems necessarily require a ‘hydraulic State’ (pace Wittfogel).27 In late medieval times, semiautonomous community archives were found at the rural margins of European kingdoms, and also among the Aymara lordships of the Southern Andes with their bundles of knotted cords, or chinu.28 Conversely, States without glottographic writing do not necessarily lack archives. A classic example is the sophisticated knotted-cord form of iconic record keeping (the khipu) perfected by the Incas; the same is true of the clay-sealed storage systems from early Mesopotamia.29 Indeed, ‘archival thinking’ probably exists among all human societies, including those small, decentralized groups which treasure inscribed ancestral tokens, to which we will return. At the domestic and individual level, archives of personal papers accompany and merge with collections of objects, with which they may be layered. Archives derive from an aesthetic, even existential desire to collect and arrange, as well as to facilitate retrieval. Personal archives may be distributed and recovered within a dynamic of friendship, loaning and promotion. Walter Benjamin

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Figure 3.2.1 Archivist Matt Wrbican discovers a wine glass while opening a Time Capsule at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. At right is cataloguer Liz Scott. Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press. See also: http://www.warhol.org/tc21/main. html

are ‘Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (SE, 9, 1−95. 1909) and ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” ’ (1925). English trans. published by James Strachey, in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 21, 1940 (p. 469). These liken inscription of traces in wax to the layering of images that form a palimpsest in the unconscious, such as are found in certain archival documents. 27 For Andean pre-State ‘hydraulic communities’, see Richard Burger’s critique of Wittfogel in Chavin: The Origins of the Andean State. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. 28 For the interaction between memory and archive in English medieval and early modern communities, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500−1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. For the combination of memory with registration in Andean knotted-string records, see Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (eds), Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin, TX: Texas University Press, 2002. Chinu (Aymara) = khipu (Quechua). 29 The Inca State did not use glottography, but had an elaborate system of archives. See Gary Urton, Signs of the Inca Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted String Record. Austin, TX: Texas University Press., 2003. Also Harvard University’s Khipu Database Project at http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/WhatIsAKhipu.html. For ‘archives before writing’, see too Enrica Fiadra and Piera Feroli, ‘The Use of Clay Sealings in Administrative Functions from the Fifth to First Millennium BC, in the Orient, Nubia, Egypt and the Aegean: Similarities and Differences’, available online at: http://www2.ulg.ac.be/archgrec/IMG/aegeum/Aegaeum5(pdf)/Fiandra.pdf. The autonomy of such systems of registration (rather than their conceptualization as ‘defective’ forms of proto-logographic writing) is defended for Mesopotamia by Peter Damerow, ‘The Origins of Writing as a Problem in Historical Epistemology’. Preprint 119, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 1999. Cited by Frank Salomon, The Cord-Keepers. Khipus and Cultural Life in an Andean Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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carried this approach to extremes: his papers and collections were conscientiously stored in envelopes, boxes and trunks, then copied and distributed among his friends for safekeeping, pending an occasional request for their return. He archived and catalogued letters received, lists of his readings and jottings of every paper that might help situate a thought or a memory. ‘For authentic memories’, he wrote, ‘it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them.’30 The allusion is archaeological and archival; but it is misleading, I will suggest, to think of archives as repositories of memories.

A MOIETY ARCHIVE I decided to visit the archive while living in the Andes, but not because of the bejewelled writing in the Andean night sky. I was still wondering how the Quechua-speaking group I was living with related to earlier societies that had occupied the same lands before and after the Spanish conquest. Was the sixteenthcentury Spanish invasion still remembered as a ‘primal scene’ – a traumatic foundation for later forms of temporality? Or was a local periodization to be preferred: before and after the rising of the Inca-Christian Sun and State, for example? People also told how their Aymara-speaking forefathers had carried the ore and trampled the amalgam in the refineries of Potosi; some enacted ritualized memories of the departure of the labourers (mitayos) from their rural communities. In 1977, during this ritual, I saw bits of

paper representing land titles stuck in the hat of a peasant riding a mule whom they called ‘the mitayo’. These papers, I was told, were ‘flowers’ (t’ika). They recalled the ‘earth eaten’ by ancestors in the silverrefining mills in order to retain rights of access to their lands. The population had changed. Many died or migrated. Spanish and créole-mestizos from time to time joined those who stayed, and intermarried with them, becoming fellow tributaries. Ideas current in Bolivia since before the Revolution of 1952 concerning radical bouleversement and mestizaje seemed to rule out a comparison with the civilization invaded four centuries before.31 Yet my stay in Macha uncovered what seemed like echoes from pre-Hispanic and early colonial times: endogamous moiety division, dual authorities, decimal organization, vertical settlement pattern, mountain worship, geometric iconography, dualism both social and symbolic, a warrior ethic, a sacred geography ... . These and other tropes could not be dismissed simply as ‘orientalism’: comparable voices were emerging from many other Andean societies. The conditions of their persistence and transformation could only be sought in the Archive.32 Later I would learn that ‘Macha’ had been listed as a regional capital from the precolonial period: in 1540 the name appeared as the capital of a large federation, the Qaraqara [‘Caracara’], among many other towns and villages granted by Francisco Pizarro to his brother Gonzalo. Derived from an Inca khipu-archive in Cusco, the first paper list was kept in the archive of Francisco’s secretary in Lima.33 Then a

30 From ‘Excavation and Memory’, reprinted as preamble to Ursula Marx et al. (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Archive. 31 Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind. The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002. 32 For the reconfiguration of the mountain cult over three centuries see Peter Gose, Invaders as Ancestors. On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 33 Tristan Platt, Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Olivia Harris, Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas. La Paz: Institut Français d’Études Andines / Plural Editores / University of St Andrews / University of London, 2011 [2006] (Documento 3, p. 642).

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document was found in the General Archive of the Argentine Nation (Buenos Aires)34 that transcribed an early oral tradition concerning the ambassadors sent by Macha lords to treat in Cusco with the revolutionary Inca Pachacuti, a century before the arrival of the Pizarros ... . If ‘Macha’ had persisted till the present, occupying some of the same lands and subdivided into the same territorial groups, it meant they must have updated their collective identity through successive social adaptations (as memory creatively renews the imprint of prior experience).35 A visit to the archive became urgent when people told me their land titles were there.36 But then something unexpected happened. The Macha, it turned out, had their own archive. The kuraka (Quechua: ‘indian moiety chief’) kept his archive with a tangle of flotsam in a mud-brick store-room, together with neatly folded weavings, homespun dresses, jackets and trousers, embroidered waistcoats, balls of spun and plied wool, spindles, chemical dyes, hung over the rafters and piled on furniture and in corners ... . He didn’t use khipus as his sixteenth-century forebears had; and his archive was no longer in a Spanish-style ‘community chest with three keys’, as during the early colonial period. It consisted of two dried sheepskins, woolly sides out, bound together with a plaited woollen cord. Papers of different sizes were held flat between these two pieces of hard leather. As we have seen, land titles are called ‘flowers’ (t’ika) when invoked during ceremonies. Perhaps we can

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recognise in these documents an archive of pressed flowers ... The papers included a type-written notarized copy (twentieth century) of a long seventeenth-century list of collective boundary markers drawn up for Macha by a Spanish field-commissioner; a mid-nineteenth century proclamation of the ‘original rights’ of indians (with millenarian insertions from the late 1860s when their lands were threatened by a dictatorial caudillo); certificates of community posts (cargos) occupied by indian tributaries; receipts for food delivered to the Bolivian army during the Chaco War with Paraguay (1932−1936); letters from the MNR revolutionary government of the 1950s, convoking ‘peasant comrades’ to political meetings and elections; correspondence with the Departmental Treasury from the 1960s, where tribute was delivered; and modern lists of tributaries by community and place of residence. The old man couldn’t read the papers, but he told me what they meant. He emphasised the millenarian document of ‘original rights’, which he called the kintali sut’i because it threatened with a hundred lashes (a quintal of azotes) anyone who sold part of the community’s land. ‘Original order’ was the basis of collective landholding: the land had always been theirs, and it would be theirs until the next judgement (juysyu, juicio).37 This nineteenth-century document reordered the rest around itself, like a new Republican arché for a postcolonial era. Yet there was something anachronistic about this moiety archive. It renewed a

34 Early colonial documentation was moved from Lima to Buenos Aires with the foundation in 1776 of the Viceroyalty of La Plata, which assumed jurisdiction over the south of the old Viceroyalty of Peru. 35 Macha access to vertical ecologies in the late twentieth century shows micro-continuities with the early seventeenth-century situation. See Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, Harris, Qaraqara-Charka (Documento 8, Apéndice). 36 Cf. for Mexico, Margarita Menegus Bornemann, ‘Los títulos primordiales de los Pueblos de Indios’, in Dos Décadas de investigación en historia econónomica en América Latina. Homenaje a Carlos Sempat Assadourian (ed. M.Menegus). Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1999 (pp. 137−161). For Inca and Spanish boundary markers, see Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, Harris, Qaraqara-Charka (Documento 15, pp. 642 ff.). 37 Olivia Harris noted that ‘judgements’ in the Andes are cyclical rather than final. See ‘De la fin du monde: Notes depuis le Nord-Potosí’, Cahiers des Amériques Latines (número special: ‘Bolivie: fascination du temps et organisation de l’apparence’, ed. Thérèse Bouysse). Paris, 1987. ‘Original order’ itself here becomes subject to periodic rupture and renewal.

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colonial discourse of ‘justice’ under the Bolivian Republic … . For archives can offer counter-narratives to those of top-down governance, and protection against those in power, including exclusive groups of white ‘Citizens’. The Macha documents defended a colonial pact between the King and his vassals, defying the Liberal assumption that ‘tribute’ is a survival of ‘feudal tyranny’. This archive belonged to a different temporality. So the archive reproduced a State, but the State barely knew it was there.38 It had became, with the populist liberalism of the 1952 Revolution, as ignored as the indian kurakas themselves, both part of an embattled discourse of indian autonomy. The advantage of hereditary chieftainship, the kuraka’s son told me, was that it helped keep the Archive together. The moiety Archive therefore prolonged the old ‘pact’ while replacing the King with the Republican State, to which the postcolonial Macha insisted on switching their tributary services as a landed community of Bolivian Runa.39

ANCESTRAL INSCRIPTIONS As rite of passage of ‘another discipline’ – history – many anthropology students avoid working in archives. Ethnography imagines ‘the field’ outside, or at least above ground, where participant observers experience ‘everyday life’ and converse with people. ‘The archive’ is shelving, buried stacks of dust and papers replete with traces of forgotten dead. The contrast between light and life

without, and darkness and death within, suggests a Platonic opposition between clear-and-distinct oral knowledge and the shadowy caves of inscribed opinion. The contrast reiterates the ‘logocentric bias’ behind the presentist ethnographer’s romantic innocence of history.40 Yet anthropology and history share epistemologies: both are based on inscribed traces of actions and events from different past presents, supplemented by living memory. The conceptual and creative work comes after the work of archival retrieval. But it is one thing to theorize history anthropologically. It is another to get down to the slow work of going to the archive, requesting and taking notes on reams of documentation, sometimes in other languages and in nearillegible handwriting, accessed through esoteric rituals of self-presentation, identification and petition that differ inscrutably from one archive to the next.41 Analogous rituals operate during the retrieval of one’s own materials from notebooks and boxes, filing cabinets and computers. Archives fascinated Lévi-Strauss, though his own project led him elsewhere. Affirming that they gave ‘a physical existence to history’ by constituting ‘the embodied essence of the event’, he compared written documents with the churinga of the Australian Aranda, inscribed ancestral objects of wood, or stone, kept piled up in caves. He compared these caves, as sites of ‘pure historicity’, to archive buildings. Both churinga and documents manifest ‘a sacredness that derives from their diachronic significance’. But Lévi-Strauss argued that the temporality of

38 In Bolivia, tributary practices continued after the revolution of 1952: cf. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fé: School of American Research, 2004. For a historical project aimed at digitizing all tributary records of Indian communities in Bolivia, see http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/barragan.html. 39 Runa (Quechua) means ‘Quechua-speaking human being’. Universal adult suffrage was introduced with the Revolution of 1952. 40 History has been gnawing at the edges of fieldwork-based anthropology for over sixty years. To Axel’s retrospective in From the Margins … (Introduction) should be added the prescient work of RG Collingwood; see, most recently, The Philosophy of Enchantment. Studies in Folklore, Cultural Criticism and Anthropology (eds David Boucher, Wendy James, Philip Smallwood). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [c.1940]. 41 Arlette Farge describes the neophyte’s introduction to these rituals in the National Library of Paris. Le Goût d’Archive. Paris: Seuil, 1989 (Ch. 2).

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churinga was neutralized by ‘wild thought’, which re-situated these objects as mediations between ancestral and recent dead at the centre of a synchronous ritual structure. He noted the persistence of this ‘wild’ thinking in European society, as when hopes are fulfilled during tourists’ visits to the homes of dead cultural ancestors. Expectation requires there to be a bed in Goethe’s house, but no one is going to demand proof of the bed’s ‘authenticity’: the requirement is purely structural.42 Thus caves and churinga were left suspended by Lévi-Strauss, caught in a ritual and analytical procedure for the abolition of historical time.43 But alternative perspectives are available, such as the pride and reverence for history proclaimed by Andean peasants in Rapaz (Peru) while contemplating ancestral khipus hung in an ‘archival temple’ in the high Andes,44 as well as the care Macha authorities bring to the conservation of their ‘pressed flowers’. Such cases remind us of the seclusion of the churinga, but also of the several English archives which hold (uncertified) copies of Magna Carta, or even of the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant. Beyond the tension between historicity and the self-imposed disciplines of ‘wild thought’, then, the archive and the field may be seen as complementary aspects of each other. Frank Salomon extols Andean rural archivists as intellectual colleagues, however strange their readings of local documents may appear.45 For archival research can be

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as focused as fieldwork, yet as poetic as a mythic reading of a chronotopic landscape. Documents mention the same people and places as are found in our chaotic field notes, linking them to other, as yet unknown sites. The archive becomes a nexus of multisitedness, linking fields, regions or continents at different times, connections which are often invisible to single-sited fieldwork. One archive leads to others, and to the presence of connected webs of meaning buried in geological strata beneath the surface. Burrowing through these superimposed levels, the ethnographer perceives the present as a moment of ‘current history’, and the ‘field-site’ as a surface node in a rich and layered historical phenomenology.46

NARRATIVE AND TRUTH The voices and statements heard in the Historical Archive of Potosí are infinite, but you cannot hear them all at once. Each document takes you down its own alleyway, introduces you to its own dramatis personae, imposes its own circumstances, manifests its own conditions of production. The connections between documents appear as you proceed, leaping across the branching structure, linking voices before you with voices in other parts of the archive. You hear things you would never hear in the ‘field outside’, as well as other things you have heard, often. Perhaps you have laboriously connected the

42 Cl. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2004 [1962] (Ch. 9, ‘Time regained’, pp. 237−240). Lévi-Strauss’ comparison of inscribed objects in ‘oral societies’ with archival documents should be taken with his account of writing as source of exploitation in Chapter 28 of Tristes Tropiques [1955]. In La Pensée Sauvage he argues that the ‘dangers of writing’ can be neutralized, together with historicity, by the symmetries of ‘wild thought’, whereas in Tristes Tropiques he had shown how easily this collective tactic might be undone by the contagious intrusion of the literate anthropologist. 43 For the Jívaro oscillation between presentism as ‘wild predation’ and history as ‘tame alienation’, see AnneChristine Taylor, ‘Sick of History: Contrasting Régimes of Historicity in the Upper Amazon’, in C Fausto and M Heckenberger, Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2007: pp. 133−168. 44 For the Andean quipo temple, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/americas/17peru.html?_r=1. 45 Frank Salomon, ‘Unethnic Ethnohistory: on Peruvian Peasant Historiography and Ideas of Autocthony’, Ethnohistory 49 (3), 2002. 46 For the idea of ‘current history’, see Sally Falk Moore, ‘Explaining the Present: Theoretical Dilemmas in Processual Ethnography’, American Ethnologist 14 (4), 1987 (727: 36).

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names of the judge, State attorney, little local lawyer or ‘Protector of Indians’, with appearances of the same characters in other documents. But these things happened a few, a hundred, four hundred years ago, ‘out there’ beyond the walls of the archive, in a treasury or a court-room, a market-place or a silvermine, a busy street or a country parish. Time again stretches itself along the rows and stacks of files, whose inhabitants nestle amongst the leaves, awaiting the reader’s touch to return to a ghostly presence, like old film footage projected in our minds.47 The network of linked archives, from a Justice of the Peace to a Supreme Court of Appeal, sometimes resembles a gossip network, perspective upon perspective, allegation upon allegation, testimony upon testimony … but is there a moment of truth? Decisions about events are made on the evidence available. A sentence claims to be fair, but events may be forged, ignored or discounted.48 Is truth procedural? Do we live events in the way in which literature represents us as living them? Some of us may intend to, as a way of lending sense to our lives. Some may even die as heroes of their own narratives, or of someone else’s. But let us hear the voice of a historian of children under the Nazis: Novelists can know things about their subjects which historians cannot. Where novelists can be certain of the emotional logic at work within their characters, the historian needs to remember the openness of real protagonists lives. Novelists after all do not need to test their intuitions against a barrage of incomplete sources.49

For archival sources, like many lives, are open. They answer certain questions, but

they raise others which remain unanswered except through acts of inference and imaginative re-enactment. A new document may undermine a patterning, or provoke a rewriting of a narrative. ‘Openness’, in the sense of unpredictability, confusion and continual rewriting, is a constant in most people’s lives; and in this respect, the archive can be closer to life than are the characters in a novel, or even than the narratives we draw from our twelve months of self-imposed ‘fieldwork’. Different authorial intentions, present in different parts of individual documents, produce a potential cacophony of voices; we must invoke other notions of truth to weigh up the conflict of narratives.

ARCHIVAL METAPHORS Every document of civilization, as Benjamin wrote while inviting us to ‘read history against the grain’, is also one of barbarism. A different view, sustained by Ann Stoler, asks us to read the archive along the grain, empathising rather with the administrators who wrote (or dictated) the documents. In her hands, they reveal the half-concealed passions, decency, racism or guilt of their authors: middle-class Dutch colonials in Amsterdam and Batavia, betrayed in administrative slips, suspicions and signatures. Stoler presents her institutional reading of a great metropolitan archive, the Rijksarchief in The Hague, as a methodological precondition for other kinds of reading, characterizing her approach as ‘ethnographic’, while marginalizing efforts to work against the grain as mere ‘mining’ or ‘extraction’.50

47 Cf. Natascha Drubek-Mayer on the Russian Film Archive Gosmil’mofond, described by Uzbek director Ali Khamraev as ‘the mausoleum of film’. ‘Do we need Archive Film Festivals?’, ARTMargins, Contemporary Central and East European Visual Culture. Monday 31 May 2010. http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/6-film-a-video/ 585-do-we-need-archive-film-festivals-film-review-article 48 As I write, the Report of the Widgery Tribunal (1972) on the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ at Londonderry has been condemned as a ‘cover-up’ by the Saville Inquiry (2010). 49 Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War. Children’s Lives under the Nazis. London: Pimlico, 2006 (pp. 16−17). 50 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. See, too, ‘Debate Ann Laura Stoler’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165 (4), 2009 (pp. 551−567).

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But there is a false antinomy here: mines have given rise to some fine ethnography.51 The Director of the Bolivian National Archive, Gunnar Mendoza, used the metaphor as he helped researchers find leads that would respond to (or diversify) their interests (Figure 3.2.2). He knew that the ‘whole’ Archive, still more the whole System of archives, was beyond the capacity of anyone to grasp alone, in whatever direction they read ‘the grain’. So he sometimes presented the National Archive as a mine, in which certain veins are followed till they flood or disperse, when others may be opened. Gunnar created search instruments, ‘artificial series’ of themed filing cards (‘Mining Labour’, ‘Indian Lands’, ‘Rebellions’, etc.), perpendicular to the ‘original order’ of the documents. The geological metaphor reappears. Leads could be followed from one section or series to another, from one archive to the next, just as the same seam can run beneath several mines: another glimpse of a ‘total’ archive. The image of documentary ‘extraction’, organized by working different veins in diverse repositories and using search instruments that cross-cut archival organization, is no less valuable than interviews with the ‘engineers’ at a single ‘open-cast’ mine, who often marginalize the workers, their devils and their dead. Ethnographic nuggets appear only to those who dig: it is as ‘miners’ that we rediscover the voices of the early Victorian lifeboatmen of Ramsgate.52 At a deeper level, the national archives of postcolonial countries rest on the colonial archives that preceded the nation; parts of Hispanic-American colonial archives rest, in turn, upon ‘lost’ Inca or Nahua archives, even – beneath or beside them – on the caves or khipu-collections of earlier or contemporary groups. Colonial archives are linked with

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Cuzco or Tenochtitlan, as well as with the Spanish Viceroyalties in Lima, Buenos Aires, Santa Fé or Mexico; and also, at another level, to the archives of the Crown and Council of the Indies now kept in Philip II’s old ‘House of Contracts’ in Seville. Each great colonial repository articulates sets of lesser archives that fan out to ‘the colonies’, through Viceroyalties and Courts down to District Commissioners, Field Officers or Corregidores in ‘the bush’. But as they get further away from the metropolis, these lesser archives undergo a sea change: they engage with different social conditions from those where their principles were formulated. Responding to new situations (such as national Independence), short of materials and thrown back on their ingenuity, emergent national, regional and local archivists invent their own ways of doing things.53

A NATIONAL ARCHIVE In August 1971 I went down from the highlands through maize-covered hills to the colonial and nineteenth-century city of Sucre, seat of the Supreme Court and capital of Bolivia. I walked across the tree-shaded plaza with its central statue of President Antonio de Sucre, children playing on the bronze lions at his feet; then half a block down Calle España to reach the Bolivian National Archive (since replaced by a fine modern edifice behind the Prefectural Palace). Climbing up two flights of creaking, polished wooden stairs with a pervasive smell of wax, I found myself in a book-lined room with tall windows looking out over the street. Staff were working at their typewriters in a hushed atmosphere of disciplined activity. In one corner there was a polished kneehole

51 See, for example, Pascale Absi, Les Ministres du Diable. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. 52 For mining as metaphor of research, see Tristan Platt with Pablo Quisbert, ‘Knowing Silence and Merging Horizons: The Case of the Great Potosí Cover-up’, in Mark Harris (ed.), Ways of Knowing. New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning. Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. 53 Timothy John Lovering, ‘British Colonial Administrations’ Registry Systems: a Comparative Study of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland’, Archival Science 10, 2010 (pp. 1−23).

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Figure 3.2.2 Gunnar Mendoza, Director of the Bolivian National Archive and Library (Photo copyright of Gilles Mermet, 1988).

desk, and behind it sat a small, alert gentleman watching over it all. One of don Gunnar’s duties was to attend the authorities of indian groups who came to Sucre in search of their colonial land titles. They came quietly up the creaking stairs in their distinctive ponchos, hats and sandals, carrying black, silver-bound staffs of office, to take their seats in front of the Director. He would speak with them in Quechua, and guide them till they found the papers they sought, providing them with photocopies. It was a duty which gave him particular satisfaction. The visitors chuckled with pleasure and disbelief at the courtesy with which they were received. I presented myself, and registered; he put before me a typewritten Researchers’ Guide, and one of the catalogues he had compiled. The catalogue was a tough, homemade cardboard filing box, reinforced with gummed brown paper, with cards cut out painstakingly with scissors. Each showed the number

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and title of a colonial document relating to ‘Indian Lands’, typed and corrected in pencil or crayon. (Many hard-copy catalogues are provisional, updated with marginal notes and queries; today’s online catalogues emit a deceptive impression of immaculate finality.) Among the cards was a reference to Colonial Documents Year 1579, no. 46, ‘The indians of Macha against Alonso Díaz concerning the lands of Uru y Carasi’. Brought from its box and shelf to my desk by a member of the archival staff, it proved to be a damaged piece of over 150 leaves, each inscribed on both sides with handwritings of differing degrees of legibility. The damage was focused on a small hole of old damp which got wider as one advanced. By the last pages − where the handwriting became most difficult to decipher − the leaves were in tatters and I had to tease nuggets out of brittle scraps of paper (the document has now been scanned and published).

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Still, enough remained to find a reference to the two moieties of Macha, their ten ayllus, and their vertical lands stretching down from the high puna to the maize valleys where I had been living, and downriver to irrigated chilli-pepper, squash and cotton fields at Carasi. In 1579 a Spaniard, Alonso Díaz, who had a contract to supply timber from these valleys to the miners of Potosi, had been granted lands by the court in La Plata (as Sucre was then called). He tried to expand his grant to include the Macha fields, so the Macha came down and threw his cattle out of their crops, while he galloped up and slashed at them with his sword. These warm, fertile fields then became the object of litigation, in which a Spanish ‘Protector of Indians’, Joan de Baños, did his best. The conflict left traces of the everyday violence that accompanies the making of a global economy, while indexing a pre-European settlement pattern that persists in some south Andean valleys today.54

EVENTS One reason why memory cannot be attributed to a computer is that memory (as opposed to memorization) is creative: imagination constantly reconfigures past events in the process of recall. The aim of computer storage, on the other hand, is to retrieve texts exactly as stored. Computers lack imagination; and an unconscious. They hold objects so they can be recovered in identical form; but re-membering the past, so that it always comes out differently, with variations

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according to the number of perspectives available, is an act of embodied creativity which is (fortunately) quite beyond them.55 And archives? Are they ‘houses of memory’ within which histories and events, forgotten outside, continue to flicker? Archivists love the metaphor: it means they can claim to be ‘guardians of (e.g. the nation’s) memory’. Yet, as Steedman points out, ‘in actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact very much there. The archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is a human memory.’56 There are only a few surviving scraps. From another angle, Yerushalmi writes: ‘Memory is not an archive, nor is an archive a memory bank. The documents in an archive are not part of memory; if they were, we should have no need to retrieve them; once retrieved, they are often at odds with memory’.57 So these scraps may serve to correct a memory that has rewritten the past, a ‘control’ only possible when living memories are replaced by shelves, dust and files; or computers.58 This leads us to questions of historical amnesia, repression and concealment. Closed archives can be brought to light, as in the recent diffusion by Wikileaks of the US State Department’s secret files, and many others. Chris Kaplonski has explored the use, in present-day Mongolia, of documents of repression from the 1930s, which rehabilitate the victims while reconstructing the past for the benefit of their descendents.59 Archives in the public domain are vastly outweighed by what is hidden, governing the world without our being aware of it, and silencing evidence required by questioned truths.

54 For landscape as archive, and its calendrical recomposition through memory, see Thomas Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1998. 55 For multi-perspectival memories, see, for example, Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. 56 Steedman, Dust (Ch. 4, p. 68). 57 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘Series Z: An Archival Fantasy’, at http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number3–4/ yerushalmi.htm 58 ‘Oral history’, by contrast, like collective memory, is socially negotiated. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 59 Chris Kaplonski, ‘The Many Lives of Secret Police Files: Repression, Rehabilitation and the Hermeneutics of Documents in Mongolia’. Talk presented at conference on State Archives and State Repression in Socialist Mongolia (Cambridge, April 2010).

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Their piecemeal disclosure throws open the mechanics of power – yet there is still ‘not very much there’.60 How can we phrase the relation between these scraps and our imagination? Each archive has a routine for providing researchers with files. Today, in the General Archive of Seville, you ask for unscanned files from the computer terminal assigned to you. You wait ten minutes, half an hour; then you make your way to the main desk. ‘Has Charcas 16 arrived?’ Not yet, so you browse scanned files on screen, or go downstairs to drink a coffee at the bar next door, exchanging gossip with a colleague on the way. You return past the security check, and up the marble stairs again. Still no news. Finally, a trolley arrives with a fat file almost bursting, its contents barely contained between bending boards by two strong, string bows ... . You sign for it, then take it to your desk and gently untie the strings, open the boards and pull back the flaps, revealing a mound of papers tied up with two delicate cotton bows. You untie these too, removing a single loose blank sheet on top, before contemplating the bare pile of documents. (Georges Lefebvre wrote of the pleasure he got from untying the files in the attics of the mairie where he worked.) Now you open each document and scan each page: briefly if it doesn’t grab your attention, more carefully when it connects with your interests, smoothing the paper flat with your hand. You turn the papers over as you advance, face downwards, beside the first, diminishing pile. You work through sixteenth-century reports by the President of the Charcas Court, directed to the King and

Council in distant Madrid. You skim the neatly written Spanish paragraphs, looking for a key word, a familiar toponym or personal name. … You follow a campaign against the Chiriwana indians, news of fresh mining discoveries, the movements of the Portuguese, the burning of a corrupt interpreter, the return of the English corsair Drake to the coasts of the Pacific: the security of the realm, the expansion of the mining frontier, a government scandal, the movements of the enemy − current news bulletins for that year, month and day. Here every word counts. A river, a mountain, a port, a date, a captain, a verb: enough to plot a movement, perceive a clash, decide on an event; clues with which to hazard a trend, a tactic. Perhaps even a response. The catalogue of the Charcas section61 leads you unawares into small, yet ‘ever mightier’ details, concealed in a dead archive of scraps and traces. But these are very different from Benjamin’s ‘fans’ that awaken the fleshy neurons of imagination, wherein are gestated our re-membrances of things past. *** To return to the arché: two outcomes frame the struggle for access. In the first, the processing of files and their selection for archiving becomes a reiterative function that establishes a routine. In her account of bureaucracy in Gaza under the British and Egyptian mandates, Ilana Feldman shows the role of files in maintaining ground-level administration, reproducing a country without a State. Here archives, both living and dead, contain traces of daily decisions and

60 It might be argued that consciousness, too, only contains scraps in comparison with what lies hidden in our unconscious. But recovery differs by as much as a psychoanalyst differs from a hacker: one has the infinite resources of an unconscious to elicit, while the hacker only downloads those bits of information which have been digitized. 61 Charcas is the tenth Audiencia (royal Court) of the Government Section (V) of the Archive; and Charcas 16 is catalogued as ‘Letters and documents of the Presidents and Judges of the Court’ (Files 16−25), corresponding to the second, or Secular subgrouping (Files 16−134, years 1538−1703) of the first Group (Files 1−153) of the four Groups making up the Charcas series (which contains altogether 736 Files, each holding a thick block of generally unlisted documents). This first Group of Files (1−153) was brought to Seville in 1786 from the State Archive of Simancas founded by Philip II. The papers had been sent to the Simancas Archive by the Council of the Indies in successive batches in 1603, 1658, 1681 and 1718. See José María de la Peña y Cámara, Guía del Archivo de Indias. Madrid, 1958. Inventory of Section V – Government, Audiencia de Charcas.

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events – taxes, milk distribution and markets – condensed into a continuously vibrating ‘hum of business’, a grass-roots archival Chaoskampf that today still strives to hold the mayhem at bay.62 The second outcome is the ‘fall into chaos’ with the interruption of bureaucratic continuity brought about by societal collapse, marginalization, or revolution. The end of the process of filing and remaindering means the suspension of the great archives and their makers. One version of the Early Middle Ages tells of the failure of Roman archival administration in Western Europe, when record keeping was supposedly reduced to a few ‘candles in the dark’ (though the arts of memorization flourished widely). But archival methods can be reinvented, or new ones coined, as part of the (re)emerging ‘wisdom’ of counties and States. Similarly, the archive of China’s Ming dynasty, distributed over several islands in a lake to keep it safe from fire, finally succumbed to an end-of-dynasty conflagration. In both cases, archival knowledge (as well as writing) was redeployed. Indeed, these techniques for reproducing routines may sometimes survive the impact of political revolution, maintaining deep continuities behind the appearance of radical change. Today, political power is contested through struggles over the creation, preservation and

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destruction of electronic archives, where prohibition and access are regulated through legislation and electronic padlocks, through individual or collective decisions, but also increasingly through the channels of cybernetic engagement between hackers and States, corporations or individuals. Such confrontations evoke nightmares in which, following rupture, small groups of ghosts huddle amidst the labyrinthine ruins of decomposing virtual archives. Meanwhile, Kafka’s vision, now openly installed in every screen, increasingly envelops those it catches in the virtual mazes of corporate websites, whose ramifications can appear, not so much like nebulae, or catalogues, or even corridors, but rather as snares of candyfloss deliberately spun from silicon and tungsten. Nevertheless, survivors as well as hackers trace their routines back to the elementary forms of archival thinking, from the churinga-filled caves of the Aranda to the pressed flowers of the Macha, from the time capsules of Warhol or Roland Barthes63 to Benjamin’s ‘mighty microcosms’. These forms may be expressed through the arrangement of collections: sacred paraphernalia, but also stones, flowers, weavings, knots, papers, boxes, fans, coins … material objects of our devotion that, like tropical shells of memory, when held to the ear, echo indistinctly the roar and music of a distant sea.

62 The stateless bureaucracy of Gaza under the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration maintained rule through reiteration and self-referentiality, according to Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza. Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917−1969. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 63 http://www.imec-archives.com/imec_communiques_barthes.php

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3.3 The Role of Language in Ethnographic Method Susan Gal

The procedures that we use, as anthropologists, to conduct our inquiries into social life are always dependent on our own and others’ linguistic and more broadly semiotic practices.1 The standard tasks – observation of everyday activities, making relationships, participating, interviewing, surveying, collecting written or oral texts, observing or recording rituals and other events, gathering media artefacts, images and people’s reactions to them – all rely on linguistic engagement with the people whose modes of life we wish to describe and understand. Regardless of the theoretical puzzles that are the focus of enquiry, the ethnographic disciplines create their evidence by selective abstraction out of the contingent stream of eventful talk and its concomitant non-verbal signalling. This has not been changed by the insight that anthropologists do not simply visit a fieldsite: they actively co-construct a ‘field’ with other social actors and in response to the vicissitudes of contingent events and opportunities. Nor has the significance of linguistic interaction been diminished by the novel kinds of field sites – from laboratories to financial markets, to single objects and timelimited corporate ‘missions’ – that are now included among the objects of anthropological scrutiny. Whatever counts as a ‘site’,

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ethnographers must engage people in talk about and in it; they must decipher semiotic/ linguistic materials. Communicative action remains the major source of ethnographic evidence. What one therefore needs, in addition to the traditional and excellent advice to ‘learn the language(s)’,2 is a perspective from which to understand how linguistic and more broadly semiotic practices are so organized that we can, in fact, learn about emergent cultural categories, about forms of knowledge, political processes as well as shifting social and economic structures by listening and talking to others. This perspective also includes a concomitant attention to language ideologies – that is, speakers’ conceptualizations about linguistic practices. These are never only about language: rather, they regiment the diverse areas of social life with which language is linked by speakers, and they consist of semiotic processes through which social relations and power differentials are negotiated, institutionalized and naturalized. This chapter aims to provide a rough introductory guide to such a perspective. In the history of anthropology, modes of analysis drawn from the study of language have frequently been re-tooled for cultural

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analysis, often to make the study of culture seem more rigorous, scientific or legitimate. My goal here is distinctly different: I focus on the doing of fieldwork as a communicational practice in order to ask: How does the perspective on communication developed over the last few decades in linguistic anthropology aid in the doing of fieldwork? The examples deliberately draw on research that is not primarily about language, but where attention to communicative practices and sign relations (a social semiotics) has motivated the construal of evidence and helped in forming analyses of, say, politics, artistic practices, or expert knowledge, labour and memory, or identity. To specify further how this goal differs from the conventional analogies common in the past between language and culture, let me briefly characterize some of those earlier linkages. In the middle of the twentieth century, Lévi-Straussian structuralism adopted and adapted Prague School phonological analysis – distinctive features, oppositions, syntagmatic and paradigmatic frames – to understand myth and kinship. Ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology of the 1960s, by contrast, took up some of Boas’s philological proposals from early in the century. Culture was seen as a semantic phenomenon, coded mostly in words and in systems of classification that were understood to be made up of basic meaning-units. It was expected that in many domains there would be universal components of meaning, with culturespecific rules of combination. The symbolic or interpretive anthropology that dominated the 1970s also focused on words or phrases, ones identified as the labels for ‘key’ symbols. In addition, cultural performances were treated as ‘texts’, drawing on hermeneutical exegesis and tropic analysis as models. In contrast to then-dominant ‘objectivist’ approaches, interpretive anthropology was interested in examining ‘… the communicative processes by which the anthropologist in the field gains knowledge of his subjects’ systems of cultural meaning in order to represent them in ethnographic texts’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 25). Seeing fieldwork as

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an interpretive enterprise heightened reflexivity among fieldworkers. Confessional and experimental writing portrayed ethnography as a personal experience. The fieldworker was someone with access to alien concepts and forms of knowledge by virtue of being in ‘dialogue’ with cultural others and thereby able to ‘translate’ those concepts for the discipline and for broader audiences. In each of these historical cases, there was a different model of analysis and of culture. But each model drew on some aspect of linguistic scholarship. The influential reassessments of the 1980s took aim at all these conceptualizations of anthropology’s project (Clifford and Marcus 1986) by once again drawing on languagebased tools, this time from literary analysis. The critics meant to examine both the communicative processes of fieldwork as well as the discipline’s practices of constructing and presenting evidence. Yet this double-pronged critique devolved to a single concern: the epistemology of writing ethnographies. The critics found ethnographic writing to be convention-bound, full of unacknowledged yet familiar literary devices that created, or attempted to create, forms of scientific authority. Under critical inspection, ethnographic descriptions were seen to be neither transparently ‘objective accounts’ of ‘being there’, nor straightforward reports of ‘conversations’ with others, even when presented as such. Even less could they be taken as self-evident ‘translations’ of other cultures. Bringing the era’s general ‘crisis of representation’ to anthropology, the critics initiated a wave of salutary self-analysis that has anatomized the genres, textual strategies and politics of ethnographic writing. Surprisingly, however, the critics have had relatively little to say about the first prong: how fieldworkers participate with others in communicative processes, and thus how communication becomes the source of ethnographic evidence. Recognizing that fieldwork involved not mere observations but ‘negotiated realities’, some critics were rightly dissatisfied with the popular image of fieldwork as ‘dialogue’. In the non-technical

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sense, ‘dialogue’ is a term in Euro-American public culture with a built in halo.3 It implies equal exchange among interactants and perhaps even an authenticity imagined to be vouchsafed by face-to-face interaction. Such an image is inadequate for characterizing fieldwork, which has long been recognized as a scene of power disparities (Briggs 2007). Relatedly, the emphasis in field manuals on ‘rapport’ and ‘comradeship’ has also been recognized as a problem because it neglects the ethical tensions ethnographers experience between professional and personal relations. Equally problematic, one must add, is that it ignores the strong interactional constraints on fieldworkers. The communicative aspects of fieldwork were relatively neglected in the epistemological turbulence that started during the 1980s. Instead, lively discussions in subsequent years have recast fieldwork as a matter of conceptually ‘shifting locations’ that are not limited to single places (e.g. Gupta and Ferguson 1997), and are very much a part of anthropologists’ own contemporaneity (Fabian 1983). Useful and insightful though these steps have been, they have still failed to address communicative issues. Yet the communicative issues raised by fieldwork remain unavoidable because the representation of others in ethnography is inseparable from some form of communication with them. Hence, all ethnographers, not only those working on language, benefit from recent approaches to semiosis and linguistic practices – their own and that of others. I outline four basic issues that anchor a semiotic approach and therefore are key to communicationally informed ethnographic fieldwork: metacommunication, referentiality/indexicality, language ideologies, narrativity and (re)contextualization.

METACOMMUNICATION The structuralist, ethnoscience and interpretive approaches in the middle decades of the twentieth century – whatever their important

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differences – were alike in focusing on semantics, often lexical semantics. That is, they explored the componential and referential meanings of key words, unravelled metaphors, and mapped the relatively context-independent, symbolic significance of terminological systems and the semantics of oppositions coded in myth. Linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics in that same period moved from semantics to the study of pragmatics: the relationship between linguistic practices and the contexts in which they occur. Jakobson (1980 [1956]), Goffman (1964, 1974) and Gumperz and Hymes (1972) identified an object of analysis – the speech event or situation of talk – that constrains what is said by whom and how. They noted that the repertoire of speech event types (and their constitutive genres, such as lectures, greetings, meetings, interviews) varies across populations of speakers. Moreover, speech event types are themselves cultural categories and include key distinctions that organize social life: understandings about roles, person types, spaces, places and temporalities that are taken for granted (Gumperz 1982). Similarly crucial are the ordinary expectations of who participates in what kinds of events and the presumed results of transgressing the usual expectations. An indispensable part of such cultural knowledge is the ability to constitute and identify speech events and to accomplish social action through speech. The signalling of events and speech acts is neither semantics nor pragmatics but metapragmatics, that is, metacommunication about the uses and thus the contextualization of language (Silverstein 1976). Metacommunication is ubiquitous. Bateson (1972 [1955]) demonstrated that any signal, to be understood at all, had to be framed by a concomitant, simultaneous metamessage that would give ‘instructions’ to receivers on how to interpret it. Consider the difference between a raised fist meta-communicatively framed as ‘play’, versus one that is framed as ‘real’. This analytic idea was extended from gestures to the signalling of speech events

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and ultimately to all the uses of language, hence metapragmatics. Through the metapragmatic or framing aspects of messages, speakers guide each other in constituting, interpreting and negotiating speech events, and in determining the roles taken by or assigned to speakers, and how a stretch of speech is taken to count as socially significant action – e.g. threat, command, request, flattery, and so on – within events (Lucy 1993). In this way, speakers make their presumptions accessible to ethnographers as well. It would be a great help to ethnographers if metacommunication were easily distinguishable from all other messages. It often is, as when signalled in non-referential modalities such as accent, intonation or gesture. Rather than naming them, such signals index (point to) aspects of speakers and speech events. In indexical signalling, the sign stands for its object – the event, role relations, social identities, level of seriousness – on the grounds of presumed contiguity with the object, rather than by a purely arbitrary relation (Peirce [1897] 1940). When speech events are named they can be referenced and declared (e.g. ‘the hearing is now in session’). But many have no names and even those with labels are often indexically signalled – enacted – as unlabelled categories (e.g. when a hush descends on a seminar room at a US university as a distinguished visitor enters). Changes in tone of voice – volume, pitch, intonation – can index the nature and course of events, but also the attitudes and identities of speakers. Differences in bodily orientation can index speaker roles in interaction and durable speaker identities; they can render a phrase parodic or ironic. Such material displays are among the semiotic tools for metapragmatic framings that allow listeners to distinguish various possible interpretations of talk and of speakers’ intentions and positions in the ongoing process of interaction. More often, however, the same linguistic means used for ordinary propositional utterances that refer to the world are the very ones

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that also, simultaneously, carry metacommunicative significance.4 Another way to say this is that utterances are always simultaneously doing referential work while also framing the utterance as an interactional move. They are at once propositional and linked indexically to the event and act of talk (Silverstein 1976; Lucy 1993). For instance, the phrase, ‘It’s cold in here’ refers or propositionally names a relative temperature, but in a particular event it may also be taken as a request to close the window. Or, as another type of example, quoted speech (e.g. ‘they say …’) can be a simple propositional report of what was said, but also an act that lends the weight of others’ opinions to one’s own. Ethnographers are well aware that linguistic labels constitute a cultural world by picking out what is deemed worthy to distinguish and name. The approach I am outlining adds a further claim: selection by speakers among the many referentially adequate and culturally acceptable ways to name aspects of the social and material world also signals (metacommunicatively and indexically) the kind of event going on as well as the identities, qualities, intentions, relations and social positionalities claimed by speakers. Social actors must pay as much attention to the metapragmatic aspect of each others’ speech as to its propositional content. It is because metacommunication is a systematic and indispensable resource for speakers in conducting social life that it becomes a rich source and form of evidence for ethnographers. Attentive ethnographers have long relied, at least implicitly, on metacommunication. Yet, two implications for fieldwork deserve further discussion. The first concerns the ethnographic task of asking questions. The necessity of framing makes it clear that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of research are inseparable: the asker is never absent from the scene. The second implication is more complex. The centrality of metacommunication suggests that we should not restrict our ethnographic attention to our usual, and often exclusive concern with propositionality and

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reference (the ‘what was said’), but attend at least as much to the indexical means by which cultural knowledge is signalled – and made socially ‘real’ – by speakers in the course of everyday events. I discuss the task of questioning in this section and then turn to the second issue by discussing referentiality, indexicality and language ideologies in subsequent sections. It is a rare research proposal that does not specify informal questions as part of the enterprise, and often interviews as well. The interview is generally recognized as a culturally specific speech event that establishes strict interactional norms. But this has not diminished its prevalence, even in cross-cultural work. Too often researchers assume that, by declaring an event to be an ‘interview’, answers to questions posed can be taken as a sample of what respondents know. Problems of truthfulness, bias, trust and length of acquaintance have all been discussed in the huge critical literature on interviewing. But the major stumbling blocks are elsewhere. As Briggs (1986) has argued, framing talk as a request for information, instruction or opinion is an important aspect of metacommunication. Invariably, there will be specific ways of asking in any field site. In addition, modes of inquiry are likely to be situation-, topic- and person-specific and to differ significantly, even among those (now virtually everyone in a mass-mediated world) who are familiar with interviews. Hence, a preliminary (and ongoing) task of field research is a small-scale ethnography of speaking in which researchers identify existing metapragmatic signals for proper asking, and try to adopt/adapt for themselves some routines that are suitable to the researcher’s social position. Briggs’s vivid discussion of his own blunders is instructive. His fieldwork with a Spanish-speaking Mexicano population in northern New Mexico was focused on work: wood carving and histories of wage labour. Learning the local dialect was only the first step. Despite people’s willingness to be interviewed and Briggs’s warm relations with

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many, no one would tell him anything about carving until he learned that questions in general, and especially about this highly valued artistic form, were considered inappropriate from a young man (then in his twenties) to older expert carvers. Until Briggs learned the details of metacommunication that allowed him to enter into the proper role relation with carvers (as non-speaking novice), his questions were ignored or redefined as other acts. His growing competence in metacommunication was constantly assessed by his consultants. Their responses to his enquiries were not a function of what they knew, and not even of what they thought worthy or permissible to reveal and teach. Their responses were calibrated to the kinds of metacommunicative interaction he was able to perform. Briggs makes a further observation: what for him were questions about labour history were for his informants part of a genre called ‘talk of the elders of bygone days’, and quite restricted in who could participate. It often happens that ‘interviewees’ consider themselves to be engaged in different events than those imagined by the researcher, even if both are familiar with the concept of ‘interview’. Straight-faced irony can go undetected by investigators, as when subaltern populations parodically perform in interviews the stereotyped images of themselves held by the mainstream (Paredes 1993), or provide tongue-in-cheek send ups of mainstream talk and opinions (Basso 1979). A different lack of fit is described in Harding’s (2000) ethnography, where the fundamentalist preacher’s framing of the interaction as a conversion session almost overwhelms Harding’s definition of it as research. In yet other cases, interviewees use the event to narrate and circulate stories that count as moves in local competitions or debates unrelated to the investigator’s purposes (De Fina and Perrino 2011). In sum, interviews and other scenes of asking are speech events, and hence open to redefinition. This does not make them any less useful for research, as long as we interpret them with their

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metapragmatic complexity in mind: there is no way to ‘bracket’ the situation and definition of talk, to disallow participants’ definitions, or to make the investigator disappear and become merely a faceless recipient of context-free information.

REFERENCE AND INDEXICALITY Given the role of metacommunication in interaction, it is not surprising that when children acquire language, grammatical patterns constitute only a small part of what they learn. Metacommunicative routines of many kinds socialize children (and other newcomers) to the ways one inhabits roles in the particular social milieu, exercises authority and power or takes up related epistemological and moral categories (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). As we have seen, the process is twosided: most metacommunicative messages are also, at the same time, referential speech (e.g. ‘let the merriment begin!’, ‘don’t take this the wrong way…’, ‘he’s so articulate!’). And, all referential and propositional speech is now understood by scholars to have a necessary indexical (metapragmatic) aspect that provides clues to its interpretation and that connects the utterance to the interactional moves it effects and the context of talk that it constructs and/or in which it occurs. To paraphrase the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin, much more than reference is done with words. Yet, most of Western theorizing about language has considered reference and propositionality to be the main (for some the only) functions of language. This makes the ethnographic task seem to be a matter of ‘what’ people say, a question of symbolic representations. Even when referentialist philosophy is rejected, as in much of anthropology today, it silently returns in research practice and analysis. By freely paraphrasing consultants, sorting fieldnotes by ‘theme’, relying on computerized content analysis, and summarizing or decontextualizing interview ‘responses’, fieldworkers presume that the

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important aspect of their materials is ‘content’. A more form-alert method focuses on the fact that propositional utterances – whatever their content – also have importance as the means by which speakers act socially, creating relationships, stances, conflicts and alignments. In many academic settings, for instance, to agree with someone about a proposition is to start establishing a social coalition. Conversely, by discussing language-related issues such as ‘who can talk in this (kind of) event’, ‘how should a person of X-type speak’, ‘what constitutes correct expressive form’ and ‘what will count as correct/appropriate for us/here/now’ speakers are simultaneously negotiating about matters other than speech, such as cultural authority, institutional legitimacy, social ties and values. Invariably, such metacommunicative skirmishes involve the fieldworker, who must also speak and can rarely remain outside such negotiations. In short, referentiality and indexicality are not separable. To succeed in labelling the world (referring) one must point to (index) some aspect of it. Furthermore, speakers are never only labelling the world; other meanings are always simultaneously signalled in interaction. Speakers are never only representing a state of affairs: a perspective or frame is always necessary for propositions to achieve reference and interpretability. A small and familiar type of example is provided by the multiple proper names of a small city now in Slovakia. The city is ‘Bratislava’, ‘Pressburg’ and ‘Pozsony’ in Slovak, German and Hungarian, respectively. All three names will be understood in any of those languages, but in any instance of talk, one must be chosen. Intended or not, the necessary selection metacommunicates indexically about the identity of speakers (will they be taken to be Hungarians? Slovaks? foreigners? nationalists? communists? historians?), speakers’ stances towards each other (solidarity, in dispute, careful official colleagues?), the genre and event of talk (private or public, occurring before 1989 or after?) and the positions each is adopting in a

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region-wide discourse about the legitimacy of state borders and by implication the legitimacy of the parties in power and the European Union. The switch away from the expected choice in a given situation can transform the event. It can convey a change in the perspective, political commitment, or perceived identity of speakers. The alternative interpretations are possible because a language ideology conceptualizes and regiments the relations between events, personae, political positions and the expected linguistic forms. Contrast sets of common nouns are also construed in this way, revealing schemas of social and political relations keyed to cultural knowledge and invocable in interaction, often creating or enacting status hierarchies. In highly educated, middle-class America, for instance, recounting a plan to have ‘gravy’ for dinner is different than talking about ‘sauce’, or perhaps ‘reduction’, ‘infusion’, or ‘emulsion’. Those socialized into the milieu in question will detect that some of these terms invoke speaker identities as ‘foodies’, perhaps engaged in a competition over who is the more discerning. The term ‘gravy’, by contrast, might suggest a lack of distinction. But such signs are always open to another round of signification. Once swept up into this contrast set, ‘gravy’ may go on to convey political resistance to what the speaker judges as overly precious elaboration of food. Uptake and further response by participants allow an investigator to decipher which of these (or other) possibilities are the proper interpretations in a specific instance. The important point is that cultural categories of objects, events and identities, of positionings in ongoing social relations, and in political discourses are all simultaneously indexed in a specific contextualized act of reference. This framing relies on speakers’ presumptions (language ideologies) that include models of how types of talk, personae and activities are (stereotypically) related. Thus, close attention to such selections and what they accomplish interactionally can also reveal how speakers reflexively use such presumptions about the

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socio-communicative order to manage and sometimes to challenge it.5 The same phenomenon is highlighted in Bakhtin’s notion of ‘dialogicality’. Wortham (2001: 19−24) provides an illuminating hypothetical example of a government spokesperson in the United States who tells his audience in a news conference about ‘collateral damage’ caused by American forces. If the analysis focused only on reference, i.e. the matter being named, it would stop at the observation that the term is a euphemism for civilian casualties. But in Bakhtin’s terms, ‘collateral damage’ in this example is not simply a referring expression but itself dialogical because it ‘responds to’ those who would call these events something else. There is no neutral term for the phenomenon. ‘Collateral damage’, like any other term, marks a position within a particular discourse about war-making. Furthermore, that position and the term itself are associated with certain types of people: military strategists, for instance. An opposing position is associated with the types of people (e.g. critics) who would use the term ‘civilian casualties’ to label the same phenomenon, as I did above. Neither critics nor military strategists need be at the news conference to be virtually present (invoked) for listeners, and for listeners to infer the interactional alignment or disalignment of the speaker with such people and hence with the listener’s own position, whatever that is. Whole linguistic registers operate in the same way. Registers are constructed by contrast and differentiation out of referential alternatives (as noted above), but also by accents, prosodic differences, choice among languages for multilinguals, politeness markers or distinctions such as those between Standard English, and regional or class dialects, ‘radio-announcer talk’, Californian ‘Valley Girl talk’, and other similar folk labels. Registers are stereotyped ways of speaking that are linked to typified social personae and their typified activities. Once the model of the relationship between linguistic variants, stereotypes of people and

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their activities is formed – this is part of language ideology – the linguistic variant can index and thereby invoke the entire model, contributing to people’s ability to adopt and attempt to inhabit recognizable identities in social interaction. Thus, we return to nonreferential, non-propositional yet distinctive aspects of linguistic practice – accent, language choice – and their social importance in the construction of ‘identities’. These are crucial to decipher in many ethnographic projects. To generalize in more technical terms, the differential use of registers, like the differential use of referential labels, honorifics and address terms, operates in social interaction to invoke cultural models of events, participant stances, identities and discourses. The linguistic forms index cultural models of people types and their linked activities; use of the forms thereby evokes the model, making it relevant to particular, real-time instances of interaction. Two kinds of linguistic indexes can be distinguished, as Silverstein (1976) has shown: presupposing indexes are selected by speakers to match what they identify as preexisting and often institutionally defined contexts; by contrast, creative indexes, once selected, redefine the situation or speakers’ perspective on it. The insight that context and talk are co-constitutive in this way allows observers to grasp how speakers resignify linguistic forms and thus challenge and sometimes undermine what is happening in a particular event, and also sometimes challenge even the models of social life that the forms index (see also: Duranti and Goodwin 1991). In sum, recent linguistic anthropology has mapped how cultural knowledge – about values and objects as well as people and events – is presupposed and also mobilized in metacommunication. Speakers display this knowledge to each other, inscribe it in institutionalized patterns of interaction, and engage in conflicts about it. By using it, they make it accessible to the inquisitive outsider. Fieldworkers are therefore well-served if they attend to this rich source of evidence

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and ask: in what ways do people communicate and metacommunicate with each other about matters of interest to the ethnographic project at hand.6

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES The view that reference – labelling the world – is the central function of language constitutes a language ideology. Language ideologies envision and enact ties of language to epistemology and ontology, to aesthetics, morality and many other cultural domains. They support and often naturalize cultural notions that define persons, groups, gender relations, nation-states, religious ritual, and institutions such as law (Woolard 1998: 3; Kroskrity 2000). Metapragmatic signalling, as discussed above, is part of such broader ideologies, which also include the models of language and social life that are indexed and invoked. Most accessible to fieldworkers are the folk theories that elaborate on what language is, what it is good for, and its connections to various other cultural domains. Expert discourses are also important sites of language ideology: genres of writing about communication by academics and intellectuals, religious experts and technicians of language. Language ideologies need not be explicit and propositional, as my examples will show. They can be enacted and embedded in institutional arrangements and ordinary practices. This definition is quite broad and the term ideology has a famously contentious history. Nevertheless, it is valuable in drawing attention to conceptions about language that mediate and frame social processes and yet are too frequently taken for granted by investigators as well as speakers. For investigators, the task is not to determine the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of an ideology, but rather to gauge the social effects of truth claims and other assumptions: How do ideas about language regiment speakers’ construal of their social worlds? By this definition, language ideologies are always partial, multiple, socially positioned,

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and hence perspectival. They are often implicated in power since they frame some ontologies and social arrangements as more authoritative than others. Referentialist ideology is one example. Widespread in the world, it is nowhere the only way of imagining language. It has a long and star-studded genealogy in the West and lots of institutional support. In a recent reinterpretation of Locke’s philosophy, Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue that part of its appeal in the seventeenth century was the attack on what Locke diagnosed as the variability and thus unreliability of language (e.g. one word could name many things) and his attack on the scholarly practice of citing textual precedents to win scholarly debates. One of Locke’s points was that these problems had political relevance. They buttressed rule by authority and the unreliability of the social order. He proposed controlling word meaning through language standardization and abandoning argument by textual authority. Arguments should rely solely on an assessment of how accurately the words represent the world described. A ‘folk’ version of this stance gives moral weight to those who provide ‘just the facts’ and claim to ‘tell it like it is’, where credibility demands a correspondence between words and things. Yet, Western discourse is not limited to referentialist preferences, though these are strong. Other visions recognize that euphemism, implicature and metaphor are practices that construct reality rather than describe it. Their effects, however, are often denied or decried. In short, referentialism, like all ideologies, highlights some aspects of practice and erases (denies) others (Irvine and Gal 2000). The perspective on communication offered by the study of language ideologies has a number of implications for fieldwork. Language ideologies turn out to be implicated in substantive matters that appear at first to have little to do with language. For example, Keane (2007) opens his monograph about Christian missionizing in the Pacific with a discussion of John Milton in seventeenthcentury England, who found the relationship

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between language and speakers to be pertinent to the moral problem of freedom. Prayer should not follow a published text, or ‘the outward dictates of men’. It should come from ‘within’. In the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries entered the religious borderland of Sumba in the colonial Dutch East Indies. As Keane suggests, the key and most contentious points in the century-long conversation between Protestant clerics and the Sumbanese were the proper forms of speech that would assure the spiritual life of the person. The poetic couplets with which the Sumbanese communicated with a spirit world were seen by missionaries to follow the coercive force of custom. The Sumbanese were seen as inauthentic, and spiritually backward because unfree in speech. Keane recounts the meeting of two quite different language ideologies in order to show that the definition of ‘freedom’, and hence of ‘modernity’, was at stake in the way that Protestants first imagined and then tried in Sumba to impose forms of prayer. The contrasting language ideologies allow us to grasp that ideas about speech (prayer) were key to the ‘moral narrative of modernity’. This example makes it seem as though ideologies of language can be tied easily to geographical regions, entire religious forms, historical traditions, or to unified ‘cultures’. On the contrary, they are often specific to domains or to institutions. Mertz, for instance, shows that a key aspect of American common law is a special mode of reading. If ordinary school-taught literacy stresses the extraction of referential content through a focus on semantic interpretation of texts, law school undermines just this approach. While a referentialist ideology regards texts and their meaning as relatively fixed, US case law tradition ‘… depends upon a conception of texts … as fundamentally reconstitutable through the process of recontextualization in subsequent cases … . What a case “means” only emerges as it is interpreted as precedent in subsequent cases ...’ (Mertz 1996: 235). In short, lawyers selectively create a history for the cases they argue and then claim that

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history justifies their own arguments. This approach to reading and to history is itself the expert skill that lawyers learn and wield within an adversarial system. Since it is one of the crucial knowledge-practices by which case law operates, it constitutes the social boundary around the legal system, thus defining a key US institution. Contrasting ideologies of language can also pick out different roles within institutions, thereby reinforcing power differences. In an out-patient drug treatment programme in the United States, clients and social workers engaged in differential ‘metalinguistic labour’, creating contrasting framings (ideologies) of proper talk for clients, on the one hand, and professionals, on the other. As Carr shows, clients were understood to be recovering if they could label their problems, ‘in the sense of properly and accurately denoting preexisting material conditions and/or mental states.’ Clients were instructed to name internal demons, eschewing external or social causes for their addiction. Therapists tried to teach their clients to forge cross-contextual identities as recovering addicts by using language that indexed inner states even outside of therapeutic speech events. By contrast, the linguistic labour of the professionals consisted of ‘deciding what language would evoke desired behaviors, practices and sentiments in clients, staff and funders alike’ (Carr 2009: 320). Thus, professionals routinely discussed how to frame their own actions with a watchful eye towards effects in the external social world. Each social role enacted a different language ideology: referentialist vs performative. Addicts could (and did) gain desired concessions from professionals. This was done not by discarding but by strategically adopting and subverting the speech modes the institution allotted to them. Missionary encounters, law schools and social service agencies are quite different sorts of objects for ethnographic scrutiny, yet in each case the ethnographer’s attention to language ideologies – as enacted, indexed, or discursively displayed – revealed processes

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that embraced far more than linguistic matters alone. In each case a particular type of social scene (Keane: the conversion event; Mertz: the law classroom, Carr: meeting of the addiction centre’s governing board) was a site at which the language ideology and the social relations that enacted it were constructed together, becoming what Peirce would have called an ‘indexical icon’. They were performed images of the relationships as construed by the ideology. Such scenesas-sites make ideologies persuasive to participants; presumptions seem to be self-evident truths (Philips 2000). As these examples suggest, ideologized understandings about language – its nature, its role, its connection to people types and action – turn out to anchor the authority of expertise for psychologists, social workers and lawyers.7 Relatedly, moral judgements in many traditions involve ideas about the form, control and power of speech.

NARRATIVITY AND (RE) CONTEXTUALIZATIONS Law school classrooms, addiction centres and missionary activities all rely on storytelling, if in different ways. All ethnographic projects make ample use of reading, listening to, and documenting narratives. One familiar theoretical interest around storytelling has been the formal relationship between narratives and the events they recount, especially the truth of stories. Another has been the ontological status of the narrated events themselves. Concerning the first, since events are action structures and narratives are verbal structures organized by culturally specific conventions of storytelling, we cannot assume isomorphism between them. Literary devices can transform the image of events. For instance, temporality can be reorganized with flashbacks and foreshadowings. Point of view can be represented in ways not usually recognized in everyday life: that of animals, infants and omniscient narrators. Concerning the second, ontological problem,

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if events are considered antecedent to the narratives that recount them, then there is a question of what ‘actually’ happened. Are the events ‘fiction’, ‘fantasy’ or ‘history’? An alternative view argues that events do not precede the telling. Rather, they are themselves abstractions from narrative. The very idea of an ‘event’, in this view, is the result of the storytelling conventions that allow us to give coherence to what happened as a set of interrelationships. Philosophers, literary scholars, and especially historians, have been much engaged by how these issues affect their disciplines’ claims to knowledge (see Roberts 2001). It was in part these questions that were brought to ethnographic writing in the critical moment of the 1980s. Linguistic anthropologists, by contrast, have started from the insight that for every story told there are at least two events in play: the event(s) being described and the event within which the story is told. It is the relationship between the two that is most fruitful for ethnographic research. The storytelling event, like any speech event, relies on culturally specific models: who can tell what kinds of stories, how and when. For any event, participants try to classify the action, asking Goffman’s question: ‘What is going on here?’ (a history lesson? a romance? a bragging cowboy?). In storytelling events there is an additional question: ‘What was going on there?’ in the event being narrated. Storytelling can be a mode of constructing coherence among the events recounted, as some literary scholars have argued. But, as Bauman notes, it can also be an instrument for ‘obscuring, hedging, confusing … what went on … and [sometimes] intentionally so’ (1986: 5−6). In short, within the storytelling event, narrating is a social act that has consequences for participants by virtue of claiming to be a representation of some state of affairs. In telling stories, as in the selection of referential terms as discussed above, referring and interactional positioning are done simultaneously. Seen in this way, narration has relevance for ethnography well past the ‘content’ of tales. By recounting images of what

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happened (in life, or perhaps only in story) acts of narration position speakers with respect to each other in interaction and in social life more generally. The social relations of the present in which the story is told are thereby transformed and as a result can alter the future. Thus, the triangular relation between narrative act, storytelling event, and recounted event is of crucial significance to ethnographers who wish to track how social processes unfold over time. Furthermore, as Bakhtin taught: narrating is unavoidably open-ended. The telling of an event may itself be framed as an event and can therefore be narrated (as in gossip, reviews, news reports about meetings and speeches, and commentaries of all kinds, including ethnography), with potential repercussions, though not only or always within the same social field as the earlier narration. Ideologies of temporality linked to language regiment these acts and constrain their effects. Once again, this time via the phenomenon of narration, we, as ethnographers, are forced to the realization that we are necessarily, like everyone else, actors in the scenes we describe.8 Linguistic anthropologists have explored the ways in which the events recounted and the event of storytelling are linked to each other. Animation or reanimations of (previous) talk – quotations of many kinds – are among the ways that stories create characters (real or imagined), and establish socially recognizable, stereotyped ‘voices’. Bakhtin argued that when social types are ideologically endowed with authority, speakers can harness that authority by ‘ventriloquating’ or echoing them, (1981: 283−285, 299). Often speakers efface their own individual ‘voices’ when they animate/ventriloquate other social actors, or abstract social types, including gods, ancestors, nature and machines. In such ventriloquations, the narrator sometimes seems to disappear, so that entire realms appear to speak directly to audiences, without mediation. Examples of abstractions that seem to speak are: the ‘teachings of nature’, the view from nowhere that grounds

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‘objective truth’, and ‘the people’ who are supposedly transformed – through the act of voting – into a ‘voice of the people’ that legitimates democratic politics. These animations create an apersonal authority evident in widely varying political, scientific and ritual contexts (Hill and Irvine 1993; Lucy 1993). Such contexts are of significance to ethnographers attempting to unravel – as part of their projects – how authority, responsibility and blame are defined, allocated or refused in various domains of ethnographic interest. The authority achieved by women in Kenya’s khadi (Islamic) courts provides an example. Hirsch (1998) describes how women seeking arbitration in disputes with their husbands went to hearings, where they told narratives of abuse. The hearing is the storytelling event. Language ideologies valorized women who spoke circumspectly, maintaining heshima (roughly: respect). Yet, some genres stereotypically ascribed to women such as ‘gossip’ and ‘criticism’ endangered respect by revealing information about the internal workings of households. The situation of a woman in court was thus a classic double bind. If she revealed troubles in her household she seemed to be gossiping and disgracing herself, undermining her claim to respect as a proper woman. If she did not complain, how could she get help, and what was she doing in court? The result was not mental distress, as in Bateson’s original examples of double bind, but a narrative style that embedded negative evaluation of the husband’s action in quoted speech. This style – rich in quotation but not in moral discourse – enacted (ventriloquated) the ideal woman by effacing personal complaint and judgement, while nevertheless vividly representing ‘trouble’. Individual speakers thus safeguarded the interactional achievement of ‘respect’ and created credibility and authority in the court’s storytelling event. As noted earlier, a storytelling event can become part of another story told; the earlier teller can later become a character in another’s story. Some set of actions is constituted as a unit – ‘a story’– then reanimated in some

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other setting. In the 1970s, linguistic anthropologists isolated performances of ‘stories’ in order to analyse them. Ironically, the analysis often consisted of the analysts ‘contextualizing’ the storytelling performances that they had themselves plucked out of the stream of social activity. Examining their own practice, linguistic anthropologists noticed that creating a chunk of cultural material for analysis by bounding and isolating it is the very same process that ordinary participants continuously engage in, making units or virtual ‘objects’ – remembered scenes, written texts, quips, quotes, gossip – out of ongoing, seamless discourse. The process relies on the assumption (a language ideology) that such segments – snippets of talk and activity – have a separate and fixed meaning apart from the specific occasions on which they are animated, quoted and enacted. Anthropologists and participants alike often take such chunks to be archetypes of what culture ‘is’. Yet, in terms of the perspective outlined here, a freestanding cultural object with a meaning separate from the flow of discourse would be an impossibility. There are, of course, abstract types and models. But whenever these are animated and enacted, their instantiations always have specific time−place interactional horizons. Ethnographers can do more than objectify culture, as participants do. They can make the chunking process (the ‘entextualization’) a focus of analysis (Bauman and Briggs 1990, Silverstein and Urban 1996). Among the many implications of this theoretical perspective for ethnographic method, I note two. First, it suggests that the objects, ideas, stories and genres identified by ethnographers are co-constituted by the contexts in which they appear. Therefore, if a cultural object seems to appear ‘again’, then some interpretation has identified it as a reenactment of an earlier or typical form. The observational and analytical questions are: How has a durable object been ‘precipitated’ out of the flow of discourse? How has a cultural ‘object’ been created? If it is a category of identity, how has it been taken up, or

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imposed, inhabited and fixed over many encounters? If it is a discursive form, how can it seem fixed even as it is necessarily somewhat transformed by (re)contextualization – by interdiscursively linking its occurrence in earlier and later settings? Is the current iteration seen by participants as a copy with a ‘source’ elsewhere, or earlier? Or is it framed as novel and originary, distant from any precedent? Second, although these processes of ventriloquation and interdiscursive linkage are everyday occurrences, there are some particularly salient examples that are of special current interest to ethnographers: massmediated images and their spread; inventions of tradition; and processes of economic and cultural globalization. The movement or ‘flow’ of objects and ideas, along with the related concerns about piracy, fakery and branding, are among the phenomena that ethnographers are intent on studying. These can be discussed more precisely with some attention to ventriloquation and interdiscursive links, which are the semiotic means by which ‘circulations’, ‘translations’ and ‘diffusions’ occur (Agha and Wortham 2005). Wolof insult poetry provides a rich example. Irvine (1996) explains that during her fieldwork, a new Wolof bride’s co-wives would sponsor weddings in which clever and often nasty verses were performed. These purported to reveal and detail the bride’s supposedly objectionable behaviour and that of her kin. Sponsors of the event and griots (roughly: praise singers) were known to construct the poems together, before the event. But this was done in secret, so that individual authorship was hidden and no one accepted blame for creating the poems. The griot performer who said or sang the poems at the event disavowed responsibility by claiming to be merely a mouthpiece. Irvine shows that the power of the insult to wound resulted, in large part, from the knowledge that the audience at the wedding would repeat the clever turns of phrase and nasty accusations at other events. Audiences assumed that in later conversations those who had been only listeners

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at the wedding would become tellers, reanimating and thus recontextualizing the stories that had been told. In short, it was expected that the poetry events recorded by Irvine were only moments in a sequence of retellings. And that is usually what happened. The stories seemed to move or ‘travel’. But the metaphor of ‘travel’ reveals only the retrospective effect. To see how and why the effect is achieved, ethnographers must explore the metacommunicative frames and interactional interests involved in various, repeated recontextualizations, and how these re-enactments themselves change the lives and contexts in which (and about which) they occur. The process of interdiscursivity is openended in principle, allowing ever more recontextualizations. But in practice, stories and other texts can become relatively ‘fixed’ when interpreters repeatedly adopt or more firmly institutionalize a single version. If interpretations or retellings are themselves entextualized in this way, they create and become social facts. These can shape reputations and have other relatively long-term effects that – at least for a while – may be difficult to undo. For example, Latour’s (1987) notion of the black box in scientific writing is a version of this same process: it, too, closes off further interpretation and redefinition, for a time.

CONCLUSION Rather than imagining language as a separate domain that can be analogized to culture, this chapter has outlined a shift in perspective that understands culture to be constituted through the use of language, as regimented by language ideologies that are socially positioned, in keeping with speakers’ interestladen projects. Linguistic practices are forms of action, even as they represent the culturally constituted world. Thus, quite often, the use of language is the means by which social life is conducted, the terrain for social and cultural negotiation and contestation. As a

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result, linguistic practices provide a form of access and a rich source of evidence for ethnographers about cultural and social processes. Moreover, because anthropologists now acknowledge that we are coeval in time and space with the people whose modes of life we hope to understand, ethnography is widely recognized as a communicative endeavour that is coextensive with our writing of ethnographies. A convergence of sorts is apparent: semiotic concepts prove revealing for social as well as linguistic anthropologists; many of the theoretical issues taken up by each group are echoed by the other. Attention to language as described here does not require extensive training in theoretical linguistics as taught in departments of Linguistics. Nor do most cultural anthropologists need to learn ‘field linguistics’, since they are unlikely to be documenting unwritten languages, as were many anthropologists in the early twentieth century. Joint degree programmes in Linguistics and Anthropology will continue to be important training grounds for some areas of interest. But for many topics, some basic training in linguistic anthropology itself would be a useful goal, including audio-visual recording of performances within carefully chosen interactional sites and some close description of such events. This allows investigators to track relatively subtle signals that participants are processing, responding to and acting upon. Parallel methods going beyond content are applicable for print and mass-mediated materials more generally. I have reviewed several semiotic concepts – metacommunication, referentiality vs indexicality, language ideologies, and narrativity and (re)contexualization – with a focus on their relevance for ethnographic method. In each case, I have described research that takes linguistic practices, language ideologies and the organization of interaction as evidence for theoretical arguments addressing other and diverse areas of social life: the unfolding of colonial encounters, the structure of institutions and their constitutive power relations, the making of gendered

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and other identities, the creation of expert knowledge and boundaries around it, the nature of temporality, and the means by which discourses ‘travel’ and globalization is constructed. There is every reason to expect that in the future, whatever foci of interest arise in anthropology generally, careful attention to linguistic practices, in some of the ways outlined here, will continue to be a crucial means of access to social and cultural processes for ethnographers.

NOTES 1 Postgraduate students ask, ‘Should I take a course on “Language in culture” even if I don’t want to be a linguistic anthropologist?’ My somewhat mischievous response, ‘Only if you’re going to do fieldwork.’ 2 This is indispensable advice, see Tonkin (1984): the names of languages and the acceptance of standard forms are political matters; a single linguistic variety is not likely to be enough for an ethnographer in most parts of the world. 3 I return later to the more technical sense of ‘dialogic’, as in Bakhtin (1981). 4 Language is its own metalanguage, in that language can be used to communicate about, say, music or art, but to communicate about language itself (i.e. to metacommunicate), we have only the tools that constitute non-metacommunication. See articles in Lucy (1993), especially the introduction for further discussion; see Gal (2006) for the place of this idea in the history of linguistic anthropology. 5 For a fuller explication, see Silverstein (2004). Schegloff (1972) relies on different conceptual terms but makes a similar point. 6 Attention to metacommunication seems to require an impossibly high level of interactional acuity. Not so. First, we all engage in metacommunication in our everyday lives. Fieldworkers must learn only the particularities of the field context. For research in our own societies, attention to metacommunication is a matter of developing self-consciousness. Second, consultants shape up ethnographers to the local patterns of metapragmatics by conveying their surprised reactions to our mistakes. One must interpret such reactions as matters of systematic communicative and especially ethnographic import. Finally, we should ask native consultants to help interpret the speech and interactions of others by listening together to their own and others’ recorded talk, taking care to protect informants’ confidentiality.

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7 The creation of state authority together with concepts of citizenship through standard languages is another example of language ideologies at work (Gal 2006a). 8 The critics of the 1980s understood this about ethnographic writing itself, when they argued that representations are social acts (Rabinow 1986). My point is that before writing a word, ethnographers are already involved in triangles of narrative.

REFERENCES Agha, Asif and Stanton Wortham (eds) 2005 Discourse across speech events: Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in social life. Journal of Linguistics Anthropology (special issue) 15: 1. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Basso, Keith 1979 Portraits of the ‘White Man’. Cambridge University Press, New York. Bateson, Gregory 1972 [1955] A theory of play and fantasy, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, New York, pp. 177−193. Bauman, Richard 1986 Story, Performance, and Event. Cambridge University Press: New York. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs 1990 Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs 2003 Voices of Modernity. Cambridge University Press, New York. Briggs, Charles 1986 Learning How to Ask. Cambridge University Press, New York. Briggs, Charles 2007 Anthropology, interviewing and communicability in contemporary society. Current Anthropology 48 (4): 551−580. Carr, E. Summerson 2009 Anticipating and inhabiting institutional identities. American Ethnologist 36 (2): 317−336. Clifford, James and George Marcus (eds) 1986 Writing Culture. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. De Fina, Anna and Sabina Perrino 2011 Narratives in interviews, interviews in narrative studies. Special Issue of Language in Society 40: 1. Duranti, Alessandro and Goodwin Charles (eds) 1991 Rethinking Context. Cambridge University Press: New York. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. Columbia University Press New York.

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Gal, Susan 2006 Linguistic anthropology, in Keith Brown (ed.), Elsevier Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistic, 2nd edn, Vol. 7. Elsevier, Oxford, pp. 171−185. Gal, Susan 2006a Contradictions of standard language in Europe. Social Anthropology 14 (2): 163−181. Goffman, Erving 1964 The neglected situation, in J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds), The Ethnography of Communication. American Anthropologist (Special Issue) 66 (6 III): 3−136. 75–119. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. Harper and Row, New York. Gumperz, J.J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University Press, New York. Gumperz, J.J. and Dell Hymes 1972 Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Holt, New York. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1997 Discipline and practice: The ‘field’ as site, method and location in anthropology, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, pp. 1−46. Harding, Susan 2000 The Story of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Hill, Jane and Judith T. Irvine (eds) 1993 Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge University Press, New York. Hirsch, Susan 1998 Pronouncing and Persevering. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Irvine, Judith T. 1996 Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles, in M. Silverstein and G. Urban (eds), Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, pp. 131−159. Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal 2000 Language ideology and linguistic differentiation, in P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language. SAR Press, Santa Fe, pp. 35−84. Jakobson, Roman 1980 [1956] Metalanguage as a linguistic problem, in The Framework of Language. Michigan Studies in the Humanities, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 81−92. Keane, Webb 2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Kroskrity, Paul (ed.) 2000 Regimes of Language. SAR Press, Santa Fe, NM. Latour, Bruno 1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press Cambridge MA.

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Lucy, John (ed.) 1993 Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge University Press, New York. Marcus, George and Michael Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. Mertz, Elizabeth 1996 Recontextualization as socialization: Text and pragmatics in the law school classroom, in M. Silverstein and G. Urban (eds), Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. pp. 229−252. Ochs, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin 1984 Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications, in Richard Schweder and LeVine (eds), Culture Theory: Essays in Mind, Self and Emotion. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 276−322. Paredes, Américo 1993 [1977] On ethnographic work among minority groups: A folklorist’s perspective, in R. Bauman (ed.), Folklore and Culture on the Texas−Mexican Border. CMAS Books, Austin, TX, pp. 73−110. Peirce, Charles S. 1940 [1897−1910] Logic as semiotic: A theory of signs, in J. Buchler (ed.), The Philosophy of C.S. Peirce: Selected Papers. Dover Press, New York pp. 98−119. Philips, Susan U. 2000 Constructing the Tongan nation state through language ideology in the courtroom, in P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language. SAR Press: Santa Fe, NM, pp. 229−258.

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Rabinow, Paul 1986 Representations are social facts, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. University of California Press,Berkeley, CA, pp. 234−261. Roberts, Geoffrey (ed.) 2001 The History and Narrative Reader. Routledge, New York. Schegloff, Immanuel 1972 Formulating place, in D. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. Free Press, New York, pp. 75–119. Silverstein, Michael 1976 Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description, in K. Basso and H. Selby (eds), Meaning in Anthropology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, pp. 11−55. Silverstein, Michael 2004 ‘Cultural’ concepts and the language−culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45 (5): 621−652. Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban (eds) 1996 Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. Tonkin, J.E.A. 1984 Language learning, in R.F. Ellen (ed.), Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. Academic Press, London, pp. 178−187. Woolard, Kathryn 1998 Introduction, in Kathryn Woolard, Bambi Scheiffelin and Paul Kroskrity (eds), Language Ideologies. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 3−50. Wortham, Stanton 2001 Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis. Teachers College Press, New York.

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3.4 The Ethnographic Interview in an Age of Globalization Joshua Barker

This chapter explores the complex mediations at work in anthropological interviews in an age of globalization. While we may still be inclined to think of the ethnographic interview as a discreet, one-to-one conversation that has a clear temporal and spatial locus, and consequently a particular kind of authenticity, and even authority, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain this fiction. Although ethnographers seldom acknowledge this fact in their writings, our work more and more involves a range of new technologies − electronic mail, social networking, instant messaging, video chat, digital voice recording− that profoundly shape how interviews are conducted and knowledge is produced. The very ubiquity of these technologies today means that in the absence of a decision not to use them, they will tend to insinuate themselves into our interview practices and settings. When we consider the interview, we thus move away from the familiar distinction between so-called structured, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, to a terrain in which the notion of the interview (as distinct from conversation, talk, electronic mail, etc.) may lose its coherence, allowing for a merging and intermingling of forms. This shift in the status of the interview is part of a broader shift underway

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in anthropology in which the spatial, temporal and social boundaries that once constituted the difference between ‘home’ and ‘field’ have been challenged, blurred and reconstituted in manifold ways. However, the status of the interview within this broader methodological and epistemological shift is unique, because even as the idea of the interview as a distinct kind of encounter deconstructs, it is also being asked to carry a greater and greater burden of responsibility as an anchor for ethnographic authority. In what follows, I first consider the conventional ethnographic interview as it has been discussed and represented in handbooks like this one and in the broader literature on methods. A brief survey of these sources allows me to specify two of the key dimensions through which the coherence, integrity and authority of the traditional ethnographic interview have been understood: embeddedness and openness. In the next section, I contrast these characterizations of ideal typical interviews with accounts of interviews that focus on the implications of using new technologies. These examples, drawn from my own experience and from recent ethnographies, serve to illustrate the complex role that mediation plays in contemporary interviews. A consideration of these mediations

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also helps to delineate the specific ways in which new technologies unravel, disrupt and contaminate the coherence of the ethnographic interview. In concluding the paper, I discuss the implications of the changing character of the ethnographic interview for broader shifts in the epistemology of anthropological fieldwork.

KEY DIMENSIONS OF THE CONVENTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC INTERVIEW While the practice of asking questions to acquire knowledge about social relationships is nothing new, the formalization of ‘the interview’ as a procedure for social scientific inquiry is a relatively recent phenomenon (Gubrium and Holstein 2002a: 4−5). Such formalization depended on an occupational specialization that allowed for clear distinctions to be drawn between social scientific interviewers and their respondents. It also depended on the belief that the everyday experiences of individuals constitute subjects worthy of systematic attention, and that people can be relied upon to provide, and will be willing to provide, insights into their own experiences. Finally, it depended on establishing a frame around certain kinds of conversations, such that they were no longer considered to belong to the usual ebb and flow of everyday discourse, but were contrived for the purposes of research (Briggs 1986; Gal this volume). The underlying contrast between the interview and ordinary (some might say naturalistic) conversation remains at the core of scholarly work on ethnographic interviewing. Most generally, discussions of the ways ethnographic interviewing differs from other kinds of interviewing have tended to emphasise how ethnographic interviewing aims to be more like ordinary conversation. Here, scholars typically focus mainly on two key dimensions of the ethnographic interview process that I have called embeddedness and openness.

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Embeddedness We interview people informally during the course of an ordinary day of participant observation; we interview people on their boats and in their fields; and we interview people in our offices or theirs. (Bernard 1988: 203)

The ethnographic interview is distinguished from other kinds of qualitative interview in its striving for a high level of embeddedness. I use the term embeddedness in two senses: to describe the degree to which the interview is taking place within the social world one is studying, rather than in isolation from it; and to describe the degree to which the interview is conducted from within a field of knowledge about the social, cultural and material world of the interviewee. There are many ways of defining what it means to be ‘inside’ a social world, but the literature on qualitative interviewing pays most attention to the kinds of settings in which the interview takes place, and the kinds of social relations within which the interview unfolds. In terms of settings, a highly embedded interview involves interviewing people ‘on their boats and in their fields’, as Bernard puts it, rather than in the researcher’s office or laboratory. Interviewing a farmer in her field has a number of advantages. First, the environs provide ready illustrations for what is being discussed, which can allow the interviewer to obtain a ‘thicker’ description (Geertz 1973) of, for instance, the region’s ecology, land tenure and agriculture. As many anthropologists have shown, landscapes are repositories of elaborate cultural meanings and sites of historical memories (e.g. Basso 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Keith and Pile 1993; Strang 1997, 2010). These meanings and memories may be called to mind within the interview in a manner that would not have occurred had it taken place in another setting. Settings are also defined by the kinds of practices that take place there, and ethnographic interviews can benefit from being embedded in everyday or occasional practices, such as agricultural work or ritual performances. Both these kinds of activity involve complex sequences of action, which

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can be easier to delineate and to discuss in detail as they unfold in the moment. In terms of my second criterion, embeddedness refers to the degree to which the interview unfolds within the interviewee’s everyday social milieu. The most embedded interviews in this sense take place within the context of long-term participant observation, after researchers have made efforts to establish a place within the networks of social relations of the people they will be interviewing. By speaking the local language or local dialect, and by being attentive to social norms, ideally they will have established rapport with their interviewees, and earned their trust.1 This stands in contrast to interviews that take place in isolated settings in which the interviewee knows the interviewer only as a researcher, and not as neighbour, friend, co-worker, or perhaps, (fictive) kin. In much psychological interviewing, there is in fact an effort to minimize the effects of the setting and to make sure the social identity and opinions of the interviewer are obscured, so as to encourage responses that are as little affected by external conditions as possible. In ethnographic interviews, by contrast, interviewers deliberately seek to approach their interviewees with an understanding of the complex social relationships involved. Through a deep appreciation of the context of these relationships, they expect to develop a richer and more layered understanding of the social worlds they are studying. The desire to increase social embeddedness has led some commentators to argue that group interviews are more effective than individual interviews. Like individual interviews, group interviews may take place either in ‘naturally established field settings, such as a street corner’, or in ‘controlled settings’, like a research lab (Fontana and Frey 2000: 652). In field settings, the context may determine whether interviews are group interviews or individual interviews. Where social ties are dense and privacy is not a priority, as in many urban slums and small villages, almost all interviews are likely to be group interviews of one sort or another.

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In other cases, gender norms might make it undesirable or even dangerous for a researcher to conduct private, one-to-one interviews across gender lines. In these cases, the interview conforms to the situational and normative frame of the social setting, which happens to encourage the use of group interviews. However, some researchers have gone so far as to argue that contrived group interviews, such as those that take place in focus groups composed of strangers, may be more ‘naturalistic’ than individual interviews, since they have greater resemblance to daily social interactions than do private, one-to-one interviews (King and Horrocks 2010: 62). Such arguments reflect a view that social embeddedness can be attained even in artificial settings.2 However, it is notable that the ‘society’ within which the researcher is doing the embedding in such cases might very well be a simulacrum, or perhaps ‘sampling’, of society rather than the ‘real thing’. Other scholars have argued that social embeddedness is not something that can be achieved at the level of a particular interview. What is important is that in-depth interviews are contextualized within a broader social setting. This means interviewing widely within a community so that one obtains a range of perspectives on social phenomena. It also means complementing the use of interviews with other kinds of research methods. Sidney Mintz (1984: 307) stresses the importance of embedding the interview within a broader social field and wider ethnographic knowledge about the society in which the interviewee lives: ‘while intensive work with one informant or several is of course absolutely essential, it must not preclude broader interviewing, or the study of the community within which the principal informant lives and works.’ Most ethnographers would sympathize with the aim of increasing the embeddedness of an interview, but to do this adequately also requires the capacity to be critical about conventionalized disciplinary predilections. Some espousals of embeddedness go beyond immediate methodological considerations to

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harbour an unstated predilection for the kind of naturalism that is manifested as a combination of localism and socio-centrism. In this view, ethnographic interviews are thought to take place most appropriately in the ‘natural’ habitats of those being interviewed, where habitat is understood to consist of proximate and enduring social relations. Embedding interviews in such relations is thought necessarily to increase the ‘thickness’ of descriptions, or perhaps the truth, authenticity, fullness, completeness, representativeness or faithfulness of ethnographic accounts. Such hopes may be entangled with what Jacques Derrida (1974: 49), following Heidegger, referred to as a ‘metaphysics of presence’: the idea that there are specific sites or modes of expression where meaning is more fully anchored, and where essences or truths are more fully expressed. Ethnography has a tradition of anchoring its meanings and its authority in ethnographers’ claims to the experience of ‘being there’ in ‘the field’, where a privileged ‘feel’ for specifically local social and cultural realities can be absorbed (Clifford 1988: 35−37; Geertz 1988: 13). Among the potential pitfalls of treating some interview contexts as more natural than others is the likelihood of misrecognizing the variety of these contexts. This is not to suggest that all claims to embeddedness or ‘being there’ have to be diagnosed as equivalent instances of latent naturalism. On the contrary, a dynamic view of social relations and their multiple scales recognizes that they unfold within a spatial and material world which is thoroughly imbued with cultural meanings. Through research, ethnographers may learn that embedding their interviews within a given setting allows them to gain access to a range of social practices and ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991) particular to a specific social dynamic or scale. They may, in other words, learn to accommodate themselves to the metaphysics of presence that holds sway in a given social setting. By this token, we have to recognize that there is no such thing as a disembedded interview. An interview that takes place in a laboratory

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is as deeply embedded as one that takes place on a boat; it is just that it is embedded in very different kinds of social fields, discourses and sets of practices. Naturalizing a particular kind of embeddedness compromises our capacity to recognize variability. Openness In addition to embeddedness, the ethnographic interview can be distinguished from other kinds of qualitative interview by its degree of openness. Bernard describes this dimension in terms of ‘interview control’, in which there is a continuum with structured interviewing on the one end and informal interviewing on the other: Informal interviewing [is] characterized by a total lack of structure or control. The researcher just tries to remember conversations heard during the course of a day “in the field.” This requires constant jotting and daily sessions in which you sit at a typewriter, unburden your memory, and develop your field notes. (Bernard 1988: 204)

It is informal because there are no lists of questions, the ethnographer is not taking on the role of an interrogator, and it happens in the course of everyday social interactions (Agar 1980: 90). In ideal typical terms, structured interviewing, by contrast, involves asking respondents a pre-established list of questions, sometimes using an interview schedule that customizes the direction of the interview based on responses to previous questions. In structured interviewing, the interviewer must be ‘directive and impersonal’, and ideally, ‘nothing is left to chance’ (Fontana and Frey 2000: 650). Between these two extremes are unstructured (or openended) interviewing and semi-structured interviewing. In unstructured interviews: … you sit down with an informant and hold an interview. Period. Both of you know what you’re doing, and there is no shared feeling that you’re just engaged in pleasant chit-chat. Unstructured interviews are based on a clear plan that you keep constantly in mind, but they are also characterized by a minimum of control over the

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informant’s responses. The idea is to get people to ‘open up’ and let them express themselves in their own terms, and at their own pace. (Bernard 1988: 204)

Semi-structured interviewing ‘has much of the freewheeling quality of unstructured interviewing, and requires all the same skills, but […] is based on the use of an interview guide’ (Bernard 1988: 204−205), which focuses on a set of pre-established topics, but allows for the evolving conversation to determine its content. Rather than being aimed at capturing easily coded data within preestablished categories, it ‘attempts to understand the complex behavior of members of society without imposing any a priori categorization that may limit the field of inquiry’ (Fontana and Frey 2000: 653). In practice, as any given interview unfolds, it may involve varying degrees of control. One common strategy, for example, is to start off informally, but then, once topics have started to crystallize, to shift into increasingly directed kinds of questioning as a means to obtain answers to specific empirical questions. Conversely, formal questions may give way to general conversation as an interview progresses. While the openness of an interview may largely be determined by the degree to which it has been scripted in advance, there are also more subtle ways that openness can be effected. The style of questioning is one example of this. Even in relatively informal and unstructured interviews, there is a range of cues the interviewer can use, and some are more directive than others. Whyte (1960, cited in Agar 1980: 90−91) presents a typology of questioning strategies for the openended interview, beginning with merely encouraging one’s informant to keep speaking through a word or a gesture, to echoing the informant’s last statement, to probing the informant’s last remark. Whereas the gesture retains maximum openness, the use of the echo and the follow-up probe provide increasing levels of structure. King and Horrocks (2010: 51−53) identify a number of other ways that the free flow of an interview can be

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compromised by the style of questioning and response used by the interviewer: by asking leading or confusing questions, by giving judgemental responses, by failing to listen, or by engaging in disruptive non-verbal communication.3 The idea that ethnographic interviews should strive for maximum openness has led some to question whether it even makes sense to distinguish between interviewing and conversation. Stage and Mattson (2003), for instance, critique Spradley (1979), who drew a sharp line between the two: interviews involve discussing the explicit purpose of the research project and asking ethnographic questions to elicit descriptions about what people do and how they organize their knowledge; conversations, by contrast, are ‘more informal and emergent [and] are marked by a lack of explicit purpose, avoidance of repetition, balanced turn taking, use of abbreviation, occurrence of pauses, expressed interest, and curious ignorance by both parties’ (Stage and Mattson 2003: 98−99). Stage and Mattson argue that researchers should treat interviews as ‘contextualized conversations’, by incorporating conversational techniques into the interview process. By pausing and reflecting, paying attention to context, and by making sure participation in the interview is reciprocal and balanced, the interviewer can obtain not just a narrow field of information but a broad kind of contextualized knowledge (2003: 101−103).4 Besides being cognisant of how conversational styles may affect openness, interviewers are also often encouraged to reflect more generally on how relations between their own subject positions and those of their interviewees are serving to frame the broader dialogic situation. Ideally, the ethnographic interview has a ‘highly personal nature’ and ‘the ethnographer and his or her informant are interrogating each other’ (Mintz 1984: 309). But how the conversation unfolds in reality may depend to a large degree on the social identities of those involved. Numerous studies describe how differences between

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interviewer and interviewee with regards to age, gender, sexual orientation, race and class may shape the interview process.5 While some argue that such studies suggest it is necessary to be cognisant of identity issues and to calibrate one’s interview style accordingly, others have gone further, arguing that power differentials around gender and other identities can have such a profound effect on the openness of an interview that it simply may not be worth employing interview techniques in some circumstances (Gubrium and Holstein 2002b: 179−180). This latter argument takes the idea of openness to the extreme, treating social relations themselves as imposing unwanted constraints on the open flow of an interviewee’s discourse. Ethnographers influenced by Freudian methods take a different approach to this problem. While in psychoanalysis there is also an effort to ensure that the patient’s free flow of discourse is not interrupted by the presence of the analyst, the reasons for doing so are different. For Freud, the goal was not to obtain a flow of discourse unencumbered by power relations, but to create a situation that allowed for a process of transference. Transference occurs when a patient projects someone else’s identity onto that of their analyst, such that they speak to the analyst as if they were talking to someone else who has played an important role in their psychic development (e.g. their mother or father), but without the social repercussions that would normally be associated with this.6 Transference thus allows for the open expression of feelings and desires that might otherwise remain repressed. Freud believed such expressions, when followed by reflexive analysis, could be both informative and therapeutic. In order to facilitate transference, he suggested that the analyst should practise a kind of self-effacement, for instance by sitting outside the visual field of the patient and by using minimally directive forms of questioning. By effacing his individuality, the analyst could serve as an empty vessel onto which different identities could be projected.

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While in ethnographic interviews transference is unlikely to be so complete, combining studied self-effacement with reflexiveness about the complex intersubjectivities at play in the interview setting can give the interviewer insights about social relations that she might not otherwise obtain. A striking example of such an approach is Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami, which provides an intimate ethnographic account of the life and thinking of a Moroccan healer. Through transference, Crapanzano allowed himself to become, as he put it, ‘an articulatory pivot about which [Tuhami, the healer] could spin out his fantasies in order to create himself as he desired’ (1980: 140). As Tuhami spun his web of meanings about himself, Crapanzano drew insights about his place in a broader cultural field. In many accounts, the openness of interviews is affected not only by scripts, styles of questioning and social identities but also by the mediations of technology and setting. Telephone and electronic interviewing can eliminate face-to-face interaction, and with it, non-verbal communication, making it difficult to establish an ‘interviewer−interviewee relationship’ (Hertz 1997, cited in Fontana and Frey 2000: 666). King and Horrocks argue that interview settings should ideally be as comfortable as possible, both physically and psychologically, and as private as possible. Distractions should be kept to a minimum: ‘you should try to have phones switched off or diverted, and a note on the door asking people not to disturb you’ (2010: 43). They also note that interviewers must be aware of ways the devices they use for recordings potentially impact on the interview process. Recording equipment has different meanings to different people: for some it has the effect of inhibiting the scope of their answers, while for others it has the effect of encouraging them to behave more formally and to provide answers that they think the interviewer wants to hear (King and Horrocks 2010: 44−45; Warren 2002: 91−92). If the interview is supposed to involve ‘natural conversation’ and to have

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‘contextual naturalness’, a face-to-face method will be better than an exchange conducted over the telephone (Shuy 2002: 541). If the desire for embeddedness in ethnographic interviews runs the risk of adopting a metaphysics of presence associated with ‘being there’, the desire for openness runs the risk of phonocentrism: the belief that the unmediated voice is the nearest thing to the pure or natural expression of thought and meaning.7 In this perspective, the things that mediate and interrupt voice − scripts, social identities, power relations, spatial environments and technologies − are taken to act as barriers to this pure communication: to take away from its fullness and authenticity.8 A good interviewer thus aims to remove such hurdles to pure communication.9 In general, the ideology of phonocentrism supports, and is supported by, the metaphysics of presence associated with ‘being there’. Both serve to lend authority and legitimacy to the conventional image of ethnographic interviews as intimate, unstructured, oneto-one conversations that take place in the field. However, these ideologies may also work at cross-purposes: the same cultural mediations that, from the perspective of phonocentrism, are seen to distort expressions of authentic voice may also be seen as a means to increase the embeddedness of an interview. Ethnographers such as Marcel Griaule and Vincent Crapanzano, for instance, considered their interview experiences and their learnings to be enriched by the presence of cultural mediators, such as local research assistants and multiple expert informants (Clifford 1983: 145−147; Crapanzano 1980; Griaule 1975). Others go further, arguing that the very desire to gain access to free and open speech is problematic, not just because it is impossible to attain, but because its pursuit may already be inscribing relations of power between interviewer and interviewee (Malkki 1995: 51). Such a perspective is consistent with Spivak’s (1988) critique of postcolonial studies and its concerns with representing the subaltern voice (cf. Morris 2010). It is also evident in the work of Veena

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Das (2006), who interviewed women about the violence that took place during the Partition of India in 1947. In these interviews, she found that a zone of silence around the event led her to question the cultural assumptions of her approach. It is often considered the task of historiography to break the silences that announce the zones of taboo. There is even something heroic in the image of empowering women to speak and to give voice the voiceless. I have myself found this a very complicated task, for when we use imagery as breaking the silence, we may end by using our capacity to ‘unearth’ hidden facts as a weapon. Even the idea that we should recover the narratives of violence becomes problematic when we realize that such narratives cannot be told unless we see the relation between pain and language that a culture has evolved. (Das 2006: 57)

Thus, while most of the literature on ethnographic interviewing appeals to ideals of immediacy − understood mainly in terms of voice and ‘being there’ − to justify the authority and power of the informal or unstructured interview, it is important to recognize that such ideals involve significant cultural (some might say ideological) assumptions. Recognizing this fact is particularly important in an age of globalization, since ethnographic interviews are increasingly departing from such ideals, and ethnographers thus have the opportunity to experiment with alternative ways of thinking about both the embeddedness and openness of their interviews.

INTERVIEWS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION How might we rethink the embeddedness and openness of the ethnographic interview in an age of globalization? To answer this question it is helpful to begin by considering Tom Boellstorff’s reflections on questions of method in his ethnography of a virtual world, Coming of Age in Second Life (2008). Boellstorff argues forcefully that virtual worlds are ‘legitimate sites of culture’ and

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they can be studied and understood ‘in their own terms’; while their sociality ‘references the actual world’ it is ’not simply derivative of it’ (2008: 61−63). He therefore takes issue with those who claim that to study virtual worlds it is necessary to conduct face-to-face interviews and to situate people’s online activities within the context of their actual world lives. Thus, while defending the value of ‘being there’, Boellstorff refuses to link this value to the specific forms of sociality associated with actual world interactions. Embeddedness in his research came to mean embeddedness within the richly mediated world of Second Life. Within this mediated world Boellstorff discovered that openness in interviews is not always achieved in the same way that it was in his earlier research in offline field settings. He found, for example, that focus group interviews were more effective than one-toone interviews, which had not been his experience during his previous work (2008: 78). He also notes that he built several virtual homes in Second Life because he found the design of the virtual rooms to affect the conversational dynamics of his interviews (2008: 260). He still sought to retain the ideal of openness, but he experimented to find out how conversations flowed under different conditions of mediation. Boellstorff’s case is an extreme one but it is suggestive of how one might think about embeddedness and openness in settings that do not conform to the image of conventional ethnographic interviews. To develop these insights further, I turn now to an interview I conducted in 2007 in Aceh, Indonesia. The interview was with James Siegel, an anthropologist under whom I have studied and conducted research, and it took place against the backdrop of a short period of multi-sited, collaborative fieldwork, involving Siegel, Arief Djati and myself. Since Aceh was the site of Siegel’s doctoral research in the early 1960s, our activities were a kind of ‘catching up’ fieldwork, involving a brief trip to the field by someone who has a deep contextual knowledge of the place, having

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done extensive prior research there. This kind of fieldwork has become more common in recent times, since travel is easier and more anthropologists are doing research closer to home. However, in this case we weren’t catching up with people Siegel had known in the 1960s, or whom he had met during subsequent visits to Aceh in the 1980s and 1990s, nor were we catching up with ‘the place’ of the village and town where he did his original fieldwork (although we did go there). Rather, we were catching up with the ‘place’ of Aceh as a whole. We did this by renting a car and driving from town to town along the coast, from the southwest corner of the province up to Banda Aceh and back down the east coast. In each town we found people to talk to, usually on the street or in restaurants or coffee houses. Sometimes these people would lead us to other people. We were mainly interested in questions of continuity and change in social relations. We often began our interviews with others by talking about recent local events, such as the tsunami on the west coast, or the introduction of sharia law on the east coast, and then asked people how (or whether) these events had changed their lives. If, in the course of these interviews, people mentioned certain local sites, such as a mass grave for tsunami victims, a garbage dump for tsunami refuse, the grave of a local hero, or a giant mansion built by a wealthy contractor for himself, we would go to visit the place and talk to the people who lived there, worked there, or were hanging around.10 Prior to leaving on this trip, I sent out an email request to some of Siegel’s former students and colleagues for questions I could put to him in an interview. I received questions from more than a half dozen people. Upon meeting up in Indonesia, Siegel agreed to participate in the interview but only on certain terms. First, I had to give him all the questions in advance and he would decide how, or whether, to answer them. Second, he would record his own answers, without my being present. In practice this meant that during our long car rides from town to town

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we would sometimes talk over the issues raised by the questions, some of which were biographical in nature and some of which concerned his work, or his views on anthropology and its relations to other disciplines. Then, late at night or early in the morning, Siegel would record a reply to some of the questions, as he had chosen to interpret them. I would then listen to the recording on my own and we would discuss it again and sometimes he would record a little bit more. In important respects, the form of the interview was consistent with Siegel’s broader epistemological stance in relation to cultural anthropology today. We are all familiar with the critiques surrounding the manner in which ethnographic writing ‘orientalizes’ or ‘others’ the people it studies.11 Siegel is a bit unusual among American anthropologists in his continuing insistence that the problem of otherness and difference ought to remain central to cultural anthropological work. One could say that he drew very different conclusions from anthropology’s self-reflexive turn than those drawn by many others.12 Rather than reflexively problematizing his own culture’s tendency to ‘other’ the object of inquiry, Siegel focused primarily on how the peoples he studied deal with the problem of otherness.13 This concern with otherness was also evident in his own approach to establishing openness in his ethnographic interviews. As has been described above for unstructured interviewing, he began by getting people to start talking and he allowed them to direct the course of the conversation, much as a psychoanalyst would. But rather than simply allowing the interviewee to direct the conversation, he would listen for the appearance of various kinds of otherness in what they said. Otherness in this instance was not understood in terms of an ethnic group, or any kind of social group necessarily; we were asking about events that people would be trying to make sense of but which might not be easy to assimilate, such as the tsunami, events in the civil war, or the killings of 1965−66. In the town of Meulaboh, for instance, when we

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asked people about the tsunami and who had died, people repeatedly said that those who had been killed were not killed by the wave, they were killed by the ‘garbage’ (sampah), or debris, carried by the wave. Rather than treat this kind of statement as insignificant, Siegel would then continue with a line of questioning that sought to find out what the garbage was, where it had come from, and hence, what it stood for. Thus, he would seek to learn how people were making sense of the tsunami as an event in which death was not the result of an act of nature or an act of God, let’s say, but an effect of the debris generated by a culture of excessive consumption in a particular part of town. His focus was on any kind of occurrence that challenged people’s capacity to symbolize it, and the traces and often disruptive effect this has on their symbolic world. In this sense, his interview method was not just ‘open-ended’, it was also ‘open-middled’ since it involved a kind of deep listening and response that allowed for meanings beyond the intentionality of the speakers involved to leave an impression on the conversation. It put into practice the more general notion that Cerwonka and Malkki (2007: 175) and others have put forward: that what distinguishes ethnography from other modes of enquiry is its openness to ‘improvisation’ and to ‘surprise’. This same openness to the unexpected was the basis for my interview with Siegel, but the forms this openness took were shaped by the very different conditions of mediation and embeddedness under which that interview took place. The interview with Siegel occurred in both a place and a ‘non-place’, to use Marc Augé’s (1995) terminology. The place was Aceh, which consisted of a set of very particular locales linked together by our automobile travel through them and by our conception of that part of Sumatra island as being our ‘field site’. The speed of automobile travel meant that we could maintain a conversation spanning several towns, creating a place that was much bigger than the kind of field site one might normally think of in the context of ‘being there’. The interviewee was

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‘in his native habitat’, so to speak, but the scale of the habitat was expanded by our movement. Even at its expanded scale the setting still furnished concrete examples for discussion and provoked new lines of questioning and analysis. Small observations Siegel made during the day, such as the fact that all the houses on the beach were built to face away from the ocean and toward the road, suggesting that people were separating themselves off from a ‘view’, would appear the following morning in his recorded answers to interview questions. It was not merely that Siegel was being a bricoleur, although there was an element of that. It was also that the place and the people in the vicinity entered into the conversation, provoking questions, interrupting chains of thought, and sometimes even drowning out the interview. This is evident in the recording of the interview, which picked up all sorts of unintended things: waves crashing in the background, people coming to Siegel’s hotel door and starting up conversations with him while the recorder was still on, and so forth. At the same time, my imposed absence from the recording sessions meant Siegel was shielded from the more conventional kinds of interview encounter. Besides being embedded in an Acehnese setting, the interview was also embedded in the non-place, or cyberspace of global connections and electronic traffic. The questions themselves were solicited and received via email from people around the world − Thailand, the United States, Italy, Singapore and Canada − and arrived bearing few traces of their locale. The lack of co-presence between the interviewers and the interviewee meant that the sense of presence as personal proximity was to some degree undermined and contaminated by this cyberspace. While cyberspace of course brought with it a certain materiality − in this context a mobile phone and laptop with only sporadic connectivity − it nonetheless weakened the sense of ‘immersion’ in the locale since it collapsed the distance between home and ‘the field’. Ironically, the weakening of place-based

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immersion was also the condition for increased embeddedness in a particular set of social relations: those that existed between Siegel and his former students and colleagues. While once primarily face-to-face, these relations had increasingly unfolded within a world of cyber connections. Embeddedness in cyberspace was thus a condition of embeddedness in social relations. We often assume that new technologies speed things up, but the real effect of the Internet, the digital recorder and the automobile in this case was to slow things down, such that the interview unfolded in a temporality that was precisely not that of immediacy and ‘real time’. Rather, the interview was asynchronous: structured with built-in intervals and pauses, not only between questions and answers but also between the posing of the question and the question being heard, and between the answer being given and the answer being heard. The intervals in this densely mediated interview meant that the time and space left open for unexpected otherness, and for new thoughts and rumination, were much more pronounced than they might be in a more conventional ethnographic interview where intersubjective immediacy is assumed. That the interview did not take place exclusively in a shared space and time highlighted the roles played by the other interviewers. Siegel commented that as he was speaking into the machine he could conjure up the people whose questions he was answering.14 These presences might have been elided had all their questions been put to him by me. While we are accustomed to thinking about how the ethnographer represents, and to some degree consolidates, the many voices of ethnographic informants, we do not often think about all the other researchers who are occluded by the idea of the lone ethnographer or lone interviewer. The mediation of the digital recorder served to flatten out these multiple others into a single spatial and temporal frame, whether they were across the world or in the room next door, and thereby allowed Siegel to achieve a form

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of transference that made a place for multiple others. At the same time, the structure of the interview also meant that these opportunities for transference were interspersed with moments of more conventional co-presence. Our interactions within the intimate space of the car, for instance, allowed for informal conversation that generated themes that carried over into the recorded sessions; they also sometimes served as opportunities to rehearse and try out answers for use in those later sessions. While this interview is unusual in that the interviewee is also an anthropologist, the mix of conventional and mediated forms it involves is not all that different from the kinds of mix one might expect to find in a growing number of contemporary ethnographic interviews. Ethnographic interviewing involves a ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering 1995) and each mangle may allow for particular kinds of embeddedness and afford particular kinds of openness. This is not simply a question of the materiality of the setting and its mediations; it is also a question of the ideologies that people hold about the kinds of discourse possible and appropriate in a given setting, including their ‘language ideologies’ (Gal in this volume) and their ‘media ideologies’ (Gershon 2010: 3). The conventional ethnographic interview relied for its authority on a particular media ideology and a particular metaphysics of presence. The challenge of ethnographic interviewing in an age of globalization is to recognize the shifting terrain of the mangle of practice and ideologies that constitute the contemporary ethnographic interview, and, to the best of our abilities, to enact embeddedness and openness within it.

CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC INTERVIEW In an age of globalization, ethnographic interviewing may be reinvented but it is not going to be a method that falls into disuse. If anything, it is likely to grow in importance in

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the years ahead. There are several reasons why it may do so. More and more ethnographers are engaging in multi-sited fieldwork, ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972), and conducting their research ‘at home’. When ethnographers spend shorter periods of time conducting research in any given place, and when they research stockbrokers and engineers rather than farmers and fishers, doing the ‘participant’ part of participant observation becomes more difficult and interviewing often takes on an added importance. This tendency has been reinforced by concerns about the politics of representation. In an effort to make ethnographic accounts less reifying and more polyvocal, anthropologists have sought to include the ‘voices’ of informants in their writings. Recorded and transcribed interviews are often taken to provide the most direct and unmediated access to such voices. There are also forces in the broader research context that are driving more ethnographers to use interviews. Researchers seeking ethics approval for research know that ethics boards often consist not only of anthropologists but also of sociologists, psychologists, ethicists, administrators or lawyers. They may thus feel inclined to employ interviewing to an even greater degree, since it has a high level of acceptance across the disciplines and it conforms readily to protocols for obtaining ‘informed consent’ and to the broader needs of ‘audit culture’ (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000; Mookherjee this volume). More generally, as Gubrium and Holstein (2002a) point out, over the past century interviewing has become less and less a specialized practice: through television journalism, radio talk shows, market research, and so on, interviewing has become so ubiquitous that we might even think of ourselves as living in an ‘interview society’. This society is increasingly a global one, so wherever we conduct research we confront the expectation that real research begins only when the voice recorder is switched on. These changes, both inside and outside the academy, make it likely that ethnographic interviewing will be

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asked to carry a greater and greater burden for ethnographic authority. Much of the writing about ethnographic interviews continues to reinforce the longheld assumption that authentic and fulsome meaning is best found through unstructured, unmediated face-to-face, voice-to-voice interviews that take place within what I argued is implicitly assumed to be the interviewee’s ‘natural’ setting. In this view, anything that distances the interviewer from the interviewee or mediates the voice of an interviewee seems to devalue the interview experience from an ethnographic point of view. This view was always inadequate, but its shortcomings are highlighted in an age of globalization because, seen this way, an increasing proportion of interviewing comes to be characterized by a lack, thrown up by its distance from this reassuring foundation. How does one strive for embeddedness in a world where ‘being there’ cannot be defined in terms of locality, where places must be understood not only as being local and material but also as imagined and intangible, and where social relations interpenetrate spatial and cyberspatial geographies? How does one achieve openness and immediacy in an interview when one is constantly coming face to face not with an interlocutor’s voice but with yet another form of mediation that seems to fragment any sense of coevalness and copresence? In this paper I have argued that embeddedness and openness remain qualities to aspire to in ethnographic interviewing, but that ethnographers should be critical and self-conscious of their own and others’ assumptions about privileged loci of meaning. The aim of both embeddedness and openness is to create conditions that allow for encounters with the unexpected, and hence, for discovery. New kinds of mediation in interviewing do not take us away from some authentic domain of truth and authenticity, but they do alter in important ways the forms of embeddedness and openness available to the interview. The ethnographic interview has always been enfolded within complex mediations. The new conditions of

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mediation brought on by the ubiquitous presence of globalizing technologies has simply forced us to acknowledge this fact and encouraged us to reflect more deeply on its implications.

NOTES 1 For helpful summaries of strategies for inserting oneself into an interview context and developing rapport, see Fontana and Frey (2000) and Ryen (2002), as well as Carsten in this volume. Agar (1980: 101) notes that although it is widely held to be important that ethnographic interviews be conducted in the language of the interviewee, the literature on interviewing rarely delves deeply into this topic. 2 For a discussion of the kinds of considerations researchers take into account when conducting group interviews (e.g. the selection of participants, group size, venue and setting up the room), see King and Horrocks (2010: 66−69). 3 Agar (1980: 93) claims that he does not even understand what a leading question would be, and argues that it is sometimes sensible to lead strongly with questions that ‘bait’ the interviewee by contradicting him as a way to test the veracity of his earlier claims. 4 In a separate article, the two authors also provide concrete examples of how to conduct interviews in this manner; see Mattson and Stage (2003). 5 See, for example, Eder and Fingerson (2002), Fontana and Frey (2000), Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2002), Reinharz and Chase (2002), Kong et al. (2002), Warren (1988), Wenger (2002) and Odendahl and Shaw (2002). 6 Freud discusses the function of transference in The Interpretation of Dreams (1965: 601−602). 7 Derrida argued that the Western philosophical tradition has always anchored meaning in speech: ‘speech being natural or at least the natural expression of thought, the most natural form of institution or convention for signifying thought, writing is added to it, is adjoined, as an image or representation. In that sense, it is not natural’ (Derrida 1974: 144). 8 The idealization of a speech situation that is open and free, unencumbered by power relations or distortions, is central to Habermas’ model of democratic communication (Habermas 1984, cited in Prasad 2005: 146−148). 9 In a review of literature on cross-cultural interviewing, Anne Ryen (2002: 336) notes that this literature frequently assumes cultural differences are barriers to open communication.

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10 The results of this research are discussed in Siegel, Barker and Djati (2008) and Siegel (2011), chapter 5. 11 The assertion of cultural difference, which was once thought to provide the basis for a critique of ethnocentrism (e.g. in the work of Boas, Lévi Strauss and Geertz), is said to reify and naturalize differences. See, for example, Clifford (1988), Clifford and Marcus (2010), Said (1978) and Fabian (1983). 12 I am referring here to the post-modern reflexive moment of the 1980s. This turn toward reflexivity had its roots in feminist critiques of the 1960s and 1970s, which showed that gender bias was pervasive in ethnographic representations of women. To surmount this bias and other forms of ethnocentrism, feminists such as Rayna Reiter (1975: 14) argued that anthropologists needed to undertake serious ‘self-critical investigation’ of its theories and its representations. 13 In Solo in the New Order (Siegel 1993) for example, which was published in the same period that Clifford and Marcus were promoting the reflexive turn (in which anthropologists would become more aware of how their representation of others in texts helped to constitute particular forms of knowledge and authority), Siegel wrote about how urban Javanese use others, including the figure of the foreigner, to construct social hierarchies. Indeed, virtually all of his work since Solo in the New Order has focused on this question of how people deal with both proximate otherness, which can usually be symbolized and named, and more profound otherness that can only be symbolized, or whose effects can only be seen, in displaced form. 14 The asynchronous act of hearing and responding to the answers was delegated to me.

REFERENCES Agar, H. Michael. 1980. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. New York: Academic Press. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bernard, H. Russell. 1988. Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. London: Sage. Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview

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Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Griaule, Marcel. 1975. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Introduction by Germaine Dieterlen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gubrium, Jaber F. and James A. Holstein. 2002a. From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 3−32. Gubrium, Jaber F. and James A. Holstein. 2002b. Distinctive Respondents. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 177−180. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume One. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 183−201. Hertz, R. 1997. Introduction: Reflexivity and Voice. Reflexivity and Voice. R. Hertz (ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Keith, Michael and Steve Pile (eds). 1993. Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge. King, Nigel and Christine Horrocks. 2010. Interviews in Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Kong, Travis S.K., Dan Mahoney, and Ken Plummer. 2002. Queering the Interview. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 239−259. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mattson, Marifran and Christiana W. Stage. 2003. Contextualized Conversation: Interviewing Exemplars. Expressions of Ethnography: Novel Approaches to Qualitative Methods. Robin Patric Clair (ed.), New York: State University of New York, pp. 107−118. Mintz, Sidney W. 1984. The Anthropological Interview and the Life History. Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (eds). Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History.

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Morris, Rosalind (ed.). 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press. Nader, Laura. 1972. Up the Anthropologist − Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. Dell H. Hymes (ed.). Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 284−311. Odendahl, Teresa and Aileen M. Shaw. 2002. Interviewing Elites. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 299−316. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Prasad, Pushkala. 2005. Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in the Postpositivist Traditions. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Reinharz, Shulamit and Susan E. Chase. 2002. Interviewing Women. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 221−238. Reiter, Rayna R. (ed.). 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Ryen, Anne. 2002. Cross-Cultural Interviewing. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 335−354. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schwalbe, Michael L. and Michelle Wolkomir. 2002. Interviewing Men. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 203−220. Shore, Cris and Susan Wright. 1999. Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in British Higher Education. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (4): 557−575. Shuy, Roger W. 2002. In-Person Versus Telephone Interviewing. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 537−555. Siegel, James T. 1993. Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Siegel, James T. 2011. Objects and Objections of Ethnography. New York: Fordham University Press. Siegel, James, Joshua Barker, and Arief Djati. 2008. Notes of a Trip through Aceh, December 2007. Indonesia 86 (October): 1−54.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271−313. Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Stage, W. Christiana and Mattson, Marifran. 2003. Ethnographic Interviewing as Contextualized Conversation. Expressions of Ethnography: Novel Approaches to Qualitative Methods. Robin Patric Clair (ed.). New York: State University of New York, pp. 97−105. Strang, Veronica. 1997. Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values. New York: Berg. Strang, V. 2010. Mapping Histories: Cultural Landscapes and Walkabout Methods. Environmental Social Sciences: Methods and Research Design,

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I. Vaccaro, E.A. Smith and S. Aswani (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132−156. Strathern, Marilyn (ed.). 2000. Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Warren, Carol A.B. 1988. Gender Issues in Field Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Warren, Carol A.B. 2002. Qualitative Interviewing. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 83−102. Wenger, G. Clare. 2002. Interviewing Older People. Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 259−278. Whyte, F. William. 1960. Interviewing in Field Research. Human Organization Research: Field Relations and Techniques. R.N. Adams and J.J. Priess (eds). New York: Dorsey Press.

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3.5 Interpreting Texts and Performances Karin Barber

TEXTS IN SOCIETY Recent anthropological approaches to text have defined it not as ‘something written’, but as a stretch of words marked out from the quotidian flow of discourse and made the object of special attention or appreciation, available for reconstitution in other contexts, at other times and places. Entextualization is the ‘process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context’ (Silverstein and Urban, 1996: 21; see also Hanks 1989). This can be done through writing, but in cultures whose predominant mode of encoding knowledge is oral, people invest enormous effort and thought in rendering spoken words memorable and recuperable. Entextualization is a ubiquitous and continuous process, involving incessant efforts to make words stick, whether orally, in manuscript or in print. Text, then, is best seen as a process rather than as a body of finished products. In this sense, it seems safe to say that all societies produce texts. But people mark, value and render recuperable different kinds of discourse in different cultures. It is the local terms and distinctions that matter, since the process of entextualization is precisely that of making

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such distinctions − between discourse that is not intended to be reconstituted and that which, in various forms, is. Since verbal forms are implicated in many ritual processes, it is worth noting the affinities between this approach to entextualization and Catherine Bell’s argument that ritual is a process of demarcating certain sequences of action from everyday, unmarked behaviour – rather than a category that can be defined, in advance, in general terms and then applied to local cases (Bell 1992). Attempting to identify a universal category such as ‘literature’ by selecting those verbal genres that most closely approximate to a historically and culturally specific (postEnlightenment, western European) category is to overlook the processes of active constitution of text in different forms. ‘Literature’ was defined by increasingly differentiating it on the one hand from history, biography, law books, and theological and scientific treatises, and on the other hand from oral, popular and ‘trashy’ forms of imaginative expression. The history of the development of this category is in itself deeply interesting and revealing of European cultural historical processes, but this does not render the endproduct suitable for general application.

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We need to start from the other end, and ask what forms of words people do actually demarcate, attend to, and recreate, and how they categorize them. Entextualization is not only a process that occurs in all communities and cultures, but also is one that is inseparable from the forms of social activity that have been the central focus of much anthropological enquiry: the establishment and perpetuation of systems of value and knowledge; the constitution of identities; the interaction with imagined other planes of existence and with the past and future; and the reflexive examination of social processes themselves. Many anthropologists ‘come across’ verbal texts in the course of researching something else: ritual, kinship, economic exchange, urbanism. A few – regrettably too few, as far as British social anthropology is concerned – take texts (oral, manuscript or print, or forms that cross the very porous boundaries between these modes) as their main object of inquiry. But whether texts are central or ancillary to the research, the same questions need to be asked and the same methods will be useful. Texts, as an embedded and continually emergent phenomenon, require to be studied in context, as an activity rather than as a finished product; in many cases they need to be understood as performance, as part of a ritual, festival, social event or interpersonal exchange, or as an intervention in an ongoing political or cultural argument. They need to be understood as forms that are differentiated and marked out for attention through certain strategies, both internal (strategies of composition) and external (modes of institutionalization, circulation, reception): that is to say, they need to be understood as socially constituted genres. But while the context is crucial, entextualization as a process of rendering stretches of discourse detachable from the immediate here-and-now context also means that texts are accorded a kind of ‘out-there’ status, which frees them from the ownership of any one producer, transmitter or receiver. A text is potentially available to be heard or read by people unknown to the speaker or

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writer, even by people far distant or yet unborn. How this uptake of texts by an audience is locally conceptualized may offer insights into wider notions about the basis of social interaction and the nature of sociality itself in that community. Interpretation of a text cannot depend on a single informant: and it requires attention to the conventions, the resources, and the potential and presumed addressees as well as actual, documented audiences. An approach based on the idea of entextualization allows us to look at the way in which verbal forms emerge from everyday life − a view of creativity which traces the generation of forms from the bottom up, and includes oral and written, popular and privileged, everyday and canonical genres in the same frame of analysis. It is possible to show how textual forms can emerge from the everyday conversation of village life − as with the Andalusian songs, which may begin ‘as bits of gossip that seem to float through the pueblo each day, year in and year out’ (Mintz 1997: 157), which are taken up and developed by groups of musicians, set to music and performed at carnival, and may then go on to be published as folleto (pamphlets), and on occasion adapted for performance to a wider television public. Thus, the text has a life story of its own which can sometimes be traced, and which sheds light on the processes of text constitution. In writing, too, one can trace the emergence over time of a body of texts: letters that shed light on the development of a personality (Burns 2006), a relationship or social network (Khumalo 2006), or a whole style of emotional expression (Besnier 1993); or diaries, such as the monumental creation of Boakye Yiadom, a Ghanaian schoolteacher, who assembled over many decades a compilation of local history, personal accounting, official information and private resolutions, a work in progress continually under revision (Miescher 2006). And in print culture, newspapers provide a site for incremental textual emergence and experimentation, where innovations can be tried out, consolidated or abandoned, so that the

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researcher can trace, instalment by instalment, not only the successes but also the failures.

PERFORMANCE AND CONTEXT While some scholars have identified the act of performance itself as the mechanism by which oral verbal art is demarcated from the surrounding discursive flow (Bauman and Briggs 1990), others have moved towards the idea that it is the words – the way they are organized, the ideas they convey − which do at least part of the work of demarcation, so that even in completely oral situations the text in some sense precedes and outlasts the moment of performance (Urban 1991; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Barber 2003). Thus, a researcher’s focus may be primarily on the live moment of performance and its improvised, responsive and fluid qualities: this will involve looking at the total performance event in all its aspects, which may include music, vocal effects (timbre, pitch, intonation), dance, gesture and interaction between participants. Or the researcher may focus primarily on the words that are performed, the way they are put together to make a text, the linguistic register, the conventions of the genre which determine what kind of thing can and cannot be done in constituting a text, and the text’s relations to other texts. Or the two approaches may be combined. Most scholars of text and performance nowadays recognize that context is crucial to understanding or describing their subjectmatter. Context has been represented various ways – among others, as a general cultural background, as linguistic environment, as a set of underlying structures which generate other social forms as well as texts, and as the field of linguistic resources, community norms, social roles and individual capacities which structure and facilitate any given verbal performance in a particular cultural setting, as is proposed in the ‘ethnography of speaking’ (Bauman and Sherzer 1974).

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When the subject of study is a live oral performance genre, however, there are a number of immediate issues which tend to face researchers whatever their theoretical focus. The first is that as part of the process of research, or as its outcome, some recension of the text or performance is going to be produced which is not itself an actual performance or performed text. Even if the aim of the research is pure participation – involvement in performance (either as audience member or, more rarely, as fellow-performer) in such a way as to gain a sensory, phenomenological understanding of the generative processes in play − still, some kind of documentation is likely to be needed in order to substantiate the insights thus gained. More often, at least part of the objective of the research is to produce a body of written texts or recordings of performance-events – records which can be stored, preserved and revisited by other researchers. Documentation raises a host of questions: about faithfulness to the live event and whether it is possible to capture its vitality when it is reduced to the constricted format of published text, film or acoustic recording; about how to make such documents comprehensible or accessible to an external audience; and about what it is the researcher actually settles for documenting. Recording, whatever form it takes, is always partial, selective and perspectival. No means of documentation can capture everything that is going on, from all points of view. Sometimes what is captured is a matter of chance or luck, sometimes a deliberate choice. Even the raw data captured by a camera or voice recorder left unobtrusively running is not equivalent to actuality: in fact, this kind of material may strike one as less ‘true to life’ than images and sounds that have been edited, layered or enhanced so as to make apparent certain features that were inaudible or invisible from the particular standpoint of the camera or recorder. Opinions differ as to whether it is of prime importance to witness and participate in a ‘natural’ or spontaneously occurring performance: i.e. one that would have happened

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whether or not the researcher were present (for an excellent discussion of this question, see Finnegan 1992: 75−82). It is very rewarding to witness a thriving performance tradition which is strongly supported by local communities and integral to their lives. If the verbal art form is part of a festival, funeral, or other larger performance, witnessing it can give an irreplaceable sense of the way the words are enmeshed with music, dance, gesture, or silence, and the way the verbal performance works together with – or in competition with – other performances going on at the same time. Certain questions can only be answered this way. Is the verbal art form central or marginal − are people actually listening to it (and if so, who)? Is it focalized within the larger event or does it seem to occur spasmodically and randomly? Even if the researcher contributes actively to a spontaneously occurring performance − for instance by playing in a musical ensemble, acting in a play, performing in a dance − his or her presence is likely to modify it only within a range of variation controlled by the group. But many researchers engage with traditions which are less robust, and it may even be that the only way to witness a performance is to instigate it oneself. When the researcher is the patron, prime mover or principal audience member, his or her presence may bring about a reorientation of the whole event. But this may have certain advantages. A command performance, or even a private one-on-one meeting to record a skilled artist, can be more revealing in some ways than a ‘natural’ one. A command performance has the advantage of alerting the performers to the ethnographer’s interests: participants may take pains to ensure that elements are not omitted, that everything is audible, and that the researcher is in the right place at the right time to witness what the local community feels to be the key elements. A private recording session can supplement these efforts in a useful way. The quality of the recording is likely to be higher. The performer is assured of space, attention and time

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to bring his or her performance to its fullest realization; the very fact of being recorded may affect the performance in a positive way, encouraging the performer to excel for the sake of posterity. (The eagerness with which many oral performers respond to the possibility of fixing a performance by means of recording is at odds with the idea that the whole art of oral performance lies in its celebration of fluidity and evanescence.) Performances instigated by the researcher require some kind of reciprocation, often taking the form of a payment. Again, opinions differ as to whether paying a performer or group of performers introduces a mercenary motive which may distort the performance and dilute its authenticity.Anthropologists tend to pride themselves on being so well accepted in a community that they can attend events just like anyone else, and can solicit specialist performances on the basis of friendship and longer-term reciprocity rather than a down payment. They resent other anthropologists who arrive and spoil the situation by throwing their cash around, attaching a monetary value to performances and thus making it more difficult for future researchers. This is worth bearing in mind when tempted to go for a quick injection of financial incentives. On the other hand, not offering a payment to a performer could be construed as rudeness, a failure to acknowledge the worth of what has been offered. Money is not necessarily associated with brute commerce: it can be a token of recognition, and the affirmation of a personal link rather than its dissolution, as Simmel proposed (Simmel 1978). Praisesingers, for instance, usually expect an acknowledgement of the service they have expertly rendered, in the form of gifts or cash: and their local patrons can often reward them much more lavishly than the struggling ethnographer – cars, fully-furnished houses and even a small aeroplane have been known to change hands (Durán 1995: 204). Individuals who have had experience of performing for TV or radio probably regard performing for the ethnographer as an undertaking of the same kind, deserving similar

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recompense. As an undergraduate student deeply interested in Okot p’Bitek, I spent a vacation travelling overland to Uganda in order to hear the Acoli songs on which Song of Lawino was allegedly modelled. I got to Gulu, and after asking around a bit, I was taken to an elderly man who was said to be the best singer in the town – the one who still remembered those old songs. He obligingly sang six or seven pieces for me before explaining his rates, based on what he was paid for his regular performances for Radio Uganda. Needless to say I was aghast, for the price was way beyond my total worldly wealth at the time. The moral of this is to enquire – tactfully – beforehand rather than after the event. It is undeniable that instigation or invitation by a researcher does affect a performance more than his or her mere presence at an event that would have happened anyway (though the latter can certainly be affected too). The real question is whether this is necessarily deleterious, and whether anxiety about it derives from a misplaced search for purity. David Conrad offered to pay his longterm friend and informant Tayiru Banbera for a special rendition of the Bamana epic of Segou. The payment was agreed as a rate per cassette that Banbera filled. One cannot help wondering whether that is at least partly the reason for the extraordinarily leisurely, ample and digressive style of the epic as narrated by Banbera. The condensed allusions, brief nominalized evocations of deeds through names, the riddle-like formulations that one finds so often in other Sahelian epics are here all spelled out, all carefully and patiently explained. But the result is fascinating and valuable, an illuminating instance of a local intellectual expanding and developing his art and his ideas in a contact situation (Conrad 1990; Moraes Farias 1991; Barber 2007: 98−100). And frankly, people often need the money – as well as all the other kinds of reciprocity that a longer stay and familiarity with a community make possible. More broadly, the tendency to shorter and more concentrated fieldwork is nowadays

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inexorably leading to a greater reliance on interviews and focus-group sessions instead of in-depth participation based on hanging around waiting for things to happen. It is therefore likely that the recording and documentation of performances will increasingly take place in staged, studio conditions or, even if ‘spontaneously occurring’, without the prolonged immersion that would make very rich contextualization possible.

AUDIENCES If locally produced texts are under-studied by anthropologists, their audiences – whether readers or listeners − are even less well documented. Yet the audience is an integral part of the constitution of a text. Richard Bauman defined performance as the assumption of responsibility by a speaker for a display of communicative competence which would justify his/her interlocutors’ concession of the normal conversational turn-taking. That is, the speakers would undertake to make it worth their interlocutors’ while to shut up and pay attention. This, conversely, implies that an audience can be defined as those people who concede the attention that makes a performance possible: there can be no performance without an audience. There are further senses, too, in which audiences are co-constitutive of performance, and of text (Duranti 1986). Audiences cannot be thought of as just ‘consuming’ or ‘receiving’ an already-constituted meaning. In performance genres they often have a creative input into the actual production of the text or textual event, as for instance when an audience corroborates an epic narrator’s words with rhythmic interjections; when audiences at a popular play complete the proverbs cited by the actors, or shout warnings to a character oblivious of danger; and when a dilemma tale leads to discussion and debate among the listeners. Audience reactions often have a constitutive role that outlasts the moment of performance. Audiences at popular improvised Yoruba theatre, for

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example, could shape the long-term development of a play by responding more enthusiastically to some parts of it than others – the popular parts would gradually be expanded and elaborated, while those that were received more coolly could by degrees be jettisoned, even if they initially seemed essential to the logic of the plot (Barber 2000). Manuscript cultures could afford participants comparable opportunities to be simultaneously audience and co-author, as for instance when courtly poets of sixteenthcentury England passed their poems to others in their coterie, who would add a verse of their own in response (Wall 1993); or when Japanese elites engaged in the act of reading ‘primarily for the purpose of artistic creation or re-creation’, as a ‘catalyst to create a new text’ (Gerstle 2003: 359); or when readers would sing classical Javanese tembang verse aloud, with ‘graceful and well-executed additions’ of their own, to the point that ‘the reader in a sense participates in creating the text’ (Keeler 1987: 186). In all these instances, writing and performance intersect just as reader and writer merge. Print culture did apparently split the reader off from the writer: verbal creation became an apparently finished product, in line with its status as a commodity – take it or leave it. But people had their own ways of intervening in the production even of printed books – for instance by producing copy-books of their own, binding a miscellany of printed items together along with their own manuscript pages, and, by this process of selection and juxtaposition, producing a new text. Newspapers, because of their serial and incremental form, can be particularly responsive to readers’ interventions. Editors can try out a new style of writing with a relatively low investment: if readers respond positively, the genre can become consolidated and elaborated; if not, it can easily be abandoned. More directly, readers may contribute substantial portions of the newspaper text (readers’ letters, occasional pieces, commentary). And in media culture, cultural studies theorists have documented the many ways in

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which viewers and listeners – formerly conceived as passive consumers – interact with media texts: by switching on and off, recording, wiping, assembling, sampling and supplementing one medium with another − for example, a soap with a celebrity magazine (Gray 1992). The interaction of audiences with texts and performances is sustained by specific material and institutional arrangements which need to be researched. In the case of performance events, we need to ask what kind of space performers meet audiences in and how they occupy that space in relation to each other. Do they meet as a sociable audience previously known to each other and to the performers – as in a village festival – or as an anonymous urban crowd, brought together momentarily by the spectacle itself, as in music hall? How are printed texts disseminated – are they mass-produced and simultaneously available over a wide area, or do they gradually make their way out along trade routes, trickling from train to truck, from truck to bicycle, until they finally wind up in a village headmaster’s bookshelf? Are newspapers regarded as ephemera or as texts to be preserved, treasured, re-read and passed around? Are television programmes watched by a nuclear family, or does the television owner’s sitting room become a small cinema for the neighbourhood whenever a popular programme is aired? The answers to these questions may point to the emergence of an audience conceptualized for the first time as a public (Barber 1997): that is, as a constituency that is, in principle if not in practice, of indefinite extent and made up of anonymous and interchangeable units − a way of imagining an audience that is often in conscious contrast to the face-to-face audiences of older oral and communal performances. The idea of the public was made possible by print and later by the electronic media; but it was also built upon the experience of the urban crowd and represented shifts in the way society was conceptualized. Beyond these concrete forms of interaction between text/performance and audience,

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it can be said that all texts and performances imply a listener or reader. The orientation of the text, the expectation that it will be taken up in a particular way by a reader or listener, is inscribed in the text itself and is a defining feature if it. Paying attention to how a text or performance addresses a real and imagined audience is a key to grasping both what it says and what it does. Audience, then, is crucial to interpreting text and performance. But audience activity, even in its more obvious forms, can be tricky to access and document. Spectacles such as films, theatres, dance and musical performances are engrossing while they go on, precluding much interaction with the ethnographer; then they finish and the audience is often in a hurry to go home. The act of reading, in many cultures, is private and to a large extent not describable to another person. What people say about a text or performance may be highly conventional while what they experience may be highly individual and idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, much can be learnt about how audiences understand their role and what they contribute to the constitution of a text or performance. In certain kinds of performances, the researcher can make discoveries simply by being there and attending to the audience’s reactions: in some theatrical genres, for example, audiences keep up a stream of comments to each other or to the audience and performers at large – repeating catch-phrases, completing proverbs, denouncing badly-behaved characters and even predicting what would be said or done next (Barber 2000). The occurrence of laughter and tension can be documented with revealing results. The researchers can distribute questionnaires, as Alain Ricard did at Togolese concert party performances, thus discovering that the travelling troupes had a definite, knowledgeable fan-base as well as a wider and less well-informed occasional public (Ricard 1986). The researcher can make contact with a number of fellow audience members and invite them to participate in an interview or group discussion after the

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event. This is especially likely to yield good results if the performance takes place in a community where the researcher is already well known. A particular opportunity presents itself when the medium under discussion is film, video or audio recording: a group of participants can be invited to watch a screening and then discuss it. If the performance takes place in a school or is of a type that is attended by many schoolchildren, the researcher can ask permission to set the children an essay question on a particular performance or event, and can offer a small prize for the most interesting answer. And in some circumstances it might be possible to invite aficionados of a particular genre to keep a diary, recording over a period of time what they watched, or heard or read, and what they thought about it. This is particularly likely to work for readers, to whom personal writing is often closely associated with the practice of reading and the aspirations that activity embodies.

INTERPRETING TEXTS If the audience is part of the textual or performance event, then participants’ ideas about what a text is, what it does and in what ways it can be held to ‘have meaning’ are part of the constitution of the text. Central to these ideas is the sensitivity to genre: that is, to what kind of text is at hand. The concept of genre is often used typologically, from an external point of view, classifying texts on the basis of their morphological features, like natural species. But recent approaches to genre have preferred to see it as a localized way of organizing speech activity, understood as a repertoire of skills, dispositions and expectations, ‘an orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse’ (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 142−143). This approach is sensitive to the variable, overlapping, fuzzy nature of local classifications, and to the way in which genre features may be blended and combined and are continually under revision with every new instantiation.

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It also recognizes the embeddedness of perceptions of genre, noting that performance mode and context may determine genre identification as much as, or more than, morphological features. Local ideas about genre shed light on what people think is worth entextualizing, for what social purpose, and how they understand the differences between different kinds of texts. An underlying assumption of most studies of text and performance is that they exist in order to communicate. But their impact may not depend on their semantic content. As with the visual art that Gell (1998) describes as existing to dazzle and overpower the viewer rather than to convey a message or attract aesthetic appreciation, so there are many genres of verbal art whose effectuality may be only indirectly related to the actual meaning of the words. The deep gratification experienced when you are saluted with your oriki (praise poetry) in the Yoruba-speaking area may be independent of any ability to assign a meaning to the cryptic, obscure phrases: from the day of their birth, people grow up hearing their oriki offered as comfort, congratulation, esteem and affirmations of belongingness. Although knowledgeable people take immense pleasure in deciphering and expanding the obscure fragments of praise poetry, this is not the only source of their power to move people, with sometimes electrifying force. On the other hand, the fascinating power of performance and text may be something that people resist, rather than engage with. Such, at any rate, is the hypothesis of Ward Keeler in relation to Javanese wayang kulit shadow plays, whose ability to enchant and induce forgetfulness, he suggests, is feared, and deflected by deliberate inattention and misconstrual (Keeler 1987: 213−225). Even more important is the fact that many oral traditions are accompanied and supported by parallel traditions of exegesis. These may be crucial to the constitution of what the text is held to mean. In extreme cases, they may even be the only aspect of the total process of text production that has an

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identifiable semantic content. A classic example of this is the ‘great song’, part of a ritual performed by the Gnau of New Guinea. The song, which took all night to perform, was made of archaic, foreign and largely incomprehensible words, like a stylized and distorted but still recognizable representation of real language. Interpretation involved a highly active and creative process of supplementation: ‘… they would pick among the sounds, here and there, such correspondences as would sustain their interpretation of what that verse was about’ (Lewis 1980: 60). Here, the process of interpretation seems to be almost autonomous, attaching meanings to a text that would otherwise be completely incomprehensible. More frequently, texts may be constructed of recognizable syntax and vocabulary, but of obscure meaning, often because they are highly allusive, pointing to an explanation that cannot be inferred from the words of the text itself but must be supplied from an independent source of knowledge not available to all. For example, praise poetry genres across sub-Saharan Africa are deliberately constructed to be opaque and riddle-like: Asante apae praises, ajogan songs of the kings of Porto Novo, Ila praise poetry, the dynastic poetry of the Yaka-speaking Lunda conquerors in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are all said by their custodians to conceal meaning rather than display it, and to insinuate the facts rather than describe them.1 The obscured and concealed meanings are expounded in parallel traditions of narrative, which may be genres in their own right with their own conventions. Thus, the work of constituting meaning is distributed between two genres, which may be transmitted by two separate categories of people. In the case of Yoruba oriki, women are the most frequent performers of the praise poetry, while male elders are the most frequent narrators of itan, the historical narratives which explain the obscure allusions of oriki. Carried in parallel by these two categories of knowledgeable person, the two genres are completely interdependent: narrators of

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itan rely on fragments of praise poetry as triggers, stepping stones and targets of their narrative, whereas performers of praise chants construct their texts from allusions that only the narrators of itan can expand. Uneven and often hierarchical distribution of the knowledge required to decipher one of these deliberately obscure texts is characteristic of this kind of knowledge economy: it may be thought that the only people entitled to pronounce on the true meaning of a text are the royal bards, the male elders, the ritual specialists or the lineage head. Others may be able to seize on a surface meaning, but the ‘deep’ meaning belongs to a privileged category of knowers. With many other genres, exegesis is not so much a defined tradition in its own right, more a set of assumptions, procedures and specific ancillary knowledge which local interpreters bring to bear on the text, often in variable and idiosyncratic ways. Strategies of interpretation can involve the mobilization of etymology, aetiology, puns and networks of associations in which an explanation may lead on to another text, and interpretation may involve traversing a whole field of interrelated textual material of different genres. Or they may depend on personal memories of incidents only known to a few intimate associates of the poet (for a fascinating example, see Boyd and Fardon 1992). These strategies and procedures reveal how texts are locally understood to have meaning. The importance of researching and recording the exegetical tradition cannot be overemphasised. This is where ethnographic research into texts is most lacking and most needed. We have many examples of meticulous, scholarly presentations of texts with virtually no clues to the mode, content or nature of the interpretative procedures which complement them: what we have is half the picture. It is admittedly tempting to record material while in the field and postpone the exacting and time-consuming business of close analysis until afterwards. But the result is likely to be that the interpretation of the text will be based on the anthropologist’s

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own intuitions and general background knowledge. Such interpretations may be astute, but to the extent that they rely on modern Western assumptions about how texts have meaning, they are likely to overlook or distort local understandings. Modern literary criticism, formed in the context of the rise of print culture and universal literacy, assumes that texts exist in the public domain; that they are publicly accessible; that in principle, they are equally accessible to everyone who has the necessary linguistic and cultural competence – which, again, is derived from publicly available sources; and that the meaning of the text lies in the text itself (‘the words on the page’, as the New Criticism put it). All these assumptions fail to fit the kinds of text we have just discussed, where specialized and unevenly distributed supplementary knowledge is integral to way a text is held to have meaning. Researching exegetical traditions and procedures alongside the texts themselves may seem a daunting challenge. But in fact, in the process of recording, transcribing and translating a text, if it is done in collaboration with members of the local community, a great deal of this kind of contextual and interpretative material will emerge. The key is to be attentive to it and to follow it up when clues are offered.

TRANSCRIPTION AND TRANSLATION As fieldwork handbooks will rightly tell you (see for example Pelto and Pelto 1978: 118, Ellen 1984: 186−187), it’s easy to record and hard to process what’s been recorded. Concentrating too much on recording everything can be a distraction from observing and participating, and one ends up with hundreds of hours of material which one never has time to transcribe, translate or probably even listen to again. Transcribing from an audio recording, where you cannot benefit from visual clues, is very difficult. Many texts were entextualized precisely by recourse to archaic, obscure or otherwise difficult

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language – ‘deep’ registers which gain their value from their rarity. It is often very hard even for a native speaker to catch everything. Speech communities, as the ethnography of speaking theorists point out, are usually heterogeneous, with different levels of competence and access. For assistance with transcription, what is needed is someone who is literate but also competent in deep local registers, and this may not be common. Even a literate and locally-knowledgeable person may not be accustomed to the rather strange idea of meticulous, verbatim transcription, so it may be necessary to go through the transcriptions with them line by line, listening, comparing, and asking questions. Such work is arduous and requires payment: something to remember when research budgets are drawn up. Above all, unless the recorded texts are in a plain, standard register that is easily accessible to most native speakers, it is not wise to count on being able to take them home, or to the capital city, and there find someone who can do the job. Transcribing is not just a matter of hearing but also of recognizing − words, idioms, genres and allusions − and a local person is more likely to have the necessary knowledge and familiarity to be able to do this. Working closely with a transcriber during fieldwork may lead to illuminating discussions and unexpected insights. Many decisions have to be made about transcription. These have been well discussed by Finnegan (1992), who demonstrates the different levels or degrees of faithfulness possible – from capturing every cough, pause and false start, to something approximating more to a paraphrase. Which level is adopted depends on the purpose of the recording, but it is important to be consistent, and to make one’s procedures explicit. And, if the source language has a standard, preferred, or official orthography (even if this is not fully known or accepted by everyone), it is advisable to use it. The inequality between languages in the world is a burning issue, and treating a ‘minority’ language as if it was so unimportant that the researcher can write it any way

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he or she likes may be perceived as insulting. After all, one would not presume to write French without any accents. Then we come to translation: this is the crux of the matter. To some anthropologists, as is well known, translation stands as a metaphor or analogy for the anthropological enterprise as a whole (Geertz 1973). To others, it is literally rather than metaphorically what anthropology is about, with textual translation at the centre of everwidening rings of contextual and cultural interpretation – as in A.L. Becker’s ‘modern philology’. His discussion of wayang kulit – Javanese shadow play – shows how translating the words of this richly-verbal genre leads into exploring fundamental conceptions of time and causality, where sequence does not necessarily imply temporal order, let alone causal relations. To understand wayang kulit involves taking up a position in an ideational environment built on assumptions about the very nature of language, knowledge and text which are alien to present-day Westerners. The goal of Becker’s approach to text is to render such constructs comprehensible to outsiders through a process of expanded translation, starting from the text itself. Translating the words is only the tip of the iceberg: the modern philologist must also render visible the internal relations of textual elements within the text (i.e. the genre conventions), the text’s relations to other texts (i.e. its relationship to a tradition), the composer’s relations to the content, medium and audience, and the relations of the text to ‘non-literary events’ outside the text. Such a formidable undertaking is equivalent, in Becker’s own account, to learning everything you need to know in order to generate a text; and in fact he did approach this topic by learning to perform wayang kulit from a master puppeteer, thus discovering ‘how to build a text in Javanese’ (Becker 1979: 211). Such profound engagement with textual production is not always possible, and Becker’s is not the only approach to ethnographic translation. Nonetheless, it serves as

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a reminder that, for any anthropologist planning to work with locally-generated texts, there is more involved in translation than knowing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the sentences. Translation always goes beyond just asking an ‘informant’ to ‘provide the meaning’. The work of producing a translation is complex and manylayered and requires curiosity, openness, persistence, patience and imagination. As a project, this work in itself deserves scrutiny and exploration: the notebooks that are filled in the process of working with people on texts can be fascinating documents. What results at the end of this process is never ‘pure’, authentic indigenous data, but a co-production between ethnographers, assistants, performers and exegetes. The degree of input from each depends on the circumstances. An elicited life story is very much a co-work, in which the researcher’s questions, prompts, expressions of interest, not to mention broader practical issues like local perceptions of what she or he is there for, how well they know each other, and how many hours the researcher and narrator have at their joint disposal play a formative part in the constitution of the text. American cultural and linguistic anthropologists, notably those working on Native American cultures, are known for long-term collaboration with individual knowledgeable interlocutors, leading to the ‘co-production of texts, preferably in the native language’ (Fogelson 1999: 81) and often involving the creation of new forms. They could build up extraordinary linguistic and personal rapport, leading to interactions which were highly productive and sometimes became ‘so intense as to resemble a folie à deux’ (ibid.) A recording of a strongly defined, strictly transmitted and culturally prestigious text such as Rwandan dynastic histories is not a co-production to nearly the same extent: nonetheless, the recording, transcription and, of course, the translation all involve multiple decisions and selections which are interposed between the emitted performance and the document produced as part of the anthropological research.

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Having acknowledged that no documentation of a text or performance comes close to the experience of a fully culturallyknowledgeable participant, it remains to say that if it is done well, a recorded, transcribed and translated text can be a joy to behold and a pearl beyond price. It can capture unique moments; preserve wonderful examples of traditions which, as always, are dying out; provide a focus for detailed, patient analysis and exploration with local interlocutors; and in some cases it can enter the domain of ‘world literature’, expanding the repertoire of forms which readers, writers and performers everywhere may encounter and profit from. In the process, of course, you produce a fixed and apparently inert text, to represent a live, responsive performance. This is true no matter how much effort is put into transcribing vocal effects, pauses, emphases, changes of tone and so on. But this can be seen as an addition, and a branching out, rather than a travesty. The recording of oral performances is perhaps the classic case of anthropological engagement with verbal productions; but working with manuscripts and printed texts raises some similar issues and brings similar rewards. Letters, diaries, notebooks and other kinds of personal writing often require careful reconstruction of the context in order to decipher their allusions; textual genres published in newspapers and pamphlets produced for localized audiences may draw on oral techniques of text production and may also exploit new conventions, forged in the very processes of convening a new kind of public. As with oral genres, local modes of assigning meaning to these texts are an essential part of the work of anthropological interpretation.

DIGITAL MEDIA Digital technology has enormously expanded the range of possibilities for recording, preserving, analysing, editing and presenting recensions of texts and performances.

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It provides the most accurate and permanent means available of capturing and storing images, sound and text in a form not subject to degradation through copying. It has opened the door to new kinds of collaboration, both between researcher and members of a community, and between two or more researchers. It can supply new kinds of texts/performances – such as blogs, listserves and interactive websites – which are open to new kinds of participant observation, and which may function simultaneously as subject of study, method and output. It has provided new interactive ways of teaching anthropology. And because of the increasing availability of personal digital media worldwide, it has allowed anthropologists to engage with new audiences. Even the old-fashioned business of reading documents in an archive has been transformed by digital photography. Instead of spending hot dusty weeks painstakingly taking notes on a mountain of texts, one can create good-quality digital images quickly and relatively effortlessly, transfer them to a lightweight laptop (backed up on an external hard drive) and take them away to study elsewhere – achieving enhanced legibility through manipulation of the images. The only caveats are to be very careful about keeping a log of exactly what each image is, and to check the quality of the images frequently as one is working. As with any other form of recording, it is necessary to operate some kind of selection process on the spot, in order to identify relevant texts – but even so, one usually finds one has missed the exact page which would have completed one’s argument! Some archivists don’t like digital photography going on in their domain, so it is important to seek permission first, and if necessary negotiate some form of quid pro quo. There can be other problems: I worked in an archive recently where the only lighting was a defective fluorescent strip which flickered randomly, so that half my images are brilliantly lit and so sharp that you can actually see the raised edges of the print, while the other half are a dim pink and barely legible. A wider concern is preservation. Producing digital images of rare texts is generally a

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good way of helping to create a record of a resource which will sooner or later (depending on the conditions in the archive) crumble away; but it must be done carefully and responsibly. Where documents are threatened by poor conditions, the ideal would be to collaborate with local archivists to raise funds from a scheme such as the British Library’s Endangered Archives to organize a professional process of digitization. There will still be issues to negotiate about ownership, access and the extent to which the resulting digital material can be made freely available, but there is no doubt that creating digital images is at present the best insurance there is against the probable loss of many precious documents held in under-resourced libraries in adverse conditions. Digital sound and video recording, as well as photography, have made it possible to create vast repositories of ‘raw’ (or rather, only lightly-cooked) field data which can be used for various purposes. Unobtrusive, lightweight video cameras with huge capacity for data storage can be used to capture scenes of daily life far more intimate, informal and responsive than was possible with VHS tape, let alone the celluloid of early ethnographic film-making. This has introduced new dynamics in the relationship between ethnographer and members of a community. The ethnographer can more easily work alone – without the camera crew, which creates a distance between film-maker and his/her interlocutors (MacDougall 2001). This, combined with the fact that people in the communities where anthropologists work increasingly have access to such technology themselves, makes for a different kind of participant observation. The traditional ‘wall’ separating viewer from viewed becomes fluid in an interactive video context, with observation occurring in both directions and feedback arising instantly (Shrum, Duque and Brown 2005). An even greater transformation takes place in the realm of analysis and presentation. Non-linear desk-top editing systems make it possible for the anthropologist him- or herself to edit digital sound and video files like

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a text – cutting, pasting and modifying for purposes of analysis, composition and presentation − without destroying the original media file. Particular moments can be pinpointed and pulled out for closer analysis. In creating presentations of the work, a combination of sound, video, still images, and text can be linked in such a way that the ‘reader’ can navigate at will between elements, seeking explanation or commentary, freezing a moving image, for example, while seeking the commentary that explains a particular feature. There is almost unlimited scope for the provision of annotations of different kinds, and links to related material, explanatory background texts and translations. This has led to presentations of ethnographic material on text and performance which are of a very different kind from classic ethnographic documentaries. One pioneering example is Luis Nicolau’s multimedia presentation on African-Brazilian rituals, which takes two core sequences of video and builds around them static images, graphics, animations, sounds and texts in order to present an analysis of the ritual structure and the phenomenon of spirit possession (Nicolau 1998). Another is the ‘Synchrotext’ web-based archive of oral texts by Haya performers from northern Tanzania, created by Peter Seitel and supported by the Smithsonian Institution.2 A split-screen presentation of a transcription and English translation are synchronized with the recorded voice by means of a visual pointer, so that listeners can follow the written text line by line as they listen. The text is studded with links to supplementary materials of several types: plot summaries, stylistic analysis, footnotes glossing vocabulary and explaining cultural allusions, photographs, and editorial notes, which can be opened at any point and then closed to revert to the performance. The same technique can be used to present annotated, contextualized video recordings. To produce such documentation clearly takes an enormous amount of work. But the result is that one can experience the recorded text/ performance and the explanation, contextualization and analysis of it almost in the same

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instant. Exploring such presentations is fascinating and absorbing. Increased possibilities for dissemination and data-sharing are a further advantage of digital technology. The web offers almost unlimited scope for the publication of materials which would be costly or impossible to publish in book form, or unattractive to publishers because of their specialized nature. A well-supported website creates the possibility of a special-interest collection which all scholars working in a particular area will visit and may at some point contribute to. A case in point is the Archives of Popular Swahili, curated by Johannes Fabian and Vincent de Rooij, which makes available texts which have ‘remained unpublished or are otherwise hard to get. Such materials may include, for instance, private documents, such as letters, autobiographies, lyrics, religious tracts, out of print text collections, locally produced books, journals and magazines, or transcripts of field recordings.’3 This website not only generously makes available otherwise unobtainable ethnographic research materials but also invites and encourages participation in a collaborative project to add to and interpret them. What is exciting about web-based repositories such as Synchrotext and the popular Swahili site is that they are potentially indefinitely expansible, a living, growing archive.4 This is not necessarily raw material – it can be deeply researched, carefully edited and interpreted documentation – but it nonetheless preserves something of the thrill of the live performance or the archival objet trouvé. Finally, multimedia web-based documentation makes it possible to generate novel teaching experiences. One of the first efforts in this direction was the Experience-Rich Anthropology project run by the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent, led by Michael Fischer and David Zeitlyn (see Zeitlyn 2000). This project makes resources available for new kinds of student scrutiny and encourages students to engage with and interpret ethnographic material for themselves. Materials range from older ethnographic work that would

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otherwise not be available, such as the field diaries − and related materials − of the distinguished anthropologists Phyllis Kaberry and Sally Chilver, to an experiment in documenting ‘A Day in the Life’ of a Cameroonian village, presenting brief video clips recorded at one-hour intervals in three different locations in the village throughout a single day. Even more engaging is the section on African divination, where the viewer can enter a simulated divination sequence and attempt to apply the relevant interpretative techniques.

whole, to preserve and present the material in the most effective way, and to the scholarly community to make his or her material accessible. Whether this is done by depositing texts and recordings in a library or archive, or by making them available online, depends on the material, the researcher’s approach to it and the wishes, or at least consent, of the local community. And in the rare situation where the anthropologist produces a best-seller, or anything remotely like one, some of the royalties ought to be shared with the individuals, groups or communities who made the production of the published document possible.

RESPONSIBILITIES As co-creator of a document representing a local text or performance, the ethnographer has to balance two ethical requirements: that of fully crediting his or her principal collaborators, and that of protecting the identity of anyone who might be damaged by exposure. Intellectual property rights and data protection rights are the legal dimensions of these ethical imperatives. Needless to say, they often come into conflict with each other and with people’s expectations and assumptions on the ground. The interaction of international legal copyright agreements and national or more localized understandings of ownership and authorship is a developing field of enquiry that reveals how complex the issues are. When it comes to autobiographical narratives and personal manuscripts, the ethnographer has an even greater responsibility to ensure that the speaker/writer of the text is fully aware of the use it will be put to – the purpose of the proposed published edition and the nature of the anthropologist’s editorial interventions. Beyond the issue of rights and ownership is the perennially tricky problem of whether or not to publish contentious material that some people may disagree with or find embarrassing, and which may affect ongoing political and social conflicts in unforeseen ways. These situations can only be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with as much sensitivity and openness as possible. The anthropologist of texts also has obligations towards the local community as a

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NOTES 1 For details of all these examples, and references to the sources, see Barber 2007: 79–81. 2 See www.performedwords.org/synchrotext.htm 3 Archives of Popular Swahili website http:// www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/index.html, accessed 13.5.2011. 4 Perhaps I may be allowed to mention here the new 'local intellectuals' strand offered by the journal Africa, which presents writings by Africans thinkers outside the academic mainstream – diaries, memoirs, local histories and so on, produced by teachers, catechists, traders, autodidacts. In the print version of the journal, contributions take the form of a scholarly essay introducing an edited excerpt of a 'local intellectual' text; but in the online version a hyperlink takes you to the entire local intellectual text, as well as supplementary materials such as interview, photographs, and so on. Eventually these contributions will constitute an archive representing a vitally important but generally overlooked stratum of African intellectual production.

REFERENCES Barber, Karin 1997 ‘Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa’, Africa 67, 3 (347−362). Barber, Karin 2000 The Generation of Plays: Yoruba popular life in theatre. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Barber, Karin 2003 ‘Text and performance in Africa’, Bulletin of SOAS 66, 3 (324−333). Barber, Karin 2007 The Anthropology of Texts. Persons and Publics: Oral and written culture in Africa and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs 1990 ‘Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on

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language and social life’, Annual Review of Anthropology 19. Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer 1974 Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, A.L. 1979 ‘Text-building, epistemology, and aesthetics in Javanese shadow theatre’, in The Imagination of Reality: Essays in southeast Asian coherence systems, A.L. Becker and Aram A. Yengoyan (eds). Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 211−243. Bell, Catherine 1992 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Besnier, Niko 1993 ‘Literacy and feelings: the encoding of affect in Nukulaelae letters’, in Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy, Brian V. Street (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyd, Raymond and Richard Fardon 1992 ‘Bìsíwe.e.rí: the songs and times of a Muslim Chamba woman (Adamawa State, Nigeria)’, African Languages and Cultures 5, 1 (11−41). Burns, Catherine 2006 ‘The letters of Louisa Mvemve’, in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday literacy and making the self, Karin Barber (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Briggs, Charles L. and Richard Bauman 1992 ‘Genre, intertextuality, and social power’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, 2 (131−172). Conrad, David C. (ed.) 1990 A State of Intrigue: The epic of Bamana Segu according to Tayiru Banbera. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Durán, Lucy 1995 ‘Jelimusow: the superwomen of Malian music’, in Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature, Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro 1986 ‘The audience as co-author: an introduction’, Text 6, 3 (239−247). Ellen, R.F. 1984 Ethnographic Research: A guide to general conduct. London: Academic Press. Finnegan, Ruth 1992 Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A guide to research practices. London: Routledge. Fogelson, Raymond D. 1999 ‘Nationalism and the Americanist tradition’, in Theorizing the Americanist Tradition, Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell (eds). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gell, Alfred 1998 Art and Agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerstle, C. Andrew 2003 ‘The culture of play: Kabuki and the production of texts’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, 3 (358−379). Gray, Ann 1992 Video Playtime: The gendering of a leisure technology. London: Routledge. Hanks, W.F. 1989 ‘Text and textuality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (95−127).

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Keeler, Ward 1987 Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Khumalo, Vukile 2006 ‘Ekukhanyeni Letter-writers: an historical inquiry into epistolary network(s) and political imagination in KwaZulu/Natal − South Africa, 1890−1900’, in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday literacy and making the self, Karin Barber (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lewis, Gilbert 1980 Day of Shining Red: An essay on understanding ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacDougall, David 2001 ‘Renewing ethnographic film: is digital video changing the genre?’ Anthropology Today 17, 3 (15−21). Miescher, Stephan F. 2006 ‘“My own life“: A. K. Boakye Yiadom’s autobiography − the writing and subjectivity of a Ghanaian teacher−catechist’, in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday literacy and making the self, Karin Barber (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 27−51. Mintz, Jerome R. 1997 Carnival Song and Society: Gossip, sexuality and creativity in Andalusia. Oxford/ New York: Berg. Moraes Farias, P. F.de with S. Bulman 1991 ‘David C. Conrad: A State of Intrigue’ [review], Africa 61, 4 (542−545). Nicolau, Luis 1998 Ritual Spirit Possession in the Mina Nagô of North Brazil (CD-ROM). Experience Rich Anthropology (ERA) project, University of Kent. London: Toifund. Pelto, Pertti J. and Gretel H. Pelto 1978 Anthropological Research: The structure of inquiry, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricard, Alain 1986 L’Invention du Théâtre: Le théâtre et les comédiens en Afrique noire. Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’Homme. Shrum, Wendy, Ricardo Duque and Timothy Brown 2005 ‘Digital video as research practice: methodology for the millennium’, Journal of Research Practice 1, 1 http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/6/11 Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban (eds) 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, Georg 1978 The Philosophy of Money, 2nd edn. David Frisby (ed.), Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (trans.). London: Routledge. Urban, Greg 1991. A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wall, Wendy 1993 The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zeitlyn, David 2000 ‘Archiving anthropology’, FQS Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1, 3, article 17 http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/ article/view/1034/2236

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3.6 Blurred Visions: Reflecting Visual Anthropology Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright

THE VISUAL FIELD In 2001, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) set out guidelines for an evaluation of the field of visual anthropology in terms of its contribution to ethnographic knowledge, its methods and theory, its importance as a form of pedagogy, and its application in anthropological research. The short statement of less than 1,000 words was produced by the Society for Visual Anthropology to address the need for clarification about the qualitative assessment of visual works in terms of disciplinary standards. The AAA reached the opinion that visual media are appropriate for the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge because they can ‘convey distinct forms of knowledge that writing cannot’ and they provide a means to experience and understand ‘ethnographic complexity richness and depth’. Methods of visual media production are equivalent to other ethnographic research techniques in the sense that they include long-term localized engagements, interviews and participant observation. The impact of theory may be less immediately evident in some visual media than in print, but works such as ethnographic

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films are nonetheless based on and directed towards theoretical analysis. Technical decisions made in production, such as the choices of camera, image composition and the combination of image and sound and image and text, are in themselves all modes of analysis. Hence, visual media ‘intrinsically align theory and documentation in the tradition of print scholarship’. The effectiveness of visual media in anthropological pedagogy is asserted, and a claim made that visual anthropology provides a means to engage in anthropology which is ‘made with and/or for the benefit of a particular community, government or business’. In summary, the AAA statement contends that visual anthropology is a form of anthropological research because it is ethnographically descriptive, methodologically committed to participant observation and interviews, theoretically insightful, pedagogically useful and has potential application. The statement is significant because it reflectshow long-standing concerns about the relationship with anthropology from within the field of visual anthropology are shared by the AAA, which acts as the largest public representation and governing body of the discipline.

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THE CONCEPT The AAA statement successfully identifies the centrality of method to the definition of visual anthropology, but it is less clear about the concept of ‘the visual’ in visual anthropology which is required to define the range of topics, theoretical issues and modes of practice involved. We begin by addressing the question left unposed: What should we understand by the ‘visual’ in ‘visual anthropology’? Questions about the relevance of the visual to anthropological theory and ethnographic practice, whether as concept, subject or method, have foundered on its contrary significations. On the one hand, the visual refers to a world made visible through an underlying scientism and Cartesian metaphysic (Benjamin 1999; Buck-Morss 1989; Deleuze 1985, 1994; Jay 1988) and, on the other, it means a mode of sensory apperception variously called ‘corporeal vision’ (MacDougall 2006), ‘haptic visuality’ (Marks 2000), ‘tactile visuality’ (Taussig 1993) and ‘attention’ in observation (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009). The radical difference between these views reflects less on the identification of a nominal subject – visual culture – than on different ideas about the nature of visual practices: as functionaries of the structure of imaging technology (Tomas 1992; Weiner 1997), as an ethnographic mode involving reflection upon processes of image production (Pink 2001), or as a quality of corporeal engagement with persons, places and events (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009; Macdougall 2006). In all these cases, appreciation of image productions as ethnography has been made on the basis of their relative distinctiveness from texts, a tendency which has been judged to betray, at best, circumspection about the visual and, at worst, ‘iconophobia’ (Taylor 1996). This notion may be extreme but it is still important to understanding debates about the relevance of visual anthropology to the discipline at large, which is the focus of the second half of this essay. Exemplary cases of iconophobia would be Hastrup’s epistemological argument (1992)

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for the ‘thickness’ of textual narratives in contrast to the map-like, schematic ‘thinness’ of image-based description, discussed later in this essay, or Fabian’s assertion of an anthropological dependency on static visualism (1983) in contrast to an active vision (Okely 2001). The distinction between these terms is explained by Okely as follows: ‘Fabian’s definition of visualism selects only one aspect of vision, confining it to the perspective of the surveyor and the draftsman. There are other visions, other ways of seeing, and ones which can be considered experiential rather than detached and omniscient’ (2001: 102). One response to iconophobia has taken the form of assertions about the potential of film as ethnography supported by the invocation of a canon of works by figures such as Robert Flaherty, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch and most notably Jean Rouch. In debates about the proper qualification of an ‘ethnographic filmmaker’ (Ruby 2000), text has been acknowledged as providing necessary contextualization of film, but the potential of alternative ideas have been less thoroughly explored, among these the ‘image-text’ (Mitchell 1994), metaphor (Jackson 1983) and montage (Marcus 2008). These alternatives point towards some constructive and evocative conjunctions of text and image on the page. The ‘new media’, such as ‘hypermedia’ (Pink et al. 2004), provide examples for such conjunctions, but they are usually supported as ‘technical and methodological’ means to overcome the disciplinary definition provided by the AAA statement and others like it, rather than as constructive applications of a media ‘co-aesthetic’ able to provide ethnographic insight in terms particular to the subject under study. Sensitivity to the representational politics of knowledge production has informed concern for the positioning and responsibilities of the observer relative to the observed, and this dovetails with anthropological debates about the production of indigenous media. In an interesting exchange on the question of whether indigenous films really are modelled

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by the particular, visual modalities of their cultures, James Weiner (1997), Faye Ginsburg (1991, 1995) and Terence Turner (1991, 1992) debated the capacity of visual media to be defined by their use rather than by their origins. This argument about use has been extended through the work of Sarah Pink (2001, 2004), who has written extensively on how the application of visual methods, ideally in collaboration with the subjects of research, enables researchers to become reflexively aware of the process of ethnographic research and therefore of their ethical, political and indeed sensory roles in creating research outcomes. The ethnographic utility of this approach is literally ‘self’-evident and suggests that a fundamental question for anthropology about visual media concerns the relative positioning of researcher and subject seen as a process. This approach, which locates ethnographic authority in the positioning process, further suggests that there may be something to learn from the kind of question which has so invigorated visual studies: namely, ‘What do Pictures Really Want?’ (Mitchell 1996); i.e. what competences do they require of us in our disciplinary orientations such that we can recognize and respect their particular kind of agency, rather than regarding them merely as a function of a given technology or context? In what has become known as ‘media anthropology’, the ascription of degrees of technological and/or contextual determination to media use as part of the politics of indigeneity and other forms of identity construction has made it difficult to separate out what is meant by ‘the visual’ and how it might be distinguished from visuality, the visible, and vision. In working out these distinctions, it is insightful to refer to the argument of Corsin Jimenez and Willerslev (2007) concerning the tendency towards holism and stability inherent in ‘the anthropological concept of the concept’, and the associated inability to find space for what may appear ambiguous and discrepant. In this context, the concept of the visual is anthropologically meaningful in that what

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is made visible through the applications and mechanical operations of the camera is integrative and coherent when it links operator, subject and medium to each other and ideally to anthropological theory. The importance of these links for the concept of the visual is the particular consequence of the observational method of filmmaking with its long takes created from positions of relational familiarity, which appears to allow life to unfold visually as it happens and thus lends itself to this holistic logic. The stability of the concept is directly related to the visual qualities of observational film, with its absence of rapid camera movements, dramatic cuts and angles, because these would alter the understanding that what we are seeing is the viewpoint of an emplaced human observer. All social worlds become potentially visible in the same manner, given this way of operating the camera and its technical capacities for observation. This is not to argue that there is a naïve technological determinism at the basis of anthropological filmmaking but rather to recognize that there is a ‘hermeneutic generosity’ (Corsin Jimenez and Willerslev 2007: 527) in its signifying concepts which may disregard what is ambiguous or incoherent as an element of the visible made visual. An example of this is the use of blurred images, which lack the clarity and detail we might expect to be necessary in an image with ethnographic value. Later in this essay we consider the juxtaposition of a blurred image and a clear image in the ethnography Sound and Sentiment by Steven Feld, but it is instructive to look first at the case of the Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas. After completing a degree in anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, Meiselas carried out a photographic project over three years (1972−1975), documenting the lives of Carnival Strippers (2003) in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Most of the photographs are of a sexual nature, but they are not graphically explicit because they employ camera blur and, in so doing, evoke the emotion of the encounters and reveal the sensitivity of

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the relationships Meiselas formed with her subjects. This is not a simple strategy, because there are a number of ways of interpreting camera blur, and it is this ambiguity which is indeed its force in this case, for it makes a virtue out of the idea that the visual is never simply identical with the visible, or indeed with vision, and therefore works ethnographically because it constructs a particular form of description that brings together the situation of Carnival Strippers with the capacities of the camera. The conception of the visual that lies behind this approach to image production draws on the notion that there may be dormant effects of the subject of an image which are manifested through the illusion of presence rather than its direct illustration. David MacDougall argues (2006: 57), following Gilberto Perez, that this is film’s ‘Material Ghost’, the capacity to make a direct simultaneous appeal to the senses. It is also part of what Corsin Jimenez and Willerslev call a movement of the ‘spirit’ or following Deleuze, a ‘flying’ (survol) singularity (1994: 20), meaning the way that an image may be formed of an assemblage or folding together of previously associated but now inactive qualities of the presence of the subject before the camera lens. Recognition of this fundamentally relational and potentially sensorial aspect of the concept of the visual has the consequence that arguments for reflexive de-positionings of the observer and their methods – in order to expose the artifice of the image and to demonstrate necessary ethical and political sensitivities – are not in themselves sufficient to reveal the ambiguous nature of the visual. This conception also changes the ethnographic value ascribed to styles of filmmaking, which privileged the observationally holistic over the kinds of impressionism which is evident in Meiselas’ work and in the fragmentation of constructivism which is evident in the work of surrealist and avantgarde filmmakers. It therefore admits a greater corpus of works for consideration, such as those discussed through notions of

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allegory under the banner of ‘experimental ethnography’ by Russell (1999).

THE LANGUAGE OF VISUALITY The ambiguity of the visual that is at issue here is different in kind (although connected contextually) to the kind of ambiguity discussed by John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1990, originally 1972), whereby vision – changes in how we see – are related to what there is to see – the visible. Berger’s ideas speak to anthropological concerns for the contingency of visuality on specific cultural conditions and also to the ‘rise of the figural’ (Lash 1985) whereby contemporary uncertainties in ways of seeing are related to the ‘frenzy of the visible’ world that surrounds and pervades all our lives (Williams 1999). The appreciation and value of this visual uncertainty is considered in a recent work, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (2008), by the art historian Janet Wolff, who describes how it is part of a turn to ‘imagistic thinking’ in sociology with the rejection of the apparently more solid and systematic model of the monograph and the scholarly text (2008: 133−134). Imagistic thinking refers to modes of description that pay attention to minute detail, the fragment or snapshot, in order to shed light impressionistically on a broader social scene. It draws heavily on the work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch and others. The language of visuality – Simmel’s ‘snapshot’ (Momentbild), Benjamin’s ‘thought-image’ (Denkbild), ‘dialectical image’ and ‘optical unconscious’, Ernst Bloch’s ‘traces’ – pervades this imagistic thinking, and while it does not deal with actual images, Wolff argues (2008: 121−122) that we can envisage an imagistic anthropology/sociology that extends this language to work with actual images. Potentially, this would be a form of descriptive practice that incorporates the opaque open-endedness of the verbal snapshot with the literal snapshot. It is an approach well represented by the

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conjunction of photographs and text in Kathleen Stewart’s ethnography A Space on the Side of the Road (1996). In this work, Stewart deliberately merges the doubtful, uncertain and open-ended nature of life and language in the West Virginia coal camps and ‘hollers’, hollows or small valleys, that she describes textually, with the visual ambiguity of the photographs that she artfully deploys throughout the book. The ambiguity of the photographs lies in their juxtaposition and poetic tension with the narratives of memory and ruin that she writes about, so that the photographs describe through what they do not show − as much as what they do. When the relationship between image and text, and between the visible and the visual, is not construed as illustrative and determinative, as in Stewart’s work, the practice of thinking in images through forms of writing and thinking with images through forms of media practice can attract charges of impressionism. For these methods are apparently unable to demonstrate the underlying structures of social life with any certainty. Instead, they may claim the virtue of reflecting the uncertainty that is part of the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2007) of everyday life, while at the same time employing images that are not simply the presentation of a nominal subject, but an assemblage of qualities that may act as a kind of word-image or line-making. In this sense, they may constitute what the artist, geographer and cultural historian Paul Carter calls ‘dark writing’: Dark writing indicates the swarm of possibilities that had to be left out when this line was taken (rather than that line). It notates reflections …. The assembly of shadows, the organization of optical phenomena that resist light, the look of things that suggest a face, the depth of bodies that cannot be unconcealed – all of these fall under dark writing’s jurisdiction. (Carter 2008: 1)

Carter’s merging of geography, art history and design as a means of ‘material thinking’ is productive in suggesting that the conceptual ambiguity of ‘visual anthropology’ is neither a necessary barrier to working with images, nor to anthropological concerns for

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analytical writing. His thesis involves the interdisciplinary identification of different kinds of lines and, as such, resonates with the arguments made by Tim Ingold for a ‘graphic anthropology’ that proceeds by thinking in terms of lines and their relationship with surfaces (2007). For Ingold, anthropology has a propensity to create, through certain modes of writing and (in the case of visual anthropology) a naïve dependency on technological means, linearization and spatial fixity that reproduce an Enlightenment rationality. The challenge is to create lines that are like human perception and therefore lived, participatory and emergent as and through modes of habitation: for Ingold, it is the act of drawing, which being manual and requiring a direct engagement with the elements is not essentially a technical act and as such avoids the pitfalls of camera work, that confuses a mechanical operation with phenomenological engagement. In this sense, the concept of the visual in ‘visual anthropology’ is a confusion of the act of seeing with what the operation of the camera makes visible, thereby reducing our understanding of visual perception to looking at mediated images. This radically phenomenological critique makes an important case for anthropological practices that are responsive to the movements of the elements, in this case light, but it passes over many of the ways in which camera work and drawing share concerns for frame, perspective and contrast as well as how these media cross over and inform each other. This point, that camera work, like drawing and other art practices, involves a certain engagement with the environment, and a learned coordination of the senses which is continuously negotiated and never simply a determination of the materials and technologies being applied, is made in the context of MacDougall’s argument for a particular kind of visual anthropology (2006). MacDougall acknowledges that there are distinctive structures to media technologies such as the camera that have an expressive affinity for particular areas of

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social experience – topographic, temporal, corporeal and personal – such that the epistemological claims of the camera image are essentially perceptual rather than conceptual: that is, ‘knowledge which has no propositional status (of generality, of explanation) except the proposition of its own existence’ (2006: 5). The notion of the body as the agential subject and means in the constitution of this kind of knowledge is dependent on its distribution across an interactive network formed by the triangle of camera operator, subject and audience. MacDougall argues for the potential of a simultaneous precipitation of this network, through the engagement of the camera operator with their subject in what Jean Rouch called a ‘ciné-trance’, and of the audience with what Bazin calls ‘that hallucination that is true in its effects’ (MacDougall 2006: 57). Ingold’s arguments are important here because his insistence on ‘following the materials’ (2000), rather than taking for granted their distribution in this network of productive relations, draws attention to the processes of image formation. The mixing, interchange, transmutation and leaking of elemental energies – light and air – is a part of the process of image creation which is not about the politics of the positioning of observer and observed mentioned earlier, but involves a reformulation of the concept and method of the visual as a relational enfolding or entanglement of the elements. Important questions are raised by this critique of vision and it will be an interesting direction for future research to consider areas such as the connections between advances in neuroscience and contemporary art practices that Barbara Maria Stafford discusses in her recent work Echo Objects (2007). There are also questions about visual skill (e.g. How is it learned and performed?) which have been addressed in a number of recent works (Grasseni 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009). They show how skilled vision is both participatory in its responsive engagement with the particularities of any field site, and observational in its commitment to a relational aesthetics. These qualities resonate with issues

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creatively tackled in Feld’s notion of a co-aesthetic which we discuss in the next section. Grasseni’s elucidation of the productive affinities between ways of seeing among Italian dairy herders and the ways in which the capacities of the camera can be utilized demonstrates how visual skill is as much about seeing what is there to be described as it is a matter of technical competence in achieving that description. It reveals a quality of ‘attention’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009) in observation that may be learned and is prior and necessary to the successful application of the camera in the observational film method. The concept which they draw upon in underpinning this notion of skilled vision, and therefore what is visual in visual anthropology, is mimesis, as interpreted by Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity (1993). For Taussig, following James Frazer and Walter Benjamin, mimesis is both a natural capacity and a construction of colonial modernity, achieving its effects through the intersection of ideas about the primitive with the magical powers of ‘copy’ and ‘contact’ attributed to the imitative capacities of mechanisms like the camera. The magic of copy and of contact in this notion of mimesis is transformative, turning the ambiguous relationship of vision with the visible and the visual into a generative process that is both simulative and creative, such that every copy contains within it traces of, and the potential for, contact. As an act that does not separate out or privilege vision as discrete from the other senses, mimesis and the copies that result from it engage with the whole sensorium, becoming ‘tactile vision’ (Taussig 1993). As part of a ‘sensuous scholarship’ (Stoller 1997), this concept of tactile vision indicates that the visual in visual anthropology can be discussed in terms of the performativity of a variety of media, not simply those that are premised on vision or designed for the production of images. This mimetic performativity of media is demonstrated in the next section through an early example of sensuous scholarship that encapsulates in detail how the dilemmas and productive

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challenges we have been describing remain vital for contemporary visual anthropology.

ILLUSTRATION AND EVOCATION The example is two photographs taken by the anthropologist Steven Feld during his fieldwork among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s (Figures 3.6.1 and 3.6.2). Seen in mimetic juxtaposition – which is precisely Feld’s intention in reproducing them in his landmark ethnography Sound and Sentiment (Feld 1990) – the two images present a theoretical argument through visual form. The first photograph (Figure 3.6.1) would not seem out of place as an illustration in any anthropological book – it fulfils certain expectations of visual anthropology and relies on a particular model of realism – itself a product of particular European visual traditions.

Figure 3.6.1 Gaso of Bon dressed in k luba costume (from Feld 1990). Image reproduced courtesy of Steven Feld. c

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However, the other photograph (Figure 3.6.2) − a blurred image that deliberately obscures its legible content − requires something more of its viewer and raises some questions. At first glance it seems less directly illustrative − although this is in some senses misleading based as it is on reading the image – and more evocative, a term that has both positive and negative connotations within anthropology. It might raise questions about whether an image as ‘information’ or ‘data’ can, or should, be evocative. Are information and evocation mutually exclusive terms within the field? Is the aim of visual anthropology the presentation of more complete, detailed data, or is it evocative representation, or is this in itself a false choice? This blurred photograph performs an aspect of what, following Taussig’s thesis about the affective or ‘sticky’ qualities of the photograph as copy (1993), may be construed as a form of primitive-modern ‘magic’. It borrows qualities of the thing that it mimics because it was present before the camera rather than on the basis of verisimilitude or likeness. It involves a form of animation, and it is animation – the work the image does, not simply as a manufacturer of indexical signs but in moving the imagination – that is important, since it raises perennial concerns with the equivalence of the camera’s operation to the act of perception. In using a blurred image in this way, Feld stresses the need to be concerned with understanding experience, rather than reducing aesthetics to function and structure (Feld 1990: 233). The second photograph (Figure 3.6.2) is concerned with understanding ‘the visual’, but in a way that is more broadly conceived and that conjoins visual anthropology with the anthropology of art and with the study of other representational systems. This is a familiar tripartite division – the first formalized attempt to define visual anthropology as a sub-field, Paul Hockings’ Principles of Visual Anthropology, in 1975, argued that the field consisted of three main areas. These areas were the production of visual material

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Figure 3.6.2 Dancer seen as ‘a man in the form of a bird’ (from Feld 1990). Image reproduced courtesy of Steven Feld.

through anthropological fieldwork, the study of other visual systems and the study of what was then referred to as ‘non-verbal communication’ and covered areas such as proxemics (the study of, particularly inter-personal, spatial distances). The fusion of these strands is a central ethos, and indeed an ethical stance that Feld takes in his fieldwork methods, which are characterized by creative and productive dialogues between different media and between subjects and observers as collaborators. Importantly, Feld sees the work – which itself takes many formats (written, visual and, particularly, aural) – that is produced as a result of fieldwork as the outcome of an encounter between two representational systems (see also Feld 2006). Although the same can be said of the ways in which language, as both speech and text, is often used in anthropology, it is still relatively unusual to find visual anthropologists conceiving of their practice as a kind of hybrid formed from the encounter between two systems, as opposed to adherence to a documentary format of one kind or another. This in-between or ambiguous status of ‘the visual’ certainly complicates many of the

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epistemological issues involved, but it does so in a positive and productive way that suggests a whole range of possibilities that should be, and in some cases are, being explored within contemporary visual anthropology. The work of Juan Orrantia, which is concerned with discerning the traces of acts of violence, perpetrated by paramilitaries, in the daily lives of villagers in northern Colombia, is one example of contemporary experimental visual anthropology that creatively explores this ambiguous quality. As both process and product, the visual allows Orrantia to access this domain of memory and everyday experience. Combining still photography with sound and also with digital video, he works collaboratively with villagers to represent these traces – the way the past erupts in the present (Orrantia 2009). Similarly, Andrew Irving works with HIV/ AIDS patients in Uganda, facilitating their own documentation of their personal stories of the condition through photography and sound to produce works that are not only extremely powerful and resonant but also collaborative in many different ways (2007).

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The second photograph (Figure 3.6.2) concerns a central tenet of Kaluli aesthetic and religious systems – the transformation of men into birds. Feld vividly describes dancers entering the longhouse in their costumes by firelight after long hours of singing. As they rush in they appear as birds ‘…the photograph is meant to reveal that in ceremonial dance, a man is seen as a bird’ (Feld 1990: 235). For Kaluli there is an interpenetration of worlds – animal/human, visible/nonvisible – and as birds sing or men dance they move from one realm to another. The subtleties of this astonishingly rich ethnography are lost here, but the idea of the movement between different perceptual worlds and the strategy of using the particular capacities of photographic images to represent this movement as an illusion of presence resonates with the ideas of MacDougall, and with Corsin Jimenez and Willserslev (mentioned earlier). This movement is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of these two photographs that – quoting photography critic Alan Sekula – Feld suggests represent opposite ends of a ‘folk’ model of photography: … the misleading but popular form of this opposition is ‘art photography’ vs. ‘documentary photography’. Every photograph tends … towards one of these poles of meaning. The oppositions between these poles are as follows: photographer as seer vs. photographer as witness, photography as expression vs. photography as reportage, theories of imagination (and inner truth) vs. informative value … (Sekula quoted in Feld 1990: 235)

As we have argued above, contemporary visual anthropology is still distracted by these kinds of oppositions and in some senses defined by them. In this light, Elizabeth Edwards’ distinction between art and documentary photography as competing forms of rhetoric is useful in helping us understand why the first photograph is, as Feld suggests, something we might take ‘refuge’ in, and an image that would not seem misplaced in any monograph, whereas the second presents more of a challenge (Edwards in Banks and Morphy 1997; Feld 1990: 233). Feld’s photographs directly illustrate the kinds of

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oppositional models that are still central to much current discussion within visual anthropology, models that continue to underlie what Lucien Taylor has argued is anthropology’s ‘iconophobia’ (Taylor 1996). These dyadic oppositional models – text vs image, illustration vs evocation, art vs science, realism vs impressionism, expression vs reportage, etc. – continue to dominate much anthropological thinking about visual methodologies and the use of visual images more generally within anthropology. Taylor cites several examples of such anthropological suspicion and open hostility towards the use of images within the discipline. He suggests that in these cases, ‘[V]isuality itself becomes merely ancillary, illustrative rather than constitutive of anthropological knowledge’ (1996: 66). The pervasiveness of these oppositional models, the way in which they have continued to frame debates around visual anthropology, reveals the central status of many of the questions they raise. Some of these oppositions are perhaps no longer productive – and they do not engage with, for example, Lyotard’s discussion of discourse/ figure, or Mitchell’s idea of the ‘image-text’, and so their dominance is, as Sekula suggests, misleading. They have, however, given rise to some of the central, and ongoing, arguments in this sub-field. One of these arguments, which is central to the definition of visual anthropology by the AAA and has been written about eloquently and convincingly by David MacDougall, is whether visual anthropology is concerned with creating new kinds of anthropological knowledge, or with constructing itself as the visual equivalent of anthropological text (MacDougall 1999, 2006). As we have seen, this question is at the heart of many contemporary criticisms of ‘the visual’ from within the discipline and particularly indicative of those that disparage media-generated images and film in particular, for not providing the same ‘ethnographic qualities’ or theorizing potential as a written text (Ruby 2000). The notorious arguments provoked by Robert Gardener’s 1986 film

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Forest of Bliss, about the meaningfulness of the images of the burning ghats (waterside cremation sites) of Benares in India, are still particularly useful for revealing the polarizing effects of these oppositional models. As MacDougall says, ‘the film tends to divide its critics into those who have a view − of historical reality, or Benares, or India, or anthropology − which the film offends and those who, perhaps even despite this, see value in such a radically different kind of film being made’ (2001: 69). The film has no subtitling or narrative voiceover and, for its critics, its visual qualities are problematic – for Alexander Moore ‘a beautiful visual exercise is just that, an exploration of imagery, not an anthropological document which can be said to illuminate the universal human condition, or to enlighten its audience’ (Moore 1988: 2). In relation to this view, Jay Ruby suggests that, … the chief criteria we should employ in critiquing a film which purports to be somehow ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ are those of anthropology. Whether it is a ‘good’ film or an artistic achievement is basically irrelevant. While we need to be competent in our craft, our major concern is not to produce ‘good’ films any more than it is with producing ‘good’ books. (Ruby 1989: 9)

In his rebuttal of the way in which the film was treated by some anthropologists, MacDougall argues positively for a visual anthropology that has a different set of concerns and produces new ways of knowing and representing than its text-based counterpart (2001). For him the film represents ‘new conceptual possibilities for visual anthropology’ and is a prototype: an experiment in a radical anthropological practice which explores the largely invisible interrelations of the visible world through visual (and it must be added, auditory) means … [and] … it seeks to do so in a fashion that resembles the way in which sensory awareness, cultural meaning, and metaphorical expression are combined in social experience. (MacDougall 2001: 71)

As well as issues of anthropological knowledge, what is at stake here is an attitude

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towards ‘craft’, and such attitudes are central to Tim Ingold’s thesis (2007) about drawing as an ethnographic skill and are key towards the way in which experiment (Russell 1999) is valorized, or not, within the discipline. Approaches to craft and experimentation are key issues for the future development of visual anthropology as an aggregation of media practices directed towards social research, but they must contend with longstanding aversions in the discipline that express what Taylor has called ‘iconophobia’ (1996).

ICONOPHOBIA In his influential article, Taylor discusses one particular example that reveals this anti-craft sentiment – Kirsten Hastrup’s 1992 essay on ‘anthropological visions’. Basing her criticisms of visual anthropology on her own experience of attempting to take photographs that reveal the aura of male sexuality that pervades an Icelandic ram festival that she witnessed, Hastrup argues that the resulting images only showed the surface of events, … the nature of the event could not be recorded in photography. The texture of the maleness and sex which filled the room had been an intense sensory experience, but it was invisible. The reality of the total social event had been transformed into a two-dimensional image, a souvenir. (1992: 9)

Hastrup denounces photography as a form of ‘thin description’ that can only show the surface of events, a record of behaviour, rather than the ‘thick description’ that can be offered by text with its ability to provide an account of meaning, transcend the particular, move back and forth in time, and so on (1992: 10). Of course film can very easily move back and forth in time – this is one of its defining features as a medium, and photographs can in some ways also transcend the exigencies of the conditions of their making – but what is perhaps more interesting are the presumptions Hastrup makes concerning visual media,

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visibility and visuality, and the usefulness of these concepts within anthropology. It is the craft or methodological aspect of ‘the visual’ that is a key point of contention here. Hastrup seems to replicate an often-quoted statement by the ethnographic filmmaker Timothy Asch − that the camera is to the anthropologist, as the telescope is to the astronomer, and the microscope to the biologist (Asch et al. 1973; see also Wright 1998) − effectively disavowing issues of craft or technique in favour of the determining characteristics of the technology. Although Asch’s considerable body of filmmaking with the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is actually far more nuanced than this idea of visual media would suggest, the quote demonstrates the way in which the visual − as technical method and as craft − is often approached in a particularly forensic manner within anthropology, an attitude that has had its critics from the outset (Edwards 2001; Rony 1996). In various different guises, the tensions between treating the camera as a technical recording device, or as a tool for skilled expression, remain a feature of contemporary visual anthropology in both a theoretical sense and in the ways the field goes about reproducing itself. For a period in the 1970s and 1980s, visual anthropology, which was then and in many ways still is, largely seen as synonymous with ethnographic filmmaking, was often treated pedagogically as a process of technical training, teaching already-trained and qualified anthropologists how to use what was then a 16mm film camera. However, this technical training also took place in many cases within a framework of some form of observational filmmaking that focused on getting students to develop the skill of paying attention to the world in particular ways. It was explicitly concerned with the texture of the world and with fostering a certain kind of attentiveness in both filmmaker and audience (see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, and Saunders 2007 for histories of observational cinema). Although perhaps initially bound up with what, in hindsight, were misplaced

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notions of technical witnessing, observational cinema is currently enjoying a renaissance both within and outside of anthropology and the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of observational filmmaking no longer appear as evidence of a simple-minded scientism or old-fashioned ethnographic realism… [but are] … constitutive of a reflexive praxis, a way of doing anthropology that has the potential to creatively fuse the object and medium of enquiry. (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 136)

There is a continuing ambivalence around the use of visual material within anthropology, but contemporary developments suggest that embracing the expressive and evocative aspects of visual media can lead to representations that combine, as MacDougall suggests, sensory awareness, cultural meaning, and metaphorical expression (MacDougall 2001). In his critique, Taylor argues that, for Hastrup, ‘only writing can evoke the existential texture of the “place” to someone who wasn’t there’ (Taylor 1996: 67). Her example reveals some of the anxiety that continues to surround visual anthropology’s perceived non-textual or anti-textual stance and suggests that it is the ability of text to evoke a sense of texture that makes it superior to visual media. This demonstrates the double bind to which visual anthropology is often subjected – it is either too evocative and expressive, exceeding its role as illustration, or it is the opposite: too limited to surface and unable to reveal any depth. The visual is either productive of a surfeit or plenitude of meaning that needs to be constrained by text, or it is devoid of meaning, incapable of the kinds of ‘thick description’ and texture that text can provide (see Pinney 1992 for a useful counter-argument to Hastrup). Such controversies, exemplified by Gardner’s film and by Hastrup’s discussion of photography, indicate the more general contours of debates around visual anthropology that have dominated recent decades. Another of the key issues at stake in Hastrup’s argument is her own role in taking

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the photographs. Feld points out, in relation to his blurred photograph (Figure 3.6.2), that it was very much theoretically premeditated and that it forms part of a positive exploration of the possibilities for representation within the particular fieldwork setting in which he was working. The idea that it might be necessary and insightful to plan theoretically or think experimentally about how to take images of the ram festival that do reveal the male sexuality pervading the event, or that such preparation might have required an explicit engagement with genres of photography that have dealt with such events and themes, does not figure in Hastrup’s account of anthropological observation. Rather, her argument seems to suggest that it was not necessary for her to plan or construct how she might go about representing male sexuality except by means of the way in which it was made visible to the fundamental technical operation of the camera. It is as if she relies on a conception of her camera as a particular kind of technical recording device and on a certain narrow notion of witnessing and visual realism or literalism Although this is not clearly spelt out by Hastrup, it does seem to be an important assumption underlying the chapter and it seems restrictive considering the vast range of options for image-making that are potentially available through different camera technologies and techniques (Weinberger 1992). It is not that any resistance to images and their use is by definition iconophobic, but that the seeming unwillingness to engage with the visual more broadly destines the project to fail. This is where Feld’s example is so productive and prescient: in his willingness to experiment, his use and combination of a wide range of different media (sound, visual, text-based), and in his open acknowledgement of a specifically visual form of coaesthetic as opposed to some narrow definitions of documentary (Feld 1990, 2006). Feld anticipates the current shift in visual anthropology towards methodological explorations that combine the call for attention to the specificities of particular media

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(as in Taylor 1996; MacDougall 2006; Grinshaw and Ravetz 2009), alongside an ethical concern for the development of a coaesthetic. The latter has recently seen increased attention through considerations of the work of Jean Rouch that explore his notion of a shared anthropology, and Henley’s important recent study takes this co-aesthetic as a way of thinking through the actual practice of Rouch’s filmmaking (Feld 2003; Henley 2010). Feld demonstrates the radical potential for visual anthropology to be concerned with the encounter between – perhaps the literal interpenetration of – different systems of perception and representation. In other words, with the ways in which the images are produced by Feld and the Kaluli, how they circulate between them, how they comment on each other, lead to further images, etc. His decision to ‘use a metaphoric convention from my own culture’s expressive tradition in photography to make a synthetic and analytic statement about a Kaluli metaphor’, and his insistence that it is ‘the imaging code typically considered to be the least documentary and the most “artistic” [that] structures what is the most ethnographic of my photographs’, both point to the theoretical and practical creativity of his methodologies (Feld 1990: 236). Like Marilyn Strathern’s creative comparison of one of her own photographic portraits of a Hagen man from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea donning his dance costume with a genetic fingerprint and its ‘barcode’ of identity (1997), Feld’s images raise questions about the medium of photography itself. There is a sense in which both of Feld’s images, in technical terms, have equal value as ‘documents’. The notion of ‘document’, as it is often applied within visual anthropology, does not always account for its broad history and application, for example as a radical form of surrealism by Georges Bataille, in his short-lived magazine documents (Ades et al. 2006), and in relation to surrealist photography (Krauss 1985). Questions of photography’s identity as a medium are useful to consider in the light of Hastrup’s comments

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above, since the latter reveal a certain culturally and historically specific understanding of the medium. The critique of nineteenthcentury anthropological and colonial photography that developed in the 1980s has had a profound impact on the development of visual anthropology (Edwards 1992; Poole 2005). But, as Stephen Nugent points out in an important work on the iconography of Amazonia, we do not yet really know enough about the history of the visual in anthropology and its relation to popular images of others (Nugent 2008). It seems strange that anthropologists frequently fail to consider the historical and cultural variables of attitudes towards photography and other media (see Benjamin 1979; Pinney and Peterson 2003). Two studies that do address these issues productively are Christopher Pinney’s extremely rich and detailed study of attitudes to photography in central India, Camera Indica (1997), a study of the social life of Indian photographs, and Jennifer Deger’s brilliant ethnography of media production in an Australian Aboriginal community, Shimmering Screens (Deger 2006). Both take into account James Weiner’s influential consideration of the ‘Western metaphysic’ of media in relation to the development of indigenous video projects (Weiner 1997), and Deger is also involved in the collaborative production of visual work that explores the qualities of such media as digital video. Feld’s juxtaposition of these two photographs reveals questions about photography’s identity as a medium and is productive, provocative and revealing of many contemporary debates about the possibilities for producing and using visual material within anthropology. These debates show no signs of being resolved into anything that resembles a commonly held set of principles – and part of the debate concerns whether or not that is actually desirable in any way. There is much heated debate concerning visual anthropology’s coherence, or not, as a separate field (see Taylor 1998). What is usually presented in handbooks of visual anthropology is some version of the history of the field along with

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a series of methodologies, visual practices and visual tools that, although undoubtedly offering the potential for creativity, do not offer a consensus on the role of ‘the visual’ and how it may refer to a concept, method and subject. This is perhaps both a weakness and a strength – what to some is an inchoate field lacking in agreed principles and criteria for evaluation, is for others the sign of creative fecundity (Taylor 1998). Despite some early and more recent attempts to establish principles of various kinds (Banks and Morphy 1997; Hockings 1975; Ruby 2000), visual anthropology remains a subject that is characterized by its relative lack of agreement about methods or concepts, and this should perhaps be seen as a redeeming positive feature of the sub-field, rather than a drawback. Although many, if not all, anthropologists make use of visual material of some kind – in their writing, lectures and web-based endeavours – they do so mostly in terms of illustration, and not as a way of engaging with some of the exciting possibilities raised by considering visual anthropology in the ways we are suggesting here. In marking itself out as a distinctive field, visual anthropology is still, all too often, seen by default, as defined against that which it is not − as in many ways embattled with text. This is a false opposition, and Feld himself has worked on projects that productively combine text, image and sound, such as the brilliant Bright Balkan Morning (Blau et al. 2002). If this opposition was overcome, perhaps many more anthropologists would be encouraged to experiment with the visual. In an important sense, many of the dilemmas facing contemporary visual anthropology are not new ones: they have been rehearsed many times, and have as much to do with the institutional politics of university departments and the viability of a field that consumes time and significant resources in a period of economic austerity. For example, the short-lived 1970s journal Alcheringa − which combined translations of various kinds (paragraphs of Lévi-Strauss translated into Nambikwara), articles on concrete poetry

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and examples of ethnopoetics together with a floppy vinyl 45rpm sound recording − still seems radical in its creative combinations of texts and sounds. The complex and demanding assembly of technologies and techniques necessary for learning, teaching and experimenting in visual anthropology, which also in some ways define the parameters of the field, also highlight its vulnerability under current conditions where the timely production of peerreviewed journal articles seems the most important measure of worth and progress. The tools most necessary to visual anthropology, as an extra-textual or non-textual enterprise, are often those in shortest supply – time, opportunity, resources and the need to embrace uncertain or different outcomes. These are necessary to create the sort of work that Feld has produced, suggesting a range of productive methodologies for working with image, sound and text. The structural and disciplinary disparagement of, or at least reluctance to encourage, experimentation has probably resulted in an overemphasis on technical training in visual anthropology. There is a world of difference between visual anthropology as technical training in how to use a video camera, versus visual anthropology as an approach to ‘the visual’ in a more broadly defined sense. Although the two are not mutually exclusive − indeed, a full technical training could well encourage experimentation − there remains resistance to experimentation at an institutional and disciplinary level, and it is also discouraged by a research-funding climate that favours predictable outcomes. If this were overcome, visual anthropology would become something that, as Grimshaw and Ravetz argue in relation to the current renaissance of observational filmmaking, ‘is not then about creating an accurate transcription of the world .. [but i]nstead … hinges upon connection, expressed in an almost intangible, empathic moment’ (2009: 136). For MacDougall, visual media allow for a kind of knowledge that is constructed not by description, but by a form of acquaintance (MacDougall in

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Banks and Morphy 1997: 286); a general consideration of the visual such as this should be as much a part of visual anthropology training as learning to operate a digital video camera. In a review article of the state of the field, Taylor (1998) argued that visual anthropology ‘offers possibilities for anthropology, and in particular for the representation and evocation of lived experience, that are unavailable to writing’ (Taylor 1998: 535). Leaving aside ongoing and unresolved tensions with anthropological text would allow visual anthropology to concentrate on exploring the properties of various media – visual and aural – and this in turn could perhaps enable a more positive and creative experimentation with anthropological ways of knowing and representing. Although anthropologists have long wanted to distinguish between a written anthropology that attends to visual culture, and an anthropology conducted through visual media (see Banks and Morphy 1997), and although Taylor suggests that ‘the two are still sufficiently unlike one another that it is as well to distinguish between them at the outset’ (1998: 534), it is a convergence of the two that would encourage the kinds of methodologies pursued so fruitfully by Feld. A notion of performativity ties together all the examples and practitioners discussed above and offers a range of productive possibilities. The notion has its roots in the anthropology of ritual, but when applied to media it signals a concern for the experience of viewers and audiences, and this has real consequences for contemporary visual anthropologists. Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s film Sweetgrass, which has attracted large audiences on general release in the US cinemas (Taylor 2010), is part of a series of works that evolved from their fieldwork with transhumance sheep-herders in Montana. Taylor chose to show one of these works, Sheep Rushes, in the Marion Goodman Gallery in New York alongside work by artists such as Steve McQueen (see Goodman 2007). He felt that the work, designed as a

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single-screen projection with precise attention to qualities of light and colour, needed a degree of performativity in its presentation. This attention to performativity has led to some experimental visual anthropologists exploring alternative venues to exhibit their work. The Tate Modern art gallery in London ran a short theoretical and practical course in ‘Experimental Ethnography’ in 2010, while an innovative group exhibition of work by visual anthropologists and artists, Ethnographic Terminalia, organized by Craig Campbell to coincide with the 2009 AAA conference, was shown in a Philadelphia art gallery (Campbell 2009). That such forwardlooking and creative visual anthropology is being shown in these spaces says something about the current concerns of the contemporary art world, but also about the relative lack of such spaces, both physical and conceptual, within anthropology. It is this, and some of the oppositions that entrench that lack of engagement, that need to be overthrown to enable the productive pursuit of experimental visual methodologies.

REFERENCES Ades, Dawn, S. Baker, C. Hancock, D. Hollier, & C. Miller (2006) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents. London: Hayward Gallery. Asch, Timothy, John Marshall, & Peter Spier (1973) ‘Ethnographic film: structure and function’, Annual Review of Anthropology 2: 179−187. Banks, Marcus & Howard Morphy, eds (1997) Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1979) ‘A short history of photography’. In One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, S BuckMorss (ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT. Berger, John (1990, originally 1972) Ways of Seeing. London, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin. Blau, Dick, C. Keil, A. Keil, & S. Feld (2002) Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Buck-Morss, S. (1989) Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Campbell, Craig (2009) http://www.metafactory.ca/terminalia/ Carter, Paul (2008) Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Corsin Jimenez, Alberto & Rane Willerslev (2007) ‘An anthropological concept of the concept: reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13: 527−544. Deger, Jennifer (2006) Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1985) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson, R Galeta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1994, originally 1968) Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. (1992) Anthropology and Photography, 1860−1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, Elizabeth (2001) Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feld, Steven (1990, originally 1982) Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli. Expression, 2nd revised edn. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feld, Steven ed. (2003) Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Feld, Steven (2006) ‘Dialogic editing: interpreting how Kaluli read sound and sentiment’. In A. Robben & J. Sluka (eds), Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Ginsburg, Faye D. (1991) ‘Indigenous media: Faustian contract or global village?’ Cultural Anthropology 6 (1): 92−112. Ginsburg, Faye D. (1995) ‘Mediating culture: indigenous media, ethnographic film and the production of identity’. In L Devereaux & R Hillman (eds), Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 256–291. Goodman, Marian (gallery) (2007) http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2007-06-21_equal-that-isto-the-real-itself/ Grasseni, Cristina (2004) ‘Video and ethnographic knowledge: skilled vision in the practice of breeding’. In A.I. Alfonso, L. Kurti & S. Pink (eds), Working

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Images: Methods and Media in Ethnographic Research. London: Routledge, pp. 15−30. Grasseni, Cristina, ed. (2007) Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. New York: Berghahn Books. Grimshaw, Anna & Amanda Ravetz (2009) Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten (1992) ‘Anthropological visions: some notes on visual and textual authority’. In P.I Crawford & D. Turton (eds), Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henley, Paul (2010) The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Hockings, Paul (1975) Principles of Visual Anthropology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (second edition printed 1995). Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim (2007). Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Irving, Andrew (2007) ‘Ethnography, art and death’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 185−208. Jackson, Michael (1983) ‘Thinking through the body: an essay on understanding metaphor’, Social Analysis 14: 127−149. Jay, Martin (1988) ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’. In Force-Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. New York/London: Routledge, pp. 115–133. Krauss, Rosalind (1985) L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism. New York: Abbeville Press. Lash, Scott. (1985) ‘Discourse or figure? Postmodernism as a ‘Regime of Signification’, Theory, Culture & Society 5: 311−336. MacDougall, David (1999) Transcultural Cinema. Edited and with an introduction by Lucien Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, David. (2001) Review of Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance and Chance in Nonfiction Film. A Conversation between Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard Film Archive, 2001. Visual Anthropology Review 17 (1): 68–85. MacDougall, David (2006) The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George (2008) ‘The modernist sensibility in recent ethnographic writing and the cinematic metaphor of montage’, Visual Anthropology Review 6 (1): 2–12.

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Marks, Laura U. (2000) The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meiselas, Susan (2003) [1976] Carnival Strippers. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1996) ‘What do pictures really want?’ October 77: 71−82. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, IL: University Chicago Press. Moore, Alexander (1988) ‘The limitations of imagist documentary: a review of Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss’, Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4 (2): 1−2. Nugent, Stephen (2008) Scoping the Amazon: Image, Icon, Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Okely, Judith (2001) ‘Visualism and landscape: looking and seeing in Normandy’, Ethnos 66: 99−120. Orrantia, Juan (2009) http://www.documentography. com/issue/11/ph/Juan/1.html Pink, Sarah (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography, Images Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage Publications. Pink, Sarah, László Kürti, & Ana Isabel Afonso, eds (2004) Working Images, Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Pinney, Christopher (1992) ‘The lexical spaces of eye-spy’. In P.I. Crawford & D. Turton (eds), Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pinney, Christopher (1997) Camera Indica: the Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion. Pinney, C & N. Peterson, eds (2003) Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Poole, Deborah (2005) ‘An excess of description: ethnography, race, and visual technologies’, Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 159–179. Rony, Fatimah T. (1996) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ruby, Jay (1989) ‘The emperor and his clothes: a comment’, Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 5 (1): 9−11. Ruby, Jay (2000) Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Russell, Catherine (1999) Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Saunders, Dave (2007) Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press.

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Society for Visual Anthropology (2001) Guidelines for the Evaluation of Visual Media. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. Stafford, B.M. (2007) Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Objects. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Kathleen (1996) A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, Kathleen (2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoller, Paul (1997) Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Strathern, Marilyn (1997) ‘Pre-figured features: a view from the Papua New Guinea Highlands’. In Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taussig, Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York/London: Routledge. Taylor, Lucien (1996) ‘Iconophobia,’ Transition 69: 64−88. Taylor, Lucien (1998) ‘Reviewed work(s): Rethinking Visual Anthropology by Marcus Banks, Howard Morphy (eds.); Principles of Visual Anthropology by Paul Hockings (ed.); Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography by Leslie Devereaux, Roger Hillman (eds.), American Anthropologist, New Series, 100 (2): 534−537.

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Taylor, Lucien (2010) http://sweetgrassthemovie.com/ Tomas, David (1992) ‘Manufacturing vision: Kino–Eye, the man with a movie camera, and the perceptual reconstruction of social identity’, Visual Anthropology Review 8 (2): 27–38. Turner, Terence (1991) ‘The social dynamics of video media in an indigenous society: the cultural meaning and personal politics of video-making in Kayap´o communities’, Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 68–72. Turner, Terence (1992) ‘Defiant images: the Kayap´o appropriation of video’, Anthropology Today 8 (6) 5–16. Weinberger, Elliot (1992) ‘The camera people’, Transition 55: 24–54. Weiner, James F. (1997) ‘Televisualist anthropology: representation, aesthetics, politics’, Current Anthropology 38 (2): 197–235. Williams, Linda (1999) ‘Prehistory: the frenzy of the visible.’ In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 34−57. Wolff, Janet (2008) The Aesthetics of Uncertainty. New York: Columbia University Press. Wright, Christopher (1998) ‘The Third Subject: perspectives on visual anthropology’, Anthropology Today 14 (4).

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3.7 Artefacts in Anthropology Liana Chua and Amiria Salmond

Since the early days of anthropology, the status of artefacts in ethnographic practice has been central to disciplinary self-definition. Whereas in the nineteenth century the emergent science defined its method with explicit reference to the collecting of objects ‘showing [Man’s] characteristic customs and methods of living’ (Flower 1898: 253), such materialist orientations were later revoked by scholars invested in distinguishing between ‘social’ anthropology and its ‘physical’ counterpart, particularly in the British tradition.1 The legacy of this schism was a dualist paradigm that held sway for much of the twentieth century and remains powerful today, based on an ‘assumption that there is an absolute difference between the immaterial and the material constitution of culture and society’ (Küchler 2008: 102). This distinction came to shape the contours of anthropology, resulting in what Strathern has described as a ‘division of labour between social/cultural anthropologists and those concerned with material culture of the kind that finds its way to museums’ (1990: 26). The Association of Social Anthropologists’ previous guide to Ethnographic Research (Ellen 1984) reflected and reinforced this divide, for it contained no section specifically devoted to artefact-based methodologies, then considered a peripheral, museological concern. At this time, socio-cultural

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anthropology was widely characterized, often critically, as an art of discourse: a form of ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). This depiction, however, was misleading. Far from being a purely written conceit, anthropology is what goes on in the field and in interactions with our informants, as well as that which happens in the book-lined studies and in the notes and computers through which we ‘write up’ our ethnographies. It is in all these sites that ethnography is practised and anthropological knowledge is produced. And, as this chapter reveals, that knowledge often consists of artefacts, and it can be material, sensorial or kinetic. None of these aspects of understanding can be reduced to rhetorical flourish, and all are central to anthropology. Whether it takes place in a remote village, an urban conglomerate or on the Internet, ethnography inevitably unfolds within a richly artefactual environment. By ‘artefacts’, we refer not simply to made, physical objects, but also to documents, environmental features, sensory, emotive and corporeal experiences, and even seemingly intangible but distinctive forms, such as ghosts, ‘the law’, forms of intellectual and cultural property, virtual networks, CT scans and thunderstorms, all of which give shape and substance to people’s lives. Being part of and moulded by this world is anthropology’s signature

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method; as novice fieldworkers invariably discover, learning to perform such mundane tasks as sipping tea, walking through crowds or performing public ablutions are often the very ways in which they become ‘socialized’, accepted and given access to local knowledge. Moreover, the tools of the ethnographic trade – notebooks, pens and pencils, cameras, voice recorders, laptops, gifts from home – are integral and prominent aspects of their presence in the field, inseparable from the insights thus accrued (Harris 2007; Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Marchand 2010). Despite their rhetorical elision from mainstream social anthropology, then, artefacts never really went away. Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists continued to collect objects, to donate material to museums (Gosden and Larson 2007; Henare 2003), and to centre their analyses on the role of objects in the social, economic, religious and political lives of their informants. The teaching of social anthropology, furthermore, continued to include practical object-handling sessions, often taught by museumbased curators, at many universities (Hodder et al. 1983). In these ways, artefacts played a crucial backstage role in the practice and theoretical development of anthropology. Yet only in the last quarter-century have their distinctive analytical and theoretical affordances been concertedly addressed. While some explorations have generated increasingly nuanced anthropological understandings of the materiality of human life, others have complicated relations between subjects and objects, expanding the notion of ‘artefacts’ to encompass far more than bounded material forms. Rather than mapping all the diverse directions taken by artefact-oriented anthropology since the 1980s, this chapter explores a selection of recent methodological developments and their entwinement with key innovations in theory and analysis. Each offers the ethnographer a framework through which to approach artefacts both in the field and the academy – and more importantly, to make them do analytical work on their own terms,

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rather than as mere props or illustrations. None takes the role and definition of things for granted; indeed, as we shall see, questions of the role, nature and definition of artefacts continue to haunt the discipline.

THE SOCIAL LIVES OF OBJECTS: MAKING THINGS PERSON-LIKE Until recently, anthropologists tended to conceive of artefacts as physical objects made or modified by humans. It was precisely this idea which underpinned an enduringly popular method that first gained prominence in the 1980s: likening artefacts to people by attributing to them person-like qualities such as ‘biographies’ and ‘social lives’. This strategy signalled an important shift in anthropological attitudes, as scholars began to deploy artefacts as thematic foci and heuristic devices through which socio-cultural insights could be gleaned, rather than as vehicles of meaning (as in ‘postmodern’ approaches) or indexes of socio-technological development (as in earlier evolutionary thinking). A key turning-point in this regard was Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986), which brought together anthropologists and historians in an effort to outline ‘a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in social life’ (1986: 1). For Appadurai and his contributors, the value of a commodity was created by the social, cultural and political networks in which exchange took place (1986: 3). As things moved through different, often shifting, contexts of exchange, they would acquire different identities, uses and values. In this way, Appadurai asserted, ‘commodities, like persons, have social lives’ (1986: 3). Appadurai’s volume soon became canonical, introducing such concepts as ‘tournaments of value’ and ‘the cultural biography of things’ (Kopytoff 1986) to the anthropological lexicon. Its most significant contribution, however, was methodological. In his introduction, Appadurai argued that to

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understand ‘the concrete, historical circulation of things’, We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. (1986: 5)

By placing material objects at the centre of his ethnographic agenda, Appadurai made them impossible to ignore – not only in economic anthropology but also in social and cultural life at large. The book demonstrated the productivity of using artefacts as loci of ethnography, analysis and theory, in ways that enriched and reshaped anthropological understandings of the social. This was achieved by focusing on specific entities as they traverse geographical, historical and socio-political boundaries. Ethnographers who adopt this approach look at things beyond the synchronic context of a bounded ‘fieldsite’, focusing instead on their multiple paths and trajectories. In this way, they introduce a vital cross-temporal dimension to the study of artefacts, revealing them as dynamic, processual entities entangled in historical and cross-cultural webs of sociality and significance. The ‘social lives’ approach to objects gained widespread popularity in the humanities and social sciences, being applied in diverse settings − from museum collections of Torres Strait artefacts (Herle 1998) to opium consumption in China (Zheng 2005). Although it offered a clear and versatile methodological programme, however, developments in social anthropology since the 1990s have revealed its analytic limitations (e.g. Graeber 2001). Within this framework, the professed likeness between persons and things is seldom more than metaphorical; here, the ‘lives’ and meanings of objects are treated as offshoots of human action and intentionality (Pinney 2005: 259). Things

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may provide focal points and methodological ‘hooks’, but their conceptual purchase is limited, because what they are able to do, mean and constitute is understood anthropocentrically. Put differently, proponents of the ‘social lives’ approach tend to uphold longstanding and pervasive hierarchical distinctions between subjects and objects, focusing on how things fit into the schemes of people. Yet, as the following sections reveal, analytical mileage can also be gained by redistributing the balance of power between these categories, or by questioning their universal relevance altogether.

AGENTIVE TURNS AND THE RECONFIGURING OF SUBJECT−OBJECT RELATIONS According to several commentators, anthropology in the 1990s experienced an ‘agentive turn’ (Hicks 2010; Hoskins 2006: 74; Jones and Boivin 2010), whereby scholars began to focus on what artefacts could do, rather than viewing them as metaphors, texts or symbols. The underlying theme and problematic in these studies was one that Appadurai and others had left unquestioned: the hierarchical relationship between objects and subjects and persons and things. Instead of depicting artefacts as passive recipients of people’s actions, scholars of agency explore how things make social action possible. Such moves have spurred anthropologists to deal with artefacts as artefacts rather than as pale imitations of persons, simultaneously feeding ongoing debates about the relationship between subjects and objects, which provide an important philosophical thread running through the approaches discussed here. The argument goes something like this: reflecting both its modernist epistemological foundations (Strathern 1990) and the ‘commonsense’ ideas of many of its practitioners, social anthropology has historically equated persons with subjects and things with objects. The assumed universal salience of these ideas has frequently overdetermined

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anthropological conceptions of artefacts: as bounded, material and inanimate entities, categorically distinct from intentional subjectpersons. The late 1980s, however, saw some anthropologists formulating novel approaches to the analysis of objects within diverse ethnographic contexts. Among the most prominent were those offered by Daniel Miller, who, drawing on Hegelian dialectics, argued that ‘the human subject cannot be considered outside the material world within which and through which it is constructed’ (1987: 86), and Marilyn Strathern (1988), who destabilized such dichotomies by depicting subjects and objects as relational niches within an action-based, inherently temporal, framework, with persons and things as the forms that those relations might take. While such meditations played out on a mainly philosophical level, they had important implications for artefact-oriented methodologies. In different ways, scholars like Miller and Strathern made the emergence of ‘agentive’ approaches to artefacts theoretically plausible, by challenging and dismantling assumptions prevalent when Appadurai’s signature work was published. In short, they helped pave the way for the emergence of an anthropology that did not have to revolve around subjects or objects in the conventional Cartesian sense. The methodological implications of such a move can be seen in two distinct and highly influential agency-oriented approaches to artefacts: actor−network theory (ANT), and Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998). Closely associated with the work of Bruno Latour (1993, 2005), Michel Callon (1986) and John Law (1986, Law and Hassard 1989), ANT emerged in the 1980s out of science and technology studies (STS) and its engagement with anthropology (Latour and Lemonnier 1994; see Harvey in this volume). More an analytic syndrome than a school of thought, ANT treats ‘the social’ as ‘a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements’ (Latour 2005: 5). Crucially, these elements are both human and non-human, and it is their combined participation in courses

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of action (ibid.: 71) that forms the substance of social relations. Rather than ‘purifying’ subjects and objects, the social and the material or nature and culture into distinct spheres (Latour 1993), ANT emphasises hybridity and networks – points at which disparate elements come together. Here, agency is not concentrated in any particular node, but is distributed, undifferentiated, across an assemblage of human and nonhuman hybrids. An anthropologist taking this perspective could, for example, view bricklaying as an action that might weave together in a matter of minutes ... a shouted order to lay a brick, the chemical connection of cement with water, the force of a pulley onto a rope with a movement of the hand, the strike of a match to light a cigarette offered by a co-worker, etc. (Latour 2005: 74)

Within this sequence, human intention, action and materiality are coextensive – they cannot be pulled apart. ANT thus insists on the ontological efficacy of artefacts and other nonhuman elements. In this regard, Latour argues, objects are ‘highlighted … as being full-blown actors’ no different in analytical terms from human subjects (ibid.). ANT far exceeds the ambitions of earlier approaches to artefacts by radically decentring both persons and things. As a methodological strategy, it has had a significant, often liberating, effect within social anthropology. By replacing persons and things and subjects and objects with a new ‘flat’ ontological scheme populated by actants inhabiting networks, ANT sidesteps modernist hierarchies and offers anthropologists new ways of understanding their fieldsites. In adopting this approach, they need not confine their gaze to human subjects, but can (indeed must) attend to the ongoing production and multiplication of agentive ‘networks’ around them − a technique that can be applied in the most seemingly mundane of settings. Take, for example, winnowing rice using a woven bamboo or rattan tray, as one of the present authors (Chua) learned to do in Borneo. Winnowing is a classic example of

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an ANT-style assemblage, wherein the separation of rice husks from the grains relies on a combination of repetitive human action and intention, the shape, uneven depth and texture of the winnowing tray, the direction of the wind, and the rice itself. Here, agency derives simultaneously from winnower, tray and environment. This combinatory logic is recognized by the winnowers themselves, who know they have got it right when they are able to produce a specific, rhythmic sound, ‘swhere-gogok’ – generated in a single, fluid sequence whereby the rice grains are tossed in the air, fall back onto the bamboo tray, are swirled twice across its surface, and then tossed again. Exploring this sequence through an ANT framework rather than one centred on persons and things highlights the agentive capacities that are simultaneously being exercised – and hence the multi-sensory networks in which winnowers acknowledge (through ‘swhere-gogok’) they are entangled. In this way, ANT can be good to think with, suggesting useful ways of attending to and analysing different modes of knowing, learning and acting in the field. In contrast to ANT, which spreads agency evenly and indiscriminately across sociomaterial networks, Alfred Gell’s ‘anthropological theory of art’, posthumously published as Art and Agency (1998), is an exercise in specifying the different forms and degrees that agency can take. Gell argued that rather than focusing on symbols or meanings, anthropologists should consider how art objects and persons act on their milieux and each other in the context of social relations. Situating artefacts within an analytical framework called the ‘art nexus’ – a ‘system of social action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ (ibid.: 6) − Gell outlined a potentially radical situation in which ‘anything whatsoever could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point of view, including living persons’ (ibid.). Taking a cue from Strathern, he shook up customary distinctions between subjects and objects by implying that within specific analytical

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contexts, persons and things could be studied as equivalent and interchangeable. Social agency, he showed, was not confined to persons, but could also be exercised by material entities. At certain points, Gell veered towards an ANT-like position in highlighting the ‘thingly causal properties’ of artefacts – such as the explosive ability of a landmine to turn a soldier from a mere man into an agent of destruction (ibid.: 17). This was expanded in the second half of his book, primarily a study of how visual and material forms, ranging from Marquesan decorative art to Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre, could themselves become agents of transformation, creativity and reproduction. Unlike Latour, however, Gell did not regard such agentive capacities as actually equivalent to those of humans. For him, the possession of intentionality by thinking persons made them ‘primary agents’ − initiators of agentive sequences. In this capacity, they could activate the ‘secondary’ agency of material artefacts, which, by virtue of their ‘thing-ly’ properties, enabled, extended (and sometimes resisted) persons’ intentional agency (ibid.: 20). Mind, personhood and things were thus not separable but inextricably ‘enchained’ (ibid.: 23) in processes of cause and effect. Rather than pronouncing on how things ‘really’ are (à la ANT’s worlds of human and non-human hybrids), then, Gell was more interested in how human efficacy and creativity could be distributed in, imputed to and inferred from artefacts by people. From his perspective, winnowing in Borneo would thus appear as an extension of the winnower’s personhood and intentionality − an effort to act on social others − rather than an undifferentiated network of human/non-human agents. While Gell’s theory has been hotly debated (for overviews, see Chua and Elliott forthcoming and Schneider, this volume), its methodological legacy is clear. His key contribution was to lend definition to a mounting consensus that artefacts can be studied in terms of what they do and the social effects that they produce. What Gell

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and the literature on ‘agency’ as a whole have introduced to anthropology is the understanding that artefacts act in the world − not simply as person-like entities or as instruments of humans, but as forces of creativity, reproduction and social transformation. The idea of agency thus serves as a useful methodological corrective to the tendency, popular for a while, to find little more than ‘meanings’, ‘symbols’ and ‘representations’ in ethnographic fieldsites. Instead, it retrains anthropological attention onto the temporal, social and political dynamics in which artefacts play active roles. Doing so, however, does not entail returning to a world in which objects are clearly distinguished from their human contexts, as in Appadurai’s approach. Whether agentive approaches preserve the distinction between persons and things, or replace them with new concepts (such as hybrids and networks), the task they perform is one of redistribution: of shifting agency from its conventional modernist locus in subjects, and working out where else it can be located and dispersed. By forcing anthropologists to think in terms of chains of efficacy rather than bounded forms such as persons and things, such strategies have also pointed to further ways of reconfiguring long-standing modernist distinctions, generating broader anthropological conceptualizations of social life and action.

BEING, BUILDING AND DWELLING-IN-THE-WORLD If agentive approaches to artefacts unsettle subject−object dualisms by redistributing agency between them, others have achieved a similar effect by denying the relevance of such categories altogether. The most prominent of these is advanced by Tim Ingold, whose work, like much phenomenologyinspired scholarship (e.g. Csordas 1994, 1997; Jackson 1996; Stoller 1989, 1997; Tilley 1997), emphasises the multidimensional, multi-sensory, nature of human

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engagements with the environment – in part to redress a perceived intellectualist bias in ethnography, often associated with the enduring popularity of theory derived from the study of language. The focus of Ingold’s work is on dismantling what he calls an ‘overriding academic division of labour between the disciplines that deal, on the one hand, with the human mind and its manifold linguistic, social and cultural products, and on the other, with the structures and composition of the material world’ (2000: 1). According to Ingold, this false dichotomy fails to capture ‘the realities of lived experience’ (ibid.), in which humanity and nature are inseparable. Humans, he contends, do not simply move across the surface of the world (2006: 17), but dwell within it (2000: 5); like material things and other features of the environment, they are best apprehended as forms that sporadically emerge out of the ongoing and creative interaction between elements. Accordingly, Ingold insists on replacing dualisms with ontologically transgressive concepts such as ‘growing’, ‘affordances’ and ‘skill’, which, he argues, enable us to understand life processually, as it is really lived. One of Ingold’s primary concerns is that we ‘take materials seriously, since it is from them that everything is made’ (2007a: 14). ‘[M]ight we not learn more about the material composition of the inhabited world,’ he asks, by engaging quite directly with the stuff we want to understand: by sawing logs, building a wall, knapping a stone or rowing a boat? Could not such engagement – working practically with materials – offer a more powerful procedure of discovery than an approach bent on the abstract analysis of things already made? (ibid.: 3)

In this way, a woven basket, for example, ‘comes into being through the gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and sensual engagement of practitioner and material’ in ‘a pattern of skilled movement’ (Ingold 2000: 342; original italics). Rather than ‘imposing a

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pre-determined mental form on inert materials’, the maker has to work with the fibres – the texture and tensile properties of which also determine the nature and shape of the basket. Such dynamic relational processes are, to Ingold, key to understanding human life in all its biophysical and socio-cultural complexity. Although he does not talk about ‘agency’ − and indeed, has recently distanced himself from agency-related debates (Ingold 2010: 97) − he paints a comparable picture of the world in which the capacity to make things happen is located not in bounded forms, but in a knotted ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2006: 13−14; 2007a: 34−35; 2007b) of interactions. Ingold’s ‘relational’ approach has been widely adopted, spawning research projects on creativity, skill, place and movement, as well as ethnographic experiments in drawing and other non-linguistic methodologies (e.g. Gunn 2005; Ingold 2007b; Ingold and Vergunst 2008). His ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold 2000) sits within a burgeoning field of similar approaches pioneered by sensory anthropologists, phenomenologists and others in the last decade (Grasseni 2007; Porcello et al. 2010). Cumulatively, these point to an important aspect of ‘doing’ anthropology: the fact that, as Mauss (1973) and Bourdieu (1977) pointed out years earlier, sensory, kinetic and affective experiences can be treated as ethnographic knowledge, rather than as supplements to it (see also Thrift 2000: 222, and Schneider, this volume). Crucially, this does not involve bracketing off ‘objects’, ‘skill’ or ‘the senses’ as distinct realms, but integrating them into anthropological inquiry, interpretation and theory − accepting them as constitutive of an expanded vision of ethnographic knowledge. Like ANT, however, work in this area can seem ontologically prescriptive. While revealing how informants’ apprehensions of the world may differ radically from the anthropologist’s own perceptions, indigenous exegesis is rarely addressed as more than an alternative ‘world view’ (Classen 1997) – elsewhere

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reconfigured as ‘world harmony’ or ‘world scent’ (Howes 2008; though cf. Knibbe and Versteeg 2008; Seremetakis 1994; Stoller 1989, 1997). Indeed, despite his rich panoply of ethnographic case studies, the thrust of Ingold’s work is on establishing a new set of (universally relevant) categories to account for all human existence. In this respect, it shares the same fundamental limitation as ANT, for what both lack which is so crucial to anthropology is a space for ontological difference, the distinctive conceptions about the nature of things that are often encountered through ethnography (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 7; Navaro-Yashin 2009: 9). In this sense, both ANT and Ingold’s programme can seem curiously divorced from ethnographic experience, revealing more about how their proponents view the world than how different people might conceive, talk about or indeed carve it up. Yet to an ethnographer, such impressions are vital: they can offer previously unthinkable ways of approaching artefacts, how people engage with them, and what capacities they have to act. For all Latour and Ingold’s laudable and illuminating attempts to destroy the foundations of modernism by rewriting the ontological constitution, anthropologists will inevitably have to deal with ethnographic specificities, politics and ‘commonsense’ conceptions of things – and take them seriously, if we want to learn anything in the process. This brings us to another artefactoriented field that in recent years has enjoyed at least as much influence as the approaches outlined above: ‘material culture studies’.

MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES: MATERIALITY, OBJECTIFICATION AND ‘VULGAR’ THEORIES OF ARTEFACTS The concept of ‘material culture’ is not new, having emerged in museological, archaeological and anthropological discourses during the late-nineteenth century (Buchli 2002: 2−8; Hicks 2010; Hodder et al. 1983).

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While achieving a certain prominence from the 1980s, its study acquired institutional recognition outside museums from the mid1990s in Britain, where the vanguard was the Material Culture Group in the Anthropology Department at University College London. Through the Journal of Material Culture (est. 1996) as well as books and articles published elsewhere (e.g. Küchler and Miller 2005; Miller 1983, 1998, 2005; Miller and Tilley 1996; Tilley et al. 2006), these scholars have built a self-consciously ‘postdisciplinary’ identity for their work that rejects encompassment by any particular discipline, theory or method. What seems to unite an otherwise diverse body of scholarship is a focus on materiality, broadly conceived (Buchli 2002: 18; Miller 2005; for critical views, see Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Ingold 2007a). Like ANT, practitioners of material culture studies often present their work as a corrective to the anthropocentrism of social theory, or ‘the tendency to reduce all … concerns with materiality through a reification of ourselves, defined variously as the subject, as social relations, or as society’ (Miller 2005: 30). To this end, it spotlights the ‘thinginess’ of things, rather than reducing them to illustrations of larger theories or disciplinary frameworks. While scholars have approached this task in different ways, material culture’s most consistent and most prolific spokesperson has been Daniel Miller, whose dialectical formulation (1987) we mentioned earlier. For him, materiality is inescapably constitutive of the social and the cultural: of identity, relations, exchange, memory, and so on. ‘[O]ur humanity,’ he asserts, ‘is not prior to what it creates’ (Miller 2005: 8). Instead, it is ‘objectification’ that simultaneously creates subjects and objects; they are mutual constructs emerging out of each other (Miller 1987, 2005). Having thus despatched the bugbear of subject−object relations, Miller proposes we move on from this philosophical resolution to ‘explicitly map the downward path back to ethnography’ (Miller 2005: 7), the basis of

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material culture studies (Miller 1998: 13, 2005: 10). He posits that other artefactoriented theorists, such as Gell and Latour, have got it wrong by doggedly focusing on questions of subjecthood, objecthood and agency, which can be resolved only at the level of philosophy. What anthropologists ought to do instead, he insists, is study ‘the mass populations who consider themselves to be, in fact, people using objects’ (Miller 2005: 10), and who ‘generally think of themselves … as subjects, living in societies, having culture(s), and employing a variety of objects whose unproblematic materiality is taken for granted’ (ibid.: 44). Consequently, a fully anthropological approach to materiality should adopt a ‘position taken from its empathetic encounter with the least abstracted and most fully engaged practices of the various peoples of the world’ (ibid.: 14). The appeal of Miller’s approach lies in its expansiveness and simplicity, which render it both profoundly democratic and shorn of philosophical pretention. His message has been enthusiastically received, producing a rich array of material-centred studies on everything from experimental museology to architecture, clothing, digital forms and cultural property. Even apparently ephemeral aspects of sociality are addressed, for example, in investigations of media, the weather and waste. Grounded in ethnography, this work engages a wide range of disciplines, overlapping with specializations such as the anthropology of art, film and photography, the body, performance, technology studies and ethnomusicology. Like Appadurai and Gell, works in material culture studies may be seen as indulging strategically in a sort of methodological fetishism (Appadurai 1986: 5) through their focus on material things. Yet this is precisely in order to ‘defetishis[e]’ things; to liberate them from a ‘simple-minded humanism, which views persons outside the context and constraint of their material culture’ (Miller and Tilley 1996: 11). In this respect, the method entails different theoretical premises and conclusions to those of Appadurai and Gell.

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In some ways, however, Miller’s programme in particular risks replicating the conceptual limitations of Appadurai’s agenda. If ANT and Ingoldian projects propose new anti-modern ontologies, Miller’s is about capturing different inflections of a single ontological process – objectification (1987, 2005). What he offers, in this sense, is another universalizing way of (re-)conceptualizing persons and things. Yet this seems to sit uncomfortably with the main thrust of his methodology: namely, its commitment to taking the diversity of ‘vulgar’ conceptualizations seriously. Ethnography reveals that not all ‘commonsense’ understandings of artefacts embrace the same taxonomies, philosophies and sensory templates, so that what may seem straightforwardly ‘material’ to ethnographers may not be the same (sort of) thing to their informants. Within a framework that insists on the virtual ubiquity of ‘objectification’, however, such discourses and experiences can only remain descriptive. While material culture studies may be better equipped than other approaches to deal with ethnographic ‘thickness’ and particularity, then, some of its manifestations risk bracketing out from the analytic process the alternative epistemological and ontological possibilities offered by the artefacts of ethnographic fieldwork.

TAKING ‘THINGS’ ON THEIR OWN TERMS? While Miller’s approach may be said to dominate the UK field, other exponents of material culture studies have queried his philosophical ‘resolution’ of the subject− object dichotomy in studies that capitalize on the alternative analytic possibilities that arise through engagement with artefacts. Susanne Küchler, for instance, has explored the ‘conceptual purchase’ of threads and textiles (1999, 2008), using smart fabrics to critique ‘models of consumption … deeply rooted in the 19th century notion of objectification’ that obscure ‘the implications of technological

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materiality for social science theory and method’ (2008: 103). Christopher Pinney is similarly sceptical about the ‘smoothness’ of dialectics in which ‘objects and culture are sutured together in national time-space’ (2005: 262), arguing that the Hindu chromolithographs he studied in India instead demand to be treated as something more like ‘densely compressed performances’ detached from Cartesian coordinates (ibid.: 269). Such analyses echo Claude Lévi-Strauss’ earlier insight that things are ‘good to think with’, but unlike structuralism, they insist by example that artefacts be allowed to influence the terms of their own analysis, to the extent that they impact upon theory. In showing how things can challenge, not merely confirm, analytic hypotheses, this work relates to other writings that foreground questions of ontological difference (e.g. Evens 2008; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Latour 2004, 2009; Salmond and Salmond 2010; Venkatesan (ed.) 2010; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004). Like Gell, Ingold and ANT, these authors seek to unsettle assumptions about the universal relevance of distinctions between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ (or ‘mind’ vs ‘matter’, or ‘persons’ vs ‘things’). Unlike those approaches, however, they refuse to prescribe new universal solutions to modernist dichotomies, insisting rather on the importance of maintaining an ontologically open position on the kinds of ‘things’ one might encounter ethnographically (see also Bell and Geismar 2009: 6). The case for such a recursive methodology has been explicitly made by the editors of the volume, Thinking Through Things, who note: The point is not that anthropologists might be wrong (or indeed unique) in their predilection for structuring the world according to proverbial ‘binary oppositions’, but simply that such notions are not universally shared (even within ‘the West’), and therefore may not be particularly useful as a lens through which to view other peoples’ lives and ideas. (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 4)

The methodological programme outlined here follows Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s

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call (1998, 2003) for ethnographers to take seriously how people account for what separates and joins them to others, ‘instead of reducing their articulations to mere “cultural perspectives”, or “beliefs” (i.e. “worldviews”)’, mere variations on a universal theme of humanity (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 10). Importantly for artefactoriented anthropology, this entails taking the ‘things’ that appear in the course of fieldwork as heuristic starting points, out of which novel theorizations and concepts can emerge. This is crucial because, as Nigel Thrift has put it; ‘thought is bound up with things: it is through things that we think’ and act (2000: 220). An example of this strategy in action can be found in Martin Holbraad’s article on aché (2007), a powder defined as power by the Cuban Ifá diviners with whom he works. Rather than arguing that his informants are making ‘a bizarre empirical claim’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 14) in conflating a concept (power) with what is only a material thing (powder), Holbraad takes aché as it appears ethnographically: as a thingconcept that is irreducibly both powder and power. Importantly, the powder’s capacity to be power (not just have or represent it) derives from its material qualities, its ‘pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles’ (Holbraad 2007: 208). During ceremonies, it is spread on divining boards to create a surface on which diviners make markings with their fingers, understood as instantiations of the deity’s presence. Aché thus not only acts as ‘the catalyst of divinatory power’ but also provides the very conditions necessary for the deities’ presence: their ability to ‘come out’ and ‘speak’ (ibid.). From this, Holbraad formulates ‘an analytics of motility’ for the study of Ifá divination, which, he argues, also ‘dissolves the problem of concept versus thing for us [anthropologists]’ (2007: 218). Thinking Through Things’ methodological programme thus emphasises how close attention to artefacts and the forms in which they appear can inform anthropological analysis.

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In insisting on taking things as they appear in the field, this approach is the most explicit among those outlined here in privileging the conceptions and accounts of informants. However, as Holbraad himself has latterly reflected, such a focus could equally be seen to suppress the conceptual affordances of things themselves. ‘If things speak in TTT,’ he argues, ‘they do so mainly by ethnographic association with the voice of “the native” – a kind of ethnographic ventriloquism’ (Holbraad 2010: 3). Indeed, in much recent anthropological theorizing about artefacts (including his own), he observes, ‘all the qualities that seem peculiar to “things” as one ordinarily conceives of them … somehow get muted, lost in … translation’ (Holbraad 2010: 9). In a move that resonates with Küchler’s and Pinney’s approaches, as well as Ingold’s recent call to ‘take materials seriously’ (Holbraad 2010: 14; original italics), Holbraad proposes instead to allow the properties of artefacts themselves – not just what people say about them – dictate the terms of ethnographic analysis. Again deploying aché as an example, he shows how he developed insights into divine immanence through just such an operation, concluding that things can, indeed, speak for themselves (Holbraad 2010: 23). Such efforts to mobilize the physical attributes of objects in the cause of developing anthropological theory appear to extend the recursive agenda outlined in Thinking Through Things in a new, radical direction. By refocusing on things themselves, ethnographers gain licence to extrapolate direct from the forms and substances of artefacts, approaching them methodologically as things that may ‘contain [their] own prior contexts’ (Pinney 2005: 268, citing Strathern 1988: 33). From a certain perspective, however, such moves appear curiously reminiscent of earlier museological practice, in which artefacts, removed from the people that produced them, were drawn together in a single comparative project through which insights into different societies, indeed humanity, could be gleaned. The problematics of such methods

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have only recently been addressed in relation to the resurgence of anthropological interest in artefacts, as is briefly addressed in the concluding section. Meanwhile, the degree of influence that these recent approaches will exert on future artefact-oriented anthropology remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION This chapter has explored how the roles and definitions of artefacts in anthropology have transformed significantly over recent decades. Intrinsic to the approaches outlined here – and in others we have not had space to mention – are methodological questions fundamental to social anthropology as a discipline: What do we encounter in the field? What should we make of those multidimensional experiences? What are artefacts in relation to process? How are anthropologists’ engagements with them influenced by theoretical and analytical concerns? How do such things, in their various guises, themselves inform theory and analysis? Answers have come thick, if not always fast, since the 1980s: where Appadurai used commodities to illuminate socio-cultural and political contexts, other scholars have argued that things, as much as people, are constitutive of these contexts in the first place. Others again have explored how artefacts might ‘contain their own contexts’, and thus dictate the terms of their own analysis. This efflorescence of interest in ‘things’ of every kind certainly suggests that it is no longer possible to relegate artefacts, even rhetorically, to the sidelines of ethnographic practice. Amidst the excitement, however, some notes of caution may be heard. Archaeologist Severin Fowles, for instance, has questioned the ethics and politics of approaches that seem to marginalize ethnography’s traditional informants in favour of more malleable interlocutors, in particular the strategy of making subjects out of objects. Pointing to the historical coincidence of decolonization

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and ‘the rise of the thing’ in social theory, he proposes that renewed interest in artefacts could be read (somewhat cynically) as a response to post-colonial challenges laid down by critically aware and increasingly self-assertive native peoples. Implicit in his case is a methodological query as to whether the associated reorientation away from postmodern discursive approaches might not have entailed an over-privileging of ‘a crude notion of presence linked to physicality and tangibility, as if the only meaningful relations were between entities that can be seen, smelt or felt’ (Fowles 2010: 25). Emphasising the importance of lost and absent objects, he suggests that such moves risk eliding a more complicated world of relations in which, packed between the multitudes of self-evident things, are crowds of non-things, negative spaces, lost or forsaken objects, voids or gaps – absences, in other words, that also stand before us as entitylike presences with which we must contend. (Fowles 2010: 25)

In a similar vein, Yael Navaro-Yashin uses her study of ‘affective spaces’ and ‘melancholic objects’ to criticise the antipathy of recent artefact-oriented anthropology toward those qualities traditionally associated with the modernist subject. In an ethnography that shows how the affect ‘discharged by’ household items and landscapes abandoned by Greek-Cypriot refugees fleeing the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus was also ‘symbolized, politicized and interpreted’ by her informants (Navaro-Yashin 2009: 14), she argues that ‘paradigmatic efforts to re-constitute the object of social analysis (identifying it literally and materially as an “object”)’ have ‘so much tilted the see-saw towards studying “non-human” entities that all methodologies for studying “the human”… are deemed antithetical’ to their efforts (Navaro-Yashin 2009: 10). Like Fowles, then, she calls for increased attention both to the political effects of reconfiguring objects as subjects, and to the methodological limitations of maintaining excessive analytic distance between them.

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Such reflections demonstrate that artefacts continue to act within social anthropology as crucibles through which disciplinary identity is asserted, challenged and redefined. More importantly, they show that, far from being neutral, the study of things both echoes and influences the ebb and flow not just of (inter-)disciplinary, but also broader sociocultural politics. As Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry have recently argued, Material culture does not represent a straightforward object of enquiry, simply requiring new vocabularies for interpretation or abstract theorization. Instead, if we take seriously the critique of any a priori distinction between subject and object, then this must also encompass the academic researcher and her object of enquiry. (Hicks and Beaudry 2010:20; italics added)

In line with this point, then, we argue that disciplinary practices, assumptions and politics matter in the social anthropological study of artefacts. More than things ‘out there’ presenting themselves (or being presented) to ethnographic attention, the artefacts we study are equally ‘the effects of our practice, which is always historically contingent. And always political’ (ibid.). Acknowledging this means recognizing that artefacts in anthropology cannot be disentangled either from the projects of our informants or from the methodological, theoretical and analytical spaces that constitute the ethnographer, and through which they move – whether in the field, the academy, or beyond. Above all, however, and wherever they appear ethnographically, the nature, significance and efficacy of things ought never be a foregone conclusion – a methodological imperative that resonates in every aspect of the discipline.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to Joshua Bell, Ludovic Coupaye, Haidy Geismar, Martin Holbraad and Philip Swift for their thoughtful comments on various drafts of this chapter. Warm thanks are due especially to our editors Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang for

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their critical insights. We hope we have done justice to the important points they raised.

NOTE 1 In line with this volume’s focus on ‘social anthropology’, we address only in passing American and continental traditions (where the role of artefacts has played out rather differently).

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun 1986. Introduction to The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, pp. 1−63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Joshua and Haidy Geismar 2009. Materialising Oceania: new ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 20: 3−27. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buchli, Victor 2002. The Material Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Callon, Michel 1986. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In Power, Action and Belief: A new sociology of knowledge, edited by John Law, pp. 196−233. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Chua, Liana and Mark Elliott, Forthcoming. Introduction to Distributed Objects: Meaning and mattering after Alfred Gell. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Classen, Constance 1997. Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses. International Social Science Journal 49 (153): 401−412. Clifford, James and George Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Csordas, Thomas 1994. The Sacred Self: A cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Csordas, Thomas 1997. Language, Charisma and Creativity: The ritual life of a religious movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ellen, Roy (ed.) 1984. Ethnographic Research: A guide to general conduct. London and San Diego: Academic Press. Evens, Terence 2008. Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the conduct of sacrifice. New York: Berghahn Books.

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Flower, William Henry 1898. Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History. London: Macmillan. Fowles, Severin 2010. People without Things. In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of transcendence and loss, edited by Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen, pp. 23−44. New York: Springer. Gell, Alfred 1998. Art and Agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gosden, Christopher and Frances Larson 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graeber, David 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The false coin of our own desires. New York: Palgrave. Grasseni, Cristina (ed.) 2007. Skilled Visions: Between apprenticeship and standards. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Gunn, Wendy (ed.) 2005. Creativity and Practice Research Papers. School of Fine Arts, Dundee and the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. Harris, Mark (ed.) 2007. Ways of Knowing: New approaches in the anthropology of experience and learning. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Henare [Salmond], Amiria. 2003. Artefacts in Theory: Anthropology and material culture. Cambridge Anthropology 23 (2): 54−65. Henare [Salmond], Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell 2007. Introduction: Thinking through things. In Thinking Through Things: Theorizing artefacts ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, pp. 1−31. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, Herle, Anita 1998. The Life-histories of Objects: Collections of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait. In Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, edited by Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, pp. 77−105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hicks, Dan 2010. The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and effect. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 25–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hicks, Dan and Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Material Culture Studies: A reactionary view. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 1–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hodder, Ian, J. A. Legget, Peter J. Ucko and Mike Rowlands. 1983. Material Culture Studies at British Universities. RAIN 59: 13−16. Holbraad, M. 2007. The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divination Cosmology of Cuban Ifa (Or Mana, Again). In Thinking Through Things: Theorizing artefacts ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, pp. 189–225. Abingdon: Routledge, Holbraad, M. 2010. Can the thing speak? Paper presented at the Things and Spirits conference, University of Lisbon, 15 September. Hoskins, Janet 2006. Agency, Biography and Objects. In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer, pp. 74−84. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Howes, David (ed.) 2008. Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses. The Journal of American History 95 (2): 442–451 Ingold, Tim 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim 2006. Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought. Ethnos 71 (1): 9−20. Ingold, Tim 2007a. Materials against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1−16. Ingold, Tim 2007b. Lines: A brief history. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. Ingold, Tim 2010. The Textility of Making. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 91−102. Ingold, Tim and Jo Vergunst (eds) 2008. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and practice on foot. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Jackson, Michael 1996. Things as They Are: New d irections in phenomenological anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press Jones, Andy and Nicky Boivin 2010. The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material agency. In Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 333–351. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knibbe, Kim and Peter Versteeg 2008. Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology: Lessons from the study of religion and experience. Critique of Anthropology 28 (1): 47−62. Kopytoff, Igor 1986. The Cultural Biographies of Things: Commoditization as process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, pp. 64−91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Küchler, Susanne 1999. Binding in the Pacific: Between loops and knots. Oceania 69 (3): 145−156.

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Küchler, Susanne 2008. Technological Materiality: Beyond the dualist paradigm. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 101−120. Küchler, Susanne and Daniel Miller (eds) 2005. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg Latour, Bruno 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno 2004. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge 10 (3): 450−462. Latour, Bruno 2005. Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor−Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno 2009. Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘bomb’? Anthropology Today 25 (2): 1−2. Latour, Bruno and Pierre Lemonnier (eds) 1994. De la préhistoire aux missiles balistiques. L’intelligence sociale des techniques. Paris: La Découverte. Law, John (ed.) 1986. Power, Action and Belief: A new sociology of knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph 32. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Law, John and John Hassard (eds) 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Marchand, Trevor 2010. Making Knowledge: Explorations of the indissoluble relation between minds, bodies, and environment. In Making Knowledge, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute special issue: S1−S21. Mauss, Marcel 1973 [1934]. Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society 2: 70−88. Miller, Daniel 1983. Things Ain’t What They Used To Be. RAIN 59: 5−7. Miller, Daniel 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, Daniel 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel. 2005. Introduction to Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture), edited by Daniel Miller, pp. 1−50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Daniel and Christopher Tilley 1996. Editorial. Journal of Material Culture 1: 5−14. Navaro-Yashin, Yael 2009. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 1−18. Pinney, Christopher 2005. Things Happen: Or, from which moment does that object come? In Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture), edited by Daniel

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Miller, pp. 256−272. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Porcello, Thomas, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa and David W. Samuels 2010. The Reorganization of the Sensory World. Annual Review of Anthropology (Reviews in Advance) 39: 51−66. Salmond, Amiria and Anne Salmond 2010. Artefacts of Encounter. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 35(3−4): 302−17 Seremetakis, Nadia (ed.) 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and memory as material culture in modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview. Stoller, Paul 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The senses in anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, Paul 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Strathern, Marilyn1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1990. Artefacts of History: Events and the interpretation of images. In Culture and History in the Pacific, edited by Jukka Siikala, pp. 24−44. Helsinki: The Finnish Anthropological Society, Transactions No. 27. Thrift, Nigel 2000. Afterwords. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 213−255. Tilley, Christopher 1997. A Phenomenology of Landscape. London: Berg. Tilley, Christopher, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (eds) 2006. Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage. Venkatesan, Soumhya (ed.) 2010. Ontology is Just Another Word for culture. Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester, Critique of Anthropology 30 (2): 152−200. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Four lectures delivered 17 February to 10 March at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2003. AND. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. Common Knowledge 10 (3): 463−484. Zheng, Yangwen 2005. The Social Life of Opium in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3.8 Knowledge and Experimental Practice: A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies1 Penelope Harvey

This essay focuses on the relationship that developed between anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) around a common interest in knowledge practices. Both parties (if we can allow this simplification for the sake of argument) acknowledge a fundamental commitment to the idea of knowledge as emergent and processual, but there are differences in how an interest in ‘practice’, in ‘relationality’ and in the ‘nonhuman’ works across these two broad fields of research. Thus, while there has been considerable mutual appreciation and interdisciplinary engagement, there remains a strong sense (perhaps primarily from an anthropological perspective) that disciplinary formation makes a difference.2 I should stress from the outset that many scholars work happily and productively between anthropology and STS, and many of the key works cited in this chapter exemplify the possibilities that such an intellectual space affords.3 Nevertheless, despite these successful experiments in cross-disciplinary work,

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anthropology and STS continue to differentiate as much as they converge. This chapter sets out to explore why this tension persists.

FOLLOWING THE ACTORS I begin with actor−network theory (ANT). This approach has had huge influence. It has also left a relatively clear and articulate trail of principles, many of which remain foundational to the broad and diverse contemporary field of STS. ANT explicitly engaged the anthropological critique of modern epistemology, particularly the disciplinary segregation of politics, religion, economics, science, and society. The anthropological commitment to explore the possibilities of human worlds that were not built on the foundations of Western understandings of reason, of nature, or of the autonomous individual generated important possibilities for critical philosophical thinking. ANT set out to interrogate Western knowledge spaces by

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attending to mundane (scientific) practices.4 Early works in this vein (Latour 1987, 1988; Latour & Woolgar 1986) explored how scientists produced knowledge.5 But the studies were not limited to scientific institutions. Callon’s analysis of a controversy over the causes of the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay (Callon 1986) and John Law’s account of how the Portuguese were able to establish and sustain longdistance trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Law 1986) are also foundational ANT texts. Rather than the study of science per se, ANT emerged as a distinctive approach to the sociology of knowledge, oriented to material practices, and a particular understanding of networked agency that stressed the importance of mobility, transformation and relationality. The approach was summed up in Latour’s philosophical essay We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993), a programmatic call for social scientists to abandon their misplaced faith in what he referred to as the ‘modern settlement’: namely, the foundational separation of society from nature, politics from science. So, how might this very particular project be of interest to contemporary anthropology? In Reassembling the Social, Latour (2005) presents an imaginary conversation between a Student (S) of Organization Studies and his Professor (P) on the subject of actor−network theory. S: So what can it do for me? P: The best it can do for you is to say something like, ‘When your informants mix up organization, hardware, psychology, and politics in one sentence, don’t break it down into neat little pots; try to follow the link they make among those elements that would have looked completely incommensurable if you had followed normal procedures’. That’s all. ANT can’t tell you positively what the link is. S: So why is it called a ‘theory’ if it says nothing about the things we study? P: It’s a theory, and a strong one I think, but about how to study things, or rather how not to study them − or rather, how to let the actors have some room to express themselves. (Latour 2005:141−142)

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‘Follow the actors themselves’ (Latour 2005, 11−12) is the ANT slogan which perhaps best captures the fundamental orientation of the creative and challenging body of work which Latour, his key collaborators (notably Law and Callon) and their many students and interlocutors, have developed over the past quarter century.6 The ‘theory’ proposed is an approach or orientation to things that highlights the importance of tracing connections and transformations, and that treats the ways in which things hold together, or facts appear solid, as accomplishments that require explanation. Philosophically ANT is allied to the work of Gilles Deleuze and his interest in processes of ‘becoming’.7 This orientation to emergent realities presupposes that life is most aptly approached as a pulse or movement in which all entities constantly differentiate and transform. ‘The basic elements of Deleuzian thought are not static but entities in becoming. Consequently, the question to be asked is not what something is, but rather what it is turning into, or might be capable of turning into’ (Jensen and Rodje 2010: 1). Relational thinking is fundamental to this approach. All things (which include material forms, facts, ideas, institutions, etc.) are complex and multiple because entities exist by virtue of their relations to innumerable other things. ANT gets at things by following the traces of these relations. To follow the actors themselves is to follow the ways in which worlds appear and transform, to follow how things teeter between stabilization and collapse, and to trace the negotiations through which specific outcomes emerge, and alternatives are erased. The project, as the Professor explained to the Student, is a theoretical one, but it can proceed only through detailed empirical study. Indeed, the empirical and the theoretical resist separation in the world of ANT. However, it is not easy to ‘follow the actors themselves’ because we are not used to thinking about the world in this way. ANT’s suggestions as to how to study things, and how not to, produced a clearly

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identifiable approach. Following Harman (2009), I summarize four foundational principles that characterized the early articulations of ANT: (i) The world is made up of actors or actants; (ii) no object is inherently reducible or irreducible to any other; (iii) translation is the means by which one thing is linked to another; and (iv) the stability of facts is directly related to the strength of alliances through which actants enrol others in support of their position.

The Actors ANT attends to the agency of all things − humans and non-human alike. The term ‘actant’ is used to capture the importance of looking beyond the activities of human beings. Humans live through their engagements with other people and with things (with instruments, technologies, objects, materials), and with non-human beings (microbes, bacteria, insects, plants, domestic and wild animals). Philosophically, the important principle is to avoid ad hoc distinctions between subjects and objects. Things also have agency: they are not simply the passive ‘objects’ of human attention, but variously enable and support, or resist and disrupt, human intention. Things can interact without human presence. The focus on nonhuman agency did not entail a claim that things have (human-like) intentions. The issue was rather to overturn conventional understandings of subject/object distinctions. To consider the ways in which things have agency is to loosen your hold on what an object might be, and to become more open to the inter-actions and the intra-actions of things. This focus on the dynamic properties and capacities of materials, matter and non-human beings is commonplace in the natural sciences. However, ANT scholars were interested in exploring the significance of the agency of things in social worlds, and refused to delegate the world of nonhumans to the natural sciences. The call to follow the actors was thus a call to attend to

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the practices of all things, to learn how they engage, on what terms and with what effects.8 Irreduction This second principle refers to the way in which the ANT researcher sets out with a determination to treat all entities on the same terms. No entity is axiomatically more encompassing or more active than another. This principle of ontological symmetry refers us back to the attempts to dislodge prior assumptions about subject/object distinctions. Rather, the researcher should trace processes of subjectification and objectification to understand how subject/object distinctions emerge. The same principle is applied to issues of scale. Questions of relative scale, or of social significance, are treated as empirical questions that require the suspension of prior judgement. Translation Translation is a central concept in ANT and is the means by which ‘networks’ are constituted.9 In a world of relational entities all kinds of things get caught up in the ongoing process of life. Apparently stable and autonomous entities − such as social groups, institutions and objects of all kinds − are from this perspective approached as contingent ‘assemblages’, or ‘networks’. The assemblage or network is a provisional space of transaction in which all kinds of things are held together or connected in chains of overlapping interest or partial equivalence. The mechanisms of connection are referred to in ANT as the work of mediation. Mediators connect but they also transform. Translation is thus a process of constant change and negotiation. ANT is interested in what gets joined up, and in what gets left to one side when connections are made between things. Translation is a risky business: things get ‘lost’ as well as ‘made’. This emphasis on mediated translation introduces a politics to the world of relational things, but it is a politics in which

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actants are hugely diverse, carrying different capacities and producing distinctive effects. ANT thus proposed a way of thinking about the role of the non-human in the constitution not only of scientific facts but also of knowledge practices more generally. The approach has important implications for how we might approach the work of experts in the contemporary world, as it forces a consideration of how expert human practice involves relations not just with other people but also with the non-human world.10 Harman captures this aspect of ANT very neatly in his discussion of the things an engineer has to negotiate in order to build, for example, a tunnel: ... an engineer digging a tunnel through the mountains near Barcelona ... studies the rock, carefully assessing its weak and solid points, the cost of selecting one path over another, the safety concerns of workers, the availability of drill bits needed for specific tunneling methods, and other such factors. The engineer is not a free-floating mastermind of stockpile and calculation, as Heidegger imagines. Instead, the engineer must negotiate with the mountain at each stage of the project, test it to see where the rock resists and where it yields and is quite often surprised by the behavior of the rock ... Nothing is pure calculation, nothing follows directly from anything else, nothing is a transparent intermediary. Everything is a mediator, demanding its share of reality as we pass through it toward our goal. Every medium must be negotiated, just as air and water strike back at the vehicles that traverse them. (Harman 2009:18).

scholars make is that for representatives to stand in for the multiplicity of those they represent, all kinds of assumptions have to be made, and supported. This work of support is the work of political allies − those who are persuaded to back the common cause, to agree to some common terms and understandings. The centrality of ‘allies’ in the language of ANT is thus a reference to how it is that a particular fact, or set of facts, comes to represent the multiple realities of real-world conditions. What do facts represent, and how do they achieve this representation? The argument clearly works against the positivist notion that there are facts about the world just waiting to be discovered. ANT suggests, by contrast, that for facts to be established, to be taken for granted, they have to be ‘black-boxed’, placed beyond question. For this to happen, all kinds of things need to be lined up or assembled.11 The work of the ANT scholar is to describe these complex relations − the actants, the translations, the networks, the alignments and alliances, and the outcomes. From an ANT perspective, assemblages can differ in strength and in complexity, and the fragility or relative openness of an entity is a matter for empirical investigation: thus, they might follow successful or failed projects.12 What unites the ANT perspective is an interest in following process, in finding out how facts, or artefacts, come to be how they are.

Alliances THE SPECIFICITY OF SCIENCE We come finally to the importance of the notion of the ‘alignments’ and ‘alliances’ through which networks manage to stabilize particular forms or entities. These concepts are introduced to deal with the sense that many things appear to be quite stable. The notion of the ‘alliance’ refers to a vocabulary designed to invoke the ways in which representational politics works, where a representative speaks on behalf of their constituency − in parliamentary systems, in union negotiations, and in the hands of the ANT researcher in laboratory settings. The basic point that ANT

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The interest in how scientific facts are made took early ANT scholars into laboratories of all kinds. Laboratories are experimental spaces that render the objects of study controversial. The descriptive task is to understand how particular outcomes emerge, to follow the actors and to observe what is assembled. The concern is to trace what it takes to establish matters of fact. These studies drew attention to the ways in which scientific practice relies on all kinds of devices, and revolves around the production

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of inscriptions that, in turn, circulate in networks that draw together a whole range of other instruments, inscriptions, materials and people. Specificity is crucial. The work showed that while all laboratories seek to create optimal conditions for experimental work, to set up a laboratory is by definition to isolate particular states of affairs and to hold things stable enough to render transformational process detectable. How this is done varies. It is a method, and like all methods it depends on what researchers want to find out, and on their preconceptions regarding the object of study (Brown 2011; Kelly 2011; Latour 1987, 1999b; Latour & Woolgar 1986). Working in a different STS tradition from ANT scholars, Knorr Cetina (1999) challenged the singularity of scientific knowledge, identifying significant differences between the ways in which scientific work is understood and conducted in diverse disciplinary fields. She pointed out that while economics or experimental psychology builds models that are intended to simulate realworld activity, and assume a certain equivalence between the world and the model, research in synthetic biology or soil science makes no such assumptions. In these disciplines experimental models are designed to produce new possibilities that do not yet exist in the world, but could plausibly be created if the necessary procedures and combinations can be discovered (Latour 1999b; Rabinow 1996). The experimental spaces of particle physics are different again. Here the scientists set up their experiments in order to capture some trace of activity that is otherwise inaccessible to systematic observation (Traweek 1992). These approaches that privileged the notion of scientific knowledge-making, as opposed to the discovery of singular ‘natural’ facts, caused offence in many quarters and generated considerable controversy in the 1990s, in a confrontation orchestrated by the media, into two opposing camps, ‘scientists’ and ‘critical theorists’. The confrontation became known as the ‘science wars’. Key

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figures from STS were certainly under fire. Their response was to reject the polarities on which this particular controversy was founded. The notion that facts were made not found was not taken by them as detrimental to the work of scientists. It was, as they tried to explain (Latour 2004), an attempt to return to the idea of symmetry, looking beyond any notion of singular reason to a more complex, relational, affective process, and pointing out how the crafting of new knowledge involves relational, material practice. This is not to say that there is no new knowledge. Scientists are creative people, who make things, and make things happen. STS scholars are not anti-science. But they are interested in looking at the practices through which scientific creativity emerges, and they are interested in looking at the ways in which some new knowledges become stable and established while others remain fragile. Once scientific practice is understood as a kind of craft practice, in which people do things and make things (rather than simply find things out), then science itself becomes a practice that is equivalent to other ways of doing and making things, while at the same time being a very specific way of doing and making things. This specificity is central to how science itself works. The vitriolic confrontations of the ‘science wars’ depicted the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘social science’ as a confrontation between an unreflexive positivist realism and an ideologically driven critical theory. This framing was itself a ‘translation’ that ignored the core concerns of practising scientists and social scientists alike. STS scholars continued to argue that the questioning of how facts are made does not imply that deception and falsehood are the basic currencies of scientific work. What it does suggest is that orthodox stories of how science works ‘black-box’ most of what is interesting to them. The argument is not against the creation of scientific knowledge, but rather that such knowledge is achieved not through the ‘discovery’ of the workings of a pre-existing natural order, nor through a process of accumulation.

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Rather, the creation of scientific knowledge is achieved through a careful process of felicitous associations and alignments. This is a political process that involves negotiations, trials, contingency, and, most importantly, the risk of failure. Isabelle Stengers, a Deleuzian philosopher of science, was an important voice at this time. She argued (2006, 2007) that it is crucial to remind ourselves that scientific practices are not just like any other; all practices are specific, and if critical thinkers fail to address the specificity of science practices they are ignoring what is most important about them. Her argument had much in common with the way in which an ethnographer might attempt to suspend judgement in an analysis of political confrontation, to better understand what is at stake. She also offers an alternative and interesting way forward through this contentious field. She suggested that If scientists had been asked ‘What is your practice? What matters for you as practitioners?’, it may well be that the resulting situation would have been much more interesting from the point of view of political struggle. It may even be that some scientists would have been confident enough to tell about the so-called knowledge economy as it threatens to destroy their practice. (Stengers 2007)

Stengers is not an apologist for science. Her approach does not predict the consequences of acknowledging this specificity, and she is fully aware that in many cases scientific approaches disqualify or side-line approaches that do not comply with the standards of established modes of evidence-based knowledge practices. But this is not the only possibility and she holds out hope, and directs our attention to the possibilities of a more positive divergence.13 Central to her argument is a focus on the notion of ‘practice’, a concept that is not deployed as a counterpoint to theory, but refers to the specific means by which truths are produced. Practices place particular obligations on those involved and they exist alongside alternatives. They emerge in relation to specific problems and fail or succeed

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in relation to these problems, and they entail interactions between human and non-human agencies. This deliberate connection between practices and specific problems becomes the focus of what Latour has termed a renewed empiricism, a call for critical thinkers to focus on ‘matters of concern’ as opposed to ‘matters of fact’ (Latour 2004). Indeed, his argument is that only through this focus on ‘matters of concern’ or in Stengers’ terms on what matters to practitioners, do we have a hope of being able to understand the specificity and the limits of ‘matters of fact’. Latour’s formulation reflects a sensibility familiar to anthropological ethnographers: Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded. (Latour 2004: 232)

From an STS perspective, keeping things controversial, or focusing on their internal non-coherence, is key to being able to learn from them. Thus, when a laboratory process becomes entirely predictable, the procedures are no longer experimental, and the laboratory has become a kind of factory line. The factory works to systematize and standardize the arrangement of things in order to minimize surprises and maximize the possibility of coming out with the same thing every time. In practice, the dynamics between experiment and standardization are always to be found. Factory systems have to deal with the unknown and the unexpected outcomes of things they bring together, just as laboratories have to standardize their practices in order to focus on specific experimental relations.14 UBIQUITOUS NETWORKS − BOUNDARY OBJECTS AND BORDER CROSSINGS This tension between standardized outcomes and experimental practice caused problems

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within the sub-field of ANT. ANT had helped people discover new things, new objects of study, new ways of thinking about the social without relying on standard (but unexamined) sociological entities such as ‘society’, ‘social groups’, ‘identities’, etc. But, in time, several leading ANT scholars began to realize that the language they had invented had itself become normative, and researchers were putting more emphasis on following the rules than on truly following the actors. Discovering networks, alliances and translations was never meant to be an end in itself and was failing to get at a different and more unsettling appreciation of the world, one that recovers as well as discovers the capacities of things to make a difference.15 Law and Mol, in particular, became more interested in the constitutive force of flexibility (Mol 2000; Mol & Law 1994). Their interest in fluid objects and in non-coherence marks an important distinction between ANT and what became known as after-ANT.16 One of the problems that ANT faced was that ubiquitous computing and an interest in social networks of all kinds had rendered the network uncontroversial as an analytical instrument. Contemporary life was overflowing with commitments to creating technological networks and to thinking in terms of networks.17 The ‘network’ terminology was getting in the way (which is why many researchers preferred to use the notion of ‘assemblage’ or ‘collective’). In a similar vein, Latour (2005) was at pains to point out that the smooth spaces of our ubiquitous networked infrastructures are not necessarily the best places to look for the networks of the kind in which ANT was interested. The assemblage process is easier to follow where there is struggle and disagreement of some kind, in spaces of innovation or invention, places that feel strange, spaces that are not working well (accidents, breakdowns, or disputes) or where the researcher is uncertain, not confident of the right thing to do, unsettled. ANT and STS more widely are interested in seeking out the variable texture of

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relations, the interfaces, disjunctures and thresholds that produce awareness of multiple overlapping realities; hence, the keen empirical interest (both ethnographic and historical) in carefully observing how life goes on. The distinctive contribution of ANT (and after-ANT) to these approaches is the insistence on the importance of the nonhuman in the story of how life unfolds, and in the tracing of relational networks and the identification of points of mediation or translation. However, much work in STS does not identify closely with ANT, and indeed many after-ANT scholars engage more systematically with feminist thinkers, or with the broad field of critical scholarship associated with the work of Deleuze, Foucault, Serres or Benjamin, to mention but a few. Donna Haraway has been a key figure for STS scholars. She has consistently identified provocative ways of intervening in dynamic spaces of invention and creativity that work through the black-boxing of relations and alliances.18 From anthropology, Strathern has also had a strong influence, particularly in relation to her commitment to unpicking the relational dynamics through which notions of equivalence and difference are established and acted upon in the modern world.19 Both Haraway and Strathern engage STS without being contained by it. Both look for new languages and idioms to provoke new associations and understandings. Both ask questions that feed back into the growing and diverse field of STS. This general line of thinking has also energized discussion of ‘boundary objects’, a term coined by Star and Griesemer (1989) in their study of the collaborations between professionals and amateur enthusiasts in the California Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. They found that the concepts used to refer to species and sub-species of mammals and birds, to the terrain of the state of California or to particular environmental factors such as rainfall were far from unitary, and yet they enabled, rather than disrupted communication: ‘Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to

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maintain identity across them’ (Star & Griesemer 1989: 1). The boundary object is similar in many ways to ANT’s mediator. The crucial difference is that the boundary object in Star and Griesemer’s hands does not effect a translation: rather, it allows the coexistence of ontological difference and commensurability. Boundaries are thus negotiated but not erased.20 Although not discussed in these terms, such ‘boundary objects’ have long been the subject of anthropological attention, classically appearing in ethnographic monographs as facilitating exchange (pearl shells, cloth, money); communication with non-human worlds (shamanic instruments or religious icons); or between incommensurate human groups (brides, parents, ancestors). In some recent scholarship, the network itself has been cast as a boundary object (Riles 2000). Networks have become explicit and self-referential; they can be traced and enumerated, and deployed as a measure of social worth whether by counting the number of twitter followers, face-book friends or academic citations, all attempts to produce a solid sense of reality through reflection on the relationships that one is able to manifest at any given time. Anthropologists will again note the parallels in discussions of competitive feasting, funeral rites, or the ways in which many otherwise quite fragile social entities work to produce a solid sense of their presence in the world.

STS AND ANTHROPOLOGY − EXPERIMENT AND CONTROVERSY Throughout this essay I have suggested that the relationship between science studies and anthropology has been both productive and controversial. Like the Student introduced at the beginning of this account, many anthropologists are not convinced that there is anything theoretically new in STS − particularly in its restricted ANT guise.21 In some ways, this position is justified. Many of the philosophical moves made by STS scholars

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brought them to places that anthropologists had found by ethnographic means: the importance of practice, the need to follow the actors, the tracking of relations and the instability of social facts. However, those who enjoy living between the overlapping worlds of anthropology and STS are aware that there are some key differences in approach. In conclusion to this essay, I want to sketch out my understandings of how these differences shape our conversations. I hope that this will take us back not to matters of fact (or quarrels over who is right and who is wrong), but to differing matters of concern that derive from our own discrete, but overlapping disciplinary histories. The idea is not to resolve the differences − but to make them more explicit, to render them controversial with the aim of unsettling any sense that the positions I describe are necessarily discrete. With this purpose in mind, I have chosen two very complementary and influential studies: Mol (2002) and Rapp (2000). Both studies draw on long-term ethnographic immersion in medical worlds. Mol, writing from within the STS tradition, was interested in the fragile coherence of a disease object − in this case, atherosclerosis.22 Her analytical description of the ontological multiplicity of this object involved tracing how diverse practices enacted quite distinctive relational embodiments that the condition of ‘atherosclerosis’ contained. Living with atherosclerosis in this framing involves not simply living with ‘a disease’, but living within the networks of persons and things where atherosclerosis is never settled but constantly under negotiation. Her work sets out to explore what we need to understand in order to grasp how atherosclerosis can be both singular and multiple. Rapp’s account of amniocentesis23 also focuses on multiplicity. Her ethnographic account is more concerned with the diverse ways in which women apprehend, interpret and act upon the information that medical specialists produce and communicate to them. This information on their bodily states holds a prognosis for future relational possibilities. The multiplicity of the medical

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information is certainly at issue in these relations, but Rapp is primarily concerned with the multiple relational encounters through which bodily states are apprehended and projected. She explores the diverse ways in which women act on the information they are given, and how they enact, or put into practice, the experimental moral philosophy that, for example, informs their decisions as to whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Mol presents her work as an exercise in empirical philosophy. She argues against culturalist approaches suggesting that different people see the same thing (nature) from diverse perspectives (culture). Her approach, by contrast, is to look at how both singularity and multiplicity becomes evident in practice, The objects handled in practice are not the same from one site to another: so how does the coordination between such objects proceed? And how do different objects that go under a single name avoid clashes and explosive confrontations? And might it be that even if there are tensions between them, various versions of an object sometimes depend on one another? .... Ontology is not given in the order of things ... ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, socio-material practices. (Mol 2002: 4)

Rapp’s objectives were significantly different, and involved the articulation of contributions to three key discussions: The first concerns the technological transformation of pregnancy, a discussion which usually focuses on what have come to be called the new reproductive technologies; how ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’ are the cluster of fertility-controlling practices like amniocentesis, when we examine their concrete social matrix, and not just their abstract potential as pieces of technology? The second examines the practical intersection of disability rights and reproductive rights, where issues of abortion on the one hand, and inclusion on the other, are now aspects of a national political discourse in the contemporary United States. The third examines the role of scientific literacy in latetwentieth-century American culture, with an emphasis on both practical knowledge and the very American nature of how we use it. The idea that science and technology provide positive

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resources for improving or even perfecting life is deep-seated in the history of the United States. So, too, is unequal access to those resources, and a consequent range of perceptions and responses to the burdens as well as the benefits that their stratified presence may impose. These concerns all take the diversity of gender, power, and culture as the starting point for analysis. (Rapp 2000: 3)

Rapp is ultimately concerned with expanding our horizons in relation to what it means to be human, tackling this question through a focus on issues of disability and reproductive rights. Mol is concerned with expanding our horizons in relation to what it means to know, or even ask, what something is. Despite this distinctive orientation, there are important things in common. Mol’s demonstration that multiplicity does not imply fragmentation is highly relevant to the ways in which Rapp traces the ‘management’ of prenatal testing. However, controversy remains between these two positions. Cutting-edge work in after-ANT-style STS is seeking to dislodge the person-centred approaches of a humanism that discounts the non-human world. The aim is to render humanist approaches controversial. Anthropology is a person-centred approach, but it works from a radical questioning of personhood, and aims to render uncritical humanist approaches controversial by asking whether the range of modern experts that seek to intervene to transform (improve) human experience have anything but a very limited idea of what being human might entail. Thus, anthropological approaches to science and technology are more likely to start with human beings than with specific non-human entities or devices. Such entities emerge in the analyses in relation to the possibilities and limitations that they pose to the unfolding of human life. There is also a less explicit tension between STS and anthropology that I would describe as a tension between a philosophical and an ethnographic project that is produced by the difference in orientation referred to above. STS scholars tend to work primarily at disrupting the legacies of particular philosophical interventions in the shaping of

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contemporary knowledge spaces. They are looking to find new ways in which we can work with multiplicity, with difference and, as we have seen, with a sense of the creative dynamism of the controversial. In this way, STS brings new perspectives to the social sciences, seeking on the one hand to challenge established orthodox theories of the social, and on the other hand to reveal the limitations of understanding social process through the lens of human intention. In this task, STS scholars have embraced the work of thinkers who challenge the foundations of Durkheimian understandings of coherent social structure. Foucault is a key figure, but so too are Deleuze, Serres and, more recently, Tarde (Candea 2010; Jensen & Rödje 2010).24 The task has involved tackling established philosophical methods, revaluing the empirical (Adkins & Lury 2009) and looking for disruptive languages to open up new spaces from which to tackle the many problems that confront our planet (Bennett 2009; Haraway 2008; Helmreich 2009; Stengers 2010). Tackling issues of climate change, sustainable energy, human illness, poverty and social inequality, the abuse of power or the mundane challenge of making a living − are things that need ‘people’ to think in new ways about their place in the world. Specifically from an STS perspective, this involves thinking again about the importance of the non-human not just in human lives but in planetary futures. Anthropology comes at similar issues from a different angle. Working with an awareness of the huge diversity of human experience, and of human responses to uncertainty and precarious life-worlds, anthropology has tended to focus on unsettling the orthodoxies that prevail in the social sciences in a slightly different way. Anthropologists are somewhat less interested in establishing in advance which theorist or philosophical position is most apt for their descriptive purpose. Any number of thinkers might offer ways of understanding things we come across during fieldwork. Of more interest to the anthropologist are the philosophical concepts they find

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at work in the field, both the questions and the certainties that guide other people’s lives. The ‘black boxes’ that anthropologists attend to are conceptual, but these concepts emerge through the ethnographic focus on embodied human practice.25 The fact that such concepts are never easy to ‘translate’, and are often presented as ‘indigenous concepts’ in ethnographic studies, troubles established conceptual fields and marks the space of conceptual creativity for our discipline. Finally, it is important to reiterate the point that STS and anthropology overlap as much as they converge. Contemporary concerns over the difficult issue of how to study the theoretical environments in which one is by definition implicated is a clear field of overlap.26 STS has done much to authorize the importance of theoretical practice, and of conceptual objects, as fields of relations that can be opened up and analysed through ethnographic research. Thinkers such as Haraway, Latour and Law loom large in the current interest in human—animal relations and in relations between humans and technological devices. Once in these spaces, both anthropologists and STS scholars will set about following the actors, attending to practices (including theoretical practices). It is of course never possible to identify all the actors. All empirical approaches are involved in some ways in framing their studies, in pulling some things in, and keeping others at bay. The scale of an empirical project can never be life-sized. STS advises the Student to go back to the object and take it more seriously. Anthropology advises the Student to go back to what people are doing and saying,27 to watch, but listen too, try it for yourself, join in, become a novice and engage in a bit of peripheral participation!28 We learn in different ways, and we do not need to agree in order to learn things: we have simply to learn to risk our existing understandings. So what is at risk for anthropologists? The anthropological way has always been to unsettle ourselves first, to use our own habits and practices as the registers of uncertainty, by trying to inhabit worlds that don’t, at first,

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make sense to us, and by asking what is involved in making a world that can seem so unsettling to some of us entirely uncontroversial to others. In this sense it would perhaps be true to say that anthropologists are less interested in seeking out spaces of controversy, than they are in working out how something that we might find controversial − witchcraft, ritual, corruption, poverty − can in practice be so utterly uncontentious to others. It should also make anthropology very open to other disciplinary approaches, such as those developed within the field of STS, without necessarily needing to assume either translation or equivalence. In short, the turn to science and technology has been important to our discipline for the way in which it has brought supposedly modern spaces and technical practices into the realm of social and cultural analysis. The flourishing of idioms of partiality (Strathern 1991), of friction (Tsing 2004) and of dynamic location (Raffles 2002), for example, indicates that the existing interface between contemporary STS and anthropology is actively producing new sites of ethnographic attention such as we find in current work on number (Guyer et al. 2010), on standards (Lampland & Star 2008), on bordering (Green 2005), on human−animal relations (Willerslev 2007), on smart materials (Kuechler 2008), pharmaceuticals (Hayden 2007; Petryna 2006 ), infrastructures (Harvey 2005, Harvey & Knox 2010), chemical pollution (Fortun 2001, 2002; Petryna 2002) and environmental ontologies (Blaser 2010; de la Cadena 2010; Kirsch 2006). Researchers working in these emerging fields of research look to antecedents in our rich ethnographic history as much as to Western philosophical traditions. But STS has also contributed important methodological orientations to the intrinsic multiplicity of entities (things, places, beings), to the idea of fractional objects that are multiple but not plural, and to the existence of distributed entities that do not necessarily manifest the clean alignments of the early ANT assemblage, but nevertheless hold together despite relations

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of internal differentiation, provisionality and uncertainty.

NOTES 1 My thanks to Richard Fardon and Veronica Strang for their perceptive editorial comments, and to my colleagues at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) for their intellectual companionship and feedback on earlier drafts. 2 Science and technology studies (STS) is not a single disciplinary field. In the United Kingdom, scholars who identify with STS as a field of research tend to be found in interdisciplinary centres for science studies, in programmes for the history of science, or working within sociology or social geography. 3 The bibliographic references that could be inserted here are multiple. The 2003 Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) decennial conference on Anthropology and Science produced two edited volumes that capture some of the varied themes and orientations that are currently engaging anthropologists in the UK (Edwards, Harvey & Wade 2007, 2010). 4 Ethnographic anthropology of the kind developed by Philippe Descola (1986), which engaged both the abstract theorizing of key French intellectuals such as Lévi-Strauss and the lived worlds of Amerindian peoples, provided a fruitful point of engagement for Latour in his search for new ways to theorize the social. 5 A foundational reference here is Shapin and Schaffer (1985). 6 John Law through the Science Studies Centre at Lancaster developed an invaluable bibliographic resource which draws together an extensive annotated list of publications. The 2004 version is located at http:// www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm. His personal websites (http://www.heterogeneities.net/) and that of Latour (http://www.bruno-latour.fr) are also packed with information, articles and intellectual debate. 7 For an accessible account of the philosophical foundations of Latour’s actor−network theory and for a clear exposition of four key concepts (actants, irreduction, translation and alliance), see Harman (2009). 8 Debates within anthropology on agency are long-standing and particularly well articulated in relation to the anthropology of religion (e.g. Spyer 1998; Taussig 1987), and the anthropology of art (e.g. Gell 1998; Pinney & Thomas 2001). The innovative move of the ANT scholars was the consideration of these issues in relation to modern science, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences.

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9 See Callon (1980). 10 See, for example, Mitchell’s account of how the emergence of the modern economy in Egypt was shaped by the contingent effects of the interactions between human experts, and non-human agents such as the mosquito, sugar cane and the instruments (maps, diagrams, figures) that supported and stabilized expert knowledge (Mitchell 2001). 11 Despite appearances, this position is not necessarily a constructivist one, and ANT is not, in principle, a non-realist position. The intrinsic properties of things and the limits to human intervention and intention is something that ANT scholars are interested in exploring. The distinctions between epistemological and ontological questions are important here. The ANT scholar quarrels with the positivist over the assumption that anything can, in principle, be scientifically verified. 12 See Suchman (2000) for an example of the former, and Latour (1996) for an example of the latter. 13 For a fascinating and alternative discussion of this issue in relation to the world of architectural design, see Yaneva (2009). 14 Studies in this vein constantly find new actors to attend to. The work involved in producing and maintaining standards is one fascinating example with obvious links to the histories of how anthropologists have approached ‘culture’ as ‘standard practice’ both normative and, when examined up close, contentious. See Wagner (1981). 15 See Latour (1999a) and Law and Hassard (1999). 16 Law and Mol were also wary of the language of alliance and enrolment and sought to emphasise an orientation to the opennesss and multiplicity of things. See Oppenheim (2007) for a discussion of the differences in approach between Latour and Law. 17 See Green, Harvey and Knox (2005) and, from a different perspective, Ingold (2008). 18 Examples include Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997, 2008). 19 Examples include Strathern (1992, 1999, 2000). 20 Green (2010) uses the concept of the ‘boundary object’ to explain the continued popularity of participatory methods in development work, despite the fact that the costs of such procedures do not seem to match their limited benefits. 21 The critiques of ANT from anthropologists tend to focus primarily on the more programmatic Latourian ANT, and the sense of the limits that such an approach poses to the many alternative understandings that might arise in ethnographic contexts. Critical voices include Blaser (2010), Ingold (2008) and Strathern (1996). Perhaps more significant is the sense that anthropological approaches to the artefactual, to the material and to the non-human do not find it necessary to go via ANT.

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22 My Mac Dictionary provides the following definition: ‘Atherosclerosis is a disease of the arteries characterized by the deposition of plaques of fatty material on their inner walls’. However, this singular version of the condition is at issue in Mol’s analysis, as she argues for an ontological multiplicity that is not contained by this biomedical definition. 23 Amniocentesis is the procedure by which amniotic fluid is extracted from the uterus prior to screening for developmental abnormalities in a fetus. 24 Gabriel Tarde, French sociologist and social psychologist, was a contemporary of Durkheim and a critic of Durkheimian theories of the social. Overshadowed and somewhat displaced by Durkheim, his work has undergone something of a revival recently, not least due to Latour’s recovery of Tarde as the precursor of ANT. See Candea (ed.) 2010 for a discussion of Tarde’s work, the tensions between Tardian and Durkheimian positions and the significance of Tarde in contemporary social science. 25 See Strathern (2010) for a recent discussion of the creative potential of the ethnographic tracking of conceptual relations. 26 Strathern (1987) has discussed the difficulties created by theoretical overlap in her discussion of ‘anthropology at home’, a position developed by many of her students, particularly by Riles (2000). 27 Henare et al. (2007) is an important collection that while arguing strongly for the need for contemporary anthropology to take things seriously, and embrace the possibility of ontological multiplicity, nevertheless still insists on working through how other people engage material worlds. 28 See Lave and Wenger (1991).

REFERENCES Adkins, L. & C. Lury 2009. ‘Introduction. What is the Empirical?’ European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 5−20. Bennett, J. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blaser, M. 2010. Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, S.D. 2011. ‘Abstract Experimentalism’. In N. Wakeford & C. Lury (eds), The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge. Callon, M. 1980. ‘Struggles and Negotiations to Define What is Problematic and What is Not: The Sociology of Translation’. In K. D. Knorr, R. Krohn & R. D. Whitley (eds), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, Vol. 4. Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel, pp. 197−219.

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Callon, M. 1986. ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the fFishermen of St Brieuc Bay’. In J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 196−223. Candea, M. (ed.) 2010. The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments. London: Routledge. de la Cadena, M. 2010. ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics’, Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–370. Descola, P. [1986] 1993. In the Society of Nature, Native Cosmology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, J., P. Harvey & P. Wade (eds) 2007. Anthropology & Science: Epistemologies in Practice. ASA Monograph 43. Oxford: Berg. Edwards, J., P. Harvey & P. Wade (eds) 2010. Technologized Images: Technologized Bodies. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Fortun, Kim 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fortun, Kim 2002. ‘Review Essay: Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof’, Ethics, Place and Environment Vol 5 (1). Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Green, M. 2010. ‘Making Development Agents: Participation as Boundary Object in International Development’, Journal of Development Studies 46 (7): 1240–1263. Green, S. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek−Albanian Border. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Green, S., P. Harvey & H. Knox 2005. ‘Scales of Place and Networks: An Ethnography of the Imperative to Connect through Information and Communications Technologies’, Current Anthropology 46 (5): 805−826. Guyer, J., N. Khan and J. Obarrio, with C. Bledsoe, J. Chu, S.B. Diagne, C. Eagleton, K. Hart, P. Kockelman, J.Lave, C. McLoughlin, B. Maurer, F. Neiburg, D. Nelson, C. Stafford, H. Verran 2010. ‘Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier’, Anthropological Theory 10 (1−2): 36−61. Haraway, D. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. 1997 Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.

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Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, G. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Repress. Harvey, P. 2005. ‘The Materiality of State Effects: An Ethnography of a Road in the Peruvian Andes’. In C. Krohn-Hansen & K. Nustad (eds), State Formation. Anthropological Explorations. Cambridge: Pluto Press, pp. 216−247. Harvey, P. & H. Knox 2010. ‘Abstraction, Materiality and the “Science of the Concrete” in Engineering Practice’. In T. Bennett & P. Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London: Routledge, pp. 124−141. Hayden, C. 2007. ‘A Generic Solution? Pharmaceuticals and the Politics of the Similar in Mexico’, Current Anthropology 48 (4): 475−495. Helmreich, S. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Henare, A., M. Holbraad & S. Wastell 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2008. ‘When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods'. In C. Knappett & L. Malafouris (eds), Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, pp. 209−215. Jensen, C.B. & K. Rödje (eds) 2010. Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kelly, A.H. 2011. 'Entomological Extensions: Model Huts and Fieldworks'. In J. Edwards and M. PetrovicSteger (eds), Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–88. Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press. Knorr Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuechler, S. 2008. ‘Technological Materiality: Beyond the Dualist Paradigm’, Theory, Culture and Society. 25 (1): 101−120. Lampland, M. & S.L. Star 2008. Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1988. The Pasturization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1996. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1999a. ‘On Recalling ANT’. In J. Law & J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Latour, B. 1999b. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2004. ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. & S. Woolgar 1986. Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lave, J. & E. Wenger 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. 1986. ‘On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India’, in J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 234−263. Law, J. 2004. After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law, J. & J. Hassard (eds) 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, T. 2001. Rule of Experts: Egypt, TechnoPolitics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mol, A. 2000. ‘The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’, Social Studies of Science 30 (2): 225−263. Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mol, A. & J. Law 1994. ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’, Social Studies of Science 24 (4): 641−671. Oppenheim, R. 2007. ‘Actor−Network Theory and Anthropology after Science, Technology, and Society’, Anthropological Theory 7 (4): 471−449. Petryna, A. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton , NJ: Princeton University Press. Petryna, A. 2006. Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Pinney, C. & N. Thomas. 2001. Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Oxford: Berg. Rabinow, P. 1996. Making PCR. A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Raffles, H. 2002. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rapp, R. 2000. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge. Riles, A. 2000. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Shapin, S. & S. Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spyer, P. 1998. Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge. Star, S.L. & J.R. Griesemer 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907−39’, Social Studies of Science 19 (4): 387–420. Stengers, I. 2006 La Vierge et Le Neutrino: Les Scientifiques dans la Tourmenté. Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. Stengers, I. 2007. ‘Diderot’s Egg: Divorcing Materialism from Eliminativism’, Radical Philosophy 144: 7−15. Stengers, I. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Strathern, M. 1987 ‘The Limits of Auto-Anthropology’. In A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London: Routledge, pp. 16−37. Strathern, M. 1991. Partial Connections. Lanham, MC.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. 1996. ‘Cutting the Network’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3): 517−535. Strathern, M. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press. Strathern, M. (ed.) 2000. Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Strathern, M. 2010. ‘Sharing, Stealing and Borrowing Simultaneously’. In V. Strang & M. Busse (eds), Ownership and Appropriation. Oxford: Berg. Suchman, L. 2000. ‘Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge Building’, Organization 7 (2): 311−327.

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Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Traweek, S. 1992. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tsing, A. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Wagner, R. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yaneva, A. 2009. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

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3.9a Twenty-first Century Ethics for Audited Anthropologists Nayanika Mookherjee1

The omnipresence of ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 2000) – whether at the behest of research funders, university ethics committees, or local and national bodies controlling access – has become a fact of life for researchers in the academy. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) first drafted its Ethical Guidelines in 1987 to meet its own sense of a need to offer advice to its members thinking through their research plans. Initially, a printed copy of these Guidelines was issued to members; later they became available generally on the Association’s website. The Guidelines came to offer a standard to meet, and a set of codes and principles to which members might refer when finding their path through audit culture. In 1999 the ASA consulted its members and revised its original ethical guidelines.2 Eleven years on, new issues have arisen and the time has come to take stock again and see where further revisions are needed. In the light of the experiences of ASA members with ethics review boards, and following extensive debates about ethical challenges, amendments to the ASA Ethical Guidelines have been proposed. These were approved in September 2011 and are in place from

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October 2011. The main themes that have emerged point towards the most intense areas of contestation in the early twenty-first century practice of ethnography, whether by anthropologists or non-anthropologists. In the attempt to address issues raised by increasing demands to make ethical best practice transparent and explicit, anthropologists inevitably find themselves asking broader contextualizing questions about the objectives and methods of contemporary social anthropology. Here I concentrate on three such debates: (a) whether any differences in ethical guidelines should apply to ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ countries; (b) how, indeed whether, participant observation is compatible with demands for ‘informed consent’, and quite what we should understand by that phrase; and (c) under what circumstances, if any, anthropologists might become involved in counterinsurgency policies. These issues beg broader contexts that can be touched upon here only briefly, of power, relationships with research participants, subjectivity and the very possibility of objectivity, the reflexive awareness of researchers, and the ethics of ‘writing up’ our research.

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WHY ETHICS? WHY, AN ETHICS OF ANTHROPOLOGY? To some of the wider public, anthropology remains associated with the study of the ‘other’, the ‘exotic’, the ‘primitive’ living in ‘remote’ and ‘bounded’ locations. This stereotype was never an accurate description of the whole of anthropological practice, and should have lost its charm by now. However, anthropology continues to privilege the ethnographic method – the process by which theory is developed on the basis of empirical data collected though fieldwork (Malinowski 1922) – as its mode of engagement with the worlds it studies. The ethnographic method encompasses a set of working practices that begin in preparation before fieldwork and extend to writing up after fieldwork. Some of the ethical questions provoked are particular, or particularly acute, in relation to this method. Ethnographers take pains to be ‘openminded’, so that the views of their informants are given adequate space to inflect research outcomes. One justification of this is as a way of not foreclosing results as might otherwise happen because of a predetermined set of ideas and theories. Ethnography also has to enter into a dialogue with theory. For instance, my own research into public memories of sexual violence during the Bangladesh War of 1971 persuaded me to revise my assumption that sexual violence during wars is consigned to oblivion and the realms of silence in post-conflict situations. What I found, contrary to my expectations, was an extensive public memory of wartime rape (Mookherjee, forthcoming). Moreover, despite my initial question, my ethnography of the women who had been raped shifted, in order to document the entirety of the life history that seemed important to them and not just their violent encounters in 1971. Participant observation, for all the difficulty of its definition, has long been considered by anthropologists to capture something at the heart of fieldwork as a method that involves long-term residence in a community,

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interaction with its members using their own language and social conventions, and participation to some degree in their daily lives as these occur in determinable spaces. This relatively informal and unstructured activity may be supplemented by more or less formal interviews, and it may be repeated in multi-sited fieldwork. According to circumstances, the ethnographer may become, to a greater or lesser degree, an insider and a participant as well as an outsider. As I discuss below, this intimate mode of research raises ethical concerns about the transparency of research aims, whether these are, or can be made, overt, and about the nature of informants’ consent. Questions of ethics do not end with ethnographic research but are equally acute during the ‘writing up’ period. Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) canalized attention on the historical, political and literary contexts of ethnographic representations. These might be enumerated as: • an institutional context, such that authors write within, and for and against, particular disciplines • a historical context, such that representational conventions change over time • a political context that determines who writes about whom and what they can say • a personal context, which involves not just an anthropologist’s age, class, gender, race, sexual orientation and nationality but also how these characteristics are reported.

Around the time Clifford and Marcus (1986) published their influential collection of essays, there had been major changes to all these contexts: for instance, with the rise of Orientalist and post-colonialist critiques; the increasing numbers of insider, indigenous anthropologists; and the significance of more ‘self-reflexive fieldwork accounts’ in which the ethnographer, her feelings, experiences, and identity, were moved centre stage from the margins of ethnography and reflected upon as part of the conditions under which fieldwork ‘data’ were generated. To highlight

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the dynamic character of knowledge production, it was argued that ethnography should be written reflexively as a dialogue, rather than as an anthropologist’s monologue, thereby replacing an ‘authoritative’ account with one nuanced by layers of discourses and dialogues. Such accounts would recognize the characteristics that persuaded James Clifford to call ethnographies ‘fictions’ which reflect, the partiality of the truths they proclaim. ‘Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete’ (Clifford 1986: 7). By emphasising partiality, Clifford reminds us that ethnographies are written from a particular position (in intellectual, political and historical terms). This, however, does not mean that ethnographies are random constructions or reconstructions of other cultures or societies. On the contrary, we can well call them ‘true fictions’. This shift in sensibility coincided with the increased application of ethnographic method in the study of Europe and North America, not just by anthropologists but, with more or less fidelity to the original understanding, by members of other social science disciplines, such as sociology, political science, geography, health, development, human rights, politics, biotechnology, genomics and gender studies. Each of these has its own ethical guidelines, but concern with the ethical implications of ethnographic practice was particularly intense in anthropology, for which this was the central method, rather than simply another method. Moreover, the predominance of research in nonWestern settings by anthropologists meant that these questions inevitably arose in contexts of evident inequality associated with imperialism, colonialism, and latterly development. Of course, ethnographers supplement participant observation and casual conversations with interviews and surveys, and they draw upon archives, as well as visual, literary and journalistic sources. Some fieldwork settings are hardly amenable to ethnographic immersion (because sites are too numerous, or networks too dispersed). Although this is changing, anthropological

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ethics have been concerned overwhelmingly with questions about ethnographic method. The pertinence of binary distinctions to the discussion of ethical issues is particularly contentious. How relevant are distinctions between the developing and developed world, the United Kingdom and non-UK, the global ‘South’ and ‘North’? I found myself engaged in just such a disagreement with colleagues involved in a Research Development Initiative funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC: see Note 1) when I preferred to refer to a ‘global’ rather than ‘non-UK’ context for ethics. In my contribution to the social science research ethics website, I argued there were no distinct ethical principles for UK and the ‘non-UK’. Contrary to a colleague who particularly emphasised risks in the ‘field’ and the safety of the researcher as pertinent ethical concerns in the non-UK (thereby constituting the ‘non-UK’ as a space of fear and violence only), I wrote, The global context involves an intersection of the global and the local − and a juncture at which they can influence each other. This situates the researcher in a complex, layered and politically informed arena. Moreover, research at the global crossroads can involve working in international or transnational organisations; and/or undertaking research outside one’s own country and therefore in varied contexts and ‘cultures’. The word ‘culture’ is predominantly understood as referring to local practices of non-western countries and that of ethnic minorities. It is important to remember that the idea of culture can encompass corporate, youth, club, consumer, religious (with various overlaps amongst each) etc. ‘cultures’ in the ‘west’ and ‘non-west’ and not just ethnic spaces and enclaves. As a result there is no absolute distinction between social science research ethics in global and intra-UK contexts, and the same fundamental ethics apply. Issues of ethics related to decorum, cordiality, custom, common sense should be kept in mind in all contexts. For example a researcher undertaking research in a predominantly middle-class area in the UK would need similar permissions to enter a house to interview people to those in ‘non-western’ places. Similarly issues of decorum, safety and risk, interactions with bureaucracy and authorities would need to be borne in mind whether working in a local authority housing estate in the ‘west’, on

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floods in English villages, a music festival in a village in Mali, club cultures in New York, shopping malls in Shanghai or call centres in Bangalore.3

The codes of practice drafted by a professional association to guide their members are not the entirety of ethical consideration. Such codes also exist for the purposes of audit and accountability mentioned at the outset. A wider conception of ethics recognizes that moral judgements are made at every juncture of ‘scientific’ practice, and these judgements are made together with other parties involved in the research. Despite wider pressures to do so, it is vital to resist discussion of ethics as a methodological and institutional ‘tool’, or as a mode of legitimization and authorization, and to continue to argue that ethics involves a broader field of negotiations with varied moralities, philosophies and politics. John Gledhill, writing as then Chair of the ASA, launched a period of intensive concern by contrasting ethical debate with rule-based codification: The new initiative on ethics that we are now launching aims to promote a quite different kind of enterprise: case-based, ethnographically grounded, debate that is not simply about our professional practice but about our contributions to public debates about ethical principles and practice in the world. Our vision is not one framed by a fixed code, periodically updated and revised by a few individuals, but of a far broader and constantly evolving dialogue that will address changing scenarios and new dilemmas as they arise. The results will no doubt be unpredictable and at times messy, but we are confident that they will be productive.4

INFORMED CONSENT AND PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION Issues of informed consent have become particularly fraught of late, as applications to undertake research projects are interrogated about the nature of consent, anonymity and confidentiality. According to one view, informed consent refers to consent which is given in possession and understanding of all information likely to be material to

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a person’s willingness to participate. This includes what the research is about, who is funding it, what will be involved for participants, how the findings will be used, possible benefits of the study and how data will be used in the future.5

This strong conception of informed consent presumes the kind of relationship between researcher and researched particularly typical of medical research, in which confidentiality is essential since research ‘subjects’ as individuals are potentially vulnerable and in need of protection. There is an underlying assumption of the autonomy of those taking part in the research, who disclose information related to their identity on the understanding that they will receive anonymity to protect their confidentiality. This emphasis on autonomy foregrounds qualities in ‘the subject’ such as ‘rationality’ and ‘enlightenment’. This imagined situation differs substantially from the ways in which ethnographers experience close interrogation of their subject positions within the communities where they research. Informed consent is demonstrated to ethics committees by the existence of signed consent forms, and this has been a particular point of contention for ethnographic practice. Applying the logics of autonomous individuals and signed consent forms to the ethics of participant observation necessarily makes ethnographic practice appear non-consensual. In the hope of addressing this gap, as the ASA Ethics Officer, and on behalf of the ASA Committee, I circulated amendments to the ASA’s Ethical Guidelines to its members. Here it is proposed that ways are found to alert research subjects to the presence of researchers undertaking participant observation, and hence to avoid research being, or being labelled as, covert. This suggestion responds to the enormous difficulty of obtaining individual, even if not signed, informed consent from all those subjects whose lives might be touched by participant observation. Think, for instance, of large-scale ceremonies, or events at which photographs might be taken. Clearly, it would be impossible to seek informed consent from all those present.

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The attempt to get people to sign consent forms might even attract suspicion about an ethnographer if, in the subjects’ experience, such requests were associated with officials of the state or other bureaucratic organizations. Reflecting on the role of ethics committees, their need for informed consent, and its impact on research processes, Bob Simpson (2011) captures a general mood when he writes that, ‘There is a fear that the framing which ethical review and informed consent procedures now require will result in a closing down of research before it has even commenced; a giving of answers before it is clear what the questions actually are.’ The suggested amendments to the ASA Guidelines reflect the experiences of many colleagues who have had to explain their research practices to ethics committees. They have, nonetheless, generated vigorous responses from other colleagues within the ASA, who felt the overwhelming focus on participant observation was detrimental to revision of research methods for which they had been arguing. Specifically, some of them were opposed to a hierarchy of preferred methods of research, and wished to see interviews acknowledged as an equally important research tool. Issues of anonymity and informed consent are not only relevant to the research process in the field but also are important ethical considerations in relation to writing and publication. This is particularly clear when research is on sensitive themes, like violence. I cite an example from my own research, mentioned earlier, on public memories of sexual violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971. In the late 1990s, women were coming forward to give testimonies of violence that had taken place two decades earlier, and their openness allayed some of my ethical concerns about working on this sensitive theme. Nonetheless, as John Barnes noted almost half a century ago, ‘We run the risk of making public that which our informants would keep secret’ (Barnes 1963: 11−134). My response to such concerns involved multi-sited fieldwork through which I tried to

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examine the circulation and interconnection of the public memories divulged in the individual and collective testimonial accounts of state actors, human rights and left-liberal activists, and ‘community’-level actors. Additionally, I mapped the circulation of these memories in archival, visual and literary sources. Rather than searching for the past within individual testimonies, I sought to focus on elements women wanted to narrate about the events of 1971 that were not specifically to do with the violence of their encounters then. Rather than making individual women conspicuous in my writing, I worked with varied accounts of the war in neighbouring areas so as to situate their violent experience in the local and national history and politics. Dilemmas about informed consent arose in various ways during this research. Whereas women would often ask me to publish their accounts so that everyone came to know about them, there were instances in which I was asked to ‘erase’ their name should I ever come across them attached to accounts already in the public domain. So, consent seemed less like an event, a one-off signing of a piece of paper, than a process that required me continually to check with my interlocutors about their intentions relative to their narratives. Regularly seeking informed consent maintained the autonomy of my informants, allowing them to continue making moral choices. This process of iterative ethical concern continued during my writing-up, a stage of ethnographic research that is not without its pitfalls. As Barnes observed, this can be dangerous, ‘Social research entails the possibility of destroying the privacy and autonomy of the individual, of producing more ammunition to those already in power, of laying the groundwork for an invincibly oppressive state’ (1979: 22). Whether to divulge information to a state or corporation, or to work with such organizations, has become a point of significant debate within the anthropological community. James L. Peacock draws attention to a

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double bind, ‘That’s the dilemma. If you abstain from providing information and something happens, is that ethical? But if you become implicated, is that ethical?’ (2006). I turn next to this debate, specifically in the context of anthropologists being hired by corporations or by the US Army to carry out counterinsurgency duties in fields of war such as Iraq during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL INVOLVEMENT IN COUNTERINSURGENCY Anthropologists in general maintain that their paramount obligation and accountability is to their research participants; where there is any question of their being in conflict, the interests and rights of those studied should come first. This itself can raise interesting ethical questions of accountability if research was being done among ‘friends’ (Mookherjee 2008), ‘enemies’, or lovers (Kulick 1995). Sexual relationships with someone who is an insider to the community might either alienate the community, or provide access to it, or do both differentially. Individuals involved in a sexual relationship may differ in their power and privilege, depending on dynamics of gender, race and sexuality. If an anthropologist is hired by a government and/or an occupying army to provide ‘cultural intelligence’ about a population, however, then it can be argued more straightforwardly that the interests and rights of the latter have become secondary and are potentially jeopardized. In the United States, many anthropologists helped intelligence agencies during the Second World War: for instance, advising officials how to phrase leaflets encouraging Japanese soldiers to surrender, or how to communicate more generally with the Japanese public (Price 2004). After the Vietnam War, most anthropologists in the academy refused this type of work. In the aftermath of the events of 9/11 (11 September 2001), however, the US government has actively courted anthropology

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students with valuable federal fellowships in return for pledges of working for the government, a practice which inescapably raises the problem of informed consent. A particularly thorny issue involves the expectation of anthropologists that they are under an obligation to tell those they study what they will do with their knowledge; but should the CIA ask about research done a decade ago then, ‘How’, as David Price asks, ‘can there be informed consent?’ (2006). In the case of newly commissioned research, a dilemma about informed consent arises because anthropologists appear to be accountable to their employer instead of to their informants. If government agencies ask about research carried out previously, the dilemma arises because there may be no possibility to advise informants of the unanticipated ways in which research is to be used and to seek their consent to this. Such situations will be even more ethically challenging should the investigator be unsure how information will be used, and hence be unable to provide research subjects with the information that might ‘inform’ their consent. Anthropological engagement with military and intelligence agencies has been widely reported and debated recently: at meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and by ASA committee members, in conversation with research councils and their funding programmes.6 Since 2006, US intelligence agencies have recruited anthropologists and other social scientists for counterinsurgency work in Iraq and Afghanistan under the auspices of the $131 million ‘Human Terrain System’ programme (HTS). HTS draws upon the cultural intelligence of ‘armed’ social scientists belonging to the US Army who are crucial to its ‘hearts and mind’ strategy.7 In spite of protests from anthropological associations, around 25 such teams8 were ready to be deployed in 2008. Discussions on the ASA blog,9 which provided anthropologists with a platform for public comment on such controversial issues, revealed the varied ways in which states and companies had sought to use anthropological

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knowledge. Not all of these are discreditable. In some nations of Asia and Africa, the government is a leading employer of anthropologists, and collaboration with the government is routine in terms of policy and planning, and not always ethically problematic. In some situations of conflict, the governmental and other non-statal organizations of Europe and North America may be the most appropriate available channels to bring state atrocities to international attention. It is possible for anthropologists to brief corporations, multinational corporations and diplomats, or to work with peacekeeping forces, without compromising their professional values. However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another, or helps in exploitation by multinational corporations, violates professional standards. The interests of corporations and occupying forces are not self-evidently aligned with the long-term interests of studied populations, and may well conflict with the fundamental ethical principle that anthropologists should not undermine the rights and interests of those they study. Even this phrasing of ethical guidance is not above challenge. In public discussion of the draft-revised ASA Ethical Guidelines, one member has argued that ‘it is a matter of political dispute whether occupying forces are aligned with long-term interests of studied populations or not’, and she goes on to ask ‘How does one advise an ethnographer studying the military itself? And how will one evaluate situations where there is conflict within the “studied population” about the virtues of occupying forces? And what of internal colonization?’ These questions demonstrate how difficult it is to formulate amendments in ways that are acceptable to all. By comparison with the equivocation of some ASA members, despite the UK’s participation in the Iraq War, in 2007 the AAA issued a far more forthright statement that declared Human Terrain Teams were ‘an

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unacceptable application of anthropological expertise’(Redden 2007). In November 2007, a resolution was adopted at the AAA’s annual business meeting calling for the reinstatement of language, subsequently removed from the 1971 ethics code, prohibiting secret anthropological research. The ASA has made no formal statement on this issue to date, and arguments continue over the terms in which to address this issue. My own proposal would be a compromise formulation stating that anthropologists should avoid facilitating any state or non-state activity which threatens the life or livelihood of civilians. This follows the spirit of Hugh Gusterson’s intervention, ‘My feeling is that anthropologists’ primary ethical contract is with the people they study. Their loyalty to their government has to come after. Their ethical obligation is to the people they study’ (2006). Within Europe, North America and Australia, the increasing number of funded programmes available to work on Islam, religious leaders and Muslim youths has become another cause for concern. On the ASA blog on counterinsurgency, Caroline and Filippo Osella noted a problematic example of this kind in the initiative ‘Combating terrorism by countering radicalization programme’ that was sponsored jointly by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the ESRC. This drew criticism from the ASA and was later withdrawn,10 to be replaced by ‘radicalization and violence’, itself subsequently reframed as ‘global uncertainties’. Attempts to deflect criticism by subsuming ‘war on terror’ research within broader frameworks effectively reduce issues of poverty, political dissent and environmental degradation to simple matters of security. The controversies over the ‘Combating terrorism by countering radicalization programme’ highlighted the desirability of bodies other than professional associations being required to provide an explicit statement of their ethical responsibilities, including research councils and government departments.11 To the surprise of anthropologists, among whom initiatives like those discussed in the

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previous paragraph aroused lively debate, some other disciplines (covering both social sciences and humanities), among them political science, international relations, sociology, religious studies and regional studies, have not found these issues relevant to them. An executive committee members of the British Association of South Asian Studies even refused to forward information on the ASA counterinsurgency blog to that association’s members on the grounds that the discussion was ‘political’ rather than pertinent to South Asian Studies. Yet we have seen in the cases of India, Pakistan and Nepal how different geopolitical concerns have been woven together with counterinsurgency issues, under the banner of the ‘war on terror’, in diverse national and international contexts. Anthropologists working with governments have found their efforts channelled into counterinsurgency efforts, as happened in India in relation to armed Maoist insurgency during the 1970s. In 2008, Indian anthropologists not in government employment contested the Chhattisgarh State government’s counterinsurgency strategy, of setting up vigilante groups (Salwa Judum) and ‘strategic hamlets’ in opposition to Maoist guerrillas, in the Supreme Court. The use of cultural knowledge for counterinsurgency purposes is long-standing, but the presence of anthropologists as combatants in a conflict zone is a more recent development. Increased recruitment of anthropologists by the Ministry of Defence and Intelligence services in the UK confirms that anthropologists have ‘become fashionable’, to use the words of Andrew Garner and Kathryn Tomlinson (anthropologists working within these organizations in the UK) speaking at a panel ‘Audible anthropologists in the government’ during the 2008 ASA annual conference. Not all anthropologists resist this trend, self-evidently not those participating in it. Some of them see their work as potentially ethical, fostering better understanding of different cultural perspectives inside these organizations. Anthropology is not the only discipline represented. Academics from

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International Relations are prominently employed by military establishments. A conference held in 2009 at the University of Cambridge, under the title ‘Mars turns to Minerva’,12 was attended by academic specialists in International Relations as well as by top military personnel recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Its subject was how Minerva’s, that is to say the university’s, focus on truth could be used by Mars, the military. It was proposed that Minerva now included a new set of knowledge practices and of characters: the scholar-soldier and the soldier-scholar. Army personnel referred to those anthropologists critical of the embedded role of social scientists in the military as the ‘nasty’ ones. By concentrating attention on recent manuals – such as COIN (the US counterinsurgency field manual), the US stability operations field manual, and the US small wars manual − military spokesmen sought to redirect criticism, characterizing scholars who opposed social scientists’ involvement in war as being in the ‘wrong’. They urged academics instead to support the army and to engage critically with misconceived governmental initiatives on wars.

CONCLUSION Anthropology’s ethics are being rethought in response to several forces, including commitment to the anthropological community itself; accountability to ethics committees and other bureaucracies; and co-opting of anthropologists by large corporations, armies and governments to provide intelligence and advice on counterinsurgency. In thinking through ethical responsibilities, concern has to be given not only to the physical bodies of others but also to ‘the social life by which they are connected’ (Simpson 2011). The impacts of any anthropological project must be considered iteratively as research proceeds, since they cannot entirely be anticipated at the outset, let alone resolved. This ongoing process of judgement involves the ethnographer’s reflexive deliberations as a

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moral being, able to discern the consequences both of actions and inactions thanks to his or her training. Developing these skills further may require theorizing an anthropology of ethics based on the possibilities of human freedom (Laidlaw 2002). I find myself supporting Alain Badiou’s ideas on how such a project might develop, which are similar to John Gledhill’s notion of non-rule-based codification (quoted earlier). This is not a cultural relativist position but rather one that emphasises the need, while developing ethical guidelines, to apply ethical principles carefully in the light of specific contexts, and particular times and places. Badiou states this cogently as a positive doctrine that he calls ‘the ethic of truths’. I borrow his words to conclude this essay. I will argue against the meaning of the term ethics and propose a very different one. Rather than link the word to abstract categories (Man or Human, Right or Law, the Other …) it should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for victims it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes. Rather than make of it the province of conservatism with a good conscience, it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural. (Badiou 2002: 3).

NOTES 1 My ideas have been formed in various capacities. As the Ethics Officer of the ASA (2007−2012) I have been responsible for responding to questions addressed to the Association concerning its ethical guidelines (Mookherjee 2009a), as well as coordinating the ASA ethics blog (on subjects that have included counterinsurgency, immigration, and the financial crisis), chairing open fora (on the ethics of apology in New Zealand in 2008, see Mookherjee 2009b; and on the ethics of reconciliation in Belfast in April 2010) and updating the ethics guidelines (See http://www.theasa.org/downloads/ASA%20 ethics%20guidelines%202011.pdf) in 2011. The exploration of ethical dilemmas has been central both to my teaching of political anthropology, and to my research on wartime sexual violence, the politics of human rights and testimonies (Mookherjee 2003, 2008, 2012). The award of a three-year ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Research Development Initiative to a group of colleagues at Lancaster University of which I was a member

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allowed the development of an interdisciplinary website for social science generally (http://www.lancaster. ac.uk/researchethics/). As an anthropologist, I was asked to contribute to the ‘non-UK’ context, which I prefer to envisage in terms of the ‘global context’, located at the intersection of the global and local, rather than in terms of UK/non-UK, West/non-West, North/South and other like distinctions. 2 For overviews of Ethics and Anthropology, see Caplan (2003) and Faubion (2001). 3 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/researchethics/3-1intro.html#intro 4 http://www.theasa.org/ethics.shtml 5 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/researchethics/3-3infconsanonconf.html 6 For discussion in depth, see Anthropology Today (2006, 2007), Gough (1968), and Price (2004, 2005a, 2005b). 7 The notion of ‘anthropologists’ being hired by HTS is slightly ambiguous. There is considerable confusion about how many of those hired initially were trained anthropologists. Out of the 419 people hired as of April 2009, HTS (itself being a multi-layered programme that includes different groups, each of which contains some staff with graduate-level degrees in anthropology) probably hired fewer than 10 anthropologists with PhDs (and perhaps as few as around five), and a further two dozen or fewer social scientists with MAs in anthropology. For the most part, HTS has filled its social science vacancies with recruits from other disciplines, and even when they have hired anthropologists, these have rarely possessed appropriate regional expertise. The ideal of anthropologists being experts in the local societies and cultures heading teams has apparently proved unfeasible for lack of qualified volunteers. This lack of competence on the part of personnel was one of the points flagged up by a BBC Radio 4 programme (Anthropology at War, broadcast on 24 April 2009), despite the programme being advertised as revealing the extent to which the involvement of anthropological expertise had continued in the face of the AAA’s condemnation of such engagement. In September 2010, Montgomery McFate, the cultural anthropologist who was Senior Social Science Director of HTS, was sacked and replaced by a forensic anthropologist, Christopher A. King. A new group has been formed to resist what appears to be an initiative to extend the HTS programme to Canada, See http://anthrojustpeace.blogspot.com/2010/12/ resurgent-human-terrain-system-concerns.html (accessed on 10 March 2011). It is important to note that the massive public relations effort that went into HTS (including many profiles of Montgomery McFate in Elle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired.com, etc.) clearly attempted to paint the programme as primarily an anthropological one. Once the AAA began criticising the programme, official language changed (as did BAE Systems job announcements) and ‘social

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science’ replaced ‘anthropology’. One of the best sources of information about HTS is the report by CEAUSSIC (AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with US Security and Intelligence Communities 2010). (http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/ commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_ Final_Report.pdf) A more recent independent assessment of HTS is available at: (http://publicintelligence. net/retracted-center-for-naval-analyses-assessmentof-the-human-terrain-system/) (John Gledhill, Roberto Gonzalez and David Price, personal communications). 8 These were small teams within which the anthropologists and other social scientists involved were typically assigned the role of ‘cultural analysts’. In June 2010, there were 10 anthropologists distributed among approximately 30 teams (most teams consisting of five members) (Roberto Gonzalez, personal communication). 9 http://blog.theasa.org/ 10 http://blog.theasa.org/ 11 These sentiments were expressed in an email communication from John Gledhill in response to a review of the ESRC Research Ethics Framework (27 February 2009). 12 Coincidentally, the US military also has a Project Minerva (on which $20 million has been spent) dealing with academic research and archiving. At: www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-10/sl_ mcfate. Accessed on 10 March 2011.

REFERENCES Anthropology Today, December 2006. 22 (6). Anthropology Today, June 2007. 23 (3). Badiou, Alain 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso: London. Barnes, John 1963. ‘Some Ethical Problems in Fieldwork’, British Journal of Sociology 14: 11−134. Barnes, John 1979. Who Should Know What? Social science, Privacy and Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 22. Caplan, Pat 2003. ‘Introduction: Anthropology and Ethics’. In Pat Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London and New York: Routledge. Clifford, James 1986. ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’. In James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles: University of California Press: pp. 1−26. Clifford, James and George Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Faubion, Johannes 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’. Representations, 74 (1, Spring) : 83–104.

Gough, Kathleen 1968. ‘World Revolution and the Science of Man’, in Theodore Roszak (ed.), The Dissenting Academy. New York: Pantheon Books. Gusterson, Hugh 2006 ‘Contribution to “If CIA calls, should anthropology answer?”’At: http:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/anthro, 1 September, accessed 18 February 2011. Kulick, Don and Margaret Wilson 1995. ‘Introduction: The Sexual Life of Anthropologists: Erotic subjectivity and Ethnographic Work'. In D. Kulick and M. Wilson (eds) Taboo: Erotic Subjectivity and Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge: pp. 1–28. Laidlaw, James 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8: 311−332. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. (Introduction: The Subject, Method and Scope of this Inquiry). George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. Mookherjee, Nayanika 2003. ‘Ethical Issues Concerning Representation of Narratives of Sexual Violence’. Women and War – activist website seeking to raise funds for war-affected women of 1971. At: http:// www.drishtipat.org/1971/war.htm Mookherjee, Nayanika 2008. ‘Friendships and Ethnographic “Encounters within Left-Liberal Politics in Bangladesh”’. In H. Armbruster and A. Laerke (eds), Taking Sides: Politics and Ethnography. (A Nancy Lindisfarne Festschrift). Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 65−87. Mookherjee, Nayanika and Ian Harper 2009a. ‘Debates on Ethical Practice: A Perspective from the Association of Social Anthropologists’, Anthropology News 50, (6): September: 10−11. At: http://www.aaanet.org/ pdf/upload/50-6-Harper_Mookherjee-In-Focus.pdf Mookherjee, Nayanika (ed.) 2009b. ‘Ethics of Apology: A Set of Commentaries’, Critique of Anthropology 24 (3): September. Contributions by Nayanika Mookherjee, Nigel Rapport, Lisette Josephides, Gillian Cowlishaw, Ghassan Hage, Lindi Todds: pp. 345−366. At: http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/ content/abstract/29/3/345 Mookherjee, Nayanika (forthcoming). The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Foreword by Professor Veena Das. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peacock, James, L. 2006. ‘Contribution to “If CIA calls, should anthropology answer?”’. At: http://www. insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/anthro, 1 September. Accessed 18 February 2011.

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Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Price, David H. 2005a. ‘America the Ambivalent: Quietly Selling Anthropology to the CIA’, Anthropology Today 21 (6): December. Price, David H. 2005b. ‘The CIA’s Campus Spies: Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program’. March 12−13, 2005, weekend edition. At: http://www.counterpunch.org/price03122005. html. Accessed 18 February 2011. Price, David H. 2006 contribution to ‘If CIA calls, should anthropology answer?’ http://www.insidehighered.

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com/news/2006/09/01/anthro, September 1, accessed 18 February 2011. Redden, Elizabeth 2007. ‘Secrecy and Anthropology’. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/03/ anthro Accessed 10 March 2011. Simpson, Bob 2011. ‘Ethical Moments: Future Directions for Ethical Review and Ethnography’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, (2): 377–393. Strathern, Marilyn 2000. ‘Accountability and Ethnography’. In M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge.

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3.9b Ethics Out of the Ordinary Michael Lambek

Critique, though indispensable, can occupy only a small part of a life that is lived sanely. It is nevertheless possible to be alert to the tension between the unconditional openness required by anthropological inquiry and the decisiveness demanded by ethical and political life. The two always go together but not easily. (Talal Asad 2006: 207)

A handbook suggests it will offer answers to general queries and propose models for performance. For this writer this is impossible with respect to ethics despite the fact that ethics is commonly seen as a set of prescriptions, of do’s and don’ts, perhaps enlivened by a few case studies of ‘difficult’ situations.1 Part of the story of anthropological ethics has been its increased professionalization, rationalization, and routinization over the last two decades. The inclusion of chapters on ethics in a section on ‘Methods’ is an illustration of that fact, as though ethics itself were a method. It is not! Insofar as ethics permeates the anthropological project, it is relevant for method as well, but it is neither a method nor should it be restricted to questions of method.2 Indeed, ethics might be considered the very antithesis of method, insofar as the concept of ‘method’ entails or presupposes an instrumental separation of means and ends, whereas ethics, in some accounts, is about a life or practices in which means and ends are one. In other words, the apparent rise of interest in ethics is actually a kind of victory of one

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kind or model of ethics − consequentialist − over others. These circumstances suggest that a closer acquaintance with the philosophy of ethics, as a complex tradition of reflection and argument, and with the anthropology of ethics, as a study of the salience of virtue and value in social life and the practical entailments of language and action, might offer clearer perspectives on the ethics of anthropology. Anthropological ethics is now taught and overseen as part of the audit culture. Many people embrace these developments and they are not entirely without merit. But, ultimately, the attraction for institutions of singling out ‘ethics’ is as a means to avoid liability. Insofar as this is a bureaucratic strategy to download accountability from government funding organizations to the universities, from universities to researchers, and from researchers − via informed consent forms − to their subjects, hence from the more powerful to the less, it is, paradoxically, an unethical invocation of ethics. (Of what possible use is an assigned consent form except as a means to pre-empt a grievance or lawsuit on the part of the signer?) The attraction of ‘ethics’ as an objectified subject for researchers is as a means to stave off anxiety. The anxiety addressed has multiple sources, including researchers’ awareness of the great troubles in the world − poverty, violence,

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exploitation, etc., and especially the inequality between our subjects and ourselves. A second source of anxiety concerns the conduct of research itself, especially the ambiguity within any form of open-ended research with respect to both its conduct and its outcome. One thinks of George Devereux’s famous title, From Anxiety to Method (1967) – to which the addition of ethics has become the latest step. However, I suggest that the objectification of ethics is largely a false solution. No amount of rules, recipes, or methods, as compiled in a handbook, are going to offset the existential dilemmas that being in the world or insinuating yourself in other peoples’ worlds entails and provokes. As a subject matter, ethics should be understood not as a solution, but as recognition of the problem: i.e. the problematic nature of human existence. At the same time, nothing could be more ordinary. **** Ethics receives a lot of attention today, not only as a concern of professional practice but also as a topic of anthropological investigation. How might the anthropology of ethics contribute towards understanding the ethics of anthropology? One could attribute the attention to a heightened concern with agency as a result of both Protestant (and Protestantinfluenced) concerns with individual responsibility and sincerity (Keane 2003) and actuarial concerns with the distribution of responsibility and the downloading of indemnity (Laidlaw 2010). At the same time, anthropology describes the prevalence of ethical criteria and concerns in ordinary life universally, indeed going so far as to argue, along with Wittgensteinian philosophers like Austin and Cavell, that ethics is intrinsic to ordinary life and language (Lambek 2010). Here it might be helpful to distinguish two senses of ‘ethics’. In ordinary usage, the ethical is what is right, good, just, etc., whether universally, culturally relatively, or in the circumstances. But ethical refers also

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to the human situation in which we are continuously faced with discerning what to do and acting upon it and in which we are dependent upon the availability of criteria, means, and disposition for doing so.3 The ethical is grounded in our existential condition and the very nature of inter-subjectivity and of social action rather than pertaining simply to the application of specific values, rules, or content. Every situation and every human act and project, however small, is ethically constituted, whether it is carried out for good or bad, rightly or wrongly, carefully or carelessly, insofar as we have some degree of freedom with respect to how to construe it and what to do and insofar as it entails some kind of regard or disregard for others. Moreover, it is always subject to evaluation after the fact (Arendt 1998). In addressing anthropological practice we need to consider in which sense we are using the word ‘ethics’. In the first sense, ethics tends to be presented prescriptively and consequentially: know right from wrong and do what is right or what will have the best or least deleterious outcome. But knowing and doing what is right or best, I argue, is often less obvious than our ideology suggests and certainly less easy a matter to determine than any formal ethical guidelines could suggest. Ethics in the sense of simply doing what is good or right is not characteristic of fieldwork any more than it is of everyday life; we don’t do right as consistently or completely as we’d like to think and we usually don’t do wrong as profoundly as our critics (or conscience) suggest. Moreover, there may be few ethical injunctions specific to anthropology. But what is interesting about anthropology is the way it is distinctive with respect to ethics in the second sense. Compared to the everyday, our consciousness of the ethical as intrinsic to action is heightened in any fieldwork worthy of the name, insofar as the situation impels us to continuously exercise judgement in the face of new, sometimes radically new, circumstances and criteria and to come face to face with the contingency and limits of the ethical criteria,

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values, principles, and rationalized rules and guidelines we bring with us. All this suggests that current anxiety over ethics within the profession is somewhat unreflexive and misplaced. Yes, anthropologists should act ethically; yes, there are always some practitioners who act unethically; yes, our research is linked (often problematically) to the policies and programmes of funding agencies and to our class, historical, and political positions; and yes, students should be reminded of the issues and warned to stay away from such dubious enterprises as cooperation with the military. But it is not clear that there is any ethical improvement to be gained in submitting research proposals to bureaucratically established ethical review processes or obediently following all their subsequent instructions, creating and inculcating lists of obligations and prohibitions, or even teaching ethics as a distinct objective subject matter. Anxiety is widespread − as noted, with respect to the acknowledgement of disparities of economic, political, and psychological well-being; with respect to the future − globally, nationally, and individually, e.g. with respect to finding a satisfying job; and with respect, also, to the anthropological project, whether it retains any relevance or clear goals, and with respect to the hubris entailed in beginning and pursuing any given ethnographic study, in both the fieldwork and the writing phases. But we should not mistake our anxiety or state of ethical confusion for the simple absence of a set of prescriptive ethics. Moreover, prescriptive ethics makes it all look too easy: simply follow the rules and you don’t have to think too hard or bear responsibility if things don’t work out as planned. By contrast, virtue ethics recognizes the continuous engagement with persons, events, and situations, the weighing and reweighing, attachment and commitment to specific courses of present, future, and past action. Some of this engagement is a product of relatively non-deliberative disposition, but fieldwork, insofar as it is an explicitly initiated

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project and insofar as it truly takes us out of our comfort zone, will move ethical judgement from the tacit towards the reflected upon. Ethics, as James Laidlaw (2002) puts it (after Kant), is an index of human freedom, or, as I (Lambek 2010) have argued (after Aristotle), expresses the human necessity for sustained exercise of judgement. The first lesson for fieldworkers is: expect ethics to be challenging. Sometimes the course of action is obvious but more often it is ambiguous, as one is confronted with novel circumstances and criteria, or even the ostensible absence of criteria, and pulled between different sets and kinds of obligations and commitments. It is a mistake − an ethical blind spot − to expect there is always an obvious, single, right, virtuous judgement to make or a correct path to follow in every situation. Not only is the enactment of every virtue a matter of situational judgement but also at times one has to balance between different virtues and between the competing and equally compelling needs of different Others (as well as between our own needs and those of others). Happily, one can turn this around and suggest that the challenges offered by anthropology provide a particular set of practices or discipline of ethical self-formation, in Foucault’s sense (1990). To be ethical is a matter of becoming ethical, of honing ones character. Fieldwork itself is an ethical adventure, a trial or journey; in the course of encountering the ethical demands of fieldwork (including the criticism and laughter our actions provoke) we continue the cultivation of our own ethical dispositions. This could entail, in the first instance, challenging one’s tendency to self-deception.4 It might be unethical (in the first sense) if personal growth of this kind were the only benefit or outcome of fieldwork, unless it were equally open to everyone. But phrased somewhat less egocentrically, by taking on ethnographic research we become accountable to broader or more complex standards, modes, or sources of evaluation; these are ethical as much as intellectual. Becoming accountable happens in the course of fieldwork (rather

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than simply being completed prior to it, in undergoing a proposal exam and an ethics review process), both because of what we do there and because of what we learn there, including learning to do better. Anthropology, and especially fieldwork, can also be seen as intrinsically and explicitly (if somewhat idealistically) ethical insofar as it attends to the other (Evens 2008, Handelman n.d, after Levinas). These are insights that can’t be directly taught or delivered by experts. You have to find out for yourself. In the lecture room or the supervisor’s office (and maybe on this page) they come across as fatuous. From an Aristotelian perspective, ethical action is a product of situational judgement. Good judgement stems from (virtuous) character, and character is to be cultivated. We try to judge the character as well as the intellect of applicants to graduate programmes and teaching and research positions (though our judgement sometimes fails) and we try to develop character in students by means of presenting the example of our own conduct and that of the anthropologists whose work we teach as models − not to exemplify ethical purity or perfection but to illustrate how we meet the challenges of our calling. Thus, one vehicle for ethical formation is reading ethnography, as seminar participants put themselves in the shoes of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Myerhoff, or other master craftsmen and appraise their strategies of both fieldwork and writing as demonstrated within the text. A classic narrative of fieldwork for my age cohort was Return to Laughter (Bowen 1964) (both fictionalized and written under a pseudonym, thus doubly dissociated and ironic); it might be compared today with the more literal-minded Madumo (Ashforth 2000). But there are many others and witchcraft (the subject of both these books) is merely a metonym for the general issues entailed in encountering other models of and for the world, modes of being in the world, attributions of responsibility, and forms of violence, ambivalence, unfairness,

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and suffering.5 One can also read fiction (Jane Austen and Alice Munro are as good primers on character as any abstract account) or works whose ethical challenge is formed through the very play with genre (e.g., Stanley Cavell 1996, W.G. Sebald 1996).6 I start a Masters’ course with Jamaica Kincaid’s, A Small Place (1988), at once a fierce and subtle challenge to many assumptions, a superb exemplification of the writer’s craft, and one of the few books to match the didactic assertiveness of Malinowski by equally addressing the reader as you. ****

Anthropology’s romantic heritage has largely evaporated into modern realism and postmodern cynicism or irony but one area in which it persists is in the idea and ideal of fieldwork. In other words, if we no longer maintain illusions about the purity of cultural differences or the autonomy of better societies, we still emphasise the unique qualities of our own practice.7 Whether to the South Seas, an inner-city neighbourhood, or a biotech laboratory, the anthropologist travels bravely forward, enters a new world, inhabits it for a sufficient length of time, and returns to tell the tale. It is a quest with hazards and rewards, an adventure, and, like all adventures, both intensely real and not quite real at all. The anthropologist is there to experience, to have experiences (Erlebnis), and to grow in life experience (Erfahrung);8 anthropological knowledge, as Sherry Ortner (2006), among others, has remarked, is filtered through the anthropologist’s subjectivity. Yet to become authorized as knowledge it must be objectified, a process beginning with detached reflection and fieldnotes, and ending in refereed publications. Susan Sontag, writing of Lévi-Strauss, spoke of the anthropologist as hero (1966). In Lévi-Strauss’ case it was the heroism simultaneously of the hazardous journey and of staying, cerebrally, at one remove from it, and of drawing on the subjectivity of experience but managing

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ostensibly equally to transcend it in the magisterial intellectual endeavours accomplished on the return. Lévi-Strauss’s lone heroic detachment9 is actually at one end of a spectrum of fieldwork style, which is characterized more commonly by its relational qualities. To begin with, the supervisor(s) sends the apprentice on the quest and is the guarantor, monitor, and judge of its success. Supervisor/ supervisee relations are likely to be fraught with transference, especially over issues of autonomy and dependence and in large part because of the ambiguity of what can be taught or learned within the relationship itself.10 Despite her relative silence, the supervisor (and the larger projected readership for which she stands) triangulates and authorizes the relationships that the ethnographer engages with her research subjects. The Internet has had an enormous impact on the former relationship, enabling monitoring and mentoring of a different rhythm and intensity than the days when letters took six weeks to arrive and the crisis that had originated the initial message had been resolved by the time of the receipt of the response. Yet, anthropologists ideally still work things out for themselves in the field; they grow up. The situation changes again during the phase of writing-up. More significant, and more fraught, are the relationships of the ethnographer with the subjects of his or her research. As Malinowski long ago discovered in the Trobriands, one of the effects − since Malinowski’s time, a deliberate one − of long-term fieldwork away from the ties of home is that the anthropologist becomes dependent on the ‘natives’, developing emotional ties, relaxing, laughing, celebrating, complaining, and grieving along with them. At the same time, the good anthropologist must be alert to differences of feeling and to the effects of her own feelings on what she understands and comes to write about (Briggs 1970). Every anthropologist gets the culture they deserve, goes an old adage, but it is more that every successful anthropologist discovers what she or he

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needs or unconsciously seeks. This is decidedly not a matter of ‘going native’, but of finding the right balance and perspective. While opinions differ, I personally advocate a relatively ascetic formulation of the anthropological calling that is sceptical of explicit attempts or even claims to being ‘changed in the field’ and forgoes some of the pleasures of full participation for the distance of reflection and the loneliness of writing fieldnotes. At the same time, fieldwork entails finding and modulating a research persona along a continuum from a relatively passive or passionate stance, allowing oneself to be placed in other people’s hands or swept along by events, towards a more active but relatively external stance, imposing a research agenda or interview protocol.11 ****

One of the curious features about ethical protocols is that they generally presume a rather thin and distant relationship with our subjects. Put another way, they focus on the ethics of observation rather than of participation, whereas the central problem of ethnographic ethics concerns subjects with whom we become very (too?) close. What are the risks and limits of intimacy? Intimacy takes many forms but for the sake of expediency I mention only one of the most salient. Thirty years ago prospective fieldworkers were warned against engaging in sexual relationships in the field. There is now a good deal less admonition, in part, no doubt, in the wake of occasional public confession and widespread tacit knowledge of infractions. Indeed, it is not unheard of for ethnographers to return home with partners or infants.12 It is not entirely clear what this taboo was specifically meant to address, presumably it was as much methodological − maintain objectivity, avoid entanglements − as ethical. Like any taboo, it clarifies and maintains boundaries, but the larger point for which it stands is the fact that intimacy entails betrayal. The more intimate our relationships in the field, the richer our experience,13 but also the more

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likely and the more intensely felt the eventual betrayal. It is not sufficient simply to assure interlocutors of our trustworthiness or to fool ourselves that being trustworthy is a simple matter of good will, since, in the end (and actually all along), we do two big things that challenge this: we leave and we write. Naturally this need not mean that we break off all ties or that we publish everything, but what else is it than a kind of betrayal to withdraw and to write frankly or from a critical angle about people whose lives one has shared?14 Equal to a concern for (degrees of) betrayal we should be on the lookout for bad faith, especially the bad faith that refuses to recognize betrayal or that assumes that telling people one is going to write about them or showing oneself in the act of writing fieldnotes is to maintain the boundaries sufficiently to preclude betrayal. Anthropology is all very high-minded (sometimes even moralistic). It is how we attract students and how we position ourselves vis-à-vis other disciplines. But we need to acknowledge that all fieldwork is ethically ambiguous. My position here is not to champion the ethical purity of anthropology, nor to take up the superficial critique that, some students report, is to be found in certain women’s studies and postcolonialism classrooms, criticism that merely lambastes anthropology for its colonialist associations and qualities and then goes on to offer in replacement thin imitations of the kind of positions that anthropology has in fact long since taken. I suggest that there are no easy or ready-made alternatives or prescriptive solutions for any of the obvious dilemmas associated with fieldwork and writing − for example, whether to be more an observer or an advocate (and if so, an advocate for which faction?); whether to grant voice to and recognize the identity of each informant (as oral historians do) or to protect identity through concealment; whether to speak ‘truthfully,’ or ‘sincerely’ in fully reciprocal conversation with interlocutors or to privilege their positions. One of the (ethical) lessons of fieldwork, and contributing to the ethnographer’s ethical

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self-formation, is the recognition that he or she cannot be consistently good or just, fully detached or fully committed, and that there is always a balance and compromise. Ethical action is never fully consistent or complete. (Saints, for example, or monks and nuns, must give up care for their immediate families.) The insights gained in fieldwork and the challenges faced are continued and possibly magnified in acts of writing. ****

Here are only a few situations encountered in fieldwork that demonstrate the pervasiveness of ethical ambiguity. A first point is that we can never stick fully to the outlooks we attempt to grasp or that by nods or silent acquiesce we appear, for a time, to share with our interlocutors. This is both because of the critical distance necessary for social science and because our interlocutors do not all agree with each other. For all the talk in the anthropological literature about acknowledging the voice of ‘the other’, there is relatively little attention to the fact that there are many ‘others’ and that (being also others to each other) they will not always agree among themselves. For example, in fieldwork in Madagascar not only did I have to disappoint expectations by not being able to provide a factual or authoritative account of Sakalava history and royal politics of the kind it seemed to some interlocutors that my inquiries were leading toward but also had I tried to do so, I could not have met equally the expectations of the members of the various factions, each of whom tried earnestly to make me see the truth and justice of their own side of things (and which I could appreciate while I listened to each of them). It is not always easy to know on which side of a conflict to stand, with whom to show solidarity, or when to step out of the fray and become a neutral observer. When some of the spirit mediums who befriended me said bad things about each other, I found my loyalties and personal consistency tested. Much stronger expressions of this dilemma are to

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be found in highly stratified contexts in which some voices are silenced at the expense of others and where the ethnographer is forced to take on the perspective of only one gender, class, or status group, and, if it is the dominant group, then to infringe on that understanding in the ensuing critical account.15 A second, related lesson concerns the prevalence and necessity of deceit. We often give an impression or fail to correct someone’s misapprehension about such matters as our acceptance of certain practices or stances. For example, an anthropologist of religion who is an atheist (or a Christian) will often fail to make that explicit.16 One could argue that refraining from expressing scepticism or superiority is often the right thing to do (not only for methodological reason of maintaining openness but also out of simple politeness) but admit that it runs counter to an ethics of full disclosure. We are no doubt aware of this dilemma from our personal lives as well − and realize that it cannot be solved by following a rule; indeed, its experience as a dilemma is heightened insofar as we do conceive of the situation as one of potentially violating a rule. Perhaps the central ethical dilemmas for anthropologists stem from the fact that by its very definition fieldwork is limited in time and space. This raises saliently the issues of forensic personhood and dissociation that have been central to philosophical debate over ethics. Commitment (to specific people, values, and courses of action) and thus responsibility are central to ethical life and hence ought to be characterized with respect to both temporal continuity (as described by the forensic quality of personhood) and consistency or completeness (as indicated negatively by dissociation). On both counts the anthropological position is distinctly peculiar. Continuity is challenged by the fact that eventually we leave the field (whether provisionally or decisively), raising questions of abandonment and the breaking of ostensible commitments (betrayal, as referred to above). This suggests that attention to departures

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ought to be as central a subject of anthropological discussion as termination is of psychoanalysis. But more to the point, the very foreknowledge of eventual departure and the fact of having a life outside the field cast a shadow over all the commitments entered into during the course of fieldwork, framing or bracketing them in a manner that implies a kind or degree of dissociation from one’s own acts. Following philosopher Alexander Nehamas, I associate this position with irony. There is irony entailed in leading a double life, but such doubling is often less a form of deliberate outright deception than of uncertainty.17 As Nehamas puts it, irony ‘enables us to play at being someone, without forcing us to decide what we really are or, indeed, whether we really are anyone. . . . Irony always and necessarily postulates a double speaker and a double audience’ (1998: 59−60). Dissociation conceived in this manner is by no means necessarily unethical (Lambek and Antze 2003) but it renders ethics more complicated. Moreover, it may readily spill over from fieldwork into ordinary life so that the latter is put into question as a kind of ‘field’ itself and is no longer quite so ‘ordinary’. The radical contingency of things is more apparent, not only cultural practices and criteria but also our own commitments to them. Insofar as commitment to one way of life, system of thought, model of reality, religious order, social identity, community, or set of people entails rejection of others, the anthropologist is poised outside of any such ordinary commitment, a perch (detached, dissociated, doubled, distributed, or ironic) that is both precarious and implausible with respect to our lives taken in their entirety.18 Within limits, it can be intellectually exhilarating but it can also be ethically problematic, or in need of specific ethical rationalization. I illustrate from my own practice. Insofar as spirit possession itself is characterized by dissociation, so has been my response to it. Readers of my work on spirit possession have accused me, on the one side, of naïvely

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accepting as real what (to these critics) is patently false, and, on the other side, of what one critic memorably called ‘ontological imperialism’ insofar as I alluded to a mystified social construction. My attempt to wriggle (intellectually) out of the dilemma was to suggest that all strong cultural practices, my own included, entail some sort of mystification of social construction or legitimation. The point is that I am vulnerable neither to becoming possessed by an ostensibly autonomous Malagasy spirit or naïvely advocating for the authenticity of possession at large, nor about to reject spirit possession as false. When I am in the field, and when I write about it, I accept the social reality of possession without question and am actively engaged in its reception (aesthetically, intellectually, ethically, and practically); in my everyday ‘personal life’, ‘at home’, spirit possession is non-existent.19 I am prepared to argue the merits of my (double) position; intellectually it represents what is valuable (difficult, exciting, insightful, perhaps even truthful and beautiful) about anthropology as a balancing act. Practically, such dissociation may not be so unusual and is certainly characteristic of numerous domains of social life (as when many Europeans move with ease between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ without worrying about consistency). The anthropological situation here epitomizes many highly intellectualized, detached, or sceptical positions or endeavours, albeit enriched and informed by deeply personal human encounters and presence (face-to-face encounters with spirits and spirit mediums, their presence and my presence, our mutual presence to each other). The anthropologist stands, in this regard, as both modernity’s hero and its fool.20 Finally, I briefly add that not only fieldwork but also theory entails ethical judgement, especially in such matters as the balance we draw between structure and agency, human freedom and creativity and biological, economic, or other forms of determinism, and the relative weight we give to power and interest. In other words, an

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ethical dimension of theory entails how we acknowledge the ethical insight, intention, responsibility, and constraints of others. ****

What I have been arguing is that the anthropological position is out of the ordinary in two, perhaps contradictory, respects. On one side, it is profoundly non-ethical or infraethical (I specifically do not call it unethical) insofar as it precludes full (continuous, consistent, undissociated) commitment to a single given alternative, community, or way of life (though of course anthropology creates its own way of life). But on the other side, this renders the anthropological position supra-ethical as it entails both a principled look at the existential abyss and a disciplined, ascetic rejection of any exclusive form of identity (or identity politics) at the same time as it understands and documents the value for a sane human life of commitment to a given cultural order and social community. Anthropological fieldwork is at once a kind of supra-ethical activity − in which one enables oneself to be ‘read’ by the field and subject to exhilarating or excruciating challenges and calls for judgement − and infra-ethical − insofar as one does not fully commit to the indexical ‘I’. One is never fully where one stands, or not exclusively there; one will leave one day, one is nosy and instrumental, and one will inevitably betray confidence and hospitality. But in the end, anthropologists are also just ordinary human beings. Having made particular commitments, being given to particular and shifting attractions, friendships, and affinities rather than others, and subject as well to indignation and other ethical emotions (Strawson 2008; Stafford 2010), anthropologists cannot do better than anyone else at remaining calm or neutral or sticking to abstract principles, even when the right thing to do might appear relatively clear-cut. Our often self-conscious lapses of exemplary virtuous behaviour Aristotelians translate by the awkward term of incontinence.

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While striving for virtue, we human beings have to be able to acknowledge our occasional incontinence as well as the unforeseen consequences of even our most virtuous acts. To act responsibly is not to protest our innocence, justify or rationalize our actions, or make excuses, but to apologize and ask forgiveness (and, in complementary circumstances, to forgive), as Hannah Arendt (1998) emphasised. Put more generally, and perhaps more strongly, following Stanley Cavell (1996), the thing to do about accidents or mistakes (cf. Austin 1961 on the distinction between them) or shifts of commitment is simply to acknowledge them. As Stephen Mulhall helpfully articulates Cavell’s position, it is not that a person is or isn’t responsible for all the consequences of their utterances or actions, could have foreseen them all, etc., but rather that, ‘she is then flatly responsible for determining her relation to them − whether and how to claim them as unforeseeable or simply unforeseen, to accept them as meant or excuse them as unintended’ (Mulhall 1996: 17). ****

I have emphasised the consistent challenges or tensions in living and working ethically, as anthropologists and in ordinary life. The ethical self cannot simply follow a rule or set of rules and established obligations; even were it possible, that would be a narrow, pinched existence. But equally, the ethical self is not simply open to a horizon of pure freedom. Instead, as we document in our ethnographic work, humans are constituted by prior commitments and open to further alternatives and other voices, acts and forms of interpellation, enticing or disturbing, more and less fully received, inhabited, or internalized. Anthropological fieldwork heightens the difficulty entailed in practical judgement between maintaining former or multiple commitments of identity and personhood, accepting interpellations, taking leaps into (or back from) new territory, or living in some degree of dissociation with both.

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Ethics can try to draw boundaries or exhort freedom, but inevitably it will escape them. There is no set of rules that could offer a perfect or foolproof guide to ethical conduct nor is it possible to act fully and consistently ethically. These are fantasies, attractive only to saints or prophets or to people whose work as professional ethicists over-rides their imagination or life experience. This is not to say one should abandon a concern with ethics − in any case, this is no more possible than the enactment of a fully ethical practice − but to suggest a bit of realism. We need to face frankly the fact that anthropological practice may not be precisely ethical in the ordinary way of things. Moreover, it is probably as ‘ethical’ to acknowledge inconsistency, incompleteness, incontinence, and just plain wrongdoing as to advocate perfection. Each version of a Handbook such as this is the product of its time. As the current period is one in which a great deal of anxiety has been expressed concerning ethics it has seemed most useful to take a critical distance and suggest a bit of ‘lightening up’. This has required judgement on the author’s part. Whether good or bad, the judgement is one that can be ascribed to the broad field of the ethical.

NOTES 1 These first paragraphs draw heavily on correspondence with Olivia Harris, expressing my hesitation at accepting her invitation to write on anthropological ethics. She, of course, disarmed me, and I offer this essay in salute to her vigorously enthusiastic yet ironically tempered engagement with the world. Ave atque vale. My thanks to Paul Antze and Donna Young for first readings. Richard Fardon proffered a helpful critique and proved as disarming and ironical an editor as Olivia. The title is inspired by Stanley Cavell’s ‘Something Out of the Ordinary’ (2005). 2 Thanks to Jackie Solway for clarifying the point. 3 I do not contrast ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’, since that distinction is highly variable among philosophers. Moreover, my point is not to contrast ordinary (conservative) observance of social obligations with extraordinary (radical) acts of individual initiative but

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to point to different levels of abstraction: from what is good and right to the exercise and accounting of good and right judgements, and from specific acts to the recognition that all acts and utterances entail judgement (Lambek 2010). 4 In this respect those anthropologists who decades ago advocated psychoanalysis as a prerequisite for fieldwork were probably right. The fact is, however, that fieldwork, conducted in an equally rigorous, disciplined, and reflective manner, can be itself a kind of psychoanalysis − and more importantly, an avenue for ethical cultivation. 5 Compare, among many others, the diverse approaches to ethics of Bailey (1994), Das (2007), Kleinman (2006), Scheper-Hughes (2004), and Smith (1999). 6 Jackson’s anthropological memoir (2004) appears to be modelled directly on Sebald. 7 For a recent example, see Borneman and Hammoudi (2009). 8 On the significance of the distinction, necessary in German and conflated in English, see Jay (2005). 9 This quality is itself partly a product of his text; it is only when he notes that his wife had to leave the field for reasons of ill health that the reader becomes aware of her existence. That is her sole appearance in 415 pages of Tristes Tropiques (LéviStrauss 1974). 10 This is surely subject for an essay in its own right. For a start, see Reczkiewicz and Lambek (n.d). 11 Compare, for example Evans-Pritchard’s interventionist attempts to learn the secrets of Zande sorcery extraction (1937) to my own (frustrated) strategy of patience (Lambek 1993). I am not suggesting that one is ethically superior to the other, but rather that the very mode of inquiry is informed by ethical judgement. In that study I did imitate EvansPritchard in letting my questions emerge through the logic of local practice and describe how what I came to know was shaped in large part by the notions characteristic of respective traditions about how to teach. See also Solway (2005) and Lambek (1991) on modesty, Hirschkind (2001) on an ethics of listening, and more generally Gadamer (1975). I develop these issues further in Lambek (1997). 12 There is silence on the matter of infants conceived in the field and left there. 13 Possibly, also then, the deeper our understanding and the better our research, except for the fact that intimacy may weaken the critical detachment that is also a crucial part of knowledge construction. 14 The situation is not so different for memoirists or most writers of fiction. 15 This raises also the relationship of the ethical to the political (or, as phrased in the epigram by Asad [2006], of anthropological inquiry to both the ethical and the political). My essay does not address the politics of anthropology: whether it is better to be a

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barefoot compagnera or a theoretical Marxist; to engage in grass-roots development or World Bank consultancy, etc. 16 This point emerged in a discussion of ethics with post-Soviet scholars, led by Güzel Sabirova, in which I was privileged to participate. 17 Geertz elucidates what he calls ‘anthropological irony’ precisely in an essay on the ethics of fieldwork. This remains an important and characteristically subtle discussion of ‘the inherent moral asymmetry of the fieldwork situation’ (2000: 83). 18 Is it ethical to compartmentalize fieldwork? Is it ethical not to? 19 Earlier reflections on the changing nature of ‘home and field’ can be found in Robbins and Bamford, eds (1997). See my essay there (Lambek 1997), and the response by Tehindrazanarivelo (1997). 20 On the ‘foolishness’ of anthropology, I am indebted to Donna Young (2010 and forthcoming).

REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah, 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition, 2nd edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Asad, Talal, 2006. ‘Responses.’ In David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ashforth, Adam, 2000. Madumo. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Austin, J.L., 1961. ‘A Plea for Excuses.’ In J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds), Austin, Philosophical Papers. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 123−152. Bailey, Frederick, 1994. The Witch-Hunt, or, The Triumph of Morality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Borneman, John and Abdellah Hammoudi (eds), 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bowen, Elenore Smith (Laura Bohannon), 1964. Return to Laughter. New York: Doubleday. Briggs, Jean, 1970. Never In Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, Stanley, 1996. A Pitch of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, Stanley, 2005. ‘Something Out of the Ordinary.’ In Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 7−27.

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Das, Veena, 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Devereux, George, 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. New York: Humanities Press. Evans-Prichard, E.E., 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evens, T.M.S., 2008. Anthropology as Ethics. New York: Berghahn Books. Foucault, Michel, 1990. The Uses of Pleasure. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1975. Truth and Method. G. Borden and J. Cumming, trans. New York: Seabury. Geertz, Clifford, 2000 [1968]. ‘Thinking as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the New States.’ In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 21−41. Handelman, Don, n.d. ‘The Ethic of Being Wrong: Levinas in the Field’, in T.M.S. Evens, Don Handelman, and Christopher Roberts (eds.) Reflecting on Reflexive Anthropology. Hirschkind, Charles, 2001. ‘The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt,’ American Ethnologist 28 (3): 623−649. Jackson, Michael, 2004. In Sierra Leone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jay, Martin, 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Keane, Webb, 2003. ‘Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2): 222−248. Kincaid, Jamaica, 1988. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Kleinman, Arthur, 2006. What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laidlaw, James, 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 311−332. Laidlaw, James, 2010. ‘Agency and Responsibility: Perhaps You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing.’ In M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lambek, Michael (ed.), 1991. From Method to Modesty: Essays on Thinking and Making Ethnography Now. Special section of Culture 11 (1−2).

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Lambek, Michael, 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lambek, Michael, 1997. ‘Pinching the Crocodile’s Tongue: Affinity and the Anxieties of Influence in Fieldwork,’ Anthropology and Humanism 22 (1): 31−53. Lambek, Michael (ed.), 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lambek, Michael and Paul Antze (eds), 2003. Illness and Irony. New York: Berghahn Books. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1974. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum. Mulhall, Stephen, 1996. ‘Introduction,’ to The Cavell Reader. Malden MA: Blackwell. Nehamas, Alexander, 1998. The Art of Living. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ortner, Sherry, 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reczkiewicz, Mark and Michael Lambek, n.d. ‘Cultivating the Art of Fieldwork in an Age of Professional Reproduction.’ Unpublished paper. Robbins, Joel and Sandra Bamford (eds), 1997. Fieldwork Revisited: Changing Contexts of Ethnographic Practice in the Era of Globalization. Special issue of Anthropology and Humanism 22 (1). Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 2004. ‘Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-Trafficking Underworld,’ Ethnography 5 (1): 29−73. Sebald, W.G., 1996. The Emigrants. London: Harvill Press. Smith, Gavin, 1999. Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Solway, Jacqueline, 2005. ‘Anthropologist and Accomplice in Botswana.’ In Anne Meneley and Donna Young (eds), Auto-Ethnographies: The Anthropology of Academic Practices. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, pp. 113−125. Sontag, Susan, 1966. ‘The Anthropologist as Hero.’ In Against Interpretation, And Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, pp. 77−89. Stafford, Charles, 2010. ‘The Punishment of Ethical Behaviour.’ In M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Strawson, Peter F., 2008 [1962]. ‘Freedom and Resentment.’ In Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. London: Routledge, pp. 1−28.

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Tehindrazanarivelo, Emmanuel, 1997. ‘Fieldwork: The Dance of Power,’ Anthropology and Humanism 22 (1): 54−60. Young, Donna, 2010. ‘Engaging Others: Religious Conviction and Irony in the Holy Lands. In M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology,

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Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Young, Donna, forthcoming. The Bridge to Nowhere: An Ethnographic Account of Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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3.10 Researching Zones of Conflict and War Paul Richards

The essays in this volume concern the craft of anthropology − how anthropology is made. The theory of making, in the sciences, is often termed ‘methodology’. Methodology is a subset of a more general theory of making, technology.1 This chapter reviews some basic aspects of the making of anthropological knowledge with regard to war and offers a sketch of some of the main methodologies employed. In knowledge work in general, methodology links basic philosophical assumptions (ontology, theories of existence, and epistemology, theories of knowing) with method (the concrete practices through which knowledge is made). Methodology in social or cultural anthropology places fieldwork as a central concern. Since Malinowski, it has generally been reckoned that making anthropological knowledge requires some element of deep observational immersion in the societies or cultures to be analysed. Actual methods include participant observation, non-participant observation, extended case studies and a variety of ways of exploring social practices and cultural constructions with witnesses from within the social setting targeted for anthropological analysis. Without this element of having been there and taken part, leading to detailed case study

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description (‘thick description’, and so forth), a study may not be deemed anthropology at all, even though it might be acceptable in terms of findings and inferences in other disciplines. This poses an immediate problem for an anthropology of war, since apart from the relatively few, unplanned, cases in which anthropologists have been overwhelmed by war and lived to tell the tale, or have taken part in conflicts as service personnel, drawing upon their experiences for retrospective (and introspective) analysis (Kilcullen 2009),2 anthropologists do not, and cannot (on ethical and practical grounds), deploy participant observation methods in actual combat.3 Even though far from the only aspect of a complex area of human endeavour, deadly combat is nevertheless central to war, and it would be a lopsided account that failed to take note of actual fighting. So, anthropologists’ accounts of wars (however richly detailed) fall prey to the criticism that unlike other areas of anthropological knowledge creation they were not actually there, to experience with their own senses what went on. Rather readily, it can be claimed that anthropologists who are reliant on testimony have been bamboozled by the special interests and retrospective rationalizations of

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their informants (Collier 2000). This seems an especially relevant criticism when testimony comes from key but unsavoury sources such as warlords or war criminals. Why wouldn’t these informants lie to save their skins or to sanitize their post-conflict reputations? The problem of testimony in war also affects victim-centred accounts. The natural sympathy of the anthropologist (and reader of anthropology) towards the victims of suffering and loss sometimes obscures the fact that the prosecution of war itself depends on surprise, deception, and decoy. Liars prosper in times of war. Misinformation (propaganda) is an aspect of all campaigns. In addition, acts of terror trigger emotions of dread and revulsion, or support and adulation. It is thus often the case that victim accounts, as recorded by field anthropologists, are full of intense emotions, and low on precise information about what actually happened. Piecing together the actual story is work for patient enquiry, often over many years, by the anthropologist-turned-investigative journalist (for a striking instance, see Keenan 2009) or forensic anthropologist or archaeologist. On the other hand, it can be argued that the predicament of an anthropology of war is only a severe form of a more general epistemological crisis that has overtaken fieldwork-based anthropological investigation in the mould normative since Malinowski. The participant observer in general suffers from some acute problems of sample bias. Ethnography is often done solo rather than in teams, and a single-handed observer is enormously dependent on what he or she happens to observe. As we now know, Malinowski would have produced a rather different account if he had talked to more Trobriand women (Weiner 1983). Restudy has taught anthropologists to be cautious about reading great ethnographic accounts only in the way intended by the author. A substantial subsequent anthropological interest in the ‘back story’ evidenced by fieldwork diaries reveals some of the most famous ethnographic accounts to be much

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more partial and tenuous than at first they appear. This can sometimes be explained in terms of undue reliance on certain kinds of key informants, or the hidden influence of the political agendas of higher authority involved in facilitating or permitting the fieldwork to take place. Some of this restudy has come close to debunking classic accountsfor entanglement in colonial military campaigns. But in other cases, apparently problematic material may deserve a more sympathetic audience, once the political and strategic context is more fully taken into account. Salemink’s discussion of ethnography associated with the long guerrilla war in Vietnam throws interesting contextual light on work of this second kind (Salemink 2003). The ‘writing culture’ debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986) has had the consequence of orienting many cultural anthropologists towards critical and discursive techniques associated with the humanities. According to this perspective, ethnographic accounts become some stories among many. They have value as partial, literary syntheses of events, but lack authority. Gone is the idea that they contribute to the sum of new knowledge, as that phrase is normally understood in the sciences. One example of the genre (Nordstrom 1997) is subtitled ‘another kind of war story’. The techniques are those of the writer and poet − crafts notoriously difficult to acquire except through repeated practice.4 There are others who argue, however, that in war, above all areas of human endeavour, only the facts, placed in a general perspective open to verification, will do. This is due to the general propensity of violent conflict to thrive upon ruse and lie. It is this perspective that underpins the methodological account below. Verification (and verifiability) is of central importance to the anthropologist of war. If evidence cannot be opened to testing and verification, it should not be used. This is why I shall adopt the lens of my own trade (technology studies), and orient the chapter around an initial analysis in terms of the technography of the anthropology of war.

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What is it that anthropologists do to make their knowledge of war, including what steps are taken to test that it is true? First, I will ask what materials waroriented anthropologists grapple with, how they organize their task groups, what influence is maintained by wider professional peergroup obligations, and how the knowledge they produce has impact on, and is in turn impacted upon, by wider groups of stakeholders. Thus, equipped with a (revisable) map of the terrain, so to say, I will then enquire into where anthropological knowledge of war stands in relation to a broader social science effort to produce secure knowledge of armed conflict. It is especially when anthropologists try to function within larger teams, and engage with larger explanatory frameworks than the ethnographic case study instance, that some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of anthropology’s distinctive ways of making knowledge will come into focus. It is here that the potential recruit to the trade will become aware of a range of skills to be mastered and strategic choices to be made. I do not seek to devalue ethnographic ‘thick description’ of armed conflict and its impacts, but will nevertheless advocate some recourse to inferential methods and large data sets (amounting, some might suppose to a judicious ‘thinning’ of description) in order for anthropology to remain engaged with, rather than risk becoming isolated from, rapidly developing debates within the larger cross-disciplinary field of social science studies of war.

MAPPING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR: A TECHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH Materialities The first level of focus for an anthropology of war is its specific techniques and tools. How is the body shaped for war? With what skills must it be imbued? What weaponry is to be deployed, and how are these weapons fashioned? The craft of anthropology employs

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a number of tools to study these topics. Some are standard in ethnography, such as asking informants to explain or demonstrate a technique or craft, or directly participating in skill acquisition and training routines connected with an activity. Other investigative tools of the materialities of war belong, in particular, to the field of material culture studies, such as knowing how weapons are made or ambushes are set and sprung. At times, the documentary skills of the historian or the skills of the biological anthropologist or archaeologist may also be needed to understand the paper trail or forensic traces left by the activities of war, including battles and atrocities. In regard to the embodied skills and routines of war, some are kept up through various forms of sporting activity in times of peace. Many anthropologists will have ethical objections to learning to understand a fighting skill by undertaking direct battlefield training, though some elements may be unavoidable. UN peacekeepers, for example, are required to have a capacity to handle communications equipment, before facilitating field access involving military escort, in Level 4 and 5 emergencies. It is perhaps less ethically objectionable to learn how to wrestle or take part in a game of polo, even though it may be perfectly obvious that these skills take much of their character from the need to maintain hand-to-hand combat or cavalry fighting skills. Although war has a distinct purpose, to assert group will by force, many of its materialities are adopted directly from an everyday non-belligerent context, and can thus be studied indirectly through the material culture of peacetime activity. In the recent civil war in Sierra Leone, a main weapon among impoverished rural militia groups was the farm cutlass. In peacetime, village young men clear the bush with these weapons: acquiring a good cutlass is a major preoccupation, and many hours may be spent in the village blacksmith’s workshop, while the right kind of blade is sized, tempered, balanced and sharpened. The blacksmith’s skill,

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and the relationships between tool, client and blacksmith, will be largely unchanged whether the purpose is farming or the perpetration of a mutilation for purposes of spreading fear and terror in a war zone (Richards 1996). Of course, there are (in modern warfare) huge areas of specialist equipment manufacture, though even here it is sometimes striking how much is multi-purpose and interchangeable with peacetime machines and equipment. Long-departed British commercial airliner types, such as the Comet, still survive in military guise for example. A visit to a weapons trade fare might not be time wasted (if perhaps a depressing experience) for an anthropologist trying to understand some of the materialities of modern warfare.5 It would also be a crash course in comprehending the daunting scope of human folly. One area which in which material culture may take on a special character in war is in the sphere of deception. A huge part of war is about tricking the enemy. Disguises and ruses abound. Australian troops during the Great War apparently specialized in constructing and manoeuvring on the battlefield fake tanks made of canvas and poles to feed German commanders’ fears of outflanking moves.6 In the American Civil War, McClelland, the notoriously cautious commander of Lincoln’s army of the Potomac, was kept from making decisive moves against Richmond, Virginia, by military intelligence concerning the huge battery of guns. They were made of wood.7 In Nigeria, alongside Uli airstrip, the lifeline through which the breakaway republic of Biafra kept itself going during the later stages of the Civil War, was a decoy zone equipped with several fake aircraft, intended to divert raids by Federal Nigerian MIG fighterbombers.8 The avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen brought down a storm of opprobrium on his head when he compared the ambitions of his own brand of total theatre to the dramaturgy of the 9/11 atrocities in the

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United States.9 Nevertheless, much of war depends on stagecraft, and on an understanding of how settings shape combat outcomes and determine the ways in which these will be translated into larger perceptions concerning progress within a war. Terrorism, as a low-cost modality of war within the scope of a small, distant and poorly resourced enemy, is effective largely through its dramaturgy alone.10 Understanding battle sites can be an important technique of anthropological reconstruction. Much can be gained simply by understanding the lie of the land, and disposition of forces. Peters (2006), for example, visited the abandoned forest base camp site of the rebel Revolutionary United Front in the South Kambui Hills, in company with former cadres, and was able to learn much about a rather shadowy movement from his companions’ interpretations of the site and its abandoned paraphernalia, and from the recollections triggered by being in a once familiar place. Knowing the site can also be a clue to the playing out of the drama. Defeat at the Battle of Hastings (14 October 1066) becomes comprehensible when it is understood where and how the defending Saxons stood, and how they were tricked through a Norman ruse that induced battlefield effervescence (‘forward panic’ in the terminology of Collins, 2008).11 Effervescence on the battlefield is essential in steeling the will for victory. But, equally, it can run out of control. Many battles, Collins surmises, are lost through unheeding pursuit of an apparently retreating enemy. If forward panic broke the Saxon lines in 1066, its regulation often requires battlefield musical resources, e.g. sounding an advance and beating a retreat (Collins 1981).12 The musicology of war is a field awaiting further development.13 In general, the materialities of war respond well to anthropological enquiry, and not only through the explanations of key informants but also through analysis of material and managerial processes, including the dramaturgy and musicology of war.

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Task groups Mende warriors in the forests of Sierra Leone would sometimes challenge a besieged rival to single-handed combat in front of the settlement war fence. Victory decided the fate of the siege. More normally, however, war is work for task groups. A key anthropological task is to identify the relevant task groups and characterize their tasks. Sometimes this information is already more or less contained in the organograms which abound in military organizations, though detective work may be required in order to understand why numbers vary for different formations (platoons, battalions, squadrons and so forth). At other times, and for less regularly organized militia forces, it has to be pieced together from informant accounts. Command structures, shift patterns, rotation policy and so forth are all relevant to understanding how fighters fight, and what may happen when things go wrong (when morale fails, or forward panic propels an isolated battle group into atrocity). In general, the analytical skills required derive from work on task-group cultures, a field once cultivated assiduously through observation and even experimentation (McFeat 1972), but latterly perhaps somewhat neglected by anthropologists. Some task groups are, of course, easier to observe than others. It is unproblematic to understand cooperative labour organization in peasant agriculture or artisanal fishing, for example, by following labour gangs or boat crews at work. It is less easy for the anthropologist to muscle in on a hospital operating theatre or the flight deck of a jetliner, though indeed such work has been attempted. Hutchins (1993) grounds an entire approach in cognitive anthropology, the study of distributed cognition, to a rich harvest of material and insight garnered through observation of harbour-and-anchor navigation on an American warship, thus proving that this kind of anthropological work is not impossible, provided it is outside the battlefield operational context, even if access permissions might defeat most of us.

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McFeat (1972) begins his brilliant little book on the topic of the anthropology of task-group cultures with a revealing anecdote based on his own military experience crossing from the Netherlands into Germany at the end of the Second World War. He witnessed a small group of soldiers trying to float a bridge section across the Ems River under fire from the opposite bank. The means were to hand. Buoyancy and outboard motors had been strapped to various parts of the structure. Things broke down at the task-group level. A sergeant tried to command the various motormen from the centre of the structure, but the wind carried his words away, and a calamitous course was followed as the individual motormen increasingly took navigational decisions into their own hands. McFeat writes that he realized this was a naval task organized according to army methods. If the navy had been in charge they would have enclosed the motormen from the elements and rigged an unambiguous signal system. Sociologically speaking, the bridge would have been reorganized as a submarine. Task-group cultures, he realized, matter. They are in fact the key to understanding what military forces do and how they work. Direct observation may give a sudden insight, but the indirect materials for such study are often readily available, requiring (only) anthropological insight and analysis. These materials include both military records and documentation, and the documentation and further interview material collected from excombatants in post-war demobilization and reintegration programmes. Important studies have been or are waiting to be built from such sources.14

Sodalities (war as a profession) Since Durkheim (1957 [1912]), the sodality, the religious society, the craft guild, the professional association has been at the heart of anthropological debate about how enduring social bonds are formed beyond the level of the family, household or daily task group.

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Durkheim grounded his lectures on professional ethics and civic morals on a study of the Roman sodales. The craft guilds, he pointed out, admitted members on the basis of both skill and ritual. Expertise required sacrifice. The sacrifice − whether payment of fees or enduring harsh tests − created emotional as well as practical ties among members of the cult. The cults asserted discipline on behalf of the tutelary genius. Regular ritual performances stirred collective feeling and regenerated commitment to a common cause. The sodality was a self-governing, self-regulating entity, and higher-level society was built, in the first instance, from a social contract respecting the self-governance of the sodalities over their specific spheres of activity. The model can be applied as well to the Royal Society of Surgeons as to the West African rural secret society. War is a craft among other crafts. Martial law is recognition of the fact that soldiers have a craft-specific system of discipline. How professionalism builds (or fails to build, or is lost) among armed forces is thus an important anthropological topic, and a key to understanding some of the typical kinds of breakdown or failures of control to which military forces fall victim. Anthropological theory is at times at its strongest when explaining how religion and ritual agency inform the functioning of both formal and informal institutions to sustain social formations at the level of the sodality. This is sometimes a crucial missing ingredient in formal accounts of institutional functionality developed by economists and political scientists. Theoretical tools notably suited to addressing the ritual dynamism at the heart of the sodality include the grid-group, or institutional theory of culture, developed by Mary Douglas (1987) and (even more specifically, in relation to war) the elaboration of feed forward as a mechanism driving violence in the work of Randall Collins (2008). An area where opportunities lie for anthropologists to elaborate understanding of cult dynamics as a tool for the prosecution and regulation of armed violence lies in

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systematic comparison of regulatory episodes. One way this has been attempted is to address a cross-cultural conspectus of war crimes and atrocities. With the advent of war crimes tribunals and truth-and-reconciliation processes for so many conflicts, useful data sets lie readily to hand, e.g. dossiers of evidence prepared by prosecution and defence teams. These at times include general documentary databases of eye-witness experiences in conflict zones (for example, war-mapping projects). A number of anthropologists and anthropologically oriented political scientists and legal scholars have begun to show what can be derived from a critical reading of these sources. Kelsall (2009) offers an excellent example in this regard for material emanating from the Special Court for War Crimes in Sierra Leone. The trial of civil defence force leaders in this conflict centred on the hunter militia sodality into which many of the fighters had been initiated. How well did the rules of the sodality sit in conformity with the international laws of war? Had its leaders instructed combatants in the laws of war? The defence tried to argue that initiated fighters did not need, specifically, to be instructed in the laws of war since they were under a general religious constraint. Specifically, the sinner deactivated the ritual protections built into the bullet proof jackets donned by fighters. Death would seek out the wicked on the battle field. Unfortunately, the data show only that death sought out those who carried the best guns, presumably because they went where the battle was hottest (Richards 2010a). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the court was not impressed by this argument. But the fact that it was made tells us something important, Kelsall claims, about competing values among sodalities, and competing notions of sovereignty, at stake in international transitional justice. This competition, both epistemological and ethical, and what to do about it, lies at the heart of the anthropological project to develop a global comparative study of the bases for social cohesion.

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Unsurprisingly, a good number of very able anthropologists have headed straight for war crimes court and truth-and-reconciliation commission data sets to test theories and advance their understanding. Modalities (communities; society, in general) The top level of any technographic study is to examine where the other levels intersect with the societal level. What is the impact of changes in the way materiality is manipulated on society at large (thus, in what ways do new remote battlefield technologies or new deployments of terror tactics such as suicide bombing change the societal impact of war, and in what ways can society hit back at technology trends, the suicide bomber’s vest not excluded?). In what ways do military task imperatives (for example, a desire for strategic advantage while seeking to minimize casualties) impinge on the larger social realities of war-affected regions? (Surely, a good anthropological study of the impact of drone attacks on the societal fabric of the Pakistan−Afghan border region cries out to be attempted, would conditions permit.) And how are the self-regulating sodalities to be regulated? In particular, how is society at large to regulate the special interests of the military cliques, the military-industrial manufacturing complex, or the mafia-like sodalities of the warlords? So much is hidden and inaccessible. It is at this level that the empirical basis begins to falter, and normative argument and speculation take over. As a result, contradictions tend to thrive. For Africa, for example, it is argued that many recent wars reflect unresolved tensions of globalization and poverty. It is sometimes even pointed out that war is at times an unavoidable part of the process of dealing with these tensions (Cramer 2006). And yet public policy and international aid are oriented towards stopping fighting and restoring peace, even though this at times seems to imply rebuilding the causes of the conflict. Anthropologists

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do not escape the intellectual contortions needed to square this circle. This is in part because they lack the top-level data to make any definitive sense of these societal trends.

WAR STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE MORE GENERALLY Thus far, a simple four-tiered technographic map has been offered of the kinds of knowledge made by an anthropology of war, with some indication of points of attachment potentially relevant to new recruits to the field. If more attention has been paid to the lower tiers of this design, then this is because the largely observational case-study approach so often preferred in anthropological study is better suited to these levels. It is sometimes suggested that the societal level can be tackled through analysis of large randomly sampled data sets using modelling and statistical inferential tools. By and large, anthropologists interested in the topic of war have not adopted such methods.15 Some have argued against any such attempt. Others have begun to experiment with a synthetic approach, deriving hypotheses from case-study findings and then seeking confirmation through inferential methods (Mokuwa et al. 2011). Whether this then provides a basis for exploring war at the societal level with a greater degree of empirical security, and freer from normativism or the pull of political opinion, than hitherto, is as yet unclear. The purpose of the second half of this chapter is to introduce the topic, first by indicating the three main kinds of theoretical orientation adopted by anthropologists of war, second by discussing the challenge and stimulus offered by ‘Large-N’ studies of war, and third by suggesting ways in which the two approaches might effectively be combined. Anthropological approaches Three broad approaches have characterized the anthropological study of war. These are

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material approaches (e.g. ecological, and political ecology approaches), interpretive approaches (e.g. approaches attempting to comprehend war in existential terms, perhaps through piecing together fragmentary and contradictory stories) and institutional approaches (e.g. including those invoking mechanisms of causation rooted in political economy, or in interlinked ritual and material practices). The approaches are not necessarily exclusive. In the context of Papua New Guinea (PNG) studies, a major ethnographic sphere for the examination of hypotheses relating to pre-industrial war, the ecological approach has been combined well with the analysis of ritual mechanisms of conflict, for example. Nor is it here suggested that any one approach is better than the others. The following notes seek only to pinpoint some main differences. Classical studies of ‘primitive’ war in Papua New Guinea explored a range of ecological hypotheses.16 Some of these accounts were influenced by the Malthusian argument that war was a check on the growing pressure of population over resources. Others took a systems or cybernetic approach, in which war played a part in the complex redistribution of resources. In a summation, Knauft (1990) concluded that there was little or no support for the idea that war was a linear response to resource shortages. Nor was war in some sense the opposite or alternative to peace. Both war and peace were concurrent and competing modes of existence, not alternating phases in the maintenance of ordered social relations, he judged. A full explanation requires reference to cultural and ideational as well as material factors. This will include reference to the way fear is constituted within society and the way terror is manipulated by belligerent agents. ‘Neither peace nor war are “natural” states ...’ but are constituted, in practice, at a historical juncture where ‘predisposing cultural orientations and socio-material opportunities and constraints’ meet (Knauft 1990: 279). This call to pay equal attention to ideational and material aspects within the

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framework of theories of practice has received a wide response from anthropologists of war in the last two decades. Many recent studies have provided detailed ethnographic accounts of aspects of war, free from the summarizing generalizations that partisans are prone to apply.17 Important insights have thereby been gained into the ways that wars, whether triggered by material conflicts, (e.g. over land or minerals) or a range of ideational factors, including ethnic factionalism, always need resources to sustain them, and how an elaborate war economy emerges with ramifications leading far from the actual zone of conflict itself. One important explanatory thread is at pains to point out that ethnic factionalism is, in itself, the symptom of a much wider set of dislocative tendencies. Colonialism’s expansion created the conditions for conflict in a tribal zone at, or beyond, the periphery of colonial control (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992). Studies of this kind, sometimes grouped under the heading of political ecology, show how imperialistic competition for resources continues within the post-colonial world based on divide-and-rule tactics centred on competing wealth extraction demands (Watts and Peluso 2001). Interpretive approaches come at war through its impacts. A main focus is to provide existential accounts of those who take part or suffer the impact of a war. A major contributor to the genre, Carolyn Nordstrom, has used such accounts not only to portray the harm suffered by victims but also to challenge the notion that war makes sense except perhaps to the most hardened of vested interests (Nordstrom 1997). A variety of theoretical and epistemological perspectives have been applied, including post-modernist and post-structuralist arguments familiar from other recent areas of critical ethnographic analysis. Some of the most interesting contributions come from ethnographers who have revisited earlier in-depth studies from the perspective of post-conflict reflections on earlier findings (Moran 2006). A general experience is that material not previously

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fully contextualized now comes into much sharper focus. A study by Ferme (2001) is exemplary in this respect, in bringing out the extent to which violence is already prefigured in her perceptive accounts of the everyday. This type of material reinforces the notion that war is not a separate and alien condition but a continuation of an established social struggle by other means. Institutional approaches to the anthropology of war typically build on the central concern with the normative basis of social life, as in the work of Durkheim, and in classic structural functionalist accounts of social order and disorder, as provided by EvansPritchard, Fortes, Gluckman, Leach and others (e.g. Gluckman 1955). Durkheim’s own thoughts on violence are extensive (Mukherjee 2010) and begin with his theory of civil war in Book III of the Division of Labour in Society (Durkheim 1964 [1893]), in which civil strife is the product of a failure to provide an open opportunity structure. For Durkheim, it was necessary for citizens to find their mutual worth through work. Lack of an open, competitive opportunity structure threatened to lock individuals and groups in anomie (conditions of unregulated desire), and from such conditions civil war would emerge. No anthropologist has built more extensively on the legacy of Durkheim than Mary Douglas. Her theory of institutions (sometimes termed ‘grid-group’ theory) shows how differently configured institutions shape notions of social accountability in different ways (Douglas 1987). The problem with social conflict is that those who have become institutionalized differently have different (and incommensurable) ideas of what conflict is about. Peacemaking requires a theory of settlement, in which there is some possibility to map conflicted institutional positions, and then devise pathways towards convergence (Douglas 1993). Grid-group analysis as a theory of dispute settlement is rather unspecific about what the process of settlement-making comprises at the level of concrete social action. And yet it

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is clear in Douglas’s overall work that she rated very highly indeed Durkheim’s claim that ritual was the basic motor of social commitment. Quite what that implied for her theory was something of a mystery until her very late work (Douglas 1999b, 2004). There she revisits the notion of effervescence. Durkheim had offered ritual effervescence as the emotional motor both creating a sense of collectivity and fixing it upon collective representations. Douglas was quite sceptical about effervescence (Mukherjee 2010). She distrusted enthusiasm, as something associated with only one of her elementary institutional forms (the sectarian corner of the grid-group graphic). She was forced to confront this demon by her long-delayed return to her field site among the Lele of Kasai (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1987 (Douglas 1999a). Here she found a burgeoning witchfinding cult, led by two Catholic priests. This disturbingly prefigured some of the demonic madness that descended upon Rwanda only a few years later.18 If the cool and ancient hierarchy of the Catholic Church was insufficient to reign in effervescence, then sectarian enthusiasm was a more potent force than she had allowed. This led to careful rescrutiny of her earlier writings on the Old Testament (Douglas 1999b, 2004). Enthusiasm also afflicted the priests of ancient Israel, she now found. It was less the defective ritualization of a blocked division of labour that threatened societal cohesion and civil war than the runaway positive feedback from ritual processes (something Durkheim had termed ‘sacred contagion’). Ancient Israelite religion, she realized, was less concerned with the excitement of the Holy than what it took to damp such excitement down. Effervescence could be rendered less potentially lethal if everyone had to go and clean the shrine. Holiness (and peace) was to be found in care for the cult. A practical culture of ‘general cleaning’ ended civil war.19 Other studies have emphasised how wars can be controlled by instituting routines associated with rituals or work. Murray Last’s

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study of the Sokoto Caliphate in nineteenthcentury northern Nigeria emphasises the pains that Sultan Bello took to diminish the predatory tendencies of the army by advancing bureaucracy at every opportunity (Last 1967). Fardon (1988) shows how those on the margins of the Caliphate, driven into the hills, then engaged in dense ritual exchange − much of it apparently routine − to join together the fragments of many shattered societies to form a new collective identity among refugees. Richards (2010b) has pointed out how skills training, rather than political negotiations, helped end the recent civil war in Sierra Leone. ‘Care for the cult’ ended a war that had shocked the world by its passionate brutality. Several ex-combatants’ groups aspired to set up or work for rubbish collection businesses as a way to attain reintegration. Economists on the war path − the greed-not-grievance debate In the 1980s, the economist Jack Hirshleifer began to apply economic logic to ‘noneconomic’ problems. One of his targets was to explain conflict and war. ‘The way of conflict and predation is equally economic’, was how he put it in his collection of essays on the Dark Side of Force: The economic foundations of conflict theory (Hirshleifer 2001). Elsewhere, he was quite explicit about an ambition for economics to take over a topic hitherto viewed as belonging to political science and other fields of social science. The superiority of econometric methods was one aspect of this plan. Today, ‘Large-N’ econometric studies of war are used in support of the idea that war is driven by the desire of participants to maximize utilities measured in economic terms − the so-called ‘greednot-grievance’ thesis (Collier 2000). ‘Large-N’ studies of war did not begin with Hirshleifer. In a comparative study of agrarian revolutions published in 1975, Jeffrey Paige offered an account of the Angolan rebellion of 1961, hypothesising that recruitment to the war stemmed from the

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inability of rural Angolans to participate in the post-1945 African coffee boom due to an influx of Portuguese small-scale planters (Paige 1975). The planters used their position within the colonial regime to squeeze Africans into labouring work rather than participating (as elsewhere in Africa) in a planting boom. The subsequent spiralling downwards of farm wages fuelled African resentments. The rebellion was led by a nationalist elite group from neighbouring Zaire, but Paige notes that recruitment was stronger in coffee districts than in areas immediately along the border. Compiling data on the onset of the war from press sources and interviews, and using number and size of coffee plantations as independent variables, he finds statistical support for a hypothesis linking violence to levels of land alienation by colonial planters. Paige’s analysis is couched in terms of a conflict fostered by grievance. But it was an economic grievance. Angolan peasants were prevented from becoming planters, and so supported a war for political independence. The analysis of Collier (2000) shows that the risks of rebellion are higher where there is a large number of poorly educated and underemployed young men in the population of poor but resource-rich countries. It would be odd to code peasant aspirations for political independence in Angola as ‘grievance’, but to code aspirations for education and jobs among rebellious and impoverished young men from oil-ravaged communities in the Niger Delta as ‘greed’. Clearly the problem lies not with the econometric method but with the way the variables have been coded. This appears to reflect the political perceptions and preferences of the analysts. Working with comparable methods and data sets, other economists have provided evidence to refute ‘resource curse’ claims (the idea that war is particularly attracted to countries like Nigeria and Sierra Leone with mineral wealth). This suggests that ‘Large-N’ analytical methods are more robust than some critics would maintain when it comes to sorting out competing claims among rival

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hypotheses about the material causes of war. The same conclusion can be drawn from a substantial study by two political scientists based on data from a large random sample of ex-combatants from the war in Sierra Leone. Humphreys and Weinstein (2008) were able to provide some substantiation for both greed and grievance kinds of explanation. This fits well with what is known more generally about this war − that it began with strong grievances but ended with a war economy based on diamonds attractive to some of the conflicted parties. Towards interdisciplinary social science? The question arises whether anthropological accounts of war can be integrated within a more general social science framework? Specifically, would it be useful to try to generate hypotheses from anthropological case studies that could be tested using, say, econometric means? Mokuwa et al. (2011) have made one such attempt. They derive a testable set of hypotheses from anthropological case-study material suggesting that war in Sierra Leone was driven by agrarian grievances. It has been suggested that a certain class of court case relating to traditional marriage disputes caused labour exploitation among a group of marginalized young men in rural society. Ex-combatants have themselves suggested that such cases caused vagrancy and made them vulnerable. The evidence has been dismissed as circumstantial. What is not known is whether testimony by ex-combatants with a possible record of war crimes is other than self-serving. Perhaps even more troubling, no one really knows whether the alleged problem is simply a relic of old practices or a more general issue. This is a conundrum that spot data from an ethnographic case study cannot solve. Mokuwa et al. (2011) collected data from courts, elders, and over 2,000 householders in 178 villages across a region of around 5,000 square kilometres, sufficient to quieten doubts about one-off village effects.

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It transpired that the problem was general. Comparative analysis of the ethnographic record suggested that these marriage disputes were used by village polygynists to make claims on a scarce supply of farm labour at two important labour bottleneck periods in the upland rice farming calendar. Indeed, statistically robust results were obtained to link patterns of court accusation and upland farming demands, and to show that accusations were typically levied by polygynists against socially marginalized younger men. In short, the claims made by ex-combatants about the grievances driving them to war can be substantiated. The study thus demonstrates that a mixed approach − deriving hypotheses about deeply embedded village institutions and subjecting them to econometric test − makes considerable sense. Further collaboration between anthropologists and other social scientists using a mix of ‘Large-N’ and village case-study methods seems warranted as an approach to the study of war. This example, however, shows only that when adequately disembedded from institutional particularities and tested on a large enough scale, the grievance just cited proved to be an economic variable after all. Elders knew how to manipulate court cases to serve their own material needs. Hirshleifer is vindicated. This is the application of economic rationality to a ‘non-economic’ problem. Anthropologists will rightly continue to argue that other mechanisms can be hypothesised that do not have an underlying rationale of material advantage. This returns us to Durkheimian effervescence, despite Mary Douglas’s reservations. The point about effervescence, in Durkheim’s own account (Durkheim 1995 [1912]), is that it was a form of ritually induced excitement taking individuals out of the space in which they maintained calculating agency. The National Assembly members who voted to abolish the French feudal system on the fateful night of 3 August 1787 acted against their own interest, Durkheim reminds us. They entered the assembly with no intention

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to vote for any such measure, and could not figure why they had decided to do so when they woke the next day (so he claims). This implies there is some kind of sub- or precognitive mechanism for coordination of human behaviour governing certain classes of group action. The recently discovered mirror neuron system in humans has been suggested as an appropriate mechanism (Gallese 2005). There is no real knowledge, as yet, as to how this mechanism functions in social contexts to modify group behaviour, whether it is subject to control by the kinds of ritual means envisaged by Durkheim, and whether it might then induce the kinds of collective outrage sometimes associated with war. If any of this could be substantiated, the notion that economic explanation covers all areas of human behaviour, including the ‘forward panic’ encountered in war, would have to be revised.

CONCLUSION For some within the profession, the idea of an anthropology of war is an impossibility. It is rarely if ever practical or possible to study war at first hand through the direct participant-observational methods seen as a defining element in the craft of anthropology. The idea of becoming an anthropologist ‘embedded’ with fighting forces raises profound ethical objections. For a start, only one side of the conflict can be seen. Others (outside anthropology) are doubtful about the value of the anthropological contribution. They suspect that eye-witness accounts from informants have little value, for reasons of partisanship or fear. Furthermore, it has been charged that anthropologists only offer case studies, when inferences from larger, more generalizable data sets are needed. The task of studying war is best left to historians or econometricians (or so it is implied). Whereas it is not denied that the anthropology of war poses special challenges, this chapter has argued, nevertheless, that it is

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both possible and worthwhile to address these challenges. War is more than battle, as Thomas Hobbes reminded his readers, being ‘a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known’ (Hobbes 1968 [1651]: 186). This is to recognize that war is one of the possible conditions of society. War and peace are, in fact, phases of social existence – as different as night and day, perhaps, but as continuous and recurrent. The fencing off of war as a distinct object of analysis makes little sociological sense, and a major task in the anthropology of war is the understanding of war−peace and peace−war transitions. In fact, an anthropology of war is inescapable if anthropology is to aspire to be an integrated account of the human condition. The phrase ‘anthropology of war’ should perhaps be understood as shorthand for an anthropology of people and communities in times of war. It follows that many of the basic techniques of anthropological analysis − including those used to study representations and material culture − apply across times of war and times of peace. This offers scope to a range of established ethnographic field methods, as well as some that are tailor-made to conflict zones. Nevertheless, working in zones of active war imposes some special constraints and opportunities. An account of some of these constraints and opportunities has been offered in answer to the question: ‘How is anthropological knowledge of war made?’ The problems of informant bias − perhaps not as grave as some have suggested, since people often retain a sense of objectivity and honesty in even the most trying conditions − can be minimized by careful attempts to include a sufficient range of appropriate fieldwork techniques. The charge that anthropology comprises only case-study materials − anecdotes writ large − is harder to address. It has here been suggested that an answer may lie in developing strategic research partnerships with quantitatively oriented researchers. Deriving good hypotheses from case studies and submitting these hypotheses to ‘Large-N’

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sample tests has been offered as one answer to a perceived anthropological over-reliance on narrative analysis. But where occurrences are unique, other (qualitative) remedies such as causal process tracing must be sought (Richards 2011). At times, the density of incident and discourse generated around war is so great that a tool to thin out systematically what otherwise becomes an overwhelming density of ‘thick description’ seems highly desirable. A final comment about the wider purposes of an anthropology of war seems in order. The field poses a number of ethical dilemmas. The ethnographer of armed conflict has always to keep under review why a study is needed (what purposes it serves) and who might (unwittingly) be harmed. Some anthropologists feel impelled to offer witness to human suffering and destruction. Others are concerned that the close focus of ethnography might turn into a kind of voyeurism. As a general point it is worth bearing in mind that anthropology emphasises the notion that war − however damaging − is a part of social life. It is for this reason that anthropologists are different from war reporters. They do not hunt around for the ‘hottest’ conflicts. Instead, they study war in terms of the light it throws on wider questions of human agency and social organization. This end may be better served by comparing society in times of war and peace, or by researching a war after it has ended. Some of the best insights come from anthropologists overwhelmed by war: for instance, those who kept their ethnographic notebooks to hand even as war tore their own communities apart. In short, the anthropologist of war needs to have (or to develop) a long-term commitment to the community studied. Perhaps the key test of integrity (intellectual as well as ethical) is whether or not fieldwork continues long after the TV cameras and flak jackets have gone. NOTES 1 At root (before it reaches tools or machines), technology is the study of embodied capacity.

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According to Mauss (1936), the body is our first tool (cf. Schlanger 2006). This includes (crucially) mental schemes. 2 Kilcullen is a professional soldier (a former Senior Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq). His book deploys what he terms a methodology of ‘conflict ethnography’ (2009: 304). 3 For a valuable discussion of the ethical challenges of ethnography in conflict zones, see Wood (2006) 4 It is perhaps important to add that literary skill is not the only humanities tool available to the anthropologist of war. Techniques of performance analysis can throw light on military rituals and discourse analysis can be applied to the language of military communication, for example. Nor is the anthropological demand ‘to be there’ so onerous when ‘there’ is the parade ground or military command centre rather than a foxhole in battle. For an observational study of naval warship navigation by an anthropologist, see Hutchins (1993). 5 Comparing the way weapons are presented in a weapons trade fair and in a military museum might make for a revealing contrast. 6 For a picture of a group of Australian soldiers in 1917 with one of these contraptions, see http:// en.wikipedia/wiki/Dummy_tank (consulted 29 May 2011). 7 On the use of so-called ‘Quaker guns’ in the American Civil War, see http://en/wikipedia/wiki/ Quaker_guns (consulted 29 May 2011). 8 Author’s observations, Uli airstrip, February 1970. 9 Stockhausen’s words are best judged through the full transcript of the press conference at the Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg, 16 September 2001 (www.stockhausen.org/hamburg.pdf, consulted 21 May 2011). 10 The media representation of war (including the music and art of war, as well as press coverage and film documentation) is a major sub-field of analysis within the anthropology of war, inviting treatment by techniques of analysis used in visual anthropology, performance studies and ethnomusicology, for example. 11 ‘The Normans, twice pretending to retreat ... suddenly wheeling their horses, cut their pursuers off from the main body, surrounded them and slew them. The ranks of the English were much thinned by these dangerous feints’ (Orderic Vitalis, c. early 12th century, translated by Thomas Forester (1853), www.bayeux-tapestry.org.uk/ordericvitalis.htm, consulted 22 May 2011). 12 In this context, Collins (1981) refers to ‘technologies of emotional production’. 13 See, for example, Department of Musicology, Goettingen University, ‘Music, conflict and the state’ (www.uni-goettingen.de/en/49139.html, consulted 22 May 2011).

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14 See, for example, Humphreys and Weinstein (2004), Pugel (2007) and Schafer (2007). 15 Anthropologists addressing the larger, comparative picture tend to prefer qualitative approaches and multi-sited ethnographies (cf. Nordstrom 1997). 16 Notably, Vayda (1971, 1974). For contrasted reactions, see Sillitoe (1977) and Ember (1982). For later reflection, see Vayda (1989). 17 It is hard to select among this rich harvest of recent ethnographic material. See, for example, Coulter (2009), Finnström (2003), Lubkemann (2007), and Peters (2011). Layton (2006) offers an excellent recent overview of the anthropological literature on war. 18 Catholic priests also played a troubling part in the ethnic massacres in Rwanda in 1994. 19 This is the phrase widely used in Sierra Leone for community attempts to clean up public spaces, seen by many as a commitment towards ending the mess of corruption and indiscipline thought to have brought on the civil war.

REFERENCES Clifford, James and Marcus, George (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Collier, Paul (2000) Doing well out of war: an economic perspective. In M. Berdal and D. M. Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner. Collins, Randall (1981) On the microsociological foundations of macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology 86(5): 984−1014. Collins, Randall (2008) Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Coulter, Chris (2009) Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cramer, Christopher (2006) Civil War is not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries. London: Hurst and Company. Douglas, Mary (1987) How Institutions Think. The F. W. Abrams lectures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Douglas, Mary (1993) In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Sheffield: Sheffield University Press. Douglas, Mary (1999a) Sorcery accusations unleashed: the Lele revisited. Africa 69(2): 176−193. Douglas, Mary (1999b) Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Douglas, Mary (2004) Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, Emile (1957 [c. 1912]) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. Cornelia Brookfield, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Durkheim, Emile (1964 [1893]) The Division of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (1995 [1912]), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Ember, Melvin (1982) Statistical evidence for an ecological explanation of warfare. American Anthropologist 84(3): 645−649. Fardon, Richard (1988) Raiders and Refugees: Trends in Chamba Political Development, 1750−1950. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ferguson, R. B. and Whitehead, N. L. (eds) (1992) War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Ferme, Mariane (2001) The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Finnström, Sverker (2003) Living with Bad Surroundings: War and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Gallese, Vittorio (2005) Embodied simulation: from neurons to phenomenal experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 23−48. Gluckman, M. (1956) Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hirshleifer, Jack (2001) The Dark Side of Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, Thomas (1968 [1651]) Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Humphreys, M. & Weinstein, J. M. (2004) What the fighters say: a survey of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone, June-August 2003. URL: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/cgsd/documents/humphreys_ combatantsurvey.pdf Humphreys, M. and Weinstein, J. (2008) Who fights? The determinants of participation in civil war. American Journal of Political Science 52(2): 436−455. Hutchins, Edwin (1993) Learning to navigate. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (eds) Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keenan, Jeremy, (2009) The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa. London and New York: Pluto Press.

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Kelsall, Tim (2009) Culture Under Cross-examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kilcullen, David (2009) The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. London: Hurst and Company. Knauft, Bruce, M. (1990) Melanesian warfare: a theoretical history. Oceania 60: 250−311. Last, Murray (1967) The Sokoto Caliphate. London: Longman. Layton, Robert (2006) Order and Anarchy: Civil Society, Social Disorder and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lubkemann, Stephen C. (2007) Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mauss, Marcel (1936) Les techniques du corps, Journal de Psychologie 32 (3−4). Communication presented to the Society for Psychology, 17 May 1934. English translation published in Economy and Society 2(1): 70−88, 1973. McFeat, Thomas (1972) Small-group Cultures. Oxford: Pergamon. Mokuwa, Esther, Voors, Maarten, Bulte, Erwin and Richards, Paul (2011) Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone: judicial serfdom as a driver of conflict. African Affairs (advance access 11 May 11, doi: 10 1093/afras/adr019). Moran, Mary (2006) Liberia: The Violence of Democracy. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mukherjee, S. Romi (ed.) (2010) Durkheim and Violence. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Nordstrom, Carolyn (1997) A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Paige, Jeffrey (1975) Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World. New York: Free Press. Peters, K. (2006) Footpaths to Reintegration. Armed Conflict, Youth and the Rural Crisis in Sierra Leone. Wageningen University Thesis. Peters, Krijn (2011) War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (The International African Library No. 41).

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Pugel, James (2007) What the Fighters Say: A Survey of Ex-combatants in Liberia. Monrovia: United Nations Development Program. Richards, Paul (1996) Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: Currey (additional material 1998). Richards, Paul (2010a) Afromodernism: an assessment. The LUCAS Lecture, Leeds University, 4 May 2010. Richards, Paul (2010b) Dressed to kill: clothing as technology of the body in the civil war in Sierra Leone, Journal of Material Culture 14(4), 495–512. Richards, Paul (2011) A systematic approach to cultural explanations of war: tracing causal processes in two West African insurgencies. World Development 39(2): 212−220. Salemink, Oscar (2003) The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850−1990. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Schafer, Jessica (2007) Soldiers at Peace: Veterans and Society after the Civil War in Mozambique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schlanger, Nathan (ed.) (2006) Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization (edited with an introduction by Nathan Schlanger). New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Sillitoe, Paul (1977) Land shotrage and war in New Guinea. Ethnology 16(1): 71−81. Vayda, Andrew P. (1971) Phases of the process of war and peace among the Marins of New Guinea. Oceania 42: 1−24. Vayda, Andrew P. (1974) Warfare in ecological perspective. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 5: 183−193. Vayda, Andrew P. (1989) Explaining why Marings fought. Journal of Anthropological Research 45(2): 159−177. Watts, Michael and Peluso, Nancy (ed) (2001) Violent Environments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weiner, Annette (1983) Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wood, Elizabeth (2006) The ethical challenges of field research in conflict zones. Qualitative Sociology 29(3): 307−341.

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3.11 Conflicts and Compromises? Experiences of Doing Anthropology at the Interface of Public Policy Tim Allen and Melissa Parker

Over the last thirty years, we have worked in a wide variety of contexts connected with aspects of health, international aid, humanitarian relief and criminal justice, mostly in Africa and the United Kingdom. We have never viewed ourselves as ‘applied anthropologists’,1 let alone ‘applied qualitative researchers’. We have tried to position ourselves as academic anthropologists who happen to work on certain kinds of issues that require collaboration with international and sometimes national institutions involved in aspects of public policy. Here we comment on issues that can arise in this kind of anthropological research, focusing in particular on dilemmas we have confronted ourselves. We have undertaken anthropological research in and on policy-related issues from the outset of our careers. Melissa Parker wrote a PhD and published a series of papers that challenged some of the underlying premises informing policy aimed at the control of a tropical disease (Parker 1992, 1993). Her research involved living in villages in the

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Gezira/Managil irrigation scheme, Sudan for several years. Proficient in Arabic, she investigated the social, behavioural and biological dimensions of infection with Schistosoma mansoni among women and children. Support was provided to her by staff from the disease control programme, as well and the Sudanese Ministry of Health, including assistance with the screening of large numbers of adults and children for parasitic infections. In addition, transport and medical supplies were provided by UNICEF, Oxfam, the Japanese government and the UK’s ODA (Overseas Development Assistance, now called the Department for International Development). Tim Allen’s route into anthropology was through an aid agency. He had lived in Sudan for several years in the early 1980s, teaching English and History in schools and at Juba University, when Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) offered him support to live in Acholi and Madi villages for a year. He occasionally had to write reports and give talks about the effects of the NCA projects on the local

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population, and eventually published some of the findings (e.g. Allen 1987). Later, when carrying out PhD fieldwork in Uganda, he had a similar relationship with Médecins Sans Frontières, Lutheran World Federation and the office of the European Union. This provided him with transport and logistical support when needed, and allowed him to study programmes aimed at assisting refugees and returning refugees in northern Uganda from 1987 to 1991 (Allen 1988, 1994, 1996; Allen and Morsink, 1994). In subsequent years both of us have worked with international agencies and other kinds of institutions involved in public policy. Parker, for example, carried out long-term research in the UK on sexual networks in London, linked to a clinic at a teaching hospital, while Allen carried out research in Botswana, Uganda and Sudan with funding and support from international agencies including the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), DANIDA (the official Danish development agency), World Vision, Save the Children, USAID (the official US aid agency), UNICEF (the UN agency for children), UNRISD (the UN Research Institute or Social Development) and UNDP (the UN Development Programme). Both of us have also been involved in public heath-related research in East Africa, with support from the WHO (World Health Organization), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and various specialist institutions (such as the Kenyan Medical Research Institute and the Tanzanian National Institute for Medical Research). Much of our fieldwork would have been impossible without funding and logistical support from organizations involved in public policy, even though we have occasionally been very critical of their activities. Contrary to views that have been voiced by some anthropologists about such collaborations, we have usually been able to do our research without experiencing any overt attempts to control findings, or to restrict what we have included in publications. That is not to say that there have never been tensions, but when

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confrontations have arisen, we have managed to weather the storm. Over the years, we have found ways to deal with difficulties before they arise, while also appreciating that there are times when taking the flak can be a helpful role to play.

CONCERNS ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY AND PUBLIC POLICY Problems associated with the relationship between anthropology and public policy are well known. Historically, there was a great deal of soul-searching within the discipline about the ‘colonial encounter’. It was argued that the constraints placed on anthropologists, the kinds of questions they asked and the kinds of insights they offered were all too readily affected by the ways in which they reached the field. Evans-Pritchard even dedicated his great book on Azande witchcraft to Major Larken, the British district official who befriended him and assisted him (EvansPritchard 1937). His equally famous work on the Nuer was in large part a response to the Anglo-Egyptian administration’s need to know how to pacify them, following a series of violent incidents (Evans-Pritchard 1940). However, if arguments about co-option apply to the past, they apply at least as strongly today. It was international aid agencies that enabled one of us (Allen) to spend time among the Azande in 2006 and among the Nuer in 2009. In both cases it was far from straightforward to reach the locations concerned. After arriving in southern Sudan, it was necessary to take two flights on United Nation’s planes and then hire a county commissioner’s motor boat, at considerable expense, to reach the Nuer population around Fangak. Three years earlier, reaching Zandeland so soon after the signing of a peace agreement in Sudan had proved even more difficult. There had been local clashes between Zande and Dinka soldiers in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and a rebel force from Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was based along

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the nearby border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In order to access the region, Allen agreed to carry out research and write a report on HIV/AIDS for World Vision, a Christian-linked international nongovernmental organization (NGO). It is an agency that Allen had taken issue with on a number of occasions, notably over exaggerated estimates of HIV/AIDS rates in northern Uganda as a consequence of LRA activities (Allen 2006a). However, World Vision, unlike many other international NGOs, often works far away from the bigger towns, and sometimes where there is little or no other international presence. It was the only agency working in the places Allen wanted to visit. Equally important, World Vision was Allen’s insurance. The agency would have done everything possible to evacuate him, along with its own staff, if the need had arisen. To arrive at the border area required security clearance from the newly established government of southern Sudan and, starting in Kenya, the journey involved four flights on small planes spread out over several days, followed by an eight-hour car journey. Fieldwork was then facilitated with the use of a motorbike. All of this, as well as accommodation and food, was provided by World Vision. In these circumstances, supporting agencies can be understandably sensitive about being criticized in published articles and books. Very often, there are pressures placed on the anthropologist to avoid such confrontations, while she or he may also feel appreciative of the care provided by well-meaning aid workers in the field, and feel considerable loyalty towards them. In short, there are problems in ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ too hard and judging how much rigorous analysis is appropriate is not always straightforward. Commenting on discussions at the 1983 Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) Conference, part of which focused on social anthropology and development policy, Michael Redclift observed that attitudes among anthropologists had changed since the ASA Conference in 1973. In the early

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1970s, he observed, the prevailing attitude seemed to be, ‘we will only join the development fraternity on our own terms’. Ten years later, he felt that view has been set aside: ‘Today, the employment crisis among anthropologists … has triggered a different response. The call seems to be to join the development brigade at almost any cost.’ In his view, there were real dangers that this would damage the discipline, as research questions and the weighting of evidence were framed by people with agendas that had little to do with anthropological understandings. ‘Must the anthropologist compromise’, he asked, ‘only to be compromised?’ (Redclift 1985: 202). At the time, many academic anthropologists took the view that the answer was ‘Yes’. Indeed, both of us have experienced some scepticism over the years from colleagues that it is possible to do credible anthropological research with funding or support from parties with potentially ulterior interests in ascertaining the ‘right’ kind of results. Allen, for example, was taken aside by a senior anthropologist at Oxford while writing his PhD in the 1980s and told that now he was doing academic anthropology, he should stop working with aid agencies. The strong implication was that it brought social anthropology into disrepute. Similar views were still being expressed by some of his colleagues at the London School of Economics (LSE) several years later. The expansion of work for anthropologists in policy arenas, particularly in the health sector and international development, and the fact that many anthropology graduates seek work in these areas after they leave university, has not meant that the kind of worries Redclift expressed have abated. On the contrary, they have been elaborated and discussed in more detail. Academic anthropologists like Escobar (1995) and Ferguson (1990), for example, have provided popular critiques of the whole international development enterprise; and some of those who have worked on policy issues have built careers by explaining the ways in which constraints are imposed and how that makes serious

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anthropological study largely untenable. One of the best known anthropologists to have espoused the latter perspective is David Mosse. He worked closely with aid organizations for more than a dozen years, but came to the conclusion that putatively scholarly work is almost inevitably co-opted when it is linked to consultancy, or faces a conflict of interest. Mosse (2004) wrote a book about his work as a social development consultant on a project in India that had been funded by DfID, and found himself in trouble: … there was consternation from my consultant colleagues and managers, who felt that I had departed from the received view of the project as an overwhelming success. The point was not that my book … rejected the view of success as being the outcome of good policy and technical design. Instead, it drew attention to the contradictions and compromises of practice … (Mosse 2006)

In early 2004, objections were made to Mosse’s publisher, to his university research ethics committee, to the academic head of the university, as well as to the Association of Social Anthropologists, ‘on the grounds that the book was unfair, biased, contained statements that were defamatory, and would seriously damage the professional reputation of individuals and institutions.’ In the event, his university, the ASA and the publisher were either not persuaded or decided that they were not in a position to adjudicate on the matter. As a result, Mosse was not obliged to make any changes to his text. The case has become well known, at least in British anthropology, largely because of the interesting way Mosse has written about it. To many, it confirms the impossibility of doing proper social anthropology with international development agencies – a perspective Mosse himself has come to largely share. We are not so pessimistic. It is certainly the case that all kinds of pressures are brought to bear on anthropologists working with international agencies to interpret things in certain ways, and to avoid commenting on certain issues. Indeed, we have confronted

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the kinds of direct pressure placed on Mosse. In our experience they are not so unusual. But are these pressures actually any worse than constraints anthropologists experience when they work with local or national institutions, or when they discover sensitive things about the people they live with? Anthropologists are always confronting the dilemma of how much to reveal, and what kinds of information might be harmful to informants. It is a problem arising from the intimacies that are an inherent part of our methodology. Anthropologists find out uncomfortable truths, including things that might be considered confidential or even secret. To invert a Swahili proverb: not all secrets are for sharing. It is also important to note that while some DfID employees may have felt betrayed by Mosse’s book, senior staff we have spoken to had not heard about the case until we discussed it with them. Their view was that to oppose publication in the manner attempted could only have been counterproductive. They asked questions about who had actually raised objections within DfID, because it had never come up for internal discussion as far as they were aware. It is possible that they were not telling the truth, but they did seem genuinely surprised by our account of what happened. In our experience, the view inside DfID is that critical research on development issues, some of which is directly funded by DfID on a ‘hands off’ basis in university departments, raises the bar on the quality of UK aid. Perhaps that point is debatable, but what is interesting is that institutionally the idea of trying to muzzle critical analysis is viewed as inappropriate. It should also be mentioned that many staff within DfID have themselves taken degrees in social anthropology, including the current director general for policy and global issues. Overall, we have found, as Mosse himself did in the end, that when overt pressures are applied, it is possible to deal with them. In addition, we have discovered that writing as honestly as possible about what we have observed, and backing up critical comments

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with robust evidence, is respected, even if it is not liked. Years ago the anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond told Allen to accept support from anyone if they allow you to do research, but never agree not to publish what you find out. It was good advice. There are, as Mosse notes, clauses in contracts about funding institutions having intellectual property rights. But they are vague, and very difficult to implement. In most instances we have found it is possible to strike out those sections, or to make an arrangement whereby material is leased to the donors, but copyright is retained by us. There have been the occasional unpleasant moments, but whenever efforts have been made to use a contract or any other measure to restrict what we write, we have always been able to resist if we have decided it is the right thing to do. We have never been forced to remain silent, even if we have sometimes decided to bide our time before releasing our findings. In the following sections we provide a few specific examples of the kind of work we have been doing, mainly related to health issues, and comment on how conflicts and compromises have been worked out.

DIVERGENT APPROACHES TO EVIDENCE One of the most important issues confronting anthropologists working at the interface of public policy relates to divergent disciplinary understandings of evidence, both in terms of what constitutes reliable information and the way in which dissemination occurs. Many policy-orientated research projects tend to emphasise ‘scientific’ methods, foregrounding quantitative approaches that appear to replicate natural science research. This is a reason why economics is often viewed as the most important social science discipline. It also means that studies published by the World Bank, for example, will often refer to econometric papers, or will have an appendix describing regressions used in the analysis. Often policy professionals themselves do not fully comprehend the methods used in these

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contributions, but they are perceived as lending credibility to the results and conclusions. More generally, there is a prevalent view among policy makers that evidence means data, and that data means numbers. In this context, social anthropologists can find themselves at a disadvantage. Their findings generally lack a quantitative dimension, and can be set aside as relatively unimportant. For this reason, it is important for those working on public policy to equip themselves with a basic understanding of quantitative techniques, so that it is possible to discern the strengths and weaknesses of what they are reading. Often such a familiarity with quantitative methods, and avoidance of defensive dismissals of numerical data, opens up useful alliances. There are many academic economists, demographers, epidemiologists and clinical scientists who are just as appalled as anthropologists by the quality of analysis that appears in policy documents. It is helpful to be able to talk to them in a language they can comprehend. In the health sector, anthropologists work alongside colleagues from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in both the biological and social sciences; and they often find themselves cast as ‘the handmaiden of biomedicine’. In these circumstances, research protocols may preclude open-ended investigations. Underlying concepts and categories informing beliefs and behaviour may be taken for granted, and the notion that they should be identified and scrutinized strongly discouraged. The investigation of health and sickness is typically divorced from the study of political economy and history, let alone local conceptions of suffering and therapy. Reductive styles of reasoning render wideranging, non-quantifiable explorations interesting, but ‘anecdotal’. Anthropologists who do more than address predefined questions such as ‘What are the social and cultural factors that impede the willingness or ability of patients to comply with particular drug regimes?’ or ‘What are the social and cultural barriers that need to be overcome to ensure the smooth running of a vaccination

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campaign?’ are likely to be viewed by at least some of those they work with as difficult, foolish or possibly threatening. They may well find their insights dismissed as ‘not proper science’. As a result, many so-called ‘applied medical anthropologists’ end up doing ‘knowledge, attitudes and practice surveys’, ‘focused ethnographic research’, ‘process monitoring’ or ‘participatory appraisal’. This is usually undertaken in a relatively short time span, sometimes over a few weeks or even days. Such techniques can produce useful findings, when done with skill. But most epidemiologists, clinicians and public health practitioners have no formal training in anthropology and, not uncommonly, equate this way of working with what anthropologists should do. It can be hard to suggest otherwise. The problem is compounded by the fact that some ‘applied medical anthropologists’ are comfortable with a range of qualitative methods other than participant observation, and basically accept the premises and approaches of biomedicine as a starting point for their work (see, for example, Pelto and Pelto, 2008 [1978]). Eager to work with epidemiologists and clinical professionals, they rarely challenge biomedical understandings of evidence, whereby data are treated as objective ‘facts’ that have analytical power when they form a significantly distinctive pattern. Compliance with biomedical approaches to evidence has led, on occasion, to tense verbal exchanges between such ‘applied medical anthropologists’ and other anthropologists, who maintain that a distance from biomedical paradigms and research grounded in comparative ethnography are crucial components of the discipline. All of this is not to suggest that anthropologists who carry out conventional participant observation fieldwork and who treat biomedical policy and practice as an aspect of their fieldwork are not able to make useful practical contributions to contemporary public health issues (see, for example, Davison et al. 1991; Fairhead and Leach 2006, 2007; Harper 2006; MacGregor 2006;

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Shaw 2009; Whyte et al. 2004). It is important to emphasise, however, that a key aspect of the influence that critically engaged anthropologists can have on public policy is that the status of evidence is not simply set aside. To be recognized as important rather than ‘interesting’, anthropologists have to take into account, and engage with, the ways in which evidence is generally constructed by biomedically orientated researchers and practitioners. It can lead to some challenging encounters! The tensions may be illustrated with reference to our own research on schistosomiasis in East Africa (Parker et al. 2008; Parker and Allen 2011; Allen and Parker 2011). Work carried out by epidemiologists and parasitologists, as well as some applied qualitative researchers, suggested that treatment programmes were going well. Kabatereine et al. (2007), for example, followed a cohort of children over a period of two years in north-western Uganda. These children were treated every year with two drugs, praziquantel and albendazole, as part of a national programme to control schistosomiasis (bilharziasis) and soil-transmitted helminthiases (parasitic intestinal worms). The selected children were monitored before treatment and at six-monthly intervals after each annual round of treatment. Key biomedical indicators included noting whether the children were positive or negative for these parasitic infections and, if they were infected, their intensity of infection and the presence or absence of clinical signs of infection such as hepatomegaly and splenomegaly. Additional epidemiological research was undertaken by Brooker et al. (2005). This was a crosssectional study monitoring changing patterns of infection among school children in Uganda over time. Both studies suggested that endeavours to control neglected tropical diseases by distributing drugs to school children, free of charge, were having a positive impact as there was a marked reduction in prevalence and clinical indicators of morbidity. In addition to this biomedically orientated research, Fleming et al. (2009)

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undertook process monitoring to explore adult responses to the mass distribution of drugs at selected sites in north-western and south-eastern Uganda. This paper also presented a positive assessment of the National Control Programme for the control of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiases, albeit from a different perspective; and argued that there was growing demand for treatment among adults and children. By contrast, ethnographic research undertaken by Parker et al. (2008) on local responses to the national integrated control programme in north-western Uganda suggested that the picture was much more complicated than that conveyed by the above studies. It highlighted the point that it is hazardous to assume that targeted populations will necessarily understand or agree with the rationale for the free distribution of drugs to adults and children, and demonstrated that treatment was being actively resisted in some places. While there was no doubt that large numbers of children were swallowing tablets under the authoritative gaze of their teachers, there was every indication to suggest that adults did not feel similarly compelled to take the medicine and, in some cases, forbade their children to take it too. Further research undertaken in north-western and south-eastern Uganda (Parker and Allen 2011) highlighted mistaken assumptions guiding the delivery of drugs, and raised the question of how much weight should be given to different kinds of evidence. Kabatereine et al.’s research (2007), for example, assessed the impact of treatment on a cohort of primary school children. Our own local-level research suggested, however, that it was misleading to extrapolate findings from this study to make general observations about the effectiveness of the national control programme for several reasons. First, the number of children successfully completing primary school in under-resourced, rural areas is small, so the number of school-aged children receiving multiple rounds of treatment is likely to be small too. Second, cohort studies are

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necessarily biased towards children from families of long-term, stable residency and relative wealth. In north-western Uganda, however, mobility is a feature of daily life – a point underlined by the large numbers of children that dropped out of the study over time. Third, local research revealed that hundreds of Congolese and Sudanese people regularly move across borders to this part of Uganda. As yet, there are no national control programmes for the treatment of tropical diseases in these neighbouring countries and our own parasitological investigations revealed that more than 95% of migrants in the study area were positive for S.mansoni and/or soil-transmitted helminthiases. Almost certainly, these patterns of migration contributed to the high rates of reinfection (ranging from 54% to 84%) recorded among school children at selected schools in the district. Not surprisingly, reactions to our findings have been very mixed. The development of the Ugandan national programme for the Control of Schistosomiasis and SoilTransmitted Helminthiases would not have happened without the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, contributions from drug companies and donations of aid from the United States and other countries. This means that most of those involved in the treatment programme, from the head of vector control in the Ministry of Health to the medical researchers and drug distributors, operate with soft funding. This creates a difficult situation: How can the head of a programme, receiving millions of pounds from a philanthropic organization to undertake a piece of work, publicly say, ‘This programme has run into difficulties’? Why would an international agency or philanthropic organization renew a programme if it is not working properly? There are enormous pressures to ‘prove’ that money is being spent wisely. For all the critical comments and private reflections, it is not even possible for a Minister of Health or a programme manager to say that ‘I do not know if the programme is working well or not,

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because the available information is too partial’. With respect to our research on neglected tropical diseases in Uganda, it has led to an array of responses. These include contacting informants in the field to tell them it is their duty as citizens of their country to say positive things about free treatment; requests by personnel implementing the programme for us to present our information selectively; and heated exchanges conveying a sense that we are disloyal and risk undermining the future of free treatment for debilitating diseases. However, there have been other occasions when we have discussed the strengths and weaknesses of our findings with biomedical practitioners and researchers with the common purpose of improving treatment and monitoring. This has not, as yet, led to material changes in the running of the national control programme, but the desire is clearly now there to respond to the difficulties identified. Our findings are in the process of being published and disseminated, not least by staff from the World Health Organization, where some tropical disease specialists have become as concerned as we are about current trends in mass drug administration. This also applies to our research on tropical diseases elsewhere in East Africa, which if anything proved even more controversial. A layer of complexity was added by the fact that we had a PhD student doing fieldwork on tropical diseases in Tanzania at the time that one of our reports landed on the desk of a key funding institution. The report highlighted fundamental problems, including widespread over-reporting of drug take up. The director of the programme told us that he found the executive summary so depressing he could not bring himself to read the rest of the document. He did not suggest that anything we had written was inaccurate, but he was reluctant to circulate the report, and keen that it was not shared with the Tanzanian Ministry of Health. He was concerned that senior figures might react by deciding to work with alternative agencies in

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the future. With an array of implementing agencies to choose from, it was not an unreasonable concern. We were also asked not to publish our findings, because there were concerns that the information would jeopardize future provision of free medicines by drug companies. Taking these factors into account, as well as the vulnerability of our PhD student if we rocked the boat too much, we decided to delay publication. Almost two years later, and having gathered more information (including details about riots that took place during some drug distributions), we provided advance notice that we would now publish. The idea was not greeted with enthusiasm, but we responded by saying that considerable time had passed and discussions to alter the structure of the national programme concerned were already at an advanced stage. We have thought carefully about our audience and have chosen to avoid conventional medical journals, because the reviewing process tends to mute critical voices and discourage the publication of articles with negative results (Allen and Parker 2011; Parker and Allen 2011). While some policy makers and biomedical researchers welcome our contribution, others do not. On the one hand, the World Health Organization recently highlighted our findings by placing a direct link to one of our articles on their Tropical Disease Research website (http://apps.who.int/tdr/svc/newsevents/news/social-science-ntd.). On the other hand, a researcher based at a medical school involved in monitoring one of the treatment programmes responded to the same publication with undisguised irritation. To quote from a circulated email: ‘People who have read this [paper] say “Are they for you or against you?” On balance I have to say it reads like against. Which considering all the support you have received is … disappointing ….’. It is possible that opportunities for us to do further fieldwork on neglected tropical diseases will be restricted, but we are optimistic that things will not work out like that.

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OWNERSHIP AND DISSEMINATION OF FINDINGS Tensions over research findings can sometimes generate more overt confrontation, especially when it comes to the ‘ownership’ of data. Anthropologists are far from unique in having to confront these difficulties. Wellknown economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and William Easterly, have been compelled to leave the World Bank, in part because they used World Bank data to raise critical points about the institution’s policies in their publications. Thus, the following example may be extreme, but it is far from exceptional. Parker undertook several years’ fieldwork on sexual networks in the United Kingdom. This fieldwork was part of a multi-disciplinary research project involving collaboration with epidemiologists, mathematical modellers and clinicians. Based at an NHS-funded clinic for sexually transmitted infections, the research tried to map out sexual networks in a multicultural urban setting by tracking gonorrhoea as it spread from one person to another. Within six months, it became apparent that it was going to be little short of impossible for Parker or any member of staff from the clinic to move much beyond the collection of a series of individual accounts of recent sexual contacts (which are usually referred to as egocentric networks by mathematicians, epidemiologists and sociologists). The reason was simple: almost no-one attending the clinic for the treatment of gonorrhoea was willing to impart sufficient information to enable their sexual contacts to be contacted through the existing system of partner notification, and few patients could be persuaded to bring their contacts into the clinic to be screened. At this juncture, relations between staff on the project became fraught. It was hard to see how an interim report, let alone a final report, to the funding agency could say anything of much interest about sexual networks. On what basis could the salaries of the research team be justified when the project was generating minimal data of academic or practical interest?

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Meetings followed meetings and various suggestions were made about how to amend the study design. These included visiting known public ‘cruising’ sites late at night, and asking those soliciting or offering sex if a member of the research team could return to their homes to chat about their sexual contacts. Parker, unconvinced that such suggestions would work any better than the previous ones, suggested that it might be easier to map out sexual networks through the study of HIV/AIDS rather than the study of gonorrhoea. Preliminary research suggested that those who were HIV positive were more talkative and trusting of staff associated with the clinic than those free from this infection, but infected with other sexually transmitted infections. However, there was no support for developing the study in this way. Concerned that the other proposed amendments to the study design would yield nothing, Parker decided to pursue the work on sexual networks and HIV transmission independently. It was not until the end of her contract that staff working on the project realized how little useful data on sexual networks and gonorrhoea had been collected by anyone on the team. At this point, the head of the clinic called a meeting. Aware that the funding agency would require a detailed report demonstrating that money had been well spent, he insisted that the clinic should take possession of all the data that Parker had collected on sexual networks and HIV transmission. She was told to bring all the data she had gathered to the clinic and hand it over. The data would then be available for others to analyse. For Parker this was unacceptable. She had trekked around London for the best part of two years, often late at night and during weekends, following leads that would enable her to map out sexual networks. No-one else at the clinic had been involved in the fieldwork, or had any idea who was connected to whom. Indeed, clinic staff had gone out of their way to ensure that no research on HIV networks had taken place in the clinic unless it was directly linked to the gonorrhoea network study. Quite apart from what

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she perceived to be an injustice towards herself, she thought that it would have been a travesty to leave others with the task of interpreting her material, and a betrayal of the relationships she had built up with her informants. When Parker refused to comply, she was told that legal action would be taken against her and that senior staff at the hospital would do everything possible to ensure that she never obtained another academic job. Shocked and a bit frightened, she considered capitulating. However, she took advice from other colleagues, including a senior anthropologist at London University, who took the view that threats of this kind were immoral – exploiting the position of an anthropologist whose contract had just ended. Parker was immediately offered an honorary research fellowship and institutional support. She was also advised to contact the human resources division of the teaching hospital concerned, and to her relief was told that the incidents in the clinic amounted to institutional bullying. There were doubtless then some frank internal exchanges, and the case was dropped. Parker proceeded to publish her fieldwork (Parker 1999, 2001, 2006). In common with Mosse’s research involving DfID in India, the above is an example of how confrontational events can become. They can sometimes prove insurmountable. There have been cases, for example, where PhD students have effectively had their data taken away from them or been forced to terminate their research. However, in most cases we know of, the more extreme the efforts to control or muzzle research, the easier it has been to resist them, even if it has not felt like that at the time. It is not unusual for those exerting their authority to overplay their hand. They assume that the researcher will be easily intimidated. Standing firm and seeking professional support often does the trick. If it does not, there is another method that can be used too. It is possible to ‘leak’ the results. This has become very effective with the expansion of the Internet and it has made

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arguments about controlling information somewhat redundant. Even if a contract has been signed stating that a funding agency ‘owns’ the research findings, there is very little that international or national institutions can do about it. There are problems with the ways in which information is accessed and uncritically deployed from Internet sources, but the Internet certainly empowers researchers if they choose to use it. The following example illustrates this point. In 2005, Allen was funded and supported by the UK section of an international NGO to carry out research in the war zone of northern Uganda. Funding and logistical support from the agency enabled him to spend time in internal displacement camps, some of which were not easy to reach from the main towns due to land-mines, attacks by the LRA and curfews imposed by the Ugandan army. The focus of the work was on the implications of the intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for children, both those in the camps and those who had been abducted by the LRA. The fieldwork was quite difficult, and on occasion very disturbing. It included spending nights in places where terrible atrocities had been perpetrated, and where fighting was ongoing. Amongst other things, the research revealed that the emphasis on traditional forms of healing as a means of dealing with the LRA was overstated, as were assertions that the mass of the local population were vehemently opposed to international criminal justice mechanisms. Another issue highlighted was that many of those who had been abducted by the LRA were adults, rather than children. Indeed the majority of those taken were probably over the age of 18, and very many of those being supported by aid agencies after escaping or being captured were adults too, even if they were being assisted in reception centres that were funded to deal with returned children. The findings proved challenging to the NGO, because they countered perspectives that had been taken as given. Presentations were made in northern Uganda and Kampala,

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and the NGO also organized a meeting in Oslo to discuss the draft report at which all the European sections of its network were present. Following this, a meeting was organized in The Hague with the ICC to discuss the situation and present in detail the NGO’s concerns about possible threats to children. One particularly significant aspect of that meeting was that it was possible to demonstrate to the ICC that the protection then being offered to those interviewed by the prosecutor’s team was inadequate. Several individuals who had spoken to ICC investigators had been easily located and interviewed by Allen and NGO staff. Their anonymity could not be guaranteed. A few weeks later, the final report was finished, and a launch was planned in Kampala. However, a couple of days before flying to Uganda, Allen was informed that the NGO had decided not to have a launch after all, but to keep the report for internal consumption. This came as a shock; several NGO staff had been very positive about the study and were keen to shift away from the approach that had been in place for several years. However, it seems that not all the members of the agency’s network were pleased with the findings. Although the specific reasons why it had been decided to keep the report secret were never outlined in any detail, discussions with sympathetic NGO staff suggested that there were concerns about making public the facts that so many adults had been abducted, and that there was less enthusiasm for so-called traditional reconciliation practices than had been supposed. Funding had been raised on the perception that the war was being waged by traumatized and innocent children, and some sections of the NGO had helped promote the view that reintegration of those who had spent time with the LRA, including perpetrators of very violent acts, should be based on local notions of forgiveness. To suggest that so many adults had been abducted by the LRA, and also that the ICC might have a positive role to play in dealing with the situation, was therefore viewed as a potential threat.

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Not surprisingly, Allen was unwilling to accept the shelving of the report. The contract that had been signed was vague about ownership of data, and nothing had been agreed about what would happen to the final report. This was pointed out to the NGO, as was the fact that a draft of the report had already been circulated to the ICC and other interested parties in email attachments. It was, in effect, already in the public arena. In the face of these points, the NGO accepted that the final report could be circulated, but wanted reference to the NGO having commissioned and supported the work removed. Subsequently, the report was expanded into a book (Allen 2006b) and, by the time it was published, issues had moved on in Uganda. What had appeared to be so controversial in 2005 was more widely accepted. The NGO then complained to Allen that the agency had not been explicitly mentioned in the Acknowledgements! They will have to wait for the second edition. From Allen’s point of view, there was an important lesson to learn here. It is usually a good idea to circulate drafts of a report by email, and to post a near-final version on the Internet as quickly as possible. Once a piece of work is available, there is little point in trying to hide it. The horse has already left the stable. The response is normally for the agency concerned to post an official version almost immediately. More recent examples of this approach are studies Allen has been involved with in northern Uganda, funded by UNICEF and USAID, and in southern Sudan, funded by DfID and PACT Sudan (Allen and Schomerus 2005; Schomerus and Allen 2010). In both these cases, as with that of the ICC report for the international NGO, findings contradicted received wisdoms. But, while some staff within the relevant agencies were concerned or even hostile to points made, many others were very keen to have points placed in the public arena that they would find hard to make themselves. In some ways it is harder to deal with the more subtle disagreements about the use of evidence. Aid agencies, government

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departments and medical institutions normally have strict ethical procedures for research. These are partly meant to protect those who might be exploited or harmed, such as patients, children, the elderly and those divulging sensitive information. However, as has often been noted, ethical clearance and ethical arguments are also used to protect the funding institutions and their personnel. In practice this can mean that there is a kind of censorship of certain arguments or findings, especially where they challenge or contradict established protocols. Sometimes it is not clear when ethical guidelines are really about ethics, and when they are about maintaining the kinds of consensus that anthropological research frequently subverts. To give one example, when Allen submitted his report on HIV/AIDS among the Azande to World Vision and the Southern Sudan Ministry of Health in 2006, there were many points in it contradicting assumptions, including the view that disease prevalence was very high in the study area. This provoked quite a bit of debate, but Allen was asked to make only one significant change before the report was published. He was asked to remove detailed reference to an HIV-positive man who sat in the market place and discussed his disease with anyone who would listen. This placed Allen in an awkward ethical position. On the one hand, the case for preserving anonymity was being made on ethical grounds, but the man in question had spent hours discussing his condition with the researchers, and had insisted on photographs being taken of his body so that these could be shown to a wide audience. He was also very keen that his name be recorded too, as a kind of testimonial and in the hope that funds would become available to set up a segregated community for HIVpositive people. In the end, Allen agreed to the name of the individual being removed from the report, as well as his photographs. Where the photograph was meant to appear, a caption explains why it was not included. Thus, an attempt was made to keep the thrust

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of the analysis and to do justice to the information collected, while respecting the concerns of the funders. Later, when the academic paper was ready for publication, a further discussion of the issue occurred with the journal’s editor. His view was that it was unethical not to include the details that the HIV-positive man wanted to have recorded. So his photographs were included, although Allen decided not to have them reproduced as clearly as they might have been, and not to include the individual’s name next to them, although at that point he could have done so. Perhaps it was still a compromise, but it was entirely Allen’s decision (Allen 2007). More generally, there are times when the concerns that those implementing policies have about releasing information do not fall under clear ethical guidelines, but nevertheless may seem ethically reasonable. This is particularly the case when releasing findings might have implications for someone in particular, even if that person is not really someone who might normally be considered vulnerable. This was an issue with Mosse’s work on DfID. Was it ethical for him to reveal so much about off-the-record and informal discussions relating to easily identifiable individuals? Many anthropologists go out of their way to disguise the identities of those they write about, often making up the names of people and places. Should this equally apply to work at the interface of public policy? Again it can be hard to decide where ethical or moral considerations should apply. Were those DfID staff who were angry about Mosse’s book right to complain about him acting unethically? Above we have mentioned a ‘teaching hospital’ and an ‘international NGO’. Would it be better − and also ethical − to be less coy and more explicit? There are no straightforward answers. Decisions have to be made in each case based on consideration of what is appropriate, but it is important to recognize that what may seem the correct approach to anthropologists may seem unacceptable to others. Indeed, anthropologists working in multi-disciplinary and policy settings are very likely to find some

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people who will consider things that anthropologists take for granted very troubling, including the way in which anthropologists publish single-authored books and articles. They will on occasion, find themselves being asked how it can be ‘ethical’ not to recognize the contributions of those that have supervised or facilitated their research, and the local collaborators and assistants who have helped them in the field. In biomedical research, for example, it is the norm to do so, and an aspect of the way that the credibility of a publication is assessed.

CONCLUSION It will be clear from the examples we have given that the two of us are now in a relatively privileged position. We both have permanent positions in academic departments. We do not have to raise our own salaries from soft funding, and we are not responsible for sustaining the income of many researchfunded colleagues. Nowadays, if we were to confront serious problems, in the way that David Mosse did, we would expect our universities to back us up, just as his did. If we decide that we do not like working with a particular funder, or if contract arrangements are too demanding, we can simply say no. Our careers do not depend on ‘fitting in’ all the time. Others are not so fortunate, and in the early stages of our careers, neither were we. Those most vulnerable to being compromised by researching on issues concerned with public policy are those whose livelihoods depend on keeping their donors content. That is not just the case for anthropologists. It also applies, for example, to medical researchers of all kinds. From our own experiences, epidemiologists and parasitologists whose research is expensive and largely soft-funded encounter considerable pressures to produce positive results. Amongst anthropologists, those most vulnerable are likely to have to raise their own salaries from grants and consultancies and are not based in

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academic departments. We know of several situations in which such researchers have felt that they have had to keep silent, or have been forced to abandon their research when it reveals ongoing problems too starkly. So we are certainly not saying that anthropologists are immune from being compromised. Work at the interface of public policy will always involve dealing with attempts to sustain consensus views. But are anthropologists more open to manipulation than scholars working within other disciplines? We have not found that to be the case. We end with four key ways to avoid it. First, for anthropologists working on policy issues it is really important to ensure that insights are explicitly supported by robust evidence, especially when those insights are threatening to entrenched interests. This will often mean triangulating findings with other available evidence and, wherever possible, numerating results. How many people have been spoken to? What percentage acted in a certain way? These are not questions that anthropologists always ask, but if you do not want your analysis called ‘anecdotal’, then you need to demonstrate that insights are representative. If your findings are strong enough, in the end that will be recognized, even by those who initially seem antagonistic. Second, try to make sure you have backup for when things become difficult. If you are not in a university department, check the wording of contracts and negotiate the removal of things that are overtly controlling, or perhaps just don’t sign until the work is finished. In our experience it is surprisingly common for contracts only to be agreed after research is underway or has already been completed. Often it is not necessary to have a signed contract to be insured during fieldwork, or to receive funds. Look into these things, and take advice. Link yourself with an academic department if at all possible as a visiting researcher or fellow, and find out what support might be available. If you end up being bullied, as happened to Parker when she was attached to a teaching hospital, do

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what she did. Contact professional bodies and senior academic anthropologists. Do not just roll over. Almost certainly, you are in a stronger position than you think you are. Third, do not let rules about dissemination, including restrictive ethical protocols, lead to a situation in which you are effectively pressurized to act unethically. You will generally be in a good position to know what is the most appropriate course of action, or sometimes the least bad one, for those who have allowed you into their lives. That is a responsibility, and it cannot just be set aside because of rules generated primarily to protect funding bodies or avoid controversy. Fourth, if you want to be a critically rigorous and independent anthropologist who works on public policy issues, then you must always seek to make your findings public. If you do not, you are likely to end up as a qualitative researcher investigating a range of pre-set questions according to some sort of established formula – such as a ‘Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice’ survey. Ideally, publication means peer-reviewed journals and books, but sometimes it means using other mechanisms, such as news media or the Internet. Occasionally, there will be things that must be kept confidential, but if you do not place most of what you discover in the public arena, then you are inevitably more vulnerable to being compromised. There are many researchers who for a variety of reasons take the latter route. While you may find some such individuals encouraging of what you do, because you can make points that they feel they cannot, you are likely to make others very uncomfortable. You may well find them the most hostile of all to what you are doing, precisely because you remind them of the choice they have made.

NOTE 1 The term ‘applied anthropology’ is commonly used to refer to qualitative research and policy work, influenced by academic social anthropology. It is normally commissioned by policy-related institutions on a consultancy basis, and is particularly

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common in the health sector and ‘grassroots’ international development programmes.

REFERENCES Allen T 1987. Kwete and kweri: Acholi farm work groups in southern Sudan, Manchester Papers on Development 3 (2): 60−92. Allen T 1988. Coming home: the international agencies and returnees in West Nile, Journal of Refugee Studies 1 (2): 166−175. Allen T 1994. The United Nations and the repatriation of refugees, International Journal of the Red Cross, December: 340−253. Allen T (ed.) 1996. In Search of Cool Ground: War, flight and homecoming in northeast Africa. Geneva: Africa World Press/UNRISD/James Currey. Allen T 2006a. AIDS and evidence: interrogating some Ugandan myths, Journal of Biosocial Science 38: 7−28. Allen T 2006b. Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army. London: Zed/ Macmillan/IAI. Allen T 2007. Witchcraft, sexuality and HIV/AIDS among the Azande of Sudan, Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (3): 359−396. Allen T and Morsink H (eds) 1994. When Refugees Go Home: African experiences. Geneva: Africa World Press/UNRISD/James Currey. Allen T and Parker M 2011. The ‘other diseases’ of the Millennium Development Goals: rhetoric and reality of free drug distribution to cure the poor’s parasites, Third World Quarterly 32 (1): 89−115. Allen T and Schomerus M 2005. A Hard Homecoming: Lessons learned from the reception centre process on effective interventions for former ‘abductees’ in Northern Uganda. Geneva: USAID & UNICEF. At: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADI241.pdf. Brooker S, Kabatereine N B, Myatt M, Stothard J R and Fenwick A 2005. Rapid assessment of Schistosoma mansoni: the validity, applicability and cost-effectiveness of the LOT Quality Assurance Sampling method in Uganda, Tropical Medicine and International Health 10 (7): 647−658. Davison C, Davey Smith G and Frankel S 1991. Lay epidemiology and the prevention paradox: The implications of coronary candidacy for health education, Sociology of Health and Illness 13 (i): 1−19. Escobar A 1995. Encountering Development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Evans-Pritchard E E 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans-Pritchard E E 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fairhead J and Leach M 2007. Vaccine Anxieties: Global science, child health and society. London: Earthscan. Fairhead J, Leach M and Small M 2006. Where technoscience meets poverty: medical research and the economy of blood in the Gambia, West Africa. Social Science and Medicine 63 (4): 110−1120. Ferguson J 1990. The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fleming F M, Fenwick A, Tukahebwa E M et al. 2009. Process evaluation of schistosomiasis control in Uganda, 2003−2006: perceptions, attitudes and constraints of a National Control Programme, Parasitology 136 (13): 1759−1769. Harper I 2006. Anthropology, DOTS and understanding tuberculosis control in Nepal. Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (1): 57–67. Kabatereine NB, Brooker S, Koukounari A et al. 2007. Impact of a National Helminth Control Programme on infection and morbidity in Ugandan schoolchildren, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 85: 91−99. MacGregor H 2006. ‘The grant is what I eat’: the politics of social security and disability in the postapartheid South African State. Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (1): 43−55. Mosse, D 2004. Cultivating Development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. Mosse D 2006. A disquieting clash of culture, Times Higher Education Supplement April 21. At: http:// www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCo de=202718§ioncode=26 Parker M 1992. Re-assessing disability: the impact of schistosomal infection on daily activities among women in Gezira Province, Sudan, Social Science and Medicine, 35 (7), 877–890.

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Parker M 1993. ‘Bilharzia and the boys: questioning common assumptions’, Social Science and Medicine, 37 (4), 481–492. Parker M 1999. HIV transmission in urban environments: London and beyond, in L Schell and S Ulijaszek (eds), Urbanism and Human Biology in Industrialised Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 280−308. Parker M 2001. Stuck in GUM: Life in a clap clinic, in D Gellner and E Hirsch (eds), The Ethnography of Organisations: A reader. Oxford: Berg, pp. 137−156. Parker M 2006. Core groups and the transmission of HIV: learning from male Prostitutes, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (1): 117−131. Parker M and Allen T 2011. Assessing the control of neglected tropical diseases in Uganda: does mass drug administration for the integrated treatment of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths really work? Health Research Policy and Systems 9: 3. Parker M, Allen T and Hastings J 2008. Resisting control of neglected tropical diseases: dilemmas in the mass treatment of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths in northwest Uganda, Journal of Biosocial Science 40 (2): 161−181. Pelto PJ and Pelto G H 2008. Anthropological Research: The structure of inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1st edition 1978). Redlclift M R 1985. Policy research and anthropological compromise: should the piper call the tune? in R Grillo and A Rew (eds), Social Anthropology and Development Policy. London: Tavistock Publications. Schomerus M and Allen T 2010. Southern Sudan at Odds With Itself. PACT(SUDAN)/LSE. At: http:// eprints.lse.ac.uk/28869/ Shaw A 2009. Negotiating Risk: British Pakistani experiences of genetics. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Whyte S R, Whyte M A, Meinert L and Kyaddondo B 2004. Treating AIDS: dilemmas of unequal access in Uganda, Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS Research Alliance 1 (1): 14−26.

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3.12 From Participant-Observation to Participant-Collaboration: Some Observations on Participatory-cum-Collaborative Approaches Paul Sillitoe

A colleague chairing a writing-up seminar for PhD students looked increasingly perplexed as the speaker talked about using participatory methods, until finally he asked if she was referring to some new variant of participant-observation. No, the recently emerged participatory approaches deployed initially in development contexts are not related to participant-observation. They are augmenting, and may evolve to succeed that venerable and contradictory method, as mass communication is encouraging and increasingly allowing all to make their voices heard. It is no longer feasible, if it ever was, for anthropologists to imagine themselves ‘suddenly set down . . . alone on a tropical beach close to a native village’ and proceeding to erect a tent, ‘remaining in as close contact with the natives as possible’; joining in their daily lives, soaking up the local airs and ways, waking ‘up every morning to a day

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presenting itself . . . more or less as it does to the native’ (Malinowski 1921: 4−7). Anthropologists now are more likely to arrive by vehicle or aeroplane than local boat, will have sought the community’s permission to enter, and will probably live in accommodation arranged by that community. If working collaboratively, as many anthropologists do increasingly, they will have been in contact with the local university, where colleagues are likely to assist with these arrangements. The participant-observation method has its uses, and there are some grounds for continuing to work in this way. But people are increasingly and rightly demanding a say in research conducted in their communities, not only in deciding whether or not they want outside assistance but also in demanding a collaborative approach. The emergence of participatory research approaches is partly a response to these demands, in addition to

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calls for better targeting of development activities.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH Relationships between researchers and researched have been changing with people worldwide able to read and criticise representations of themselves, and increasingly resisting being subjects of enquiry. Vocal ‘indigenous scholars’ have emerged, demanding to have their say (Tuwihai Smith 1999; Four Arrows 2008). Anthropology is responding and consequently embracing more collaborative research approaches. These changes have been under way for some years, as illustrated in the ongoing evolution of the ethical codes of various professional associations. Following the El Dorado affair, for instance, the American Anthropological Association’s Task Force concluded that ‘the anthropology of indigenous peoples and related communities must move towards “collaborative” models . . . [where] all parties are equal partners in the enterprise, participating in the development of research design’. Collaborative research − sometimes called ‘community-based research’, ‘action research’ and ‘engaged anthropology’ − is grounded in the perspectives and interests of the community in question (Lassiter 2005). It parallels participatory approaches, in reaffirming people’s rights to co-direct research that purports to represent them and may inform decisions that affect them. It seeks to work ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people and community members play a prominent part in defining and contributing to the research, from project design through data gathering and analysis to presentation of final results. Some might argue that participantobservation involves peoples’ participation as teachers. But from a collaborative perspective that is insufficient: such contributions to the generation of anthropological knowledge are hidden and controlled by the ethnographer. Reflexive critiques have created increasing

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discomfort about the often invisible relationships anthropologists have with ‘informants’ or ‘respondents’, whose anonymity is further criticised as cover for bogus objectivity. Acknowledgement of the people who afford access to their communities’ ways and contribute significantly to anthropological research should be central to ethnographic practice. Collaborative approaches seek to make this contribution overt, producing co-conceived and co-written work. These differ profoundly from previous participantobservation methods and the postmodern reflexive focus on the anthropologist’s achievements and experiences. There is also the awkward issue of anthropologists asking questions and analysing data in ways that are foreign to ‘insiders’, even appearing to understand them better than they understand themselves. It leads to their exclusion from the academic process, and similarly from development planning and policy making. The discipline has long championed other ways of knowing, but has yet to follow through the implications of acknowledging a plurality of knowledge systems regarding the deployment of its theoretical perspectives. It is partly a power issue: current arrangements allow anthropologists to claim authority for their work, which they are reluctant to relinquish. Collaborative research may encourage plurality, offering an alternative ‘cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 42) − to understand others’ ways, and achieve a more appropriate representation, instead of favouring certain sorts of knowledge and expression, and particular kinds of research design, data gathering, analysis and representation. There is an intriguing contradiction here. Anthropology seeks to represent as sympathetically as it can many different ways of knowing and understanding the world, while accepting that it cannot entirely capture other perspectives. To the extent that this plurality comprises the discipline, anthropological knowledge has been co-produced over time, with many non-Western ideas informing our

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understanding of humanity, and continuing to do so, with gradually more visible coauthorship. In this sense, anthropological knowledge is not wholly a ‘Western’ conceptual construct, with dynamic cross-cultural interchange featuring in its ongoing advancement. But as Strang (2006) has observed, anthropology is also a comparative ‘metadiscourse’ that occurs on a different scale to locally founded knowledge (though the latter is increasingly globally informed). The discipline is consequently ‘an international and intercultural discussion’, encompassing but not based within local cultural realities. Nonetheless, this representation of the discipline does not place it in some plural intellectual domain beyond any particular cultural context as the ‘meta-discourse’ is a Westernframed intellectual thing. These crossculturally informed ideologies-cum-theories legitimate the discipline’s claim to expert knowledge. The conundrums are not all on anthropology’s side. While indigenous critiques of anthropology are useful and welcome, they should beware of continually stereotyping the discipline as a Western colonial imposition, merely to score cheap political points, while making unacknowledged use of its theories and methods to join in the ‘meta-discourse’. There is more traction in making the co-production of anthropological theory and practice more explicit by acknowledging the complex realities of contemporary research: the diversity of those involved and their relationships. Another downside to depicting communities as powerless colonial victims of ‘Western research’ is that it wholly denies their agency. Although recognition of their contributions to anthropological knowledge may rarely extend far beyond grateful acknowledgment in preface and footnotes, they have nevertheless made significant contributions to the discipline.

PARTICIPATION IN DEVELOPMENT During the last three decades there has been an increasing focus on participatory

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methods, notably in international development contexts. This is partly a response by development agencies to criticism of their failures, spending billions of dollars with disappointing returns. These poor results have been attributed partly to a top-down approach which assumes that communities need development – that is, modernization via incorporation into the capitalist economic system. It is also a response to pressure from the communities themselves. These increasingly demand co-direction in development programmes, often through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing them. This bottom-up approach maintains that if the poor, who are the targets of development, contribute to deciding goals and strategy, these may better address their priorities (Chambers 2001). As agencies gradually acknowledged the need to involve local people meaningfully in development activities, participation slowly became an accepted modus operandi, and today it is commonplace. It has produced numerous acronyms, PRA (participatory rural appraisal), PLA (participatory learning and action), PAR (participatory action research), PCR (participatory community research), PPA (participatory poverty assessment), PTD (participatory technology development) and PVA (participatory video assessment), to name a few – contributing to the alphabet soup typical of development reports, which has readers continually turning to glossaries. Participatory approaches originated in farming systems research and applied anthropology. Their subsequent proponents have come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including agriculture, medicine and social sciences. A forerunner was RRA (rapid rural appraisal), where teams made recommendations based on information gathered during brief field visits with little or no further input from communities, unlike later participatory approaches that emphasised community involvement in both data collection and analysis. But there is an equally large difference between such participation,

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where strangers arrive with a preconceived research project and arrange for local participation, and collaborative research that features community involvement at every stage of a project.

PARTICIPATION IN PRACTICE Participatory research comprises a suite of methods, or (in development-speak) ‘tools’. These have proved cost-effective and reliable, which has further recommended them to funding agencies. As well as using established research methods, such as participantobservation and interviews (formal, semi-structured and informal) and questionnaire surveys, participatory approaches have pioneered less familiar ones such as focus group discussions, problem censuses and innovative workshops. Researchers have proved imaginative in matching these to local demands: techniques employed to investigate space, for example, may include not only participatory mapping but also the compilation of transects, seasonal charts and various diagramming techniques (such as Venn organizational diagrams), to collect data on local resources, the location of various social groups, etc. Techniques used to investigate time may also feature calendars and annualcycle timelines combined with life histories and investigation of significant community events (to follow changes in population, migration, environment, resource use, etc.), together with various flow charts and webs. These investigations may use a range of locally appropriate media. Analysis depends on the data: it may include group discussion of themes and also statistical analysis, if quantitative data feature, together with techniques such as ranking and scoring, pattern charts and matrix exercises (Kindon et al. 2007; Reason and Bradbury 2008). Participatory research has highlighted that local communities are diverse and complex. Development projects are increasingly aware of inequalities and rifts, and the dangers of exacerbating these if certain sections of a

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community benefit disproportionately, or at the expense of others. Participatory research projects routinely seek to accommodate community variation – according to gender, age, social status, ethnicity, occupation, etc. − employing various strategies to ‘widen participation’. This disaggregation of communities matches the move away from structure to process in the social sciences, further making the participatory way of working topical.

PARTICIPATORY MAPPING Participatory mapping can address a range of issues. In addition to natural resources − such as topography, water, soils and forest − these may include historical events, property regimes, ritual and cosmological geography, social and political groups, land-use patterns, human settlement, communications and location of services and markets. (Figure 3.12.1) In development contexts, mapping may inform participative analysis of current and potential future problems and conflicts over issues. Discussion of maps may generate insights unachievable in other ways. In the central Tanzanian community of Madah, ‘Drawing a map of the area and discussing it had a profound effect on the perception of land use for a number of people . . . participatory mapping helped to focus local interest’ (Östberg 1995: 179). The discussion crystallized

Figure 3.12.1 Participatory mapping of a Bangladeshi village.

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differences between locals and newcomers over land resources, human demography, forest clearance and livestock numbers, opening the way to constructive future landuse planning. Maps can reveal a profound knowledge of circumstances beyond verbal communication, such as the sophisticated understanding of water movement and

Figure 3.12.2 1994: 120).

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management shown in a Bharuch village watershed map (Figure 3.12.2). As with any method, caution is needed in drawing conclusions from data recorded on maps, as partial representations that may suggest particular questions and answers. Interpreting spatial data, like statistics, requires the support of other methods.

Map showing watershed status of village in Bharuch District, India (Shah

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Mapping may be combined with such other methods as flow diagrams and guided walks. A combination of resource mapping with a flow analysis of labour allocation in a Honduran community furthered understanding of intra-household division of labour, and control over and responsibility for various activities. Participants from households, differentiated according to social status, first drew resource maps and then activity flow diagrams on tracing paper (using different coloured lines for each person). Overlaid on the maps (with time allocations added for various activities), these gave a visual representation of their complex interrelations (Willmer and Ketzis 1998). Encouraging people to express their ideas diagrammatically can result in unorthodox representations and new insights, such as the representation by Sri Lankan farmers incorporating yantric symbols. These relate to rituals that surround their activities, creating vibrations that promote harmony in their cultivations and protect crops (Figure 3.12.3). The diagrams relate to powerful metaphysical forces. It is necessary not only to get the environmental factors right in farming but also the cosmic ones, as a Buddhist priest from Kataragama explained: Sri Lankan Buddhism recognizes . . . balance and synergy . . . understanding cannot be achieved by mental efforts only. Also other levels of understanding are important: spiritual perception,

Figure 3.12.3 A yantric representation of a rice-threshing procedure, Sri Lanka (Upawansa and Wagachchi 1999: 111).

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feelings, intuition, using ordinary and extra-ordinary senses, dreams, visions. Words are too limited to explain the full richness and functioning of these powers and forces. [...] A different language is necessary, of course: the language of metaphors, art and rituals (Upawansa and Wagachchi 1999: 107−108).

These comments give some indication of the challenges faced in collaborative research, where we seek to accommodate diverse world-views and knowledges.

PARTICIPATORY HISTORY Mapping may include temporal − seasonal and historical − data, and monitor change, such as in land-use patterns. For example, ‘retrospective community mapping’ seeks to document generational differences in what people recall of past events and conditions. It combines maps and diagrams with timelines, visualizing changes over ‘time-slices’. Participants are grouped according to how far back they can remember, and each group maps their period of recall, showing the features and change they think are important. The groups subsequently meet in an openended discussion to learn about and agree the community’s history and to consider proposed interventions. Participatory investigation of time more usually takes the form of community history accounts and life histories. A time-honoured way to collect such data, particularly personal histories, is to provide a person with a recording device and allow her to ‘tell her story’. But these are notoriously difficult to edit, often needing the participant to answer questions to contextualize and explain things for outsiders. In development contexts, such enquiries often take the form of participatory reconstruction of timelines, which simply seek chronologically to arrange and date benchmark events significant to a community or individual. Oral testimony is correlated with written records where possible to corroborate and possibly date accounts. Such historical reconstruction may contextualize

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intervention plans and inform focus group discussions. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ feature in project monitoring and evaluation, which are prominent activities in development. The collaborative exploration of historical changes may help define indicators to assess future impacts and suggest appropriate and sustainable initiatives. In PRA (participatory rural appraisal) people undertake their own evaluations. They may discuss the impact of past events and changes and explore these using various methods, such as Venn diagrams, flow charts and problem-tree analysis. For example, historical matrix scoring (Figure 3.12.4) compares options, responses to events and problems at different times. The local focus of such enquiries, like much participatory research, can be a problem where development planning demands data from large areas and generic regional or even national recommendations. There is no way of knowing if local case studies are typical of a wider region: communities may vary, and policy making based on such research may result in unintended impacts on some communities. It is a Catch 22 situation: while it is questionable to assume homogeneity and use the results of micro-level research regionally, there is often no option. The costs of researching larger areas to reveal variations are prohibitive, even using these techniques in rapid mode. Yet if development efforts are to be equitable and reach the ‘margins’ of a community, it is necessary to accommodate variation.

PARTICIPATORY SUBTLETIES Participatory approaches face further problems: applied in a mechanistic way they can yield dubious results. In participatory mapping, it is not a case of giving people large sheets of paper and box of coloured pencils and leaving them to get on with it. It is necessary to grasp their pictorial representation of space and allow them to explore within this framework, possibly working with locally

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familiar media such as sticks and stones or drawing in sand. Participants may produce a representation very different to a strictly cartographical one, demanding sympathetic interpretation. Maps drawn according to local canons and scale rarely conform to the Cartesian two-coordinate projection of space, which informs Western constructions. Social and personal characteristics may inflect the information recorded (and omitted). Participants may contract or expand features and manipulate the relations between these according to their importance rather than strictly according to spatial relationships. As Orlove (1993: 42) observes, ‘there are no objective universal criteria by which maps can be judged, distinguished from non-maps ... these categorizations emerge from culturally specific understandings of images from socially specific habits of viewing’. Thus, there are no ‘impartial maps’, only maps from different perspectives. Historical data are similarly difficult to interpret: change is likely to involve multiple factors and it is hard to be sure of comparing like-with-like over time. It is necessary to exercise caution with accounts of past events that participants think significant in the present, as they may, retrospectively, rationalize happenings as following some predetermined course. Though somewhat safe from personal whim by being shared, the remembered past is a selected past; the interpretation of historical events is subjective and may be changeable (e.g. by subsequent events, unspoken agendas, whether discussed oneto-one or in a group and subject to peer pressure, etc.). It is necessary to triangulate according to standard anthropological procedure − that is, collect data from various sources to cross-check reliability and reduce bias. In this way the accuracy of one person’s recall is confirmed by others (and maybe by written or visual records too). This procedure applies to all fieldwork with humans, who have their own idiosyncratic recall and understanding of events and may even seek to ‘spin’ information to support personal schemes.

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Figure 3.12.4 Historical matrix of livelihood strategies, Senegal − showing diversification and cash economy engagement (Schoonmaker Freudenberger 1994: 126).

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While these points may strike anthropologists as blindingly obvious, they are not necessarily so to others who employ participatory tools. Grasping diverse understandings of time and space assumes an in-depth appreciation of local ideas not achievable in the rapid research that characterizes most development. This relates to the relatively low numbers of anthropologists involved in the formulation and use of these participatory approaches. Instead, many persons without the necessary experience have come forward, and applied the techniques in unsophisticated ways, such as those at a Department for International Development (DfID) workshop who presented themselves as participatory research experts on the basis of a fortnight’s training, which had apparently also equipped them sufficiently to talk of themselves as anthropologists. This threatens to devalue participatory methodologies at a time when they should be refined as part of the collaborative research agenda. Participatory approaches lack a disciplinary home that can vouch for the qualifications of practitioners and so raise and maintain standards. Too little critical academic review has gone into their evolution and, consequently, they lack intellectual weight. There is a need for substantial interrogation of these methods through discussion and practice. Significant anthropological engagement may address these shortcomings, as anthropological training will promote a better critical analysis of these methods, their capabilities and the problems likely to arise in their use. It is not too late for the discipline to give participatory methods an intellectual home and contribute significantly to their refinement. It is appropriate, after all, as the emerging collaborative agenda concerns both participatory and anthropological approaches. Whereas ethnographic research features a spectrum of approaches and some anthropologists increasingly employ participatory methods among others, this is piecemeal and the discipline has yet to evolve or endorse a distinctive set of participatory research tools.

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POST POSTMODERNISM The involvement of anthropology in the advancement of participatory methods should appeal even to those who argue that the discipline should not involve itself actively in development on the basis that it is a fundamentally flawed imposition of capitalistdemocratic values and ways on the entire world, or, in more jaundiced views, an attempt by the ‘first world’ to perpetuate exploitative neo-colonial relations. Why? Because the participatory movement offers a way around the postmodern dilemma that anthropologists can never really know other communities, beyond subjective experiences of them. While anthropologists have debated the methodological implications of participantobservation for many years, postmodernism has criticised it for suggesting an improbable combination of the subjective and objective, of inductive and deductive understandings. While not mutually exclusive, it is difficult both to participate and observe at the same time. When I established a small kitchen garden adjacent to my house in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, for instance, I mucked in with clearing the vegetation and fencing the site with my friends, and gained some appreciation of the work involved. But when I documented the establishment of a swidden garden in detail, I carried notebook, camera and clock, which precluded me taking part. And, in truth, my participation was pretty limited, my friends supervising my efforts and feeling responsible for seeing that that I did not injure myself as a tender-handed academic wielding an axe. The postmodern critique also casts doubt on the validity of our observations in comparison to actors’ understandings. Whatever I do, I cannot achieve the viewpoint of my Highlander friends, let alone communicate it to others. There is no objective stance, however we conduct our observations, given the cultural relativity of our knowledge. Recognizing the limitations of participantobservation has contributed to contemporary

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methodological changes. Nonetheless, participant-observation has its uses: it has undeniably contributed significantly to the discipline’s ethnographic foundations, without which its theories can neither be ‘constructed or deconstructed’. A case can be made for working in this way, with people lacking any means of documenting their own lifeways, particularly those undergoing rapid change. There is considerable urgency, in such cases, to address the loss of languages and associated wisdom and knowledge. For instance, in biodiversity conservation contexts there is increasing appreciation of the need to conserve biocultural diversity. And participant-observation continues to feature in participatory research, albeit as only one method of many. The move towards collaborative/participatory approaches does not spell the end of former methods but their supplementation with new ones to meet demands for an equalization of relationships with host communities, enabling the co-direction and co-production of research. Current ethnographic methods have unquestionably furthered our understanding of humanity’s diversity, but they need to evolve to meet today’s demands for more collaborative approaches. These make a participatory approach mandatory. If anthropology should be more than travelogue−autobiograp hical−philosophy, and the ‘science’ of its claimed ‘social science’ epithet is to have some substance, then participatory approaches are a logical way forward. In seeking to engage people meaningfully in the research process as partners rather than informants, it incorporates those who do presumably know their communities, as socialized members of them. Anthropologists may continue to face considerable challenges of translation but the issue of subjective outsider distortion is diminished considerably.

PROBLEMS WITH PARTICIPATION The implication is not that all will be plain sailing with participatory approaches.

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They have not proved as successful as originally declared in ensuring that local concerns and perspectives are included in the development process. Many projects employ the word ‘participation’ as little more than a catchword to give them credibility, while others struggle to give it significance. Several commentators note that it ranges from tokenistic ‘contract’ or ‘manipulative participation’, where researchers seek to control the process, through to empowering ‘collegiate’ or ‘self-mobilization’ approaches. Participation is vulnerable to manipulation, both from without and within communities. The power relations and rhetoric involved in participatory research have recently been subject to scrutiny (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Hickey and Mohan 2004), examining particularly how some may twist such research to suit their own ends, including covert project manipulation. Targetdriven development staff may manage ‘participatory’ investigations to come up with results that fit preconceived ideas and plans, sometimes under pressure from the agencies employing them (in turn under pressure from political authorities). In other cases, local interest groups, such as the more wealthy, may dominate participatory activities to ensure that they, if not benefiting directly, at least do not see their privileged position threatened, when the mandate of national and international development agencies is now openly to assist the poor. Such actions lend credence to the postdevelopment critique that the assumptions of Euro-American culture dominate and, however well intentioned, contribute to the problems that development seeks to address. Capitalist informed development imposes an assumption that humans should dominate and control the world and each other. Its aims – from promoting competitive market arrangements that emphasise ‘cost−benefit audits’ to concentrating power in centralized bureaucracies overseen by ‘democratic governments’ − may be inimical to local understandings and ways of being in the world. The power differentials and inequalities of

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the global economy are the problem, which development perpetuates, allowing ‘experts’ from wealthy regions to represent the developing world as poor, ignorant and problematic, needing outside intervention to improve life. While the critique has a certain force, momentous political change, a virtual global revolution, would be required to address the issues it raises, and meanwhile the gap between rich and poor widens and people continue to starve and die of preventable sicknesses. Critics of development are not arguing for the abandonment of efforts to alleviate poverty but rather that it should seek to find new ways of doing things that address some of their points. While there are attempts to break with tokenistic participation by advancing strategies to further ‘empowerment’, it would be naive to imagine that political manoeuvring can be eradicated. New participatory tactics continually open up new challenges and opportunities for political action. The powerful are likely to manipulate − often subtly − any attempts to secure community consensus on issues, and encouraging the expression of a diversity of views may increase the possibility of conflict. Again, strong anthropological involvement and training may help to tackle these problems by sensitizing researchers to such issues in cross-cultural context. Close association with a community may also prompt researchers to keep their distance, able to surmise (probably thanks to an extended period of fieldwork featuring participant-observation), how their involvement may be manipulated by certain parties. Thus, one of the editors of this volume on reading this chapter confessed to be ‘extremely wary of offers made to me about avowedly “participatory” research . . . since I can read the intentions behind my attempted co-option quite clearly’. Another problem is the association of participatory methods with research conducted in short time frames. RRA is notorious in this regard, and the short-term focus of development, noted earlier, working to tight schedules aimed at achieving demonstrable results

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in time for project-end evaluation, has contributed to the debasement of participatory methods in some hands. They have too often been deployed as a quick-fix way to plug the local community into any development initiative and continue with business as usual. It is important to undo this image of participatory approaches, if we are to do them justice. It takes time to win people’s trust, as any fieldworking anthropologist will confirm, and meaningful collaboration demands longterm commitment. It is only then a researcher can start to perceive status differentials, for example, that might distort participatory work, and devise ways to accommodate them. For instance, it is unlikely that people are going to participate meaningfully with a group of strangers who descend on their community for a few days and arrange for them to take part in a range of unfamiliar exercises. The results are likely to be impressionistic, which decision makers, favouring hard data, may discount as ‘anecdotal’. In order to induce cooperation, participants may be paid for their time, taking part only for the reward and not out of any commitment to the research: though this is better than those projects that make unrealistic demands on people’s time, impacting negatively on their livelihoods. This is not to argue that participatory methods should not be used in ‘quick and dirty’ work if that is all there is time for, as it is surely better to try to ensure some local involvement rather than none at all. But this should only be as a last resort and with a warning about the provisional status of the results to those who intend to use them. There is an inevitable ethical dilemma of whether anthropologists should cooperate in such research at all, with refusal leaving lessqualified researchers to fill the gap and produce work that is likely to prove even less helpful to communities. Though valid, such criticisms should not blind us to the positive aspects of participatory research in development contexts. These include incorporation of a wide range of stakeholders; an appreciation of community

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capacities and problems by participants; and increase in community understanding of, influence over and commitment to development interventions. Such projects may also produce research results accessible to the community; less intrusive (and often cheaper) than formal questionnaire surveys, like ‘snowball’ ethnographic research, they may yield, unanticipated information.

COLLABORATION WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY New technology offers exciting opportunities to tackle some of these problems and make sophisticated advances in participatory research. A recent innovation is the use of geographical information system (GIS) technology, which electronically merges cartography and databases, allowing users to store and manage spatial information, and undertake interactive analysis. Proponents of participatory GIS seek to make the technology accessible to communities so that they can better make their views known and, in development contexts, meaningfully take part in decision-making by putting their knowledge on a par with that of outsider experts. The technology can facilitate exploration of alternative perspectives and information, and their implications. A project using participatory GIS in Mpumalanga in South Africa, for instance, which overlaid official land resource data with local soil knowledge, revealed discordant representations of land potential that led to productive discussions with the community about farming developments (Abbot et al. 1998: 27). Many challenges surround participatory GIS, such as training people in the use of sophisticated software. Its use throws the aforementioned issue of the cultural relativity of cartographic representations into stark relief, and underlines warnings about how the insensitive use of participatory methods can result in ethnocentric representations and distortion of knowledge. The technology demands careful handling, as it has a cultural

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bias; structured according to Boolean logic, it obliges users to proceed in a certain way, which militates against the representation of multiple realities of space and alternative knowledge. But differences in perception are instructive. The lesson that emerges from the ongoing debate about participatory GIS and its use in development and other contexts is again that meaning and its representation are relative to cultural context. It is necessary to temper the etic view that GIS supports by using complementary methods to explore and interpret emic views of spatial data and relationships. There are opportunities here for anthropology to make significant contributions to methodological advances. The discipline knows how to enquire into sociocultural context, and how to reveal the multiple meanings and perspectives that may coexist between stakeholders. Participatory GIS offers contradictory opportunities with the potential both to empower and marginalize people simultaneously, depending on how it is deployed. Any discussion of representation is likely to have a political dimension, particularly if it involves decision-making, as in many development contexts. GIS technology may skew such discussions: its supposed value-neutral and objective status gives pre-eminence to what it defines as facts, inclining toward normalization, if not knowledge engineering. There are worries that development planners will give further priority to such information ‘objectively’ presented using Western techno-science, reinforcing top-down planning and decision-making. It may commoditize data and so support moves toward a bureaucratic−informational complex where certain institutions control access with resulting inequities. Differential access to the technology may further reinforce unequal power relations, further working against participation by effectively disenfranchizing people. Video also offers exciting opportunities for engaged and innovative research. Participatory video − also called ‘community video’, ‘grassroots video’, ‘indigenous

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media’ etc. − seeks to advance the use of film by communities to convey their views, albeit aware that it too can further misunderstanding, even has the potential to be misused or hijacked. It involves handing the camera over, which is now possible with user-friendly technology, unlike previous cameras that demanded specialist knowledge of focus, exposure, etc. There are no protocols other than the community is responsible for the film. Video provides an opportunity for the presentation and interpretation of oral traditions to a wider audience, in a manner that is truer than the written record; not replacing traditional ways of transmission but extending on them in an increasingly globalized world. In producing a film, people are able to reflect on their views and structure the presentation of their knowledge, rather as in writing, which gives their considered thoughts added weight (Cullen 2011). Although handing the camera over to the community is not new, participatory filmmaking is marginal in anthropology. But it is gaining ground in development contexts, where it is associated with empowerment and advocacy. It raises people’s consciousness; playback allows them to reflect on issues, realize that they have worthwhile contributions to make and builds self-confidence to express opinions. Participatory video can facilitate communication with planners and decision-makers, allowing communities to present their views to distant meetings they cannot attend and which would otherwise rely on second-hand written submissions. Participatory video also provides an opportunity for the documentation of experiential, non-verbal understandings. The participation of participant-observers − however feeble, such as my gardening experiences − is significant in accessing such experiential or embodied knowledge, which we increasingly realize, comprises a deal of what people know, passed on through demonstration and practice, by work rather than word. But it is difficult to capture verbally. Film is a valuable adjunct to text in visually recording aspects of life beyond words.

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Some criticise communications technology for changing the way that people represent what they know. While it provides new ways to express views and concerns, it simultaneously threatens to undermine cultural identity. Similarly to GIS, it encourages a certain way of communicating that complies with dominant codes and narrative styles, and in learning how to use such technology, people implicitly adopt these. It transmogrifies the understandings that they communicate, even alters their previous comprehension of the world. While it is useful to bring these issues up for discussion, these critiques appear disingenuous in implying that the way to address them is to persuade people not to use such technology. There are few communities unfamiliar with film nowadays and many have been the subject of documentaries. It is surely arrogant to argue that they should not have access to the latest technology if they wish to use it and think that it will help them to express their views. And participatory approaches allow people to shape its use in accord with their own cultural ways and ends. We know that the adoption of new technologies need not necessarily extinguish previous ways or supplant relations. The problems are more usually practical; as noted, such technology often being beyond the reach of local people. The different perspectives of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ implies that the traditional anthropological role of cultural broker remains to convey so far as possible the insiders’ worldview, drawing on its translocal and ‘metadiscursive’ insights into the representational process. For instance, Western viewers may find boring the long landscape pans that occur in many Australian Aboriginal videos, not being equipped with the necessary ancestral and mythical knowledge to appreciate what is there (Michaels 1991). Participatory video, like participatory research generally, does not necessarily remove the need for interpretation. Local productions may demand some commentary or text to make sense to outsiders. Looking at differences in interpretation underlines the complexity of different

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cultural perspectives and differences in knowledge and perception, and presents intriguing analytic challenges.

CHALLENGES TO COLLABORATION The criticisms that participatory GIS and video distort peoples’ worldviews apply to collaborative research generally, in that it assumes that members of a community have a Western-centric academic understanding of what research is about and think that it will help further understanding of issues. After all, neither the Inuit, Aborigines, Trobrianders, Tikopians nor many other peoples had any notion of cross-culturally informed enquiry, such as anthropology and the social sciences practise. If people have no such ideas, can they meaningfully collaborate? Again, we have confrontation of different epistemologies and ontologies, as the post-development critique affirms. An intriguing proposition that throws these issues into relief is to imagine ‘us’ participating in ‘their’ research: that is, reverse anthropology, which looks at the West through an Aboriginal or Inuit philosophic-cultural lens. To what extent is this possible or does the prospect simply perpetuate structures of intellectual domination, obliging people to follow the rules of European intellectual enquiry and debate? In short, the assumption is that people will not only want to participate but also that they can do so as equal partners, having the same knowledge of what is at stake, and that doing so will not do violence to the local knowledges and lifeways that we seek to understand. People may have historical and political reasons for not wishing to participate. In parts of the Americas, for example, people are deeply suspicious of outsiders and their intentions; understandably so, given their history of colonial domination and fears of exploitation and biopiracy – as the notorious El Dorado affair illustrates. This draws attention to a potential downside in emerging indigenous studies, such as the Kaupapa

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Maori approach. Indigenous scholars may seek to exclude outsiders from working with local communities, as has happened, for example, in Aotearoa, where for the last several decades non-Maori anthropologists at New Zealand universities have more often conducted research elsewhere. While perhaps explicable in view of negative colonial experiences − indeed sometimes spoken of as decolonization of the mind − it is a shame for those who seek to further understanding of all humanity and think that an independent outsider view can be helpful, believe in the open exchange of knowledge and wish to advance collaborative research approaches. What if, as mentioned, a community or some section of it sees collaboration as an opportunity to manipulate events to their political ends? For some researchers, participation means such political engagement − often called action research. They advocate participative approaches to address unequal neo-colonial power relations − such as those that allow wealthy academics to travel around the globe and poke their privileged noses into others’ lives. They also want researchers to think more about the consequences of disseminating their findings, what is made of the knowledge and who benefits. These are tendentious issues. After all, do social scientists who engage in participatory research wish to be seen as political apparatchiks for hire? It is questionable, to say the least, for outsiders to involve themselves actively in the political interests of other communities − surely their business − as opposed to seeking to further comprehension of issues on all sides and facilitating mutually comprehensible interaction. While we may legitimately seek to advance understanding, this does not give us the right to represent others’ interests, not being local politicians (or come to that, politicians of any stripe). This is not to say we should ignore the plight of those we work with, often the marginalized and poor. Collaborative research may inform action that the local community thinks in its interests, which is surely what anthropology’s involvement in development is all about, and

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may help further narrow the gap that has until recently existed between academic and applied anthropology (Sillitoe 2007). But there are fine lines to be negotiated here. These issues relate to the tricky question of securing the agreement of communities to engage in participatory research. Where they face the imposition of some development intervention, they may welcome such an opportunity, seeing it as a way to get their views known. The challenges of initiating and managing genuine collaborative research are considerable. It is easier to imagine alighting from a canoe on a village beach and undertaking your own research project. Involving a community from the start in devising any project presents challenges. Making initial contact and starting the participatory planning process is one, it being necessary to agree the form of collaboration – aims, time-scale, partners’ interests, requirements, and capabilities, etc. – at the start. Defining topic of study and research questions collaboratively challenges conventional research procedure, which assumes formulation of hypothesis and objectives before entering the field, to address intellectual issues of current meta-discursive concern to the discipline, starting out with preconceived theoretically informed aims − albeit this immediately falls foul of postmodern criticism. These challenges relate to institutional problems, such as those faced currently with funding agencies, which will not countenance grant applications to fund six months in some community developing a research project to address largely unknown issues. It requires a reworking of current funding application arrangements to allow for the building of the necessary relations and collaborative advancement of a research proposal, as opposed to its fait accompli imposition on a community. The need to tackle such institutional barriers is a further reason why we need disciplinary involvement and ownership. In sharing the control of research, participatory methods have to be adaptable and

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iterative to respond to local demands, in stark contrast to formal milestone-tracked research projects. There is a danger that current procedures may impose rigid organization on necessarily informal participatory ways. It demands intellectual flexibility and sharpness to perceive people’s views of issues and jointly come up with a viable research project that does justice to them and is not an imposition of external intellectual standards of enquiry. In some senses it implies collaborating with people who devise their own research approach, as has happened in a few places (e.g. the Maori Kaupapa approach − Tuhiwai Smith 1999: 183−195). Participatory research focuses as much on building partnerships and sharing knowledge as it does on achieving predefined goals. It entails assisting participants in learning about research methods sympathetic to their views of the world and contributing to analysis by doing. And this poses considerable problems given current research funding structures that demand statements of outcomes before any research commences. Collaborative research may feature partnerships with a range of stakeholders, including persons from the local community, government agencies, NGOs, academic institutions and possibly the private sector. The complexities of such collaborative arrangements can be considerable and demand management expertise (Sillitoe et al. 2005). This signals a change in postgraduate training with students not only learning how to plan and undertake research projects but also working alongside senior staff on collaborative projects into their postdoctoral years, as apprentices learning the necessary management skills. Participatory research may feature multi-disciplinary and multi-experienced teams of researchers and locals, employing a range of techniques, particularly in development, further complicating management demands. There is scope to draw on strategies used to facilitate interdisciplinary work, such as openly addressing the potential for differential power relations by subscribing to the principle that all participants are equals,

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setting out to co-design research from start to finish, sharing knowledge from diverse worldviews and willingness to hear different ideas from others. A participatory team regularly reviews and sometimes revises its aims and methods during a project, responding to changes in circumstances, new knowledge, and analysis in progress. It is necessary to make arrangements that allow all participants a fair voice. This may be a formal-cum-informal management group agreed, and constituted in collaboration, with the local community, cognisant of the political realities and the need to avoid, so far as possible, any one section taking over. Such arrangements are beyond any research council blueprint, varying from one region to another, necessarily flexible and sensitive to local cultural arrangements. A formally constituted committee may be appropriate in one place but a disaster in another. In development contexts, projects sometimes establish ‘consultative groups’ to advise and support research, meeting at regular intervals and helping with dissemination of results and influencing policy. The different parties in collaborative research may differ over aims and results. Differences between NGO and university staff are illustrative. NGOs depend heavily on donor funds, with trumpeting of successes and hiding of failures widespread, for experience shows that only positive outcomes attract continuing financial support, which conflicts with academic expectations of honesty. Universities, on the other hand, pressure faculty to publish high-quality research in peer-reviewed journals to satisfy funding bodies, government-imposed research assessment exercises and win further funding, which NGOs may consider inappropriate, even exploitative, given their aims and their view of communities’ needs. On the positive side, collaboration with politically active NGOs is one way for research to have some policy impact. Donor agency demands, rather than a commitment to collaboration, gave the initial impetus to work with NGOs in development research, and many now recognize

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the benefits. Their field staff often have substantial knowledge of local issues and extensive networks, extending internationally with large NGOs, which they can call on for support. In turn, they gain from academic experience, analysis and facilities unavailable locally. NGO−academic collaboration, like any other, demands allowance and respect for cultural difference − a willingness to defer to other ways of doing things within the context of agreed tractable aims, and an appreciation of the nuances of different organizational and work arrangements − of the sort that an anthropological training hones.

CONCLUSION The history of anthropology broadly comprises three stages. In the first stage, there was no direct participation or firsthand interaction. When a few nineteenth-century scholars started to take an interest in the ways of other communities − a radical step in its time when the majority dismissed these as savage and of no civilized consequence − they conducted their enquiries from the comfort of their libraries. These armchair observers relied on reports and correspondence with colonial officers, missionaries and travellers. In the second stage, ‘we’ participated with ‘them’. Some scholars went to the field and stayed in communities, for months or years, and, so far as possible, joined in the lives of their hosts to further our understanding of humanity. This stage marked the birth of the ethnographic fieldwork tradition and dominated the twentieth century. The ranks of these participant-observers grew steadily throughout this period, bequeathing the discipline its bedrock ethnographic legacy. In the third stage, ‘they’ are increasingly participating in research. Local scholars are more and more demanding a voice in enquiries conducted in their communities, seeing ‘us’ as collaborators in jointly tackling problems that they help define. These participantcollaborators look set to play a prominent role in the twenty-first century, with the

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emergence of a truly pluralistic discipline. They are increasingly finding opportunities to influence the direction of intellectual debates, particularly with the advent of the participatory research agenda. These are epochal discipline-defining stages, unlike fashion-driven ideologies (theories) that are more often of academic interest. They bring to mind the historical periods of (1) exploration, (2) colonialism and (3) post-colonialism. Looking back, there was a certain inevitability to the changes they mark, after the Renaissance sparked off the process of globalization, with European colonial expansion around the world. The quest for intellectual independence is part of subject peoples increasingly seeking to assert self-determination. We can expect some resistance from the anthropological status quo to these changes, which mean handing over control of research and ‘knowledge production’, and challenging claims to expert status: not to mention the unsettling demands to forge new ways of working and engagements with ethnographic reality that threaten current theoretical preoccupations and interpretations. While participation addresses contemporary post-modernist concerns, its challenge to the foisting of current academic preoccupations on others is likely to deter post-theorists. When two Wola friends and I collaborated on a contribution to a volume on the millennium, we experienced such resistance. There was widespread belief in Papua New Guinea that something cataclysmic would occur on 1 January 2000. I did not believe that anything untoward would occur; I felt, as an unbeliever, inadequate to express their views, and I was uncomfortable at offering some Western interpretation. We agreed that they would write down their thoughts and we would discuss them, and I would translate and edit them without − so far as possible in any translation − changing their meaning, and also add some agreed explanatory points. A reviewer wrote: This chapter reflects surprisingly careless academic practice given the prominence of the author. . . .

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The worse sin, however, is that Sillitoe inserts his explanatory editorial/ethnographic comments in several places in the Wola texts without a break, as though they were the work of the Wola authors themselves. (It is only changes in persons and tense that signal intrusion of external editorial material.)

Fortunately for us, the volume’s editor was more open-minded and sympathetic to our tentative collaborative efforts. After reading this chapter, an editor of this volume asked if it is not contradictory and queried why participatory methods should nix standard ethnographic ones. The contradictions are inherent in currently evolving practice. The compilation of an ethnographic record requires the cooperation of culture bearers, who inevitably live and know their ways better than any anthropologist can ever do or can capture using any combination of methods and media. Such local experts trump any other understanding of their world. But anthropologists seek to locate this within a comparative frame comprising their theoretical ‘meta-discourse’, which is inevitably informed by Western intellectual concerns, albeit heavily influenced by what is learnt of other ways of being in the world. If indigenous scholars acquire the skills necessary to contextualize their knowledge ‘translocally’ and contribute to anthropological debates, this will transform their understanding, in addition possibly to changing the discipline’s contextualizing practices. The conundrum is that they become incorporated one in the other. Furthermore, anthropological understanding is heavily informed by an awareness of cultural relativity, such that a background in the discipline should help advance participatory methods, which deployed in the rapid research contexts of development are not meeting their potential. It is not a case of one nixing the other but rather of them running along in parallel and working out ways that they may better integrate their different understandings, realizing that complete integration would amount to assimilation: it is an aspect of the local versus global contradictions caught in the ‘glocal’ neologism.

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Truly collaborative research often demands more time, commitment, flexibility and resources both to initiate and manage, than lone fieldworker participant-observation research, which in its turn was considerably more demanding than letter-writing armchair-ethnographic scholarship. We no longer have the foreign researcher as free agent, entering a community to follow her own intellectual agenda, but increasingly having to do so as an equal collaborator. The collaborative approach also, contentiously, requires those accustomed to making the decisions to relinquish some control. But the intellectual rewards, at least notionally, are considerable, not to mention that this way of working is becoming politically the only one acceptable to many communities.

REFERENCES Abbot, J., Chambers, R., Dunn, C., et al. 1998 Participatory GIS: opportunity or oxymoron? PLA Notes 33, October. Chambers, R. 2001 Participatory Workshops: A sourcebook of 21 sets of ideas and activities. London: Earthscan. Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds) 2001 Participation: The new tyranny? London: Zed Books. Cullen, B. S. 2011 By the community, for the community [electronic resource]: an investigation of participatory video with Karrayyu Oromo pastoralists, Ethiopia. Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham. Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) 2008 The Authentic Dissertation: Alternative ways of knowing, research and representation. Abingdon: Routledge. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds) 2004 Participation – From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring new approaches to participation in development. London: Zed Books. Kindon, S., Pain, R. and Kesby, M. (eds) 2007 Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge. Lassiter, L. E. 2005 The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Malinowski, B. 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Michaels, E. 1991 Aboriginal content: Who’s got it, who needs it? Visual Anthropology 4 (3−4): 277−300. Orlove, B. 1993 The ethnography of maps: the cultural and social contexts of cartographic representation in Peru. Cartographica 30 (1): 29−46. Östberg, W. 1995 Land is Coming Up: The Burunge of central Tanzania and their environments. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) 2008 The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative inquiry and practice. London: Sage. Schoonmaker Freudenberger, K. 1994 Challenges in the collection and use of information on livelihood strategies and natural resource management. In I. Scoones and J. Thompson (eds), Beyond Farmer First: Rural people’s knowledge, agricultural research and extension practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, pp. 124−133. Shah, P. 1994 Participatory watershed management in India: the experience of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. In I. Scoones and J. Thompson (eds), Beyond Farmer First: Rural people’s knowledge, agricultural research and extension practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, pp. 117−124. Sillitoe, P. 2007 Anthropologists only need apply: challenges of applied anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 147−165. Sillitoe, P., Dixon, P. and Barr, J. 2005 Indigenous Knowledge Inquiries: A methodologies manual for development. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Strang, V. 2006 A happy coincidence? Symbiosis and synthesis in anthropological and indigenous knowledges, Current Anthropology 47 (6): 981−1008. Tuhiwai Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Upawansa, G. K. and Wagachchi, R. 1999 Activating all powers in Sri Lanka agriculture. In B. Haverkort and W. Hiemstra (eds), Food for Thought: Ancient visions and new experiments of rural people. London: Zed Books, pp. 105−122. Willmer, A. and Ketzis, J. 1998 Participatory gender resource mapping: a case study in a rural community in Honduras, PLA Notes October.

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3.13 Comparative Methods in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Today Andre Gingrich

Today, to an increasing extent, comparative methods are once more emerging in sociocultural anthropology – in ways that are unpretentious and rather pedestrian while also displaying a fair amount of pragmatism and at times even playfulness. Three short examples illustrate this introductory point. A comparative method is applied when an MA student (to whom I shall refer to here as Khulud) in the final section of a seminar paper summarizes her findings from the ethnographic literature on the many respectful ways in which several West African societies treat their elders – and when she then concludes by contrasting those findings with the frequently careless forms of treatment of the majority of senior citizens in many North American contexts. In fact, Khulud – who actually attended the seminar of one of my colleagues at a US Midwestern Anthropology Department – applied an elementary form of self-reflexive binary comparison as a device for ‘anthropology as cultural critique’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986). While some argue that contrasts are to be clearly distinguished from comparison, I share the alternative view that contrasting is an integral element of comparative analyses.

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In the present case, certain qualities of specific local societies ‘elsewhere’ are contrasted along comparative criteria with their counterpart features ‘here’. If carried out properly, this form of self-reflexive binary comparison indeed may help to gain some additional critical distance from a seemingly familiar setting, and to criticise and reassess it accordingly. Another set of comparative methods is put into practice when ‘Boris’, a junior scholar, in preparation for publication of a new book, revises the manuscript of his excellent PhD thesis on, say, organized crime in a small, remote post-Communist Russian town (see Schneider and Schneider 2011 for a similar context). It is certainly not unusual when his former PhD adviser, if not his publisher’s anonymous reviewers, tells the author that despite his own enthusiasm for finely grained ethnography, many potential readers might not find the details of organized crime in that particular town, per se, to be interesting enough. Adviser and publisher thus seek to encourage Boris to bring out the wider relevance of his ethnographic case. He should relate the ethnography from that small postSoviet town to other documented cases of

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organized crime explicitly in the wider region and beyond. This will put Boris in a much better position to convince his future readers of the ways in which his particular study also represents an exemplary case for a wider class of phenomena. By following this advice, Boris is applying forms of regional and distant comparison in order to highlight that wider relevance. In turn, the additional comparative effort may not only promote the author’s career and the book’s marketing but also is likely to provide a more straightforward and accessible contribution to human knowledge in this specific field of research. Thirdly, some of socio-cultural anthropology’s financially most successful grant proposals during the twenty-first century’s first decade investigate along comparative lines the diverse forms of impact of current global crises, and of the current phase of globalization. In her European Research Council project ‘Waterworlds’, for instance, Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup directs an interdisciplinary team with a core group of anthropologists in pursuit of her main research question, regarding how people in different parts of Asia, Africa, and the circumpolar regions cope with the consequences of climate change for water (Hastrup 2009). From the outset, this project therefore included strong elements of distant, as well as of shifting time/space comparison. While appreciating the diversity among and between these different local coping strategies, the project’s overall methodological design and key questions, equally importantly, allow for the identification of commonalities as well.

RENEWED INTEREST IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL COMPARISON: AN OVERVIEW OF MOTIVES AND PRACTICES In a nutshell, the three preceding examples already feature some of the main factors underlying the recent (re-)emergence of comparative methods in anthropology. Khulud’s seminar paper contrasts the usually respectful treatment of elders in some West African

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societies with the often careless behaviour towards elder citizens in many North American cases: the use of insights gained from encounters with other societies for a new assessment of the researcher’s society of residence represents perhaps the prototype of anthropological comparison. As Laura Nader once argued (1994), most anthropologists (at least implicitly) tend to compare in this elementary binary manner: opposing ‘their’ society and culture to ‘ours’, however, always entails the danger of arriving at conclusions that may be premature at best. An uncritical usage of binary comparison sometimes merely serves to corroborate preconceived stereotypes about ‘others’ (or, for that matter, about ‘us’). Yet if employed in a nonsimplistic, critical, and self-reflexive manner, i.e. by avoiding any negative (or positive) stereotyping, binary comparison may in fact yield interesting preliminary insights. Thus, one source for the renewed interest in comparative methods in anthropology can be identified in the continuing need for critical analysis and awareness about the world and the societies we inhabit, and in the requirement to consider alternatives. The second source is somewhat more profane. To a certain extent, the growing demand felt by many anthropologists for the more explicit highlighting of the wider relevance of their particular ethnographic examples translates changing market pressures. In an increasingly media-informed and mediasaturated world, book-length analyses of very particular cases per se attract less attention and sell worse than some of their ‘exotic’ predecessors did in previous times. Whether the thematic monograph in question is based on single-sited or, as in Boris’ manuscript, on multi-sited ethnography matters little in this regard: readers still would have to engage primarily with organized crime in a relatively obscure post-Soviet provincial setting, and many potential readers might not find that theme exciting enough in its own right. Publishers and anonymous reviewers who anticipate this discrepancy do of course respond to market mechanisms. Yet, in

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another sense, discussing a particular case not only in its own right but also as an example of a larger phenomenon is and should be routine research practice that might be expected of anthropologists. In order to carry that out in a proper way, comparison is indispensable but in ways that go beyond mere ‘butterfly collecting’, as Edmund Leach quite rightly pointed out long ago. The documentation and systematic analysis of colourful particularities is indispensable, but it is not enough as a research agenda. In fact, an academic discipline permanently confining itself to nothing but the documentation of particularities would soon lose its entitlement to exist as a discipline in its own right. Although still widespread among many senior anthropologists, the reluctance to compare is a legacy that is losing the historical justification it once had for a while, and is fading out. During the past century’s final quarter, a majority of anthropologists in that generation became quite wary of the many abuses and dead-end streets of comparison in the service of the many grand theories and universalist ‘meta-narratives’ that had prevailed until then. As a result, a substantial number of anthropologists – especially those following a combination of postmodern philosophy with cultural relativism in North America and elsewhere – became relatively sceptical about comparison and confined themselves largely to ethnographic analyses: they felt that comparison would always necessarily go together with the need to corroborate one or the other grand theory and its universal claims. That generation’s scepticism had several positive effects, such as the subsequent profound reassessment of ethnographic methods, and, likewise, it also led to a basic disentanglement of grand theory from comparative methods. For these reasons, today, it is again self-evident that one may well pursue comparative methods without having in mind any universal (e.g. structural, evolutionary, or other) grand theory, although some theoretically informed problem always will have to guide the pursuit of academic comparison. When publishers, advisers,

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reviewers, and the media therefore encourage Boris to please highlight the wider significance of his particular ethnography, then this should not be misinterpreted in a reductionist manner as sinister seduction by evil market forces. Instead, it can be seen as a healthy reminder – sometimes mediated by the market, and sometimes not – that the time has come to also address larger issues through improved ethnographies of the particular by means of new forms of comparison. When socio-cultural anthropologists are encouraged to highlight the wider relevance of their ethnographic examples by comparative means, they are invited to reintegrate our field in this regard into standard academic procedures and routine research practices, on the basis of our improved awareness and with refined skills and tools. The historical moment when it was appropriate to shy away from any comparison whatsoever is over, and if as an entire field we were to try to preserve that moment artificially we would put our discipline at risk. ‘Not giving the game away’, as Marilyn Strathern aptly phrased it (2002), indeed is the task we face with regard to comparison in anthropology. Consequently, Boris is very well advised to use elements of regional comparison as a more established comparative procedure for assessing other cases in the same wider area against his own analysis, and to combine that with the more innovative technique of distant comparison for his additional consideration of organized crime during the same period, but in other parts of the world. ‘Anthropology as cultural critique’ and ‘highlighting the wider relevance of particular ethnographies’ have been identified as two main sources and applied fields for anthropology’s renewed interest in comparison. Those transnational and globalizing forces that define our world at present lend both sources much additional weight. In their own right, these forces represent the third source, and the single most important element among the variety of causal factors that have put comparison back on socio-cultural anthropology’s methodological agenda.

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More and more people around the world are facing similar challenges and transformations albeit to different degrees, at different speeds, and in different forms. It therefore has become an increasingly urgent research requirement to compare the diverse and similar ways in which they locally interact with those transnational and global challenges and transformations. Whether or not this represented a less pressing necessity for anthropology during the 1980s or 1990s may be open to debate. It certainly can no longer be contested during the twenty-first century’s first quarter, however. This is the very transparent and elementary rationale underlying Kirsten Hastrup’s tremendous grant success. I have already pointed out that the project’s main empirical sites are located on at least three different continents. This indicates not only an interesting intersection between larger, comparatively-oriented projects such as ‘Waterworlds’, and one possible dimension in the ethnographic strategy of multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1995, see also Janet Carsten in this volume). Perhaps more importantly, however, the project’s design also indicates a potentially increasing relevance for distant comparison in the near future. In their ecological, economic, and in most other of their main dimensions, globalization and global crises do imply hegemonic tendencies of time/space compression (Harvey 1990), by which temporal and spatial distances tend to lose some of their significance. The world’s growing interconnectedness therefore makes it more relevant than before to compare the living conditions of humans who until recently were thought to be separated by large temporal and spatial distances, but who are no longer so strictly separated from each other in the one global ecumene that we inhabit.

COMMON ELEMENTS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL COMPARISON The three introductory examples and their discussion have already briefly demonstrated

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a few of the main characteristic elements and features of anthropological comparison today, and they have also provided an implicit and cursory first overview of the pluralism and the diversity in the field’s current methodological inventory. These two aspects – common characteristics and pluralist diversity – will now be elaborated further. Characteristic common elements of anthropological comparison will be discussed in the present section, in order to subsequently explore some of the diverse comparative procedures in a more detailed manner in the final section. In a way, the argument will thus proceed from the exemplary introductory cases towards a loose and flexible form of systematization. From the outset, comparison is first of all an elementary cognitive activity by which the human mind identifies similarities and differences. In its basic modus operandi, comparison therefore is closely related to other cognitive phenomena such as analogy, recognition, inference, intuition, memory, abstraction, conceptualization, or classification (see Christina Toren in this volume). Depending on the theme or experience under scrutiny, one of comparison’s main two component elements at times may become much more significant than the other. Yet, essentially, comparison always entails at least some elements of both: it thus can be defined as the mental activity of simultaneously identifying similarities as well as differences. If anthropological comparison is understood as a highly specialized version of the human mind’s general comparative potential, we can see that both share the same salient feature. Anthropological comparison always examines and analyses similarities and differences among humans’ interactions with each other and with the world they inhabit. At the same time, comparison in one way or another also represents a fundamental methodological ingredient in almost every academic sub-field of the humanities, the social sciences, life sciences, and physical sciences. In that wider academic sense, comparative research is subjected to the prevailing – and frequently contested – general

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principles, standards, and procedures of research at large. They include, in the present context, several key elements. One key element is the priority for formulating a valid central research question, and its defining role for the subsequent choice of empirical and analytical methods. Another key element in this context is epistemological, and concerns a bundle of intersubjective necessities such as coherence, transparency, plausibility, and a more or less systematic, more or less up-to-date form of communicating the results to the relevant academic community (Flick, Kardorff, and Steinke 2004). Since anthropological comparison also has to be understood as a specialized form of academic comparison at large, it shares these general features – in particular those of the defining role of the central research question, and the relevance of intersubjective necessities. Whereas the elements discussed so far are common features shared with many other forms of comparison, the following points are more specific to anthropological comparison and only a few additional neighbouring academic disciplines. Similar to the position occupied by the whole field of socio-cultural anthropology, anthropological comparison is situated within the wider research landscapes at the intersection primarily between the social sciences and the humanities; a few additional zones also intersect with the life sciences, such as cognitive anthropology and medical anthropology. Based on its unique position in the wider interdisciplinary realm, one of its main markers of distinction is the fact that anthropological comparison as a methodological procedure, often to a very large extent, or even entirely, depends on the successful pursuit of other empirical procedures – first and foremost, ethnographic fieldwork. As with socio-cultural anthropology as a whole, anthropological comparison could not exist without such clear priority given to ethnographic fieldwork. In this substantial sense, anthropological comparison relies on the same empirical foundations that define the whole field, but it usually does not represent

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a quasi-independent empirical methodological strategy. Anthropological comparison therefore is a largely dependent methodology that fully recognizes and acknowledges the priority of ethnographic fieldwork and other primary empirical procedures. From such a perspective it also becomes evident that anthropological comparison always engages with the question of what is unique in a particular case, what of it represents wider general or even universal phenomena, and how one can be epistemologically ‘translated’ into the other (Niranjana 1992). The priority of ethnographic fieldwork over anthropological comparison may be played out in direct ways, if the researcher primarily compares by means of his/her own fieldwork and its results, or in an indirect manner, i.e. if other researchers’ fieldwork results are used for comparison. For writing up her seminar paper at her US Midwestern Anthropology Department, Khulud of course could not carry out any fieldwork in West Africa or North America herself. In this case, the priority of ethnographic fieldwork over comparison was indirect in two ways: some of it had been carried out some time ago by others in West Africa, and some in North America, and Khulud could – and had to – rely on it critically in order to compare the results a posteriori through her cultural critique. Boris could rely on his own fieldwork, but he also felt motivated to compare that case study a posteriori with evidence he afterwards chose from the published literature, i.e. that had been researched by others. By contrast to these first two examples, Kirsten Hastrup’s project ‘Waterworlds’ represents an a priori combination of plans for ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological comparison within one coherent research process. Such an a priori comparative orientation allows the overall comparative research question (‘How do people in various sites of this globe cope with current and foreseeable future effects of climate change upon their access to water?’) from the outset to have a direct impact on the pursuit of ethnographic fieldwork. Still, no final comparative

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synthesis would be possible in order to answer the central research question if ethnographic fieldwork yielded insufficient or unsatisfactory results. In this a priori combination of anthropological comparison with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the latter therefore again takes priority over the former – in very direct ways in fact, since the main bulk of ethnographic work for the final comparative analysis is done by the team’s researchers themselves. For the sake of clarity, it should be added that each of these two sequential forms of anthropological comparison has its advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the research question and on the available means to pursue it, either one may be more appropriate than the other in a given context. As in Hastrup’s project, an a priori sequence of combining ethnographic fieldwork with anthropological comparison requires much more intensive preparation and fine-tuning from the outset, and, if carried out successfully, this will provide more fertile and satisfying results for the final comparative analysis. Possible disadvantages in such a priori combinations may occur whenever the comparative goals impose limitations and challenges upon the actual pursuit of fieldwork that are too rigid. Another disadvantage lies in the fact that most of these a priori combinations unavoidably tend to be timeconsuming, or budget-intensive, or both: it seems that in general, a priori combinations thus are better suited for larger individual or group projects than for smaller ones. By contrast, the a posteriori combination of ethnographic fieldwork results with comparative analysis is defined by the fact that comparison is carried out at a later point, after the conclusion of fieldwork. This has the advantage that the earlier phases of preparing and carrying out ethnographic fieldwork do not yet require the additional investment of designing them in ways that would optimize the final comparative analysis. While these earlier phases thus remain free from that additional burden, the last phase at times might become more difficult

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than expected, as in Boris’ text. He had to carry out quite an intensive search of additional literature, in order to find and analyse appropriate comparable examples that could highlight the wider relevance of his results. At times, such an a posteriori search for comparable cases might not yield such positive results as in Boris’ case, and it might even fail altogether. That relatively high risk of total failure is the biggest disadvantage in an a posteriori sequence of combining fieldwork with comparison. The risk is even greater if regional and/or distant comparison is required, because for these forms of comparison a broader range of cases is needed. For the same reason, binary self-reflexive comparison, as pursued in Khulud’s paper, entails a smaller risk of failure, because it requires merely one additional set of comparable cases. At the end of this brief discussion of ethnographic fieldwork’s profound relevance for anthropological comparative strategies, and of the ways these two may be sequentially combined, a self-evident point should be mentioned at least in passing. The a priori and a posteriori forms of sequentially combining ethnographic fieldwork and comparison relate to the results of fieldwork, and to how those results may be combined with anthropological comparison. In a more basic way, every ethnographic fieldworker also compares during the empirical phases of fieldwork: whenever we repeatedly observe similar standard situations in ritual or in everyday behaviour, until we are sure about the kind of more general statement we are entitled to make on that basis, we have been comparing. In this sense, intrinsic empirical comparison is of course part and parcel of any fieldwork procedure itself. (If we add the thought that comparison as a general cognitive or epistemological process of course enters the research process from the outset, then some form of comparison in fact is intrinsic to any anthropological investigation.) I now address those less frequent instances in which fieldwork has no primary relevance

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for comparative analysis. For the present purpose, I have to confine myself in this regard to a few short remarks on those occasions when anthropological comparison may turn out to be useful, even if it is neither directly nor indirectly based in any immediate manner on ethnographic fieldwork. These occasions may at times arise in connection with experiments in ‘comparison at a distance’ (see next section), but most other cases of this kind belong to the realm of historical anthropology (see Tristan Platt and Jane Cowan’s chapters in this volume). Several works may be referred to as examples in this latter context, such as Jean and John Comaroff’s historical analysis of Christian missions and colonialism in their South African nineteenth- and twentieth-century dimensions (1991/1997), Marshall Sahlins’ contrast of historical warfare in Polynesia with Thucydides’ account of warfare in European antiquity (2004), or Eric Wolf’s comparative outline of the encounters of emerging mercantilism and capitalism with the world’s indigenous people (1982). One of my own analytical exercises, in which I compared the effects of the processes of decay and collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in 1918 with those of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Gingrich 2002), belongs to the same basic genre. The empirical material in most of these comparative studies in historical anthropology comprises published or unpublished historical texts and historians’ analyses of them: for the anthropologists who scrutinize those texts with this field’s concepts and comparative tools, the comparative method attains independent significance. Only in these very special cases, then, does anthropological comparison switch its position from a fieldwork-dependent to a relatively independent methodological strategy in anthropology. It should be emphasised that all these more recent examples differ from much earlier anthropological traditions such as diffusionism and evolutionism. Those paradigms had claimed to explain human history in its grand movements. By contrast, the more recent

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works quoted here deal with very specific phases of regional histories – including regions in which the authors themselves had mastered some previous ethnographic fieldwork – to then analyse and compare these regional histories by critically applying anthropological concepts that historians had neglected. This is precisely the point that at times makes anthropological comparison extremely useful for historical analyses, even when to a large extent it cannot be directly based on fieldwork results. Thus, whenever anthropological concepts are available that are richly informed by ethnographic evidence and theoretical debate, they may well be considered for critical comparative application along specific historical timelines. If the historical records are rich enough, and if application of the relevant anthropological concepts promises to explain those processes in new and more profound ways, then I for my part would argue that historical comparison without fieldwork may be a justified and worthwhile endeavour for anthropologists. This ends my brief remark on one important exception to the general rule of ethnographic fieldwork’s primary relevance for anthropological comparison, to which we may now return. The specific positioning of anthropological comparison as a dependent methodological strategy that is based on insights gained from ethnographic fieldwork has an additional important consequence for the main common features of anthropological comparison. Precisely because of ethnographic fieldwork’s central role, anthropological comparison today in most cases is of a qualitative kind. This does not exclude minor or even major quantitative sub-elements in anthropological comparison, but they are usually of merely secondary importance. Quantitative procedures once played a very important part in anthropological comparison, and at times the term was almost synonymous with a specific record of comparative codification which became known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), strongly associated with the name and work

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of G.P. Murdock as its founding father. Originally sponsored by US government institutions as part of anthropology’s contribution to the Second World War effort (Price 2008), these quantitative comparative procedures have lost much of their former significance within anthropology since the 1970s. That decline primarily was related to disappointing results, and to serious methodological reservations about the empirical basis and the procedures of the HRAF codification. It should be added that the HRAF continue to operate, with partially improved and updated features – but the research communities interacting with them today are small minorities inside and outside of anthropology. It seems doubtful whether this or any other quantitative comparative procedure will attain anything other than a peripheral position in anthropology’s near future. The strong and, as I have tried to show, well-founded reluctance to give quantitative comparative procedures more weight in social anthropology has an additional important consequence: because anthropological comparison primarily relies on qualitative procedures, the numbers of examples included in any comparison today are usually much smaller than in the quantitative modes of comparison prevailing in sociology, political sciences, economics, and others among the larger social sciences. As for comparison, the relation between quantitative and qualitative procedures in sociology tends to be the inverse of that in social anthropology, where the number of compared (sets of) cases usually remains relatively low, i.e. closer to the minimum of two than to a maximum of one or two dozen. The status of anthropological comparison as a primarily fieldwork-based methodological strategy with a qualitative orientation, and with strong limitations upon its quantitative range, has important return effects for epistemological and theoretical approaches in anthropology. The choice of appropriate methods always has to be informed by the central research question. In most cases, that choice is simultaneously guided by theory, as

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well as being oriented towards the problem or puzzle to be solved. Yet any methodological strategy has its own procedural properties, which make a given method, or bundle of methods, in a specific context more appropriate than another for the purpose of solving the problem. In this sense, it has become apparent that because of its quantitative limitations anthropological comparison offers merely some modest utility and value with regard to far-reaching theories with universal claims of relevance. This is less problematic in strictly deductive constellations of universal theorizing, but comes more fully into play as an obstacle in inductive settings and in those transcending both, also known by the epistemological term ‘abduction’ (Reichertz 2004). In anthropology’s history, Claude LéviStrauss’s magnum opus Mythologiques (1969–1981) represents one of the most outstanding attempts to deductively apply and corroborate a predefined universal theory by means of a specific form of anthropological comparison. Those four volumes compared, decoded, and interpreted a wide range of indigenous myths in the Americas, which was guided and inspired by the wider theoretical project of further elaborating a universal theory of the human mind as being organized by, and around, binary oppositions. This is of course not the place to discuss the merits and shortcomings of Lévi-Strauss’s important contributions to research and knowledge – but most anthropologists will agree that since the publication of his main works, cognitive anthropology has advanced well beyond his universal structural theory of the human mind. Mythologiques merely serves us here as a well-known example to make a methodological point: in a deductive manner, it still may formally work to corroborate up to a certain extent, and to subsequently elaborate a universal anthropological theory by means of a far-reaching qualitative anthropological comparison which still has its clearly defined limits, i.e. regional limits in this case. Since a universal theory hardly can ever be ‘proven’

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at once, such a deductive choice of anthropological comparison up to a point is formally possible in such a context with a number of qualifications. In inductive but also in abductive settings, however, the quantitative limitations of anthropological comparison hardly permit the elaboration of any universal theory in the actual sense of this term. Ethnography’s rich empirical saturation with a smaller number of comparative cases allows for much more detail to be compared among them, but this comes along with clear limits regarding the possibility of inferring from there towards universals. What anthropologists have to offer instead, on the level of inductively, or alternatively, of abductively, pursued anthropological comparison, are forms of cultural critique as already mentioned, as well as general statements and insights about clearly specified contexts, and middle-range theories (Holy 1987; i.e. with ranges of validity that are limited by topic, time frame, or region). Although not yet completed at the time of writing, Hastrup’s ‘Waterworlds’ project seems to be moving in the direction of formulating middle-range theories of a qualitatively based, empirically saturated new type that addresses a globally relevant topic through references to specified sets of different cases. By contrast, other works represent the alternative of ‘specified general insights and statements’. In such an approach, all available evidence for a predefined set of ethnographic cases is systematically compared, which then allows general elaborations about precisely these cases. An excellent example is Ernst Halbmayer’s work on the Carib-speaking Native American communities (2010). Based on his fieldwork among the Yukpa in Venezuela, Halbmayer carried out systematic comparisons with eight other Carib-speaking societies to demonstrate in which ways prevailing cosmologies are shared and not shared among them, and in relation to other native groups on the continent. Specified general insights of this type then represent a solid basis for contributions

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to wider, ongoing theoretical debates in our field. While theorizing about universals has become less frequent in socio-cultural anthropology, its comparative methodological inventory nevertheless represents an attractive methodological tool for anybody in this field pursuing wider theoretical or problemoriented interests. For the discipline’s cultural critique, for the formulation of specified general insights, and for anthropology’s middle-range theorizing, anthropological comparison is indispensable.

A NEW DIVERSITY OF COMPARATIVE METHODS IN ANTHROPOLOGY After the first section’s discussion of examples and the partially epistemological outline of anthropological comparison’s common features in the preceding one, the final section will now take a more pragmatic and hands-on turn in exploring comparison’s new diversity in our field. Developing a Comparative Project The basic common features of anthropological comparison as discussed in the previous section have all already had a profound pragmatic significance for the very first phase of developing a minor or major comparative research project. In any such case, the central research question and its formulation represent the decisive first key: whether that key is charged with a highly theoretical orientation, or rather with a very empirical and pragmatic agenda, or with a combination of both, as in most cases, all fieldwork is likely to begin from a problem to be explored, and that problem already exists as both an empirically and theoretically worked subject. Depending on the available budgets of time, effort, and resources, one might, during such a project’s early phase of development, then contemplate at least the theoretical alternatives regarding how that first key would work if it were to be employed either in no

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comparative manner at all, or in what could perhaps become an a posteriori endeavour at a later stage, or, rather, in an a priori manner straight away. For this first main decision, two aspects should also be assessed against each other. The first aspect lies in the fact that comparison neither represents l’art pour l’art, i.e. it is not a laudable or pleasant activity in its own right, nor is it a straitjacket or some sort of moral obligation. It should only be pursued either in a serious or in a more playful way if this includes the potential to gain additional insights that cannot be expected from the results of fieldwork alone. Against this first factor of early caution and scepticism the second factor of personal curiosity and professional interest has to be assessed. That second factor also includes the general sources of currently rising attention in anthropology’s comparative agenda as discussed in the first section, according to how they combine with the central research question at hand. In addition, different local and national methodological training traditions might provide additional inspiration in either direction. For instance, it might perhaps need a somewhat more engaged theoretical argument in some US contexts than in others to convince one’s colleagues and advisers that it is worth at least trying out comparison in a given context, while it might turn out to be a more self-evident and playful endeavour to do just the same in many academic environments of the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, Australia, India, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. Practical and Empirical Design In case the early development phase tends to gravitate towards a pro comparison decision, the question of how to design that comparative endeavour intellectually has to take over. This is in fact a very crucial phase, when all those factors have to be considered in their mutual interdependence and finetuning – and repeatedly so in each subsequent phase – which a linear text now obliges me to discuss one after the other. The phase

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of the practical and empirical design of a comparative anthropological project is perhaps the most difficult between a project’s start and its conclusion in publication. It thus requires ample attention, and one should also be prepared to experience frustration and failure. There are five key design factors to be considered in their respective interdependence, as well as against the option of choices discussed in the final subsection (e.g. whether to choose binary or regional or distant comparison, etc.). There is no need to bore one’s readers with the actual details in a published text, where they may well be kept implicit or confined to a few paragraphs in a chapter on methodology. Yet, for the comparative research process itself, it is necessary to be explicitly aware of these five design factors – regardless of whether an individual researcher or a smaller or larger team are involved, these factors have to be developed and adapted to the respective a priori or a posteriori context of fieldwork, or of historical comparison without fieldwork. 1 Choice of compared units. An older requirement can no longer be upheld today that once demanded a maximum independence among the units to be compared. That requirement from the outset was formulated as too close an analogy to the model of experiments in the natural and life sciences. In times of increasing global interconnectedness, that requirement loses much of its foundation. Still, if the units to be compared actually do exert some obvious influences upon each other (e.g. if you compare aspects of popular culture in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan), then this should be explicitly addressed. Another misleading requirement was less academic but rather folkloristic. It argued that ‘one should not compare apples and oranges’. It is true that for some research questions it is more useful to compare ‘apples with apples’ if you are interested in, say, soil fertility, tree quality, and the like. It is also true that one can hardly imagine any reasonable research question that would make sense of comparing apples with plaster, or with coffee shops. Yet, comparing apples with oranges may make a great deal of sense if your research questions deal with annual cycles of fruit reproduction, or with their nutritional value for that matter. If nobody had ever compared squirrels and dolphins, we would not have realized that both are mammals: the

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question of comparability thus cannot be solved a priori, but depends on the empirical side of a problem, and on how the research question is formulated – particularly so since we are always engaging with human lives in anthropological comparison. 2 Controlled comparison. After 1945, the notion of controlled comparison in anthropology was first argued for by Fred Eggan (1954). This represented an attempt to reconcile the particularist orientations in US cultural anthropology following the legacy of Franz Boas and his students with those rather middle-range orientations of British social anthropology that mostly followed A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and to unite both traditions against the universalist claims of G.P. Murdock’s HRAF comparison. In that sense the notion of controlled comparison was directed against statistical random procedures of choosing examples for comparison. Instead, it argued for selective, qualitative priorities in anthropological comparison and in its choice of examples for comparison. That first sense of the term today has become a common feature of almost all forms of anthropological comparison. An important second meaning of the term refers to the actual criteria of comparison and to which empirical properties within the chosen cases they relate, as discussed in the next paragraph. 3 Criteria of comparison. This crucial third design factor requires analytical activities at two levels and will result in the identification, first, of the comparative criterion marker(s) and, second, of the empirical criterion feature(s). The further specification of both forms of criteria always requires repeated adjustments that may well continue into advanced phases of the final analysis. Comparative criterion markers specify the crosscutting sub-topics that you want to assess and compare in similar ways among all the examples selected for a comparative analysis. Khulud, for instance, raised a comparative research question about social interactions with senior people in West Africa and in North America. To pursue that question, she employed loosely defined (and debatable) comparative criterion markers such as older people’s frequency of weekly conversations with family members, residence proximity in relation to one’s family, and advice-seeking mechanisms, which could be applied to most of her cases while simultaneously serving her research interest in cultural critique. The empirical criterion features designate the fieldworkbased evidence for the ways in which a particular case, or set of cases, is configured in that specific topical realm. The comparative analysis may then proceed either with a more narrative, or with a more formalized logic. This might be facilitated through the introduction of defined quantifiers

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and/or qualifiers such as ‘high/medium/low’ for ‘frequency of weekly conversations’, or ‘in the same neighbourhood/in a different neighbourhood or settlement’ for ‘residence proximity in relation to one’s family’. 4 Discreteness of compared units. Theoretical approaches in anthropology with a strong background in systemic analysis and/or in life sciences have always insisted on the need to define as precisely as possible the limits of the units to be compared. For my part, I tend to regard this matter as primarily influenced by theoretical preferences and to legitimate theoretical pluralism in anthropology – but not as an a priori methodological necessity. Their inter- and transdisciplinary engagements require utmost precision in this regard from some anthropologists, but a correspondingly different engagement does not demand the same from others among us (nor could it be answered to for that matter). In fact, an era of increasingly rapid transformations including deterritorialization, mobility, diaspora contexts, and related phenomena makes it highly advisable for considerable segments in global anthropology to actually insist on the legitimacy and necessity of working with processual and loosely defined boundaries for the sets of cases they plan to compare. In sum, addressing the limits of those clusters or units to be compared is indeed important – but whether this is done in a very loose or in a very precise manner is not a principled a priori methodological requirement, but dependent on those theoretical orientations that inform the central research question. 5 Scale of comparison. This fifth key design factor includes important pragmatic consequences of a ‘weakest link’ type, since scale always has to do with abstraction (Wergin and Neveling 2010). If a comparative analysis is focused on a small group of cases, each of which can be analysed to an equal extent and in an equally detailed manner, then the fifth design factor requires the transformed representation of all these cases according to a correspondingly comparable scale. If, on the other hand, a comparative analysis discusses one main set of ethnographic examples in much more detail than all the other cases that are to be compared with the first one, and with each other, then that remaining group of other cases has to be transferred into one scale that allows their joint representation. In both alternatives, those cases as available on the record with the highest level of abstraction either predetermine to an extent the overall scale of comparison, or they have to be left out from the analysis because they are too highly abstracted. The publication of ethnographic fieldwork already represents a selective abstraction from real-world experience, and comparison represents an additional level

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of abstraction from that, which always includes important elements of qualitative translation from one level to the other. The quantitative limitations and the qualitative priorities in anthropological comparison thus require that the question of scale be handled with utmost care, and that the cases chosen for comparison be translated with transparency and pragmatic empathy into the required scale (Gingrich and Banks 2006).

Choice Matters The example of Boris’s book publication has shown that the actual choice of one specific method of anthropological comparison may come along during the very last phase of analysis and writing, and that there is nothing wrong with that. The following list neither represents a complete inventory, nor a menu to choose from. This is merely an overview of some among those comparative methods in anthropology that have been most frequently applied in recent years. I confine myself to a shorthand description of key characteristics, and to references for appropriate examples. 1 Binary comparison: in a critical and self-reflexive way, this may be employed for cultural critique as in Khulud’s case, or as a more sober and distanced contrast of one analysis against the other, as in Margaret Lock’s study of menopausal experience in Japan and in her resident country Canada (Lock 1995). This procedure requires even more attention to the avoidance of stereotypes than comparison normally does. 2 Regional comparison: perhaps the most conventional, and most widely respected, comparative method among the older national traditions in anthropology, as in US cultural anthropology’s area studies, or in British social anthropology’s classic African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940), or in French structuralism’s key work Mythologiques (LéviStrauss 1969–1981). The more contemporary, transnational usages address in new forms: political power in Melanesia (Godelier and Strathern 1991), neo-nationalism in Western Europe (Gingrich and Banks 2006), and many other topics. Simultaneously, social scientists, historians, and anthropologists in the Global South strive to decentre their work from North American and West European hegemonies, by building up and reinforcing mutual cooperation among themselves. This indicates a new, rising

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relevance for regional comparison in anthropology’s fields of intersection with postcolonial studies (Chen 2010: 227). In regional comparison the temporal level of comparison should remain controlled and transparent if not equal. 3 Temporal comparison: already discussed in the third section of this chapter as one possible exception to the priority of fieldwork. The emphasis on specific historical sequences implies that in temporal comparison, the regional level should remain transparent and controlled if not identical. 4 Distant comparison: from the outset, this method presupposes different regional and temporal contexts, balanced by a very elaborate and precise central research question. In a way, the main dimensions in the work of Mary Douglas represent an important cornerstone of this methodological choice (1966, 1970), insofar as her wider theory of group and grid as two central dimensions (or criteria) for comparing human societies was originally based on her comparative analyses of values and law among the Lele, in the Old Testament, and in European societies. More recent and very good examples of distant comparison are offered in Ulf Hannerz’s Cultural Complexity (1992) through his examination of cultural creativity in Calcutta (in the early nineteenth century), Vienna (late nineteenth and early twentieth century), and Los Angeles (1950s and 1960s), or by Thomas Fillitz for the anthropology of art (2002). An unorthodox specialized version of this approach is ‘Comparison at a distance’, as recently proposed by Antonius Robben (2010) for times and cases such as Iraq in the years since Saddam Hussein’s fall. 5 Shifting time/space comparison: this challenging method accompanies phenomena across various periods and sites. Pioneer works in this realm were, to an extent, Eric Wolf’s analysis of the spread of capitalism into indigenous worlds (1982), or Sidney Mintz’s research on sugar (1985). More recent exemplary studies analyse diasporic communities and their histories (Manger 2010), or strategies of coping with the consequences of global crises, such as Kirsten Hastrup’s ‘Waterworlds’ project.

As a concluding remark, a reminder is apposite. Communicating the results of comparative analyses is important. Others may benefit from learning about the reasons for failure. If the comparative analysis worked out successfully, then the results deserve an elaboration that responds to the original research question: a contribution to pragmatically solving a puzzle, and/or a middle-range

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theory, a specified general insight, or an anthropological critique.

REFERENCES Chen, Kuang-Hsing (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff (1991/1997) Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. I: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol. II: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary (1970) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie & Rockliff (Cresset). Eggan, Fred (1954) ‘Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison’, American Anthropologist 56: 743–763. Fillitz, Thomas (2002) ‘The Notion of Art: From Regional to Distant Comparison’, in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox (eds), Anthropology, by Comparison. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 204–224. Flick, Uwe, Ernst V. Kardorff, and Ines Steinke (eds) (2004) A Companion to Qualitative Research. London, Thousand Oaks,CA, and New Delhi: Sage. Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward (eds) (1940) African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press. Gingrich, Andre (2002) ‘When Ethnic Majorities are Dethroned: Towards a Methodology of Self-reflexive, Controlled Macro-comparison’, in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox (eds), Anthropology, by Comparison. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 225–248. Gingrich, Andre and Marcus Banks (eds) (2006) Neonationalism in Western Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Godelier, Maurice and Marilyn Strathern (eds) (1991) Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halbmayer, Ernst (2010) Kosmos und Kommunikation: Weltkonzeptionen in der südamerikanischen Sprachfamilie der Cariben. 2 Vols. Vienna: facultas. wuv. Hannerz, Ulf (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hastrup, Kirsten (ed.) (2009) The Question of Resilience: Social Responses to Climate Change. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Holy, Ladislav (ed.) (1987) Comparative Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Blackwell. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969–1981) Mytholoqiques I–IV. Vol. I: The Raw and the Cooked, 1969. Vol. II: From Honey to Ashes, 1971. Vol. III: The Origin of Table Manners, 1978, London: J. Cape. Vol . IV: The Naked Man, 1981, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Lock, Margaret (1995) Encounters with Ageing: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Manger, Leif (2010) The Hadrami Diaspora: CommunityBuilding on the Indian Ocean Rim. Oxford: Berghahn. Marcus, George (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer (eds) (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mintz, Sidney W. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Nader, Laura (1994) ‘Comparative Consciousness’, in Robert Borofsky (ed.), Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, pp. 84–94. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Price, David H. (2008) Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Reichertz, Jo (2004) ‘Abduction, Deduction and Induction in Qualitative Research’, in Uwe Flick, Ernst v. Kardorff, and Ines Steinke, Ines (eds), A Companion to Qualitative Research. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage, pp. 159–165. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. (ed.) (2010) Iraq from a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us about the War. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Sahlins, Marshall D. (2004) Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, Jane and Peter Schneider (2011) ‘Organisierte Kriminalität’, in Fernand Kreff, Eva-Maria Knoll, and Andre Gingrich (eds), Lexikon zur Globalisierung. Bielefeld: Transkript (i. pr.). Strathern, Marilyn (2002) ‘Foreword: Not Giving the Game Away’, in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox

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(eds), Anthropology, by Comparison. New York and London: Routledge, pp. xiii–xvii. Wergin, Carsten and Patrick Neveling (2010) ‘Tourism and Scale’, Anthropology News 51/8: 3−4. Wolf, Eric R. (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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PART 4

FUTURES Edited by Trevor H. J. Marchand

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Introduction − Anthropologies to Come Trevor H. J. Marchand

The other three parts of this Handbook focus in turn on: anthropology’s interfaces with other disciplines, its diverse regional and geographic foci, and its dynamic repertoire of methods responsive to an ever-changing field. Part 4 is about prognosis. Issues of interface, site and method are resumed in these chapters, but with eyes fixed on the future. Authors were invited to speculate upon possible trajectories in their subject areas so as to contribute provocative essays that signpost emerging topics of interest and areas of specialization in our discipline. Some of these have already begun to take shape, and others are only spectral forms of possible social anthropologies yet to come in the twenty-first century. Discussion among anthropologists about the ‘future’ may elicit either cautious circumspection about the discipline’s long-term viability or optimistic musing upon new horizons of research and discovery; and more often than not it stimulates a dialectical exchange between both predilections. Decades of banter between doom and hope has challenged the nature and purpose of social and cultural anthropology, productively forcing practitioners to keep in step with a changing world by imagining new positions and possibilities proactively. An historic example serves to

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illustrate the perseverance of this dynamic. In a provocative communication to the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1942, the outspoken Right Honourable Lord Raglan (later the RAI President) warned the community that it was on the wrong track for building a science of human culture: ‘The collection of facts about savages … has come to be regarded as an end in itself. As savage cultures die out, so will social anthropology itself die out, unless it adopts a different outlook’ (Somerset 1943: 19). A flurry of rebuttals was published in Man, including one from Lucy Mair, who asserted that social anthropology’s emphasis ‘is not on the disappearing untouched primitive culture, but on the process of change that is now going on – a subject as fertile for the study of human society in general as it is inexhaustible’ (1943: 63, my emphases). Mair’s prudent recognition of change and the inexhaustible potential it would supply were squarely reinforced by Raymond Firth. Firth argued that social anthropology not only studies social process but also is a product of it, and hence ‘it has changed its material and developed its methods as world relationships have changed and developed.’ Going further, he declared that, ‘In the future it may do so even more, and may probably be expected to enlarge its scheme of values in so

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doing’ (1944: 20). In Firth’s view, future study of the world’s changing cultures demanded greater collaboration with the other social sciences and, notably, with a corps of expertly trained anthropologists coming from those very regions under examination (ibid.). He also advocated the need to bring anthropology to the public, thereby making it relevant to present-day problems (op. cit.: 22). Interdisciplinarity, global training of anthropologists, and the greater visibility and wider relevance of the discipline have remained elementary building blocks in our individual and collective (re-)imaginings of the discipline’s possible futures. To these one might add, as a minimum, an ongoing calibration of theory with practice, critical engagement with ethical guidelines and ethnographic representation, and dynamic reconceptualization of field and method, all of which are addressed in varying measure in the following chapters. Jonathan Spencer rightly noted that the particular constellation and prioritization of concerns that distinguish any era in our disciplinary history are bound to be influenced by the ‘political, social, and institutional context within which that history [is] worked out’ (2000: 2). Spencer traced the impact of these contextual factors in parallel with Adam Kuper’s intellectual histories of the discipline and the changing themes of the Decennial Conference meetings of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) to present a lucid account of the ongoing renegotiations of our disciplinary boundaries (op. cit.). Severe funding cuts to the social sciences throughout the 1980s, combined with anthropology’s postmodern ‘disintegration and fragmentation into myriad subdisciplines, subspecialties and interest groups’ (Rubel and Rosman 1994: 335), left many asking whether the discipline had any future. Uncertainty lingered long into the next decade, but Spencer reports that the mood of the 1993 ASA Decennial Conference was nevertheless ‘upbeat and expansionist’ with a variety of new topical subject areas elbowing

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their way to centre stage (op. cit.: 14−15). James Peacock conveyed a similar spirit of optimism in his 1995 Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), underscoring the discipline’s leading role in addressing ‘the complex challenges of a transnational yet grounded humanity’ (1997: 14). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson injected another dose of confidence into that ‘disorderly theoretical moment’ by affirming the continued importance of ethnographic work while recognizing that it will proceed ‘along a number of different methodological lines and in diverse theoretical directions’ (1997: 25). The contents of this Handbook are testimony to the fruits of that diversity, but as Cris Shore and Richard Wilson point out in their introduction to Part 1, the discipline has retained a common core built on firm commitment to an empirical approach and ethnographic method. Confidence in anthropology’s future remained buoyant for the first eight years of the new century while UK departments operated under steady funding regimes and enjoyed high student numbers and new academic posts. The globalized ‘Great Recession’ that struck in December 2007 shook confidence and made prognosis a risky business once again. But the evidence this time around indicates that, through hard-earned experience, the discipline has achieved a state of greater self-assuredness. Despite writing in the thick of a financial environment that is delivering massive public spending cuts and unprecedented changes to higher education (see Fardon 2011), the contributors to this Part on ‘Futures’ have taken for granted anthropology’s capacity to stand its ground and endure. Instead, energies have been channelled into creative contemplation about emergent social, biological, scientific, technological and environmental issues, and into propositions for responsive and viable research directions. There is acknowledgement that as long as we are around as a species, the possibilities for study of the human condition are, in Mair’s words, inexhaustible.

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INTRODUCTION

After all, the human is where knowledge begins, and from which all other studies emanate. This final part of the Handbook comprises four sections of four to five chapters each and an afterword on ‘Futures’ from the ASA Life President, Dame Marilyn Strathern. Authors of Section 4.1, titled ‘Neo-Darwinism, Biology and the Brain Sciences’, were invited to consider developments in these fields, and to reflect on the ways that recent findings are impacting upon anthropology’s conceptions of mind, body and, more generally, the human. All four authors call for greater interdisciplinarity and they invite the reader to recognize the emergence of increasingly sophisticated theoretical positions, hypothesis testing and methodologies in the evolutionary and brain sciences, as well as in social anthropology. Both Robin Dunbar and Harvey Whitehouse propose overarching framework theories under which cognate disciplines can engage more effectively with one another in formulating questions about such classical anthropological issues as kin selection and religious thinking, and pursuing interdisciplinary answers to them. Greg Downey’s quest for a constructive way forward in anthropology’s tradition of cognitive research leads him to a robust engagement with cutting-edge neuroscientific research. His chapter formulates a promising outline for a socio-cultural neuroanthopology to study the enculturation of the nervous system. In the final essay, Trevor Marchand looks to evolutionary theory, anatomy and the brain sciences to explore the intricate relation between brain and hand, and the ways that handtools become an extension of the body during the course of practical use. Section 4.2 focuses on the future of anthropology ‘After Development’, exploring the possible roles and purpose of the discipline in response to environment and climate change, rising energy demands, growing food concerns and natural disaster. Questions of political mitigation and technological adaptation (and the capacity of communities to do so) are at the forefront of these enquiries.

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The authors advocate research agendas with a closely integrated focus on the social and the environmental. Given that politicized disputes over livelihood strategies in a rapidly changing environment are set to increase, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach persuasively argue for the need to connect ‘understandings of moral orders and associated environmental imaginaries more firmly to the political economies and ecologies that shape environmental action’. Laura Rival, in her examination of the fraught relation between economic development and biodiversity conservation, underscores the continuing relevance of anthropology for understanding the ways in which knowledge is produced and used in the act of governing nature and society. For Jakob Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry West, the world’s most pressing problems are connected to food. Their broad survey of production and distribution, regulatory mechanisms, consumption and preparation is framed by a discussion of the liberalization of the global food trade, and illustrated with examples of new anthropological engagement in this evolving subject area. Veronica Strang draws attention to resources of critical concern to group and national interests: water, land and territory. Because anthropologists have learned from the holistic worldviews of indigenous societies, she argues that we are best-positioned to lead in the development of integrated theories of human−environmental relations. In his essay, Edward Simpson contends that disasters regularly lead to economic booms. Using the case study of the 2001 earthquake in western India, he observes that while the moment of disaster is normally inaccessible to the anthropologist, it initiates an accelerated moment of consumption that ‘reverberates and amplifies in the aftermath’. Section 4.3 addresses futures in the anthropology of ‘Demographics, Health and the Transforming Body’. The three interrelated categories are affected by climate change and food shortage (or surplus), rapid social transformation, advancements in technology and medical procedures, the looming threat of a

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global pandemic, pharmaceutical regimes and the global neo-liberal economy. With reference to her research with sex workers in the UK, Sophie Day examines the ways that anthropologists study the flows, connections and movements of people across various kinds of boundaries in a new and changing world order. Importantly, she reminds us that demography continues to offer ‘a valuable material context to the relations between individuals and states, discourse and the body’. Helen Lambert offers her reader a sweeping and tantalizing overview of the future opportunities for medical anthropology in the face of such trends as global mobility, transnational medical markets, an emerging biopolitics of ‘global health’ and virtual medical interventions. Lambert incites medical anthropologists to take up activist positions and to represent their findings in pursuit of greater health equality for the world’s communities. Axel Klein’s overview of the anthropology of drugs similarly expresses a duty for anthropologists to give voice to groups that historically have been marginalized in the study of drug cultures. His claim is that we must dislocate the discussion on drugs from its pathological foundations and integrate it more positively into normative discourses. Drawing on a host of examples from around the globe, Andrea Cornwall projects the anthropology of gender into the twenty-first century to explore the synergies between new technologies and the making and shaping of bodies, while considering how these practices nurture the production and performance of gender and sexual identities. Section 4.4 centres on those ‘New Technologies and Materialities’ to which authors of the previous chapters allude. Swift transformations in computing and communication technologies and in the material sciences are changing anthropology’s traditional objects of inquiry, including knowledge, identity, social interaction, community, nation and mobility. The authors here consider the impact of these trends on anthropological theory and method. Susanne Küchler takes the reader on a penetrating journey into the world of nanoscience

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where materials are capable of taking over matters of mind. When mind comes to inhere in matter, the Cartesian distance between human and non-human worlds collapses. From this point, she proceeds to address a critical question: What is anthropology’s relation to its subject within this colossal paradigm shift? According to Ron Eglash, anthropology finds itself precariously situated between seemingly divergent studies of, on the one hand, indigenous communities and, on the other, burgeoning hybrid socio-technical spaces. His enquiry into the possibilities of anthropology sustaining its commitments both to vulnerable populations and to emerging subject areas ultimately points us toward the fascinating, but sorely neglected, connections between indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies. In a careful examination of media anthropology, Dominic Boyer documents the efflorescence of a consensus that our conception of mediating practices must be broadened to include technologies, spaces, materials and institutions beyond those of communicational media. This strategic subversion on the part of practitioners, he argues, will serve to move the subdiscipline more productively into the anthropology mainstream. In the concluding chapter, Christopher Pinney invites the reader into an exhilarating vision of a dystopian – or utopian? – future, when EuroAmerica’s global force has imploded, taking with it capitalism, instrumental technical rationality, vertebral states and the kind of ‘muscular’ anthropology that they bred. This clears the ground for the blossoming of what Pinney coins anthropology’s ‘Red Period’ – an anthropology firmly rooted in indigenous knowledge and survival, whose practitioners engage directly in knowledge transfer as interlocutors at the meaningful level of the community. REFERENCES Fardon, Richard 2011 ‘Feigning the Market: funding anthropology in Britain’, Anthropology Today 27(1): 2−5. Firth, Raymond 1944 ‘The Future of Social Anthropology’, Man 44 (Jan−Feb): 19−22.

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Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1997 ‘Culture, Power, Place: ethnography at the end of an era’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1−29. Mair, Lucy P. 1943 ‘Discussion of Lord Raglan’s Communication on the Future of Social Anthropology’, Man 43 (May−Jun): 62−63. Peacock, James L. 1997 ‘The Future of Anthropology’, American Anthropologist NS 99(1): 9−17. Presidential Address to 94th Annual Meeting of the

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American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, November 1995. Rubel, Paula and Abraham Rosman 1994 ‘The Past and the Future of Anthropology’, Journal of Anthropological Research 50(4): 335−343. Somerset, Fitzroy Richard, 4th Baron Raglan 1943 ‘The Future of Social Anthropology’, Man 43 (Jan−Feb): 19. Spencer, Jonathan 2000 ‘British Social Anthropology: a retrospective’, Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 1−24.

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SECTION 4.1

Neo-Darwinism, Biology and the Brain Sciences

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4.1.1 Anthropology and Neo-Darwinism Robin I.M. Dunbar

During the nineteenth century, evolution played a prominent role in the social sciences, including anthropology, not least because of a generic interest in the evolution of society. However, with the dawn of the twentieth century, there was a progressive parting of the ways, with the social sciences increasingly eschewing any connection with biology under the influence of Durkheim and Boas. Dissatisfied with the biologizing of human behaviour, both of these intellectual giants had insisted that cultural phenomena could, and should, only be understood in terms of culture. This view was undoubtedly justified at the time, since biologists’ own interests largely focused on anatomical evolution. It was, however, unfortunate that the rift between biology (and hence evolution) and the social sciences developed at a time when biologists themselves had still not sorted out in their own minds what evolution really involved. Mendel’s genetics had yet to be rediscovered, the neo-Darwinian synthesis was still more than a quarter of a century away, the biological world was still thoroughly bedevilled by Spencerian Social Darwinism (which, incidentally, is Lamarckian rather than Darwinian in conception) and, Darwin’s efforts notwithstanding, biologists

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still clung to the old pre-Darwinian eighteenthcentury Lamarckian views of inheritance (his famous ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’), group selection and, worse still, linear evolutionary change. The latter was particularly central to social scientists’ concerns, since it seemed to imply the inexorable upward evolution of humans through a series of stages of sophistication and social and intellectual complexity from brute beasts, through ‘primitive’ peoples to ‘civilized’ folk, ultimately, of course, reaching its acme in Victorian Englishmen [sic], stages that we could happily study in their various forms around the Empire. The reaction against this view, however justified, was particularly unfortunate, because it left the social sciences with the ghosts of preDarwinian thinking. The Great Chain of Being that underpinned these kinds of progressivist theories of evolution even within biology owed their origin to Aristotle and the medieval philosopher-theologians; it had eventually become entrenched as a core principle in the theories of evolution developed by the great French biologists of the eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries (notably Buffon, Cuvier and Lamarck himself).1 These views were not based on idle

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speculation. They represented the outcome of detailed anatomical and developmental research, and indeed were grounded in welldesigned experiments (Mayr 1982) that demonstrated conclusively one of the central assumptions of the Great Chain of Being, the continuous spontaneous creation of life.2 On this view, each new life form inexorably developed through the same series of stages of increasing complexity, such that a species’ age could be unequivocally reckoned by its level of complexity. These innovative early theories, along with those of Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus Darwin and others, laid the groundwork for Darwin’s later theory of evolution by natural selection, but in a number of important respects they differed radically from the view that Darwin was later to develop. Unlike the eighteenth-century theories, Darwin’s theory assumed a single, very early origin to life on earth and that evolutionary history was serendipitous, a species’ trajectory through time depending only on the circumstances and opportunities that challenged it. Not only was evolution neither inevitable nor progressive but also complexity of form told us nothing about a species’ age. Unfortunately, Lamarckian views continued to vie with Darwin’s theory, even among biologists, well into the twentieth century, very often in hybrid forms in which biologists attempted to blend the best of both theories.3 In Germany, Darwin’s great advocate, Ernst Haeckel, argued vigorously for a semiLamarckian version, summed up in his now largely discredited catchphrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’.4 Similar progressivist views were expressed by leading social scientists, notably Herbert Spencer,5 one of the founding fathers of sociology. It was not until well into the twentieth century that Lamarckian views were finally set aside as untenable, and this had to wait for the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on the laws of inheritance in 1909 (Mayr 1982).6 The subsequent century of development within the neo-Darwinian paradigm has produced some major new developments,

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including the establishment of sexual selection as a major force in evolution, the discovery of DNA as the molecular basis of inheritance, and the development of a mathematical basis for the discipline and the extension of evolutionary ideas to cultural processes, among many other phenomena. All of these have important implications for how we understand evolutionary explanations, and it is to this that I now turn.

TINBERGEN’S ‘FOUR WHY’S’ In the 1960s, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen was anxious to place ethology (the study of animal behaviour) on a firm scientific footing. He wanted to show that ethology was not merely a haven for casual ornithologists, but serious science. One of the central planks of his argument was what came to be known as Tinbergen’s ‘Four Why’s’ (Tinbergen 1963).7 Tinbergen pointed out that, when biologists ask, ‘Why is X the case?’, they might have one of four different kinds of questions in mind. One question is about function (How does this trait maximize fitness?); a second question is what kinds of anatomical, physiological, psychological or behavioural mechanisms underpin the trait and allow it to have the functional consequences it does (a mechanistic sense of ‘Why?’); the third question is about ontogeny (How do genes, the environment and learning lead to the appearance of the trait in the developing individual?); and the fourth question is about phylogeny (by what sequence of stages did the trait evolve within the species’ biological lineage?). Tinbergen pointed out that, while all four questions are necessary for a complete explanation for a given trait and its evolution, they are in fact logically and biologically independent of each other: our answer to any one of them does not presuppose or constrain our answers to any of the others. More importantly, it is crucial not to confuse one kind of answer with another.

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This has one important consequence: because the four ‘Why’s’ are logically independent of each other, we can deal with them piecemeal without the need to worry about whether or not we can provide answers to all of them. We can assume that there must be some kind of explanation at the other levels, but we do not need to concern ourselves with these in order to pursue our particular disciplinary interests. This is probably just as well, since most disciplines in the sciences and social sciences tend to focus on just one of Tinbergen’s four levels, and ignore all the others. That said, functional explanations play an especially important role in evolutionary explanations, because they provide the driver that causes changes in the proximate mechanisms that we see instantiated in individual phylogenetic histories. Without that driver, we do not really have an evolutionary explanation. This is an important point, because phylogenetic (or historical) explanations are sometimes confused with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Central to functional explanations is the concept of fitness. Properly defined, fitness is a measure of the relative success with which a gene is propagated in future generations. As such, it has no absolute value, but has value only in comparison to the rates with which alternative alleles at the same locus are (or could be) propagated. It is particularly important to be clear, however, that the use of the term gene here is a proxy for ‘whatever it is that gets passed on from one generation to another that allows a trait to survive through time’. Because of the separation between functional and ontogenetic explanations, genes in the functional sense do not have to be bits of DNA. Technically, in Darwinian explanations, genes are Mendelian genes (i.e. traits) and should thus be represented as strategies rather than as biological traits. It so happens that in many biological cases (for example, bits of anatomy), genes are indeed bits of DNA. But the point is that they need not be: Darwin managed to develop his entire theory of evolution by natural selection without knowing anything about genes or DNA.

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The importance of Tinbergen’s ‘Four Why’s’ is that they caution us against confounding explanations of radically different kinds. The two most common sources of error are to confuse functional explanations with ontogenetic ones and functional explanations with proximate (mechanisms) ones. The first source of confusion is caused mainly by the fact that the word ‘gene’ appears in both functional and ontogenetic explanations (functions are calibrated in terms of a gene’s fitness, and genes also play a central role in biological development), and there is a natural tendency to assume that they refer to one and the same thing. In fact, they do not. As we noted above, the genes that appear in functional explanations are Mendelian genes (essentially traits), and these may or may not be instantiated as bits of DNA. From a purely functional (i.e. fitness) point of view, it does not matter whether a trait is determined ontogenetically by genes, individual trialand-error learning or social transmission, or a combination of all three, providing there is some correlation between the trait’s appearance in successive generations (i.e. children resemble their parents, whether this is physically or culturally). As an aside, one might note here the contrast between the two evolutionarily based sub-disciplines sometimes referred to as evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary (or Darwinian) psychology. The first emphasizes question of function (and has its roots in animal behavioural ecology) and the second emphasizes mechanisms, in particular the cognitive mechanisms that underpin behavioural decisions, having had its roots in cognitive psychology. The two provide complementary approaches to the question of why humans behave as they do (see Barrett et al. 2000). The second source of confusion (confounding functional with mechanism explanations) is caused in a similar way by assuming that fitness is some kind of motivation. Because we often explain our own behaviour in terms of motivations, and maximizing fitness both looks like a motivation

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and very often is one for us (we really do occasionally worry about benefits to our grandchildren), it is easy to suppose that we are talking about the same kind of thing. We might thus insist that the motives for our behaviour are not always maximizing fitness but also sometimes other psychological states like hunger, empathy or falling in love. This, however, is to confuse levels of explanation. The bottom line is that evolutionary explanations need both kinds of explanations at the same time: fitness and motivations are answers to complementary why questions, not alternative answers to the same why question. These two confounds have played a particularly prominent role in the disputes between the social and evolutionary sciences. Social scientists have been much exercised by the nature/nurture debate (whether or not behaviour is socially learned or is hardwired in some genetic sense). The distinction acquires considerable political significance because it affects whether or not we can easily change people’s behaviour (the assumption that underlay Marx’s grand socialist programme). The desire to be able to change society for the better has generally made social scientists very nervous of any implied suggestion that human behaviour is hardwired – and thus presumably unchangeable. In fact, Tinbergen’s ‘Four Why’s’ guard us against this error. Functional explanations are about teleonomic objectives, and hence the best way to think of them is in strategic terms. This means that, so far from behaving in some rigid unthinking manner, individuals themselves decide how best to behave in ways that are influenced by the particular circumstances they happen to find themselves in. In biological terms, it is not the behaviour that is genetically determined, but the set points (goal states or objectives) and the capacity to make decisions. It is always possible that, no matter how smart the species, some behaviours are genetically determined, but this is a purely empirical question and cannot be determined a priori. With this philosophical issue clarified, I now turn to the key methodological issue

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that lies at the heart of the evolutionary approach: hypothesis-testing.

STRONG INFERENCE Whatever else it might do, the neo-Darwinian approach explicitly offers explanations about the world and how it came to take the particular form it does: it has evolved that way through a series of historical circumstances and accidents. What guides its evolution is the teleonomic (not teleological, note!) principle of fitness maximization. The assumption that, all else equal, any biological system will always evolve in such a direction as to maximize fitness provides us with a very strong basis for making predictions about the world. Strong theories that make unequivocal predictions play a very powerful role in science: they allow us to test our theories against the real world in a very uncompromising way. In the philosophy of science, this is known as ‘strong inference’ (Platt 1964). In effect, we invite the organism itself to tell us whether our assumptions about its behaviour are correct or not by offering it (in the form of data we extract from its behaviour) the opportunity to choose between alternative hypotheses. Conventionally, these are usually the choice between the hypothesis we are interested in (X causes Y) and the so-called null hypothesis (that there is no relationship between X and Y because the hypothesis is not in fact true). This means that we can reject wrong hypotheses much more quickly than we can if our hypotheses are casual and we use only vague qualitative evidence to support (or, much less often, refute) them. The point about neo-Darwinian theory in this context is that, at least in terms of functional explanations, it gives very explicit and precise predictions about how an organism ought to behave if it is trying to maximize fitness. This is a direct consequence of the integration of mathematics borrowed from economics with evolutionary thinking. It is important not to confuse this approach with

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economics itself: it is only the mathematics of optimization that has been borrowed by evolutionary biologists, not the central concepts of economics. Indeed, the two disciplines differ radically in terms of what they think drives behaviour: economists assume it is things like money-making (or occasionally these days happiness), whereas biologists uncompromisingly insist that it is fitness. Whereas it is true that organisms may indeed sometimes maximize happiness, this is always and only when happiness is a reliable proxy for fitness. But we cannot assume that this is always so: it is a purely empirical question that can only be decided on a caseby-case basis. Evolutionary biologists are always especially cautious on this point. The process of fitness maximizing, however, is complex because it does not involve just the physical world. The social world provides at least as important an environment within which organisms have to operate. Darwin himself recognized the importance of this and it formed the basis of his theory of sexual selection, though few of his contemporaries understood how important this particular contribution was. Most attention over the last century and a half has focused on the ‘natural’ component of natural selection: hence the aphorism ‘Survival of the fittest’. But survival is just one component of the business of producing descendents that lies at the heart of the Darwinian approach. Most organisms are social, and the business of finding mates and rearing offspring is particularly social by its very nature. Unless these problems are successfully solved, it profits an organism nothing to survive. Although it is conventional, following Darwin’s original lead, to refer to these aspects as sexual selection and to distinguish them from natural selection, strictly speaking sexual selection is a subset of natural selection, whose two components we might less confusingly distinguish as social and survival selection. And the important issue here is that organisms can trade off between these two: you don’t have to survive for long to maximize your fitness, providing you reproduce lots instead.

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This distinction in turn reminds us that there are yet other components to fitness besides the simple business of surviving and reproducing. As W.D. Hamilton pointed out in his seminal work on inclusive fitness and kin selection (Hamilton 1964), fitness can in fact be maximized by not reproducing at all yourself but instead helping relatives to reproduce more effectively than they would otherwise have done. This recognizes that fitness is a property of genes (how effectively they are passed onto future generations), not the property of individuals, and thus that any behaviour that benefits the genes concerned will be selected for even if it harms the survival or reproductive interests of the individuals who bear them. One step further removed is the role of cultural transmission which may allow behaviours to be passed on from one generation to the next irrespective of whether they are in the direct genetic interests of those who perform them. The point here is that the biological world is complex, and we cannot make simple assumptions about the underlying evolutionary processes. In each case, we have to approach the problem as an empirical question, identifying and testing between alternative mechanisms that might explain what we see. The bottom line is whether we want to explain the world (and having found an explanation, thereby understand better how to change it) or merely describe it. Pure description is, of course, entertaining and beguiling in itself, but ultimately, in purely intellectual terms as well as practical ones, it is not enough simply to describe: if we want to change the world, we need to understand why the world is as it is. Description is the starting point for this (we need to know what we are trying to explain), but in the end we have to challenge our beliefs and assumptions about how the world is by hardnosed testing. Precisely because we lack omniscience, we have to submit our hypotheses (our best guesses as to how the world is) to empirical testing by allowing the world to tell us whether our understanding is right or wrong.

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Ratio of investment in daughters' vs sons' education

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Fig. 4.1.1.1 A test of the Trivers−Willard effect in four Hungarian communities. The X-axis plots the ratio of parental investment in daughters versus sons (indexed as the time in secondary education, something that families had to pay for); the Y-axis plots the corresponding ratios of fitness gains through daughters versus sons. The vertical dotted line divides those communities that had higher fitness through their daughters (right-hand side) and those that gained more fitness through their sons (left-hand side). The dashed line is the regression line set through the data. The standardized slope coefficient for the regression equation is b = 0.908, very close to a slope of b = 1 that would be expected if parents were titrating their parental investment exactly in proportion to the expected fitness payoff. Redrawn after Bereczkei and Dunbar (1997).

Figure 4.1.1.1 illustrates some of these points. It was designed to test whether there was evidence that humans followed a wellestablished principle in evolutionary theory known as the Trivers−Willard Effect (Trivers & Willard 1973). This states that, whenever the reproductive opportunities of males and females differ, parents will vary the sex ratio of their offspring as a function of their circumstances. Conventionally, this usually reflects the physical condition of the mother and the fact that her ability to invest in her offspring depends on how much energy she can afford to spare. If a mother is in good condition, she should prefer to produce more sons because strong sons will invariably be able to compete better against other males in the competition for matings, and will thus sire more offspring than weaker males born to poorer-condition mothers; the latter females will prefer to produce more daughters because female reproduction is more constrained than that of males, and so less likely to vary as much. In short, daughters are

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a safe bet, sons a gamble. A logical inference is that, in humans, not only might parents adjust the sex ratio of their offspring in response to their circumstances (the original animal phenomenon that Trivers and Willard sought to explain), but they might also adjust their postnatal investment in their children, favouring one sex at the expense of the other if this offered them better opportunities of producing grandchildren. The example shown in Figure 4.1.1.1 concerns parental investment in the two sexes of offspring in four small communities in Hungary. The value on the X-axis is the ratio of parents’ investment in daughters’ versus sons’ secondary education,8 and the value on the Y-axis is the corresponding ratio of grandchildren produced through daughters versus sons. It seems that these populations match the expectations of Trivers−Willard remarkably closely: those who expect to get more grandchildren through their sons (the points to the right of the vertical dotted line) invest more heavily in their sons, and vice versa. More importantly, this

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effect is a quantitative one, not a yes/no response: parents seemingly titrate their investment surprisingly carefully in the light of their expectations. This example highlights several other issues. One issue is that, in the Darwinian view, human behaviour is not genetically determined so as to have one universal form. Here, the parents actively make decisions on how they should adjust their behaviour on what turns out to be a very fine-grained basis. A second issue is that whatever motivations (parental solicitude, frustrations with recalcitrant sons) intervene, the parents seem to have their eye firmly on the fitness consequences of their actions (at least in so far as these are indexed by the numbers of grandchildren produced). A third issue is that these data are in fact cross-cultural: the four communities represented in Figure 4.1.1.1 represent both ethnic Hungarian and Roma communities, as well as a range of economic contexts (urban and rural populations), yet there is no way one could identify which community is which ethnic group from the graph alone.

DARWIN AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Social scientists have often worried that the Darwinian approach is simply a form of intellectual imperialism. It’s important to head this one right off at the outset, because it represents a radical misunderstanding of what is involved. The issue is not the wholesale replacement of traditional social anthropological (or more generally, social science) methodologies and approaches by ones from biology. Far from it: in fact, the role of a Darwinian approach is not to replace traditional methodologies, but rather to provide an overarching framework theory that would allow the various disciplines to engage more effectively with each other. This follows directly from Tinbergen’s ‘Four Why’s’, which provide a clear basis for integrating the four different kinds of questions one might ask.

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This is especially important in the case of functional explanations, because these depend on knowing the precise context in which individuals are behaving. The optimal behaviour in any given context (i.e. that which maximizes fitness) depends on the costs and benefits of specific alternative choices open to the organism. We need a very detailed knowledge of exactly what these costs and benefits are in the specific context in question. Thus, the basic descriptive work that has traditionally formed the core to social anthropology is an absolutely essential part of the process. Without participant observation, our understanding of both the broad social context and the choices an individual has (or might have) remain unknowns, and no amount of evolutionary arm-waving will fill that gap. Instead, close integration of social anthropology with other cognate disciplines remains perhaps the real prize on offer. This is particularly crucial now because of the extensive interest that evolutionary biologists (both those with a background in behavioural ecology and those with backgrounds in evolutionary psychology) have shown in human behaviour generally and the social and cultural heartlands of traditional anthropology in particular (see, for example, Barrett et al. 2000; Dunbar & Barrett 2007). It is important that social anthropology be involved in these studies in order to ensure that they are done properly. Although this has not always been the case, anthropology has in recent decades tended to eschew grand theories, as well as evolutionary theorizing. This reluctance to engage in theorizing may owe its origin to dissatisfaction with the kinds of theories being touted within both social anthropology itself and more broadly within the evolutionary sciences in the past, and may well have been justified. However, with the emergence within the evolutionary sciences of more sophisticated kinds of theoretical positions and more reasoned hypothesistesting methodologies in the last couple of decades, it is perhaps time for social anthropology to re-engage. Encouragingly, there

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have been a number of concerted attempts to do so on the part of social anthropologists in recent years (see, for example, Allen et al. 2008, Barnard 2009). Another important feature of the Darwinian approach has been the comparative method. In fact, the comparative method has had a long and honoured history in social anthropology, having been the workhorse of much anthropological theorizing since the late nineteenth century. It has fallen into abeyance in recent decades in the interests of minutely detailed studies of individual societies. Without needing to decry the value of ethnographic detail, a strong case can be made for reintroducing comparisons between cultures and societies as a powerful tool for hypothesis-testing. This is particularly so now that very powerful statistical methodologies have been developed within evolutionary biology in the last few decades that enable much more detailed hypothesis-testing to be undertaken. One example is provided by Holden and Mace’s (2003) test of the classic anthropological claim that the acquisition of cattle is associated with the loss of matriliny among the Bantu populations of sub-Saharan Africa. Using new statistical methods, they were able to confirm this correlation. But they were also able to go beyond this and show (1) that matriliny was the ancestral state among the Bantu and (2) that cattlekeeping was acquired first before matriliny was lost (confirming the causal direction in the relationship). Anthropology has a rich storehouse of information on the cultural and social patterns of traditional and modern societies. This offers exciting opportunities for extensive analysis and theory development for those willing to engage with it. Despite the fact that these data are often in qualitative form, much can be made of them as an extensive range of evolutionarily informed anthropological studies over the past decade have shown (for some examples, see Barrett et al. 2000). Richer pickings still are available when data are explicitly collected in quantitative form using

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formal sampling methods across a range of societies. NOTES 1 A reminder, perhaps, that Darwin did not invent the concept of evolution. It had had a long history within European thinking long before Darwin, and had been developed into a particularly sophisticated theoretical framework by the late eighteenthcentury French biologists. 2 Unfortunately, these simple and ingenious experiments failed on a classic Popperian criterion: they overlooked the existence of bacteria and other microscopic forms of life that were not to be discovered until half a century later. 3 This was due in part at least to the fact that, even after Darwin’s death in 1882, his theory was by no means universally accepted by biologists. For one thing, the Lamarckian view was so well entrenched that many were reluctant to abandon it completely. But, importantly, it was widely recognized, even by Darwin himself, that his new theory had serious weaknesses, especially in respect of the mechanisms of inheritance. 4 His claim was that we can see a species’ evolutionary history (phylogeny) replicated in its organic development (ontogeny), a claim based on the very considerable similarity in the embryonic forms of even distantly related species. 5 It was Spencer who was responsible for coining the term ‘survival of the fittest’. Darwin borrowed it in his later writings, but later regretted having done so because it overlooks the role of sexual selection. 6 Mendel’s laws of inheritance provided the mechanism of inheritance that Darwin needed for his theory to hang together. It was something that he had conspicuously failed to find during his lifetime. Indeed, in the later editions of the Origin of Species Darwin had been forced to resort to a form of Lamarckian inheritance. 7 Strictly speaking, Tinbergen was not, in fact, the originator of the ‘Four Why’s’. He developed an idea that was first sketched out by Aristotle in approximately 350 BC, and which had been noted by a number of biologists into the twentieth century. Aristotle identified three of the four ‘Why’s’. Tinbergen added the fourth (phylogeny), which would obviously have been beyond Aristotle’s knowledge. 8 During the Communist era, only primary education was free; parents had to pay a small fee for secondary education. Their willingness to pay fees thus provides a measure of the parents’ willingness to invest in a child. The index used here is the number of months a child spent in secondary education.

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The overall average for the sample was 10.9 months (N = 358 cases), reflecting the fact that all four of these communities were poor (see Figure 4.1.1.1).

REFERENCES Allen, N.J., Callan, H., Dunbar, R.I.M. & James, W. (eds) (2008). Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Barnard, A. (2009). Social origins: Sharing, exchange, kinship. In: R. Botha & C. Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language, Vol. 1, pp. 219−235. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, L., Dunbar, R.I.M. & Lycett, J.E.L. (2000). Human Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Palgrave/ Macmillan. Bereczkei, T. & Dunbar, R.I.M. (1997). Female-biased reproductive strategies in a Hungarian Gypsy population. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London 264B: 17−22.

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Dunbar, R.I.M. & Barrett, L. (eds) (2007). Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I, II. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1−52. Holden, C.J. & Mace, R. (2003). Spread of cattle led to the loss of matriliny in Africa: A co-evolutionary analysis. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 270B: 2425−2433. Mayr, E. (1982). The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Platt, J.R. (1964). Strong inference. Science 146: 347−353. Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 20: 410−433. Trivers, R. & Willard, D. (1973). Natural selection of parental ability to vary the sex ratio. Science 179: 90−92.

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4.1.2 Cognition, Evolution and the Future of Social Anthropology Harvey Whitehouse

Social anthropology began by asking big questions about the origins and causes of human nature, society, culture, and history.1 The intellectual founders of the discipline (in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century) were enchanted by the idea that societies evolve, but they lacked the tools to build up a plausible account of those evolutionary processes and were subsequently castigated by generations of anthropologists for producing theories that were either unverifiable or, if rendered in a testable form, patently false. The apparent failure of early explanatory ambitions in the field, together with growing anxiety about the association between those ambitions and imperial colonial projects, brought grand theoretical aspirations almost to the brink of extinction. This intellectual retreat began with a shift away from whytype questions towards how-type questions. Instead of asking about causes and origins (Why are societies and cultures the way they are?), social anthropologists increasingly restricted themselves to problems of function and structure (How do sociocultural systems fit together?). The French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, among other great anthropologists of the twentieth century, never entirely reconciled himself to this

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demotion of the explanatory enterprise. As his British colleague Meyer Fortes once wistfully observed, the ‘lure of the pourquois’ remained irresistible for Lévi-Strauss – albeit tantalizingly out of reach. By the close of the last century, however, even generalizing efforts in the study of structure and function appeared to some anthropologists hopelessly unproductive. Many had by then abandoned theory altogether in favour of exclusively humanist agendas, concerned with interpretation, phenomenology, literary artifice, and postmodern critique. Almost unobserved, however, some of anthropology’s neighbours had been making some startling discoveries. After a long period in the theoretical wilderness, largely under the grip of behaviourism, scientific psychology underwent a dramatic revolution. The invention of computers led, by the middle of the twentieth century, to radically new models of information processing which, taken together with advances in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences, opened up a new window on human psychology and its evolutionary history. A mass of scientific research now points to the naturalness of various features of human thinking and behaviour. To qualify as ‘natural’, such features must emerge in a

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similar fashion in all normal human beings without the need for deliberate instruction or training (barring pathology – itself often a valuable source of insight into natural cognition) (e.g. Farah and Wallace 1992, Hillis and Caramazza 1991). These aspects of human nature shape and constrain sociocultural systems even if, reciprocally, at least some of those features may also be ‘tuned’ by cultural environments (McCauley forthcoming). The nature of human minds is salient also for an understanding of economic behaviour, political strategizing, and systems of kinship, marriage, and descent (to take some of anthropology’s traditional heartland subject areas) as well as more fashionable areas of research: for instance, the study of performance, art, and display or of materiality, discourse, and embodiment. But while some social anthropologists have begun to appreciate the need to integrate their findings with those of neighbouring human sciences, this remains largely a minority concern. Pascal Boyer has recently argued cogently that social and cultural anthropology has become preoccupied with the production of ‘relevant connections’, at the expense of erudite scholarship and the systematic testing of scientific theories (Boyer forthcoming). What counts as an authoritative body of work, or even an individual authority, is hotly contested by anthropologists. There is no agreed method of assessing the relative worth of competing contributions. There are no standard authoritative textbooks. Intellectual factions continually coalesce around fashionleaders and then disperse. The privileged mode of research dissemination is the meandering monograph or reader rather than short and pithy articles. And the argument of authority (despite the contested nature of that authority) rules supreme – such that merely alluding to a fashion-leader is treated as equivalent to evidential support. Boyer’s bleak diagnosis is hard to ignore. Social and cultural anthropology began with scientific ambitions and proceeded to build up an impressive corpus of scholarship on comparative ethnography (for instance, in the

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highly specialized study of systems of kinship, marriage, and descent). But, nowadays, science and erudition have been pushed to the sidelines. The crucial question, to which Boyer’s critique does not direct itself, is Why? Our sorry predicament stems, I will argue, from the limitations of our folk ontological knowledge and the fact that, as a consequence, social science is really hard to do (or at least to do well). Reasoning about sociocultural phenomena doesn’t come naturally. Or to put it more precisely, we humans lack adequate intuitive machinery for reasoning about highly elaborated social morphology. As our societies have grown in size and complexity, we have witnessed the emergence of a vast plethora of specialized offices and corporate groups based on a broad range of sorting principles: kinship, descent, rank, caste, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Categories of office, coalition, and class are no more than idealized models of how the social world is organized, rather than precise descriptions of how it operates on the ground (Firth 1964; Leach 1954). But they provide robust schemas for individual behaviour, cumulatively instantiating patterns that people reciprocally interpret in terms of those schemas. But these schemas are a relatively modern and potentially dispensable accretion to human thinking, too recent in our evolutionary history to have led to specialized cognitive skills for reasoning about social complexity. The same could not be said for patterns of thinking in many other ontological domains. As part of our evolutionary endowment, we possess dedicated intuitive machinery for reasoning about physical properties (such as solidity and gravity) (McCloskey 1983; Povinelli 2000), biological properties (such as essentialized differences between natural kinds) (Bloom 2000; Carey 1985; Leslie 1994), and psychological properties (such as a capacity to empathize with suffering) (Preston and De Waal 2001). Our intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology may have to be substantially revised

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in light of the discoveries of scientific physics/ biology/psychology but our intuitions often also deliver useful reference points and pedagogic tools. For instance, while our intuitions about the discreteness and stability of natural kind taxonomies are inconsistent with the diachronic character of evolutionary processes, nevertheless they provide a convenient on-the-hoof framework within which to conceptualize speciation. Problems arise, however, when some of our intuitively grounded ontological commitments also serve as markers of identity. In order to function in that way, such commitments must cause us to differ discernibly from other people so as to become a locus of conflict. If you and I share the intuitively grounded explicit belief that certain features of the natural environment are the outcome of intentional design, then we can live in peace with that delusion. But if somebody challenges those beliefs with an alternative account (e.g. that the features in question were caused by some other agent or by no agent at all) we have a basis for conflict, especially where competition for resources, either symbolic or material (or both), depends on who comes down on which side of the debate. In this particular case, some evolutionary biologists and their supporters have been drawn into protracted disputes with young earth creationists and proponents of intelligent design. In scientific circles, however, these kinds of battles tend to be somewhat peripheral to the day-to-day business of formulating hypotheses and gathering data to test them. Any competent biologist who has the slightest sympathy for certain variants of intelligent design, would (despite this oddity) be doing the same kind of science as anybody else in that field. Likewise, an astrophysicist with theistic commitments is not necessarily hampered in the conduct of good scientific research on the origins of the universe that would be recognized as such by atheistic colleagues. Imagine, by contrast, a domain of scholarly enquiry that based its theories on multiple and conflicting intuitions about the basic nature of the phenomena under study.

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It would struggle to get off the ground because of interminable turf wars among competing coalitions with widely differing foundational assumptions about the nature and purpose of scholarly enquiry. Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine it. That is exactly the problem, or at least has been the problem historically, with social and cultural anthropology. Since we lack dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about social complexity, we are prone to borrowing intuitions proper to alien ontological domains. Consequently, social scientists at turns reify institutions, biologize social categories, anthropomorphize offices, and mentalize corporate groups. Consider the following examples in scholarly sociologizing. Instances of teleological reasoning about the social are obviously rampant in functionalist and Marxist traditions in the social sciences. For example, the theory of social functions (as elaborated by several generations of British anthropologists since Malinowski) maintained that every social institution serves to bolster some other institution (or cluster of institutions) so as to contribute to the maintenance of stable social systems. Thus, the ritualized abuse of a monarch in some African kingdom might have the social function of giving public expression to structural tensions running through society (e.g. between commoners in opposition to an exploitative aristocracy and monarchy or between loyal commoners and the king in opposition to plotting royal heirs, and so on) while publicly affirming in the concluding rites that unification of the kingdom is both necessary and desirable in spite of this (Gluckman 1962). At the core of this mode of social theorizing is the idea that rituals are like tools, with specific functions, and offices (such as the kingship) and social categories (such as commoner clients) are like artefacts that are made and remade through the application of those tools. Marxist scholars have often adopted similar strategies of reasoning, except that the functions of political, legal, and religious institutions are

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typically said to serve the interests not of society as a whole but of a particular sector of society (the ruling class) (Bloch 1983). Just as we are prone to deploy artefact cognition in sociological reasoning, so we are also inclined to treat certain types of persons as natural kinds, based on analogical extension of intuitive knowledge about the biological world. The temptation to biologize the social world grows stronger as societies become larger, more heterogeneous, and the division of labour more elaborate. It is no accident that Emile Durkheim coined the term ‘organic solidarity’ to characterize this type of social morphology. Biologizing the social can lead us also to essentialize institutions, especially where particular offices or membership of social groups and categories are transmittable from parent to offspring. Where that is not the case (for instance where there is great occupational mobility, where people join and leave clubs and associations at will, where religious affiliations are chosen rather than ascribed, etc.) we may be less likely to essentialize the social. But where people’s roles and identities are determined by birth and shared with ancestors, the speciation of social categories is hard to resist. Despite or perhaps because of the extensive tendency for the man or woman ‘on the street’ to biologize social categories (for instance, in racial stereotyping), this way of reasoning is highly problematic for liberal academics, nowadays at least. Efforts, particularly in the nineteenth century, to carve up humanity into distinct races based on phenotypic characteristics seems to most contemporary social scientists at least as distasteful as it is biologically indefensible (Peers 2007). But that is not to say that intuitive biology has ceased to play a role in social theorizing. A particularly widespread, if largely unexamined practice in social and cultural anthropology is (and probably has always been) to talk about cultural traditions as at least implicitly analogous to biological species, especially when threatened with extinction. There are striking continuities for instance between the ways in which some anthropologists reason

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about the rights of small-scale societies to preserve their traditional beliefs and practices, and the way conservationists campaign for the protection of endangered species. Even though anthropologists have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of cultural traditions, and their embedding in wider regional and global processes of economic expansion and political struggle, there remains a widespread intuition that all traditions should be respected and preserved, that there is no moral high ground beyond the local cultural universe from which we can justly impose reform. And from that relativistic perspective, cultural and linguistic diversity comes to be valued by more or less explicit comparison with the taxonomic richness and diversity of the natural world. Just as we are tempted to borrow from artefact cognition and intuitive biology when reasoning about complex sociocultural phenomena, we are no less inclined to draw on our intuitive psychology for similar purposes. For instance, the so-called ‘culture and personality’ school in American anthropology, inspired by the ideas of Franz Boas and Sigmund Freud, was premised on the idea that variable childrearing practices lead to the predominance of certain personality types at a population level, allowing us to generalize about tribes and nations rather as we might about the character of an old friend. In France, also, the tendency to anthropomorphize social groups and categories has been a recurrent theme, featuring prominently for instance in the ideas of L’année sociologique whose members talked freely and enthusiastically about such things as ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1950), and ‘collective conscience’ (Durkheim 1964). Some of these ideas have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years – indeed, around the turn of the millennium it was practically impossible to find a major conference in any of the arts, humanities, or social science disciplines that did not in some way emphasize the theme of memory, and in particular its putatively collective or social character as understood by social theorists.

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The trouble with grounding our ideas about the sociocultural realm in intuitive thinking borrowed from other domains is not merely that we discover these to be, inevitably, inadequate tools for the job. True, social and cultural institutions are not really artefacts with functions, organisms with essences, or minds with collective personalities or memories. But if that were the only problem, it would be relatively easy to surmount (in comparison with the more intractable problem to which we presently turn). After all, mature sciences are accustomed to explaining that our intuitions – for instance about the cosmos, or the natural world, or the mind – are only going to take us so far and then we have to abandon them. It is not that those intuitions then disappear. It may still seem to us that the sun moves across the sky (rather than the earth round the sun) or that some kind of intentional agent is responsible for selecting the characteristics of biological species (rather than effects of random mutation and ecology on the fitness of organisms). But with sufficient education and intelligence we can realize, and remember when reasoning explicitly, that things are not as they seem. Where it gets tricky is when people’s identities become wrapped up in a particular intuitive construal of the world. This is how Galileo wound up under house arrest as punishment for his heretical claims about the structure of the solar system. Even today, intuitive forms of biblical literalism are belligerently espoused by Christian fundamentalists. The problem gets worse, much worse, when the same phenomena attract mutually exclusive and competing intuitive claims, upon which professional reputations are pinned. Every time a new school of thought has emerged in social anthropology, anchored in borrowed intuitions, it has eventually provoked a backlash of objections from those inspired by alternative intuitions. Often the arguments are less about the issues at stake and more about whose intuitions should prevail. Ultimately, however, all are losers. Functionalism, for instance, is now considered

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a dirty word in social anthropology where once it had been a more or less paradigmatic method of ethnographic enquiry (Goldschmidt 1996). Why? Because whereas we could trace the functions of real tools and artefacts to the intentions of ancestral (and sometime historical) individuals, nobody could explain how institutions came to have the useful properties that functionalists ascribed to them. Of course there were other causes of embarrassment too: we found that societies were seldom if ever trapped in a state of functionally integrated equilibrium: looking a little closer, we always found a writhing morass of contestation and struggle rather than consensus and harmony; looking a little longer, we found upheaval and transformation rather than stability and social reproduction. But although often cited as the reason for functionalism’s downfall, such considerations are less than compelling. There is no reason why tendencies towards functional integration should not be possible to demonstrate in principle, and arguably these have been repeatedly demonstrated in practice. So we return to the real nub of the problem: if institutions really do have functions then this cannot be understandable in terms of intuitive teleology. An alternative possibility is considered presently. Before we can begin to contemplate solutions to this sorry state of affairs, however, we have to attend to an even deeper tragedy. Disillusioned by all attempts to discover a sociological method grounded in stable intuitions, social theorists in the second half of the last century began to look for ideas with increasing desperation almost anywhere. The structure of natural language seemed to many to be a promising starting point, not least because of its systemic character. For instance, in France, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist paradigm was inspired in no small part by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s observation that not only are most of the sounds of a words discernible only on the basis of arbitrary phonetic differences (‘bat’ being distinguishable from ‘mat’ by virtue of a small and entirely arbitrary difference between two bilabial consonants) but so

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too are many of the conceptual structures to which those sounds refer (e.g. ‘river’ being distinct from a ‘stream’ in English because the former is larger and wider, while ‘fleuve’ is distinct from ‘rivière’ in French because the former flows into the sea) (Leach 1989). Both the phonetic and semantic properties of words seemed to be determined by arbitrary systems of differences, an insight that LéviStrauss and his followers enthusiastically transferred and extended in the analysis of a wide variety of cultural forms: myths, rituals, kinship, descent, marriage, culinary traditions, and so on. This way of thinking emphasized the relativity of cultural systems, both in terms of directly observable properties (behaviours and artefacts) and interiorized but distributed inner states (meanings and values). But it also greatly exaggerated the importance of binary logic in both language and culture (Boyer 1993). After all, much of the conceptual content entailed by the concept ‘river’ is held in common with the concept ‘fleuve’ and not all variability across languages/cultures may be said to result from arbitrary differences between signs (e.g. the sounds of speech or the concepts they signify). Lévi-Straussian structuralism founders ultimately on the narrowness and triviality of its account of the cognitive foundations of cultural recurrence and variation. Soon it too was abandoned and replaced by ever more desperate strategies, such as Clifford Geertz’s brand of ‘interpretivism’ which sought to detach sociocultural phenomena from mental activity entirely, arguing with varying degrees of coherence that culture occupies an ontological domain of its own and can only be described and interpreted in terms belonging to that domain.2 These developments, as well as the rise of many varieties of post-structuralist and postmodernist critique, all have something curiously in common: they take sociocultural phenomena to be fundamentally text-like, allowing interpretive flights of fantasy extending far beyond the dull world in which everyday culture is produced and transmitted.

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Authors rapidly became distracted by the suggestiveness of their own language through the creation of jargon and stylistic innovations, decorating the limited interpretations of informants with vastly more fanciful and appealing interpretations of their own (Gellner 1992). In this runaway inflation of ideas, almost anything goes, as long as it is new and different. To reverse this trend we require a robust and encompassing scientific framework on which to construct our questions and pursue answers. Such a framework exists: evolutionary theory, since at least the time of Darwin, has made immense progress in explaining the anatomy, appearance, behaviour, psychology, history, and development of our species. Despite some false starts and blind alleys, efforts to explain recurrence and diversity of sociocultural traits within this framework, both in humans and other animals, is generating cumulative and therefore increasingly sophisticated bodies of theory based on the formulation of precise and testable hypotheses (Boyd and Richerson 2005; Henrich and Henrich 2007; Sosis and Alcorta 2003). Through the lens of evolutionary theory we can conceptualize and explain sociocultural phenomena by answering four major kinds of interrelated and complementary questions, what Niko Tinbergen called the ‘Four Why’s’: a functional why, concerning the adaptive value of the trait in comparison with others; a causal why, concerning the mechanisms required to produce it; a developmental why, concerning the processes by which the trait emerges in the growth and maturation of the individual; an evolutionary why, concerning the phylogeny of the trait, its appearance via a succession of preceding forms (Tinbergen 1951, see also Dunbar in this volume). These four whys are intimately interrelated. Suppose, for instance, we discover that groups performing certain kinds of rituals tend to absorb or destroy groups that lack such rituals (making the rituals in question a between-group adaptation and possibly also an in-group adaptation if there

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is variability in the accrual of individual advantages), we can only fully explain the emergence and spread of these functional properties by understanding the psychology required to produce the successful pattern of ritualized behaviour, its developmental history, and the constraints on cultural innovation set by prior ritual forms on which the current institution has been modelled − in other words, the evolutionary history of the cultural trait. One may suspect that evolutionary explanations of sociocultural phenomena furtively sneak in old arguments, and their problematic intuitive assumptions, through the back door. The notion, for instance, that a certain kind of institution might help to reproduce the society in which it occurs (in evolutionary formulations a perfectly respectable hypothesis) may seem to be indistinguishable from the kind of outmoded functionalism that anthropology has largely abandoned, and surely founders on the same errors of intuitive teleological reasoning. Recall, however, that the problem with functionalism was that it failed to specify the mechanism by which socially useful traits came into being. The intuitive solution, based on teleological reasoning, leads hopelessly to notions of intentional design and not to Darwinian evolution (Wilson 2002). It is precisely these intuitive errors that need to be avoided. The same may be said of our accounts of proximate causation. Successful accounts fractionate sociocultural phenomena into component features that are explainable in terms of discrete suites of causes rather than luring us back into familiar traps of reification and anthropomorphism. By way of illustration, consider the discovery (by social anthropologists Alan Fiske and Nick Haslam) that recurrent features of cultural rituals closely resemble the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (or OCD) (Fiske and Haslam 1997), a correspondence that Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard have recently sought to explain in terms of the workings of a specialized cognitive system (dysfunctional in OCD patients)

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concerned with triggering precautionary responses to potential hazards (Boyer and Lienard 2006). While this new body of research may significantly advance our understanding of some features of ritualized behaviour, it certainly does not (and is not intended to) explain in general terms why people perform rituals or why they vary in frequency and emotionality, or why they recruit various ideas about the involvement of supernatural agents, and so on. So easily is this point misunderstood, that authors of the hazard−precaution theory of ritual were tempted to forewarn readers that they were offering not a theory of ritual but a theory of ‘XB29’ (a random string of letters or numbers chosen to represent the specific aspects of ritualized behaviour picked out by their theory). There is little that is intuitive (or even culturally familiar) about this procedure. While that may be a problem in communicating the value of this approach to wider audiences, it is also a great strength if we are dealing with phenomena that conflicting intuitions have led us to argue about so unproductively. For the past three years, I have been running a project entitled ‘Explaining Religion’ (EXREL),3 funded by the European Commission and involving the collaboration of some fourteen universities in Europe and North America. This project seeks to explain pan-human features of religious thinking as well as the spread and persistence of complex religious systems. A central goal of EXREL has been to identify those features of religious thinking and behaviour that are most widely recurrent cross-culturally and to tease apart the psychological mechanisms that might account for this recurrence. The fractionating strategy has played a central role in this effort. Examples of recurrent features include notions of bodiless agents, of life after death, of intelligent design, of portentous events, and so on (the list continues to grow). All such concepts come to be culturally elaborated in distinctive ways in different environments but they also activate a set of pan-human

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implicit beliefs that can be disambiguated in psychological experiments. As our research in this area matures we are beginning to understand the developmental pathways of these pan-human beliefs and their shaping and constraining effects on the emergence and spread of more explicit concepts, some of which become culturally distributed and may persist over long periods of time. What is becoming increasingly clear is that there can be no single proximate explanation for all the recurrent patterns of thinking and behaviour that we associate with the label ‘religion’. Each of the myriad component features we need to explain stems from a large set of distinct (or in some cases overlapping) suites of psychological mechanisms. But religions are not merely bundles of unconnected beliefs supported by pan-human intuitions. Such beliefs are typically linked together by complex networks established through rumination and verbal testimony. To the extent that common elements of these networks are transmitted by religious teachers or peer-to-peer, they come to form more or less robust religious systems that can be transmitted to others and passed down through the generations. One of the challenges of the EXREL project has been to explain the spread and reproduction of religious systems in terms of ultimate causes: the selection of religious beliefs and networks of belief because of their consequences for the survival of the individuals and groups that sustain them, often in conditions of intense between-group competition. The EXREL project pursues a new kind of anthropology, one that recognizes the complexity and counter-intuitiveness of social and cultural phenomena, seeking explanation at multiple levels (proximate, developmental, phylogenetic, and ultimate) and using whatever methods are best suited to the task at hand (in this particular project combining ethnography, historiography, experiments, economic games, surveys, semantic network analysis, and computation modelling). Much of social anthropology nowadays is ‘mindblind’, but more generally the discipline

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has developed a kind of evolutionary myopia. The future of anthropology lies in the development of much sharper vision in these areas. Anthropology not only needs to be informed by major discoveries in neighbouring fields but also it can and should be a major player in making those discoveries. It remains one of the broadest of all the human sciences and its emphasis on cross-cultural comparison based on long-term field research makes it also uniquely informed on questions of cross-cultural recurrence and variability. Despite my reservations about some recent trends in the discipline, at the core of social and cultural anthropology remains an enduring commitment to the production of careful and rigorous ethnography. It is also noteworthy that some of the most important developments in the cognitive science of culture have been spearheaded by scientists originally trained in social anthropology (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001; Sperber 1996). Anthropology has made (and continues to make) valuable contributions that will, if we are wise, be put to increasingly effective use in the scientific study of our species’ social and cultural achievements.

NOTES 1 This is an abridged version of an article originally published under the same title in Ted Slingerland and Mark Collard (eds), Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, reproduced here by kind permission of Oxford University Press. 2 For a critical discussion, see Strauss and Quinn (1997). 3 For further details of the EXREL project go to http://www.cam.ox.ac.uk/research/explaining-religion/

REFERENCES Atran, Scott 2002. In Gods We Trust. New York: Oxford University Press. Bloch, Maurice 1983. Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship. Oxford: Clarendon. Bloom, Paul 2000. How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter J. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Boyer, Pascal 1993. ‘Cognitive aspects of religious symbolism’, in Pascal Boyer (ed.), Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, Pascal 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Boyer, Pascal (forthcoming). ‘From studious irrelevancy to consilient knowledge: modes of scholarship in anthropology’, in Ted Slingerland and Mark Collard (eds), Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyer, Pascal and Lienard, Pierre 2006. ‘Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action-parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29: 1−56. Carey, Susan 1985. Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Durkheim, Emile 1964 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin. Farah, M.J. and Wallace, M.A. 1992. ‘Semanticallybounded anomia: implications for the neural implementation of naming’, Neuropsychologia 30: 609−621. Firth, Raymond 1964. Essays on Social Organization and Values. London: Athlone Press. Fiske, A.P. and Haslam, N. 1997. ‘Is obsessivecompulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Evidence of similar content’, Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease 185: 211−222. Gellner, Ernest 1992. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Gluckman, M. 1962. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen and West. Goldschmidt, Walter 1996. ‘Functionalism’, in David Levinson and Melvin Ember (eds), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Vol 2. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Halbwachs, Maurice 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Henrich, N. and Henrich, Joe 2007. Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hillis, A.E. and Caramazza, A. 1991. ‘Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: a double dissociation’, Brain 114: 2081−2094. Leach, Edmund 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Athone Press. Leach, Edmund 1989. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Leslie, Alan M. 1994. ‘Pretending and believing: issues in the theory of ToMM’, Cognition 50: 211−238. McCauley, Robert N. (forthcoming). The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science. McCloskey, M. 1983. ‘Intuitive physics’, Scientific American 248 (4): 122−130. Pedwell, Carolyn 2010. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison. London: Routledge. Peers, Laura 2007. ‘On the social, the biological − and the political: revisiting Beatrice Blackwood’s research and teaching’, in David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek (eds), Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Povinelli, Daniel 2000. Folk Physics for Apes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Preston, Stephanie D. and de Waal, Frans B.M. 2001. ‘Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 25 (1): 1−20. Sosis, Richard and Alcorta, C. 2003. ‘Signalling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious behavior’, Evolutionary Anthropology, 12: 264−274. Sperber, Dan 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. London: Blackwells. Strauss, Claudia and Quinn, Naomi 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tinbergen, N. 1951. The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Clarendon. Whitehouse, Harvey 2011 “Whence and Whither Sociocultural Anthropology” in Ted Slingerland and Mark Collard (eds.), Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, David Sloan 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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4.1.3 Neuroanthropology Greg Downey1

The advent of non-invasive neuroimaging sparked a revolution in the brain sciences. Technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) produced data about brain architecture and functioning, not by inference from behaviour or from autopsy, but by directly detecting metabolic processes in living organisms. In spite of important discoveries over the last three decades, however, brain science scarcely touched anthropology, except in its biological wing and through evolutionary theory (with noteworthy exceptions: see, Deacon, 1997; Domínguez Duque et al., 2010; Reyna, 2002; Seligman and Kirmayer, 2008; Tomasello, 1999; Vogeley and Roepstorff, 2009; Whitehouse, 1996). Continued insulation from brain sciences appears untenable in the long run, potentially increasing our field’s marginalization, especially as neuropsychology and imaging turn to questions of cultural diversity. Moreover, conditions appear auspicious for the advent of socio-cultural neuroanthropology to join engagement with brain research in biological anthropology (Rilling, 2008; Tomasello, 1999), linguistic anthropology (Liebermann, 2002, 2007) and archaeology (Malafouris, 2009; Renfrew et al., 2008). This chapter sketches out, briefly, the theoretical and methodological foundations for socio-cultural

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neuroanthropology. Neuroanthropology can help shape interdisciplinary cognitive science, continuing the tradition of influential work on cognition within our field (such as Boyer, 1994; D’Andrade, 1981, 1995; Hutchins, 1995; Shore, 1996; Sperber, 1996).

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY DISENGAGES FROM THE BRAIN Reflecting on his own career, Victor Turner guardedly proposed an alliance with brain sciences: My career focus mostly has been on the ritual process, a cultural phenomenon, more than on brain neuroanatomy or neurophysiology. But I am at least half convinced that there can be genuine dialogue between neurology and culturology, since both take into account the capacity of the upper brain for adaptability, resilience, learning, and symbolizing, in ways perhaps neglected by the ethologists pur sang, who seem to stop short in their thinking about ritualization at the more obviously genetically programmed behaviors of the lower brain. (1973: 104)

Likewise, early proponents of cognitive science, influenced by anthropologists such as Bateson, Lévi-Strauss and Mead, anticipated ongoing collaboration. For example, psychologist Howard Gardner (1985) suggested

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that anthropology would be among the six pillars of the ‘mind’s new science’ (see also Bodgden, 2006; Norman, 1980). Sociologist Warren TenHouten (1976) called for the development of ‘neuroanthropology,’ as did anthropologists Charles Laughlin and Eugene d’Aquili (1974; Laughlin et al., 1990).2 Anthropologists as diverse as Malcolm Crick (1982), Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1997), Maurice Bloch (1998) and Stephen Reyna (2002) have advocated dialogue with the brain sciences.3 Beginning in the 1980s, evidence of regional brain specialization, coupled with the domain specificity of some knowledge (the fact that information was often not shared among cognitive functions), was interpreted as implying the existence of cognitive ‘modules’ (Fodor, 1983). Modules were conceptualized as innate structures similar to those Chomsky (1990) proposed for language. Later theorists expanded Fodor’s original argument to posit ‘massive modularity’ in the human mind, a mental endowment of innate, special purpose tools created by evolution (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Carruthers, 2006; Pinker, 1997; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, 2000). Although some anthropologists have productively engaged with the massive modularity thesis (Sperber, 1996; Sperber and Hirschfeld, 2004; cf. Whitehouse, 1996), for many socio-cultural anthropologists, the thesis simply made too many unpalatable assumptions. Massive modularity seemed to imply nativism, universality, inflexibility and an adaptationist understanding of evolution. The insistence that neurophysiology necessarily implied conclusions anathema to social and cultural research discouraged many anthropologists from keeping abreast of discoveries in brain sciences, so they missed roiling controversies about the theoretical interpretations of emerging research (see Sperber, 1994). For example, controversies about ‘mirror neurons’, which become active when the subject does an action or when observing the same action, have continued unabated since they were first identified

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(Di Pellegrino et al., 1992; Gallese et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al., 1996; see Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004, for a review; cf., Greenfield, 2006; Marchand, 2007). To many anthropologists, brain sciences seemed a risk to our field’s integrity. Emily Martin, in a 1999 keynote address to the American Ethnological Society, cautioned: With their research expensively underwritten by foundations, corporations, and the government, and their claim to provide reductive accounts of the social and cultural without (from my point of view) much information about social and cultural dimensions of existence, I see the neuroreductive cognitive sciences as the most dangerous kind of vortex − one close by and one whose power has the potential to suck in disciplines like anthropology, severely weakening them in the process. (Martin, 2000: 574)

Along these lines, anthropologists have conducted what Choudhury and colleagues (2009) call ‘critical neuroscience’ (Dumit, 2004; Joyce, 2008). One irony of Martin’s fear of ‘neuroreductive cognitive sciences,’ however, is that empirically based, ecologically valid accounts of brain development have become more complex and multi-causal − less ‘reductionist’ − than a host of theoretical schools thriving within socio-cultural anthropology. Increasingly, neuroscientists recognize that developmental environments, early social interaction, formative symbolic niches, skill acquisition, first language, emotional dynamics, motor patterns and child rearing can have profound neurological consequences. Just as empirical research in genetics led to a reassessment of the ‘gene’ to take into account emergent properties of biological systems (Gerstein et al., 2007), investigation of brain mechanisms has highlighted contingency and variability (see Edelman, 1987; Feldman, 2009; Mareschal et al., 2007; Westermann et al., 2007). Moreover, growing evidence of neuroplasticity and of regional ‘repurposing’ has led brain scientists to reconsider the implications of data on tissue specialization (see Anderson, 2010; Pascual-Leone et al., 2005; Sanes and

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Donoghue, 2000). Although neuroanthropologists will continue to be interested in shared human capacities, such as the brain systems facilitating our species’ sociality (see Adolphs, 2009) or the consequences of evolution (Gibson, 2002; Rilling, 2008), this work will be accompanied increasingly by research on the ways that cultural influences sculpt the brain’s plasticity (see Chiao, 2009a, 2009b; Park and Huang, 2010; Wexler, 2006).

CULTURAL NEUROSCIENCE Improving neuroimaging technology and growing infrastructure for cross-cultural research have permitted neuroscientists to demonstrate empirically that observable psychological differences often have neurological analogues (Chiao, 2009a; see reviews, Chiao, 2009b; Chiao et al., 2010b; Han and Northoff, 2008). Growing appreciation of neural malleability and subtle research techniques even revealed cultural differences in brain functioning not visible in psychological studies, so often based on explicit self-report (Fiske, 2002: 81−82). In the past decade, cultural differences in neural activity have been demonstrated in a range of activities, including: making perceptual judgements (Hedden et al., 2008); attentional control (Ketay et al., 2009); semantic tasks (Gutchess et al., 2010); music perception (Nan et al., 2008); amygdala responses to fearful faces (Adams et al., 2010; Chiao et al., 2008a); self-construal and recognition (Chiao et al., 2010a; Lewis et al., 2008; Sui et al., 2009); taste perception (McClure et al., 2004); and theory of mind (Kobayashi et al., 2007, 2008). Although each case is distinct, the over-arching pattern is that areas in which cross-cultural psychology has found observable cognitive divergences typically also evidence neural functional or structural divergence under close scrutiny (for reviews, see Chiao and Ambady, 2007; Fiske, 2009; Kitayama and Park, 2010). For example, cross-cultural studies find consistent differences in the ability of Western and Asian subjects to judge relative and

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absolute sizes of objects and to recall information about focal objects and backgrounds from photographs and video. These studies support the argument that Western subjects perceive absolute size and focal objects more accurately, whereas Asian subjects recall context and relative size better (see Chiao et al., 2008b; Kitayama et al., 2003; Masuda and Nisbett, 2006; Nisbett et al., 2001; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005). Goh and Park (2009) imaged matched subjects using carefully tested, identical magnet systems in Singapore and the United States. Their experiments documented differences between the subject groups, especially older individuals, in the brain areas most active in figure-ground recognition (see also Chee et al., 2010; Gutchess et al., 2006; Park and Gutchess, 2006). Interestingly, some of the difference was mitigated by explicit instruction (Goh and Park, 2009: 106). This modulation suggests that the neural disparities were due not to inability but to cognitive habits. In sum, behavioural disparities, such as patterns of eye movements when viewing faces or scenes (see Blais et al., 2008; Chua et al., 2005), coincide with distinctive patterns within networks that themselves show substantial cross-cultural architectural consistency. Likewise, Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) classic paper on Western and Asian selfconstrual provoked cultural neuroimaging examination (see also Heine, 2001; Triandis, 1995). Markus and Kitayama argued that the Western ‘self’ is independent, whereas the Asian ‘self’ is fundamentally relational and interdependent. Markus and Kitayama had been inspired by anthropologists Shweder and Bourne (1984), who asked whether the ‘self’ could vary cross-culturally. Using functional MRI (fMRI), Zhu and colleagues (2007) found that the medial prefrontal cortex, especially active in Western subjects recalling traits of or making judgements about themselves, was also active in Chinese subjects when making judgements about intimate relations (their mothers). They explain,

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The relatively heavy emphasis on interpersonal connectedness in Chinese culture has led to the development of neural unification of the self and intimate persons such as mother, whereas the relative dominance of an independent self in Western cultures results in neural separation between the self and others (even close others such as mother). (2007: 1314−1315)

Subsequent studies by Han and colleagues (2008, 2010) complicated the picture by demonstrating that some religious backgrounds might accustom individuals to distinctive forms of self-cognition. Devout Buddhists demonstrated patterns of neural activity in self-reflection that resembled those more commonly seen in the evaluation of others, perhaps due to religious advocacy of self-transcendence or habitually imagining judgement by a divine other (see Han and Northoff, 2008; Kitayama and Park, 2010; Sui et al., 2009; cf. Heatherton et al., 2006). The field of cultural neuroimaging has produced remarkable empirical results, gratifying to anthropologists who have long argued that enculturation affects thought. Nevertheless, this emerging research area is dogged by problems, some of which will be obvious to socio-cultural theorists, such as pervasive sampling and explanatory biases, with most of these studies resketching familiar ‘East−West’ comparisons. Cohen (2009: 194) writes about psychological research on cultural differences: ‘A person reading these literatures could be excused for concluding that there is a very small number of cultural identities (North American versus East or Southeast Asian), that vary principally on the dimensions of individualism-collectivism or independent-interdependent self-construal.’ As Henrich and colleagues (2010) point out, the pervasive sampling bias distorts the types of variation explored by cross-cultural psychology, not just its sites, producing subject pools that, from all available evidence, are themselves statistical outliers (see also Arnett, 2008; Choudhury et al., 2009). For pragmatic reasons, the bias toward Asian−Western comparisons is understandable: neuroscience research demands

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specialized skills and expensive, often immobile imaging equipment. Nevertheless, cultural neuroimaging seems to lag behind even cross-cultural psychology, which Lehman and colleagues (2004: 704) hoped was ready to ‘move beyond the East−West comparisons that have become so commonplace’.4 Moreover, given the pattern of East−West comparisons, the explanations of differences will strike socio-cultural anthropologists as overly simplistic and a kind of neural Orientalism, borrowing from Said (1978). Causal explanations for neurological differences refer to homogeneous, opposing civilizations, stretching back to ancient philosophers to highlight irreducible dichotomy between Asians and Westerners (see Nisbett, 2003). Nisbett and Masuda’s (2003) influential account of Western ‘analytical’ and Eastern ‘holistic’ thought, for example, links these to ‘independent’ and ‘interdependent’ social life, tracing cultural isomorphism across causal attribution, logic, categorization, attention, perception, recognition of covariation, affordances and perception of everyday life events. This East−West contrast assumes that a culture is characterized by a single pattern, and the assertion of internal homogeneity contrasts markedly with contemporary anthropological understandings of culture (see Roepstorff et al., 2010). The empirical evidence generated by cross-cultural psychology itself undermines the strict division of Asians and Westerners, and their description with bipolar opposition (see Chiao et al., 2010a). Oyserman and colleagues (2002) found in a meta-analysis of cross-cultural studies of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’, close reading reveals that ‘Asians’ and ‘Westerners’ are hardly homogeneous groups and that the categories, ‘individualist’ and ‘collectivist,’ collapse heterogeneous, independent domains. Within psychology, reconsiderations of cross-cultural research have created an opportunity for greater cooperation with anthropologists. Fiske (2002: 79), for example, advocates theoretical and methodological approaches

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borrowed from anthropology (see also Rozin, 2009). The problem, however, is not simply sampling bias or outmoded classificatory systems (see Bond, 2002), but also the way in which psychology conceptualizes culture. Anthropologist Domínguez Duque and colleagues (2010: 143−144) argue that psychologists treat ‘culture’ as a variable exogenous to the research; subjects are assigned to groups based on an understanding of cultural differences as group identity. But culture itself, or enculturation as a process, is not a research subject (see Vogeley and Roepstorff, 2009). One task of neuroanthropology will be to aid interdisciplinary brain sciences to move beyond unproductive understandings of culture, including dichotomies between East and West. In the process, anthropologists can help to bring a more intriguing set of research questions to cultural neuroimaging.

‘CULTURE’: A NEUROANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE One ongoing challenge for neuroanthropology will be the ideational model of culture that currently dominates in our field. Ward Goodenough (1957: 168), for example, defined culture as ‘whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to [a group’s] members.’ Although the definition and qualities of culture have long been debated (see Kuper, 1999), Roy D’Andrade (2003) argues that the treatment of culture as primarily an ideational system is now firmly lodged in our field. Even when a less overtly cognitive structure is imputed to a cultural agent, such as a ‘habitus’ or ‘embodied knowledge,’ too often this construct still behaves just like an ideational structure (see Downey, 2010a).5 Although the culture concept helped disentangle ‘culture’ from ‘race’, an overly ideational model harbours an unproductive strong juxtaposition from ‘biology’ that cannot be sustained in neuroanthropology.

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The ideational model can lead socio-cultural anthropology to a ‘brain−mind’, ‘hardware− software’, or ‘organ−information’ distinction (Reyna, 2002: 120). In contrast, brain sciences treat learning and neural ‘representation’ as physical change in the nervous system (Ghose, 2004). Robert Turner (2001: 167) offers a neurocentric definition of culture as ‘relatively coherent and systematic biases in brain functional anatomy’. Turner’s definition assumes that the generative structure of cultural manifestations is the culturally-inflected biological agent, not a structure within expression itself. This fundamental shift in the location of culture’s generator − away from an ideational (or ambiguous) structure − and a shift in scale − to the level of the individual’s nervous system − will be hallmarks of neuroanthropology. In a complementary proposition, Super and Harkness (2002: 270) offer that culture ‘is usefully conceived … as the organization of the developmental environment’ (see also Choudhury, 2010). Super and Harkness draw attention to the formative niche for the developing nervous system: the diverse medium which includes material culture, social interaction, language, symbols, technology, sensory experiences, behaviour patterns, education and other pervasive elements of the lived environment. As Fuentes (2009) comments, the use of niche construction for understanding the dynamics of inheritance is inherently constructive and integrative, as social, ecological and biological dimensions are all part of a developing organism’s niche (see also Li, 2003). This approach builds on evolutionary theories that incorporate non-genetic inheritance, such as Dual Inheritance Theory (Durham, 1992; Richerson and Boyd, 2005; see also Lewontin, 2000; Jablonka and Lamb, 2005). At a developmental rather than evolutionary time scale in neuroanthropology, phenotypic adaptation is crucial to understanding enculturation, especially as we recognize that the human nervous system has likely been selected for versatility and under-determination

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(Sterelny, 2003). As Wheeler and Clark (2008: 3565) write, ‘much of what is most distinctive in human cognition [is] rooted in the reliable effects, on developmentally plastic brains, of immersion in a well-engineered, cumulatively constructed cognitive niche.’ Rather than treating the nervous system as the medium for culture’s propagation, neuroanthropology focuses on how the nervous system responds and adapts to social, material and cognitive environments (see also Roepstorff et al., 2010). This reversal of figure-ground relations in analysis is a powerful ‘person-centred’ refocusing of our theoretical energies. The material environment, both natural and artificial, provides structure and information to the growing organism incorporated with its inherited biological legacy. This approach borrows from dynamic systems theory (Oyama, 2000; Oyama et al., 2001), niche construction theory (Laland et al., 2007; Odling-Smee et al., 2003; Sterelny, 2007), and recognition of the ‘extended’ human mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Menary, 2010). As Ingold writes, culture and biology become inextricably entangled in the human individual: If, as I have suggested, those specific ways of acting, perceiving and knowing that we have been accustomed to call cultural are incorporated, in the course of ontogenetic development, into the neurology, musculature and anatomy of the human organism, then they are equally facts of biology. Cultural differences, in short, are biological. (2001: 28; see also Ingold, 2007)

Neuroanthropological research may suggest that some cultural theories are biologically implausible (such as Downey, 2010a; Turner, 2002). Nevertheless, one tenet of dynamic systems theory is that, at different scales of analysis, systems behave according to distinctive principles (Oyama et al., 2001). Dynamic systems have emergent properties at higher levels, thwarting the pernicious ‘neuroreductive’ tendencies that Martin feared. As psychologists Ambady and Bharucha (2009: 345) describe, the combination of neurosciences and cultural research ‘provide the exciting opportunity to examine

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the mutual interplay of culture and biology across multiple levels of analysis, from genes and brain to mind and behaviour, across the life span’ (see also Li, 2003).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Although there are many new opportunities (see also Chiao, 2009b; Seligman and Brown, 2010), this final section will focus especially on cultural neuroimaging, the use of skillsbased research techniques, sensory enculturation, and techniques for studying embodiment in areas such as emotion, somatization and psychopathology. New Opportunities in Cultural Neuroimaging One role for neuroanthropologists is in multi-disciplinary projects, especially helping to generate innovative, testable hypotheses about cultural diversity. Juan Domínguez Duque and colleagues (2010) have called for ‘neuroethnography’, a multi-stage examination of human neurological variation in which ethnographic study generates questions for comparative imaging research (see Domínguez Duque, 2007; Seligman and Brown, 2010). Domínguez Duque et al. (2010: 141) caution that ‘no published study yet conforms to the neuroethnographic method’, but they do hold up collaborative research on romantic love led by anthropologist Helen Fisher as exemplary (Aron et al., 2005). Domínguez Duque has proposed imaging research to test anthropologically derived hypotheses about neural diversity in kinship reference (personal communication). The wider proliferation of imaging technology will, inevitably, demonstrate unrecognized areas of variation in brain development if neuroscientists are alerted to the possibility. The equipment involved, however, is still largely restricted to cities, although mobile devices can now deploy into remote areas (see Rilling, 2008: 27).

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The research is challenging for a host of reasons: subtle differences among equipment, difficulties matching populations, the low reliability of signals and questions about statistical methods (Goh and Park, 2009: 99; Vul et al., 2009). More portable techniques are available, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR), event-related optical signalling (EROS), diffuse optical imaging (DOI) and electroencephalography (EEG). fNIR, for example, uses light introduced to the scalp to monitor cortical activity, offering a portable, non-invasive, and costeffective way to conduct imaging research (see Izzetoglu et al., 2005, 2007). Although these technologies are limited (for example, allowing only outer cortical imaging), neuroanthropologists can help to accelerate their refinement by posing intriguing research questions that require their broader adoption. Skill acquisition One way to incorporate neurological research and cultural theory is to treat culture, not as information, but rather as skill acquisition, an approach advocated by Ingold (2000: 416−417; see also Marchand, 2010). Reconceptualizing enculturation as ‘enskilment’ links to robust findings on neural architecture and functioning among highly skilled individuals: London taxi drivers (Maguire et al., 2000), musicians (Bengtsson et al., 2005; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003), jugglers (Draganski et al., 2004; Draganski and May, 2008), and second language learners (Golestani et al., 2007; Green et al., 2007), for example. Even animal models show that tool use can affect cortical reorganization; macaques trained to use rakes to get food, for instance, evidence increasing cortex dedicated to visuo-tactile neurons (Frey, 2007: 369). Asian−Western comparisons can be reinterpreted as highlighting the skill-like dimensions of culture. Tang and colleagues (2006), for example, interpret neurodynamic differences during mental arithmetic as resulting from habitual use of the abacus in primary school. Even when calculating

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without the tool, the training allows Asian subjects to use visual-spatial simulation for mental calculation, whereas Western subjects used verbal processing systems (see Cantlon and Brannon, 2006; Hanawaka et al., 2003). Similarly, researchers have found using computer problem-solving tasks that people from different backgrounds employ diverse cognitive resources, which can be modified by explicit training (Güss et al., 2009; Strohschneider and Güss, 1998, 1999). This research could extend to sport, music, and other elite skill development in which we have evidence of stylistic difference that might indicate underlying neurological diversity (Downey, 2010b). Sensory learning Anthropological studies of the senses have highlighted variety in sensory interpretation and experience (Classen, 1993, 1997; Geurts, 2002; Howes, 1991; Pink, 2009; Stoller, 1989). Alfred Gell (1995: 235), for example, noted how Umeda became particularly alert to sounds and smells in the forest where sight was limited by dense underbrush; Edmund Carpenter found Inuit hunters had extraordinary visual ability, spotting distant people on low-contrast ice fields (1973: 36; cited in Ingold, 2001: 253). Ingold (2001: 250) argues that anthropology needs to take account not merely of how senses might carry diverse meanings or be treated hierarchically but also how the senses might be trained (see Downey, 2007; Grasseni, 2007, 2009). Extensive psychological research demonstrates the plasticity of perceptual systems, that they become better adapted to the tasks for which they are consistently deployed (Gibson, 1969; for reviews, see Ahissar, 2001; Edeline, 1998; Fahle and Poggio, 2002; Feldman, 2009; Ghose, 2004; Kellman and Garrigan, 2009; Seitz and Dinse, 2007). For example, Kuhl et al. (1992) found that children’s first language affected their ability to perceive speech sounds by six months of age, and psychologists have long known that all cultural groups are not equally susceptible

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to visual illusions (Segall et al., 1966; see also, Henrich et al., 2010: 64−65). In extraordinary circumstances, sensory adaptation can produce remarkable refinements; Gislén and colleagues (2003) found that ‘sea gypsies’, the Moken of Southeast Asia, who forage by swimming, develop acute underwater vision by suppressing the automatic dilation reflex. Neuropsychological research on sensory plasticity suggests that refinement can occur at many levels, from the conscious interpretation of sensations far ‘downstream’ in perception, to patterns of sensation seeking (such as eye fixation patterns in Chua et al., 2005; Goh et al., 2009), to better suppression of competing sensation (Ghose, 2004), even to quite ‘upstream’ modification in the peripheral sensing organs (Sasaki et al., 2010; Zenger and Sagi, 2002). In contrast, some parts of the sensory systems appear much less susceptible to change (Zhang and Kourtzi, 2010). Some alterations to the peripheral nervous system occur through modulation by descending neural pathways that return from the brain to peripheral sense organs (on vision, see O’Regan and Nöe, 2001). These descending pathways mean that ‘higher’ brain functions, such as emotions, motivations, attention, consciousness and cultural interpretation, can bias sensory input at the neurological interface with the perceptual world. A neuroanthropological approach recognizes that the senses serve as channels for deep enculturation, and are themselves liable to enculturation. The regularities of sense experience and early maturation of perceptual mechanisms can provide sufficiently uniform neurological conditioning that a sense-dependent trait appears almost universal even though that trait is neither innate nor genetically fixed. For example, research with the blind demonstrates that, in the absence of ocular stimulation, visual cortex is reallocated to other sensory functions (Sadato et al., 1996). Research methods in neuroanthropology will include techniques borrowed from perceptual psychology, adapted for field use, such as increasingly

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versatile and field-ready eye-tracking technology and illusions. But awareness among anthropologists of diverse forms of perceptual plasticity will already allow ethnographers to generate testable hypotheses about the perceptual learning mechanisms engaged by enculturation. Embodiment The anthropology of embodiment developed under the influence of phenomenology but has not engaged substantially with neuropsychology (see, for example, Csordas, 1990, 1992; Jackson, 1989; Strathern, 1996). The gap is particularly ironic given that Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1942), a central inspiration, read neuropsychology closely and was explicitly committed to locating body image in the central nervous system (see also Reyna, 2002: 185, fn.2). Campbell and Garcia (2009) have recently put forward a neuroanthropological exploration of bodily image, specifically exploring the physiology of malnourishment, and argue that ‘emotional embodiment’ is a key area for future exploration (see also Damasio, 1994; Laughlin, 1997; Niedenthal, 2007; Seligman and Brown, 2010; Varela et al., 1991). In fact, embodiment constitutes perhaps the broadest frontier for future neuroanthropological exploration. The sense of self is underwritten by both conscious and non-conscious embodiment, such as emotional and endocrine processes. For example, a series of papers examined cortisol and other stress hormones in relation to the ‘honor complex’ among Southern males (Cohen et al., 1996; D’Andrade, 2002; see also Kemper, 1990); the research suggests that a culturally distinctive form of masculinity involves heightened sensitivity to social slights and increased endocrine response. These findings parallel research on testosterone and challenges to status, including among non-human primates, which finds that the endocrine system is responsive to behavioural and emotional states (for reviews, see Archer, 2006; McAndrew, 2009;

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Sapolsky, 2004). Other research has explored populations with distinctive neuro-endocrine and autonomic responses to basic human sensations, such as feeling compassion (Lutz et al., 2007), pain (Kakigi et al., 2005), or fear (Chiao et al., 2008a). These cases suggest that limbic systems can be affected by patterns of early experience, and are provoked (or suppressed) by symbolic situations, social contexts, or even learned techniques for self-manipulation, such as reappraisal (Barrett et al., 2007; Davidson et al., 2000; Ochsner and Gross, 2008). The neuroanthropological study of embodiment reveals that the body is not simply ‘good to think with’, but that basic neurological functions influence, and are influenced by, conscious experience. Variability reveals how developmental trajectories can recruit phylogenetically ancient systems, skewing their responses, linking them to evolutionarily younger cognitive capacities, or cuing them with novel stimuli (Greenfield et al., 2003; Gogtay et al., 2004; Li, 2003). For example, Carol Worthman (2009) discusses how systematic interaction between genes and environment, including maternal stress levels, affects serotonergic and other endocrine-related neurotransmission, partially explaining vulnerability to trauma, antisocial behaviour and depression. Embodiment is a crucial issue for neuroanthropological research in medical anthropology. For example, Seligman and Kirmayer (2008) have sought to integrate psychophysiological research on dissociation with anthropological explorations of altered states such as trance. Their rich account not only highlights the cortical inhibitory processes associated with dissociative states (hypnosis, trauma) but also demonstrates how cultural setting can lead dissociation to be classified as pathological or as a valorized skill, such that biological-social ‘looping’ reinforces these states in non-pathological individuals (2008: 50). Anthropological inputs could be added to the emerging conversation between neurophysiology and developmental psychopathology, where, as Cicchetti and Cohen

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(2006: 3) discuss, researchers recognize that a ‘multiple-levels-of analysis approach’ is necessary to understand the emergence of psychopathology (see also Hay, 2009; Kirmayer, 1989, 2004). Neuroanthropological research may help us to evaluate conflicting explanations of pathological variation. Lende (2005), for example, used in-depth interviews and a specialized survey instrument with drug-taking Columbian youth to better understand their motivations. Lende argues from the ethnography that drug seeking − ‘wanting’ and ‘craving’ − is driven by a shift in the salience of drug-related stimuli, not simply by the felt effects of drugs. Lende’s work uses close interpretive analysis of users’ accounts to test competing neurological theories, an approach that flows in the opposite direction of the ‘neuroethnography’ advocated by Domínguez Duque and colleagues (2010). Lende subjects neurologically based theories to ethnographic field testing rather than bringing field-based hypotheses to the laboratory. Both are promising approaches that require openness to diverse quantitative and qualitative methods (see also Brown et al., 2009).

CONCLUSION Shifting the anthropological focus to the enculturation of the nervous system highlights a set of novel research questions, places anthropological theory on more confident footing and creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration (Lende, 2008; Seligman and Brown, 2010). The project of neuroanthropology will be to examine different neural systems empirically, understand how neural capacities develop and document which biological and environmental factors can shape their realization. As James Rilling writes: The study of neuro-development also reveals which aspects of brain development are highly canalized and which are more labile, and in so doing, identifies mechanisms by which brain development can be affected by social and cultural

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environments to make people in one culture think and act differently from those in another. (Rilling, 2008: 3)

Methodologically, this will require problemdriven resourcefulness and openness to mixed methods. No single psychological or neuroimaging technique will be able to illuminate all aspects of the brain’s variability. Neuroanthropology will necessarily confront a number of serious obstacles before it can more widely influence our discipline, including the fraying but still strong commitment to the ‘psychic unit’ of humanity. ‘Psychic unity’, advocated by Franz Boas (1938), long served as the ‘theoretical and moral bedrock’ of the four-field approach to anthropology, according to Bradd Shore (1996: 15). Understanding the profundity of neural enculturation plunges us empirically into the ‘psychic unity muddle’ that Shore highlights. Social differences, including problematic categories like ‘race’, can become biology because they shape the emerging nervous system (see Gravlee, 2009). We no longer need to argue, as a field, however, that our ‘minds’ can be different because our ‘brains’ are all essentially similar. In fact, brains can be grown into different configurations, not because we are, at birth, fundamentally and irreducibly different, but because we become ‘en-brained’ from our own distinctive combination of genes, epigenetic influences, environmental factors, experiences, learning, and even understandings of ourselves. Neuroanthropology will make use of both established and emerging technologies in brain imaging; compelling anthropological questions will help to drive projects that are epistemologically sophisticated and to motivate technological refinements in methods. But neuroanthropology will also advance when our field’s understanding of the brain grows more sophisticated, and anthropologists recognize widely that, whether we admit it or not, theories about culture are at the same time theories about brain function and development.

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NOTES 1 The author owes a special debt to Daniel Lende, my longtime collaborator on neuroanthropology (http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology) and a constant source of inspiration. Unfortunately, after working with him for years and engaging in discussions too numerous to count, it is easy to forget just who is responsible for the most important ideas, and he will inevitably get too little credit. I would also like to thank Ben Campbell, Agustín Fuentes, Cameron Hay, Trevor Marchand, Paul Mason and John Sutton for a number of conversations that have shaped this contribution. 2 More recently, Laughlin’s work with Jason Throop (2006, 2009) has explored what they term ‘cultural neurophenomenology’, a perspective that explores human experiential possibilities through rigorous introspection, philosophical reflection, and insights from the brain sciences. 3 Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1995: xx) has also described himself as a ‘neuroanthropologist’. Although his work is inspiring for any humanistic account of neurodiversity and a range of brain conditions, and any nascent field would certainly be proud to include him as an intellectual ancestor, his experience-centred accounts of patients represent a significantly different tradition of inquiry to what is being called ‘neuroanthropology’ here. 4 Ironically, in the rare cases that cross-cultural psychology moves beyond comparing Asians and Westerners, the differences are often still explored along the same polar oppositions between ‘individualist’ and ‘collectivist,’ or ‘analytical’ and ‘holistic’ thinkers (see, for example, Uskul et al., 2008). 5 For a more sympathetic reading of Bourdieu’s theory in light of recent cognitive science work on embodiment, see Adenzato and Garbarini (2006) and Roepstorff et al. (2010).

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Masuda, Takahiko, and Nisbett, Richard E. (2006) ‘Culture and change blindness’, Cognitive Science, 30(2): 381−99. McAndrew, Francis T. (2009) ‘The interacting roles of testosterone and challenges to status in human male aggression’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 14(5): 330−5. McClure, Samuel, Li, Jian, Tomlin, Damon, et al. (2004) ‘Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks’, Neuron 44(2): 379−87. Menary, Richard (ed.) (2010) The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Nan, Yun, Knosche, Thomas R., Zysset, Stefan, and Friederici, Angela D. (2008) ‘Cross-cultural music phrase processing: an fMRI study’, Human Brain Mapping, 29(3): 312−28. Niedenthal, Paula M. (2007) ‘Embodying emotion’, Science, 316(5827): 1002−5. Nisbett, Richard E. (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. New York: Free Press. Nisbett, Richard E., and Masuda, Takahiko. (2003) ‘Culture and point of view’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 100(19): 11163−70. Nisbett, Richard E., and Miyamoto, Yuri. (2005) ‘The influence of culture: holistic versus analytic perception’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(10): 467−73. Nisbett, Richard E., Peng, Kaiping, Choi, Incheol, and Norenzayan, Ara. (2001) ‘Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition’, Psychological Review, 108(2): 291−310. Norman, Donald A. (1980) ‘Twelve issues for cognitive science’, Cognitive Science, 4(1): 1−32. Ochsner, Kevin N., and Gross, James J. (2008) ‘Cognitive emotion regulation: insights from social cognitive and affective neuroscience’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(2): 153−8. Odling-Smee, F. John, Laland, Kevin N., and Feldman, Marcus W. (2003) Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Regan, J. Kevin, and Nöe, Alva. (2001) ‘A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24 (5): 939−1031. Oyama, Susan. (2000) The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, 2nd rev. edn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oyama, Susan, Griffiths, Paul E. and Gray, Russell D. (eds) (2001) Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Oyserman, Daphna, Coon, Heather M., and Kemmelmeier, Markus. (2002) ‘Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analysis’, Psychological Bulletin, 128(1): 3−72. Park, Denise, and Gutchess, Angela. (2006) ‘The cognitive neuroscience of aging and culture’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(3): 105−8. Park, Denise C., and Huang, Chih-Mao. (2010) ‘Culture wires the brain: a cognitive neuroscience perspective’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4): 391−400. Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, Amedi, Amir, Fregni, Felipe, and Merabet, Lotfi B. (2005) ‘The plastic human brain cortex’, Annual Review of Neurosciences, 28: 377−401. Pink, Sarah. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Pinker, Steven. (1997) How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton. Renfrew, Colin, Frith, Chris, and Malafouris, Lambros. (2008) ‘Introduction. The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 363(1499): 1935−8. Reyna, Stephen. (2002) Connections: Brain, Mind, and Culture in a Social Anthropology. London: Routledge. Richerson, Peter J., and Boyd, Robert. (2005) Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Rilling, James K. (2008) ‘Neuroscientific approaches and applications within anthropology’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 51: 2–32. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Craighero, Laila. (2004) ‘The mirror-neuron system’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169−92. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi. (1996) ‘Action recognition in the premotor cortex’, Brain, 119(2): 593–609. Roepstorff, Andreas, Niewöhner, Jörg, and Beck, Stefan. (2010) ‘Enculturing brains through patterned practices’, Neural Networks (article in press) doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2010.08.002 Rozin, Paul. (2009) ‘What kind of empirical research should we publish, fund, and reward? A different perspective’, Perspectives in Psychological Science, 4(4): 435−9. Sacks, Oliver. (1995) An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Knopf. Sadato, Norihiro, Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, Grafman, Jordan, et al. (1996) ‘Activation of the primary visual

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cortex by Braille reading in blind subjects’, Nature, 380(6574): 526−8. Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sanes, Jerome N., and John P. Donoghue. (2000) ‘Plasticity and primary motor cortex’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23: 393−415. Sapolsky, Robert M. (2004) ‘Social status and health in humans and other animals’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 393−418. Sasaki, Yuka, Nanez, Jose E., and Watanabe, Takeo. (2010) ‘Advances in visual perceptual learning and plasticity’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(1): 53−60. Segall, Marshall H., Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits. (1966) The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Seitz, Aaron R., and Dinse, Hubert R. (2007) ‘A common framework for perceptual learning’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 17(2): 148−53. Seligman, Rebecca, and Brown, Ryan A. (2010) ‘Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience’, Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2−3): 130−7. Seligman, Rebecca, and Kirmayer, Laurence J. (2008) ‘Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: narrative, metaphor and mechanism’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32(1): 31−64. Shore, Bradd. (1996) Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Shweder, Richard A., and Bourne, Edmund J. (1984) ‘Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?’, in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (eds), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158−99. Sperber, Dan. (1994) ‘The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations’, in Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and Susan A. Gelman (eds), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39−67. Sperber, Dan. (1996) Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan, and Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. (2004) ‘The cognitive foundation of cultural stability and diversity’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1): 40−6. Sterelny, Kim. (2003) Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sterelny, Kim. (2007) ‘Social intelligence, human intelligence and niche construction’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362(1480): 719−30.

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Stoller, Paul. (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Strathern, Andrew. (1996) Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Strauss, Claudia, and Quinn, Naomi. (1997) A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strohschneider, Stefan, and Güss, Dominik. (1998). ‘Planning and problem solving: differences between Brazilian and German students’, Journal of CrossCultural Psychology, 29(6): 695−716. Strohschneider, Stefan, and Güss, Dominik. (1999) ‘The fate of the MOROs: A cross-cultural exploration of strategies in complex and dynamic decision making’, International Journal of Psychology, 34(4): 235−52. Sui, Jie, Liu, Chang Hong, and Han, Shihui. (2009) ‘Cultural difference in neural mechanisms of selfrecognition’, Social Neuroscience, 4(5): 402−11. Super, Charles M., and Harkness, Sara. (2002) ‘Culture structures the environment for development’, Human Development, 45: 270−4. Tang, Yiyuan, Zhang, Wutian, Chen, Kewei, et al. (2006) ‘Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 103(28): 10775−80. TenHouten, Warren. (1976) ‘More on split brain research, culture, and cognition’, Current Anthropology, 17(3): 503−6. Tomasello, Michael. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. (1992) ‘The psychological foundations of culture’, in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 19−136. Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. (2000) ‘Toward mapping the evolved functional organization of the human brain’, in Michael S. Gazzaniga (ed.), The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1167−78. Triandis, Harry C. (1995) Individualism and Collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Turner, Robert. (2001) ‘Culture and the human brain’, Anthropology and Humanism, 26(2): 167−72. Turner, Stephen P. (2002) Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. (1973) ‘Body, brain and culture’, in James B. Ashbrook (ed.), Brain, Culture & the Human Spirit: Essays from an Emergent Evolutionary

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Perspective. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 77−106. Uskul, Ayse K., Kitayama, Shinobu, and Nisbett, Richard E. (2008) ‘Ecocultural basis of cognition: farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 105(25): 8552−6. Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vogeley, Kai, and Roepstorff, Andreas. (2009) ‘Contextualising culture and social cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(12): 511−16. Vul, Edward, Harris, Christine, Winkielman, Piotr, and Pashler, Harold. (2009) ‘Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(3): 274−90. Westermann, Gert, Mareschal, Denis, Johnson, Mark H., et al. (2007) ‘Neuroconstructivism’, Developmental Science, 10(1): 75−83. Wexler, Bruce E. (2006) Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Wheeler, Michael, and Clark, Andy. (2008) ‘Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363(1509): 3563−75. Whitehouse, Harvey. (1996) ‘Jungles and computers: neuronal group selection and the epidemiology of representations’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 1(1): 99−116. Worthman, Carol. (2009) ‘Habits of the heart: life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion’, American Journal of Human Biology, 21(6): 772−8. Zenger, Barbara and Sagi, Dov (2002) ‘Plasticity of low-level visual networks’, in Manfred Fahle and Tomaso Poggio (eds), Perceptual Learning. Cambridge, MA, and London: Bradford Book/MIT Press, pp. 177−96. Zhang, Jiaxiang and Kourtzi, Zoe (2010) Learningdependent plasticity with and without training in the human brain’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 107(30): 13503−8. Zhu, Ying, Zhang, Li, Fan, Jin, and Han, Shihui. (2007). ‘Neural basis of cultural influence on selfrepresentation’, Neuroimage, 43: 1310−16.

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4.1.4 Knowledge in Hand: Explorations of Brain, Hand and Tool Trevor H. J. Marchand

It is not possible to picture a carpenter or joiner apart from his tools … . To such experienced bench-hands the tools were co-operators in the common service of life, the character of the tool becoming like that of the owner. There existed a subtle unity of disposition between the tools and their proper users, which was simply the outcome of much common use, a peculiarity in the working of the tool born of a corresponding peculiarity in the method of the user. The joiner became accustomed to handling it, to its distinctive shape and grip, its temper and weight. (Walter Rose, 2001 [1937]: 49−50)

Walter Rose’s tribute to the village carpenter records a profession and way of life in his native Buckinghamshire on the eve of the twentieth century. The chapters of his slim book describe the impressive, but at the time standard, variety of work that his family shop undertook, manufacturing everything from wooden water pumps to coffins, erecting door frames and timber roofs, and repairing furniture and windmills. His reminiscences of the timber yard and workshop vividly portray an environment animated by skilled handwork, the rhythmic chorus of saws, whispering bench planes and thundering mallets, the smell of freshly cut timber, and a lighthearted exchange of banter. The orchestration

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of hands, tools and raw materials features prominently, and Rose emphasizes the need for skilful handling and mindful maintenance of one’s tools: ‘Treat the plane as a human being, it will respond to good treatment, but will be ruined by careless, haphazard use’ (2001: 54−55). The intimate relation between a craftsman and his tools is eloquently captured in the opening quote, which expresses the progressive manner in which carpenter and tool reciprocally form one another in shape and posture, in performance and efficiency. This essay investigates the brain−hand connection, and the way that handtools become an extension of the body during the course of practical training and use. Carpenter and columnist Jeff Taylor poetically evokes the experience of that union: ‘At a certain point, upon a day, you almost become the work, a moving and cognitive part of the tool in your own hand’ (1996: 5). Mastering a tool modifies and expands our integrated cognitive and physical capabilities. Tools are cultural artefacts that possess their own history of use and shared meaning, and through practice we are, so to speak, ‘socialized in the tool’. Skill, therefore, is both context

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dependent and culturally nurtured (Preiss and Sternberg 2005: 204). The following inquiry grows out of my previous fieldwork with masons in Yemen (Marchand 2001), then Mali (Marchand 2009), and my recent vocational training with woodworkers in England.1 I also draw upon related literature on skill and craft, and upon the rapidly growing body of research from the cognitive and neurosciences exploring the intricate relation between brain, hand and tools. My objective is to encourage anthropological thinking about the relation between the three.

BRAIN, HAND AND TOOLS The hand is not a thing appended, or put on, like an additional movement in a watch; but a thousand intricate relations must be established throughout the body in connection with it such as nerves of motion and nerves of sensation …. But even with all this superadded organisation the hand would lie inactive, unless there were created a propensity to put it into operation. (Charles Bell 2009 [1833]: 87)

The hand is the most effective body part for manipulating objects and for configuring and modifying our physical environment. Hands, too, are an important medium for communicating, expressing and even shaping ideas and emotions, either on their own or more typically in coordination with utterance, spoken language, facial expression or posture. Hands point, gesture and sign; make fists, protect or express tenderness; support our body, head and other appendages; climb or break a fall; grasp, hold, carry, wield and manipulate external objects; and operate tools. My present concern is with the nature of ‘skilled handtool use’ which might be defined at the outset as practised coordination between brain, hand and tool, acting in direct relation with the environment, and with the intention of manipulating or reconfiguring objects or materials. But what does such ‘coordination’ entail? Nearly two centuries of scientific progress separate the studies made by Scottish surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell and

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American neurologist Frank Wilson, but their accounts of the hand converge on the same finding: namely, the existence of a special and intricate connection between brain and hand. Echoing Bell, Wilson points out that brain and hand resist differentiation into neatly bounded categories and are instead intimately joined by the nervous system, each stimulating activity and development in the other. The nervous system connects brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerve, neuromuscular junction, and onward ‘down to the quarks’ of our fingertips, and back again. Wilson astutely concludes that ‘brain is hand and hand is brain’ (1998: 307). A handtool, by contrast, is an inanimate artefact, seemingly plainly distinguishable from the brain−body that wields it. A handtool can be generically defined as an implement or device that is grasped and employed to act upon another object or to alter the state of a material, lending greater efficiency to what can be achieved by hand (or other body part) alone. In action, however, a handtool becomes an extension of the forearm, hands or fingers, and thereby integrated within a brain−hand−tool complex. Margaret Mead eloquently drew attention to this phenomenon in a UNESCO report: ‘Where technology is simple, the tool is an extension of the body; the shuttle elongates and refines the finger, the mallet is a harder and more powerful fist. The tool follows the rhythm of the body; it enhances and intensifies but it does not replace and does not introduce anything basically different’ (1953: 257). The question of how this phenomenon is achieved is fascinating, and should be equally so to anthropologists, archaeologists, anatomists, neurobiologists, cognitive scientists, and all those who share a scholarly interest in the nature of human knowledge, learning, practice and material culture.

THE HAND IN ANTHROPOLOGY It seems from the coalescing body of evidence from archaeology, physical anthropology, anatomy and neurology that our

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relation with tools stretches back nearly two million years (Leakey 1971). Evolution of the brain−hand was necessary for making and using tools. But, likewise, tool use played a pivotal role in the further evolution of the human hand (Marzke 1997; Marzke and Marzke 2000) and the brain (Peeters et al. 2009; Washburn 1960), as well as in the development of gestural communication and language (Frey 2008; Greenfield 1991), and in the construction of culturally defined notions of intelligence (Maynard, Greenfield and Childs 1999; Maynard, Subrahmanyam and Greenfield 2005). Co-evolution of brain, hand and tool endowed humans with the remarkable capacity for transferring a proximal goal (e.g. grasping a mallet) to a distal one (e.g. driving a wooden peg). This demands tight coordination between multiple cognitive domains and physical strategies. Our ability to conceptually identify and understand the uses of a wide variety of tools, to plan with tools and satisfy goals, and to manipulate tools with high levels of (manual) dexterity is a defining trait of our species. Hands are our primary means not only for engaging with but also learning about the overwhelming majority of tools that humankind has invented and fashioned.2 Mastery of the tools of any trade – whether masonry, carpentry, smithing, culinary, surgical, or other – typically involves specialized training within a community of practitioners. Training normally focuses on hand skills, though the anthropology of craft and apprenticeship reveals that training equally includes the formation of values, ethos and social persona, and the learning of related professional competencies (Coy 1989; Dilley 1986; Downey 2005; Goody 1989; Herzfeld 2004; Lave and Wenger 1991; Makovicky 2010; Marchand 2008; O’Connor 2005; Portisch 2010; Rice 2010; Sinclair 1997; Stoller 1989; Wacquant 2004). Hand skills are more complex than simply training the hands to perform a series of correct actions. They entail balanced posture and complementary movements of other body parts in synchrony with the dominant hand; a sophisticated coordination between

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sensory knowledge and motor activity; an ability to flexibly adjust and respond to the material being worked; and the knowhow to make corrections and repairs, often in ways invisible to all but the craftsperson. Nevertheless, the skilled hand is the focal point of craft work, and as Wilson reports, ‘for a great number of people, the hand … becomes the critical instrument of thought, skill, feeling and intention for a lifetime of professional work’ (1998: 277). The ability to engage in skilled handiwork lends practitioners a vital sense of agency to make, undo, repair and transform their world, and the world of others, in an immediate, practical, hands-on way (Crawford 2009; Paradise and Rogoff 2009; Rose 2004). In spite of this, the hand as instrument and expression of knowledge and agency has been overlooked by social and cultural anthropology, with a few notable exceptions. In 1888, Frank Baker, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Georgetown, published his essay ‘Anthropological Notes on the Human Hand’ in the very first issue of American Anthropologist. Baker’s aims were twofold: first, to describe the role of the hand as charm and fetish in warding off disease, changing fortunes, and bringing luck; and secondly, to propose a more rigorously scientific physiognomy that would illuminate the inextricable links between hand and mind, and supersede the quack’s art of chirognomy. His animated explorations of ‘curious superstitions’ take the reader across time and space, from ancient Greece and medieval France, to the ‘laying on of hands’ by English monarchs, and to the counties of England and to Baltimore’s Catholic community where hands of the deceased were still used for curative purposes. At the time of Baker’s publication, Charles Bell’s study of The Hand remained an authoritative source, and new empirical evidence from the operating theatre and dissection room was confirming the thorough integration of nervous with muscular systems. Baker cleverly employs the demonstrable anatomical connection between brain and hand to support his anthropological thesis that the hand is an

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enduring and universal symbol of human and divine power (1888). Four years later, anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing published his fascinating and detailed essay on the influence of handusage on cultural development. Initially curator of ethnology for the National Museum in Washington, Cushing became a leading expert on indigenous Zuni culture, living for extended periods in a Zuni Pueblo and arguably founding the methodological practice of participant observation. Cushing’s essay opens with a description of the ‘three great steps in the intellectual development of man’: namely, ‘the biotic’, referring to humankind’s ability to walk erect and have free hands; ‘the manual’, or our capacity to make an environment by hand, which in turn gave rise to the ability for rational devising; and ‘the mental’, enabling humankind’s quest for the ‘ascertainment of truth’ (1892: 289−290, original emphasis). Following a series of cross-cultural investigations into hand influence on the formation of spoken language terms, recorded numerals and ceremonial succession, Cushing determines that ‘the hand of man has been so intimately associated with the mind of man that it has moulded intangible thoughts no less than the tangible products of his brain’ (1892: 308). The topic of ‘handedness’, pursued only briefly in Baker and Cushing, was taken up more fully by French sociologist, and student of Durkheim, Robert Hertz in his essay ‘The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand’ (2007 [1909]). Hertz notes at the outset the asymmetrical neurological connection between the ‘preponderance of the right hand’ and the ‘greater development in man of the left cerebral hemisphere’ (2007: 30). Significantly, he was also the first to formulate the analogical association between the religious polarities of sacred and profane with the symbolic powers of the right hand and left hand, respectively. His study, grounded mainly in available ethnographic data on the Maori, proposes that practices of suppressing the left hand are an attempt to restrain the sorcery and occult powers

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associated with it. Subsequent structural and symbolic studies of handedness (i.e. Mines 1982; Needham 1960, 1967; TenHouten 1995) have offered stimulating insight into the constellation of relationships mapped between human bodies and religious beliefs; the complexity and contradiction inherent in collective representations; and evolving social status and power relations among neighbouring groups and castes in a changing world. Dedicated anthropological exploration of the wondrous connection between hand and brain, however, seems to have dissipated somewhere near the turn of the nineteenth century, the inquiry having been surrendered to the natural sciences.3 I therefore propose that social and cultural anthropology revisit the subject first expounded by Charles Bell and probed by Baker, Cushing and even Robert Hertz, but now drawing the role of handtools more squarely into the hand−brain puzzle, and taking on board what is being learned by other disciplines. In retaining the traditional strength of anthropology, fieldwork should be carried out in places of everyday work and activity in order to take full account of the impact of social interaction and environment on learning hand skills, developing personal style, and problem solving with tools and materials.

A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PHYSICAL HAND, GRASPING AND BIMANUAL COORDINATION The coupling of brain and hand within the weave of the nervous system makes it practicably impossible to draw any definitive functional boundary between them. Our fingertips have evolved to contain some of the densest concentrations of nerve endings in the body, and because of this, the ‘sense of touch’ is most powerfully associated with the hand. In the evolutionary history of the brain−hand connection, the development of human bipedalism was arguably the most critical stage.

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The freeing of our upper limbs and hands allowed for more complex manipulation of the physical environment. And with the evolution of the opposable thumb came the ability for articulated grasps and firmer grips of objects, and the manufacture of increasingly sophisticated artefacts and tools. These activities together multiplied and refined brain−hand links to the point that the hand has become the most physically adept and nimble part of the human anatomy, capable of more intricate and precise manipulation than that in the comparable extremity of any other animal. In Homo sapiens, the hand’s skeletal structure contains 27 bones – remarkably, the two hands together account for a little over a quarter of the total number of bones in the body. These include the carpal bones of the wrist, the metacarpals making up the palm, and the phalanges of each finger. The metacarpal at the base of the thumb is joined at the wrist’s multifaceted trapezium-carpal in such a way that the thumb can be rotated 90 degrees perpendicular to the palm and can be brought opposite to the fingers in order to pinch and grasp objects. These capacities make the thumb the most mobile digit of the hand and a crucial component in the history of human tool use and skilled hand work. Movement is made by muscles animated by electrochemical exchanges of signals between neurons. Hand movement is initiated in the shoulder muscles. Shoulder movement automatically anticipates and supports hand movements, ‘transporting’ the hand to its intended target (Wilson 1998: 73). The basic mechanics of the arm and fingers are operated by two kinds of specialized muscles: one producing flexion (e.g. biceps) and the other extension (e.g. triceps) of a single joint. More specifically, the so-called extrinsic muscles of the hand consist of the long flexors originating on the underside of the forearm and extending through the palm into the fingers; and the extensors originating on the topside of the forearm and extending into the fingers along the hand’s dorsum. Flexors and extensors allow for bending and

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straightening of the fingers, respectively. In combination, the extrinsic muscles are responsible for the wide range of possible hand motions, but their control over hand and digit movement is crude in comparison with the so-called intrinsic muscles of the hand. The intrinsics originate on the bones of the hand and are accountable for fine hand and precision finger movement, and for the coordination of such movement in parallel and sequence. In addition to extrinsics and intrinsics, the thumb is also composed of other small, specialized muscles, lending it its ‘opposable’ abilities and making possible a number of sophisticated grasp formations. Grasping is a ‘prehensile’ action in that it involves gripping and holding an object either partially or wholly with an extremity.4 Wilson distinguishes between ‘power grips’ and ‘precision grips’, defining the former as ‘any holding posture using the palm as a buttress’ (e.g. using a mallet), and the latter as using ‘any combination of thumb in opposition to fingers’ (e.g. squeezing pliers) (1998: 120). Grasping an object entails ‘a highly precise registration of neurological preparations for the biomechanical requirement of the task’ (Wilson 1998: 120). The arm must move the hand to the target guided by vision (or possibly sound or touch), and the hand must orient itself, simultaneously forming the palm, fingers and thumb in a manner appropriate for grasping, then manipulating, the target object. As contact is made, the fingers and palm receive haptic information and responsively adjust and fine tune the grip, and apply the necessary force to lift, then carry, manipulate or operate. Touch is both reactive and proactive, seeking tactile data that informs the shape of the grip, the application of pressure and the subsequent hand movements.5 The orientation of the hand, the configuration of the grip and the adjustments of palm, fingers and thumb differ considerably whether the target is a teacup or a hammer; or for that matter whether it is granny’s dainty bone china teacup, a sturdy coffee mug or a Chinese tea bowl.

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Tools and tasks demand a diversity of grasps, grips and dexterous manipulations, each configuration dependent upon the goal of the exercise, and the practice and experience of the individual. In discussing grips, Richard Sennett notes that with training and long hours of practice ‘grips develop in individuals just as they have developed in our species’ (2008: 152). Such individual stylization applies equally to dextrous manipulations, notably including the ways that we learn to coordinate the actions of our dominant and non-dominant hands in bimanual activities. Coordination, Sennett observes, is best achieved if both hands are engaged in learning the task from the start as opposed to incrementally mastering each segment, and subsequently trying to suture the actions together in a seamless performance (2008: 164−165). The reason for this, explains Wilson, is that the two unequal hands perform complementary functions, the non-dominant hand counterbalancing and ‘framing’ the activities of the dominant, or continually adjusting the position and orientation of the material being worked, or worked upon (1998: 159). ‘The spatial and temporal scales of movement of the two [roles] are different’, writes Wilson, ‘the dominant being ‘micrometric’ (i.e. lower in amplitude and faster in repetition) and the non-dominant being ‘macrometric’… [involving a wider] variety of improvised holds and move sequences’ (1998: 160−162). Take, for example, a right-handed carpenter using a paring chisel to remove waste from a simple housing joint.6 With her dominant hand, she grips the chisel handle with a power ‘pad-to-side’ hold, index finger and thumb pointing downward along the hardwood shaft to maximize control over the sharp cutting edge. As she moves the tip of the chisel into position along the bottom of the rectangular channel of the housing joint, she takes hold of the long, flat metal blade with her non-dominant left hand, applying a precision grip by lightly bracing its width between her thumb and four

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fingertips. Before beginning to pare away timber, she carefully aligns the chisel tip with the edges of the channel, relying on sight and the ‘feel’ conveyed by tool to hands, adjusting her posture, position and cutting angle accordingly. Monitoring and adjustment will proceed in this way throughout the activity, responding also to the sound of the blade and the character of the timber. Once started, her dominant right hand and forearm control the angle, rhythm and force of the backward-and-forward thrust of the cutting edge along the wood surface, and the left lends increased command over the directionality of the cut and over the sequential application and removal of force to the material. While the grip and movement performed by her right hand remain largely unchanged throughout the exercise, she transfers the fingers on her left up and down the length of the blade to balance force with accuracy. Her left hand is also periodically employed to remove wood shavings from the channel (accompanied by a blast of air issued from pursed lips) and to feel its surfaces for smoothness, shape and depth. By Wilson’s account, the complex but generally repetitive muscular tasks performed by the carpenter’s dominant hand are, to some extent, ‘automized’ by her brain, thereby requiring minimal sensory monitoring, whereas the non-dominant hand moves in ‘supportive anticipation … conforming its movements both to the behaviour of an external object and to the action of the other hand, to ensure that the object and the handheld tool will intercept at the intended time and place’ (1998: 162).

HAND−EYE COORDINATION Skilled handwork involves fast and fluid exchanges of various kinds of sensory information, motor action feedback, semantic knowledge, and reflective thought on goals, present actions and tasks completed (see Ingold 2006). When this exchange of action, information and thought is synchronized,

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a woodworker, for example, experiences a sense of unity to what he sees, hears, feels and does with tools and materials. As with athletes, the carpenters I trained with referred to this experience as ‘being in the zone’ or ‘the Zen of woodworking’– body, mind and soul fully absorbed in the present event of the task. Even when certain tool-wielding actions are mastered and the neuromuscular system performs them in a seemingly automatic way, they become ‘routinised but not mindless’ (Rose 2004: 78), for the carpenter is acting not merely upon, but with materials and with tools whose inherent qualities ‘respond’ to the work. Responses are perceived and processed by the senses, which, in turn, shape reflective thought and guide the carpenter’s continual, and usually subtle, adjustment of posture, bimanual activity and force. In his discussion of carpentry, Mike Rose writes that the biomechanical skills involved in the craft ‘build on and enhance basic sensory, kinaesthetic, and cognitive abilities that emerge through natural development’ (2004: 76). In Cristina Grasseni’s study of ‘skilled vision’ among Northern Italian cattle breeders, for example, she argues that the long apprenticeship beginning in childhood includes learning to actively search for certain kinds of information in the daily living environment, cultivating a distinct way of seeing both bovine and landscape (2007). Skilled vision is also coveted among woodworkers. ‘Having a good eye is synonymous with being a good carpenter’, reports Wendy Millroy, who signed up as an apprentice furniture-maker during her ethnomathematics fieldwork in South Africa (1992: 173). Though woodworkers rely on touch, hearing and even smell to monitor and adjust their operations, skilled vision is commonly employed for assessing the figure of timber, for judging smoothness, straightness, angles, symmetry and proportions, and for approximating dimensions and volumes – or in Millroy’s term, for ‘mathematizing’ (1992). In addition, skilled vision is critical to good hand−eye coordination.

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The subject of hand−eye coordination in tool-using activities gives rise to an important set of related questions: How do we grasp what we see? How is information supplied by vision regarding ‘what a tool is’ and ‘where it is located’7 integrated with motor cognition? More precisely, how does visual information serve as input to the coordinated motor operations involved: first, in delivering the hand to the tool and forming an appropriate grasp, and secondly, transferring the hand and, more to the point, the functional end of the tool to a precise location on the material or artefact being worked? The short answer is that the brain−body must solve the ‘correspondence problem’, meaning that it must integrate signals from vision and haptics in a manner that combines information referring to the same object located in space in dynamic relation to the moving hand (Downey 2010: S28; Takahashi, Diedrichsen and Watt 2009). But, again, how does this occur? And how is hand−eye coordination honed through training and practice? Or, conversely, diminished through injury, slackening regimes of practice, changes to design, technologies and procedures, or the inevitable fact of ageing and deterioration? To my mind, there is an obvious role for anthropology and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in addressing these questions.

EXTENDING THE BODY Where the tool has its stories, the hand has its gestures … . But ‘bringing into use’ is not a matter of attaching an object with certain attributes to a body with certain anatomical features; it is rather joining a story to the appropriate gestures. (Tim Ingold 2006: 73)

Handtools in use supplement and extend, and are psychologically incorporated into, the physiology of limbs. Carpentry handtools, in particular, enable us to execute a large number of actions with and upon wood more efficiently and with higher levels of precision than by hand and arm alone (M. Rose 2004: 78−79; see also Weber, Dixon and Llorente

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1993: 485−486). These include pounding, tapping, pulling, cutting, chopping, carving, bending, shaping, boring, scraping, smoothing, bracing, holding, pinching, cramping, joining and measuring. Language contains preliminary clues to the embodied relations we have forged with carpentry tools. In English, for example, the proper names for a variety of specialized tools, tool parts or common wood joints refer metaphorically to human or animal anatomies, thereby inciting some level of somatic identification and abetting a more immediate, ‘visceral’ understanding of their form, function or fit.8 General category terms such as saw, hammer, chisel and plane are both noun and verb in a number of languages,9 describing equally the kind of handtool, its function and the action associated with using it. The fact that proper noun and functional verb share the same lexical term (or root) may be a contributing factor to the neurological finding that an area in the left temporal lobe associated with processing action words is also activated when naming tools (Martin et al. 1996). In a neurological experiment using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), Grafton, Fadriga, Arbib and Risolatti (1997) confirmed that both ‘seeing tools’ and ‘silently naming them’ activate the left dorsal premotor cortex in equal measure. However, ‘silently naming tool functions’ (i.e. ‘hammering’) increases activation of the left dorsal premotor cortex, and additionally activates another area in the premotor cortex as well as the supplementary motor area (SMA) associated with planning and coordinating complex movements like bimanual tool use.10 They concluded from these results that motor cognition plays a significant role in assisting our recognition, identification and understanding of objects that have a ‘motor valence’. In other words, motor cognition is part and parcel of our meaning-making processes, and the information it supplies is incorporated into the mental representations we entertain about artefacts like tools. After all, the meaning of a tool is not fully accounted for by the object’s appearance, but centrally

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includes its function which is animated by a user in combination with materials. Thus, to think of a smoothing plane implies not only thoughts of it as an object but as an object-in-use. ‘No object considered purely in and for itself, in terms of its intrinsic attributes alone, can be a tool’ writes Ingold. ‘To describe a thing as a tool is to place it in relation to other things within a field of activity in which it can exert a certain effect’ (2006: 71). Elizabeth Grosz similarly observed that ‘it is only insofar as the object ceases to remain an object and becomes a medium, a vehicle for impressions and expressions, that it can be used as an instrument or tool’ (1994: 80). Tools are already a part of the world that we are born into: they have a history of use, and the basic properties and function of many have changed little since ancient times (Mercer 2003). A familiar tool whose ‘story’ we know invites us, so to speak, to take it up, becoming a ‘vehicle for learning about the properties of materials themselves’ (Rose 2004: 79), a means of problem solving, or an enabler for modifying and transforming our physical, and possibly social, world. This quality that invokes even the most fleeting urge to pick up and use is the tool’s ‘motor valence’ – a property powerfully conjured up in John Updike’s poem, Tools (2003): […] Tools wait obliviously to be used: the pliers, notched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench with its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough to take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit still fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought; […]

Close sensory engagement with tools can result in their temporary incorporation into a sense of what belongs to our body, or ‘body schema’. The body schema is a nonconscious system regulating the proprioceptive sense of our body’s posture and movement, and dynamically updated by information supplied by all sensory modalities,

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including visual, auditory, haptic and motor (Holmes and Spence 2004). A changing sense of what constitutes the body has corresponding effect on the body’s relation to its surrounding space. Indeed, the brain’s representation of peripersonal space (a sense of space within reaching distance) and extrapersonal space (the sense of space beyond reaching distance) are shown by cognitive experiments to be remapped when using a tool. The tool, as an extension of the mechanics of body in space, extends one’s sense of ‘nearness’ (Berti and Frassinetti 2000). Similarly, peri-hand space in which vision and touch are integrated is expanded during tool use, and directly correlated with the length of the tool, and more specifically, with its functionally effective length (Farne, Iriki and Ladavas 2005). The results of experiments carried out by Takahashi et al. (2009) further indicate that when using a handheld tool, the brain treats the haptic signal as though it were coming from the operational end of the tool, not the hand. This allows the brain to combine haptic and visual information coming from the very same distal location (i.e. the head of the nail being clasped by the jaws of the pliers), thereby solving the previously introduced correspondence problem. I conclude with a final example. Results of recent neuroscience experiments on grasping imply that when employing a handheld tool such as pliers to grasp another object, motor representations of the way that we would grasp that object with our own hand are instantiated to guide the tool’s grip orientation. fMRI data indicate that the same areas of the motor cortex were activated when planning a grasp either with the hand or with the mechanics of a handheld tool. This strongly suggests that motor-based mental representations for manual actions performed directly with our biological effectors provide the operational basis for orienting and manipulating the clasping or gripping components of a handheld tool, thereby facilitating the ‘transfer of skill’ between hand and tool (Jacobs, Danielmeier and Frey 2010; see also Umilta et al. 2008). During use, the tool

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becomes one with the skilled practice of mind−body.

CONCLUSION The complexity of the brain−hand−tool relationship lays to rest any lingering credence in mind−body dualism, and goes one step further by disclosing the inseparable relation between mind, body and environment. Importantly, it makes plain the unfeasibility of a fully ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ body. The physical, neurological and psychological convergence of human and machine makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine where the body begins and ends. In their Assembling Bodies exhibition catalogue,11 curators Anita Herle, Mark Elliot and Rebecca Empson observe that ‘[t]echnologies intended to augment or enhance the body often extend the body [through time and space] beyond its corporeal boundaries. They do not make the body ‘whole’, but add to it in a process that has no preordained end’ (2009: 77). The relation between brain, hand and tool is at once evolutionary, physical, neurological, psychological, cultural and social in nature. This multifaceted relation holds the key to what makes us human. Anthropology’s continued involvement in exploring the everyday manifestations of this remarkable union is essential to the growth and development of the discipline’s expertise in the related fields of craft, skill, technology, work and sport, as well as to its ongoing contributions in the fields of medicine and health, and gender, sexuality and the body.

NOTES 1 ‘Building-craft Knowledge and Apprenticeship in Britain’ (2005−2008), funded by ESRC Fellowship RES-000-27-0159. 2 Exceptions include, for example, drinking straws, which are manipulated, at least in part, with the mouth. Upper-limb amputees also learn to use their feet and mouths to perform many of the tasks that handed individuals habitually execute with tools.

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3 Exceptions include a number of excellent anthropological studies of the use of hand gesture and deictic pointing in communication, including, for example, Edwin Hutchins and Leysia Palen (1993), John Haviland (2000) and Nick Enfield (2005). 4 Prehensility is displayed not only by hands but also by toes, monkey tails, elephant trunks and the snouts of marsupials. In differentiation from prehensile movements, non-prehensile ones are hand and finger interactions with an object, instrument or material that do not involve grasping. 5 See Sennett (2008: 152) for a more detailed discussion of the proactive and reactive properties of touch. 6 A housing joint is a simple rectangular channel cut across the grain of a board that ‘houses’ the end of another board slotted in perpendicularly (e.g. a shelf in a bookcase). 7 My survey of the brain science literature turned up an underlying assumption that human spatial understanding is universally manifested from an egocentric perspective. However, ethnographic studies of spatial relativity (i.e. Levinson 1996; Senft 1997) reveal that some individuals or cultural groups display a strong propensity to calculate the location of an object or thing relative to neighbouring objects or to absolute frames of reference (see also Downey, this volume). 8 For example: snipe bill plane; swan neck chisel; shoulder plane; bullnose plane; granny’s tooth plane; head, striking face and claw of a hammer; saw tooth; cheek of a frame saw; mouth, throat, frog, toe horn and sole of a bench plane; neck of a chisel; jaws of a ratchet brace; tusk peg; dovetail joint; tongue and groove joint; finger joints; male and female components of a mortise-and-tenon joint. 9 In Arabic and French, for example, object noun and action verb are derived from the same root. In Arabic nouns are derived from the verb form: saw(n) (v) hammer (n) (v) chisel (n) (v) plane (n) (v) French saw (n) scie (v) scier; hammer (n) marteau (v) marteler; chisel (n) ciseau (v) ciseler; plane (n) rabot (v) raboter. 10 The premotor cortex and supplementary motor area are part of the overall motor cortex located at the posterior of the frontal lobe. 11 Assembling Bodies: art, science and imagination was held at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, March 2009 to November 2010.

REFERENCES Baker, Frank 1888. ‘Anthropological Notes on the Human Hand’, in The American Anthropologist, vol. A1, issue 1, pp. 51−76.

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Bell, Charles 2009 [1833]. The Hand: Its mechanisms and vital endowments as evincing design. Breinigsville, PA: General Books LLC. Berti, Anna and Francesca Frassinetti 2000. ‘When Far becomes Near: remapping of space by tool use’, in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(3): 415−420. Coy, M.W. (ed.) 1989. Apprenticeship: From theory to method and back again. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Crawford, Matthew 2009. Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work. London: Penguin. Cushing, Frank Hamilton 1892. ‘Manual Concepts: a study of the influence of hand-usage on cultural growth’, in American Anthropologist, 5(4): 289−318. Dilley, R. 1986. ‘Tukolor Weavers and the Organisation of Their Craft in Village and Town’, in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 56(2): 123−147. Downey, Greg 2005. Learning Capoeira: lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downey, Greg 2010. ‘Practice without Theory: a neuroanthropological perspective on embodied learning’, in T. Marchand (ed.), Making Knowledge, special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S22−S40. Enfield, N.J. 2005. ‘The Body as a Cognitive Artifact in Kinship Representations: hand gesture diagrams by speakers of Lao’, in Current Anthropology 46(1): 51−80. Farne, Alessandro, Atsushi Iriki and Elisabetta Ladavas 2005. ‘Shaping Multisensory ActionSpace with Tools: evidence from patience with crossmodal extinctions’, in Neuropsychologia, 43(2): 238−248. Frey, Scott 2008. ‘Tool Use, Communicative Gesture and Cerebral Asymmetries in the Modern Human Brain’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B − Biological Sciences, 363(1499): 1951−1957. Goody, E. 1989. ‘Learning, Apprenticeship and the Division of Labour’, in M.W. Coy (ed.), Apprenticeship: From theory to method and back again. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 233−256. Grafton, S.T., L. Fadriga, M.A. Arbib, M.A. and G. Risolatti 1997. ‘Premotor Cortex Activation During Observation and Naming of Familiar Tools’, in NeuroImage, 6, 231–236. Grasseni, Cristina 2007. ‘Communities of Practice and Forms of Life: towards a rehabilitation of vision’, in M. Harris (ed.), Ways of Knowing: New approaches in the anthropology of experience and learning. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 203−221.

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Greenfield, Patricia 1991. ‘Language, Tools and Brain: the ontogeny and phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential behavior’, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14(4): 531−551. Grosz, Elizabeth 1994. Volatile Bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haviland, John 2000. ‘Pointing, Gesture Spaces, and Mental Maps’, in David McNeill (ed.), Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13−46. Herle, Anita, Mark Elliot and Rebecca Empson (eds) 2009. Assembling Bodies: Art, science and imagination. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Hertz, Robert 2007 [1909]. ‘The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: a study of religious polarity’, in Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar (eds), Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the anthropology of material life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 30−40. Herzfeld, Michael 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and artifice in the global hierarchy of value. London: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, Nicholas and Charles Spence 2004. ‘The Body Schema and the Multisensory Representation(s) of Peripersonal Space’, in Cognitive Processing, 5(2): 94−105. Hutchins, Edwin and Leysia Palen 1993. ‘Constructing Meaning from Space, Gesture, and Speech’, in Lauren Resnick, Roger Säljö, Clotilde Pontecorvo and Barbara Burge (eds), Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on situated cognition. Berlin: Springer, pp. 23−40. Ingold, Tim 2006. ‘Walking the Plank: meditations on a process of skill’, in J.R. Dakers (ed.), Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an epistemological framework. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 65−80. Jacobs, Stéphane, Claudia Daniel Meier and Scott Frey 2010. ‘Human Anterior Intraparietal and Ventral Premotor Cortices Support Representations of Grasping with the Hand or a Novel Tool’, in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(11): 2594−2608. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leakey, Mary D. 1971. Olduvai Gorge: Excavations in beds I and II, 1960−1963. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen 1996. ‘Relativity in Spatial Conception and Description’, in J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity.

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Mines, Mattison 1982. ‘Models of Caste and the Lefthand Division in South India’, in American Ethnologist, 9(3): 467−484. Needham, Rodney 1960. ‘The Left Hand of the Mugwe: an analytical note on the structure of Meru symbolism’, in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 30(1): 20−33. Needham, Rodney 1967. ‘Right and Left in Nyoro Symbolic Classification’, in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 37(4): 425−452. O’Connor, Erin 2005. ‘Embodied Knowledge: the experience of meaning and the struggle towards proficiency in glassblowing’, in Ethnography, 6(2): 183−204. Paradise, Ruth and Barbara Rogoff 2009. ‘Side by Side: learning by observing and pitching in’, in Ethos, 37(1): 102−138. Peeters, R., L. Simone, K. Nelissen, et al. 2009. ‘The Representation of Tool Use in Humans and Monkeys: common and uniquely human features’, in Journal of Neuroscience, 29(37): 11523−11539. Portisch, Anna 2010. ‘The Craft of Skilful Learning: Kazakh women’s everyday craft practices in western Mongolia’, in T. Marchand (ed.), Making Knowledge, special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S62−S79. Preiss, David and Robert Sternberg 2005. ‘Technologies for Working Intelligence’, in R. Sternberg and D. Preiss (eds), Intelligence and Technology: The impact of tools on the nature and development of human abilities. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 183−208. Rice, Tom 2010. Learning to Listen: auscultation and the transmission of auditory knowledge’, in T. Marchand (ed.), Making Knowledge, special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S41−S61. Rose, Mike 2004. The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. London: Penguin.

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Rose, Walter 2001 [1937]. The Village Carpenter. Hertford: Stobart Davies. Senft, Gunter 1997. Referring to Space: Studies in Austronesian & Papuan languages. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sennett, Richard 2008. The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane. Sinclair, Simon 1997. Making Doctors: An institutional apprenticeship. Oxford: Berg. Stoller, Paul 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The senses in anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Takahashi, Chie, Jorn Diedrichsen and Simon Watt 2009. ‘Integration of Vision and Haptics during Tool Use’, in Journal of Vision 9(6): 3.1−13. Taylor, Jeff 1996. Tools of the Trade: The art and craft of carpentry. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. TenHouten, Warren 1995. ‘The Eclipse of the Sacred and the Paradoxical Liberation of the Right Hand’, in Anthropology of Consciousness, 6(2): 15−26. Umilta, M., L. Escola, I. Intrskirveli, et al. 2008. ‘When Pliers Become Fingers in the Monkey Motor System’, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(6): 2209−2213. Updike, John 2003. ‘Tools’, in Poetry, 182(3): 134. Wacquant, Loïc 2004. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Washburn, Sherwood 1960. ‘Tools and Human Evolution’, in Scientific American, 203(3): 63−75. Weber, Robert J., Stacey Dixon and Antolin M. Llorente 1993. ‘Studying Invention: the hand tool as a model system’, in Science, Technology and Human Values, 18(4): 480−505. Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language and human culture. New York: Pantheon Books.

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SECTION 4.2

After Development – Environment, Food, Energy, Disaster

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4.2.1 Environment and Society: Political Ecologies and Moral Futures James Fairhead and Melissa Leach

Environment is fast becoming the political issue of our age around which new forms of morality, sociality and governance are emerging. As Geertz long ago articulated, technological advance ‘ties us in even more closely with the habitat that we both make and inhabit, that having more impact upon it we in turn cause it to have more impact on us’ (Geertz 1973: 199). In an ‘era of climate change’, scientific, technological and market triumphalism interplay with rapidly emerging risks, uncertainties and anxieties. More than ever, the reciprocal interactions between society and environment require research and reflection, and anthropologists can draw in newly productive ways on a rich canon. We are concerned here, however, that aspects of anthropological argument also risk becoming part of assemblages that satisfy elite environmental interests, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the effect of marginalizing and impoverishing others, whether in rural or urban worlds. If anthropology is to offer prospects for more open, inclusive forms of understanding and debate, this will require analysis and engagement that connect understandings of moral orders and associated

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environmental imaginaries more firmly to the political economies and ecologies that shape environmental action.

ENVIRONMENT AND MORALITY One legacy of the long tradition of work by environmental anthropologists is an appreciation that encounters with the environment and the prosperity, fertility and health derived from it are moralized encounters. Anthropologists have shown not only how technically sophisticated most environmental practices are but also how they are entwined with moral expectations about how people relate to each other and to the ecological and political forces that govern productivity (Croll and Parkin 1993; Descola 1996). Exemplars span all kinds of environmental practices, from the extraction of gold and silver (Clark 1993; Biersack 1999; Harriss 2000; Sallnow 2000; Luning 2008), to the hunting of wild animals (Ingold 1996; Leach 2000; Nadasdy 2007; Vitebsky 2005), the collecting of good honey (Novellino 2002) and the securing of a good

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crop (Gottleib 1982; Jacobson-Widding and van Beek 1990; Lansing 1991; Moore et al. 1999). Mining disasters, hunting failure, drought and crop loss are often as easily attributable to social faults and human spite as to technical failure. Whereas many exemplars of this emerge from the study of localities far removed from centres of global calculation, others discern the mutual embeddedness of the moral and technical dimensions in more hi-tech and globalized domains (Haraway 1986, 1997), in conceptions of risk and systems failure (Wynne 1996), or in social and moral reactions to genetic modification (Stone 2010). That technological encounters such as those that occur in agricultural development projects are also moral encounters can be seen, for instance, in the ways that fertilizer or genetically modified seeds are received (Fairhead 1994; Stone 2010). How people find their way through fickle and uncertain environmental processes is not, then, merely the stuff of technical debate, but calls on wider moral orders. Disputes over what is happening to environments (and why) implicate the social and moral dimensions that are enwrapped within different explanations and arguments (Wynne, 1992; Aisher 2007; Hulme 2009). A major contribution of these anthropologically influenced works, however, is not simply to reveal the contested politics of environmental knowledge and morality within societies but also to show how differences of opinion and disputes are inseparable from political-economic questions. This is as visible at a micro level in the different opinions men and women may have within the same family over why crops are failing, as in globalized debates over the health and environmental implications of agricultural biotechnologies that are animated by different corporate, government and activist lobbies. At stake are tensions and struggles for control over resources and markets, whether this is in everyday intra-household negotiations or in national and global pathways leading to different possible agricultural futures.

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Whereas the economic positionality associated with particular modes of reasoning is sometimes relatively straightforward to discern, this is not always the case. Take, for example, the currently fashionable concept of ‘ecosystem services’, which has become an organizing concept in environmental policy discourse since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). This concept has been appealing in its recognition of ‘cultural services’ that environments provide as well as the provisioning, regulating and supporting services that they afford. It also emphasizes the interconnections and mutual dependence of these elements. Yet, as a mode of reasoning, the concept carries invisible baggage: its language of services is deeply compatible with monetary valuation and commoditization, and it serves to divide and distance humanity from nature, which becomes something to act on and gain services from. The latter is a kind of distanciation – a phenomenon whose effects have been of deep concern to anthropologists. For example, Ingold (1993) argues that such distanciation lures us into an ontology of indirect representation rather than direct engagement. He explores, in particular, how the concept of ‘spaceship earth’ privileges a global environmental science and politics, which renders us myopic to the localities that we all actually inhabit. It produces a distanciation of the environment in which we are all asked to think global when we act local. As Jasanoff (2010) puts it in relation to climate change, global science ‘detaches global fact from local value, projecting a new, totalizing image of the world as it is, without regard for the layered investments that societies have made in worlds as they wish them to be’. Whether as part of global visions, or taking more national or regional forms (the ecosystem, the environmental hotspot, the forest, the park), such representations risk delivering the environment as out there, to be manipulated, protected or managed in a modernist and mechanistic way. Cases abound where these ways of ‘seeing’ and of representing ecosystems in turn

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marginalize and disempower the understandings and ways of life of those who do live and engage in these landscapes on a daily basis, and outside of a global frame. In observing this, our objection is not simply a romantic scream at a disenchanted world, but a realization that a new and dangerous enchantment is emerging, one that is enabling and legitimating far more pernicious forms of political economy in which global business in alliance with global environmentalism reaches in new ways into all of our places and ecologies. Our point is that global perspectives do not risk just being disembedded but are newly embedded in the operation of particular, and sometimes extractive, political-economic logics.

POLITICAL ECONOMIES AND ECOLOGIES Much early environmental anthropology neglected the encounters with resource extraction that were part and parcel of colonial encounter. The focus was more on how people made livings in ‘other’ places and concerned debates on their sustainability – which themselves were often framed by colonial governance anxieties. Were ‘savages’ environmentally noble or not? If not, what should be done about it? Did resource use without private ownership lead to a tragedy of the commons, for instance?). Yet since the late twentieth century the centrality of resource extraction in the peripheries of circuits of global power have become ever more apparent and a focus of anthropological work (Ballard 2003), from the gasfields of Bangladesh (Gardner 2012) and bauxite mines of Orissa (Padel and Das 2006; Mathur 2009), to gold from New Guinea (Kirsch 2002; Weiner 2010), coltan from Congo (Fairhead 2005; Mantz 2008) and timber from Asia and Africa (Tsing 2005; Hardin 2010). Anthropological studies have engaged and merged with those from other disciplines – geography, economics, development studies – to track the social and political dimensions of global−local chains

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of appropriation and connection, and the political ecologies, curses and conflicts involved (Peluso and Watts 2001; Ferguson 2005). That the mineral wealth attracting global corporations happens to be in global peripheries may seem an unfortunate coincidence. But the twenty-first century is revealing a much less coincidental logic, one in which these regions provide new resources precisely because of their peripheral status. These are the resources that feed new global and national concerns with environmental protection and security and the new markets that are unfolding with these, opening the way for new forms of appropriation, or ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead et al. 2012). Places such as the rain forests of Southeast Asia, West Africa, Madagascar, the Amazon and New Guinea have become hotspots for the protection of global biodiversity – the latter constructed as a hedge against uncertain global futures and as yet unknown resource needs. The very same forests are now also embroiled in the emerging carbon markets, targeted for protection as part of schemes for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) and to offset carbon emissions (e.g. Ferguson 2009). Other ‘peripheral’ lands – those less obviously biodiverse or offering carbon sequestration potential − now find themselves the target of other forms of appropriation which also derive their force from global environmental legitimacy. Thus, for example, large regions of the world are being drawn into large-scale biofuel schemes and ‘land grabs’ associated with them to produce ‘climate friendly’ energy – in the process enabling environmental security to dovetail with national energy security in energy-intense metropoles (farmlandgrab.org). Other land is now being appropriated directly or through the market for large-scale commercial farming to meet national food security concerns in geopolitically more powerful regions, including the economies of Asia and the Middle East (Cotula et al. 2009). Yet, even these other

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land grabs are being justified on global environmental grounds; on the way that new, efficient commercial agriculture – often with genetic modification – offers the world an intensification opportunity to prevent biodiversity loss elsewhere, and on the broader ecological grounds of bringing population food needs and land availability into balance at a global level. There are innumerable policy reports suggesting the conditions under which the new financial flows associated with these developments could support the economic interests of existing landusers (e.g. World Bank 2010). Neither history nor political economy offers optimism that they will. Although the mineral, oil and timber extraction industries have historically been associated practically and discursively with environmental destruction, these industries have also been able to recast themselves. Through emergent discourses and practices of corporate responsibility, many of their activities are now being justified in terms of their contributions to environmental protection, security and sustainability. In particular, the extractive industries have managed to integrate with global environmental organizations. Indeed, many major global conservation initiatives are themselves heavily funded by mining operations (e.g. visible in Conservation International’s Business and Sustainability Council). Innumerable alliances have emerged between the extractive industries and conservation organizations in these peripheries (such as between the WorldWide Fund for Nature and Shell in Gabon). It is proving much easier for minerals firms to get access to land in conservation areas where local people have already been disenfranchised and where nation-states have more ability to cut land deals. The rapid emergence of environmental dimensions to corporate social responsibility in the extractive industries is partly an acknowledgement of this process. It is not only the oil and mineral businesses that have been profiting from global environmental discourses but also the business of

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conservation itself. Conservation activities have been liberalized (with state activities subcontracting to private businesses and consultancies), and conservation organizations have increasingly adopted business models. They are extremely well organized in lobbying for state and public support (Corson 2010). Among the funders are major philanthropists, as well as a myriad of minor philanthropists keen to part with a small amount to guard a hectare or two of rain forest. Philanthro-capitalism (Bishop and Green 2008) is becoming philanthro-conservation (Brockington 2009). One dimension of this business arena concerns the emerging carbon markets and the huge range of business and companies they have spawned, finding mission and profit in providing carbon offsetting and consultancy services. Thus, no sooner was the concept of ‘biochar’ born of Amazonian research into the enriched dark earth soils that are the legacy of large pre-Hispanic populations (e.g. Woods et al. 2009), than it has been coopted by the foraging companies and consultancy firms seeking profit in scaling up carbon capture in the peripheries of the world as a geo-engineering solution to climate change. They find in it a ‘triple win’ that addresses not only carbon but also energy and food sustainability problems, in which, as one such company put it: Biochar can be produced from agricultural and forest wastes sustainably worldwide. Large scale deployment of biochar in agriculture can deliver gigatons of annual carbon sequestration while improving farm productivity, making us all healthier and wealthier. (Venn Earth Group LLC, http:// www.venearth.com/)

Biochar, thus framed, exemplifies an emerging political economy of promise around profit-generating technological solutions to global environmental problems. This new business landscape has formed into a regime, which is, in turn, shaping futures (Leach et al. 2012). Anthropologists are only beginning to grapple with these emergent enviro-business

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dynamics and their societal implications. Exploring who the ‘us all’ is that is becoming healthier, wealthier and more environmentally secure and what material interests, landscape engagement and alternative imaginaries are being occluded will be part of the agenda. Although this literature does lead us to global peripheries and to ethnographies of them, the ‘periphery’ is no longer so easily distinguished geographically. Environmental arguments play out in slum clearances in the urban settings of poor countries, conducted in the name of environmental cleanliness but obscuring the enormous economic interest in land value (e.g. Rademacher 2008). Moving into the metropoles themselves, powerful assemblages delivering genetically modified organism technologies that are now justified in terms of land efficiency and conservation, as well as global food security, are in battle with consumer anxieties about environmental and health uncertainties and corporate-led agricultural pathways (e.g. Wynne 2001). In short, marginalization and disenfranchisement associated with global environmentalist arguments can and do occur as much in the growing urban centres of rich industrialized nations as they do in rural settings in the global South. The point is not to damn environmentalism, but to acknowledge that we are no longer seeing a clash of an environmentalism with an extractivism − but a clash of environmentalisms, which anthropological research is both exploring and contributing to.

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF ENCOUNTER A vibrant field of anthropological study has considered the encounters between a ‘global green’ and those who inhabit the places it values. This has been most developed in research on the encounters between authorities and inhabitants around national parks and protected areas (e.g. Fisiy 1997; Brosius 1999a,b; Chatty and Colchester 2002; Anderson and Berglund 2003; West 2006;

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Keller 2008; Agrawal and Redford 2009). This tradition of work overlaps strongly with both cultural geographies (e.g. Neumann 1998) and with anthropologies of development encounters (e.g. Mosse 2005). How anthropologists and others have theorized these ‘parks and people’ and ‘projects and people’ encounters will help elucidate the encounters thrown up by twenty-first century eco-businesses and land grabs. Their studies have explored the grounded social and environmental worlds, lived landscapes in all their moral and ecological complexity, and alternative imaginaries and political ecologies of encounter that will be important for discerning transformations wrought by ‘environmentalist’ businesses. In particular, such studies draw attention to domination and extraction, to resistance and ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985), to the more agentive ‘aikido’ where people selectively appropriate and redirect powerful elements of global assemblages and play creatively with the power of external agencies (Tsing 2005; Li 2007), and the emergence of new environmental subjectivities out of encounters (Agrawal 2005). Located ethnographies give attention to the local agency shaping such unfolding encounters. Yet it is methodologically important also to build comparative studies in order not to miss the more regular effects that seem to be occurring across many localities under the combined weight of globally framed biodiversity conservation, carbon capture, and food and energy-related ‘land grabs’: the progressive reduction in the room for local manoeuvre and scope to shape the terms of debate, the progressive erosion of resource rights, and progressive material losses. As environmental anthropology becomes involved with these processes, it confronts new and difficult traps and dilemmas. Anthropology framed within the conceptual apparatus of global environmentalism, and anticipating its readership and impact there, could as we have indicated be an unwitting handmaiden to a new political ecology of impoverishment. Yet, an anthropology

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attentive merely to local perspectives in these encounters can both miss the importance of bigger ecological pictures, and in its critiques, risks playing into laissez-faire approaches that allow both a more conventional, environment-disregarding capital and local ‘tragedies of the commons’ to proceed unaddressed. Located critiques of this sort thus lose power or salience at a higher scale. They are too vulnerable to counter-arguments that policies for the global good will bring local good in the longer term – or that a few peripheral places and people are necessary sacrifices or ‘trade-offs’ in the policies that ‘we all’ need. The anthropological study of environment and society is ever-increasingly being configured by these tensions. As we address modern and future relations between society and the environment, our research will need to encompass less easily located people and processes who are important to any locale. These should include the more diffuse worlds of those who supply the credit (banks, venture-capitalists, sovereign funds) for example, and the financial transfers linked to carbon trading and REDD. It will need to include the conduct of environmental science, and the social and economic relations of its production (Fairhead and Leach 2003). Global assessment processes – from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and beyond − implicate social and political relations and meanings in both process and outcomes (Miller and Erickson 2006; Scoones 2009). It would be hard to study contemporary social/ecological relations in a global locality without considering how dispersed publics participate through media, education, the Internet and advertising, as well as through science and policy. Environmental experience is implicated more than ever in every act of consumption. This is not just in the studies of fair trade and product certification and regulation, for instance, which have become

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increasingly interesting to environmental and economic anthropology, but also in studies of the broader consumption experience, including the consumption of cheaper products which are not so certified, but whose social meanings have becoming reshaped by these new distinctions. Thus, standard supermarket chicken in the United Kingdom is reconfigured as ‘not organic’ or ‘not free range’, and cheap imported fruit is reconfigured as ‘nonlocal with a weighty carbon footprint’. The weight of study in environmental anthropology has tended to be focused less on these dimensions, than on ‘globalization from below’ (Appadurai 2000), whether due to the appeal of these arenas to researchers, or to the difficulties of research access in other areas. The social movements and virtual social networking that has emerged around environmental movements have a tendency to embrace wide interest, including that of wandering researchers. It is in these movements that alternative ideals and pathways to sustainability are often imagined and enacted. Anthropologists have embraced, and often aligned their political sensibilities, with environmental social movements – whether around indigenous rights and lifestyles, dissent to mining or dams, or other claims, blurring boundaries between anthropology and advocacy. Others have studied the broader networks, alliances and fora amongst such movements – such as the Bolivian-convened ‘World People’s Conference on Climate Change’ (Lindisfarne 2010). Yet these studies themselves reveal − and sometimes become unwittingly embroiled in − complex located sensitivities surrounding locality, identity, sovereignty and internationality.

ENVIRONMENTAL MORALITIES AND SOCIAL DIVIDES Political authority in many societies has been upheld and legitimated through the capacity to ensure the productivity of environments and the prosperity derived from them.

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Classic studies from Africa, for example, relate the political importance of managing rain in central Africa (Schoffeleers 1978; Lan 1985; Sanders 1994; Gewald 2001), the capacity of land chiefs to set ‘unbalanced’ environments back on track to restore the productivity of crops and hunting in Guinea (Fairhead and Leach 1996), and even the intentional destabilization of an enemy’s environment in times of conflict in the precolonial politics of the Great Lakes (d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964). Claims to environmental control are, in such cases, part and parcel of social hierarchy – between chiefs and commoners, landowners and strangers, or men and women. This observation returns us to the argument we made at the start of this chapter: that ideas of environmental order and how to achieve it are integral to moral and political order, and social and economic hierarchy. These insights, however, are by no means restricted to rural African worlds. As we have tried to relate, the mutual construction of environmental and political orders is also visible in conservation and eco-business encounters, both in the claims to environmental control of powerful intervening agencies, and in the alternative ecological readings and reasoning associated with the societies and polities that resist, subvert and challenge them. Environmental understandings themselves, whether in different strands of science, citizen science or ethnoscience, interlock with social values and meanings (Leach et al. 2005). The experience of colonization and resistance to it was often most sharply felt and articulated through encounters with colonial forestry and conservation apparatus. Now, however, global and neoliberal environmentalism is fast becoming a central prism through which wider experiences of disempowerment and disenfranchisement are refracted (e.g. Ervine 2010). As new environmental moralities and green politics are developing in European settings, too, new social and economic hierarchies are being felt: between those who have the resources

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and social positionality to support the consumption practices of an eco-friendly lifestyle that addresses carbon footprints, and those who do not. A new generation of anthropologists is attentive to the forging of new forms of society and community configured by environmental action and practices: whether in British ‘transition towns’, the practice of permaculture, or sustainable housing (Veteto and Lockyer 2008). They are also noting how environmental and climate change, and their media and Internet coverage, are generating new forms of globally oriented citizenship, alliance and sympathy. How what might be seen as a creative vanguard in sustainable modes of living might spread, and how marginal niches of environmental and social practice might become part of broader transitions, are questions being raised in interdisciplinary innovation studies (e.g. Smith and Stirling 2010; Smith et al. 2010), endeavouring to forge pathways to sustainability. These studies of popular experimental practices, movements and collective public values and pressure around environmental issues acquire wider relevance amidst arguments that it must be these that reorientate environment-plundering corporations, governments and publics (e.g. Collier 2010). But a critical environmental anthropology again needs to be attentive to the readings of the environment, and linked moralities that are enjoining and animating such movements, and the ‘polycentric’ global environmental governance they contribute to. The extent to which they feed off and contribute to the dispossessing dynamics that we observed above, or instead open up attention and resources to alternative ecological and moral framings, will crucially shape future politics, environmental and broader. These divergent tendencies can be seen in the way questions of overpopulation are once again driving policy and research agendas. Population programmes are again being animated by global environmental discourse. The highly influential ‘Optimum Population Trust’ in the United Kingdom, for example,

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in 2010 launched its PopOffsets initiative, in which ‘individuals in the United Kingdom can offset their carbon emissions by funding family planning services in the developing world’ (www.popoffsets.com). Although it claims that it is simply funding ‘unmet demand’ for family planning, the programme is wilfully naïve to the myriad of questions that anthropologies of ‘family planning’ might raise. It reveals positionality in global environmental discourse in which the great and the good, and those who might pay for such offsets, ‘predict catastrophe for others, with a secret rider that somehow privilege will see “us” through’ (Lindisfarne 2010: 2). As ideals of environmental order and morality become more important to social distinction, so it is important to recall the elitist roots of this moral divide. In Fascist Europe in the 1930s the Nazi movement found strength in its aesthetic of environmental order, whether in the purity of organic agriculture in contradistinction to an improper and alienating mechanization (Biehl 1995), or in perfecting the integration of modernity with the landscape. A politic of environmental romanticism was part of the moral authority that upheld the claims of racial superiority which fuelled the genocide, but the same politic that was driving Fascism in Germany was also visible in British fascist politics that were also integrated with the organic movement (Moore-Colyer 2004).

CONCLUSION Environment has never been more central to the study of society, whether because of the weather and climate, or because of the scientific, commercial and activist activities around it, and the cacophony of meaning that this had generated. And yet it is a peculiar ‘environment’: a global one, and as such the dice for its control are loaded in favour of those capable of speaking for the globe, voices that often draw on and reproduce, we have argued, new forms of capitalist appropriation.

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It is essential that anthropology engages with the global challenges posed by environmental change. And yet there are traps in this engagement. It is all the more important to be reflexive in our encounters with global discourses and bring such reflexivity to the centres of calculus in global environmental reasoning. More than ever, anthropologists need to work with others to reveal logics, rationalities and reasoning that that are not configured in globalized frames, and to avoid contributing – even unwittingly – to their delegitimation. As Jasanoff argues, research can restore to public view, and offer a framework in which to think about, the human and the social in a climate that renders obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience. It is to make us more aware, less comfortable, and hence more reflective about how we intervene, in word or deed, in the changing order of things (2010: 233).

Our current and future age is set to involve even more fraught and politicized disputes about ways to live with a rapidly changing earth and atmosphere. Environmental anthropology has long been associated with the study of ecology and social organization, comprehending indigenous knowledge and practices, and the politics of colonial and postcolonial development and conservation encounters (e.g. Dove and Carpenter 2008). Yet, since anthropologists turned to the study of environmentalism (e.g. Milton 1993) and global climate change (e.g. Crate and Nuttall 2009), it has become a very different topic, grappling with the way contemporary lives are shaped both by environments and by the proliferation of discourses around them. The located world and the critiques that are revealed by this anthropological research will be no panacea. But out of resistance, dissent, mobilization and quieter but none the less determined attempts to find more sustainable lifestyles, alternatives to ‘lock in’ not just with business-as-usual, but with environmental business-as-usual, may emerge.

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Lansing, J. S. (1991). Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Leach, M. (2000). New shapes to shift: War, parks and the hunting person in modern West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4): 577−595. Leach, M. I. Scoones and B. Wynne (eds) (2005). Science and Citizens: Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement. London: Zed Press Leach, M., J. Fairhead and J. Fraser, 2012, ‘Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy’, Journal of Peasant Studies. Li, T. M. (2007). Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36: 263–293 Lindisfarne, N. (2010). Cochabamba and climate anthropology. Anthropology Today, 26(1): 1−3 Luning, Sabine (2008). ‘Earth & gold: Gold mining in Sanmatenga, Burkina Faso: Governing sites, appropriating wealth, in Jon Abbink and André van Dokkum (eds), Dilemmas of Development: Conflicts of Interest and Their Resolutions in Modernizing Africa. Leiden: African Studies Centre. Mantz, J. (2008). Blood diamonds of the digital age: Coltan and the Eastern Congo. Global Studies Review, 4(3): 12−14 Mathur, H. (2009). Investor-friendly development policies: Unsettling consequences for the tribal people of Orissa. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology,10(4): 318−328 Miller, C. A. and P. H. Erickson (2006). The politics of bridging scales and epistemologies: Science and democracy in global environmental governance, in Walt Reid, Fikret Berkes, Tom Wilbanks and Doris Capistrano (eds), Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems: Concepts and Applications in Ecosystem Assessment. Washington, DC: Island Press, pp. 297−314 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press Milton, K. (ed.) (1993). Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London: Routledge Moore, H., T. Sanders and B. Kaare (1999). Those Who Play With Fire: Gender, Fertility, and Transformation in East and Southern Africa. London: LSE Moore-Colyer, R. (2004), Towards ‘Mother Earth’: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists. Journal of Contemporary History 39(3): 353−371

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Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press Nadasdy, P. (2007). The gift in the animal: The ontology of hunting and human–animal sociality. American Ethnologist, 34(1): 25−43 Neumann, R. (1998). Imposing Wilderness. Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1−13 Novellino, D. (2002). The relevance of myths and worldviews in Pälawan classification, perceptions and management of honey bees, in J. R. Stepp, F. S. Wyndham and R. K. Zarger (eds), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Ethnobiology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press Padel, F. and S. Das (2006). Anthropology of a genocide: Tribal movements in Central India against overindustrialisation. For the SAAG 2006. At: http:// www.freewebs.com/epgorissa/FelixPadelSamarendraDas.pdf Peluso, N. and M. Watts (2001). Violent Environments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Rademacher, A. (2008). Fluid city, solid state: Urban environmental territory in a state of emergency, Kathmandu. City & Society 20(1): 105–129 Sallnow, M. J. (2000). Precious metals in the Andean moral economy, in J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209−231 Sanders, T. (1994). (En)gendering the weather: Rainmaking and reproduction in Tanzania, in S. Strauss and B. Orlove (eds), Weather, Climate, Culture. Oxford: Berg Schoffeleers, J. (1978). Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults. Gwelo, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press Scoones, I. (2009).The politics of global assessments: The case of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3): 547−571 Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press

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Smith, A. and A. Stirling (2010). The politics of socialecological resilience and sustainable socio-technical transitions. Ecology & Society, 15: 1. Online at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss1/art11/ Smith, A., J. P. Voβ and J. Grin (2010). Innovation studies and sustainability transitions: The allure of the multi-level perspective, and its challenges. Research Policy, 39: 435−448 Stone, G. D. (2010). The anthropology of genetically modified crops. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39: 381–400 Tsing, A. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Veteto, J. R. and J. Lockyer (2008). Environmental anthropology engaging permaculture: Moving theory and practice toward sustainability. Culture & Agriculture, 30(1−2): 47–58 Vitebsky, P. (2005) Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. London: HarperCollins and Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Main / DK 759. E83 VIT Weiner, J. (2010). Reverse anthropology: Indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 21(1): 141–142 West, P. (2006). Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books Woods, W. I., W. G Teixeira, J. Lehmann, et al. (eds.) (2009). Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision. Netherlands: Springer World Bank (2010). Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? Washington, DC: World Bank Wynne, B. (1992). Uncertainty and environmental learning. Global Environmental Change, 2: 111−127 Wynne, B. (1996). May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert−lay knowledge divide, in S. Lash, B. Szerszynski and B. Wynne (eds), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology. London: SAGE, pp. 44−83 Wynne, B. (2001). Creating public alienation: Expert cultures of risk and ethics on GMOs. Science and Culture, 10: 445–481

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4.2.2 Anthropological Encounters with Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation Laura M. Rival

I grew up with the idea of development, but had to wait until 1993 for my first encounter with the idea of biological diversity.1 I had just started a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford where I met Darrell Posey who was, by then, deeply immersed in the politics of developing intellectual property rights protocols for indigenous peoples in relation to the newly signed Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). I accepted his offer to contribute to a book he was preparing on the cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity (Posey 1999). In his foreword to the book, Klaus Töpfer explains why biodiversity must be protected from development: Climate change, loss of biodiversity, depletion of the ozone layer, pollution, exhaustion of water resources, and conflicts over shared resources are some of the most pressing problems faced by humankind. There is strong evidence that the life support systems on which our economies depend are being overloaded […]. Besides the profound ethical and aesthetic implications, it is clear that the loss of biodiversity has serious economic and social costs […]. Placing a monetary value on species and ecosystems may be a useful exercise by which to integrate the cost of using and conserving biodiversity into the current global economic

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system, but it will never be possible to comprehend the true value of life in such a system. Respect for biological diversity implies respect for human diversity. Indeed, both elements are fundamental to stability and durable peace on earth.

The contradiction between economic development and biodiversity conservation has only deepened since the publication of this book, and scientists have continued to express their concern in major reports such as the Millennium Ecological Assessment (2005), in which some anthropologists participated (Filer 2009; Norgaard 2008). In the Kaua’i Declaration, ethnobotanists, anthropologists and ‘people from associated disciplines’ consider ‘the grave environmental crisis facing the world today, the loss of biodiversity and the loss of culture,’ and stress the need to use scientific knowledge to provide ‘some of the solutions towards more sustainable living’: If plants did not exist, human life would not be possible. Today we also depend on them for many of our opportunities to improve the quality of human life in the future. Plants are fundamental to the functioning of all human societies and to the operation of all ecosystems. The application of

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ethnobotany is a possible way of breaking free of our passive approach to the world and dealing with this seemingly overwhelming set of challenges in a positive way. Ethnobotany is at once a vital key to preserving the diversity of plants as well as to understanding and interpreting the knowledge by which we are, and will be, enabled to deal with them effectively and sustainably throughout the world. Thus ethnobotany is the science of survival.

As these two quotes illustrate, the idea of biological diversity invites us to act to ensure that natural resources are used at a rate slower than that at which they are being created. By weaving together older ideas of nature and new conceptual frames, biodiversity changes ‘how people far and near see the natural world, value the natural world, and therefore treat the natural world’ (Takacs 1996: 338). What does this drive to slow environmental destruction tell us about processes of change and social transformation? And how has anthropology contributed to an understanding of mobilizations to contain the forces of development? Such big questions can only be answered partially here. I start with a brief account of a recent meeting to integrate the social and natural sciences jointly organized by conservation biologists and anthropologists. The meeting illustrates two prongs of a new research agenda which explores the links between biological and cultural diversity and analyses proposals to value and govern diversity. They document how complex and dynamic ideas of development and biodiversity are being shaped, interpreted, contested and negotiated in different places around the world today. Although necessarily multidisciplinary, these two areas of research show the continuing relevance of anthropological approaches for the study of the ways in which knowledge is produced and used in the act of governing nature and society. I end with a few reflections on the theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges faced by anthropologists in an era when increasing economic and political resources are being committed to the preservation of biological diversity.

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‘SUSTAINING CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD’ I was invited in April 2008 to address a fourday symposium organized by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on the theme ‘Sustaining Cultural and Biological Diversity in a Rapidly Changing World: Lessons for Global Policy’. Participating in this event made me fully aware of the extent to which the idea of biodiversity had embedded itself in my work. The meeting was co-organized by the museum’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, the World Conservation Union’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (IUCN-CEESP), Terralingua,2 the WennerGren Foundation, and the Christensen Fund.3 Panels covered a wide range of themes, including endangered languages, traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous peoples and climate change, agrobiodiversity, ecocultural health, and the ethics of valuing nature. Each day started with indigenous testimonies in sessions called ‘Voices from around the World.’ Around 130 delegates had been invited to participate in the symposium, amongst whom I counted 27 professional anthropologists and linguists. Although the delegates came from different disciplines, there seemed to be broad agreement that survival will depend on the realization that humans, far from being separate from the rest of nature, form an integral and critically important part of biodiversity (Redford and Brosius 2006). Therefore, cultural, economic and social factors deserve a place alongside genes, species and ecosystems as components of biodiversity. This radical broadening of the notion of biological diversity required a sustained understanding of: (1) bioculturalism as ‘a major conceptual step towards re-entwining the domains of nature and culture whereby value is not determined by what can be bought, sold and monetarily profited from’ (Sian Sullivan, an anthropologist); (2) the earth as an ‘integrated concept of humans

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and nature’ (Jules Pretty, a geographer); (3) diversity arising from ‘natures and cultures [as] emergent properties of localised alternative actions’ (Eleanor Sterling, a biologist). Disagreements remained, however, on which epistemology should frame such integration, ‘material realism’ or ‘social constructivism,’ and on whether a return to systemic analysis was desirable. The choice by the symposium’s organizers to engage the diversity of nature with one specific human component − cultural difference as revealed by language − was the source of much debate as well.4 The scientific validity of the ‘biocultural diversity’ concept was probed in a background paper prepared for the panel (Graef et al. 2008). There were also critiques of the symposium’s peripheral treatment of economic and political factors. How could the paradigm of biodiversity conservation be strengthened through the inclusion of cultural diversity and its preservation, while leaving aside the thorny issue of economic development? A number of delegates and participants mentioned the need to research the power structures through which global policy agendas get shaped, as well as the macroeconomic structures that destroy both natural environments and human communities. Other delegates stressed the importance of collective action to reform development and conservation policies. Someone simply asked: For whom should biodiversity conservation be sustained? A delegate from Papua New Guinea noted the value shift that had occurred in the country in less than one generation, resulting in the local adoption of a ‘resource view of nature’: Resources are to make money with. People want to sell their resources; they want the right to use their resources as they wish. This is a problem for conservation work. It’s difficult to build alliances where there is mistrust, and where clans are divided.

A Maori environmental lawyer presented concrete examples of how indigenous claims to resource control and autonomy, often

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negatively portrayed by mainstream society, were promoting benefits for all: Maori fight the government in a way that benefit the whole society by campaigning, for example, against the discharge of raw sewage in the sea […] Native claims can translate into new environmental policy. We need to think about the management of nature in terms of citizen rights. Before you move forward, you have to deal with the legacies of the past.

I presented to the panel ‘The Role of Social Scientists in Critical Civic Issues’, discussing a small inter-cultural exchange in the Ecuadorian Amazon I had just organized at the demand of Huaorani friends. In the spring of 2006, I revisited the community of Toñampari in order to collect additional data for my chonta palm management study (Clement, Rival and Cole 2009). During my visit, the first in 12 years, parents told me ‘our children are not learning’ because the school ‘works against the forest.’ […] ‘We want to build a different education system for our children.’ To help villagers in this endeavour, I offered to organize a visit with a Maya Kakchiquel activist from Guatemala, whose project of cultural revitalization and land restoration had impressed me deeply. Although the visit lasted only 10 days, much happened during our short stay. At the villagers’ request, we started each day by teaching English in one of the school’s classrooms. Participating children and adults were fascinated by the variety of English accents we used when teaching them the basic vocabulary and phrases they wanted to learn. They were aware of my French accent, whether in Huaorani, Spanish or English, and curious about the Spanish used by my Guatemalan friend. The day was spent visiting gardens and fields, comparing planting techniques and soil quality, and inventorying crop varieties. Children who were not at school took us on forays in the forest surrounding the village, each yielding an abundance of fruits. In the evenings, the whole village would assemble to listen to my Mayan friend’s stories, asking him a myriad of questions about life in his village and in Guatemala,

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welcoming each answer with cascading jokes and bursts of laughter. We created a small ‘Mayan garden’ near the school, and distributed the remaining seeds to cultivators who wanted to try them out in their own gardens. We talked about what the new school could be like, about the links between soil fertility and snakes, and about the powers of the moon and the river. Small gifts of plants, flowers, seed necklaces, and food were exchanged. News of this visit quickly spread in Huaorani land, and I soon received requests from other villages for more visits. This success was undoubtedly due to the Huaorani’s insatiable curiosity for foreign ways, especially those of the ‘small dark foreigner’ from Guatemala, whose stories had not been heard before. I tried to explain to the panel as selfreflectively as I could how this visit had come to represent a form of civic engagement, one which critically engaged my professional expertise in cultural difference. The changes that occurred in Huaorani society and culture over the last 30 years illustrate the symbolic violence exercised by dominant society, which cannot recognize the value (let alone the right) of being different and of living in a distinct human collectivity. My career as an anthropologist working among various indigenous communities in Latin America had, I explained, convinced me that one of the biggest challenges for policy makers in the twenty-first century is to create opportunities so that people need not renounce their identities in order to have access to the full range of social and economic possibilities. It also taught me that the global ecological challenges the world faces in the twenty-first century will not be solved by ‘top-down’ solutions or unidirectional ‘harvesting’ of knowledge. Instead, genuine exchange needs to be fostered between those who retain an understanding of the ecological and cultural specificity of their environments and researchers seeking to understand the web of relations between ecology, culture and history. Although their goals are seemingly opposed, economic development and

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biodiversity conservation interventions may in fact be very similar in the way they are conceptualized, financed and planned. This is why, I concluded, anthropologists, through their indefatigable efforts to deconstruct dominant discourses and to document forms of knowledge and intelligent practices often invisible to other scientists − because they are ordinary, marginalized or subaltern − continue to play an important role in creating the conditions for democratic debate on what to conserve or what to develop, for whom, and how. This admirable goal, however, is becoming more difficult to achieve, as phronesis is harder to sustain in a world that has become less consensual and more polarized (Flyvbjerg 2001). Who determines what kind of scientific evidence matters as a guide to action? Such dilemmas are not new. Issues of engagement (Howell 2010; Spencer 2010) were already faced by previous generations of anthropologists, who had to take sides, rather than just studying how sides were being taken, on, for instance, the legitimacy of national liberation movements (e.g. Asad 1973).

THE BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY OF WILD AND CULTIVATED NATURE In his address to the AMNH Symposium, Ashish Kothari, who works for IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature), explained that keeping pristine wilderness beyond human reach was no longer considered to be the most effective way of protecting biodiversity. The shift from ‘PAs’ (protected areas) to ‘CCAs’ (community conservation areas) was endorsed a few months later at the Barcelona World Conservation Congress.5 Kothari expressed his confidence that the new paradigm of conservation practice ‘across landscapes and seascapes’ would preserve biodiversity ‘in more than just islands of protection in the midst of destruction,’ while ensuring a fuller integration in conservation thinking of the rights of indigenous and traditional peoples to livelihood

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and culture.6 Conservationists, it seemed, had finally recognized a fact familiar to anthropologists, i.e. that social groups and individuals may modify ecosystems in ways that actually enrich, rather than degrade, biological diversity (e.g. Balée 2006; Lockyer and Veteto in press; Rival 2006). Comparing this new vision (see also Dressler et al. 2010) with Wilson’s (1985) seminal paper ‘The Biological Diversity Crisis: A Challenge to Science’ highlights what has, and has not, changed in biodiversity thinking over the last 25 years. Today’s policy recommendations, like then, are guided by more than just biology, for the conservation of species and ecosystems diversity cannot be separated from social, cultural and political factors (Adams et al. 2004). If some awareness of the great variation in how humans and their cultures influence biodiversity was already present in Wilson’s writings, this awareness is being strengthened by the positive valorization of indigenous and traditional ways of life in terms of their supposed biodiversityenhancing effects. We are gradually moving away from the conservation agenda of ‘the rich,’ with its alleged focus on megafauna and endangered species. In its place is the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Martinez-Alier 2002), born out of the material livelihoods of marginalized people and now actively re-appropriated and contested by both socio-ecological movements and ‘REDD+’ advocates.7 As poor rain forest dwellers are often ‘indigenous,’ indigeneity has gained increased salience within the new political battles for biodiversity conservation or resource development (Blaser 2009; de la Cadena 2010; Doolittle 2010; Escobar 2008; Li 2010). However, the extent to which indigeneity − with all its linguistic, territorial, identity, knowledge and livelihood ramifications − is reshaping the narratives of biodiversity conservation and economic development is still unclear. We lack cross-cultural comparative analyses of political expressions of

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indigeneity, of regeneration practices, and of rules creating ‘off human reach’ spaces. As a result, anti-conservationists remain convinced that biodiversity is a Western obsession that has been discursively − if not coercively − imposed on the rest of the world. To conciliate economic development with the preservation of nature represents one of the greatest political challenges of our times, a challenge that calls for a cultural revolution in the way we think about nature. It is therefore not surprising that a body of anthropological literature critical of the premises on which conservation areas are created is emerging (Descola 2005; Surrallès and García Hierro 2004). It is associated with calls for a politics based on ontological difference and cosmopolitan reason that will bring forth new ecological values and shared normative practices (Apffel-Marglin 2012; de la Cadena 2010).8 The problem with conservation biology is not so much that it is ‘geno-centrist’ (Escobar 2008: 140) or ‘globo-obsessed’ (Ingold 2001: 217), but, rather, that it was, until very recently, blind to the biological diversity of cultivated nature. When I started researching the cultural practices that enhance the genetic diversity of manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz ssp.) among the Makushi of southern Guyana (Rival and McKey 2008), a unique reserve of 371,000 hectares of ancient rain forest called Iwokrama had just been created in a part of their traditional territory. I will never forget the gaze of total puzzlement on the faces of the reserve’s staff when the multi-disciplinary team with which I was collaborating presented its research project on manioc domestication. Their questions clearly indicated that, to them, researching biodiversity amounted to working on wildlife and pristine ecosystems with a view to discovering new species and protecting them from human interference. The exclusion of agrobiodiversity issues9 from conservation biology has meant that it took almost 30 years of research, engagement and contestation for the field to start acknowledging that regions untouched by capitalist development

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are not ‘wild’ or that ‘hotspots of biodiversity’, far from being pristine environments, have long been inhabited and transformed by humans − an awareness that climate change research has undoubtedly accelerated (Szabó 2010; Townsend 2008). It was at the panel on agrobiodiversity at the AMNH Symposium that I heard the most stimulating discussions, both in terms of theory and policy. Sophie Caillon convincingly showed that people in the Vanuatu village where she worked are not conserving, but, rather, managing diversity, with different cultural practices coexisting in the same village, resulting in some crops being more genetically diverse than others (see also Caillon and Degeorges 2007; Caillon and Lanouguère-Bruneau 2005). Gary Paul Nabhan discussed seed preservation and exchange in the wider context of food biodiversity, and concluded that a maximal level of interaction between biological and cultural diversity is found when taking into consideration the entire food system, including food processing.10 Their studies richly demonstrate the biocultural diversity of cultivated nature (see also Atran 1999; Clement et al. 2010; Ellen and Fukui 1996; Medin and Atran 1999; Nazarea 1998, 2005). By making humans with their knowledge systems, values and interests an inherent part of the biodiversity story (Sponsel 2001; Toledo 2001), the anthropology of agrodiversity offers detailed empirical studies that challenge the threetiered, hierarchical identification of diversity at the levels of genes, species and ecosystems more effectively than discourse deconstructions can ever do (Anderson and Berglund 2006; Carrier and West 2010).

VALUING AND GOVERNING BIODIVERSITY The general theme selected for the Barcelona World Conservation Congress was ‘a diverse and sustainable world’. The objectives of the Congress, as stated in official documents, were to:

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1. Demonstrate the ‘links between natural and socio-cultural diversity and the role biodiversity plays in underpinning development’ 2. Show ‘how the environment underpins all economic, social and cultural development’ 3. Promote ‘economic tools and markets’ to achieve ‘positive change’ through a ‘new ethics based on ecosystem health and renewed environmental vitality’.

The Congress gathered over 7,000 delegates and was covered by at least 30 ethnographers (Brosius and Campbell 2010; Doolittle 2010). I do not know how the agenda of biocultural diversity fared at the Congress (or since), but there is no doubt that a marketbased mechanism for protecting biodiversityknown as ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES) gained considerable political clout (e.g. Brokington 2010). The year 2010, declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations,11 has seen the release of several influential reports, in particular the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) study.12 A report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) entitled ‘Latin America and the Caribbean: A Biodiversity Superpower’ released at Nagoya Biodiversity is already making waves.13 In the United Kingdom, a number of anthropologists (myself included) have been asked to participate in a £40.5 million multi-disciplinary research programme on ‘Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation’ (ESPA),14 whose cumbersome name nevertheless indicates the new directions taken by policy-oriented research on development and biodiversity, and the links between the two. It is the positive value that biological diversity puts on all life on earth that makes it more than ‘simply a new name for nature’ (Farnham 2007: 7). As the idea of biodiversity embodies and generates moral principles (Takacs 1996: 286), it is not surprising that conservation biologists have worked hard to develop a new value vocabulary to fight ‘against biotic impoverishment’ (Farnham 2007: 31; Takacs 1996: 194), or assess the link between natural reality and human labour. Takacs shows how natural scientists

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have been grappling with the issue of how various values (scientific, ecological, social amenity or mutualism, biophilic, intrinsic, spiritual and aesthetic) can be mobilized to explain ‘why we should value nature’. He convincingly shows that conservationists were forced to develop an economic argument for biodiversity (i.e. ‘make the business case for biodiversity’) because economic value is the only language donors and the public would listen to (Takacs 1996: 208). Nonetheless, most conservationists in fact believe deep down that the love of nature is innate (Kellert and Wilson 1993; Takacs 1996: 218; Wilson 1984). According to Takacs, conservationists turn to religion to cope with the contradiction between their belief in biophilia (i.e. the intrinsic value of biodiversity) and their real-world observations that biophilia is easily superseded by utilitarianism and greed. Although the value of biodiversity debate is anthropologically fascinating, it has not received the attention it deserves (but see Posey 1999; Rival 2010). Analysts have preferred to focus their critical attention on the naïve utilitarianism and the imposition of globalized North American values that underlie the biodiversity discourse (e.g. Anderson and Berglund 2006; Carrier and West 2010; Harper 2005). Takacs himself concludes his insightful book with the remark: ‘biologists feed into the very system that is destroying biodiversity by harnessing the forces of international business and labelling biodiversity another “resource” while leaving buried the causes of its destruction’ (Takacs 1996: 282). This is exactly the line of analysis adopted by ‘critical geographers’ who research the impact of neoliberal capitalism on nature (e.g. Brockington and Duffy 2010; Igoe and Brockington 2007). Studies of ‘the business of biodiversity’ have multiplied, including in anthropological circles (e.g. Sullivan 2009). This body of political ecology work argues that, as predicted by ecological Marxists such as O’Connor (1988), conservation is instrumental to capitalism’s growth and

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reproduction, for it turns environmental limits into new sources of capital. The financialization of biodiversity conservation, like the ‘financialization of everything’ (Harvey 2005: 33) else, brings forth the promise of new forms of accumulation. These studies offer useful insights in the political tensions surrounding the activities of international organizations such as the CBD or the GEF (Global Environmental Facility), while shedding new light on the ideological struggle over the form that the international governance of biodiversity should take (MacDonald 2010). Corson’s (2010) reconstruction of the changing alliance between the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and four large US conservation non-governmental organizations (NGOs) between 1970 and 2010 illustrates the circularity of funding flows irrigating an unusual public/private/non-profit partnership designed to conserve biodiversity in developing countries.15 Her study partly shows that ‘international biodiversity conservation is creating new symbolic and material spaces for global capital expansion’ (Corson 2010: 578). However, her claim that conservation fuels the process of capitalist accumulation by creating new enclosures is not fully substantiated. Corson helped me identify possible answers to questions that remained unsolved during my research on SUBIR,16 a large, 10-year USAID-funded biodiversity conservation programme in the Ecuadorian Chocó. As my research was located in Chachi and AfroEcuadorian communities along the River Cayapas, I could not, despite formal interviews with USAID consultants, fully understand the reasons why this aid organization had suddenly decided in 1989 to single out biodiversity and forest conservation over issues that seemed to me more urgent in terms of development (such as soil erosion and agriculture), which USAID had previously funded. My ethnographic research showed that SUBIR went through radical changes as it responded to the demands of Ecuadorian NGOs,

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indigenous organizations and villagers. It promoted community-owned cooperatives against the exploitative buying practices of logging companies. Critically, however, the political and economic debates around the valuation and pricing of timber, nontimber forest products, biological resources and ecosystem services that SUBIR triggered were Ecuadorian debates − even if Ecuadorian conservationists were sometimes accused of being ‘sold to the Yankees’ by extractivists and resource nationalists. Biodiversity conservation, very much like international development, needs to be studied at many levels of the policy network (e.g. Agrawal 2005; Mosse 2005; Orlove and Brush 1996). Corson’s simplistic anti-neoliberal approach does not allow her to go beyond the surface of rhetorical pronouncements, or to engage the complex contexts in which rhetoric gets transformed into activities and processes ‘on the ground’ (Tsing 2005; West 2005). True, biodiversity conservation organizations have attempted to sell themselves through a militant faith in market solutions to environmental problems.17 Whether they have convinced decision-makers and financers beyond the narrow circles of international development remains to be seen. Moreover, what is designed as a market instrument is often realized as a more complex, hybrid mechanism (e.g. Kumar and Muradian 2009; Martinez-Alier 2009; Rival 2010). Furthermore, neoliberal rhetoric fuels antimarket protests all around the world, in which life – in both its biological and cultural diversity – becomes a potent source of moral imagination and political inspiration (Fernandez 1998; Rival 1998). As already argued, discursive regimes (Fletcher 2010) and virtualism (Miller and Carrier 1998) cannot exhaust the analytical possibilities. Conservationism, like developmentalism, can no longer be seen as a Western myth imposed on ‘the rest’, for the rest actively shapes the world’s future directions (Hulme 2010; Liu and Wang 2009; Rival 2009, in press).

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OIKOS FOREVER Development and biodiversity emerged as new ideas recombining older ones in the second half of the twentieth century − the former around 1950, the latter 30 years later. Both have changed the way we see the world, and the way we act upon it. Both combine scientific ideas with moral ones (it can only be good to develop; the more diversity, the better). As exemplary ‘boundary objects’, comprising scientific facts and social constructions with ‘deliberate and useful vagueness that makes it susceptible to a number of legitimate and potentially beneficial interpretations and reapplications’ (Guyer and Richards 1996), development and biodiversity have provided excellent terrains for a range of deconstructivist projects. In social anthropology, Foucault’s approach to power and knowledge, and, to a lesser extent, Latour’s constructionist perspective on the networked relation between science and society have offered some of the most influential theoretical frameworks to apprehend the discursive effects of development and biodiversity. Ethnographers have provided invaluable accounts of the complex and highly dynamic processes of resistance, accommodation, domestication, or negotiated internalization that have occurred in many communities around the world during their encounters with either economic development or biodiversity conservation. As I have tried to show, late twentiethcentury thinking about sustainable development is slowly being recast within a new paradigm that proposes to replace older trade-offs between development and conservation with new hopes of ‘developing while conserving’. A new generation of economists is being trained in a new kind of economic thought, ecological economics (e.g. Daly and Farley 2004), which, it is hoped, will lead to a new way of making development decisions by incorporating the values that nature provides for human livelihood, biodiversity, and resilience of ecosystems. The problem, long understood by some thinkers

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(O’Neill 2007), is that such values cannot easily be translated into money terms. They require the development of multi-criteria methods that seek to avoid economic reductionism by integrating social and environmental factors in the units of measurements. The re-evaluation of nature that characterizes this new regime of value deserves serious anthropological attention. Anthropologists will need to address, through ethnographic enquiry, the complex links between ecosystems, biological diversity, economic development, human needs, aspirations and political struggles. In addition to obvious epistemological tensions between poststructuralist and ethnobiological explanations of nature (Ellen 2010; Escobar 2008), anthropologists will need to account for the coexistence of self-interested calculation and commitment to values. Could value and interest ever be brought in line? For some authors, this duality overlaps with the tension between ‘materialist’ and ‘spiritual’ (Apffel-Marglin 2008); for others, it corresponds to the tension between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ (Hastrup 2009). Anthropologists, who on the whole have shied away from the sustainability debate, may soon realize that conversations around responsibilities for the maintenance of the earth’s commons raise fundamental anthropological questions, including that of engaged anthropology (Low and Merry 2010). As anthropological research is predicated on the dilemmas of portraying the ‘native point of view’ without having necessarily to share it, researchers will have to find ways of examining commitments to values that are deeply implicated in our common future from a range of locations and perspectives.

NOTES 1 For the idea of development, see Cooper and Packard (1997), Cowen and Shenton (1996), and Crush (1995). The term biological diversity was coined in 1980 (Farnham 2007: 9) and shortened to ‘biodiversity’ at a forum sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution,

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which E. O. Wilson organized in 1986 (Escobar 2008: 341), and which formed the basis for the book Wilson edited in 1988. 2 An NGO (http://www.terralingua.org/) defending linguistic diversity as a means, in its own words, ‘to sustain the biocultural diversity of life’. 3 Ken Wilson, Executive Director of the Christensen Fund chaired the panel ‘Funding Opportunities for Sustaining Biological and Cultural Diversity.’ He explained that the fund, which had for many years purchased art works to donate them to museums, where they could be enjoyed by a wide public, was now dedicated to funding the ‘custodians of biocultural diversity who maintain beauty in their lived landscapes’. 4 The symposium’s theme directly related to a volume edited by Terralingua’s co-founder and president, Luisa Maffi, which explored the links between language, knowledge and the environment (Maffi 2001, 2005). 5 The 2008 World Conservation Congress (WCC) marked IUCN’s 60th anniversary (see http://www. iucn.org/). 6 For anthropological analyses of IUCN conservation policies, and the model of ‘communitybased resource management’ through ‘participatory conservation,’ see Brosius and Campell (2010), Doolittle (2010), and Brosius (2004). As always, the issue is to determine whether such new attempts at integrating conservation and development are imposed from without, embraced from within, or negotiated in fairness (Brosius et al. 2005, Zerner 2000). 7 An International Payment for Ecosystem Services (IPES), REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) aims at curtailing deforestation in countries where the agricultural frontier is expanding dangerously. REDD represents a new global mechanism by which developed nations pay developing ones to maintain tropical forest carbon stores. REDD+ refers to REDD policies that propose to meet the opportunity, capacity-building and management costs of biodiversity conservation, while simultaneously addressing the need to sustain vital ecosystem services and to reduce rural poverty. For tensions between REDD and biodiversity conservation policies, see Putz and Redford (2009). 8 For a moving, subtle and deeply insightful account of transcultural ecological thinking, see Kopenawa and Albert (2010). 9 Brookfield, who coined the term, defines agrobiodiversity as ‘diversity in the manner in which farmers use all their resources’ (Brookfield 2001: xii). Agrobiodiversity studies form an essential scientific component of the public debate about industrial agriculture and its impact on the environment (Stone 2010). 10 See also Nabhan (2009) and works by the other panellists: Brush (2004), Louette et al. (1997),

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Pinedo-Vázquez et al. (2003), Brookfield and Padoch (1994) and Jarvis et al. (2007). 11 http://www.cbd.int/2010/welcome/. 12 As indicated on the TEEB website (http:// www.teebweb.org/), the TEEB study is a major international initiative which aims to: (1) draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity; (2) highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation; and (3) draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical biodiversity conservation actions. 13 Bovarnick, Alpizar and Schnell (2010) reveal the continued influence of Costanza et al. (1997). UNEP (the United Nations Environmental Programme, http://www.unep.org/), in close collaboration with UNDP, is coordinating the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) set up as a mirror of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopted by the United Nations 65th General Assembly (UNGA) on 21 December 2010. 14 See a description of this programme aimed at ‘improving ecosystems management policies to help alleviate poverty in the developing world’ at http:// www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/espa/. ESPA research, which is sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DfID) hopes to ‘provide the evidence and tools to enable decision makers and end users to manage ecosystems sustainably and in a way that contributes to poverty reduction.’ 15 Corson cites a former USAID official who told her that ‘it is easier to do biodiversity overseas than in this country because the conflicts don’t involve constituencies of Congress’ (Corson 2010: 592). 16 Standing for ‘Sustainable Use of Biological Resources.’ See Rival (2003, 2005, 2007). 17 The best example has to be Daily and Ellison’s (2002) silly mantra ‘nature has to pay for itself’.

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Escobar, A. 2008. Territories of Difference. Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farnham, T. 2007. Saving Nature’s Legacy. Origins of the idea of biodiversity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fernandez, J. 1998. Trees of knowledge of self and other in culture: on models for the moral imagination. In Laura Rival (ed.), The Social Life of Trees. Anthropological perspectives on tree symbolism, pp. 81–110. Oxford: Berg. Filer, C. 2010. A bridge too far: the knowledge problem in the Millenium Assessment. In J. Carrier, J. and P. West (eds), Virtualism, Governance and Practice. Vision and execution in environmental conservation, pp. 84−111. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Fletcher, R. 2010. Neoliberal environmentality: towards a post-structuralist political ecology of the conservation debate. Conservation and Society 8(3): 171−181. Flyvbjerg, B. 2001. Making Social Science Matter: Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graef, D. et al. 2008. The cultural politics of sustaining diversity. Background paper prepared by the Dove/ Carpenter lab at Yale University. Ms. Guha, R. and J. Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guyer, J. and P. Richards. 1996. The invention of biodiversity: social perspectives on the management of biological diversity in Africa. Africa 66(1): 1−13. Harper, K. 2005. ‘Wild capitalism’ and `ecocolonialism’: a tale of two rivers. American Anthropologist 107(2): 221−233. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hastrup, K. 2009. Waterworlds: framing the question of social resilience. In K. Hastrup (ed.), The Question of Resilience. Social responses to climate change, pp. 11−30. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Howell, S. 2010. Norwegian academic anthropologists in public spaces. Current Anthropology 51(S2): S269−S277. Hulme, M. 2010. Cosmopolitan climates. Hybridity, foresight and meaning. Theory, Culture and Society 27(2−3): 267−276. Igoe, J. and D. Brockington. 2007. Neoliberal conservation: a brief introduction. Conservation and Society 5(4): 432–449. Ingold, T. 2001. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.

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Jarvis, D. I., C. Padoch and D. Cooper (eds). 2007. Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Ecosystems. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaua’i Declaration. 2007. Economic Botany 61(1): 1−2. Kellert, S. and E. O. Wilson (eds). 1993. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Kopenawa, D. and B. Albert. 2010. La Chute du ciel. Paroles d’un chaman yanomami. Paris: Plon, Collection Terre Humaine. Kumar, P. and R. Muradian (eds). 2009. Payment for Ecosystem Services. Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, T. 2010. Indigeneity, capitalism, and the management of dispossession. Current Anthropology 51(3): 385−414. Liu, L. and Z. Wang. 2009. The development and application practice of wind−solar energy hybrid generation systems in China. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 13: 1504−1512. Lockyer, J. and J. R. Veteto (eds) in press. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia. Bioregionalism, permaculture and ecovillages for the sustainable future. Oxford: Berghahn press. Louette, D., A. Charrier and J. Berthaud. 1997. In Situ conservation of maize in Mexico: Genetic diversity and maize seed management in a traditional community. Economic Botany 51(1): 20−38. Low, S. M. and S. E. Merry. 2010. Engaged anthropology: diversity and dilemmas. Current Anthropology 51(S2): S203−S225. MacDonald, K. I. 2010. The devil is in the (bio)diversity: private sector “engagement” and the restructuring of biodiversity conservation. Antipode 42(3): 513–550. Maffi, L. (ed.). 2001. On Biocultural Diversity. Linking language, knowledge and the environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Maffi, L. 2005. Linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 599−617. Martinez-Alier, J. 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor. A study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Martinez-Alier, J. 2009. Social metabolism, ecological distribution conflicts, and languages of valuation. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 20(1): 58−87. Medin, D. and S. Atran (eds). 1999. Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Millenium Ecological Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Biodiversity synthesis. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Miller, D. and J. Carrier (eds). 1998. Virtualism, A New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg.

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Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating Development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto Press. Nabhan, G. P. 2009. Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s quest to end famine. Washington, DC: Island Press. Nazarea, V. 1998. Cultural Memory and Biodiversity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Nazarea, V. 2005. Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers. Marginality and memory in the conservation of biological diversity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Norgaard, R. B. 2008. Finding hope in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Conservation Biology 22: 862−869. O’Connor, J. 1988. Capitalism, nature, socialism: a theoretical introduction. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 1: 11–38. O’Neill, J. 2007. Markets, Deliberation and Environment. London: Routledge. Orlove, B. and S. Brush. 1996. Anthropology and the conservation of biodiversity. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 329−352. Pinedo-Vázquez, M. et al. 2003. Peru. In H. Brookfield, H. Parsons and M. Brookfield (eds), Agrodiversity: Learning from farmers across the world, pp. 232−248. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Posey, D. (ed.). 1999. Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. A complementary contribution to the global diversity assessment. Nairobi: UNEP and IT Publication. Putz, F. E. and K. H. Redford. 2009. Dangers of carbonbased conservation. Global Environmental Change 19: 400−401. Redford, K. H. and J. P. Brosius. 2006. Diversity and homogenization in the endgame. Editorial. Global Environmental Change 16: 317−319. Rival, L. 1998. Trees from symbols of life and regeneration to political artefacts. In Laura Rival (ed.), The Social Life of Trees. Anthropological perspectives on tree symbolism, pp. 1−36. Oxford: Berg. Rival, L. 2003. The meanings of forest governance in Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Oxford Development Studies 31(4): 479−501. Rival, L. 2005. From global forest governance to privatized social forestry: company−community partnerships in the Ecuadorian Chocó. In Michael B. Likosky (ed.), Privatizing Development: Transnational law, infrastructure and human rights, pp. 253−270. London: Brill Academic Publishing. Rival, L. 2006. Amazonian historical ecologies. In Roy Ellen (ed.), Ethnobiology and the Science of

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Humankind. A retrospective and a prospective, pp. 97−116. Special issue of JRAI # 1. Rival, L. 2007. Partnerships for sustainable forest management: lessons from the Ecuadorian Chocó. In Mirjam Ros-Tonen, H. van den Hombergh and A. Zoomers (eds), Partnerships in Sustainable Forest Resource Management: Learning from Latin America, pp. 37−62. Amsterdam: CEDLA. Rival, L. 2009. The resilience of indigenous intelligence. In K. Hastrup (ed.), The Question of Resilience. Social responses to climate change, pp. 293−313. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Rival, L. 2010. Ecuador’s Yasuní−ITT Initiative: the old and new values of petroleum. Ecological Economics 70: 358−365. Rival, L. 2011. Planning development futures in the Ecuadorian Amazon: the expanding oil frontier and the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. In Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive Industry. Evidence from South America (ed.) A. Bebbington. Pp.155–173. New York: Routledge.. Rival, L. and D. McKey. 2008. Domestication and diversity in manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz ssp. esculenta, Euphorbiaceae). Current Anthropology 49(6): 1119−1128. Spencer, J. 2010. The perils of engagement. A space for anthropology in the age of security? Current Anthropology 51(S2): S289−S299. Sponsel, L. E. 2001. Human impact on biodiversity, overview. In Simon Asher Levin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, 3, pp. 395−409. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Stone, G. D. 2010. The anthropology of genetically modified crops. Annual Reviews of Anthropology 39: 381−400.

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Sullivan, S. 2009. Green capitalism. Radical Anthropology 3: 18−27. Surrallès, A. and P. García Hierro (eds). 2004. Tierra adentro. Territorio Indígena y percepción del entorno. Copenhagen: IWGIA (Document 39). Szabó, P. 2010. Why history matters in ecology: an interdisciplinary perspective. Environmental Conservation 37(4): 380−387. Takacs, D. 1996. The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophy of paradise. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Toledo, V. M. 2001. Biodiversity and indigenous peoples. In Simon Asher Levin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, 3, pp. 451−463. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Townsend, C. 2008. Ecological Applications. Toward a sustainable world. Oxford: Blackwell. Tsing, A. L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. West, P. 2005. Translation, value, and space: theorizing an ethnographic and engaged environmental anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632−642. Wilson, E. O. 1984. Biophilia: The human bond with other species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. 1985. The biological diversity crisis: a challenge to science. Issues in Science and Technology 2: 20−29. Wilson, E. O. (ed.). 1988. BioDiversity. Washington, DC: National Academic Press. Zerner, C. (ed.). 2000. People, Plants and Justice. The politics of nature conservation. New York: Columbia University Press.

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4.2.3 New Directions in the Anthropology of Food Jakob A. Klein, Johan Pottier and Harry G. West

Food has always been a primary human concern, entangled with virtually every other dimension of the human experience (Montanari, 2006). And anthropologists have been interested in food − albeit generally as a piece of a larger ethnographic puzzle − since the foundation of the discipline. More recently, however, anthropologists have begun to conceive of food as a topic worthy of more focused enquiry (Mintz and Du Bois, 2002). If the industrialization and modernization of food and agriculture persuaded many in the twentieth century that ‘the food problem’ was being solved definitively, we now find ourselves living once more in times when the world’s most pressing problems nearly all seem to be, in significant measure, connected to food. Today, nearly a billion people around the world (a seventh of the global population) are under-nourished, while over a billion (more than another seventh) suffer the effects of over-nutrition (Patel, 2007). But what we eat, or fail to eat, is only part of the picture. Through food, social bonds or, for that matter, divisions are created, reproduced, and contested, meaning that food is an issue in

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everything from the travails of the modern nuclear family (DeVault, 1991) to civil wars and failed states (De Waal, 1997). What is more, the industrial intensification of agriculture and food has come to play a significant part in the environmental crisis we now face, contributing greatly to the reduction of biodiversity and to the rise in greenhouse gases (Kimbrell, 2002). It is within this context that the anthropology of food is becoming a rich and exciting field of study in its own right. As limitations on the length of this chapter preclude any systematic review of the anthropology of food, we focus instead on works that illustrate a new anthropological engagement − and further possibilities thereof − with the changing global food landscape. Many forces give shape to the contemporary landscape of food, including multinational agribusinesses and supermarket chains, national and international regulatory agencies, the media, and consumers, not to mention the vast numbers of people who in one way or another grow, process, prepare and/or eat their own and others’ food, from peasant farmers and allotment gardeners, to artisan food makers and the vendors of street and

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market foods, to cooks in the home, the roadhouse, the café or the restaurant. In what follows, we consider how anthropologists, as well as scholars in other disciplines contributing to an emergent interdisciplinary field of ‘food studies’, have begun to examine each of these forces in their work. We structure the chapter, however, around a discussion of what is perhaps the most definitive force in today’s food world − namely, the liberalization of the global food trade − as well as around anthropological study of various responses to this, including several of the most celebrated ‘alternatives to the global food system’. Our critical analysis of these proposed alternatives allows us to broaden the scope of our survey to include many of the most dynamic and promising areas of study in the anthropology of food today. The industrialization and globalization of food may precede the industrial revolution itself, as Sidney Mintz has argued (Mintz, 1985), but the post-cold war restructuring of the global economy has afforded a context for its unprecedented intensification in recent years (McMichael, 1994). The birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 1 January 1995 further altered the global food landscape dramatically. Whereas the WTO’s predecessor General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) did not include agriculture under its remit, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture created the global architecture for ‘free trade’ in foodstuffs, building upon regional trade agreements from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to the more recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (Madeley, 2000). Deborah Barndt’s seminal work, Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (Barndt, 2002), illustrates how the global ‘free market’ in one food commodity, namely the tomato, has led to: more concentrated and intensive cultivation in selected locales, often with detrimental implications for the environment; the sourcing of food over greater distances, also with ecological costs; the substitution of unstable,

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low-income farm work, often undertaken by migrant workers, for self-sufficient farming at various scales; the concentration of profittaking in the food processing industry and, especially, in large-scale retail chains; and production of foods of generally lower nutritional value and poorer taste. Anthropologists are well placed to document the lived experience of the new global food system all along the chain mapped out by Barndt. For example, contributors to Striffler and Moberg’s collection, Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Striffler and Moberg, 2003), build upon the commodity-based approach developed by Mintz (1985) and used by anthropologists (e.g. Sick, 1999) as well as other social scientists (e.g. Hellin and Higman, 2003), to examine the impact of the global banana trade on producers in Latin America while also laying bare how politics − in this case alliances between Latin American elites and North American capital − undergirds a ‘free market’ that is experienced by smallscale growers and farm labourers as deeply exploitative. Aggravating perceptions of injustice among many rural people in the Global South, especially in Africa, has been a paradigm shift, clearly articulated by many of the participants at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, embracing the idea that ‘deagrarianization’ is an inevitable process (Bryceson, 1996). When the UK Department for International Development called for ‘New Directions for Agriculture in Reducing Poverty’, Simon Maxwell (of the Overseas Development Institute) argued that the majority of rural people in developing countries were destined to become functionally landless (without land or with only small homestead plots), while their incomes would in future come mostly from non-agricultural work, including ‘jobs in food processing or manufacturing, or in other ways in the supply chain’ (Maxwell, 2004). Donors agreed. In a 2005 report, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) argued that a more commercial agricultural sector was

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crucial for sustainable poverty reduction, and called for policies that would enable the poor to take advantage of their most valuable asset: their own labour (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2005). But the new paradigm’s assertion that trade was key to achieving food security was in fundamental contradiction with observed experience that with expanding trade volume generally comes declining terms of trade for the products that developing countries produce. What is more, the deagrarianization paradigm focused insufficient attention on poor people’s perspectives (Pottier, 1999). One of us subsequently examined how poor farmers in Rwanda, a country that had become a showcase for the new paradigm, might react to the downward price pressures created by agricultural ‘free trade’, as well as to the ‘invitation’ to give up their land for asyet-non-existent jobs in food processing and manufacturing and the promise of a better future (Pottier, 2006). Whereas the Rwandan government, with donor support, took the view that a fully commercialized approach to land management (through land consolidation) would generate a spectacular boost in non-agricultural incomes, and that this would persuade land-poor farmers to opt out of agriculture, the poor have shown reluctance to abandon their land, in no small measure due to the conceptual meanings that accrue to land ownership − values at the core of Rwandan social identities. Similar struggles over meaning can be witnessed elsewhere around the globe and, based upon these ethnographic realities, anthropologists have looked critically at policy claims that local land tenure systems invariably impede higher production and sustainability, arguing instead that such systems often give farmers the flexibility and mobility necessary to cope with short-term crises (Agarwal, 1994; Breusers, 2001). Ethnographic accounts of the impact of neoliberal food trade on farmers and labourers have not been limited to the Global South. Striffler has explored the nexus between intensive poultry farming and

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low-wage employment in processing plants in the United States, focusing on the use of undocumented migrant workers, who are vulnerable to low wages, hazardous conditions, and other abuses in the workplace (Striffler, 2005; see also Wells, 1996). Dunn has examined how privatization of a baby food plant in post-socialist Poland has reshaped worker subjectivities there (Dunn, 2004). The global food trade has also contributed to the rapid growth of service industries, from supermarkets to fast- (and slow-) food restaurants, to dieting industries, all of which provide vast new terrain for ethnographic exploration (Belasco and Scranton, 2002; Kulick and Meneley, 2005; Watson, 2006 [1997]; Watson and Caldwell, 2005; Wilk, 2006b). The ethnographic contexts in which agriculture and food have been studied in the Global North bear witness to the fact that liberalization of the global food trade has not only affected rural people around the world but also urban dwellers, whose numbers are increasing dramatically in part due to deagrarianization policies. Longitudinal studies of Cairo (Khouri-Dagher, 1996) and Kinshasa (Trefon, 2004), for example, show how external shocks force poor people (and even the middle classes) to make difficult, sometimes painful choices regarding who will eat and who will not, while also balancing the need for food with needs for medical treatment or education. Urban groups and individuals are ever on the look out for dynamic new forms of social organization, which may involve reworking conventional relations of kinship, class and gender, as well as new politicoeconomic adaptations. An insightful illustration is Auyero’s study of clientelist networks in the shantytown of Villa Paraíso, where grass-roots political (Peronist) offices became the hub for the distribution of powdered milk in return for political loyalty (Auyero, 2000). In Kinshasa, hardship has led to increases in urban and peri-urban agriculture, which means that most families now grow some of their own food. Havana in the post-Soviet era is another highly visible example of a new,

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food-oriented urban agriculture, although Premat argues that despite improving food security, commercialized urban agriculture there has provided relatively little income to the poor, and that while it may have given them access to more food it did not necessarily afford the quality and diversity needed for a balanced diet (Premat, 2005). The wide range of motives and methods associated with the growth of urban agriculture, not only in the Global South but also in the North, will be of interest to anthropologists for years to come. As the studies of urban food security cited above suggest, anthropologists are well positioned not only to see the effects produced by the intensification of industrialization and globalization of the world’s food supply but also the human responses to these changes, as well as the limits and consequences of these responses. The range of responses is, of course, enormous. It is no coincidence that the Zapatista uprising was launched on 1 January 1994, the day on which NAFTA came into force. ‘Free trade’ threatened the livelihoods of many of Mexico’s rural poor (Barry, 1995). Elsewhere, opposition to free trade in agriculture has been waged by activists on websites and blogs, as well as in the streets during key meetings of international institutions, such as the ‘Battle in Seattle’ during the WTO Ministerial in 1999 (Borras, Edelman and Kay, 2008). In the decade since, the ‘Doha round’ of WTO negotiations has stalled, in no small measure due to impasse over whether or not the trade in agricultural commodities should be further liberalized and, if so, how. Whereas proponents of neoliberal trade regimes celebrate them as means of ‘disembedding’ the market from the distorting influences of politics, culture and, even, the natural environment (notwithstanding Karl Polanyi’s foundational critique of such attempts [Polanyi, 1957]), others have asserted that ‘food is different’ (Rosset, 2006). Foodstuffs may be the original commodities, but because food is a fundamental human necessity, management of its supply

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has long been fundamentally political. Arguably, the state was born with management of the food supply, and food shortages profoundly threaten any political regime. Food’s fundamental economic importance relates to the fact that its production, processing, trade, preparation, and serving have long been principal human occupations. Even today, more than half of the world’s population derives a living from food-related work. ‘Foodways’, therefore, are profoundly entangled with ‘lifeways’ − in other words, culture (Camp, 1989). And food production not only derives from and depends upon natural ecologies but also serves as a means by which these ecologies are reproduced, transformed, or destroyed. Many of the proposed ‘alternatives to the global food system’ therefore aim to ‘re-embed’, or to recognize the ‘embeddedness’, of agriculture and food in political processes, culture institutions and natural ecologies of varying dimensions (Hinrichs, 2000; L. Raynolds, 2000). Organic agriculture is one of these. Born of concerns raised by the use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides in the 1930s and 1940s, founders of the organic movement envisioned agriculture as a form of coexistence with, rather than extraction from, nature. Sir Albert Howard, a key figure in the establishment of the Soil Association, was dispatched to India by the British government to teach peasants modern farming techniques, but returned with the message that their simple farming methods were the better model (Howard and Howard, 1945). Echoing Howard, agroecologists and ethnoecologists today continue to explore the ways in which ‘indigenous agricultural knowledge’ might underpin more sustainable agricultural production (Altieri, 1995; Nazarea, 1999; Posey and Plenderleith, 2002). ‘Organics’ has, of course, come to mean something rather more specific than food grown in harmony with nature, regardless of the knowledge systems used to grow it. Following on the many bodies that arose to certify organic food, the International

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Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements has, since 1972, set standards recognized by most of the certification schemes operating around the world today. The market for ‘organics’ remains a small proportion of the food sector worldwide, but has grown dramatically since the early 1990s. Although the post-Second World War counter-culture envisioned a ‘counter-cuisine’ embedded in more egalitarian social and economic institutions, some now argue that ‘organics’ have become little more than industrial food without chemical inputs (Belasco, 1993): i.e. that the burgeoning ‘organics industry’ has been ‘conventionalized’ (Guthman, 2004). Despite these critiques, in countries including the United Kingdom (Kneafsey, 2008), Russia (Caldwell, 2007) and China (Klein, 2009), a variety of partially connected social movements, discourses and practices surrounding ‘organic’, ‘green’, ‘ecological’ and ‘natural’ foods have come to provide focal points for articulating and managing growing consumer concerns about the taste, safety and healthiness of the food supply. Indeed, with the globalization and industrialization of food systems, anthropologists working in both the Global North and the Global South will doubtless be paying greater attention to how people variously perceive and manage bodily risks, including those associated with obesity and malnourishment, food- and animal-borne illnesses, food contamination and adulteration, genetically modified organisms, and bioterrorism (Caplan, 2000; Kleinman and Watson, 2006; Lien and Nerlich, 2004; Lupton, 1996; Nestle, 2003; Sobal and Maurer, 1999). Increasingly, nutritional science is animating new discourses used to describe, interpret and manage the relationship between food and bodily health. Governments, the food industries, social reformers and development organizations have, at various historical moments since the end of the nineteenth century, disseminated nutritional advice as means to improve the health of populations (Jing, 2000; Levenstein, 2003 [1993]; Turner, 1982). However, critics have argued that the

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spread of nutritional advice has been inseparable from the exercise of state power, the interests of industry and/or the construction of individualized health subjects (Austin, 1999; Coveney, 2006 [2002]; Jing, 2000; Lupton, 1996; Nestle, 2007 [2002]). The influential critic Michael Pollan has popularized claims that the dominance of nutritional discourse in the United States has increased anxieties about eating (by encouraging people to take individual responsibility for ‘eating right’) and to think of food not in terms of taste or pleasure but in terms of the effects of calories and nutrients on bodily health and size. No longer grounded in the supposedly taste-oriented and socially embedded foodhealth cultures of their forebears, Americans have become susceptible to the latest nutritional fads and at the same time ever more anxiety-ridden as a result of the conflicting and frequently changing advice provided by dietary experts and disseminated through the mass media, a situation which Pollan suggests may be having negative effects on the population’s health (Pollan, 2008; see also Levenstein, 2003 [1993]; Mintz, 1996). Although focusing on the United States and some other advanced economies, these arguments have implications for anthropologists concerned with the impact of biomedical discourses, the food and dieting industries, and the state on dietary cultures and human health around the world. Nonetheless, the critique of the spread of biomedical nutrition and the corresponding loss of ‘traditional’ foodways suffers from a lack of ethnographic grounding. Sociocultural anthropologists’ potential contributions to debates on the health impact of industrialized foods and nutritional knowledge lie in their ability to provide such grounding, and in their understanding that concerns and practices to do with the body and health are always bound up with concerns around social relations and collective identities (Caplan, 1997; Sobo, 1997). Thus, for example, ethnographies exploring the reception of ‘healthy eating advice’ in both Britain (Bradby, 1997; Keane, 1997) and

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China (Guo, 2000; Jing, 2000) highlight that peoples’ food ‘choices’ are complex phenomena shaped by historical memory, embodied experience, social class, and gendered and generational relations within the family (see also Farquhar, 2002; Lora-Wainwright, 2009; Lupton, 1996). Furthermore, people may exercise a great degree of agency in their everyday dietary decisions, for example, by actively drawing on apparently incompatible dietary belief systems such as Ayurveda and biomedical nutrition (Bradby, 1997; see also Jing, 2000). Moreover, even in settings where debates on ‘organics’ and other forms of ‘ethical food consumption’ are little known, people’s attitudes toward industrialized foods and nutrition may be informed by social critiques as well as by concerns for bodily health. Lora-Wainwright interprets some Sichuan farmers’ scepticism of the now abundant fresh pork sold in markets, which was thought to have come from pigs raised on genetically modified foods, and their disapproval of children’s school meals, described by one parent as ‘disgusting and not nutritious’, as a reflection of their broader dissatisfaction with the consumerism and inequalities brought about by China’s market reforms (Lora-Wainwright, 2009). Whereas movements toward ‘organics’ have often been particularly concerned with promoting the health of ecosystems and humans by reconnecting food production with ‘nature’, another celebrated alternative to the global food system, ‘fair trade’, explicitly focuses attention on the social embeddedness of the foods we eat, seeking to connect consumers (especially in the Global North) to producers (especially in the Global South). Like organics, fair trade has deep roots. Religious communities, such as the Mennonite Central Committee, began selling handicrafts from developing countries in small shops in the late 1940s, and charities such as Oxfam followed suit in the 1960s. Solidarity networks supporting socialist revolutions from Tanzania to Nicaragua sold coffee and other foodstuffs produced by

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those they supported from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The term fair trade was consolidated with the emergence of certifying schemes − many of them, in turn, certified since 2004 by the World Fair Trade Organization − and the marketing of fair trade goods, including an ever-growing range of foods, through established retail networks, including supermarket chains. Anthropologists and other social scientists have both celebrated and criticized fair trade (Barrientos and Dolan, 2006; Harrison, 2005; Luetchford, 2008; Nicholls and Opal, 2005; Raynolds, Murray and Wilkinson, 2007; Sick, 1999). While fair trade schemes ‘cut out middle men’, insuring that a greater proportion of purchase price reaches point of production, they sometimes undermine the livelihoods of traders − a vast and variable category of actors not yet sufficiently studied by anthropologists. Critics have shown that fair trade projects have naively vested confidence in producer ‘communities’ to share the resultant wealth fairly but, as anthropologists well know, communities are complex and often contentious social fields. What is more, the connection fair trade schemes create between producers and consumers is, ultimately, mediated by certification schemes and marketing devices; as the embrace of fair trade by supermarket chains has shown, this may put a happy peasant face on what is still, in large measure, a lucrative corporate business. And of course, the connections fair trade facilitates are rendered necessary precisely because of the distances at which these products are consumed, meaning that fair trade can work at crossed purposes with attempts to re-embed food systems in the natural ecology. As understanding of the global environmental crisis has grown over the last two decades, an abiding concern with limiting ‘food miles’ has animated a vast array of initiatives to embed food and agriculture in ecologies of varying dimensions. In the Global North, the ‘back to the earth’ movement of the 1960s has been followed by the proliferation of farmers’ markets, and

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community-supported agriculture and box schemes, as well as by the resurgence of community gardens/allotments and kitchen gardens (Lyson, 2004). ‘Locavores’ seek to eat only food grown within a determined radius of their place of residence, attuning their consumption to the seasons that define their food shed (Kingsolver, Hopp and Kingsolver, 2007; Nabhan, 2002). Proponents of ‘food sovereignty’ argue that the global food system has increasingly ignored the importance of food in the construction and reproduction of society in its many dimensions. They argue that political, social and cultural systems are intimately bound up not only with the consumption of certain foods but also with their production, processing, trade and preparation, and that people should be able to defend their foodways, and thus lifeways, from unfair − often subsidized − competition (Schanbacher, 2010). Around the world, national, regional and local governments are investing resources in identifying and supporting the identification and marketing of ‘heritage foods’, whether through geographical indication schemes that link a food product to a place, its people and their productive traditions, or through contesting the use by transnational corporations of the genetic material produced by local farmers over millennia (through selective plant and animal breeding) as raw material for the creation and patenting of genetically modified organisms (Cleveland and Murray, 1997; Tansey and Rajotte, 2008). Ethnographic studies of these phenomena also reveal contradictions and limitations (Holloway and Kneafsey, 2004; Kneafsey, 2008; Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch, 2006; Watts, Ilbery and Maye, 2005). Many home and community gardeners farm without much commitment, whether for lack of time or loss of interest (DeLind, 2003). Farmers’ market consumers may add food miles (perhaps even more than they save) to their diet by inefficiently acquiring these foods − for example, driving much further than their ‘local’ supermarket (to which they also continue to go) to buy only a fraction of the

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foods they actually consume. Like organics and fair trade, ‘local’ is a concept mediated by traders, and consumers are often pleased to consume ‘localness’ at a great distance so long as the product is presented in the language of any locality. This is particularly true at the high end of the food market. Slow Food − founded in Italy in 1986 in response to the opening of the first McDonald’s in that country − suggests that one can ‘do good by eating well’ (Kummer, 1999), but critics have argued that the organization feeds on nostalgia for ‘simpler times’ and propagates romanticized and inaccurate versions of past peasant lifeways which were, in fact, almost invariably more arduous and more impoverished than portrayed (Laudan, 2004; Leitch, 2000; Pietrykowski, 2004). The celebration of ‘local’ and/or ‘heritage’ foods may also gloss the importance of export agriculture, particularly to farmers in the Global South who have come to depend on northern markets, and may serve as a vehicle for ethnocentrism and xenophobia, as in the case of the 2009 ban on the sale of ‘ethnic foods’ in the Tuscan town of Lucca, which served, in effect, as a ban on immigrant small businesses (Owen, 2009). The food sovereignty movement may be of particular interest to anthropologists, not only because it calls for the documentation and protection of threatened regional and national foodways but also because this agenda inevitably raises vexing questions about how such traditions can be delineated in space and time. Indeed, foodways (like the broader cultures of which they are an integral component) constitute dynamic systems, subject to ongoing contestation and transformation. Food may travel in today’s global economy, but foods have travelled throughout human history, their movements transforming ‘local’ foodways everywhere, sometimes subtly and sometimes in dramatic fashion. Examples of this include the spread of soy foods from China throughout Northeast and Southeast Asia and the arrival of New World crops such as the Andean potato and the tomato in Europe, cassava in sub-Saharan

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Africa, or maize, sweet potatoes and peanuts in China (Crosby, 2003 [1972]; Du Bois, Tan and Mintz, 2008; Mazumdar, 1999; Mintz, 2008). Ideas about food (the appropriate structure of a meal, for example) and food technologies (means of preservation, or marketing, for example) have also long travelled, and not necessarily together with the foods they were first associated with. And finally, people, as Mintz (2008) reminds us, travel now as they have throughout human history, sometimes bringing their foodstuffs with them, sometimes bringing food ideas or technologies, but always adapting their foodways in their new places of residence. Such adaptation may, of course, involve the abandonment of food practices in favour of those of the ‘host’ society, but may also involve shaping the foodways of these hosts and, in some cases, of those ‘back home’. Anthropologists are particularly well situated to explore the complexities of ‘local foods’ within contexts of increased longdistance trade and migration. In fact, food has figured prominently in recent anthropological discussions on the fate of local cultures and localities in the current phase of globalization. Thus, while Ritzer contends that the globalization of American fast food is having a homogenizing effect on cultures (Ritzer, 2004 [1993]), ethnographic engagements with fast food purveyors and consumers have instead highlighted tendencies toward both convergence and divergence. For instance, a groundbreaking volume edited by Watson (2006 [1997]) explores how East Asian consumers have variously incorporated McDonald’s into their eating patterns, ritual practices and food categories, as well as how McDonald’s foods and its restaurant spaces have figured in renegotiations of class, gender, age and national identities (see also Caldwell, 2004; Yan, 2000). Indeed, the opposition between ‘globalized’ and ‘local’ food cultures is often highly misleading (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1999). An early article on the ‘Cincinnati chilli culinary complex’ by the folklorist Timothy

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Lloyd demonstrates that ‘regionally’ or ‘locally’ distinctive foods are not necessarily rooted in pre-industrial agricultural food systems, but can be constructed by entrepreneurs, who, in the Ohio case, creatively combined industrial products with the foods and cooking styles of various immigrant communities (Lloyd, 1980). Similar to Lloyd, Wilk shows in an historical ethnography of Belizean cuisine how, over centuries, there emerged a distinctive local cuisine that was heavily dependent on imported foods and borrowed techniques. Furthermore, Wilk argues that the quite recent recognition of these culinary practices as a distinctive ‘national’ cuisine emerged in a context of international tourism and, especially, transnational migration, as Belizean migrants in the United States began to desire and trade in ‘authentic’ Belizean foods and subsequently introduced ideas of Belizean culinary distinctiveness in the home country itself (Wilk, 2006a). Such desires among migrants for foods of the homeland hint at the powerful links between foods, the senses, embodiment and memory − links which anthropologists have increasingly been exploring, following on the seminal works of Seremetakis (1994) and Sutton (2001). Seeking to bridge the gap between cognitive and structuralist theories, Sutton argues that food plays a particularly salient role in the construction of individual and social memories both because: of the immediacy with which smells/tastes may evoke the contexts in which they were previously experienced while evading precise description outside of these contexts, and of the way meals, building on Douglas (1971), help structure daily, annual and life cycles, thereby shaping the ways people experience time and change. Moreover, he argues − on the basis of his ethnography of the Greek island of Kalymnos − that while the capacity of food to create powerful, embodied memories is universal, food memories are elaborated in culturally and historically contingent ways, such that, for example, Kalymnians tend to

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value repetition in foods and attach great significance to small variations in constant patterns, in contrast to Americans, who, he argues, tend to place a greater value on novelty and variety. Sutton’s engaging arguments shed light on the role that food can play in the construction of social identities in a variety of contexts, including the ways in which nostalgia for the tastes and smells of childhood may be a potent force in nationalist struggles among exiled populations (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004) and, arguably, among producers, activists and consumers engaged in ‘alternative food movements’. However, there is a tendency in the food and memory literature to romanticize the culinary nostalgia it describes, and to downplay the role played by food memories in differences and conflicts within households and communities. As Lora-Wainwright (2009) describes in the case of rural Sichuan, different dispositions toward food embodied through historically contingent experiences of famine and abundance in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China shaped (but did not determine) ongoing inter-generational conflicts over dietary decisions. Moreover, as Holtzman (2009) argues in an important recent ethnography on the experiences of rapid dietary change among the Samburu in Northern Kenya, food memories can be deeply ambivalent. Thus, the Samburu profoundly experienced the rapid shift in their livelihoods and diets away from the pastoral products of milk, meat and blood to an increasing reliance on agricultural products both as cultural, physical and moral decay and as ‘progress’. Similar ambivalences surrounding dietary transformations are arguably widespread, and anthropologists should heed Mintz’s point that while many people may mourn the ‘loss of that rich texture of daily social interaction’ brought about by the rise of industrialized cuisines and the disembedding of food supplies from kin groups and communities, many others ‘celebrate freedom from the kitchen, from dishwashing, from provincial life [… and …] from intimacy’ (Mintz, 2006: 15).

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The focus of many ‘alternatives to the global food system’ − including organics, fair trade and local food − on ‘ethical consumption’ not only empowers ‘everyone’ to ‘make a difference’ in ‘little ways’ but also is limited by the very ambivalence mentioned above. Even if modern diets in the Global North effectively constitute daily feasting, with well-known health risks for the individual, reduced food security for the nation, and diminished natural resources for the planet, Northern consumers (and the growing middle class elsewhere) appear loathe to give them up, searching instead for quick fixes in the form of fad diets, foreign land grabs and genetically modified foods. Even those who wish to ‘change their ways’, and with them to ‘change the world’, remain vulnerable to advertisers celebrating the merits of nutriceuticals and greenwashing air-freighted produce grown on clear-cut rain forest land, if not paralysed by more information than they can possibly process in the supermarket aisle. In this regard, the food sovereignty movement is different, for it not only challenges the idea that one can at best coexist with a global corporate food system but also calls for a new political and legal framework giving force to more healthy, more sustainable, and more democratic foodways. Attempts to secure such a framework − at various scales and in places scattered around the globe − are both inevitable and inevitably contentious. They will, however, define not only how we eat but also how we live in the decades to come and, so, anthropological interest in these dynamics is also inevitable.

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Holtzman, J. (2009). Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Howard, A., and Howard, L. E. M. (1945). Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease. London: Faber and Faber. Jing, J. (2000). Food, Nutrition, and Cultural Authority in a Gansu Village. In J. Jing (ed.), Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change (pp. 135−159). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keane, A. (1997). Too Hard to Swallow? The Palatability of Healthy Eating Advice. In P. Caplan (ed.), Food, Health and Identity (pp. 172−192). London and New York: Routledge. Khouri-Dagher, N. (1996). The State, Urban Households, and Management of Daily Life: Food and Social Order in Cairo. In D. Singerman and H. Hoodfar (eds), Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A view from the household (pp. 110−133). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kimbrell, A. (2002). Fatal Harvest: The tragedy of industrial agriculture. Washington, DC: Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in arrangement with Island Press. Kingsolver, B., Hopp, S. L., and Kingsolver, C. (2007). Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life (1st edn). New York: HarperCollins. Klein, J. A. (2009). Creating Ethical Food Consumers? Promoting Organic Foods in Urban Southwest China. Social Anthropology 17(1), 74−89. Kleinman, A., and Watson, J. L. (2006). SARS in China: Prelude to pandemic? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kneafsey, M. (2008). Reconnecting Consumers, Producers, and Food: Exploring alternatives. New York: Berg. Kulick, D., and Meneley, A. (2005). Fat: The anthropology of an obsession. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Penguin. Kummer, C. (1999). Doing Good by Eating Well. Atlantic Monthly 102−104(March), 106−107. Laudan, R. (2004). Slow Food: The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism. Food, Culture and Society 7(2), 134−144. Leitch, A. (2000). The Social Life of Lardo: Slow Food in Fast Times. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1(1), 103−118. Levenstein, H. A. (2003 [1993]). Paradox of Plenty: A social history of eating in modern America (rev. edn.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lien, M. E., and Nerlich, B. (2004). The Politics of Food (English edn). Oxford and New York: Berg.

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Lloyd, T. (1980). The Cincinnati Chili Culinary Complex. Western Folklore 40(1), 28−40. Lora-Wainwright, A. (2009). Fatness and Well-being: Bodies and the Generation Gap in Contemporary China. In B. S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen (eds), The Body in Asia (pp. 113−126). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Luetchford, P. (2008). Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Lupton, D. (1996). Food, The Body, and The Self. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lyson, T. A. (2004). Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting farm, food, and community. Medford, MA and Lebanon, NH: Tufts University Press and University Press of New England. Madeley, J. (2000). Hungry for Trade: How the poor pay for free trade. London and New York: Zed Books; distributed in the USA exclusively by St. Martin’s Press. Maxwell, S. (2004). Launching the DFID Consultation ‘New Directions for Agriculture in Reducing Poverty’. Mazumdar, S. (1999). The Impact of New World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India. In R. Grew (ed.), Food in Global History (pp. 58−78): Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McMichael, P. (1994). The Global Restructuring of Agrofood Systems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking. Mintz, S. W. (1996). Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into eating, culture, and the past. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mintz, S. W. (2006). Food at Moderate Speeds. In R. R. Wilk (ed.), Fast Food/Slow Food: The cultural economy of the global food system (pp. 3−11). Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Mintz, S. W. (2008). Food and Diaspora. Food, Culture and Society 11(4), 509−523. Mintz, S. W., and Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Reviw of Anthropology 31, 99−119. Montanari, M. (2006). Food is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Morgan, K., Marsden, T., and Murdoch, J. (2006). Worlds of Food: Place, power, and provenance in the food chain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Nabhan, G. P. (2002). Coming Home to Eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods (1st edn). New York: W. W. Norton. Nazarea, V. D. (1999). Ethnoecology: Situated knowledge/located lives. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

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Nestle, M. (2003). Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nestle, M. (2007 [2002]). Food Politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health (rev. and expanded edn). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nicholls, A., and Opal, C. (2005). Fair Trade: Marketdriven ethical consumption. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1999). We Eat Each Other’s Food to Nourish Our Body: The Global and the Local as Mututally Constituent Forces. In R. Grew (ed.), Food in Global History (pp. 240−272). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Owen, R. (2009). Italy Bans Kebabs and Foreign Foods from Cities. The Times 31 January. Patel, R. (2007). Stuffed and Starved: Markets, power and the hidden battle for the world food system. London: Portobello. Pietrykowski, B. (2004). You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement. Review of Social Economy 62(3), 307−321. Polanyi, K. (1957). The Great Transformation ([1st Beacon paperback edn). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Pollan, M. (2008). In Defense of Food: An eater’s manifesto. New York: Penguin Press. Posey, D. A., and Plenderleith, K. (2002). Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Pottier, J. (1999). Anthropology of Food: The social dynamics of food security. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers. Pottier, J. (2006). Land Reform for Peace? Rwanda’s 2005 Land Law in Context. Journal of Agrarian Change 6(4), 509−537. Premat, A. (2005). Moving between the Plan and the Ground: Shifting Perspectives on Urban Agriculture in Havana, Cuba. In L. J. A. Mougeot (ed.), Agropolis: The social, political and environmental dimensions of urban agriculture (pp. 153−185). London: Earthscan. Raynolds, L. (2000). Re-Embedding Global Agriculture: The International Organic and Fair Trade Movements. Agriculture and Human Values 17(3), 297−309. Raynolds, L. T., Murray, D. L., and Wilkinson, J. (2007). Fair Trade: The challenges of transforming globalization. New York: Routledge. Ritzer, G. (2004 [1993]). The McDonaldization of Society (rev. new century edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

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Rosset, P. (2006). Food is Different: Why we must get the WTO out of agriculture. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing. Schanbacher, W. D. (2010). The Politics of Food: The global conflict between food security and food sovereignty. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International. Seremetakis, C. N. (1994). The Senses Still: Perception and memory as material culture in modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sick, D. (1999). Farmers of the Golden Bean: Costa Rican households and the global coffee economy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Sobal, J., and Maurer, D. (eds). (1999). Weighty Issues: Fatness and thinness as social problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Sobo, E. (1997). The Sweetness of Fat. In C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik (eds), Food and Culture: A reader (pp. 256−271). New York and London: Routledge. Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken: The dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Striffler, S., and Moberg, M. (2003). Banana Wars: Power, production, and history in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sutton, D. E. (2001). Remembrance of Repasts: An anthropology of food and memory. Oxford and New York: Berg. Tansey, G., and Rajotte, T. (2008). The Future Control of Food: A guide to the international negotiations and rules on intellectual property, biodiversity and food security. London: Earthscan. Trefon, T. (2004). Reinventing Order in Congo: How people respond to state failure in Kinshasa. London, New York and Kampala, Uganda: Zed Books and Fountain Publishers. Turner, B. S. (1982). The Government of the Body: Medical Regimes and the Rationalization of Diet. The British Journal of Sociology 33(2), 254−269. Watson, J. L. (ed.). (2006 [1997]). Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (2nd edn). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Watson, J. L., and Caldwell, M. L. (2005). The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Watts, D. C. H., Ilbery, B., and Maye, D. (2005). Making Reconnections in Agro-Food Geography: Alternative Systems of Food Provision. Progress in Human Geography 29(1), 22−40. Wells, M. J. (1996). Strawberry Fields: Politics, class, and work in California agriculture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Wilk, R. R. (2006a). Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean food from buccaneers to ecotourists (English edn). Oxford and New York: Berg. Wilk, R. R. (ed.). (2006b). Fast Food/Slow Food: The cultural economy of the global food system. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

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Yan, Y. (2000). Of Hamburgers and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing. In D. S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (pp. 201−225). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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4.2.4 Water, Land and Territory Veronica Strang

Water, land and territory are a central focus for every society, and have therefore always been of interest to anthropologists. Today, as human engagements with land and resources generate increasingly urgent and intractable problems, research in this area has become critically important. There are several key trends in human−environmental relations to consider: most particularly a commitment to growth that has driven massive intensification and expansion of resource use and led to the adoption of unsustainable patterns of consumption. A related expansion in human populations, and greater aspirations for material wealth, have compounded these trends and spurred aggressive efforts to commoditize and enclose land and resources. These developments have given rise to some urgent social and cultural issues. Bitter conflicts are being generated by contests over the ownership and control of land and water, and by widening disparity in people’s access to resources. Further discord is created by industrial societies’ externalization of the social and ecological costs of their productive processes to poorer nations, and this willingness to utilize resources at the expense of other societies and non-human species has generated major ethical debates. The emerging realities of climate change promise greater disruption: the forced migration of whole populations (Brettell 2003; Nolin

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2006); a further escalation in competition for resources; and intensifying pressure for radical changes in contemporary modes of production and consumption. With a long-standing interest in how societies govern and manage people and resources, anthropology has a distinctive contribution to make in providing in-depth analyses of these issues. Its comprehensive and integrated approach has the potential to challenge the more compartmentalized models that dominate popular discourses and public policy. This challenge may be politically unwelcome, but it is much needed: societies can only hope to adapt to change successfully with a real appreciation of the complex interrelationships that connect them to other human groups, non-human species, and shared local and global ecosystems.

ENGAGING WITH WATER AND LAND Societies’ interactions with water and land reflect their broader engagements with the material environment, and their ongoing processes of adaptation (Haenn and Wilk 2006; Harrison and Morphy 1998; Moran 2008). Early anthropological studies of these progressed from a focus on modes of production to more systematic examinations of resource use, employing theories of cultural

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ecology (Rappaport 1968; Steward 1977). Further development of these ideas has encouraged close-grained analyses of how people engage with their surroundings in cognitive and phenomenological terms. Cognitive approaches have focused on the ways that people use the world ‘to think with’, incorporating the material world in language, visual imagery (Figure 4.2.4.1.) and metaphor (Bachelard 1983; Boivin 2008; Lakoff and Johnston 1980; LéviStrauss 1966). Both land and water are implicated in this creative process. For example, Giblett, in his examination of ‘netherlands’ (1996), described how ideas about landscape permeate notions of the body (and vice versa), and other writers have considered how aquatic imagery and the hydrological cycle are used in multiple schema to express concepts of change, movement and flow over time (Strang 2004; Tuan 1968). Studies of phenomenological and sensory experience have illuminated diverse cultural ways of ‘being in the world’ (Bull and Back 2003; Feld and Basso 1996; Howes 2005;

Figure 4.2.4.1

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Rock art, Laura, Cape York.

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Stoller 1989) and considered how this experience is embodied (Csordas 1994; Marchand 2010; Nast and Pile 1998). The notion of embodiment resonates with ideas about how the material environment itself serves as a repository for meanings, histories and memories (Kuechler 1993; Stewart and Strathern 2003). The location of these in the landscape makes places out of spaces (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Low and LawrenceZuniga 2003) and provides a basis for social and cultural identity (Thornton 2008; Trigger and Griffiths 2003). Land and water are the major things that societies ‘act upon’, and the source (along with climate and weather) of the pressures and opportunities with which they are presented. Mutually constitutive environmental relationships create cultural landscapes and waterscapes which manifest and reflect societies’ particular beliefs, values and practices (Bender 1993; Krupnik et al. 2004; Layton and Ucko 1999). Given the colonial appropriation of many areas of the world, such landscapes are frequently contested (Figure 4.2.4.2), as groups seek to promote their own values and interests (Bender and Winer 2001). Because economic activities tend to gain priority in public discourses, there has been a tendency to focus on the importance of water in primary production. But, just as land is implicated in multiple aspects of human−environmental engagement, water permeates and connects every aspect of human life, taking a central role, for example, in health and hygiene practices, recreational activities and religious and aesthetic undertakings. It is as important in the domestic sphere as in economic endeavours, and as vital in the cityscape as in the countryside (Swyngedouw 2004). All of these domains are systemically interrelated, both conceptually and practically. Ideas, knowledge and values spill from one into another, producing material outcomes. As Orlove and Caton put it: ‘Water connects domains of life such that the water used in one will affect the water used in others’ (2010: 402). Thus, notions of

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Figure 4.2.4.2

Protest against mining in National Parks, Auckland.

what constitutes wealth and health may discourage water conservation; the profligate use of water in domestic urban life may threaten farmers’ access to limited freshwater supplies; and economic aspirations may clash with recreational interests. Much depends on the agency of each group of water users, and on the social and ecological impacts of its expression. There is wide diversity in the extent to which people seek to exert human agency on land and water, with some cultural or subcultural groups maintaining low-key and relatively sustainable practices and others adopting highly exploitative, short-term forms of resource use (Strang 2009; Wisnewski 2008). It has long been recognized that the control of water is fundamental to political power and agency (Wittfogel 1957). Schama observes that giant dams and hydroelectric power stations denote the omnipotence of ‘modern despots’ just as the Nile irrigation canals manifested the power

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of the Pharaohs (1996: 261). The lack of such control is a commensurate measure of disenfranchisement, and there is a critical relationship between the public ownership and control of water resources and societies’ potential to exercise democratic processes (Donahue and Johnston 1998; Khagram 2004; Lansing 1991). Land is similarly implicated in issues of control. The notion of ‘territory’ conflates ideas about power, space and identity, expressing the importance of the processes through which people embed social meanings in landscapes, locate identity in place, and develop affective attachments to their homelands (Dominy 2000; Rose and D’Amico 2002). Territorial conflicts – concerns about boundary transgression, invasion and pollution – are perennial at every scale, from the impassioned minutiae of ‘neighbours at war’, to major contests over territory between nations (Halpern and Kideckel 2000; Richards 2005).

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COMMODITIZATION AND OWNERSHIP Historically, people’s interactions with land and water – and with each other – have undergone a critical shift from small-scale, kin-based societies based on systems of exchange and inalienable relationships to places and things, to larger industrial societies and market economies in which land, water and other resources have been reframed as alienable commodities (Appadurai 1986; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Kopytoff 1986; Van Binsbergen and Geschiere 2005). Commoditization has led to ecosystems being evaluated on the basis of their abilities to provide measurable ‘environmental services’ (Alexander 2005; Lansing et al. 1998), and to a primarily commercial use of land and water. Affluent societies have set aside some areas for recreation, but even these (though imagined as non-commercial

Figure 4.2.4.3

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‘wildernesses’) are in a sense commoditized as a resource for tourism (Anderson and Tabb 2002; Butler and Boyd 2000). Often such areas are – or were – the traditional land of indigenous communities (Hall 2000; West et al. 2006). Thus, commoditization has brought key changes in ways of owning water and land. Place-based societies have generally held these things in common, but centuries of population expansion and land enclosure, often in a colonial context, have led to increasing ‘propertization’ and to more individuated forms of ownership (Bardhan and Ray 2008; Goldman 1998; Hann 1998; Verdery and Humphrey 2004). Although the notion of water as a commons has been more persistent, recent decades have seen similar attempts to enclose and commoditize water resources (Figure 4.2.4.3). Initiated in Britain and the United States in a period of Thatcherism and ‘Reaganomics’,

Wivenhoe Dam, Queensland.

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water privatization has been aggressively promoted (Bakker 2003). Australia recently established a ‘water market’ by transforming water allocations into private and tradable assets (Young and McColl 2004), and transnational companies, in a form of economic colonialism, continue to make strenuous efforts to encourage water privatization in Latin America, Africa and other parts of the world. This highlights the globalization of resource ownership and control, which has greatly enabled the spread of neoliberal ideas and practices (Bradshaw 2008; Eriksen 2007). As Donahue and Johnston observe: The story of water is all too often a story of conflict and struggle between the forces of self-interest and opportunities associated with ‘progress’ and the community-based values and needs of traditional ways of life .... The quest to capture, store and distribute a reliable supply of water (or energy) implies the capture of a commons resource and the building of structures and institutions to enclose, commodify, and control it. ... Systems for controlling resource access and use typically reflect the ways in which societies are organized and thus recreate and replicate the inequities in society. (1998: 3)

Rights in conflict The appropriation of land and water has not gone unchallenged. Indigenous peoples continue to resist dispossession and domination (Blaser et al. 2004; Schweitzer et al. 2000; see also Hitchcock and Sapignoli, in this volume), and their struggle to reclaim land and reassert their traditional laws has become an important area of research and advocacy for anthropologists (Abramson and Theodossopoulos 2000; Attwood and Markus 1999; Morphy 2006; Toussaint 2004). Some restitution has been achieved based on earlier agreements, such as the Waitangi Treaty in New Zealand (1840), and through newer legislation, such as Australia’s Native Title Act (1993). Progress has also been made in Canada with the 1999 handback of the Nunavut region to indigenous communities, and with the UN’s 2007 Declaration of Indigenous Rights. However, the issue of land rights continues to generate

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conflicts in settler societies, where nonindigenous populations – having settled for a number of generations – now feel disossessed by indigenous claims (Mackay 2005). The ownership of water is generally less certain than that of land: its material fluidity challenges fixed notions of property and eludes ‘territorial’ boundaries (Strang 2010).1 Nevertheless, communities whose subsistence economies relied heavily on waterways, wetlands and seashores are now seeking to re-establish traditionally collective water rights, in opposition to national efforts to enclose and privatize water resources and create new ‘water markets’ (Altman 2004). As with land rights, there has been some limited success: in Australia, a landmark case in Arnhem Land upheld an indigenous community’s ownership of the seashore (Morphy and Morphy 2006), and in New Zealand, though the ownership of the foreshore continues to be contested, some formal agreements have been reached establishing bicultural ownership and management of rivers. For the majority of people in larger societies the issue of water ownership is more complex, and the processes of dispossession less visible. Most populations (though by no means all) retain sufficient access to water for their basic needs. The UN’s original Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family’ (1948: Article 25), and there has been a recent campaign for an additional Article directly addressing human rights to water. This reflects a long-running ideological tug-ofwar between groups who believe that water is a ‘common good’, and those who seek to commoditize and privatize water ‘resources’.2 In effect, neoliberal networks, composed of ideologically right-leaning governments and transnational corporations keen to commoditize and privatize water, are opposed by a range of left-leaning counter-movements (Figure 4.2.4.4). These ‘emergent assemblies’ (Latour 2005) are generally initiated at

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Figure 4.2.4.4

Water rights, Mexico City.

a grass-roots level, and are increasingly gaining a voice in critical discourses through ‘virtual’ connections and alliances with likeminded communities (Johnston 2009; Nash 2004). Some have encouraged direct activism: thus, efforts to appropriate public ownership of water in Bolivia were violently repulsed (Albro 2005)3 and other parts of Latin America have seen similar efforts to resist global political and economic forces (Cruz-Torres 2004).

GROWTH AND INTENSITY Among the key trends discernible in human interactions with land and water, the most powerful of all – which may be said to underlie all of the issues outlined in this chapter – is a process of intensification and expansion. Evident since the first shifts from hunting

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and gathering to agricultural land use, this has enabled population growth, which has in turn spurred technological innovation, further intensification of resource use, and further population expansion. This has resulted in the colonization of larger land areas, often at the expense of their original inhabitants. However, this process has rarely been seen in negative terms by those engaged in it: on the contrary, over the last several centuries ‘productivity’ and ‘development’ have become entrenched as positive ideals as industrialization and mass production have created economies that require – and therefore valorize – continual growth and consumption, with the latter increasingly reliant upon designed (or perceptual) obsolescence and increasingly wasteful resource use.4 Under this intensifying pressure, agriculture and resource exploitation have extended further and further into marginal hinterlands.

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Forests and wetland areas are rapidly disappearing, and so too are non-renewable resources. Efforts to increase land’s carrying capacity for stock, or to produce more crops per hectare and/or per year, rely heavily upon fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, establishing mono-cultural farming systems that degrade soil structures, pollute waterways and (because of their biological uniformity) are vulnerable to major epidemics of crop or animal diseases.5 Such agricultural practices are equally reliant upon both drainage and irrigation, demanding the construction of major infrastructures for impounding and redirecting water. Most countries, especially those in arid areas, have massively increased their agricultural water use. For example, in a pattern reflected around the world, the amount of water abstracted for irrigation in Australia has doubled in every decade since the 1960s, and over 70% of its freshwater is now used for this purpose (Figure 4.2.4.5).

Figure 4.2.4.5

The social and ecological impacts of this process of intensification are enormous. It has dislocated many place-based societies, destroying their economic viability, undermining their cultural practices and traumatizing their health and well-being (Bodley 2008; Povinelli 1999; Tan 2008). Almost any form of intensification is disruptive: industrialized farming pushes populations out of rural areas and into the cities; the destruction of forests and wetlands removes the resources necessary for subsistence economies (Orlove 2002); and mining devastates indigenous landscapes ecologically, economically and cosmologically (Kirsch 2003; Rumsey and Weiner 2001). Overuse of freshwater resources creates discord at every level: local squabbles about allocations; widening divides between rural and urban water users; and major transboundary conflicts when upriver nations dam flows across international borders (Blatter and

Irrigation channel, Queensland.

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Ingram 2001). As irrigation often uses groundwater at a rate faster than it can be replenished, diverts flows vital to aquatic ecosystems and degrades the land to which it is applied, it is temporally finite – as illustrated by increasingly frequent collapses in agricultural economies.6 Thus, in many parts of the world, though growth continues to be valorized by those gaining from it, intensifying land and water use are placing increasing pressures on those who are not (Benzing and Bernd 2003). The impacts of growth are also experienced by non-human species. Urban development has generated a rapacious demand for fuel and building materials and land clearance for these resources and for agriculture has led to massive habitat loss, as well as widespread pollution and soil erosion. The constant passage of ships and seismic exploration of the oceans has brought crippling disruptions to the acoustic ecologies of marine species and, as starkly demonstrated by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the careless mining of aquatically located resources can devastate shorelines and saltwater habitats. The impoundment of water for irrigation and hydroelectricity has led to the almost total destruction of major river ecosystems such as the Yangtze and |the Murray-Darling Basin (Beresford et al. 2001),7 and with irrigation vast areas of arid landscapes have been salinized and rendered infertile.8 The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) calculates that 38% of the Earth’s 1,642,189 plants, animals and other organisms are now under threat of extinction.9 Such extinctions have increased exponentially with intensifications in human activity, and between 27,000 and 30,000 species are now lost each year – around 3.4 an hour (IUCN 2008). Thus, one of the key characteristics of growth-based economies has been the externalization of their negative effects to less powerful people and even less powerful non-human species. As anthropologists of human−animal relations have observed, there are obvious parallels in the

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exploitation of animals and humans, not just as sources of labour but also as the bearers of the costs of industrialized societies’ forms of land and water use (Haraway 2008; Serpell 1996). In a contemporary era, though the world’s poorest societies are feeling the impact first, endemic environmental degradation has the potential to disrupt the lives of even the most cushioned elites. Both cultural diversity and biodiversity are needed if ecosystems are to retain their integrity and resilience. Globalization is leading diverse cultural groups towards a homogenized replication of unsustainable practices, and thus towards increasing conflict. A loss of biodiversity also represents increased risks. Species extinctions at the basal levels of ecosystems are destabilizing. For example, the disappearance of even minor organisms can permit the spread of destructive fungi or invasive plants. If insect populations collapse, crops cannot be pollinated, and the loss of their natural predators can encourage crop-consuming plagues of pests. Though aimed at producing more, the over-exploitation of land and water may result in new threats to food security (see Klein et al., previous chapter in this volume). Climate change, anthropogenically created by human activities, is now acknowledged as a major threat to human and non-human health. As Young et al. put it: One of the most important impacts of climate change will be its effects on the hydrological cycle and water management systems, and through these on socio-economic systems. (1994: 90)

The overuse of freshwater has already illustrated the problems that will be exacerbated if changes in global temperatures lead to more variability – and less security – in water supply. Water, wealth and health run together, and downstream water users are inevitably disadvantaged if upstream users choose to ignore their needs. This can be seen at every level: for example, Cubbie Station in southern Queensland has achieved international notoriety by buying up multiple water

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allocations and building giant dams to impound nearly a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River (Strang in press). This has had a significant effect on the unique ecosystem of the MurrayDarling Basin (whose wetlands support numerous species of migratory birds), and on the farmers downstream, whose water allocations simply fail to arrive unless there are massive (but in Australia infrequent) floods. Within societies, such issues can be mediated, up to a point, although – as demonstrated by the vituperative debates about Cubbie and irrigation more broadly – sufficient pressure on resources can cause internal conflicts to spiral. Where nations rely on water flowing across the border from more powerful neighbours the potential for conflict is far more extreme. Reisner (1986) describes how the overuse of the Colorado River in the United States leaves Mexicans with a mere saline trickle, and Lowi (1993) points to competition for the water of the Jordan as a critical factor in Middle-Eastern politics. As Mosse observes, Water resources of all kinds are never simply there, but are produced, used, and given meaning by shifting social and political relationships ... . This study describes a South Indian irrigation system which bears the imprint of former political regimes, its technology shaped not by means-end necessity, but by relations of power, which have been engineered into the landscape. (2003: 3)

Mosse’s comment serves as a reminder that water and human agency are intrinsically linked, and those who can choose how water resources (or for that matter land) are used are commensurately empowered. To date, such choices have been made largely in accord with values espousing growth and development as a positive process. However, the resulting environmental degradation is now at such a level that subaltern voices are gaining a more sympathetic hearing. In broad terms, this highlights a widening divergence between, on the one hand, commitment to growth-based ‘productivism’ and, on the other hand, increasing doubts about the further intensification that this requires.

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As Hull (2006) points out, fundamentalism on both sides has tended to polarize issues, setting conservation against development and framing regulation as antithetical to economic growth. Many commentators remain hopeful that with more efficient technology ‘sustainable development’ can be achieved and resource use rendered less destructive. However, for others, the impacts of current practices suggest a need for a more fundamental change in direction. Rising anxieties about environmental change have encouraged the globalization of local counter-movements, creating larger social networks and alliances of ‘conservationists’ and those committed to social justice, including those opposed to water privatization (Milton 1993; Yearley 2005). There has been a rapid rise in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) whose raison d’être, with varying degrees of radicalism, is to protect ecosystems and non-human species, and to forward the interests of disadvantaged human communities. They seek to influence societal practices by lobbying for more – or more effective – social and environmental regulation; through educational and representational activities; and through direct action (Figure 4.2.4.6). There is considerable cultural diversity within these networks: colonized indigenous communities’ critiques of introduced land and water use practices have little in common with the sentiments of disaffected youth groups in European cities protesting about animal extinctions. However, they share a common theme of doubt about the wisdom of unrestrained utilization of the material environment in the interests of short-term economic growth, and a tenuous coalescence of this movement is emerging in the face of apocalyptic images of environmental change (Baer and Singer 2009). In 2011, a rising groundswell of doubt about the ongoing feasibility and/or desirability of globalization and untrammelled capitalism led to a range of protests, including riots and ‘occupations’. Self-defined as ‘revolutionary’, these activities are continuing to spread

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Figure 4.2.4.6

G20 protests, Toronto 2010.

around the world, ironically with the assistance of globalized media. Critiques of land and water governance been aided by recognition of ‘environmentality’, which Agrawal describes as ‘the knowledge, politics, institutions and subjectivities that come to be linked together with the emergence of the environment as a domain that requires regulation and protection’ (2005: 227). In the last century, nation-states have experienced centralization of government and, with the dominance of free-market values, a simultaneous reduction in governance. Responsibilities for environmental management have often been passed down not to local government bodies (whose powers have been heavily eroded) but to unelected ‘stakeholder’ organizations. Though presented as ‘democratization’, such moves frequently lead to the capture of resources by powerful commercial interests, and to the marginalization of indigenous communities and non-commercial land and water users (Lawrence 2005). The lack of democratic process has also tended to increase gender

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inequalities in this area (Alston 2006; Coles and Wallace 2005; Lahiri-Dutt 2006). Thus, there are some major questions about the roles and responsibilities of governments in resource management.

GOVERNING LAND AND WATER Historically, each upsurge of concern about environmental issues has ushered in new legislation aimed at reducing the ecological impacts of human activity. But, as noted above, land, water and other resources are increasingly the property of transnational corporations – elite networks located in multiple sites (Dogan 2003; Gezon 2006; Shore and Nugent 2002). Their form eludes national or local regulation: their members may live thousands of miles from the effects of their activities and, uncontained by national boundaries, they appear more responsive to the ‘the market’ than to any form of governance (Jedrzej and Pegg 2003; Ong and Collier 2004). This dilution of notions of territory

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has served to undermine not just legislative authority but also the nation-state itself. Though nations continue to enact laws limiting the emission of pollutants and the destruction of habitats, in recent decades regulatory efforts have shifted to an international level. This has generated agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, signed by 187 nations in 1997 and ratified in 2005, and the (considerably weaker) Copenhagen Accord of 2009. But the resistance of countries such as the United States to signing these treaties, and the pressure by many powerful nations to reduce their stringency, is indicative of a reality that legal efforts to protect ecosystems (and related laws aspiring to protect cultural diversity) are seen by many to be at odds with staunch political commitments to ‘productive’ activities. To date, such regulation has been demonstrably ineffective, at best only slightly ameliorating the negative impact of intense resource exploitation on people and ecosystems. Now, faced with the stark realities of environmental change, there are some critical choices to be made by all societies, about their modes of engagement with land and water, and the forms of governance, locally, nationally and internationally, that might establish more sustainable practices. Clearly, these will only occur in concert with a collective human shift in the aims and values that dominate social action. It seems unlikely that this level of international cooperation will be reached without some truly imperative events. Thus, anthropological research in the future may be heavily concerned with the ways that societies manage disruptive levels of change and achieve more cooperative decisionmaking processes.

FUTURE TERRITORIES Anthropologists have long been interested in how societies manage resources in common (Ostrom 1990). Now the challenge is to bring into articulation the discipline’s in-depth understandings of localized, culturally

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specific modes of environmental engagement with the various levels of cooperation needed to achieve sustainability on a larger scale (Agrawal 2003; Carrier and West 2009; Paavola and Lowe 2005). There is an immediate need to examine societal modes of production and forms of energy and resource use, and to work in collaboration with other disciplines towards the development of new understandings and practices. This is related to the larger challenges of climate change, which are already causing significant disruptions to agriculture and other primary industries, and seem likely to create even more severe social and ecological impacts in the near future (Crate and Nuttall 2009; Strauss and Orlove 2003). As Henning points out: Anthropological theories, methods and research are needed, not only for the study of how humans around the world adapt to climate change, but for studies that might actually contribute to climate change mitigation. (Henning 2005: 8)

With successful mitigation unlikely in the near future, a more immediate use of anthropological expertise will be in assisting environmental refugees, already being driven from their homelands by the effects of unsustainable forms of land and water use. As other societies try to absorb these populations, multiple strains are created by competition for resources and by contentious diversities in worldviews, values and practices. There will thus be an increasing need for the traditional strengths of anthropology in cross-cultural mediation and conflict resolution. Such skills will also be in demand in resolving larger conflicts. Some commentators have suggested that anxieties about water ‘scarcity’ and discourses of ‘crisis’ have been manufactured by commercial interests attempting to enclose resources. But whether perceptual or material, these clearly have the potential to lead to rapid breakdowns in social and political relations and to conflicts over terrestrial and aquatic territories. And if current trends in resource use persist, there is little doubt that many

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societies will be genuinely unable to meet rising demands without critical levels of social and ecological disruption. Cross-cutting all engagements with land and water, as well as related issues of environmental change, are societal processes of adaptation (Caldararo 2004; Townsend 2009). The question of how to deal with greater variability in temperature, rainfall, sea levels and extreme weather events is fundamentally concerned with the extent to which populations can respond to change. Anthropologists working with groups who have demonstrated resilience are well positioned to consider the factors that enable successful adaptations (Humphrey and Sneath 1999). In this regard, local cultural factors, such as diversity in modes of production, mobility, and careful limitation of resource use, need to be linked with broader efforts to maintain cultural and biological diversity (Orlove and Brush 1996). Implicit in debates about sustainability is an underlying question about population management. Greater flexibility and efficiency in land and water use can buy time, as can the development of less expansive modes of production. But with populations continuing to enlarge there is also an urgent need for some challenging local and global conversations about producing humans. Given the centrality and the cultural specificity of ideas about human reproduction, this is clearly an area in which anthropologists should be involved. Societies’ efforts to develop more sustainable lifeways therefore remain entangled with major ideological and ethical debates about moral responsibilities to other human groups, and to other species (Beirne and South 2007). In these necessarily crosscultural debates, anthropology’s focus on in-depth comparative research, and its understandings of the relationships between local, national and global processes, have much to offer. In each of these ‘future’ areas there is a need to promulgate theoretical approaches that reintegrate social and ecological concerns. In the last several decades, dualistic

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theories of culture and nature and an increasingly materialistic, technical vision of ‘the environment’ have led to an important perceptual separation of social and ecological domains. ‘Environmental’ organizations (both within and outside government) have tended to specialize in ecological issues; those concerned with ‘social’ matters have been similarly compartmentalized. This divergence is echoed in scientific research. But having gained intellectually from the more holistic perspectives of indigenous societies, anthropology is one of the few disciplinary areas employing genuinely integrative theories of human−environmental relationships. It therefore has an important potential role in enabling the collaborative interdisciplinary research that is needed in the territories of the future, and in helping societies to generate new ways of thinking about and engaging with land and water.

NOTES 1 In any case, as Strathern observes, notions of stable rights in property are always somewhat illusory: Ownership gathers things momentarily to a point by locating them in the owner, halting endless dissemination, effecting an identity (1996: 30, see also Strathern 2010). 2 This is evident in the United Kingdom, for example, where, following the privatization of the industry in 1989, successive governments have made it legal and then illegal to cut off water supplies to households who fail to pay their water bills. 3 In the late 1990s, the World Bank, in response to a request for loans, demanded that Bolivia sell its water to private corporations as a condition of its assistance. A major international corporation, Bechtel, was brought in to facilitate this privatization. Water prices rose massively beyond the means of the poor, who were forbidden even to collect rainwater now ‘owned’ by the corporation. In the resulting riots, a number of people were injured, a teenager was killed, and the privatization was dismantled. 4 Designed obsolescence in the manufacture of artefacts has shortened their life spans, and perceptions about what is ‘fashionable’ (and pressure to conform to such notions) has encouraged even more rapid disposal of objects.

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5 Famously illustrated historically by potato blight in Ireland, recent examples include the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom, and long-running problems with outbreaks of maize streak virus in Africa. 6 As seen, for example, in Somalia in 2010, and in parts of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin during the droughts that persisted between 2002 and 2009. Major problems arising from the overuse of groundwater reserves are also evident in Yemen (see Orlove and Caton 2010). 7 Reducing the flow of rivers prevents them from being able to flush away wastes from industries and intensive farming. The flow of organic waste and fertilizers into watercourses also causes eutrophication (lack of oxygen caused by excess nutrient loads). 8 Salination occurs when irrigation brings buried salts up to the surface of the land. Once the topsoils are saline, not even native vegetation can grow successfully. 9 There is wide variety according to species: for example, the planet has lost 21% of its mammals and 37% of its fish species, but much higher percentages of some plants have gone − 86% of the mosses and 66% of the ferns.

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Wittfogel, Karl (1957) Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Yearley, Steven (2005) Cultures of Environmentalism: Empirical studies in environmental sociology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Young, Gordon, Dooge, James and Rodda, John (1994) Global Water Resource Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Mike and McColl, Jim (2004) ‘Parting the Waters: frontiers in water management, Dialogue, 23(3): 4−18.

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4.2.5 The Anthropology of Disaster Aftermath Edward Simpson

Recognizing that disasters are ‘complex’, those working in the field have stretched the definition of ‘disaster’ beyond breaking point and meaning. Of course disasters are ‘complex’, but are they any more so than a city, popular Hinduism, or the cognitive functions of a weaver? Somewhat contrarily, the tenor of this piece is to suggest that defining an area of research by making special claims on its complexity is parochial and that the ‘anthropology of disaster’ is mostly not the study of disaster at all, but the study of ‘aftermath’. The aim is not to give rise to a new subdiscipline – on the contrary, it is to reopen the field to broader questions about the human condition because wars, revolutions and violence also have aftermaths. Professionals in post-disaster reconstruction are often frustrated by the inability of the industry to learn from past disasters. Generally, anthropology seems also to increasingly suffer from amnesia, or at least a general reluctance to engage with anything published much before 1980 – other than what we euphemistically call ‘the classics’. Those who consider disaster academically seem particularly susceptible to this condition and I wish to take this opportunity to draw attention to some good ideas contained in old books.

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In a sense, amnesia has been routinized by the dominant epistemological approach to disasters. These days, academic emphasis is on the uniqueness of the circumstances of each disaster, particularly on the identification of the distinct patterns of vulnerability or risk, and so on. Therefore, if all societies are affected by disaster, but this society has not been affected by this disaster before, then the necessity to read and think comparatively is reduced because what we are confronting is unique. My suggestion is to restore an earlier and more innocent vocabulary, simply represented by the chronology in the titles of a brace of books by Francesca M. Wilson on World War II: In the Margins of Chaos (1944), which was followed by Aftermath (1947). This moves us beyond the ‘uniqueness’ paradigm by returning to older comparative frames – as exemplified by the sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin. In a 1942 work, Man and Society in Calamity, he masterfully discusses the after-effects of the ‘four monsters’ (1942: 13) – war, revolution, famine and pestilence – on emotional, political and religious life in a comparative frame. Claiming back disasters from the anthropologists of disaster for a more general anthropology, the small changes of emphasis and vocabulary I will suggest below allows us to

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restore the relationships with other bodies of literature that Sorokin saw most clearly, most obviously in the comparative writing on his four monsters. The study of natural disasters is currently thoroughly dominated by the American academy. Anthropology is a junior partner to sociology in the field. The work of Anthony Oliver-Smith dominates the anthropological literature (for example, 1977, 1986). Excellent thematic surveys on catastrophe and culture have been written by Susanna M. Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999) and vice versa (2002). Previous reviews of the anthropological literature on disaster include Torry (1979) and Oliver-Smith (1996); the allied work of sociology has been described by Quarantelli and Dynes (1977) and Kreps (1984). Instead of repeating them, and to clarify my approach to the subject, I begin by critically outlining three related trends drawn from reading these review articles. The first point to note is the persistent concern with definition and taxonomy of disasters (see also Oliver-Smith 1999; Quarantelli 1998). To me, aside from shoring up the boundaries of a subdiscipline, what these discussions actually suggest, rather than developing a watertight description of a disaster, is the impossibility of drawing a definite line between what is a disaster and what is not. Furthermore, the range of themes addressed in the literature is so vast – political economy (Albala-Bertrand 1993), sodomy (Gilbert and Barkun 1981) and symbolism (Hoffman 2002) – that it seems somewhat futile to uphold a meaningful distinction between the anthropology of the every day and that of disaster. This leads me to the second point. Modern approaches to the study of disaster have surprisingly held onto the idea that disasters are some kind of natural laboratory for the study of human behaviour. As OliverSmith boldly put it in the 1990s, disaster is ‘a crise revelatrice as the fundamental features of society and culture are laid bare in stark relief by the reduction of priorities to basic social, cultural and material necessities’

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(1996: 304). What the literature consistently shows, if anything, is that disaster is more likely to bring about a moment of abnormality and confusion in which people are thrown together as victims of a common calamity. The pioneering sociological research of Samuel Henry Prince (1920), for example, shows how ‘primitive behaviours’ (the approach is less anachronistic than the language) such as hallucination, delusion, pugnacity as well as a gregarious instinct come into view at the time of disaster (1920). Prince’s study of ‘the [then] greatest single explosion in the history of the world’ (1920: 27) focused on the devastation following the collision of two ships in the port of Halifax, Canada. In Prince’s view, the matrix of custom is shattered or disorganized rather than laid bare by catastrophe, as mores are broken up and scattered. As his discussion suggests, the laboratory supposedly created by natural disasters reveals what the margins of chaos look like, rather than the routinely sublimated features of society. More critically, however, to see disaster as a ‘laboratory’ confuses the moment of catastrophe with what anthropologists actually study. This is my third point. What is often called the ‘anthropology of disaster’ is more properly the study of the ‘aftermath’. From at least the sixteenth century, the word ‘aftermath’ has referred to the second flush of grass after the harvest of the first; and this seems an apt way of thinking about things (the organic association notwithstanding). Most anthropologists do not experience disaster first hand. If they do, the experience will move them (see Loker 2009), but it is not typically a time in which conventional research techniques count for much: the dead and dying cannot be interviewed, and many disasters (the drag of famine, drought and poison are possible exceptions) do not last long enough for the routines of participant observation to be effective. Anthropologists generally study what happened next; in doing so, they necessarily focus on acts of mourning and remembering, social organization and distributive

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mechanisms, as well as acts of creation and reconstruction. They might ask people to recall the moment of disaster, but such research itself is an act of reconstruction. In other words, studies of disaster tend to rely on the moment of disaster as a point into which the past implodes and a new narrative begins. This is in part due to the epistemological structure of most disaster research, which only begins after the disaster. Studies by anthropologists of the same place before and after disasters are to my knowledge few and would clearly be of quite a different order to most of the current literature. Recent collections on the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, for example (de Alwis and Hedman 2009; McGilvray and Gamburd 2010) take this perspective on the aftermath and the politics of reconstruction, the disaster itself casting a long shadow, but the moment of disaster is not confused with the subject of the research. Reading across the literature, aftermaths seem to have structural similarities, crudely as follows: immediately after the flood/fire/wave/earthquake, traditional social distinctions collapse; later, there is mourning/nostalgia/blame/anger and a general reflection on the nature of ethnic/ regional/national identity; then there is political protest and the reformation of social distinctions along the lines of caste/class/ religion; but, perhaps most commonly of all, these phases give way to the emergence of new economies characterized by rapid growth or boom (see Kendrick 1955; Seidensticker 1990 as prime instances). In what follows, I wish to focus primarily on the ‘boom’ of the aftermath of an earthquake, primarily because I am not aware of an anthropological piece of writing on the topic. The general literature is clear: earthquakes – far more often than not – lead to economic booms (in our times, the 2010 Haiti earthquake might prove an exception). This is reported in history as well as in a range of different cultural settings. The conventional idea is that the investment by the state and the concerned in the wake of a natural disaster creates further growth and

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this is aided by a gradual moral rejuvenation among the affected and generosity spun from both guilt and morbid fascination among the witnesses (disasters now often have global audiences). As a telling example, Barbara Bode (1989) and Oliver-Smith (1986) independently documented (in some of the best ethnographic work on aftermaths) the social changes, both subtle and stark, to follow an earthquake in Peru in 1970: the former writing with the subtitle ‘destruction and creation’, the latter with ‘death and rebirth’ to reflect the Phoenix-like ethos of life after the math. Earlier, the political economist John Stuart Mill (1848) wondered why countries recover so rapidly from states of devastation. For Mill, the destruction was nothing other than the accelerated consumption of what had been previously produced, which would have been consumed anyway. Therefore, in some senses, and to push the argument further, disaster is a moment of hyper-consumption, which necessarily – given certain general conditions – acts as powerful economic stimulus. Through the material presented in what follows, and drawing on the political economy of Mill and the neglected sociology of Prince (1920), I suggest that, among other things, the moment of disaster is itself an accelerated moment of consumption, the veracity and nature of which becomes part of a hyperbolic boom that reverberates and amplifies in the aftermath. Post-disaster booms are old and regular features of catastrophe, which must be understood as parts of the moment of sublime destruction and the collective emotional and sociological responses of the beleaguered. In other words, the nature of the aftermath is related to the form of consumption of the disaster. Although, as I have suggested, aftermaths often have common structures, they cannot be seen as a generic sociological condition in anything but the broadest sense; I do, however, think aftermaths have more in common than the disasters that create them. I now turn to look at the particular ethnography of an aftermath boom.

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AFTERMATH In 2001, an earthquake in western India suddenly consumed towns and villages. It consumed offices, schools, hospitals and houses, as well as many of the things inside them. It also consumed people, killing instantly around fourteen thousand. Many people I already knew well from previous research in the region (the district of Kutch in the state of Gujarat) died, and more lost relatives, homes and possessions.1 The aftermath of this disaster strongly resembles those of other earthquakes, including the boom. In the days after the earthquake, disorder prompted people to spend time with people they would usually not spend time with; there was for a short while commonality in terror. However, elsewhere, things went on as normal, Hindus corpses were burned and Muslims were buried – reaffirming their differentiation in death. Some looting took place, and people came from all over the world to give things, to take pictures and antiques and to witness. The dust eventually settled and the emergency response teams left (on the earthquake from the perspective of bureaucrats, see Reddy 2001; Mishra 2006). Then, people faced the task of rebuilding their houses, livelihoods and relationships in a landscape depleted of many familiar people and things. From the outset, as it had done in the past, when God failed the people, the state was expected to compensate, which it financed, in part, with a $390 million loan from the Asian Development Bank and further equally large loans from the World Bank.2 The disaster quickly brought about regime change at the top of the state government. The coup was conducted in the name of ‘efficiency’ in relation to earthquake reconstruction policies. The moderate Keshubhai Patel was replaced with the darling of the Hindu right, Narendra Modi. At his hand, the following year (2002), Gujarat was wracked by the worst communal violence for many years. Post-earthquake reconstruction

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became inseparable from communal politics with a distinct Hindu−Muslim inflection. On the ground, there was scramble for the rights to give and receive aid, which was intimately connected to the machinations of party politics, as well as to various manifestations of modern Hinduism and politicized nostalgia (see Simpson 2005; Simpson and Corbridge 2006). In the countryside, villages were rapidly rebuilt by private agencies with financial assistance from the state (see Mahadevia 2001). In the process, a variety of new political and religious ideologies were inscribed on rural Kutch (see Simpson 2004). Such interventions were frequently associated with various types of religious and political proselytization. At the time, these efforts seemed pernicious – exploitative of the vulnerability of the stunned and dispossessed – particularly when driven by the political and religious aims of the private organization and their auditors rather than by the requirements of the villagers. For a while, religion and religious ideas were far more visible colonizers of the shocked population than capital. With a few years hindsight, however, these kinds of intervention seem quite innocent in scale and ambition when held up against broader movements of capital and industry into Kutch on the back of government subsidies in the name of post-earthquake reconstruction. In Bhuj, the administrative centre of Kutch from where most of my data is drawn, the disruption in the early years (loosely 2001– 2004), as seems to be the case in a great many disasters, is/was often referred to as the ‘second earthquake’ as the Government of Gujarat seemed to impose the weight of its understandable hesitancy on the beleaguered. It is not an exaggeration to say that surviving the earthquake became a full-time job for quite some years after the actual event. Many busied themselves with the details of the various compensation packages; some studied the new building codes; for others, there was time for little more than staying one step ahead of the bulldozers that had been drafted in to reconstruct the town.

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The complexities and bureaucracy of urban reconstruction, the sheer size of the task, and clear divisions in popular opinion undoubtedly contributed to delays in policy design and implementation. There were some, for example, who thought Bhuj should be built anew elsewhere; others favoured rebuilding it the way it had been. For a long time, however, there appeared to be no plan and people became angry; then it was decided to rebuild Bhuj where it had been and to allow room for future expansion and the resettlement of the homeless. Then, as the months passed, concern shifted to building temporary shelters, the implications of having lost documents relating to property and finance and the lack of governmental coordination. Later, it was planning considerations, policies for rubble clearance, levels of compensation and baffling questions about the rights of tenants and apartment owners that preoccupied many. There were surveys and resurveys, and a mystifying system of damage classification was introduced which encouraged some of the propertied classes to do further damage to their homes. Later still, there were gnawing questions about the location and design of permanent housing and the scale and scope of new infrastructure. Meanwhile, large numbers of people found good reason why their homes, which had survived the earthquake, should not be destroyed to make way for new roads of the new town planning schemes. It appeared to many people as if the state was taking away property to make way for these new roads without compensation. This caused widespread anxiety and resulted in a number of suicides. To an extent, the tragedy of these suicides stood as a metaphor for the popular perceptions of maladministration and alienation at the time. Gangs of profiteering contractors, mostly from distant parts of northern India, descended on the town at night with noisy machinery and hoards of (supposedly) wild and unruly labourers to demolish what remained of the old town. The local citizenry, often quite sensibly feeling alienated, engaged in enthusiastic

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letter-writing campaigns, hunger strikes and protest marches against delays and injustices. Some called for an independent Kutch or for Union Territory status (direct rule from Delhi), free from the shackles of the step-motherly state-level Government of Gujarat. For many, the perceived neglect of ruined Kutch by those with the power in the east of the state was merely the extension of a well-established syndrome. In these confused, anxious and alienating times, while many worried about money and shelter, for others there was an unfamiliar superabundance of ‘disaster boom’ cash, which fuelled the first waves of the consumer revolution. Resources had poured in from all over the world, generosity motivated in part by the presence of a large and influential Gujarati diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. There came a great material boost in the form of tents, sewing machines and other items intended to regenerate livelihoods. In the early days, the state provided daily cash payments to all. Later, there came a wide range of state-led compensation schemes for lost livestock, body parts, property and life. With a view to kick-starting the local economy, the state also made available a large number of small enterprise grants; it is widely recognized that many applications to the scheme were fraudulent (beauty parlours were particularly attractive). And, therefore, while it might not have been fully successful in its aims, the scheme contributed quite directly to the rejuvenation of the economy. Although the property compensation payments were eventually staggered in line with certified construction, those who had regularized property but had previously scraped by on low wages suddenly had tens of thousands of rupees from government compensation schemes. The money was, of course, intended for new housing, but agencies selling motorbikes and television sets prospered. For others, cash sums from insurance companies and the state came at a very high price: the loss of relatives and/or body parts.

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Many people, encouraged by an emergent class of brokers, made false claims for compensation and for enterprise grants. Creative corruption was an open secret in which it often seemed as if the whole town was complicit; very few could point accusatory fingers at others from the security of innocence. Some corruption was simply so outrageous, especially in relation to contracts for rubble clearance, that it made people chuckle and this had a cathartic effect. In 2004, government audits revealed some of the false claims, and many beneficiaries − having already disposed of the cash − faced the worry of further debt or imprisonment. Gujarat is well known for its enterprise, and this largely withstood the impact of the earthquake. Unless buildings were utterly destroyed, most newspapers and hotels only lost a few days business to the disruption. Private transport operators, English speakers and those with access to building materials were initially in high demand. There were no food shortages, only abundance. Although the bazaars of the old town were closed for a while, improvised markets soon started to appear. Mobile phone operators hastily opened networks to ‘improve communications’. A creamy layer of civil society emerged in a multiplication of new nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as the businesses of grant writing and project management expanded. Computers and the Internet had just reached the provinces before the earthquake, and many people were feeling richer, but as the anniversaries of the earthquake came and went, it was obvious to all that the disaster had brought great prosperity to the region. In 2001, the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had promised a ‘New Kutch’. In 2004, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, told Kutchis to put the earthquake behind them because the rest of Gujarat had forgotten about it. In 2006, Modi started to liken Kutch to Singapore; according to him, New Kutch, the engine of Gujarat’s double-digit growth, was complete. Then, six years after the earthquake, Bhuj,

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and the neighbouring towns of Anjar and Bhachau, were essentially construction sites of vast proportions. The story of post-earthquake reconstruction was then clearly far from over despite the pronouncements of the politicians – but their words did reflect a tremendous investment in the region and the promotion of a feel-good economy. The sense of mourning and sometimes futility remained, but life went on under clouds of dust, amid an endless and mentally draining cacophony of roars, thumps and tapping sounds. The aftershocks continued, but fruits of post-disaster policies, described in what follows, were beginning to ripen. Much of what can be seen in Kutch is new, if not exactly reminiscent of Singapore.

THE NEW BHUJ For at least the last hundred years Bhuj has been expanding, the population gradually settling outside the walled confines of the old town, tentatively at first and then in something of a rush. After the earthquake, the pace and scale of change has been greatly increased. The distinction between the old walled town and the post-1960s suburbs has been softened. New thoroughfares and roundabouts carry new names, particularly those of the various Hindu congregational orders which descended on the town to great effect with relief after the earthquake and found a generally receptive audience among the townsfolk. On the back of an economy fuelled by grief and cash, boutiques, supermarkets and sweet shops with shimmering glass and metal facades sprang up, again reflecting the new possibilities for consumption. The most striking thing, however, about the new Bhuj is the size of the place, as vast swathes of suburban land, the work of government relocation strategies as much as private developers, stretches many kilometres to the south. Acres of tarmac have been laid to form concentric four-lane roads that

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surround the town; most, eerily, are unused by traffic but good for cricket and evening strolls. Today, in 2010, although many of the new housing colonies are only half-populated and some of the shopping centres bordering the ring roads have never opened, Bhuj is a visibly prosperous place, at least when compared to its old self. Perhaps the silent influence of military strategists, with an eye on the border with Pakistan, is behind the scale of new infrastructure; or, perhaps, the planners and consultants in the subcontracted pay of the Gujarat Urban Development Company simply got carried away with the lines of the segmented and concentric models of urban development – like those they had studied in school. Either way, the rings of tarmac encircling Bhuj carry weighty symbolic capital if not traffic. In sum, there seem to be two major assumptions in the way new Bhuj was planned. First, not everybody need be planned for equally, and there is nothing particularly surprising here. Secondly, those who have been planned for the most, so to speak, will lead particular kinds of lives that will involve suburban living, largely devoid of pre-earthquake social history. New roads were bulldozed through the symbolic core of Bhuj, changing the shape and boundaries of the traditional neighbourhoods, and resettlement programmes redistributed people to new colonies, radically altering the distribution of castes through the town. Once the capital of a feudal and ritually elaborate kingdom, Bhuj was redrawn by planners as a post-colonial town in which transport corridors and shopping centres oriented the town rather than the seats of power and divinity. The plan was not only for the town; its effect was to demand a new type of citizen, a mobile suburban consumer. Elsewhere in the region, the state reduced various industrial taxes and facilitated the transfer of land and other resources to the industries of India (see Sud 2007 for a general discussion). In sum, for those (such as myself) who have watched for long enough, the moment of catastrophe brought about

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not sudden sustained change as initial analysis (including my own of 2004) would suggest, but gradual and fundamental changes in society that are now percolating into view. The most fundamental of changes has been the rapid industrialization of the region, primarily through tax incentives and other forms of easement. Therefore, it seems sensible to reunite the anthropology of aftermath with a general literature on social change, and, in this instance, with industrialization. Through the gross industrialization of Kutch, the region has essentially been recolonized (in a mild form and it may have happened anyway) by the Gujarat state. As part of this process, the population has swelled with people from all over India, which has introduced new languages, lifestyles and tensions. The district has been firmly drawn into the economy of the nation; the isolationist and distinctive nature of its previous economy and polity – dependent as it was on various forms of international and domestic migration – has been reduced in character. Perhaps this was also implicit in the postearthquake policies, for the effect has been to silence calls, which were most audible in the first years after the earthquake, for Kutch to have a separate political status from Gujarat. That said, in the coming decades, it is not impossible to imagine a backlash against such neocolonization in the name of regional or linguistic identity and a renewed series of calls for a separate political status for Kutch; this time perhaps such calls will come from Bhuj’s new suburbs rather than from the crumbling mansions of the former Princely State.

FUTURES The anthropology of disaster has become cultish, and in this piece I have attempted to weaken the grip of some of its key terms. I also hope to have made it clear why a shift of focus to the aftermath is intellectually interesting. Naomi Klein (2007) has suggested that interventions after natural

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disasters are strategic extensions of Milton Freedman’s vision of free-market capitalism. In this view, capitalism uses the public disorientation of collective shocks to control and profiteer. At first glance, Klein’s model of ‘the shock doctrine’ seems a productive way of understanding what happened in Gujarat. Laws were discretely changed, enabling the state and capital to join hands in an environmentally catastrophic land grab. The government essentially colonized a troublesome political zone, which had the audacity to demand separate political status. From the centres of government in the east of Gujarat, the state used the disaster to gain a firmer footing in an area which had been culturally distinct in the past. There were technocratic, linguistic and bureaucratic aspects to the neocolonialism. The new hospital was mounted on springs, which distracted many for some time as the awe of imported technology pacified the beleaguered. As I have discussed, the swift instrument of town planning cut through old societies, taught people how to read maps and to envisage life in suburban housing colonies; in the process, new forms of citizenship were designed into the town. Signs of reconstruction started to appear in Hindi, the national but previously invisible language in the region; religious sects who used the Gujarati language for liturgy seemed to be particularly encouraged by the state to move into the affected region, where the primary language was Kutchi. More generally, the state expanded dramatically in size and function, and even when public−private partnerships were formed the state remained the senior partner. Freedman favoured the free operation of markets, with little or no interference by the state. The effectiveness of the state in postcolonial India suggests the existence of other models of shock doctrine to that outlined by Klein. In these neoliberal times of disaster, the state did not retreat but instead served as a broker and facilitator of private interest. A fine area for future research would be to develop a history and language to understand

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the nature of the ‘shock’ in post-colonial, post-communist and post-American worlds. Sociologists of natural disaster often use the expression ‘tabula rasa’ to refer to society in the aftermath. It refers to the unformed, featureless mind as found in the philosophy of John Locke, and has some resonance with the notion of the layers of culture supposedly revealed in crisis. Klein, too, finds the metaphor appealing, drawing on the experiments of psychologists who laboured with the idea that if the personality of a patient could be erased, then it could be built back without fault or disorder. However, to simply begin the story in aftermath is to forget the sublime awe of the earthquake itself as well as the time of innocence before the disaster. In very different ways, Prince, Sorokin and Mill draw our attention to the fact that the shock of disaster is not primarily in the aftermath (for those are secondary shocks, or ‘secondary earthquakes’), but in the nature of the event itself, which gives particular form to the aftermath (my discussion has focused on property and infrastructure; agriculture and food distribution, for example, were hardly affected in this instance). The moment of catastrophe reverberates into the emotional and political relations of society and into the opportunities for capitalism amid the ruins. The earthquake itself rapidly consumed most of what had been produced, well in advance of the state making any additional resources available. This accelerated moment of hyper-consumption was the catalyst for the boom, perhaps far exceeding in its economic benefit the loans from the development banks. Whereas the theory is plausible, there are as yet too few studies of the actual mechanisms through which the consumption of disaster is transferred into the emotional and political lives of those who live on in different kinds of aftermath. Sorokin attempted it in the abstract language of high sociology; the challenge now is to work this through in the precise language of ethnography. Most of the confrontational politics in the aftermath in Gujarat were conducted on

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regionalist lines, suggesting a long history was played out in new forms, and that the tabula rasa was no such thing. The worstworst-affected region claimed a separate linguistic and cultural identity from the rest of the state; the Government of Gujarat, in turn, used the opportunity of the earthquake to strengthen its presence in the region. In this sense, the earthquake had a dynamogenic effect, congealing emotion and trauma in the form of a nostalgic regional identity that, in turn, came into conflict with the actions of the state, and it was primarily this conflict that animated the post-disaster landscape, aided by the rapid consumption of Bhuj by the earthquake. Alongside this, the spaces for new kinds of citizens were created as the public economy passed from sorrow to elation as the ruins and the dead were transformed into wealth. My final suggestion is that it is productive to see aftermaths as reflections on the intervention of catastrophe in social life. Although this firmly links the two moments (catastrophe and aftermath), it also asks for research on the imagination of time in the aftermath. People are endlessly drawn back to the moment of the disaster by the affection of fear, as well as to the pre-catastrophic days in a quest for the absence of the burden nostalgia, while at the same time, they are indivisible from the accelerated and future-oriented acts of reconstruction. For the consequences of such a split and pressured temporal consciousness, as well as with the other suggestions I have made in this final section, the anthropology of aftermaths should be looking to make new connections with Sorokin’s other old monsters.

NOTES 1 I conducted doctoral research in the region between 1997 and 1999, and have spent periods ranging from two weeks to six months in Bhuj every year since 2001. Funding for this research came from the Nuffield Foundation in the form of a New Career Fellowship (NCF/00103/G) and from the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-155-25-0065).

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2 Asian Development Bank, Project Number: 35068, Loan Number: 1826, September 2008, India: Gujarat Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Project; World Bank; implementation and completion and results report (IDA-36370) on a credit in the amount of SDR 3.56.0 Million (US$442.8 Million equivalent) to the Republic of India for a Gujarat emergency earthquake reconstruction project. April 29, 2009.

REFERENCES Albala-Bertrand, J.M. (1993) The Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters: With special reference to developing countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bode, B. (1989) No Bells to Toll: Destruction and creation in the Andes. New York: Scribners. de Alwis, M. and Eva-Lotta Hedman (eds) (2009) Tsunami in a Time of War: Aid, activism and reconstruction in Sri Lanka and Aceh. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies. Gilbert, A.N. and M. Barkun (1981) ‘Disaster and sexuality’, The Journal of Sex Research, 17(3): 288−299. Hoffman, S.M. (2002) ‘The monster and the mother: The symbolism of disaster’, in S.M. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith (eds), Culture and Catastrophe: The anthropology of disaster. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 113−142. Hoffman, S.M. and A. Oliver-Smith (1999) ‘Anthropology and the Angry Earth: An overview’, in A. OliverSmith and S.M. Hoffman (eds), The Angry Earth: Disaster in anthropological perspective. London: Routledge, pp. 1−16. Kendrick, T.D. (1955) The Lisbon Earthquake. Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company. Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Kreps, G.A. (1984) ‘Sociological inquiry and disaster research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 10: 309−330. Loker, William M. (2009) ‘A flood of impressions: Riding out Mitch and its aftermath’, in Marisa O. Ensor (ed.), The Legacy of Hurricane Mitch: Lessons from post-disaster reconstruction in Honduras. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 67−99. Mahadevia, D. (2001) ‘Privatising earthquake rehabilitation’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(39): 3670−3673. McGilvray, D.B. and M.R. Gamburd (eds) (2010) Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and religious dimensions. New York: Routledge.

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Mill, John Stuart (1848) Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. Boston, MA: C.C. Little & J. Brown. Mishra, P.K. (2006) The Kutch earthquake 2001: Recollections, Lessons, and insights. New Delhi: National Institute of Disaster Management. Oliver-Smith, A. (1977) ‘Traditional agriculture, central places and postdisaster urban relocation in Peru’, American Ethnologist, 4(1): 102−116. Oliver-Smith, A. (1986) The Martyred City: Death and rebirth in the Andes. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Oliver-Smith, A. (1996) ‘Anthropological research on hazards and disasters’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 303−328. Oliver-Smith, A. (1999) ‘‘What is a disaster?’ Anthropological perspectives on a persistent question’, in A. Oliver-Smith and S.M. Hoffman (eds), The Angry Earth: Disaster in anthropological perspective. London: Routledge, pp. 18−34. Oliver-Smith, A. and S.M. Hoffman (2002) ‘Introduction: Why anthropologists should study disasters’, in S.M. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith (eds), Culture and Catastrophe: The anthropology of disaster. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 3−22. Prince, S.H. (1920) Catastrophe and Social Change: Based upon a sociological study of the Halifax disaster. New York: Columbia University. Quarantelli, E.L. (1998) What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the question. London: Routledge. Quarantelli, E.L. and R. Dynes (1977) ‘Response to social crisis and disaster’, Annual Review of Sociology, 3: 23−49.

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Reddy, L.R. (2001) The Pain and the Horror: Gujarat earthquake. New Delhi: Aph Publishing. Seidensticker, E. (1990) Tokyo Rising: The city since the great earthquake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Simpson, E. (2004) ‘“Hindutva” as a rural planning paradigm in post-earthquake Gujarat’, in John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon Hewitt (eds), The Politics of Cultural Mobilisation in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 136−165. Simpson, E. (2005) ‘The “Gujarat” earthquake and the political economy of nostalgia’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2): 219−249. Simpson, E. and S. Corbridge (2006) ‘The geography of things that may become memories: The 2001 earthquake in Kachchh-Gujarat and the politics of rehabilitation in the pre-memorial era’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(3): 566−585. Sorokin, P.A. (1946) Man and Society in Calamity. New York: E.P. Dutton. Sud, N. (2007) ‘From land to the tiller to land liberalisation: The political economy of Gujarat’s shifting land policy’, Modern Asian Studies, 41(3): 603−637. Torry, W.I. (1979) ‘Anthropological studies in hazardous environments: Past trends and new horizons’, Current Anthropology, 20(3): 517−540. Wilson, F.M. (1944) In the Margins of Chaos. London: J. Murray. Wilson, F.M. (1947) Aftermath. New York: Penguin Books.

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SECTION 4.3

Demographics, Health and the Transforming Body

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4.3.1 Demographies in Flux Sophie Day

Since the 1980s state capitalism and socialism have unravelled and extensive deregulation has led to the free movement of capital and new restrictions for people on the move. In response to these developments and also to earlier and severe auto-critiques, anthropologists have changed their methods of research to investigate flows, connections and movement across various boundaries that might have previously escaped analysis. In relation to ‘demographies in flux’, it is migration that has attracted most anthropological attention, although the other two members of the classic demographic triad, birth and death, have also been problematized and researched ethnographically. Even a summary of key contributions from the recent scholarship on migration and neoliberalism presents a formidable challenge, given also the interdisciplinary nature of the field. In response to the format of this volume, therefore, I offer a vignette from work of my own, which is roughly coextensive with the period of concern. My research with sex workers (women) may offer a springboard to more general anthropological concerns, albeit deriving largely from the UK setting. I focus on three moments: prior to recognition of the changes introduced by neoliberalism, an early scholarship on migration and a more troubled series of analyses in the twenty-first century. The earlier moment

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of migration research may also seem in retrospect to have developed spatial methods of research more successfully than parallel or co-constituting temporalities. I draw attention to renewed comparative interest in the nationstate in a broader time frame where processes of making and marking time through alwaysparticular relations promise insights into the transmission of memories, post memories, absences, traces and knowledge that are equally relevant to official histories and everyday life. Methods for exploring these multiple coexisting times and spaces confirm that they can never be known ahead of time, prompting reflection on Fabian’s (1983) influential plea for an anthropology of the coeval. Does this plea express, in part, a desire for transparency that effectively brackets present realities to one side, and thus prevents us from asking when and how the coeval is brought into view, in which relations and to what effect?

LONDON SEX WORK: MID-1980s TO MID-1990s I began research with sex workers in response to an AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) crisis, specifically the dawning realization that it might not be possible to contain disease at the social margins.

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News of heterosexual transmission accumulated to cause a panic about gender, for it was the figure of a woman who stood for heterosexual normalcy between husband and children, family and society. Fears of disease and demographic catastrophe prompted methodological innovations in the study of topics that have remained important, such as the social consequences of anticipating crisis; sprawling political assemblages joining nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to the church and new forms of activism; and the feminization of poverty along with gendered politics of blame (Baylies and Bujra 2000; Farmer 1992; Fassin 2007; Ong and Collier 2004). Overall, existing social inequalities were confirmed in the wake of AIDS and intensified by World Bank-imposed structural adjustment measures, which severely reduced public spending and weakened local states. Despite visceral fears of contagion in the United Kingdom, an indigenous heterosexual epidemic has yet to emerge, and demographic change arrived a decade later through the deregulation that encouraged immigration. We (Sophie Day and Helen Ward, see Day 2007) had met mostly UK women in our Praed Street Project in London but saw more women from other countries by the mid1990s. All had been encouraged ‘to get on their bikes’ to find work. Before the mid1990s, sex workers moved because of a local recession and the oil crisis. Many hoped to make good in London as internal migrants from small urban centres and rural areas. Non-UK nationals, approximately a quarter of the workforce at the time, attracted little attention and no one then spoke of migrants. Until the mid-1990s, sex work in the United Kingdom was acknowledged to offer the flexibility that allowed women in particular to get by and, with a gamble, to prosper. In common with other informal and either dangerous or disapproved jobs, sex work was seen in class terms as a vehicle for social mobility. The United Kingdom developed a harm minimization approach to human

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immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission that encouraged social inclusion. Hundreds of government and NGO projects working with the so-called hard-to-reach indirectly supported recognition of a sex work movement that insisted on the dignity of the job and promoted health and safety measures and self-organization. AIDS funding provided publicity for this platform and enabled activists to meet locally and internationally. With this still highly limited recognition of sex work, claims to occupational rights travelled more widely, and sex workers contributed to understandings of citizenship based on a politics of sexual difference, the position of women as carers or domestic workers (paid and unpaid), and analyses of sexual violence and hate crime in movements for social justice. These developments scarcely touched state systems of prostitution control or the whore stigma but, by comparison with the following decade, sex work in London attracted a certain legitimacy in relation both to AIDS prevention and the politics of work. A rich anthropology of the state and its fictions during the 1980s confirmed the more general relevance of sex workers’ fragmented and contradictory experiences. For example, sex workers saw public health officials protecting civil society in ways diametrically opposed to those of the criminal justice system. Investigation of population policies (Greenhalgh 2008), reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004), gendered nations (Nagel 2003; Yuval-Davis 1997), indifference (Herzfeld 1993) and attachment (NavaroYashin 2002) have all contributed to our understanding of the impact of the state on demographies in flux. As the state withdrew from public provision, critical perspectives on deregulated capital flows and markets, the informalization of work and the marginalization of perhaps the majority of the world’s people refigured the field. The informal sector came to connote market-friendly policies in general rather than activities of the poor. But the distinction between formal and informal sectors gradually lost any meaning.

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Weaker labour standards and the loss of state protection have decreased pay in the formal sector, where work is increasingly insecure. Development can no longer be imagined through an informal sector that will absorb unemployment or cushion the effects of structural adjustment and recession (Hart 2001; Portes et al. 1999; Smith 1999). Migrants are disproportionately represented in the informal sector, owing to a lack of papers as much as the conditions that led them to move in search of work. Along with these developments, idioms of mobility in sex work changed and came to be seen almost exclusively in geographical terms associated with, usually, illegal immigration. In the Praed Street Project, the mid-1990s marked a demographic ‘transition’ in the workforce. Three-quarters of women attending the Project were now born outside the United Kingdom. As the proportion of sex workers of UK origin fell, we saw a large increase from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (Ward et al. 2004). We contrasted the 1980s and 1990s cohort that spanned this shift from a largely local to a largely migrant workforce. The later cohort was better off and more likely to have college qualifications and experience of skilled work (Ward et al. 2004). Whereas fieldwork suggested great variation across these cohorts, we found little to suggest that ‘migrants’ were any less able than ‘locals’ to navigate often-exploitative labour conditions. In the 2000s, still fewer women came from the United Kingdom; migration from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe lessened and workers came from a greater variety of countries in the South. This pattern was repeated across Europe and, in a collaborative European study, we reported general disarray about policies to regulate prostitution alongside considerable consensus among governments to limit immigration to national labour requirements (Day and Ward 2004). Restrictions on migration affected the sex industry directly and prompted the debate that has raged since.

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LONDON SEX WORK: MID-1990s TO 2000s In the 1990s, anthropologists associated mobility with positive developments among transnational communities in multicultural settings. Tsing questioned the air of excitement that perceived a ‘rhetoric of linkage and circulation as the overcoming of boundaries and restrictions, through which all this excitement appears positive for everyone involved’ (2000: 332). She understood the mood in terms of disciplinary auto-critiques, which had dismissed anthropological constructs of ‘culture’ as a product of imperialism. Tsing implies that a tone of celebration in the scholarship on the politics of culture from the 1990s could be plotted in step with processes of globalization. It seemed that a revitalization of anthropology had been achieved through research on global interconnections; for example, Northern and Western anthropological genealogies now sat alongside others and scholarship was internationalized. Tsing perceived a form of futurism developing out of an older teleology of progress, one that was soon to be dampened by the post-2001 War on Terror. Tsing’s doubts about the revitalization of anthropology were phrased in still stronger terms by Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002). A ‘globalization fever’ led to the dismantling of old stabilities, knowledge, conventions and identities (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 321−322). The past was static, the present was fluid; the past contained homogeneous cultures while now we lived in a world of hybridity and complexity. Disavowing what appears to have been a previous preoccupation with bounded processes of social reproduction defined by fieldwork, anthropologists developed new methods for following events, practices, people, divisions of labour and ‘scapes’ of all kinds (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Marcus 1995). The decade’s intense debate created distinctions between local and international migration in UK sex work. Free-market advocates

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responded to arguments that sex work could be seen as a business subject to normal regulations (see, for example, Lim 1998): such ‘toleration’ fit with the apparent virtues of neoliberalism, where morality could be left to global market forces. But arguments about a double standard for men and women accompanied by the belief that sex should not be traded as a commodity simultaneously attracted increasing support in the context of unprecedented inequality in Europe. The weight of this second view was associated with the influence of feminism in social democracy, which defines prostitution as violence against women; in other words, it is inherently exploitative. As far as sex workers organizing for change were concerned, it soon became clear that neoliberal principles of toleration worked to the benefit of employers rather than workers. More unexpectedly, sex workers also found that feminists opposed idioms of choice in sex work so effectively that it was difficult to see how a broad feminist alliance could ever be built to improve conditions. Hysteria about trafficked women and children forced to work in the sex industry changed UK prostitution policy (Day and Ward 2004). International movement was described as trafficking and, more recently, idioms of trafficking have been applied to sex work of all kinds. In 2009, the UK parliament passed a Policing and Crime Act, criminalizing the purchase of sex when workers are coerced. In practice, coercion is difficult to define and many advocates of the reforms consider locals to be coerced too, if only by self-delusion (Day 2010). Increasing repression of sex work in the United Kingdom during the 2000s will no doubt affect locals as much as migrants (Day 2009) and has implications beyond the particular case of prostitution. Research on the feminization of migration in Europe, for example, prompted sustained investigation into the care market. Most women on the move had found jobs in other people’s domestic spaces, as cleaners, carers of the elderly and au pairs or nannies, as well as wives or sex workers. Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s

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edited collection (2003) documents supply chains linking women’s homes and jobs across great distances. For poor migrants, home is behind, propped up through remittances earned in another woman’s house. For richer citizens, home and work are combined in a traditional daily cycle. Following such chains of love (Parreñas 2001), anthropologists in particular have insisted on contextualizing migration within social relationships such as ‘homes’, which themselves exist across geographical sites (Basch et al. 1994; Ong 1999, 2006). These relations of care are influenced by intersecting demographic changes. Migrants have responded to population declines in Europe as well as economic restructuring to meet the ‘care deficits’ of ageing populations, the needs of working mothers and childless households. Across Europe, but with significant national variation, the number of children born to a woman has declined, stabilizing at 1.42, with more of these children being born later in a woman’s life (MISSOC 2002). From 1981 to 1996, the size of the average household decreased in Europe’s urban centres (from 2.8 people to 2.3); the number of people living alone rose (from 27% to 38%) and the proportion of lone-parent households also increased (from 6.5% to 7.5%) (European Commission 2000). More people are living in a greater variety of household arrangements. Many of our research participants remained childless or had children late. In addition, they were avid participants in new technologies of cosmetic surgery and mechanisms that distanced working from procreative sex. Anthropologists exploring these technologies have examined the unease that greets an individual who does not age or who reproduces a family independently of heterosexual relations of parenting. They have explored foundational conventions about ‘proper’ relationships and their relevance to wider social groupings, including the nation-state (Franklin and Ragone 1998; Strathern 1992; Weston 1991). Hochschild (2003) described the care and love provided by Third World women today

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as ‘new gold’, similar to the old gold extracted previously from poorer countries to benefit the rich at low cost. Capital’s extractive power to ‘bleed’ the labouring classes until they are too weak to resist the difficulties of life has been noted since the Industrial Revolution (Marx 2000 [1873]), but processes of ‘arterial’ extraction have intensified with the rise of biocapital (Nguyen and Peschard 2003: 466). An anthropology of moral outrage has witnessed theft from the South such that ordinary people are losing their (future) health in order to stay alive. Simultaneously, anthropologists have considered whether the movement of people is forced or voluntary in relation to concepts of bonded, slave and free labour. The abolition of slavery provides a core reference for humanitarian interventions, with oftensurprising consequences. Strathern, for example, pursued a contrast between whole persons and their parts in relation to the criminalization of exchange in New Guinea (Strathern 2005). She analysed the global morality implemented by the relevant NGO and court in order to show that the victim status in human rights discourse is closely tied to an equation of people with things. According to this global morality, labour can be bought and sold as it involves only part of the person, but the whole person cannot be transacted. The strongest image of victimhood is located in slavery and the very development of human rights is related to its abolition: ‘[I]nvoked, it [slavery] presents the strongest possible image of the inalienability of the person-body seen as an entire entity’ (Strathern 2005: 191, note 9). Several analyses of a humanitarian industry based on compassion and pursuing an apparently selfevident logic of morality suggest that practices are mired in processes of triage that necessarily apply rights instruments selectively. These include analyses of prostitution as trafficking that show how governments and the humanitarian industry unwittingly dehumanize ‘victims’ through the exercise of compassion and rescue (Agustín 2007;

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Doezema 2010; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Ticktin and Feldman 2010). This is the apartheid that reinforces indifference, as nationstates outsource to NGOs and others who are unable to enforce anything at all. In relation to scholarship on intimate markets, it becomes relevant to ask why the child in transnational adoption is considered a fortunate beneficiary while the child or adult in transnational sex work is seen as a victim. How to account for the surprising association between victims of trafficking and a traffic in body parts (Cohen 1999; Lock 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2000)? It is not only illegal migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and those leaving conflict and post-war states who are apparently dispensable but also much of the urban edge. Many of the cities that have come to house almost half the world’s population are deindustrializing and labour-intensive. Today’s urban poor enjoy minimal opportunities in the informal or illegal economy where strategies to avoid family collapse include the intensification of work, household pooling and migration. The poor live alongside polluting and often illegal industry that makes inhabitants especially vulnerable to ‘natural’ disasters such as earthquakes, floods and fire. Poor city dwellers now suffer from classic diseases of underdevelopment alongside those associated with industrialization, and health differentials are greater within cities than between the urban and the rural. Mike Davis presents the majority ‘truly and radically homeless in the contemporary international economy’, with no chance of progressing into formal employment or upward mobility (Davis 2008: 178; see also Wacquant 2008). Davis cites Jan Breman’s work (2003) on the labouring poor in India; ‘the late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place’ (2008: 199); in other words, the reserve army of labour has been made permanently redundant now and in any foreseeable future. Histories of informalization intersect closely with migration studies in documenting this rush to the city alongside international movement.

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Such unexpected turns − the intensification of inequality and the abandonment of whole populations − have created a sense of déjà vu. Until recently, it seemed that ‘population problems’ attached to ‘prostitutes’, ‘gypsies’ or the ‘dangerous classes’ in general had been shelved more than a hundred years ago, after plaguing a previous finde-siècle. But intensified moral policing of the nation’s poor and the repatriation of anyone who does not belong suggest an unsettling return to the past. Today’s moral panics have renewed attention to the comparative and historical dimensions of nationstate building, including analysis of the term migrant itself, which has been applied largely to international rather than national movements.

NATION-STATES The possibly unwarranted optimism in anthropological accounts during the 1990s has been replaced by much more pessimistic explorations of social violence. What looked like weaker states pre-2001, less and less relevant to regulation of the economy and of culture, are demonstrating traditional strengths. It is these very states that have orchestrated global processes of market society and privatization while guarding national borders, arbitrating forms of citizenship, ‘unmixing’ populations and making foreign policy. Global relations are ‘not only compatible with statehood; [they have] actually fuelled the desire for it, whether to have access to resources and powers experienced, imagined, or glimpsed or to defend an ethnic group against the violence of another state’ (Aretxaga 2003: 395). The exercise of sovereignty, and state impunity in regimes of discipline, punishment and warfare have become central themes since September 11. World systems and related theories have long recognized the connections between nation and empire. States and nations developed within and alongside colonial and imperial practices but histories of trans-border

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and transnational nation-state building became invisible (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 308). Social scientists had studied migration within a nation-state framework, contrasting the lives of citizens and migrants. Immigration attracted more interest than emigration and the return of co-nationals, and internal migration became a topic for other disciplines such as urban studies. Yet, transnationalism was central to even the post-war period of strong nation-states that ‘bounded and bundled most social processes’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 302). As the cold war blocs solidified, memories of previous movement were erased, border controls were tightened and attention devoted to the importance of national belonging in a decolonizing world. It is only in retrospect as modernist development thinking disappears that the cold war blocs can be seen to have competed to abolish world poverty, rehouse slum dwellers, employ their citizens and avert subversion through social welfare and reforms (Buck-Morss 2000). The anthropological auto-critiques noted above perhaps downplayed the birth of ethnography in this ‘national model of society’ in favour of its imperial connections (Grimshaw and Hart 1996). The social sciences in Germany are state sciences, and anthropology’s shared intellectual history with nationalism may have caught us unaware, surprised by its power to mobilize support today and, in the case of sex work, to re-criminalize ‘immorality’. Should we see warfare, exclusion of the dangerous classes and ethnoreligious and racial violence as part of the occult (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999)? In an attempt to understand the panic about trafficking of people and body parts in the United Kingdom, commentators were returned to the last such great panic, known as white slavery, which ended with the First World War. Maximum anxieties have coincided with particularly intense periods of globalization, from around 1870 to 1914 and since the 1990s, both periods of intense nation-state building. Mass emigration ‘saved’ rural displaced labour in Europe

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a century ago but unprecedented barriers prevent most movement to rich countries today. Women’s bodies expressed general concerns about ‘free economic intercourse’. It is still women on the move who threaten the honour of social groups, and their sexual behaviour, above all, that marks the borders (Day 2010). Recent work on demographies in flux deploys a broader historical frame, including an interest in the coexistence of varied temporalities as well as spaces and unanticipated eruptions of the past into the present. It contributes to an anthropology of the state in relation to what Aretxaga (2003) called ‘the untenable hyphen’ joining state and nation. In response to claims that anthropologists may have been too ready to concur with a positive reading of belonging, contemporary scholars have focused on practices of exclusion which might have been emphasized as much as social inclusion ever since peasants were seen as ‘part’ societies, tenuously incorporated in the nation. Sometimes, it seems that states and nations can neither live with nor without each other. Studies of violence show how the ‘people’ can become an object of fear and violence so that a state works against a nation (Goddard 2007), and Aretxaga suggested that ‘one should consider a variety of relations that are ambivalent, ambiguous, hostile, violent, porous … in which the nature of the hyphen [between state and nation] is more a cipher than a self-evident reality’ (2003: 398). If the state cannot be dislodged from the nation in anthropological analysis, it cannot be attached either. Analyses of structures of feeling contribute to the literature on imagined communities, a key theme since an earlier anthropology of the nation (Anderson 2006 [1983]; Chaterjee 1986; Gellner 1983). As Lancaster (2003) has suggested, contemporary values emphasizing flexibility, mobility and individuation do not require the same familial regimes as mid-twentieth-century systems of production and consumption, and the economic transformation of feelings has become a major focus of research.

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Secularism, one form of universalism (Greenhouse 1996), underwrites old as well as new practices of exclusion and offers an example of what may simply be taken for granted. Adams et al. discuss the intensification of regimes of anticipation, arguing that hope and fear generate urgent senses of the future in ways that authorize action in the present (2009: 249). Povinelli asks how disparate social and cultural worlds are ‘made commensurate with the social idea(l) of nationalism and/or civil society without the use of repressive force?’ (2001: 326). She suggests that liberal rule assumes good intentions that will lead to tolerant coexistence in the future. This anticipation makes it possible to ignore the contradictions between liberal discourse and practice so that the liberal national form continues to reconstitute a future ‘we-horizon’ from the economically vital flows of people, images and things transnationally without acknowledging the real-time exercise of violent exclusion and repression. Povinelli emphasizes how this impasse of reason is shifted onto other places and people who are forced to ‘fit in’ with liberal ideology. In the current ‘state of emergency’, a long list of disasters in progress or waiting to happen have become signs of the end and Latour (2009), among others, picks up the post-secular theme of apocalypse. Although the apocalyptic is often combined with Malthusian pessimism (Diamond 2005; McNeill 2006) and ‘endtime’ movements (Stewart and Harding 1999), Latour proposes that we consider how the religious urge to transform radically that which is given into that which has to be fully renewed might apply to present concerns about the drastic changes needed to ‘save’ the world (2009: 473). In addition to this focus on the future, anthropologists have returned to past interests in gendered familial relations (AsanoTamanoi 1986; Ortner 1978; Schneider 1971) in order to explicate politically central ways of building nations and self-responsible citizenship (Aretxaga 2003). Recognition that

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the intimate or reproductive is simultaneously commercial and productive led Berlant (1997) to argue that US political life models an ‘infantile citizenship’ from metaphors of trauma and therapy. Trauma transforms relations between citizens and the nationstate as much as those involved with the humanitarian industry; it becomes an idiom of citizenship, self-help groups and liberation movements. Das (2008), likewise, demonstrates how central the family is to the exercise of sovereignty. She has explored the ways in which women’s bodies have provided not only a field for the enactment of state power but also a site from which the state draws its power in North America (Das and Leonard 2007) and South Asia (Das 2007). Das emphasizes, too, how state is stitched together with nation, how individuals repair the fabric of everyday life and how women who were abducted and raped during the Partition of India subsequently digested the poisons of violence and dishonour. She shows how exceptional violence is built out of and folded back into everyday life when rumours incite panic and riots in relation to particular views of events that occurred decades earlier. Rumours build on a general silence about the violence with which the modern state was founded, histories that have been transmitted and embodied in everyday relations of kinship, generation and gender. Thus, homes and nation-states house multiple intimacies and domesticities, some terrifying in equal measure to both domestic workers and family members. The work of time also allows families to find ways of offering care to daughters or wives concealed from public view and in opposition to national stories of honour and shame. As in the case of sex work, sexual and reproductive violence is aimed towards women as cultural and biological repositories, not just of nations but also ethnic and religious groups, and a means of humiliating the other side (Das 2008: 291). Ideas of honour and shame are as critical as they were in previous studies of family and nation, and considered increasingly in

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terms of at least potential violence (Freeman 2001; Haeri 1995; Johnson and LipsettRivera 1998; Wikan 2008). Growing interest in the temporalities of time-space compression (Harvey 1989) alongside its spaces lack the earlier optimism noted by Tsing. Nonetheless, recent events such as the 2008 financial crisis and alter-global interest in specific nation-state alliances such as the Bank of the South (Lindisfarne 2010; Pleyers 2010) are exploring progressive possibilities to this ‘impossible hyphen’. Perhaps current developments herald a decline of the market fundamentalism that has ruled since the 1980s? Perhaps they signal revived state regulation of the economy and the rehabilitation of earlier development thinking about the limits to growth and the need for sustainable initiatives?

CONCLUSION: ANTHROPOLOGY AND DEMOGRAPHY Classic demographic explorations of ageing, generation and cohort may complement this recent anthropological literature on the multiple senses of time. Although this essay is positioned within social anthropology and the recent past, demography offers a valuable material context to the relations between individuals and states, discourse and the body (Bledsoe 2002; Johnson-Hanks 2008; Rivkin-Fish 2003; Schneider and Schneider 1996). Mannheim (1952), among others, indicated the importance of generations or cohorts in relations of conflict and change as well as continuity. Social mobility is a less plausible option for citizens of Northern and Western nation-states today and it is unclear which ‘migrants’ will manage to get by. Take a sex worker born in the mid-twentieth century. One of the so-called baby boom generation, she may have enjoyed success as she moved from factory or call-centre to a London suburb. In Europe and North America, boomers are widely associated with privilege; as a group, they were the healthiest and wealthiest generation historically, and among the

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first to grow up genuinely expecting improvements in the world. By force of numbers they remodelled society as they aged and, to some eyes, caused havoc for their children and grandchildren (Easterlin 1980; Ortner 2007). Later cohorts have experienced enormous economic and social uncertainties as the cold war ended (however provisionally), and crises in energy and finance emerged. Some generations, including incomers and emigrants, have been lost. Ringel presents one of many examples in a ‘male emergency’, where there are no jobs, no children and few women among the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda in the former East Germany (GDR; cited in Pearce 2010: 108). What happens to our idioms of social reproduction or continuity and change when there is no one to carry a family name and very little overlap of life narratives? As with Das’s explorations of the past that elicits such a resounding silence, so too have others asked what is transmitted and what is lost from one generation to the next, whether among Malagasy peasants (Cole 2001) Hungarian Roma (Stewart 2004) or in a Chinese silk factory (Rofel 1999). Longitudinal methods associated with repeated visits to the field enable discriminations to be made between what is said, shown and ignored from one generation to the next (for example, Collier 1997), and methods in cognate disciplines such as post memory studies (Hirsch 2008) yield insights into mechanisms of transmission that are built into particular artefacts or aesthetic frames. Failures and unintended experiments in social reproduction may have focused latterly upon social violence but they too imply a positive reading of the very resilience of relations that are at once intimate, national and cosmopolitan in scope. For example, Berlant (2008) asks what it is that sustains our attachments to the ordinary when it has let us down so often. The shift I have discussed from a celebration of fluidity to pessimism about the interplay between nation-states and global processes recognizes how the scientific eye has been bound to the body of the nation and

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looks for both new and old analytic tools. If fieldwork remains critical to anthropology, it is not as a window on to some larger unit or territory but as a method for investigating and following particular relations. Although anthropological methods have benefited from certain breaks with the past and elaborated techniques to follow multiple connections across conventional boundaries in the contemporary landscape, much of this demography in flux is far from new, and attention to the longer time frame I have outlined enables us to see how we have been caught within tropes of the post world war consensus. My references to gendered idioms and practices suggest the relevance of previous studies of nineteenth-century nation-state building and, in anthropology, idioms of honour and shame. These constitute one theme in processes of territorializing and deor re-territorializing the metropole, region and nation-state (Sassen 2001) and one perspective on the relations between generational cohorts. Continued empirical investigation into varied mechanisms of transmission and non-transmission will help unpack what is bundled under the rubric of social reproduction. It will renew attention to another untenable hyphen, as ambivalent and ambiguous as that joining nation and state, which continues to associate anthropology with the concept of culture.

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Day S. (2007) On the Game: Women and Sex Work. London: Pluto. Day S. (2009) Renewing the War on Prostitution: Issues of ‘Trafficking’ and ‘Slavery’. Guest Editorial. Anthropology Today 25(3): 1−3. Day S. (2010) The Re-emergence of ‘Trafficking’: Sex Work between Slavery and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 816−834. Day S, Ward H. (eds) (2004) Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe. London: Kegan Paul. Diamond J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Allen Lane. Doezema J. (2010) Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking. London: Zed Books. Easterlin RA. (1980) Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare. New York: Basic Books. Edelman L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ehrenreich B, Hochschild A. (eds) (2003) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta. European Commission. (2000) The Urban Audit: Towards the Benchmarking of Quality of Life in 58 European Cities. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Fabian J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Farmer P. (1992) AIDS and Accusations: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fassin D. (2007) When Bodies Remember. Experience and Politics of AIDS in Post-apartheid South Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (first published 2006). Fassin D, Rechtman R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma. Inquiry into the Condition of Victims. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (first published 2007). Franklin S, Ragone H. (eds) (1998) Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power and Technology Innovation. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Freeman JB. (2001) Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Gellner E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Goddard V. (2007) Demonstrating Resistance: Participation and Politics in the Marches of the Mothers of Playo de Mayo. Focaal 50: 81–101. Greenhalgh S. (2008) Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Greenhouse C. (1996) A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Grimshaw A, Hart K. (1996) Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press (first published 1993). Gupta A, Fergusson J. (1992) Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7: 6−23. Haeri S. (1995) The Politics of Dishonor: Rape and Power in Pakistan, in M Afkhami (ed.), Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World. London: Tauris, pp. 161–173. Hart K. (2001) Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and His Memory Bank. London: Profile Books. Harvey D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Herzfeld M. (1993) The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Hirsch M. (2008) The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29: 103−128. Hochschild A. (2003) Love and Gold, in The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 185−197. Johnson LL, Lipsett-Rivera S. (eds) (1998) The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame and Violence in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Johnson-Hanks J. (2008) Demographic Transitions and Modernity. Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 301–315. Lancaster RN. (2003) The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Latour B. (2009) Will Non-humans be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 459−475. Lim L. (ed.) (1998) The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Lindisfarne N. (2010) Cochabamba and Climate Anthropology. Guest Editorial. Anthropology Today 26: 1−3. Lock M. (2002) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mannheim K. (1952) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marcus G. (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95−117.

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Sassen S. (2001) Cracked Casings: Notes towards an Analytics for Studying Transnational Processes, in L Pries (ed.), New Transnational Social Spaces. London: Routledge, pp.187−207. Scheper-Hughes N. (2000) The Global Traffic in Human Organs. Current Anthropology 41: 191−211. Schneider J. (1971) Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies. Ethnology 10: 1–24. Schneider J, Schneider P. (1996) Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860−1980. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Smith G. (1999) Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Stewart K, Harding S. (1999) Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 285−310. Stewart M. (2004) Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10: 561−582. Strathern M. (1992) Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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4.3.2 New Medical Anthropology Helen Lambert

Medical anthropology has followed a trajectory similar to that of the discipline as a whole over the past quarter-century in moving from small-scale ethnographic studies of local understandings in specific contexts, to explorations of macro-social and political processes in multiple settings. Topic foci have gradually shifted from an interest in conventional forms of medical intervention (whether healing rituals within ‘traditional’ medicine or doctor−patient relationships within biomedicine) to novel medical technologies and global health discourses, and from an assumption of underlying stability in medical and social formations to a focus on health conditions as manifestations of processes of mobility and social fragmentation. Since the turn of the millennium, developments in medical anthropology have been and will continue to be marked by a growing emphasis on the processes and health consequences of globalization, particularly with regard to the impact of ‘big science’, social mobility, marginality and unrest, environmental disruption, and structural inequalities.

FOLLOWING WHERE BIOMEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH LEAD Since its formation as a distinct subfield during the 1980s, medical anthropology has

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always engaged in a kind of ambulancechasing, with the selection of new research foci emerging as responses to the latest advances in medical and other biosciences and in public health policy and practice. Thus, the upsurge in work on the social and cultural implications of the ‘new genetics’ during the 1990s was prompted directly by the beginnings of mapping the human genome and associated concerns (largely unrealized) about the possible consequences of genetic screening on specific populations and individuals revealed to be ‘at risk’ of genetic disorders. Similarly, work on diarrheal disease, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and in particular, HIV/AIDS was prompted by their emergence as high-priority public health problems seen as urgently requiring some social science insight. The tendency of research trends in medical anthropology to shadow developments in medical science and public health priority-setting is, of course, in large part a consequence of shifts in the research funding made available for particular issues, which are in turn the result of interest lobbies in health and science. In public and international health, health economists and major aid organizations tend to have the greatest influence, with specific items being given priority for funding and governmental attention accordingly. For example, witness the rise of ‘mental health’

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onto the international stage (Desjarlais, Eisenberg, Good, and Kleinman, 1996) once disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) instead of mortality were used to recalculate global disease burdens for the World Health Organization, or the resurgence of malaria research once the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation decided to support alleviation of this apparently intractable public health issue. In biomedical (clinical and epidemiological) research, other key influences on agendasetting are professional specialist associations, wealthy patient support organizations and the pharmaceutical industry. There is no reason to doubt that the tendency of medical anthropological research to track these shifting priorities will continue, inflected by the degree to which particular potential research opportunities happen to intersect with questions of general anthropological interest. Currently high on the international public health agenda is ‘global health’ itself (Janes and Corbett, 2009), followed by ‘chronic disease’ (galvanized by a perceived need to respond to rising rates in poor countries of what were previously known as ‘diseases of affluence’, as well as a desire in some quarters to counterbalance the philanthropic focus on infectious and childhood diseases). Accordingly, we can expect to see in the next decade a growing body of medical anthropological work concerned with nutritional issues (concerns over both obesity and malnutrition as risk factors for chronic disease also relating conceptually to traditional anthropological interests in ‘the body’ and to biosocial approaches) and with responses to chronic disease (especially cardiovascular disease and diabetes – the latter long a focus of interest among medical sociologists) and ‘self-care’. Internationally, attention to chronic and (re)emerging infectious diseases that are associated with the transnational movement of people (avian influenza or ‘bird flu’, H1N1 or swine influenza), to environmental change and to natural disasters prompted by recent global events, may precipitate a re-engagement and reformulation of theories

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of ‘lay epidemiology’ and risk, a fruitful but oddly short-lived field of interest in earlier medical anthropology (Davison, Davey Smith, and Frankel, 1991; Douglas, 1992; Gifford, 1986; Kaufert and O’Neill, 1993). More applied versions attempted to formulate the relations between individual and local conceptions of vulnerability with statistically derived calculations of exposure, as used in population and public health, in a reciprocally meaningful manner. More theoretical treatments situated the very discernment and allocation of ‘risks’ in relation to particular political and economic formations. The tendency to study ‘entities as they are conceptualized by biomedicine’ has previously been described as a ‘medicalization’ of the field (Browner, 1999). With this comes the attendant benefits of engagement with issues that affect the health of millions and the possibility of contributing to their alleviation, but also the risks of conceptual cooptation through the adoption of biomedical categories that renders much medical anthropology incapable of contributing to broader anthropological theorization. Often enough, however, while funding-driven research initially produces relatively modest empirical attempts to document qualitatively the views of specialists or the experiences of diagnosed individuals in regard to a particular health problem, subsequent (re)conceptualization of the same problem from an academic vantage point illuminates its relevance to broader anthropological themes. Thus, an East African clinical trial becomes the starting point for reflections on the state of knowledge relations (Strathern, 2009); the advent of genetic testing for susceptibility to particular diseases gives rise to a reverse conceptualization of biological−social relations that becomes a major platform for subsequent theorization as in Rabinow’s ‘biosociality’ (Gibbon and Novas, 2007); or self-medication and the use of private practitioners in Delhi slums offers grounds for conceptualizing the role of ‘local ecologies’ and sociality in shaping health possibilities (Das and

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Das, 2006). In similar fashion, empirical research on emergent problems in population health precipitated by social and environmental changes or novel species interactions may be the source for new theoretical insights.

OMICS, BIOSCIENCES AND THE BIOMEDICAL TURN In molecular biology for example, ‘epigenetics’ is replacing ‘genetics’ as a dominant research focus and anthropological attention will shift accordingly. Epigenetics is a potentially more fertile topic for anthropology, with its recognition of the ways in which potential genetic determinants are contingent on modification through pre-conceptual, fetal and early-life influences onwards throughout life in order to produce health and susceptibility to disease. Here, emerging understanding in the biological sciences will meet anthropological recognition of the interpolation of the biological and the social, as expressed, for example, in the concept of ‘local biologies’ (Lock and Kaufert, 2001). Epigenetics concerns the literal embodiment of the social in individual life processes and this field offers possibilities for a new rapprochement between social and medical science. This field, however, is itself just one dimension of a more general shift in the biosciences to map the components of living organisms in their entirety, hailed by some as the ‘next’ revolution in science. The rise of ‘omics’ − as ‘genomics’ is the mapping of the complete set of genes in an organism, so proteomics is the mapping of the set of proteins in the cell, metabolomics the equivalent exercise for metabolic compounds, and so forth − combines with systems biology and information technology to organize a new way of doing science. As anthropologists begin to recognize how organic life and, in turn, health and disease are being reconceived, various ‘omics’ will come to populate a growing number of titles of research proposals in medical anthropology.

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Engagement with the latest bioscientific techniques and their social implications and interpretations will continue a trend in medical anthropology that has involved a progressive telescoping of the field into ever more specific subdomains of biomedicine. Early studies marking a significant shift in medical anthropology away from the study of ethnomedicines and indigenous healing traditions set out to examine ‘biomedicine’ itself (Lock and Gordon, 1988), often with an emphasis on clinical encounters. One past future of medical anthropology aimed to transform the quality of clinical biomedical practice through the application of anthropological conceptual tools. This unfulfilled future has instead spawned stereotype-reinforcing ‘cultural competence’ training within North American medical education, while within the academy it has evolved into several specialized subfields. One such subfield continually refines structured instruments for gathering, mapping and comparing explanatory models and illness narratives (Craig, Chase and Lama, 2010; Weiss, 2001), while another continues to explore the art of clinical practice (Rice, 2010) and the socialization of health professionals. In the main, however, rather than embedding itself within biomedicine as ‘clinically applied’ anthropology, medical anthropology has increasingly entailed critical investigation of specific subcomponents of biomedicine, whether particular medical technologies such as computed tomography (CT) imaging and amniocentesis or specialist domains such as obstetrics and organ donation. Broadly speaking, while earlier versions of medical anthropology focused primarily on the perceptions and practices of the recipients of medical intervention (patients, communities and cultures), the focus of attention within anthropological academe has shifted inexorably onto the authors of medical innovation (doctors and research scientists) and their products. Medical anthropological theorizing will in future continue to concentrate on its academic counterpart, medical and public health research, while simultaneously − and

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sometimes as part of the same theoretical projects − a lively tradition of applied work continues to be part of such research within a multidisciplinary frame. Accordingly, much medical anthropology will be concerned with investigating emergent fields in bioscientific, biomedical and epidemiological research. One such area that is likely to attract anthropological attention is ‘translational research’ (the effort to translate laboratory-based findings for clinical benefit, especially through commercially viable medical products) and other types of ‘knowledge transfer’, as the concept of translation expands to cover the desired movement from discovery to application for health improvement across the full range of health sciences. Another emerging area is ‘biobanking’ – the acquisition of human DNA from selected populations for the purposes of genetic and epidemiological study (Palsson and Rabinow, 2005; SleeboomFaulkner, 2008). The manifestations and consequences of clinical, epidemiological and genetic research programmes in different country settings will constitute important objects of enquiry. Detailed empirical work on the particular trajectories of biomedicine in a range of country contexts may help to shift the field away from a generic formulation of ‘global’ medical science towards more nuanced understanding of its variability. The futures of biomedical intervention and the success of medical scientific innovations will increasingly be shown to depend on the histories of their positioning within particular social and political formations, rather than simply on the extent of penetration of ‘global’ science into ‘local’ economies. The focus on ‘research’ as a topic of research in its own right may also herald a more widespread theoretical engagement with public health and epidemiology, rather than with clinical practice, which, due to its inherently interpretative character within the clinical encounter, offers easier interpolation with social anthropology’s modes of understanding than do the quantitative traditions of public health.

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BIOETHICS AND REGULATORY REGIMES A particularly prominent focus of attention for anthropological treatments of health research will be the social accoutrements of such research; that is, the philosophical constructs, regulatory mechanisms and formal institutions that oversee research involving human subjects, including the ethics committee or the institutional review board. Encouraged by the eagerness of funding agencies to support research into the ‘social and ethical’ dimensions of a range of new genetic technologies and other culturally sensitive issues such as organ transplantation and the use of foetal stem cells, increasing numbers of anthropologists will move into the growth area of ‘bioethics’, as yet only partially colonized by the discipline (Das, 1999; Sleeboom-Faulkner, 2007). Building on recent work that focuses on the ethics of clinical trials (Fairhead, Leach and Small, 2006; Geissler and Pool, 2006; Petryna, 2005) and on ethnographically situated work that questions a universalist ‘ethics’ as imposed biomedically (Simpson, 2004), this area will expand exponentially in the new medical anthropology, combining as it does some of social anthropology’s core concerns (the nature of knowledge, relationality, translation and the cultural incommensurability of human value systems) with funding availability. To date, anthrological contributions to bioethics have focused primarily on the individual as the traditional subject of medical ethics, asking for example what informed consent means in resource-poor settings where people enter clinical trials in order to avail themselves of basic medical care, or to gain compensation for participation as a needed source of income. Future studies, however, will also start to examine the biomoral implications of public health interventions, providing a distinctive anthropological contribution to the ethical complexities of balancing population-wide health protection with individual rights in settings where ‘individual’ and ‘community’ are differently

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marked and valorized than in the countries where these ethical frameworks originated. Attention to ‘bioethics’ engages with the assumed globalization of such universalist constructs as they spread across national boundaries, along with their attendant medical innovations. A related stream of work on health and the state will treat this movement as the central problematic, building on and reshaping social theory by employing the tools of ‘biosociality’ and ‘biological citizenship’ in order to theorize body−society relations and biopolitical configurations for an ever-increasing range of health conditions and settings. Future work will attempt to explore tensions across the multiple affiliations to locality, community, nation-state and global society that are found in, for example, the phenomena of cross-border reproductive care; discourses on health as a human right in relation to the marketing and mobility of body parts across national boundaries; and the underwriting of entire national healthcare systems by donor agencies and private philanthropy. Empirical work will stretch and test these concepts to their limits, after which, they will (like earlier constructs such as ‘explanatory models’ and ‘comparative medical systems’) gradually acquire the status of senior citizens in the field and settle into retirement, never actively disowned but rarely visited.

STEM CELLS, GENDER AND THE REMAKING OF BODIES Other developments in the biosciences will continue to command academic attention in the future, building on the existing solid platform of work on new reproductive and medical technologies and their kinship implications (Edwards, 2000; Franklin, 1997; Franklin et al., 2003). Investigations will continue into emerging genetic, reproductive and medical fields such as cloning, surrogacy and, in particular, stem cell research (Bharadwaj and Glasner, 2008; Patra and Sleeboom-Faulkner, 2009), with its fundamental implications for

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manipulating life. Work on stem cells, currently framed almost exclusively in the language of bioethics, has been seen as having special potential for illuminating cross-culturally variable readings of the nature, meaning and value of life and for tracking discontinuities in social relations across borders. Thus, despite − or perhaps because of − their limited potential accessibility as therapeutic resorts except for wealthy elites, novel biotechnologies will remain of interest as ‘good to think with’ socially. Much scholarship in this area has been and will continue to be informed productively by attention to gender and by feminist concerns. Reproduction itself will continue to command attention, particularly with respect to the gender politics of fertility and childbearing (fetal sex determination as contributing to imbalanced sex ratios, maternal mortality, the gendering of population policy and reproductive rights) as well as infertility (in vitro fertilization [IVF], surrogacy and transnational adoption). As previously, future researchers in this area will continue to take a lead in advocacy, and the development of anthropological research on policymaking and regulation will be shaped significantly through empirical work in the areas of reproduction and population. Interdisciplinarity between anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies (STS) is so well established in studies of the biosciences for disciplinary boundaries to have largely dissolved, and sharing of theoretical concepts across subject domains is common (see Harvey, this volume). The prescient figure of the cyborg (Haraway, 1991), for example, has had longevity as a tool for thinking about postmodern bodily transformation and was adopted as a metaphor for and instantiation of human−technology hybridity (Davis-Floyd and Dumit, 1998). Newer ways of conceiving singular and compound bodies are coming into focus in a search to articulate more effectively their inherent sociality and to move beyond biology/culture dualism (Lambert and MacDonald, 2009). One aim is to conceptualize better the corporeal material

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that clinical biomedicine (Mol, 2002) and the biosciences deal with and how its symptoms and disorders are construed. In retrospect, the strange ‘loss’ of the body to the discipline may be seen as a consequence of the separation of biological and social anthropology, now being recovered through the opening of avenues (such as cultural evolution, or epigenetics) for a new rapprochement. Future medical anthropology will continue to rethink the corporeal, seeking to encapsulate both technical and experiential versions of bodies and the changes in them occasioned by engagements beyond the local, and looking for ways to overcome dependence on the tired binarism of ‘science and society’. In empirical work, the framing of ‘global assemblages’ to characterize the operations of bioscience (Ong and Collier, 2005) will continue to produce a flow of studies concerned with the commodification (ScheperHuges and Waquant, 2002), movement and utilization of human biological material (stem cells, donor eggs, kidneys, tissues) in particular settings that, in future, will contribute to ways of newly envisaging corporeality and inequality.

PHARMACEUTICALS, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HEALTH AND GLOBAL MEDICAL MARKETS The trajectory of medical anthropology is exemplified by the anthropological study of pharmaceuticals, which over time has shifted from the user end of the ‘biographical’ chain outlined by van der Geest et al. (van der Geest, Reynolds White, and Hardon, 1996) with studies that mainly focused on the local interpretation and usage of drugs and their effects by lay people, to the operations of the global pharmaceutical market. Recent studies have considered the movement and marketing of drugs (Ecks, 2005; Kamat and Nichter, 1998), processes of ‘pharmaceuticalization’ in the Global South (Whitmarsh, 2008) and the outsourcing of pharmaceutical

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research in the form of clinical trials (Petryna, 2009). This shift in focus marks a movement from an interpretative analytic that focused on pharmaceuticals as symbolically malleable objects through an emphasis on their agency and ‘liberating’ potential as mobile commodities, drawing on the work of Appadurai (1986), to a more squarely political economic reading, with the bodies of the poor who act as experimental subjects for multinational pharmaceutical companies being conceptualized as ‘biocapital’ (Rajan, 2006). Pharmaceuticals continue to be a favoured area of focus, although it seems unlikely that numerous studies of pharmaceutical marketing and the outsourcing of drugs trials to commercial research organizations (CROs) will yield many further significant theoretical insights. There will also be continuing interest in the commoditization of health and in the creation and spread of new biomedical disease categories through the development of new products and markets for them, particularly in the area of mental health and neuropharmaceuticals (Lakoff, 2006). The era of ‘personalized medicine’, through the development of pharmacogenomics that enable the tailoring of specific drug products to individual constitutions, will become a new focus of further work in the anthropology of pharmaceuticals. More generally, health inequalities and the implications of global economic flows for configuring the bodily status of entire populations in the interests of profit will continue to gather pace, the political economy of health having moved from being a minority niche concern among ‘critical’ medical anthropologists initially in the 1980s (Baer, Singer and Susser, 1997; Frankenberg, 1980; Morsy, 1990) to an influential positioning at the leading edge of current medical anthropological theory. The workings of transnational medical markets in relation to global mobility will become a key focus of medical anthropological investigation within the academy, in the form, for example, of work on various forms of medical and fertility tourism and in the marketing and

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consumption of new health technologies. Concurrent with a developing focus on the transnational biopolitics of ‘global health’ will be a continuing interest in the role of nation-states as both guardians and violators of the health of their resident populations. This interest is engendered and framed by the recent introduction of theories that treat corporeally based claims to entitlement as forms (biological, therapeutic, pharmaceutical) of ‘citizenship’ (Nguyen, 2004; Petryna, 2002; Rose and Novas, 2004), drawing on Foucauldian views of governance through biopower and intersecting with the conceptualization of health as a right in international health policy. Research in this area has begun to grapple with the complex equations entailed in health rights advocacy for the poor who may lack access to basic health care, while simultaneously their bodies and body parts become ‘bioavailable’ (Cohen, 2005) for potential commodification (Sharp, 2000) through remunerated organ donation, trial participation or medical experimentation that benefits wealthier populations. In future, the study of medical markets could fruitfully expand to encompass medical labour itself, as the familiar scenario of health professionals from developing countries being exported to serve the healthcare systems of developed nations becomes complicated by the development of new markets in the West for ‘traditional’ health care requiring indigenous experts, on the one hand, and by a growth in medical tourism to developing countries, on the other. These issues have yet to be addressed by medical anthropologists, perhaps partly because studies of the health professions have tended to remain squarely within the province of medical sociology.

THERAPEUTIC TRADITIONS AND HEALTH SYSTEMS The focusing down of medical anthropology onto increasingly specific domains within biomedical and science research will be counterbalanced in part by a return to the

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study of other (non-biomedical) therapeutic traditions as they are shaped and transformed by the evidentiary requirements of biomedical science and by international markets. The role of ‘traditional healers’ in indigenous settings as they take on (biomedical) disease prevention activities has long been a focus of applied anthropological work, while ‘complementary’ medicine in Western settings became a brief focus of attention when it began to rise in prominence almost two decades ago (Sharma, 1991). Revitalization of interest in non-biomedical expertise will be built on recognition of the redundancy of former distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. Work in this area has tracked the commercialization and packaging of ‘traditional’ medical products for the global marketplace (Banerjee, 2009; Bode, 2006) and on Asian medicine outside Asia (Alter, 2005), but future research will engage with the politics of evidence for the adoption of rival medical forms in medically plural settings. The cultural politics associated with importation of bioscientific techniques (such as the randomized controlled trial [RCT]) into other medical traditions to appraise effectiveness and bolster, or contest, patient/consumer lobbies for the provision of particular forms of health care awaits sustained anthropological attention. These interests may provide a basis from which to reconfigure earlier conceptualizations of ‘medical systems’ and reappraise the character of ‘medical pluralism’. An emerging focus will be the historical transformations and variable institutionalization or marginalization of modern varieties of ‘traditional’ medicine, both within their countries of origin and in new settings where they become competitors with, complementary to or even integrated into biomedicine in state health care. Methodological issues will continue to be prominent in research in and on health systems. Ethnographic work within health institutions and clinical settings (an early application of medical anthropology) will return to prominence and will spread to new domains (Cook, 2005) as it becomes

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increasingly established as an accepted means among non-anthropologists of analysing the workings of health systems in EuroAmerican settings and beyond (Reeves, Kuper and Hodges, 2008). ‘User involvement’ in health research will become an emerging problematic as anthropologists and health services researchers, perforce, confront the reframing of notions of evidence, effectiveness, quality of life and other previously exclusive technical constructs by their own research informants. This will render anthropologists increasingly accountable in both research practices and in the construction of analytic categories to the perceptions of research ‘users’, both lay and professional.

ACTIVISM AND APPLICATION IN MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY The agency of the ‘research user’ intersects with another trend that will continue to gain pace in the future, while being contested within the discipline: this is a shift toward a more activist orientation, with medical anthropologists increasingly seeking to represent their findings as contributing to a search for social justice and a reduction in health inequalities. Calls for social justice are manifest now less in the form of advocacy for endangered tribal communities whose lives are threatened by imported diseases, than in dissecting the role of corporate capitalism in medicalizing the majority world. Whereas approaches that interweave application and advocacy with critical contributions to theory (as in the work of Bourgois, Farmer and Singer on various ‘social pathologies’) will remain models for engagement, active involvement in future fields of work may not be so much the willed result of deliberate choices among anthropologists to reposition themselves. Practical engagement will be driven, rather, by the decreasing space available for those working as medical anthropologists to remain detached observers of the phenomena they study. The elaboration

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of research practice regulations and codes of conduct intended to ensure accountability, together with the demands of funders to show ‘impact’, will enforce membership in a wider community of research actors and participants, particularly as medical research itself becomes a central focus. Medical anthropologists will increasingly find themselves participating in their own fields of enquiry, whether as members of ethics committees or expert advisors to patient groups and local communities. Greater reflexive attention to the methodological tools used in medical anthropology and fuller explication of the epistemological grounds of research findings in medical anthropological work – long sought by higher education and funding bodies and consistently resisted by anthropologists − may become unavoidable in consequence of such engagements. A growing determination among anthropologists to produce work that will somehow contribute to the provision of appropriate and high-quality medical care and to the enhanced well-being of the world’s poor can only be a welcome development. Yet generic structural analyses of the social determinants of health status that endlessly invoke the recently dominant constructs of ‘social suffering’ (Kleinman, Das and Lock, 1997) and ‘structural violence’ (Farmer, 2003) neither reward nor require attention to the particularities of social suffering and action, or to their local interpretation and effects. There remains a need to link studies directed at ‘application’ − for example, on tobacco use, access to health care, or immunization − with the theoretical framing of political economy that currently dominates academic medical anthropological scholarship; a mediating analytic framework that will provide constructive tools for intervention as well as fodder for social theorizing awaits development. Future work will need to provide more nuanced accounts that attend to local specificity and individual agency in interpreting and, crucially, responding constructively to health problems, as well as examining the inflections of political will and social conformity that shape

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responses to disease. One possible counterbalance to the emphasis on social suffering and negative critique of harm-producing medical interventions will be consideration of forms of social and structural resilience (Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010), as will more sustained attention to clinical and public health practice through ethnographic exploration of what does, rather than does not, work (Evans and Lambert, 2008). The traditionally adversarial approach adopted by anthropologists towards health professionals and their construal of publics may gradually be overturned by new interdisciplinary collaborations and more constructive mutual engagement (Kleinman, 2010).

BIOGRAPHIES AND BUREAUCRACIES Another possible means of rebalancing the analysis of global forces with work that has practical import as well as theoretical interest is to counterpose examination of structural constraints with studies of individual biography. In this vein, some have argued recently for a (return to) focus on subjectivity (Biehl and Moran-Thomas, 2009), but while such an approach supports and explicates the coconstitution of individual agency and political economy in producing health and sickness, it implicitly allows the social to continue to be subsumed by the geopolitical. What may be required, if the ambitious methodological requirements entailed can be met, is a return to more conventional (i.e. immersive) ethnographic methods and middle-level analyses through which to examine the interactions and points of intersection between elite configurations of interest and their local manifestations and consequences. Studies of the workings of international aid and of the processes of translation between policy formation and local implementation in health and development (Foster, 1987; Justice, 1989; Mosse, 2004) remain rare in anthropology (though less so in investigative journalism), due in part to the methodological, access and funding problems entailed. This kind of approach

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therefore demands making more of a case (to both potential research subjects and users) for the utility of anthropology as an analytic tool, which in turn requires, as Fischer (1999) has argued, more explicit recognition of ourselves and our analyses as speakers in a larger arena of competing discourses. The nascent interdisciplinarity between health sciences and anthropology that has long been an established part of the applied end of the subfield will be heightened in consequence.

VISUAL AND VIRTUAL MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Final trends in new medical anthropology will be more work in the visual and the virtual. The advent of research into new forms of community, especially those to be found online, will mitigate the trend towards a predominant focus on the producers of medical intervention and innovation, while themselves constituting explorations of innovation in information technology. Future research on the use of the internet among health seekers will contribute to the development of virtual ethnography as anthropologists go ‘to the field’ by entering chat rooms and websites devoted to specific communities of sufferers from a range of (mainly chronic) conditions. New studies will seek to understand the use of online information for informing decision-making about treatment options. ‘E-health’ and the use of mobile phone technology, already foci of interest among clinical and public health experts seeking to find new means for collecting and disseminating tailored medical information to and from individuals, will become new domains for medical anthropological research. Medical imaging is another development in medical technology to be seen as having potential to offer fundamental breakthroughs for biomedical diagnosis and health care, as well as for understanding cognition, personhood and disease processes through visual

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investigations of brain activity. Work on positron emission tomography (PET) scans (Dumit, 2005) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (Cohn, 2004) are precursors to a re-emerging concern with the social and clinical consequences and implications of new medical technologies (Edwards, Harvey and Wade, 2010). There is particular interest in the claims of neuroscience to enable ‘diagnosis’ and classification of conditions previously seen as part of a spectrum of disorders, such as autism and depression. Engagement with these technologies and their potentially novel clinical and cultural consequences may also prompt a return to foundational issues of medical social science concerning definitions of the normal, disease classification, and stigma. Meanwhile, the search to render research findings more immediately accessible in all branches of medical anthropology will increasingly favour the use of visual images and will foster collaborations between ethnographers and photographers, as seen recently in work by Biehl (2005) and Bourgois and Schonberg (2009), and in the future, film-makers and bloggers. In summary, some of the dominant concerns of new medical anthropology will be molecules, images, trials and new pluralities.

REFERENCES Alter, J. (2005). Asian Medicine and Globalization. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Appadurai, A. (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baer, H. A., Singer, M., and Susser, I. (1997). Medical Anthropology and the World System: A critical perspective. Westport, CT and London: Bergin and Garvey. Banerjee, M. (2009). Power, Knowledge, Medicine: Ayurvedic pharmaceuticals at home and in the world. New Perspectives in South Asian History, Vol. 23. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Bharadwaj, A. and Glasner, P. (2008). Local Cells, Global Science − The rise of embryonic stem cell research in India. London and New York: Routledge.

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Biehl, J. (2005). Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Biehl, J. and Moran-Thomas, A. (2009). Symptom: Subjectivities, social ills, technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 267−288. Bode, M. (2006). Taking traditional knowledge to the market: The commorditization of Indian medicine. Anthropology and Medicine, 13, 225−236. Bourgois, P. and Schonberg, J. (2009). Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Browner, C. H. (1999). On the medicalization of medical anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 13, 135−140. Cohen, L. (2005). Operability, bioavailability and exception. In A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 79−90). Oxford: Blackwell. Cohn, S. (2004). Increasing resolution, intensifying ambiguity. Economy and Society, 33, 52−76. Cook, K. E. (2005). Using critical ethnography to explore issues in health promotion. Qualitative Health Research, 15, 129−138. Craig, S. R., Chase, L., and Lama, T. N. (2010). Taking the MINI to Mustang, Nepal: Methodological and epistemological translations of an illness narrative interview tool. Anthropology and Medicine, 17, 1–26. Das, V. (1999). Public good, ethics, and everyday life: Beyond the boundaries of bioethics. Daedalus, 128, 99−133. Das, V. and Das, R. K. (2006). Pharmaceuticals in urban ecologies: The register of the local. In A.Petryna, A. Lakoff, and A. Kleinman (eds), Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, markets, practices (pp. 171−205). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Davis-Floyd, R. and Dumit, J. (eds) (1998). Cyborg Babies: From techno-sex to techno-tots. New York and London: Routledge. Davison, C., Davey Smith, G., and Frankel, S. (1991). Lay epidemiology and the prevention paradox: The implications of coronary candidacy for health education. Sociology of Health and Illness, 13, 1−19. Desjarlais, R., Eisenberg, L., Good, B., and Kleinman, A. (1996). World Mental Health: Problems and priorities in low-income countries. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press. Douglas, M. (1992). Risk and Blame: Essays in cultural theory. London: Routledge. Dumit, J. (2005). Picturing Personhood: Brain scans and biomedical identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Ecks, S. (2005). Pharmaceutical citizenship: Antidepressant marketing and the promise of demarginalization in India. Anthropology and Medicine, 12, 239−254. Edwards, J. (2000). Born and Bred: Idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, J., Harvey, P., and Wade, P. (eds) (2010). Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Eggerman, M. and Panter-Brick, C. (2010). Suffering, hope, and entrapment: Resilience and cultural values in Afghanistan. Social Science and Medicine, 71, 71−83. Evans, C. and Lambert, H. (2008). Implementing community interventions for HIV prevention: Insights from project ethnography. Social Science and Medicine, 66, 467−478. Fairhead, J., Leach, M., and Small, M. (2006). Public engagement with science? Local understandings of a vaccine trial in the Gambia. Journal of Biosocial Science, 38, 103−116. Farmer, P. (2003). Pathologies of Power: Health, human rights and the new war on the poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fischer, M. (1999). Emergent forms of life: Anthropologies of late or postmodernities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 455−478. Foster, G. M. (1987). Bureaucratic aspects of international health agencies. Social Science and Medicine, 25, 1039−1048. Frankenberg, R. (1980). Medical anthropology and development: A theoretical perspective. Social Science and Medicine, 14B, 197−207. Franklin, S. (1997). Embodied Progress: A cultural account of assisted conception. London: Routledge. Franklin, S., Haraway, D. J., Hayden, C. P., et al. (2003). Remaking Life and Death: Toward an anthropology of the biosciences. Santa Fe, NM and Oxford: School of American Research Press. Geissler, P. W. and Pool, R. (2006). Editorial: Popular concerns about medical research projects in subSaharan Africa − a critical voice in debates about medical research ethics. Tropical Medicine and International Health, 11, 975−982. Gibbon, S. and Novas, C. (eds.) (2007). Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making biologies and identities. London and New York: Routledge. Gifford, S. (1986). The meaning of lumps: A case study of the ambiguities of risk. In C. Janes, R. Stall, and S. Gifford (eds), Anthropology and Epidemiology: Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of health and disease (pp. 213−246). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Janes, C. and Corbett, K. (2009). Anthropology and global health. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 267−288. Justice, J. (1989). Policies, Plans, and People: Foreign aid and health development. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kamat, V. R. and Nichter, M. (1998). Pharmacies, selfmedication and pharmaceutical marketing in Bombay, India. Social Science and Medicine, 47, 779−794. Kaufert, P. A. and O’Neill, J. (1993). Analysis of a dialogue on risks in childbirth. In S. Lindenbaum and M. Lock (eds), Knowledge, Power and Practice (pp. 32−54). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kleinman, A. (2010). Four social theories for global health. Lancet, 375, 1518−1519. Kleinman, A., Das, V., and Lock, M. (1997). Social Suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Lakoff, A. (2006). Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and value in global psychiatry. Cambridge Studies in Society and the Life Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambert, H. and MacDonald, M. (eds) (2009). Social Bodies. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Lock, M. and Gordon, D. (1988). Biomedicine Examined (Culture, illness and healing). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lock, M. and Kaufert, P. (2001). Menopause, local biologies, and cultures of aging. American Journal of Human Biology, 13, 494−504. Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Morsy, S. (1990). Political economy in medical anthropology. In T. Johnson and C. Sargent (eds), Medical Anthropology: Contemporary theory and method (pp. 26−46). New York: Praeger. Mosse, D. (2004). Cultivating Development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Nguyen, V. K. (2004). Antiretroviral globalism, biopolitics, and therapeutic citizenship. In A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 124−144). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ong, A. and Collier, S. (eds) (2005). Global Assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Palsson, G. and Rabinow, P. (2005). The Iceland controversy: Reflections on the transnational market of civic virtue. In A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as

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anthropological problems (pp. 91–103). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Patra, P. K. and Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. (2009). Bionetworking: Experimental stem cell therapy and patient recruitment in India. Anthropology and Medicine, 16, 147−163. Petryna, A. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological citizens after Chenobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Petryna, A. (2005). Ethical variability: Drug development and the globalization of clinical trials. American Ethnologist, 32, 183−197. Petryna, A. (2009). When Experiments Travel: Clinical trials and the global search for human subjects. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rajan, K. S. (2006). Biocapital: The constitution of postgenomic life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Reeves, S., Kuper, A., and Hodges, B. D. (2008). Qualitative research methodologies: Ethnography. BMJ, 337, a1020. Rice, T. (2010). Learning to listen: Auscultation and the transmission of auditory knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16, S41−S61. Rose, N. and Novas, C. (2004). Biological citizenship. In A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 439−463). Oxford: WileyBlackwell.

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Scheper-Huges, N. and Waquant, L. (eds) (2002). Commodifying Bodies. London: Sage. Sharma, U. (1991). Complementary Medicine Today: Practitioners and patients. London: Routledge. Sharp, L. A. (2000). The commodification of the body and its parts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29, 287−328. Simpson, R. (2004). Impossible gifts: Bodies, Buddhism and bioethics in contemporary Sri Lanka. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10, 839–859. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. (2007). Social-science perspectives on bioethics: Predictive Genetic Testing (PGT) in Asia. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 4, 197−206. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. (ed.) (2008). Human Genetic Biobanks in Asia: Politics of trust and scientific advancement. London: Routledge. Strathern, M. (2009). Using bodies to communicate. In H. Lambert and M. McDonald (eds), Social Bodies (pp. 148−169). New York and Oxford: Berghahn. van der Geest, S., Reynolds White, S., and Hardon, S. (1996). The anthropology of pharmaceuticals: A biographical approach. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 153−178. Weiss, M. G. (2001). Cultural epidemiology: An introduction and overview. Anthropology and Medicine, 8, 5−29. Whitmarsh, I. (2008). Biomedical ambivalence: Asthma diagnosis, the pharmaceutical, and other contradictions in Barbados. American Ethnologist, 35, 49−63.

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4.3.3 The Anthropology of Drugs Axel Klein

Over the past century, how to manage mindaltering substances has emerged as a critical political, as well as moral, question. Few subjects are as likely to arouse such emotive responses, and few are so difficult to assign to the jurisdiction of any one professional area of expertise. Anthropologists, whether in research or practice, enter the domain of drugs at their peril, in the knowledge that the field is hotly contested by rival academic disciplines, professional practitioners and policy makers. Anthropological interest in drugs overlaps with those of interdisciplinary area studies, and anthropological studies of human rights, public issues, consumption, medicine and economics, so there is a strong argument for blending these diverse concerns into a subdiscipline. It has been observed that drug (and alcohol) studies are inherently ‘multidisciplinary’, and that their findings cannot be the serendipitous by-product of fieldwork (Heath, 2000) but require targeted research, often in conjunction with colleagues from public health studies, medical sociology and various arms of policy.

THE RELEVANCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE DRUGS FIELD All this said, relations between the parties involved in drugs research can often be

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complicated. Anthropologists typically seek socio-cultural explanations for drug effect, and they are given to challenge blunt assertions of cause and effect between drug use and medical, criminal and social problems. Their preference is to regard drug use and intoxication as everyday aspects of social life to be studied in context (Curtis, 2002; Douglas, 1987; McDonald, 1994; Moore, 2002). This kind of ‘problem deflation’ has been critiqued in various ways, as: a shortcoming inherent in an ethnographic method that privileges ritual and spectacular displays (like collective celebrations) rather than kinds of data recorded by epidemiologists on the course of long-term disease; a consequence of the predominance of male informants, who are more likely to hold positive views on drugs than are women and children; and the functionalist imperative to present drug use as socially integrated (Room, 1984). The cultural centrality of drug use posited by some anthropologists has been projected into the past and argued to be a defining feature of Homo faber pharmakon (La Barre, 1975), which can explain shifts in social organization (for example, from the shamanic use of naturally occurring hallucinogens that enhance the powers of perception needed to find game, to the very different concerns of a priestly caste with the control of weather for agriculture).

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Until the 1970s, anthropological interest in mind-altering substances focused predominantly on alcohol, but this was to change with the rise in popularity of other drugs, the illicit status of which, along with the criminalization of their users, made them difficult to research by survey techniques. In response, researchers from other social sciences adopted anthropological methods (particularly ethnographic research, through participant or direct observation, and in-depth interviews with key informants) as part of what became known across the drugs field as ‘qualitative research’ (Moore and Maher, 2002; Rhodes and Moore, 2001a; 2001b). Anthropological precepts, including the investigation of the construction of meaning by the social agents themselves, were adopted as relativizing counterpoints to a priori definitions of ‘junkies’ or ‘dealers’ (Neale, 2002; Radcliffe and Stevens, 2008). Up-close, indepth fieldwork with small cohorts was used to document the human concerns of stigmatized groups that had been pushed to the margins of society and were often victimized by state agencies. This critical disposition, combined with an emphasis on situating phenomena within wider socio-cultural contexts, helped move discussion of drugs from preoccupation with the substances themselves towards concern with their social contexts and policy environments (Asmussen Frank and Kolind 2008; Jensen, 2008). Because they are emotive, it is important to establish explicit definitions of the terms being used. ‘Drug’, signposting a handful of substances believed to be harmful because of their addictive or personality-destroying properties, is a term that has been coined over the past century (Porter, 1996). While ostensibly scientific, the idea of drugs is inextricably linked with moral judgements about the character of the people who consume them (Ruggiero, 1999: 123), and with the political process of their control (Seddon, 2010). Use of the term ‘narcotic’ in official US discourse to describe illicit substances with contrary pharmacological action (including stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamine) serves to

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illustrate the point. Insistence on understanding the chemical properties and appropriate classifications (e.g. Lewin’s classic scheme distinguishing narcotics, stimulants, inebriants, hallucinogens) is doubtless prerequisite to understanding the effects of drugs; but, beyond the interaction of external and endogenous chemicals in the human body, impact is determined by the expectations users have of the drug experience, the company they keep, and the places where drugs are used: succinctly summarized by the sociologist Norman Zinberg as ‘drug, set and setting’ (1984). Intoxication is itself part of a learning process during which subcultural processes define the experience as being in contradistinction to, or in alignment with, dominant values depending on the legal status of substance and social status of user (Agar, 1973; Becker, 1953; McAndrew and Edgerton, 1969). Incorporation of a relatively small number of the hundreds of naturally occurring psychoactive substances into the repertoire of recreational, spiritual or medical forms of consumption, and the associated celebration or condemnation of them, is an outcome of history and of social action. For instance, the transformation of opium in nineteenth-century Britain from panacea to menace (Jay, 2001) was as much a consequence of social attitudes as it was of advances in organic chemistry delivering medical alternatives, while the rapid spread of coffee in Enlightenment Europe has been explained as achieving ‘pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfil spiritually and ideologically’ (Schivelbusch 1992: 39). The distribution of hallucinogenic plants, of which 100 have been identified in the New World and only 15−20 in the Old World (Davis, 1985), reflects the thriving shamanic spiritual traditions of the former, and the jealous control over mind-altering experiences exerted by organized religions in the latter (La Barre, 1969; Schultes, 1963; Wilbert, 1987). The range of available, mind-altering substances, and their diverse applications, make

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the need for classification both urgent and contested. One proposed classification highlights users’ intentions by identifying a category of ‘substances taken into the human body for purposes other than nutrition’ (Sherrat, 1995/2007:1). This distinction is supported by ethnographic material on the differentiation made by the Barasana of northwest Amazonia between meals (food) and anti-meals (cigars, beer, or infusions of ayahuasca vine) (Hugh-Jones, 1995). Providing an alternative to the pharmacological and legal definitions prevalent in policy and popular discourses (that are typically not self-critical) is potentially one of anthropology’s key contributions to drug and alcohol studies (Hunt and Barker, 2001). Another is to look at cultural contexts of drug use ‘beyond the West’ (Coomber and South, 2004).

DRUGS AND THE OTHER Culture-bound substances and weapons of the weak Many drugs that play a significant role in ritual, religion or social life remain little known in the West (Furst, 1972; Harner, 1973): coca leaf, betel, kola, kava, peyote, iboga and ayahuasca are largely ‘culture bound’, which by default has left anthropologists to explain the roles and functions these drugs play within their cultural context. For historical reasons, anthropological accounts are often oppositional: for instance, providing alternative accounts of coca (Erythroxylum coca), to the legacy of colonial, missionary and post-colonial discourses that continue to denigrate and denounce the habit. Anthropologists have on occasions participated quite deliberately in the creation of a counter-discourse, designed to restore the voice of subordinated and marginalized groups. Drugs may be construed as weapons of the weak in a historic process of exploitation. The position of the Peruvian elite has mirrored shifts in Western opinion over the

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course of the past century. In the late nineteenth century, Western opinion celebrated cocaine while remaining contemptuous of coca chewing as a sign of backwardness; by the early twentieth century, it sought to distinguish ‘good coca’ from ‘bad cocaine’, and by mid-century it identified both ‘bad coca’ and ‘bad cocaine’ (Gootenberg, 1999). Working in the context of a struggle for livelihood by coca farmers in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, anthropologists have provided positive accounts of coca chewing (aculli), and written detailed descriptions of its material culture, including preparation, the quantities used and mixed with alkaline (lejia), and the manner coca is carried in a special wrap called the coca chino (Spedding, 2004). The significance of coca in everyday life, such as the similarity between ‘a chew’ and an English tea break, have been underlined to destigmatize the habit at a time military forces have been eradicating the crop in all three Andean countries. The insertion of coca crops into the paradigm of a, largely US-driven-and-financed, ‘war on drugs’ has raised critical questions about state legitimacy and the relationship between farmers and government (Sanabria, 2004). Anthropologists have recorded the resurgence of coca use as part of the political protest that culminated in the presidential election of former coca farmer Evo Morales in Bolivia, and celebrated affirmation of the ‘chew’ as an expression of a Latin-American identity (Cusicanqui, 2004). Identity and status The wider links between ethnic identity, social status and drug use have been employed instrumentally in a number of anthropological studies. In the South Pacific, local preference for the stimulant betel nut (Piper betle) or the narcotic kava (Piper methysticum) has been presented as an index of migration by different ethnic groups (Brunton, 1989). As yet, both substances remain outside international drug control classification systems, and so recent studies have been able to focus on the

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shift from traditional to contemporary methods of consumption (Merlin and Raynor, 2004). A recurrent theme of ethnographic discussion is the suspension of traditional controls on consumption. Across Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, kava was once reserved for ceremonial occasions, and for older men drinking in a designated area outside the village. Today, there are no such restrictions. The plant has been commoditized, and its distribution and sale are mediated through the market. The consequent rise in production is putting pressure on fragile island ecosystems, and the increase in consumption has implications for public health and social well-being. Culture on drugs Noting that the ‘pub is a central part of English life and culture’, one observer concludes that most societies can be understood only by closely analysing the role and function of their dominant drug (Fox, 2004: 88). The complex interrelationship between hallucinogenic visions, patterns and symbols of material culture, and the motifs of legend and song are brought out by ethnographies from the Amazon. Among many ethnic groups, different concoctions of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) are traditionally used for important ceremonial occasions. Thick descriptions of patterns of use and effect among the Tukano (ReichelDolmatoff, 1975) − which explore links between the visions experienced when under its influence and motifs in sculpture, bodily decorations and tribal mythology − demonstrate the centrality of ayahuasca to religious experience. Moreover, different phratries harvest the plants available in their respective eco-zones, thus producing hallucinations that reflect each group’s particular character and corresponding myths. The foundation of syncretic religions in Brazil in recent years has provided ayahuasca with new contexts of consumption. The Uniao Vegetal, Santo Daime and other syncretic religions recognized by the government since 1987

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all drink ayahuasca as their sacrament at mass. A similar, though unrelated, phenomenon is reported from West Africa, where an indigenous response to Christian proselytizing contributed to the founding of the Bwiti cult. At the centre of Bwiti is the ingestion of parts of the ibogaine root (Tabernanthe iboga), a powerful hallucinogenic capable of inducing death by overdose. Strong doses are, nonetheless, used during the rite of initiation to ‘break open the head’ and facilitate an outof-body experience with access to the ancestors and other spirits (Fernandez, 1982). While Bwiti remains a thriving religion in Gabon, Cameroon and Congo, it has also found new adherents in the West. Ibogaine and ayahuasca are increasingly used in the expanding ‘drug treatment complex’ for addictions and other conditions (Alper et al., 2008; McKenna, 1992). These adaptations of traditional ways of healing have been criticized as drug tourism (de Rios, 1972), but when transplanted to Europe or North America they undergo significant cultural changes, a trend that recalls earlier adaptations of drugs to fit the needs and desires of European consumers (Courtwright, 2001; Schivelbusch, 1992; Sheller, 2004). Policy makers working inside the control system characterize all current patterns of consumption of classified drugs as ‘abuse’ (UNODC, 1997), a position that is open to criticism to the extent that it assumes a past pattern of more socially integrated drug consumption that was lost with the transition to modernity. Such a construal would uphold a notion of authenticity as something rooted in the past that cannot develop into a modern practice without losing its cultural essence. Seen this way, the transposition of established practices to contemporary settings − from village to town, or from religious to secular occasions − has to be told as a story of cultural degeneration, involving a drift from use to abuse that stands in need of correction through the intervention of the state and international agencies (Klein, 2008).

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Globalized drugs The conflicts between culturally sanctioned and problematic use play out most vividly in emerging global cultures of consumption. Cannabis, in both herbal form and as resin (hashish), has a long tradition of use in India, the Middle East and North Africa, but became a successful export in the nineteenth century when merchants and indentured labourers spread its consumption to Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America (Mills, 2003). Today, an estimated 200 million people globally use cannabis (UNODC, 2009). Anthropological accounts from India have emphasized how cannabis (bhang) was integrated into the religious calendar, so that consumption was an adjunct to a festival and not a defining character flaw of the addict (Charles et al., 1999). In the Caribbean, cannabis was introduced in the nineteenth century by Indian migrants, but crossed to older African populations in Jamaica where far lower levels of Indian immigration facilitated intercultural marriage and friendships. It became popular with the emerging Rastafarian movement both for its instrumental use in accessing spiritual power and because of its non-European origin as a rejection of white ‘Babylonian’ domination (Chevannes, 2004; Rubin and Comitas, 1976). Opium, meanwhile, travelled in the opposite direction. Demand for this global panacea was driven by the dispensaries of Europe and America, and by recreational and spiritual use in India, the Middle East and most notably China. An estimated 47,000 tons were produced annually in the early twentieth century. In 2010, global production hovered around 6,000 tons, most of it farmed illegally. Cultural accounts often reference the finding of the 1898 Indian opium survey that problematic uses of opium were isolated and negligible. Since then, studies of opium in Rajasthan (Ganguly, 2004), Laos (Westermeyer, 2005) and Afghanistan (MacDonald, 2007) have argued for the protective value of opium, while

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noting that problematic consumption patterns are associated with a number of modern processes, including urbanization, social fragmentation and the unleashing of market forces. The most deleterious factor in terms of social pathology, however, has been the policy of prohibition that has pushed supply patterns from opium to heroin across various Asian countries. The refinement of naturally occurring substances through the synthesizing of derivatives (e.g. from opium to morphine to heroin; from coca leafs to cocaine; or the distillation of alcohol) intensifies the intoxicating powers of drugs. Greater potency accelerates crossing of the brain−blood barrier, and intensifies the stimulation of neurotransmitters. But the greatest risks stem from the absence of social conventions and cultural knowledge on how risks are best managed. The tendency to employ a familiar drug control paradigm for managing new substances comes at a cost. Policy makers have come to prioritize message-sending over objective risk assessments, and end up banning substances like mephedrone, that are comparatively risk free (Measham et al., 2010). Users are criminalized and tempted towards new and untested substances, while entire drug scenes are pushed underground.

DRUGS AS THE OTHER Thriving drug markets under circumstances of prohibition have opened new opportunities for anthropology in subcultural studies closer to home. Initially, drug use, perceived as an irrational, pathologized activity that was prohibited on medical grounds, required explanation that went beyond epidemiological data on prevalence and incidence. In a complex society, targeted research was needed to explain the behaviour patterns of selected minorities. Subsequently, the clandestine nature of drug-related activities proved an ideal terrain for the kind of anthropological research known in the drugs field

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as ‘qualitative studies’ (Rhodes and Moore, 2001a). Though the very illegality of status proscribes any suggestion of ‘integrated use’, from the outset of drug prohibition, anthropologists and others have employed social theory to broaden understanding of drug users and to challenge medical notions of the addiction process (Lindesmith, 1947). Studies have dismantled the prevailing paradigm of drug use as a retreatist response to structural exclusion by marginal groups. For instance, in-depth interviews with Afro-American attendants of a drug treatment centre provided insight into heroin use as the preferred vehicle of protest. Its illegality and the attendant lifestyle of pursuing ‘cool kicks’ while eschewing responsibility set up a symbolic opposition to the dominant values of white, ‘square’ America (Finestone, 1957). The daily hustles of New York ‘user dealers’, who had to navigate around the attention of the law, and the demands of their withdrawalinducing habit, as well as an unpredictable clientele, were analysed to be no less complex and demanding than the daily grind of any other businessman (Preble and Casey, 1969). While foregrounding concepts of lifestyle, subculture and a drug-using career, the collected experiences of users articulated a critique of a policy that was not only ineffective in eliminating drugs but also responsible for rising crime rates. The contradictions between, on the one hand, strong demand for drugs in certain sections of the population and, on the other hand, an increasingly repressive policy, provided the subject matter of critical studies, with shifting concerns from subcultural networks to the persistent structural exclusion of minority groups. For instance, an ethnographic study of Spanish Harlem depicts a vicious cycle of disinvestment and deprivation that left drug dealing as the only viable economic option available to minority men growing up across American urban spaces (Bourgois, 1995). Close analyses of street dealing have generated data on the social embeddedness of drug dealers (Pearson, 2001) that disprove notions that drug dealers lack social

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responsibility (Curtis and Wendel, 2000), and just seek easy money. It transpires, on the contrary, that most drug dealers struggle to make a minimum wage, and are forced to live with their mothers (Venkatesh, 2006). Detailed studies have also helped to establish the role of women in drug street cultures (Inciardi et al., 1993). The initially dominant themes of victimization and exploitation have been challenged by more nuanced accounts of women who have successfully occupied niches in complex drug markets as a matter of (albeit, structurally limited) choice, rather than as mere victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation (Anderson, 2005). The moral disposition of drug retailers has also been measured against allegations of luring young people into a vortex of addiction by giving out free samples, or adulterating injectable heroin with harmful substances. Research identified a gaping lack of evidence for these allegations, and recast the ‘drug dealer’ as a social construct used to legitimize state violence and as a scapegoat for social problems (Coomber, 2006). Concern over the spread of blood-borne viruses, particularly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) since the 1980s, has informed a strand of anthropologically oriented work of a more applied character. Working alone in classical roles of passive observer or as members of interdisciplinary outreach teams, researchers have taken part in action research designed to help change the lifestyle and consumption patterns of their informants. This was an opportunity for anthropologists to demonstrate the relevance of their methodology as a practical contribution to drug studies that went beyond conceptualization, critique and reframing. But the methods themselves were disputed by policy makers, who regarded some interventions − providing injecting drug users with clean needles, or inviting street users into drop-in centres − as condoning illegal activities. Together, such interventions are known as ‘harm reduction’ (HR), and they are distinct from ‘abstentionist’ approaches

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in the wider field of drug treatment: ‘abstentionism’ conceives drug use as the problem, whereas HR focuses on the physical and mental problems associated with drug use. While subject to heated policy debates at national and international levels, HR has provided a platform for some medical anthropologists to investigate the assumptions, conditions and power relationship inherent in drug treatment. The imposition of controls on people seeking treatment has been explored as a new dimension of biopower, driven by vested professional and institutional interests (Hunt and Barker, 1999) that often fails to address structural issues of dispossession and marginalization (Garcia, 2010). Overall, drug treatment programmes have very low success rates measured in terms of long-term abstinence, prompting providers of treatment to shift their reporting focus from outcomes to processes: reductions in waiting times, and the completion of treatment programmes, make for better reading than do ‘success rates’. Ongoing investment in programmes and facilities, described as ‘treatmentality’, is supported by a broad consensus that drug treatment is something good to do. Research with providers and clients, also known as service users, has shown wide differences in their understandings of treatment (Jöhncke, 2008). In spite of its quasi-medical cast, ‘treatment’ is a mixed bag of medication-supported psychotherapy and administrative measures. Major agencies, including the US National Institute for Drug Abuse and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), claim that drug addiction is a brain disease, yet they understand neither its aetiological process nor its appropriate treatment. Future challenges for research include unpicking the political intention behind such claims (which shifts the issues from the sphere of criminal justice to that of medical intervention), the use of unsupported quasi-scientific claims and the impact of treatment regimes on both users and practitioners.

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POLICY TENSIONS − NORMALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT Following years of generous investment, drug treatment in the United Kingdom (MacGregor, 2010) finds itself at the crossroads, as public funding agencies exert tighter controls, while private practice moves into new and increasingly experimental domains. The instrumentalization of hallucinogenic drugs to assist with the search for behaviour change is promising but also expensive. Disillusionment with the efficacy of treatment, combined with a weary acceptance that drug use is a permanent feature of UK culture, may reduce social willingness to spend public money on treating what are still widely perceived as self-imposed afflictions. In the late 1990s, the growing popularity of mind-altering substances as a readily available option in the repertoire of recreational activities led to the proposal that they be ‘normalized’. This was a notable shift from the previous focus on subcultures and on drug use as a social abnormality in need of explanation (Measham et al., 2002). The drift of drug use into the cultural mainstream has, however, since been paralleled by the stigmatization of tobacco, and by the revival of a temperance movement that is reproblematizing alcohol. Critical in the development of treatment modalities is the role of the ‘service user’, and this has been tentatively encouraged by state agencies in recent years. Whatever the suitability of neoliberalinspired notions of customer choice, selfdetermination has emerged as a critical factor in treatment outcome, as well as a critical factor for repositioning the drug user. At present, the bulk of research publications concern problematic use. Not only does this give the impression that such problems (be they medical or social) are the inevitable outcome of drug use but also it leaves unrecorded the experience of the vast majority of drug users who experience no lasting problems. An absence of detailed accounts of cultures of consumption holds back the identification of protective factors, which include

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rituals of moderation that ensure users do not expose themselves to excessive harm, the understanding of the effects of drugs by users, and the elaboration of roles and support systems among users. Arguably, as much to justify policy decisions as to improve the allocation of resources, funding by government agencies and grantgiving bodies has concentrated on pathologies (mental health, infectious diseases and the cost of drug-related crime). Qualitative research is regarded suspiciously for generating sympathy with drug users (Buxton, 2006), and so remains marginal to both drug studies and anthropology (Bourgois, 2002; Hunter and Barker, 2001). Yet the growing demand for mind-altering experiences, and the increasing instrumental use of drugs for recreation, self-medication, spiritual exploration and performance enhancement create an urgent need for such accounts. Future research must shift from a singular focus on the harms of drug use to take in the harmful impacts of repressive policies, including the criminalization of users. Building on existing studies of vulnerable groups (Allen, 2007; Bourgois, 2002; Hammersley, 2008), social research is needed to explore the normalization of criminal behaviour within social attitudes towards law and the state. A similar shift has already occurred in some producer and transit countries where drugs were identified as a policy challenge during the 1990s. More recent scholarship has begun to identify the policy framework as the critical issue. Field studies from the Caribbean, South America and Afghanistan have shown cannabis, coca and opium poppy cultivators to be farmers, in all likelihood traditional and conservative in outlook, who have been pushed into illegality and alliance with trafficking organizations by policy and circumstance (Klein, 2004; Mansfield, 2005). Anthropologists are in a position to give voice to these groups and to ensure that their interests are taken into account in decision-making processes. The urgency of doing so is underlined by the corrosive effects of drug-related violence

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and corruption on stability and governance in countries like Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia. While information on drug users, producers and traders is growing, the only studies of the functioning of drug control agencies are historical (Bewley-Taylor, 1999; Bruun et al., 1975; McAllister, 2000). Organizational studies are needed to understand the practical workings of national agencies, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and international agencies − like the UNODC and INCB (the International Narcotics Control Board) − in areas such as risk assessment, the establishment of ‘truths’ about the drugs field, the transfer of knowledge and the negotiation of policy.

LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE The multiple crises of health (notably HIV), crime and insecurity, development and governance, human rights and state legitimacy that are associated with drugs and drug policy strengthen the argument for a ‘unified theory’ of drugs (Hunt and Barker, 2001). The policy and practice-driven distinction between production and distribution, on the one side, and consumption, on the other, dominated by law enforcement and public health sectors, respectively, has been unhelpful for understanding processes and interconnections, and has allowed public response to be dominated by narrow professional interests. Scholars working on legal substances have shown the benefit of collapsing artificial separations when studying licit substances such as the ‘drug food’ sugar. Changes in culinary preference are interwoven with revolutionary changes in labour arrangements, technology and engineering, and imperial expansion (Mintz, 1985). The continuing expansion of global sugar consumption is not simply the expression of consumer preference and a boon for dentistry, but part of a complex and chequered social and political process. This story exemplifies the role that

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substances play as commodities, trade goods, items of fashion and of experience in ‘globalization’, and as both drivers and consequences of this vaguely defined phenomenon. The arrival of new drugs was, and is, both a spur and an outcome of global trade. The current tendency of deliberations on drug status to focus on isolated case reports from mental health practitioners and law enforcement serves to skew policy towards a prohibitionist paradigm that ignores the needs and views of traders, farmers, sellers and consumers. Holistic studies on products that are not yet under international control, like khat (Anderson et al., 2007), provide a muchneeded corrective to the general trend to construe products as problems that can be resolved only by control measures. Current discussions around the medical applications of marijuana provide a forum where a general review of perceived health benefits and detailed studies of consumption patterns can be carried out. These can be used to strengthen the argument for drug regulation being a local rather than a global business, and one that should be determined by elected officials at community level rather than by the secretariat of intergovernmental organizations. Beyond the evident need to engage with policy and practice, anthropology has much to offer other than containing harm and managing risk. The relationship between drugs and culture − from the social significance of the institution of the English pub, to the material production of artefacts such as opium pipes or chillums, and the significance of drugs in rites of passage and religion − poses profound question about society, culture and human identity. Combining archaeological evidence with ethnographic accounts allows for new interpretations of old data, such as the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascau, which, it has been suggested, served in mind-altering experiences during rites of passage, with or without the aid of intoxicating substances (Rudgley, 1993). We are only beginning to explore the role of drugs in education through experimentation

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with cognitive enhancers, such as the socalled medical use of amphetamine-based Ritalin (methylphenidate) in attention-deficit disorder and the habitual use of coffee and other stimulants in the workplace. There is a need to balance the political and commercial interests of, for example, the pharmaceutical industry with alternative accounts of ‘plant wisdom’ pioneered by mushroomand peyote-eating writers like Gordon Wasson (1980), Aldous Huxley (1954) and Carlos Castaneda (1969). Applications within contemporary education have also been suggested (Tupper, 2003), marked by a shift in labelling from the somewhat discredited ‘hallucinogen’ to the more positive ‘entheogen’, referring to the God within. Occupying the interface between the humanities and social science, anthropology can provide latitude to exercises of speculative thought. Attending to the constructive possibilities in human−plant relationships provides a refreshing alternative to the hysterical and sometimes apocalyptic tenor taken by some practitioners and the media. There is an opportunity to dislodge discussion of drugs from its pathological foundation and to integrate it more positively in normative discourses, including those about consumption, recreation, creativity, self-development, ecology and global cultures. The anthropology of drugs has the potential to make inroads beyond the policy impasse into a more constructive engagement with drugs in the future.

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of Colombia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rhodes, Tim and Moore, David (eds) (2001). Addiction ‘On the Qualitative in Drug Research – Part 1.’ Addiction Research and Theory 9(4). Rhodes, Tim and Moore, David (eds) (2001). Addiction ‘On the Qualitative in Drug Research – Part 1.’ Addiction Research and Theory 9(6). Room, Robin (1984). Alcohol and ethnography: a case of problem deflation? Current Anthropology 25(2): April. Rudgley, Richard (1993). The Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in society. London: British Museum Press. Rubin, V and Comitas, L. (1976). Ganja in Jamaica: The effects of marijuana use. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Ruggiero, V. (1999). Drugs as a password and the law as a drug: discussing the legalisation of illicit substances. In N. South (ed.), Drugs: Cultures, controls and everyday life. London: Sage, pp.123−138. Sanabria, Harry (2004). The state and the ongoing struggle over coca in Bolivia: legitimacy, hegemony, and the exercise of power. In Steinberg, Michael, Joseph Hobbs and Kent Mathewson (eds.), Dangerous Harvest. Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1992). Tastes of Paradise: A social history of spices, stimulants and intoxicants. New York: Pantheon. Schultes, R. (1963). Hallucinogenic plants of the New World. Harvard Review 1: 18−32 Seddon, T. (2010). A History of Drugs: Drugs and freedom in the liberal age. Abingdon: Routledge. Sheller, Mimi (2004). Consuming the Caribbean. London: Routledge.

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Sherrat. A. (1995/2007). Introduction: peculiar substances. In: J. Goodman, P.E. Lovejoy and A. Sherratt (eds), Consuming Habits: Drugs in history and anthropology. Routledge, New York, pp. 1–10. Spedding, Alison (2004). Coca use in Bolivia: a tradition of thousands of years. In Ross Coomber and Nigel South (eds), Drug Use and Cultural Contexts ‘Beyond the West.’ London: Free Association Books. Steinberg, Michael, Hobbs, Joseph and Mathewson, Kent (eds) (2004). Dangerous Harvest. Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tupper, Kenneth (2003). Entheogens and education: exploring the potential of psychoactives as educational tools. Journal of Drug Education and Awareness 1(2): 145−161. UNODC, (1997). World Drug Report. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC, (2009). World Drug Report. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Venkatesh, Sudhir (2006). Off the Books: The underground economy of the urban poor. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Wasson, Gordon (1980). The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica. New York: McGraw-Hill. Westermeyer, J. (2005). Opium and the people of Laos. Steinberg, Michael, Joseph Hobbs and Kent Mathewson (eds.), Dangerous Harvest. Drug plants and the transformation of indigenous landscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) Wilbert, J. (1987). Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zinberg, N.E. (1984). Drug, Set and Setting: The basis for controlled intoxicant use. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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4.3.4 Transforming Bodies: The Embodiment of Sexual and Gender Difference Andrea Cornwall

Our bodies are projects in the making. From everyday acts of body maintenance to the use of surgery and prosthetics to produce bodies that correspond with or confront prevailing social or cultural norms, bodies are sites on which the disciplining effects of heteropatriarchy are played out. What we do with our bodies reflects unspoken, and often unquestioned, ideas about how bodies ought to look and what bodies can do, and about what is ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. The body habits we acquire, what Marcel Mauss (1936) called ‘techniques of the body’, transform our bodies in unwitting ways. Other body modifications are pursued more consciously. A profusion of surgical, prosthetic and pharmaceutical interventions offer the possibility of more radical transformations. Whether administered under medical management or purchased in the marketplaces available to the late capitalist consumer, they make possible expressions of identity and belonging, of conformity and of resistance (Bornstein 1994). This chapter draws on literatures from anthropology and beyond to explore the

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making and shaping of bodies in the production and performance of gender identities. I weave a path through a densely populated and diverse literature by focusing on practices of body modification that produce the embodiment of sexual and gender difference, and I explore some of the issues of power that emerge.1 Exploring modifications of the body through a gender lens highlights the extent to which the body becomes a site for transformations that is shaped by, and that literally comes to embody, not merely cultural norms of femininity and masculinity, but also what Gilbert Herdt (1993) has called ‘the principle of body dimorphism’. This principle rests on the assumption that there are only two kinds of body: a male body and a female body. Dimorphic bodies are fashioned through interventions that exaggerate or minimize bodily characteristics, with the potential to achieve transitions or transits from one gender to another, or to produce a range of gendered possibilities within the scope offered by being and becoming a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in different cultural and subcultural contexts.

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PRODUCING GENDERED BODIES Everyday interventions in the body produce our gendered identities. The selective removal and cultivation of hair is a body modification that most people engage in routinely. Bodyaltering exercise is another. Body modifications can also be achieved through marking and piercing the skin, fattening and dieting, the use of binding and padding underwear, prosthetics and surgery, and the ingestion of pharmaceuticals and biochemical-altering herbs. These practices have long been of interest to anthropologists. ‘Armchair anthropologists’ of the nineteenth century catalogued diverse forms of body modification from around the world, constituting an often racialized field of representation that might be termed ‘ethnopornography’ (Whitehead and Sigal, 2004). For those who ventured into ‘the field’, practices of scarification, tattooing and excision were of interest, primarily for their ritual and symbolic dimensions. Initiation ceremonies that marked rites of passage (van Gennep, 1960) were a particular magnet for anthropologists (Brown, 1963; La Fontaine, 1986). Anthropological analyses of that which Ahmed and Stacey (2001) term ‘dermographics’ − the ways in which the skin becomes meaningful in different cultural contexts − highlight the ways in which ‘inscriptions on the body’ (Schildkrout, 2004) produce cultural meaning, whether as constitutive of social identity, expressive of cultural resistance or as a means of social control (Gell, 1993; Gengenbach, 2003 and Auslander, 1993, cited in Schildkrout, 2004). Rituals of body modification involving scarification, branding, tattooing and forms of ritual cutting are also found in North America, Europe and Australasia amongst body modification communities. Online body modification forums offer anthropologists a virtual ‘field’ that is rich in possibilities for research. Powerful contrasts with ritualized practices in other cultural contexts emerge in the online testimonies of ‘bodymodders’. They speak of using their modifications to mark

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memories and to achieve the ultimate in individuality, the pain of achieving these changes carefully distinguished from self-harm. Some transformations are transitory – achieved, for example, with injection of saline solution under the skin in certain parts of the body. Some involve the insertion of objects in or under the skin or under the surface of the eyeball. Others are more permanent, such as scars or tattoos. All of these forms of body modification can reproduce normative expressions of gender identity. But they can also contest normativities in interesting ways. One online forum, for example, features a torso latticed with red and pink cuts, in the process of healing, that resemble a corset. It appears to be that of a male-bodied person. But on closer inspection, the two large scars at the top of the ‘corset’ seem to be the result of a mastectomy. As one commentator put it, ‘it gives the illusion of a different body shape’.2 The choice of this body artwork to complement the body transformation of transitioning from female to male is intriguing, not least because the corset is so significant in the history of the use of garments to produce gendered bodies (Summers, 2001). Anthropology has also long taken an interest in hair (Leach, 1958; Douglas, 1966), but, as Julia Thompson (1998) notes, more in the symbolic and ritual dimensions of hair than in everyday experience. Hair is in some respects especially interesting for anthropologists as it is the part of the body that is most commonly modified. Routine body maintenance can involve often painful modifications of body hair, naturalized as ‘normal’ and performed as part of the production of gender difference. Hairstyles reflect not only normative notions of gender identity but also cultural and subcultural identities (Hebdige, 1999), and can signify both conformity and resistance. Kia Lilly Caldwell (2003), for example, illustrates how Black Brazilian women contest prevailing aesthetic norms and reconstruct their subjectivities through the ways that they choose to modify their

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hair, evoking a cultural politics that seeks other kinds of transformations. Like hairstyles, clothing plays a significant part in modifying appearance. Danny Miller writes, ‘clothing is the carapace that often conducts and connects … rather than separates our sense of what lies within and outside ourselves’ (2005: 6). Just as the corset referred to earlier, clothes can be used to shape the body: to accentuate, exaggerate, conceal or minimize parts of the body, in the production of particular forms of gender expression. Implants and other surgical procedures take this a step further. The artist Orlan has gained fame for using her own body as a canvas, documenting her plastic surgeries as an art form.3 These forms of body modification are used not only for selfadornment but also to produce bodies that conform to desired forms of gender expression. Feminists have drawn attention to the use of technologies of body modification in perpetuating beauty myths (Wolf, 1991) that naturalize particular representations of the idealized female or male body. Kaw (1993), for example, notes the racialized dimensions of cosmetic practices such as eyelid reconstruction, sought by women of Asian descent as a signifier of brains as well as good looks. The idea of the body as a project (Shilling, 2003) is a useful way to conceive of these transformations. The worked-upon body is not only an object of consumption and adornment but also a project of becoming that can be as much an act of resistance as one of conformity. Shilling cites a study of bodybuilding: When I look in the mirror, I see someone who’s finding herself, who has said once and for all it doesn’t really matter what role society has said I should play, I can do anything I want and feel proud about doing it. (Rosen 1983: 72, cited in Shilling 1993: 6)

Marilyn Strathern’s (1979: 243) account of body adornment in Mount Hagen adds another dimension. She highlights what she calls the ‘cosmetic paradox’: whether the

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application of cosmetics – or, in this context, body paint and other adornments – transforms the body into a de-individualized object or creates the persona. This ‘paradox’ finds expression in transformations of the body that, by aligning the body into greater congruence with normative expectations of what a ‘real woman’ or ‘real man’ ought to look like, also brings about the active appropriations of these ideals.

DISCIPLINING BODIES The inscription of ideals of containment and passivity onto the female body has been documented by historians for nineteenthcentury England, where ‘over-excitable’ women had their ovaries excised and were ‘treated’ with vibrators. In her study of the historical construction of ‘nymphomania’, Carol Groneman cites British gynaecologist Heywood Smith who ‘stated that clitoridectomy was “the best, indeed, the only, cure” for those women whose “lives were a misery to them on account of excessive sexual desire” (Heywood Smith in Tait 1888: 315)’ (1994: 366). Today, the performance of clitoral excision to discipline women’s bodies is more commonly associated with Africa. The practice that is widely known as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM) has provoked intense debate, drawing anthropologists into uncomfortable discussions about ethics and obligations, cultural relativism and ethnocentrism in understanding women’s bodies and pleasures (Boddy, 1989; Dellenborg, 2004; Silverman, 2004). The politics of naming practices of genital modification is complex (Walley, 1997). The term ‘circumcision’ invites a direct comparison with the removal of the male foreskin, yet some of the practices associated with female genital modification are far more invasive, risky and damaging. To talk, however, of ‘mutilation’ evokes the colonial continuities and contested post-colonial politics of Western concern about African women’s lives (Walley, 1997; James and Robertson,

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2005). Clitoridectomy, excision, infibulation and other practices that modify the female genitalia have come to be associated with a narrative about the barbarity of ‘traditional’ practices in Africa.4 Yet a conundrum anthropological studies have revealed is that these practices may be relatively recent invented traditions, rather than residues of the past. Dellenborg’s (2004) ethnographic study of circumcision amongst the Jola of Senegal, for example, shows that female genital modification has made a relatively recent appearance, corresponding with the spread of Islam. It is seen as part of being ‘modern’, associated with and defended by women as part of what it means to be a ‘real woman’. Dellenborg’s study raises a recurrent theme in studies of body transformations. She reminds us of the social significance for women of conformity with ideals of the ‘proper’ or ‘real’ woman, arguing that in this particular cultural context clitoridectomy gives women self-esteem, cultural recognition and scope for the exercise of agency. She also notes the thousands of clitoral reductions carried out on babies born with ambiguous genitalia in countries where FGM is not only illegal but also a topic of substantial public censure, such as the United States.5 Reis’ (2005) work on the history of intersex in the cultural context of the United States shows the role of the medical profession in normalizing involuntary bodily transformations. Cheryl Chase, founder of the Intersex Society of North America (www.isna.org), notes that “Genital mutilation” is a phrase that’s easy for us to apply to someone who belongs to a Third World culture, but any mutilating practice that’s delivered by licensed medical practitioners in our world has an aura of scientific credibility.6

These genital modifications imply entirely different dynamics of power, different narratives of sexuality and of idealized masculinity and femininity, and quite different implications for women, men’s and intersex people’s experiences of sex. But from an

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anthropological perspective, the contrast between these forms of intervention in the body force us to look beyond ethnographic accounts of rituals and rites of passage and to think more comparatively about the politics of genital modification. Some variants of female circumcision can indeed be regarded as a brutal violation of women’s bodies. But the category ‘FGM’ spans a spectrum.7 It also includes practices that are performed to enhance women’s pleasure: such as the elongation of the labia minora, which is widely practised in southern Africa (Arnfred, 2004). In Britain, FGM is illegal. Yet in recent years there has been a dramatic rise in popularity of labiaplasty, the cutting of the inner labia. This has been attributed to the ‘pornification’ of British culture. The procedure is now even available on the NHS.8 Private cosmetic surgery clinics in Britain offer ‘female genital surgery’ loans to fund ‘designer vaginas’ without any censure from the Department of Health (2010). Is this also ‘FGM’? This leads to the question: Is any modification to the genitalia ‘mutilation’? And if so, how are we to think about the routine removal of the foreskins of baby boys in the name of hygiene, culture or religion (Silverman 2004)? Male ‘bodily integrity’ activists would argue that this procedure, which an estimated 60% of American men undergo as babies, is indeed mutilation and that the loss of thousands of erogenous nerve endings, and the complications that can result, ought to make it a public health concern.9 What might this imply for the promotion of male circumcision in Africa by international development agencies as an HIV prevention strategy? This raises further questions about the politics of intervention, brought into sharp relief by one especially interesting case. In the name of restoring the capacity for pleasure to African women who had undergone FGM, an organization called Clitoraid launched an ‘Adopt an African Clitoris’ campaign. Construction of a ‘Pleasure Hospital’ in Burkina Faso was begun, where operations

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would be performed to ‘restore’ the circumcised clitorises of African women using techniques developed by a French surgeon.10 The project was halted due to the controversy it generated. The story was soon taken up in the blogosphere, leaving a fascinating trail of commentaries, one of the most incisive being Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg’s piece, ‘No, you can’t have my clitoris’.11 There are a number of issues here that are of anthropological interest. The Clitoraid campaign played into the Western preoccupation with the clitoris as the site of female pleasure.12 It also made use of the long-standing trope of the heroic role of the West in rescuing abused African women, a narrative that has secured funding and public support for the interventions of myriad other external agents of ‘development’. Also of anthropological interest is the promise of empowerment that accompanies narratives of restoring ‘bodily integrity’ – a term that is used uniquely to refer to the genitalia. Two examples from North America offer interesting insights. The National Organization of Restoring Men (NORM) promotes the benefits of restoration of the foreskin. Their site details a range of techniques, from lead fishing weights and steel balls, to commercial devices with names like ‘Foreballs’ and ‘Tug Ahoy’ (see Silverman, 2004: 435).13 Personal testimonies attest to the new-found pleasures of ‘bodily integrity’. ‘Revirgination’ also promises empowerment. Surgical hymen reconstruction appears to have originated in the Middle East where women seek to ‘regain’ their virginity amidst cultural pressures that prohibit or forbid premarital sexual activity. For American women, hymen reconstruction is marketed by plastic surgery clinics as a ‘special gift’ to ‘add sparkle’ to tired marriages.14

TRANSITS AND TRANSITIONS Surgery and hormones offer the possibility of making more lasting changes to the body that permit people to transit genders and

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transition from one sex to another. They also offer the means to reinforce the ‘principle of dimorphism’. Silicon bra inserts and wonderbras offer women surgery-free cleavage, whereas modern-day corsetry – such as Spanx ‘slimware’ − constrains flabby stomachs and lifts and shapes sagging derrieres. Male-bodied people can purchase an array of prosthetics to enhance the length or girth of their penis. A ‘package booster’ lends additional shape and emphasis to masculinize crotch and butt; and a whole range of ‘booty enhancers’ are available to lift and add curves to rear ends. The gender binary is further reinforced by the marketing of surgical procedures that can enable women and men to alter their bodies to conform more closely to cultural ideals of femininity and masculinity. Amongst the most common plastic surgery procedures in the United Kingdom are breast augmentation for women and breast reduction for men. London billboards advertise exercise as a way of removing ‘man boobs’, reflecting a growing concern amongst men about their ‘moobs’: the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reported a 28% increase in ‘moob jobs’ in 2010.15 The promise of perfect breasts calls out to women from densely packed adverts in women’s magazines. Radical feminist analysis might lead us towards regarding those who consume or endorse modifications that inscribe gendered meaning onto bodies as being hopelessly beguiled by hegemonic femininity or masculinity. And women who seek breast augmentation, hymen repair or labiaplasty might be regarded as subjecting themselves to the knives of patriarchy (Morgan, 1991), their bodies becoming sites for disciplining power effects of discourse (cf. Foucault, 1976). Arguably, however, things are more complex than this. For instance, Gagné and McGaughey’s (2002) examination of women’s motivations for undergoing elective breast surgery found that far from being victims, women experienced empowerment from making changes to their body. Conformity with ideals

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need not mean the erasure of agency and self-expression. Surgery, silicone and hormones provide the means for more radical body modifications. Prevailing cultural norms discipline bodies into two sexes, shored up by science that obscures the existence of anatomical variation (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and maintained by a medical establishment that is largely intolerant of ambiguity. Normative genders are literally carved out of and implanted in bodies as part of ‘normalization’ processes.16 Institutionalized heteronormativity and sexism inform interventions to ‘correct’ anomalies.17 Intersex people are subjected to doctors’ ideas about what is important, with little consideration of their own desires: in ‘The Missing Vagina Monologue’, for example, Esther Morris (2001) tells of how doctors’ preoccupations with creating a vagina suitable for penetrative heterosex occluded any concern with her fertility. In many cultures, and especially in the West, dimorphism is so deeply embedded in everyday life that any departures from normative gender expressions can be met with mockery, discrimination and violence. A range of garments and gadgets are available to those in transition or seeking alternative forms of gender expression. Female to male transgenders (FTM) and transmen can, for example, purchase flaccid and erect penissubstitutes, and ‘stand-to-pee packers’ to navigate any awkward moments in male public toilets. Garments are available to manage unwanted physical signs of femaleness. In a moving account, the North American blogger ‘Butchelor’ writes of the agonies ze endures in the management of hir gender identity:18 With the start of each new day also begins a day of ongoing pain and discomfort … . I hate binding. Abso-freakin-lutely HATE it … but I hate my chest even more. Day-in and day-out I’m faced with the fact that binding is an essential part of my existence. And everyday it pisses me off more and more that this is something that I just have to deal with … . The very item that helps me cope with

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those never-ending waves of body dysphoria is also the one constant reminder that I don’t look the way I should.19

Critiques of the notion of ‘gender dysphoria’ highlight the internalization of a normative gender binary. Anthropologists have contributed to the documentation of a range of non-normative gender expressions, from the work of colonial anthropologists describing female-bodied people in a number of African societies who were perceived to ‘act like men’ (Cromwell, 1999) to studies of the North American berdache (Roscoe, 1993). Those who would regard their sex and gender as being neither male nor female, but rather as hijra, travesti, kathoey and fa’afafine, have attracted anthropological attention for the ways in which their gender expression both confounds and confirms cultural constructions of gender and sexuality.20 Just as anthropologists have documented alternative gender identities in other cultures, there is a role here for anthropological research in contexts where the cultural inscription of the gender binary is so dominant as to obscure other forms of gender identification. There is in this work a powerful connectivity between research and political praxis. One such study is David Valentine’s (2007) ethnography of the evolution of the category ‘transgender’ in the United States. ‘Transgender’, Valentine shows, has provided an uneasy umbrella category for these and other forms of gender variance, uncomfortably accommodating transsexuals who wish to make a permanent transition from one sex to another and transqueer activists critical of the naturalization of the gender binary that is reinforced by the medicalization of transsexuality. In a study of transgender clients in a Dutch clinic, Benjamin Davis (2007) cites Patrick (formerly Pat) Califia’s observation of the convergence between transgender activists’ questioning of the binary gender system and a rise in people identifying with neither, either or other genders, who ‘insist on their right to live without or outside of the gender

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categories that our society has attempted to make so compulsory’ (Califia, 1997: 245). Davis highlights the extent to which research has neglected those who do not wish to transition, and who prefer to live between genders. Transgender activist Zachary Nataf argues that, for some trans people, transitioning is about being ‘more fully and truly myself’. This, he goes on, involves ‘suspending the symbolic hold society’s rules had over my body in order to achieve it. The rigidity of the rules is what is not natural’ (my emphasis).21 These ‘rules’ prescribe what trans people are supposed to want. Research shows, however, that transgendered people who are born without vaginas do not necessarily share the surgeon’s or psychiatrist’s view that vaginoplasty is needed if they are to become a ‘real woman’ (Aizura, 2010), and Cromwell talks of transmen who refer to phalloplasties as ‘frankendicks’ (1999: 125). The title of Mattilda’s (a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore) collection Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Bernstein Sycamore, 2006) encapsulates the transqueer critique of the notion of ‘passing’ as a man or a woman. Jason Cromwell cites transgender activist and writer Richi Wilchins, ‘it’s not so much that there have always been transgendered people; it’s that there have always been cultures which imposed regimes of gender’ (1997: 67). These regimes of gender are imposed not only through surgical intervention, prosthetics, make-up, dress and exercise, but they are also pursued through pharmaceuticals that modify the body from within, and through the disciplining effects of medico-psychological interventions. Hormones are prescribed and taken not only to effect ‘sex reassignment’ but also to manage a women’s experiences of pre-menstrual and menopausal hormone fluctuations, transforming the women in those bodies by ironing flat the hormonal peaks and troughs that can stimulate creativity and dissent (Vines, 1994). Pharmaceuticals and herbal medicines are marketed as a means to boost sexual vitality,

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playing into representations of idealized masculinity and femininity. From herbal vaginal drying agents to the use of Viagra, medicines produce gendered sexual expressions that fall into line with cultural expectations. Jennifer Fishman (2001), for example, looks at how bodies are refashioned through the use of Viagra, concluding that, discursively, Viagra serves to shore up dominant notions of masculinity and male sexuality, but the heterogeneity of its consumers opens up the possibility of new alternatives.

ENGAGING ANTHROPOLOGY Many of the issues touched on in this chapter are areas of substantial contestation. Thinking anthropologically about the plasticity of the gendered body (Strathern, 1988) and the politics of body transformation raises ethical, legal, moral and political concerns that provide potent challenges to the discipline, as well as opening up new areas for research. Traditionally, anthropologists have been squeamish about directly contesting injustice and inequality. The engaged anthropologist – especially the anthropologist who uncompromisingly takes sides and declares certain practices morally wrong – is typically regarded with suspicion by the mainstream discipline. Indeed, for many years anthropological ethics favoured non-intervention. When it comes to the politics of body, however, there is much at stake. Silverman (2004) suggests that circumcision and FGM are issues that can help anthropology ‘to redefine its sense of moral purpose’ (2004: 420). This may be as much through (re)directing the anthropological gaze to mainstream Western cultural practices as through anthropological research with non-Western Others. Anthropologists have demonstrated the lack of fit between Western categories and those that are culturally salient in other contexts, work that has helped illuminate the distorting effects of development practices involving the transposition of categories from one context to another (Khanna, 2011).

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Together with historians, anthropologists have shown that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ about the way in which scientists have represented the body and its processes, and that indeed science is a site for the production of gendered meaning and the exercise of discursive power (Martin, 1989, 1991; Laqueur, 1990). Sexual minorities have been able to make use of academic work that contests the homophobic narrative that same-sex desire is a Western disease (Epprecht, 2005). Trans activists have drawn on historical and anthropological work that documents the existence of non-normative forms of gender expression (Cromwell, 1999). Anthropological research has been used by activists to contest homophobic narratives of sexuality, and to challenge the exclusion and subordination of women for reasons of ‘biology’. As the anthropologist’s ‘field’ has come to be radically redefined in the Internet age, new possibilities unfold for research and for activism on issues of body politics, opening up new methodological possibilities. Online ‘fields’ invite a way of doing anthropology that may be both less intrusive. Where the participant-observer makes themselves visible and shares their thoughts and reflections as part of the research process, this holds the promise of making anthropological research more congruent with the ethics of mainstream social science than the old days of furtive fieldwork and solitary nights writing up field notes that were generally never shared with the anthropologist’s often unwitting ‘informants’. Such approaches also offer ways of engaging the objects of anthropological research as active subjects in the production of anthropological knowledge. Dispelling the old prejudice that ‘fields’ need to be found far from home, and that ‘native anthropologists’ are less able to document their own cultures, there is an important role in this work for those whose experiences of body modification lend them unique insights into and empathy with the experiences of others. There are lessons from anthropological research and activism in the fields of body

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politics and body transformation for the discipline more broadly. These chime with a growing recognition of the contributions that anthropology can make to social action, and the emergence of a new ethic of engagement that is coming to shape the discipline in exciting and productive ways. It is here that I believe the most stimulating future directions lie, in the opportunities for contesting constraining and oppressive normativities that anthropology’s engagement with activism opens up. There is much work to be done.

NOTES 1 There is a rich and fascinating literature on body enhancement technologies that extends well beyond the scope of this chapter. For a valuable review of this literature, see Hogle (2005). 2 http://news.bmezine.com/2011/05/12/a-dif ferent-kind-of-corset/ [accessed May 12, 2011]. 3 http://www.orlan.net/biography/ [accessed May 18, 2011]. 4 For further information on what exactly is involved in these practices, see http://www.who.int/ reproductivehealth/topics/fgm/overview/en/index. html [accessed May 12, 2011]. See also, LightfootKlein (1989). 5 For an interesting exploration of the US debate about female genital modification, see James and Robertson’s (2005) collection Genital Cutting and Global Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics. 6 Cited by Zachary Nataf in ‘Transgender’, New Internationalist, Issue 300, 1998, http://www.newint. org/features/1998/04/05/trans/ [accessed May 11, 2011]. 7 An excellent collection of essays edited by Hernlund and Shell-Duncan (2007) explores the complexities and contradictions of the debate on FGM. 8 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/ nov/20/cosmetic-vulva-surgery [accessed May 17, 2011]. 9 http://www.fathermag.com/health/circ/gmas/ [accessed March 21, 2011]. See also, Bailey et al. (2008), in response to the advocacy of male circumcision as a way of stemming the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. 10 http://travellingspouse.blogspot.com/2007/ 04/dr-pierre-folds.html [accessed May 17, 2011]. 11 http://savingafrica.wordpress. com/2010/03/29/adopt-an-african-womans-clitoris/ and http://savingafrica.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/

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no-you-cant-have-my-clitoris/ [accessed March 12, 2011]. 12 See Hernlund and Shell-Duncan (2007) for several critiques of the exclusion of other forms of pleasure that follows from the focus on the clitoris. 13 A support group for men seeking to restore their foreskins, NORM offers further information: http://www.norm.org/devices.html [accessed May 11, 2011]. 14 http://anthropologist.livejournal.com/797878. html [accessed May 17, 2011]. 15 Not all public discourse on men’s breasts is negative − ‘moobs of the month’ competitions are run on several sites, and the blog ‘Gusset Muncher’ proclaims that ‘if you’ve spotted a delicious pair of moobs, don’t keep them to yourself. Share them dammit’. http://www.thegussetmuncher.webeden. co.uk/#/moobs-of-the-month/4539970584 [accessed May 11, 2011]. 16 There is a huge literature on intersex, some of the most interesting produced by historians (see, for example, Elizabeth Reis’ 2005 book Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex). See the intersex activist organization ISNA’s extensive online bibliography at http://www.isna.org/bibliographies/author [accessed March 10, 2011]. 17 The International Coalition for Bodily Integrity (www.icgi.org) argues that intact bodies are a basic human right. Intersex associations in the United States (www.isna.org) and the United Kingdom (www.ukia.org.uk) advocate for an end to harmful genital surgeries that deny intersex people the right to be whoever they wish to be. 18 I use here the gender-neutral ‘ze’ and ‘hir’. 19 http://thebutchelor.com/2010/01/29/10among-many-reasons-that-chest-binding-sucks-balls/ [accessed May 17, 2011]. 20 Each of these categories has its own story: a wealth of anthropological research, dating back decades, documents the existence of a ‘third gender’ or ‘third sex’ in many contexts. See the excellent collection Third Sex, Third Gender (Herdt, 1993); see also Jackson and Sullivan (1999) on Thai kathoey, Schmidt (2001) on Samoan fa’afafine, Kulick (1998) on Brazilian travestis, Nanda (1993) on Indian hijra and Khanna (2011) on gender ambiguities and gendered sexualities amongst Indian ‘MSM’. 21 Zachary Nataf in ‘Transgender’, New Internationalist, Issue 300, 1998, http://www.newint. org/features/1998/04/05/trans/ [accessed May 11, 2011].

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. and Stacey, J. (2001) Thinking Through the Skin. New York: Routledge.

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Aizura, A. (2010) ‘Feminine transformations: gender reassignment surgical tourism in Thailand’, Medical Anthropology, 29(4):1–20. Arnfred, S. (2004) ‘Rethinking sexualities in Africa: introduction’, in S. Arnfred (ed.), Rethinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Auslander, M. (1993) ‘“Open the wombs!” The symbolic politics of modern Ngoni witchfinding’, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and Its Malcontents. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Bailey, R.C., Egesah, O. and Rosenberg, S. (2008) ‘Male circumcision for HIV prevention: a prospective study of complications in clinical and traditional settings in Bungoma, Kenya’. Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, 86(9): 657−736. Bernstein Sycamore, M. (2006) Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. Boddy, J. (1989) Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bornstein, K. (1994) Gender Outlaw: On Women, Men and the Rest of Us. London: Routledge. Brown, J.K. (1963) ‘A cross-cultural study of female initiation rites’, American Anthropologist, 65: 837–853. Caldwell, Kia Lilly (2003) ‘“Look at her hair’: the body politics of Black womanhood in Brazil,’ Transforming Anthropology, 11(2) 18−29. Califia, P. (1997) Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. Berkeley: Cleis Press Cromwell, J. (1999) Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders and Sexualities. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Davis, B. (2007) ‘Effects of standardization on cultural identity and community involvement: transgender clients at the Vrije Universiteit Gender Clinic’, ISP Collection. Paper 225.http://digitalcollections.sit. edu/isp_collection/225 Dellenborg, L. (2004) ‘A reflection on the cultural meanings of female circumcision. Experiences from fieldwork in Casamance, Southern Senegal’, in Signe Arnfred (ed.), Rethinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge. Epprecht, M. (2006) ‘“Bisexuality” and the politics of normal in African anthropology’, Anthropologica, 48(2): 188−201. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000) Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality, New York: Basic Books.

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Fishman, J. (2001) ‘Potency in all the right places: Viagra as a technology of the gendered body’, Body and Society, 7(4): 13−35. Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin. Gagné, P. and McGaughey, D. (2002) ‘Designing women: cultural hegemony and the exercise of power among women who have undergone elective mammoplasty’, Gender and Society, 16(6): 814−838. Gell, A. (1993) Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon. Gengenbach, H. (2003) ‘Boundaries of beauty: tattooed secrets of women’s history in Magude District, Southern Mozambique’, Journal of Women’s History, 14(4): 106−141. Groneman, C. (1994) ‘Nymphomania: the historical construction of female sexuality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19(2): 337−367. Hebdige, D. (1999) ‘The function of subculture’, in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 441−450. Herdt, G. (1993) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books. Hernlund, Y. and Shell-Duncan, B. (eds) (2007) Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hogle, L. (2005) ‘Enhancement technologies and the body’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 34: 695−716. Jackson, P. and Sullivan, G. (1999) Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand. New York: Haworth Press. James, S. and Robertson, C. (2005) Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kaw, E. (1993) ‘Medicalisation of racial features: Asian American women and cosmetic surgery’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 7: 74−89. Khanna, A. (2011) ‘Meyeli Chhele becomes MSM: transformation of idioms of sexualness into epidemiological forms in India’, in A. Cornwall, J. Edström and A. Greig (eds), Men and Development: Politicising Masculinity. London: Zed Books. Kulick, D. (1998) Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Laqueur, T. (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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La Fontaine, J.S. (1986) Initiation: Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge Across the World. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leach, E. (1958) ‘Magical hair’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (2): 147–64. Lightfoot-Klein, H. (1989) Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. New York: Haworth Press. Martin, E. (1989) ‘Cultural construction of gendered bodies: biology and metaphors of production and destruction’, Ethnos, 54: 143−160. Martin, E. (1991) ‘The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male−female roles’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(3): 485−501. Mauss, M. (1973) ‘Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society, 2(1): 70–88. Miller, D. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in S. Kuklick and D. Miller (eds), Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Morgan. K.P. (1991) ‘Women and the knife: cosmetic surgery and the colonisation of women’s bodies’, Hypatia, 6: 25−53. Morris, E. (2001) ‘The missing vagina monologue’, Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, 26(7). Nanda, S. (1993) ‘Hijras: an alternative sex and gender role in India’, in G. Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender. New York: Zone Books. Nataf, Zachary (1998) ‘Transgender’, New Internationalist, Issue 300 http://www.newint.org/ features/1998/04/05/trans/ Reis, E. (2005) Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roscoe, W. (1993) ‘How to become a berdache: towards a unified analysis of gender diversity’, in G. Herdt (ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender. New York: Zone Books. Schildkraut, E. (2004) ‘Inscribing the body’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 319–344. Schmidt, J. (2001) ‘Redefining Fa’afafine: Western discourses and the construction of transgenderism in Samoa’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 6, August. At: http:// intersections.anu.edu.au/issue6/schmidt.html#t55 [accessed 12 February 2011]. Shilling, C. (2003) The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Silverman, E. (2004) ‘Anthropology and circumcision’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 419−445. Strathern, M. (1979) ‘The self in self-decoration’, Oceania, 49(4): 241−257. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Summers, L. (2001) Bound to Please: A Short History of the Victorian Corset. Oxford: Berg. Thompson, Julia (1998) ‘Cuts and culture in Kathmandu’, in A. Hiltebeitel and B. Miller (eds), Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian societies. New York: SUNY Press. Whitehead, N. and Sigal, P. (eds) (2004) Ethnopornography – Sexuality and Anthropological Knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valentine, D. (2007) Imagining Transgender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960 [1909]) Rites of Passage. London: Routledge.

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Vines, G. (1994) Raging Hormones: Do They Rule Our Lives? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Walley, C. (1997) ‘Searching for “voices”: feminism, anthropology and the global debate over female genital operations’, Cultural Anthropology, 12(3): 405−438. Wilchins, R. (1997) Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion & the End of Gender. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books. Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. London: Vintage.

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SECTION 4.4

New Technologies and Materialities

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4.4.1 New Materials and New Technologies: Science, Design and the Challenge to Anthropology Susanne Küchler

I can put my meaning together with letters. Suppose an A connected so closely with a B that all sorts of means, even violence, have been made use of to separate them, without effect. Then suppose a C in exactly the same position with respect to D. Bring the two pairs into contact; A will fling himself on D, C on B, without its being possible to say which had first left its first connection, or made the first move toward the second. (Goethe 1809: Elective Affinities)

Whatever we do, we come into contact with materials. We know materials and recognize their potential through the sensorial nature of our encounter, tempered by the material’s tactility, luminosity, sound and scent. The phenomenal framing of material knowledge has long informed our approach to products of culture. Since the rise of chemical science more than two-hundred years ago, materials have also been known as being good to think with. In 1809, Goethe’s novel about the analogy between chemical and human relationships, Elective Affinities, captured a cultural moment when chemistry increasingly occupied the minds and leisure time of the

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European public (Adler 1990; Kim 2003). Chemical substances were said to unite ‘like friends and acquaintances’ or stay as ‘strangers side by side’ depending on their different reactions to one another. A whole array of moral lessons could be drawn from the behaviour of chemical substances and their human analogues, making chemistry ‘an authentic discipline’ with prestige and public visibility long before the onset of the Chemical Revolution, nearly a century earlier than modern physics. The question raised in this essay is whether two-hundred years later we have reached a point when Goethe’s reflections on the analogical potential of materials have ceased to resonate. Where chemistry once provided us with a sense of a logic of relations that we could grasp with intellectual expectations backed by experience, the loves and lives of chemically engineered materials have reached such a complexity today that a new phenomenon has been created – that of not knowing. ‘Not knowing’ extends from the world of the every

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day, in which we handle and come into contact with a myriad of materials whose identity, function and behaviour appear no longer restricted to their phenomenal properties, to the world of design, where the selection of materials has become a distinct source of anxiety. ‘Not knowing’ is effected, on the one hand, by a reduction of the scale of materiality to the nanometre, and, on the other, by material interfaces whose ambient and agentive qualities highlight the distinction between persons and things by invalidating the analogy of material agency with human action. In this world of ‘technological materiality’ (Küchler 2008), empathy and intuition (once the hallmark of counterrational methodologies such as psychoanalysis and ethnography) are emerging as tools vital to the designing and inhabiting of a world made to measure. Largely overlooked and unexamined, yet one of the defining phenomena of our time, not knowing has at once been created by and masked the creation of materials in the prehermeneutic space of laboratory experimentation from which materials emerge as ‘noumenal’: namely, independent of mind and as a ‘thing-in-itself’. Nanotechnology and information technology are now combining with biology and the life sciences – whether in terms of design (biomimetics) or end product (bionics) – to create new materials with the capacity for pervasive effects. Readily equipped with technical function and cutting across all known classifications of nature and culture, materials by design take the vision of effect to a level described long ago by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) as the operative quality of the mythical mind, which knows things in their concrescence and manifests a logic that we can intuit and imitate through careful observation, yet cannot control (cf. Bensaude-Vincent 2004; Latour 1992; Silberglitt 2001). In its raw outline, the challenge posed by the convergence of science and design is already well known. Bruno Latour (1996) has captured for us the vanishing of the relevance of existing systems of classification in

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which ‘things’ are radically other to ‘persons’, inventing a vocabulary that makes manifest the agency of non-humans and the recalcitrant materiality of humans – tantalizingly capturing a world in which persons are no longer substituted for by things (Latour 1993). He speaks of a ‘parliament of things’ (Latour and Rossler 2001) to draw attention to the ways in which new material technologies form assemblages that interrupt, revise or restructure life. Yet, while anthropology has come to appreciate the newly found appeal of the ‘agency’ of things (Gell 1998), new materials and new technologies have rapidly become the new epistemic object par excellence (Bensaude-Vincent 2007; Daston 2004). Anthropology is in danger of being left behind, declaring itself an increasingly irrelevant bystander of developments it is no longer capable of understanding if it insists on the absolute newness of such developments. Now that material agency no longer mirrors human action, anthropology has to ask whether it has misrecognized the nature of material agency in the conduct of its ethnography, or whether it is business as usual for ethnography ‘elsewhere’, reasserting nonpermeable boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the face of global markets (Morphy 2009). Informing the debate will be novel concepts and methodologies, whose implication for the discipline we are only beginning to grasp.

THE QUESTION OF EMPATHY IN A WORLD MADE TO MEASURE The science writer Phillip Ball (1999) has aptly referred to new materials as being ‘made to measure’ (cf. Klein and Lefèvre 2007). What this measure is, and how it could synergistically affect the take-up of materials in society is far less clear. Writing from a history of science perspective, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2007; Bensaude-Vincent and Newmann 2007) leads the current discussion on the growing polarity between the natural and the artificial,

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which points to the end of the system of classification on which we have relied since its creation in the sixteenth century by Dutch physician Samuel Quickelberg for the then burgeoning collections of naturalia in curiosity cabinets (Cook 2007: 27). These new materials are both composites that cannot easily be disentangled, either conceptually or physically (thus impeding such deconstructive or reconstructive actions as copying and recycling), as well as, at least potentially, aggregates in their systemic capacity for propagation and replication – presenting those that need to select materials with real problems. Knowing materials to the extent that one can select from a range of several thousand that fulfil more or less the same function has become a specialist domain for the material consultant. Aiding navigation through this minefield is a burgeoning literature on the huge range of engineered materials from which designers and manufacturers can choose in fabricating any artefact. There are also handbooks on new materials directed at a specialist audience in design and industry. Such handbooks furnish the designer with an image of a material and its functional characteristics, such as luminosity or tensile strength, but leave out any discussion of experience of use. Ashby and Johnson (2002) have recently began to fill this gap by writing a phenomenologically-oriented guide to new materials based on modelling the range of effects of materials, so that architects and designers can take them into consideration when creating relational material structures that consist of more than one material. Using grid systems, they map out acoustic, olfactory, tactile and motion-sensitive factors that are inherent in the materials, and arrange these on a spectrum at the centre of which is the egocentric and relative sensorial space of a person. Highly popular, the text reflects a resurgence of interest across the social sciences in the sensorial interface with the material world (Howes 2003). Most new materials take the form of screens or fibrous membranes, a fact which cannot quite be explained by the perceptual

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paradigm implicit in this phenomenological account of new materials. Simulating cloth, membranes (much like skin) form both a boundary and a point of contact between the human and the material world, binding people in social and economic relationships at the same time as they define their difference. In a previous article on this topic, I have outlined two emerging relational models that are expressed in radically different materials and material interfaces (Küchler 2008). The first, driven by electro-engineering, has seized upon the availability of smaller, cheaper and more powerful electronic components and wireless communication to make computing highly portable, immediate and independent of any kind of container. This last capacity is enabled by carbon-coated fibres that allow computing to be embedded into any cloth surface – whether clothing, wallpaper, furniture coverings, architectural structures or, of course, screens. The second mode of innovation is driven by chemistry and materials science, and via mechanical, opto- and electro-engineering has created new materials, so-called composites, capable of responding to light and heat so as to conduct information rapidly across a range of surfaces that interact with each other without the need of external support. The first model of social connectivity through new materials is designed along the lines of familiar notions of network and linear connections, with all the trappings of an egocentred circuit that would need to be dismantled whenever a person inhabiting this information-processing space wished to extract him or her-self, or to dislocate parts of the system. In fact, this model, known as ‘i-wear’ or intelligent clothing, currently has its commercial viability in question, as it is considered unreliable. For the moment, it appears to be the second model of multilayered envelopment that is becoming the preferred option. Chemically engineered, such materials are not new, having first been produced some fifty years ago by NASA for the purpose of space exploration. Cuttingedge developments conceive of ambient

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environments in which surface conductivity connects vast spatial fields, making external energy sources redundant and reconfiguring the way we conceive of modalities of action at the human and non-human level. We are not faced with an abundance of technological solutions, but rather highly standardized models that strive to connect, bringing together and solidifying immaterial streams of energy in a material medium. That such engineered materials do more than reveal (through a kind of retroprojection) social labour and its animation in the lifeless body of the fetishized object is apparent in the stories of kautschuk (the generic term for a variety of elastic polymers found in rubber and plastic) and cellulose. Independently of each other, these materials have shaped the mobility and material versatility characteristic of modern life in ways that we now take for granted (Mossmann and Smith 2008; Rübel and Hackenschmidt 2008). Whether it is such interfacing material structures or standalone materials, reactivity is now the property of choice. Looking through catalogues of new materials one can glimpse the future challenge of theorizing the response to material reactivity in ways that will enable us to explain why some material and technical solutions may be readily taken up, whereas others will disrupt and challenge the way we inhabit the technical in daily life (Strathern 2001). Although they are highly specific in their functional and material properties, most materials appear to compete over a limited set of artefact types. Where materials used to be comprehended in terms of classificatory systems that broadly distinguished the ‘natural’ from the ‘engineered’ and evoked subcategories of recognizable and stable properties, they now tend to explode category distinctions. One such material is aerogel, which is a lightweight advanced material consisting of 96% air, with the remaining 4% comprising a matrix of silicon dioxide (a principal raw material for glass). Another such material, liquid wood is composed of lignin (an oftendiscarded element of cellular wood) mixed

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with natural resins, flax and fibres before being injected into moulds to form precisionmade objects that were conventionally made of plastics. Liquid woods such as Arboform® confront our most treasured assumptions surrounding the behaviour and properties of materials in mass-produced design through their ability to shift shape and solidify like plastics, while being 100% biodegradable. Given the speed of invention and the indeterminacy of association and application, materials libraries created in the wake of the avalanche of new materials have begun to forego any attempt at classification altogether, merely assigning each incoming material a new number. Identifying, tracking and acquiring often extremely localized material inventions is supposed to be made easier by online and offline libraries such as Material Connexion that have seized on the new phenomenon of material diversity to create the lucrative new job descriptions of the ‘materials broker’ and the ‘materials aesthetics advisor’. Their work will require a new set of skills when reactive materials become commonplace. This is because ‘ambience’, the character and atmosphere of a place, will no longer be the result of the form or the material properties of discrete artefacts, their scale, colour or texture, but of inter-artefactual relations that create fields of connectivity, in turn requiring designers to envision potential social relations via relations between things.

MATERIALS IN THE MIND: NOUMENAL TECHNOLOGY The materials we have begun to surround ourselves with are increasingly the products of a new combination of biomimetic chemistry (directed to the artificial creation of life) and nanoscience (Bensaude-Vincente 2004). Shaped by futuristic objectives and purely conventional definitions, the historic emergence of science at the nano scale is the subject of much debate (Baird et al. 2004). Forerunners in the 1980s included the

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well-known fields of protein engineering, supramolecular chemistry, ultrafine particle engineering, surface science, thin film engineering, mesophysics, molecular electronics and scanning probe microscopy, but there was as yet no talk of nanoscience. The term nano is used to designate units at a factor of 10−9, and means ‘dwarf’. Molecular nanotechnology was originally inspired by the ‘eco-technological’ concerns of using minimum amounts of matter and energy, and may have originated from the translation of intuitions developed at the macroscopic scale about the behaviour of molecules to the meso scale (Schummer 2006). While scale appears to be the overriding operative factor of nanoscience, in fact, as Sacha Loeve explains, what matters in its definition is not the scale at which experiments are carried out, but ‘the difference between the statistical approach [of conventional science] and the individual approach to phenomena [in nanoscience]’ (Loeve 2010: 6). Unlike physics at higher scales, which are analysed statistically, taking into account ‘some stochastic “noise” and statistical “fuzziness”’ (ibid.), nanoscience’s ‘monomolecular machines are made up individually through internal quantum behaviours intervening with a single object (a molecule) or a few countable objects (electrons)’ (ibid.). Tracing and mimetically recreating the processes of individuation that define molecular behaviour at the meso scale has become the defining characteristic of nanoscience. The crucial difference made by nanotechnology to biochemistry is that instrumentbased relations to matter are now fashioning an ontology of technological materiality that is impossible to know, believe or imagine. In his reflections on the incredible tininess of nano, Alfred Nordmann (2005) observes that nanotechnology is not concerned with phenomena that can be experienced, but with noumena existing beyond human perception and experience, ‘the things-in-themselves’. Unlike rituals, bureaucratic procedures, social codes or other ‘immaterial technologies that are the subject of knowledge and

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control’, Nordmann argues that ‘the nanodimensions of nanotechnology … fail to become material by failing to become an object of experience at all’ (Nordmann 2005: n12). Noumenal technology that exists beyond the limitations of the phenomenal world is known only through the concretization of abstract processes of individuation at the level of the material (Schummer 2007). Given the at-once abstract and aesthetic nature of matter at the meso scale, it is little wonder that Kantian-inspired philosophy has informed the discourse about nanotechnology (Joachim 2005). The creation of the material as a by-product of understanding and capturing the process of its individuation, now the hallmark of nanoscience, is not restricted, however, to science at the meso scale. This is because, around the same time that scientists discovered the nano scale, electro-engineers rediscovered a process of individuation in production known as rapid prototyping (RP). This was briefly fashionable in the late nineteenth century as part of the technical invention of topographical relief maps and photosculpture. Coupled with rapid manufacturing (RM), rapid prototyping is today setting out a world of objects that are individuated from the start, using computeraided design (CAD) drawing and micro-level design to produce objects that emulate the grown, rather than the made – such as seamless garments or bone structure. Objects made from powdered compounds can be manufactured, fully assembled, anywhere in the world, and the computer software that translates the behaviour of the powder into concrete form is critical to the object’s look and feel (Hopkinson et al. 2005). The essential character of RP technology is an additive mode of fabrication, bonding materials layerby-layer to form objects, a mode quite in contrast to mechanical processes of fabrication (such as milling or turning), which form objects through a repetitive action of removing material to create a shape that can then be further reduced into the stuff of cultural memory.

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The chief impact factor of the concretization of individuation processes at the heart of nanoscience and RP will undoubtedly be the transformation of relations of labour and loyalty made possible by the decentralization of both production and science, which can now take place anywhere with minimum investment in infrastructure. Industrial cities that grew to accommodate labour forces around factories will need to adapt in order to create and sustain communities whose relations of loyalty no longer derive from relations of labour (and possibly no longer from kinship) as mobility increases and forms of work diversify. Because new materials used by RM come in powdered form, they can easily be transported. Seamless digital production makes the fabrication of small components such as screws or wedges, as well as the middlemen who manage their distribution, unnecessary. In their place will be testing centres, material consultancies and new types of work springing up around new types of material and in the wake of increasing technical obsolescence. The contingencies of laboratory life, meanwhile, will require a highly educated workforce, willing to live in close-knit communities that are as mobile and international as they are independent in spirit and funding. Universities, once the centres of education and dependent upon government funding, will become the centres of new forms of manufacturing and pooling stations of labour. Faced with the new reality of noumenal materials, objectification (the epistemic problem par excellence since Hegel) has become inadequate either as a theoretical model or as a window for ethnographic observations, as the observation of the material has moved from the process of consumption to the prior stages of innovation and concretization. What in fact is needed is not a theory and method born out of the nineteenth-century industrial mode of production, but rather one emerging from its near opposite – small-scale, yet richly networked sites of production – and a method sensitive to the vocabulary and attitude of the science of the concrete, long ago

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invoked by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) as the trademark of anthropology. The management of new materials at the macro or the meso scale will undoubtedly demand a similar kind of knowledge to that required for sago palms: to know when a sago palm is ready for harvesting you need to observe closely and have a very concrete apprehension of the logic underlying the growth patterns unique to each palm. We may realize that objectification and the logic of substitution on which the organization of relations of labour have been based since the Industrial Revolution may require revision, but where we turn to for an alternative model of material culture and of sociality is less clear. There have been few ethnographers who have confronted the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, but it is with reference to these writings that anthropologists (Adams 1982; Hogden 1952) have made some steps in the right direction. Influenced by the work of the social historian Arthur Raistrick (1953) on the role of Quakers in science and industry in seventeenth-century Britain, the American anthropologist Anthony Wallace produced an outstanding example of historical ethnography with his study of Rockdale (1972). Rockdale captures the growth of an American village in the industrial revolution, setting out for us the transformation of attitudes to, and practices of, sociality in the reverse, as it were. Probing into the archives for detail of a kind that took nine years to write up, Wallace reconstructs a world of rapid change conquered by an international fraternity of mechanics whose thinking about the ‘lives and loves’ of machinery became the central axis not just of innovation but also of a new way of life, a new understanding of work and a new political economy. Wallace’s later work on innovation and on mind (1982, 2004) examines the implications of his early ethnography, by pointing up the transformation of the logic underlying relations of labour and loyalty: from a temporally oriented sequential logic, informing the relational nature of actions upon which fraternities were formed, to a

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logic of substitution, which supported the moral order of cotton mills with an ethical system for workers. Much neglected, Wallace’s study is in fact hugely provocative, and comparison with its findings sheds considerable light on the unfolding relations around material technologies in the nanoworld. For instance, Mikkael Johannson’s recent study (2008) of nanoscientists and their cosmology in a Swedish research laboratory describes the translocal nature of the identity of nanoscientists, and the way they belong to a global and transient community through an act of choice. For those who routinely work with etchings, new coatings and carbon nanotubes, and who daily experience the hardship of making these things work, a set of routinized actions creates the basis for an intersubjectively shared empathy with the material world at the level of the micrometer in ways that are not dissimilar to the shared concern with machines that set the precedent for the early industrialist fraternities created by machinists. Like those early machinists, a nanoscientist’s sense of belonging to a community is tied to an appreciation of the sequential nature of routinized action (such as working towards a competitive research calendar, attending conferences and undertaking visits) that punctuates individual biographies and the research calendars of the laboratory. Nanoscience also demands high-level personalized skills, such as a fine intuitive sense for the correct sequential conduct and timing of actions, which is crucial for the success of experiments (failure to time correctly means that the researcher has to begin the process again). Enskilment in nanoscience requires a long period of trial and error, during which an intuitive feeling about correct timing is developed. The early Industrial Revolution machinist and the contemporary nanoscientist share the ability to foreground an empathy with the temporal nature of sequentially conceived actions on the material world, of which the nanotubes are abstract and strictly noumenal

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manifestations. Understanding the difference between the commonsense understanding of the world as it appears to us and the world at nanometre level enables the scientist to predict effects such as the loss of colour or the change of position of atoms, and constitutes a shared intersubjective knowledge and emotional attachment to the nanoworld. Actions of scaling down and scaling up in a range of material translations between macro- and microphysics bind today’s nano researchers to one another in ways that cannot adequately be described with the notion of a network. Networks have nodal points at which information of material or immaterial kind is shored up, exchanged and redistributed; they also rely on external conditions and/or public knowledge to facilitate such points of distribution, and are generally independent of the emotional attachment of participants to one another and to the materials they transact. The global reach of the family of nanoscientists, on the other hand, is held together in spite of the inherent competition in experimentation and production by what Vittorio Gallese (2001) called ‘the shared manifold of inter-subjectivity’. This consists of an empathy with the temporal nature of actions upon the material world. Spatial metaphors and models that we have used for capturing the relational nature of such action and the spatial maps that we feel inclined to draw showing the connections between the various laboratories have become irrelevant, as they fail to capture the time maps that nanoscientists themselves use to strategically move within their community. What we are witnessing in the formation of decentred communities, such as those that crystallize in the vicinity of the nanoworld, is that it is not the material itself that stands at the heart of the nano-community, but shared ideas and intellectual expectations about the nature of the relation to the material world in micrometre, relations which consists of sets of temporally conceived sequential actions. While the materials at the nanometre level are, by definition, not knowable, its effects are, and it is via the concrete calculation of

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such effects that intellectual expectations can be extended to materials and social relations alike.

CONCLUSION This essay has taken a grand sweep across new materials and new technologies, sketching the difference they make to both the expression of sociality and to the way we model its emergence. Having started out by drawing up the challenges invoked by the role of ‘not knowing’ in encounters with a material world made by design, the essay continued to trace the epistemic changes that are brought about by the conception of the material as independent of experience. Anxiety provoked by the loss of systems of classifications that enabled us to know and to control the material world and hold its effects at bay was shown to be met by the rapid emergence of new institutions of control and a new regime of knowledge which comprehends the material as the concrete articulation of processes of individuation apprehended at the noumenal, pre-hermeneutic level, rather than at the phenomenal one. A not-so-new logic was argued to emerge in the vicinity of new materials and new technologies, one that invokes the temporal exigency of sequence at work in the making and the observation of the concrete at a scale whose subperceptual level may be the really significant difference in the long term. By recovering its composure and finding signposts in a rather unstable future, where things are never quite what they seem, anthropology can make a substantial contribution through a recapturing of the sense of large questions and the relevance of small places.

REFERENCES Adams, R. 1982. Paradoxical Harvest: Energy and Explanation in British History 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Adler, J. 1990. ‘Goethe’s Use of Chemical Theory in his Elective Affinities’. In A. Cunningham and N. Jardin (eds), Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashby, M. and K. Johnson 2002. Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Baird, D., A. Nordman and J. Schummer (eds) 2004. Discovering the Nanoscale. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Ball, P. 1999. Made to Measure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bensaude-Vincent, B. 2004. Le libérer de la matière? Fantasmes autour de la nouvelles technologies. Inra. Bensaude-Vincent, B. 2007. ‘The New Identity of Chemistry as Biomimetic and Nanoscience’. In The Evolving Identity of Chemistry. Working Party on the History of Chemistry. European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences. Belgium: Leuven, pp. 53–64. Bensaude-Vincent, B. and M. Newmann (eds) 2007. The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Cook, H. 2007. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Daston, L. (ed.) 2004. Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books. Gallese, V. 2001. ‘The Shared Manifold Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5−7): 33−50. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goethe, J. von 2008 [1809]. Elective Affinities: A Novel. Translated by David Constantin. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodgen, M. 1952. Change and History: A Study of the Dated Distribution of Technological Innovations in England. Viking Fund Publications No. 18. New York: Wenner Gren Foundation. Hopkinson, N., R. Hague, and P. Dickens (eds) 2005. Rapid-Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, D. (ed.) 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Joachim, C. 2005. ‘To be Nano or not to be Nano’. Nature Materials 4: 107−109. Johannson, M. 2008. Next to Nothing: A Study of Nanoscientists and Their Cosmology at a Swedish Research Laboratory. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg.

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Kim, M. G. 2003. Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Klein, U. and W. Lefèvre 2007. Materials in Eighteenth Century Science: A Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Küchler, S. 2008. ‘Technological Materiality: Beyond the Dualist Paradigm’. Theory, Culture and Society 25(1): 101−120. Latour, B. 1992. ‘Where are the Missing Masses: The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’. In Wiebke Bijker and John Law (eds), Shaping Technology/ Building Society: Studies in Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1996. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. and G. Rossler 2001. Das Parliament der Dinge: Naturpolitik. Frankfurt: Surkamp. Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Loeve, S. 2010. ‘About a Definition of Nano: How to Articulate Nano and Technology’. International Journal of Philosophy and Chemistry 16(1): 3−18. Morphy, H. 2009. ‘Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Art and Agency’. Journal of Material Culture 14(1): 5−23. Mossmann, S. and R. Smith 2008. Fantastic Plastic: Product Design and Consumer Culture. London: Black Dog Publishing.

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Nordmann, A. 2005. ‘Noumenal Technology: Reflections on the Incredible Tininess of Nano’. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 18(2). (Special issue: Nanotech Challenges Part II, edited by D. Baird and J. Schummer. Published with Hyle.) Raistrick, A. 1953. Dynasty of Iron Founders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale. London: Longmans, Green. Rübel, D. and S. Hackenschmidt 2008. Formless Furniture. Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz. Schummer, J. 2006. ‘Gestalt Switching Molecular Image Perception: The Aesthetic Origin of Molecular Nanotechnology in Supramolecular Chemistry’. Foundations of Chemistry 8: 53−72. Schummer, J. (ed.) 2007. The Public Image of Chemistry. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Silberglitt, R. (ed.) 2001. The Global Technological Revolution: Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015. Santa Monica: Rand. Strathern, M. 2001. ‘The Patent and the Malanggan.’ In C. Pinney and N. Thomas (eds), Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, A. 1972. Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Wallace, A. 1982. The Social Context of Innovation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wallace, A. 2004. Modernity and Mind: Essays on Culture Change Volume 2 (edited by Robert S. Grumet). Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press.

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4.4.2 Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Science, Subject and Symbiosis Ron Eglash

There is much to celebrate in the rapid shifts that anthropology has made in relation to technology. As I will discuss below, anthropologists not only have incorporated new technologies as tools of inquiry but also they have inhabited hybrid socio-technical spaces as field sites. But these shifts have also been accompanied by challenges to some of the epistemological and ethical foundations of anthropology itself. How should we regard a discipline which investigates both the laboratory and the taro patch; the inner city and outer space; communities that are virtual and languages that are virtually extinct? Is the illusion that anthropology still constitutes a unified science of humanity giving way to a motley bricolage, bound only by vague generalities? Or is it the claims for technologydriven difference that generate the over-hyped illusion, and anthropology the means by which we will see beyond fads and media buzz to find the forces that will determine earthly survival? This chapter takes neither a nostalgic view, lamenting the loss of the indigenous community as the centre of anthropology, nor an

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opportunistic one, celebrating new vistas and ‘endless frontiers’. Rather, I shall ask how we came to be situated in this apparently diverging field, and what future directions might be useful in sustaining anthropology’s commitments to both vulnerable populations and emerging areas of inquiry.

COMPUTERS AS TOOLS The anthology Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) is considered to be one of the foundational works of postmodernist anthropology. It begins with an invocation of the central role of writing in ethnography, and how, by making the writing of texts invisible, ethnographers have avoided a reflexive investigation of their own constructions. But embedded in this powerful irony of the opening paragraph − ‘somewhere lost in his account of fieldwork among the Mbuti pygmies … Colin Turnbull mentions that he lugged around a typewriter’ − is also a disappearing act. Just as the original cultural accounts failed to reflect on the role of

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literary arts, this seminal text introducing ethnography as literature held little reflection on technology. Few anthropologists of the late 1980s would be able to maintain that elision for long, as online ethnography, agent-based simulation, human−computer interaction (HCI), data mining, social network analysis and other new applications, as well as theoretical innovations such as Haraway’s cyborg metaphor, made it impossible to continue to think of technology as a trivial accoutrement we reluctantly lug around the field site. We can best start with the observation that all knowledge is ethnoknowledge: i.e. all forms of scientific and technological development take place in a specific cultural context, and thus are co-constructed by both social and natural forces. Social studies of science and technology over the last century have been slow to acknowledge this, in large part because of the assumption that science and technology (unlike arts, religion, etc.) are precisely those endeavours which seek universal, objective principles of nature, and therefore must (by definition) transcend cultural influence. Thus, initial work at the intersection of anthropology and emerging technology primarily concerned tools that anthropologists could (non-reflexively) deploy. In one pioneering application, Kunstadter et al. (1963) developed a simulation to examine how demographic variables (birth/death rates, age-specific marriage rates, etc.) might affect the prevalence of certain marriage patterns with respect to kinship (e.g. the prevalence of cross-cousin marriage). The early history of some of these simulations is recounted in an interview with Michael Fischer (Houtman 1995; see also Fischer 1994). Simulation has been a growing aspect of anthropological computing, ranging from population dynamics of the !Kung (Howell and Lehotay 1978) to contemporary agent-based simulations such as ‘Artificial Anasazi’ (Axtell et al. 2002). The online version of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation reports an average of 4,000 hits daily.

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There is, however, an even larger body of work from statistical analysis in anthropology, and although that predates electronic computers, its contemporary ubiquity is coextensive with the rise in computing technology. Griffiths and Hill (1985) note the arrival in 1954 of the Elliott-NRDC 401 at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, where it was applied to agricultural data, as the origins of computational statistics. Until the mid-1960s such programs were customdesigned in the machine language peculiar to each computer. The introduction of FORTRAN and ALGOL allowed the creation of the first general-purpose statistical packages, which were mainly for biomedical use (Bimed, BMD). In 1967, Norman Nie, a 22-year-old PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University, decided to develop the first statistical package for social analysis when he became frustrated with attempts to apply other statistical software to cross-cultural comparisons. Nie’s program, which became SPSS, grew rapidly, and in 2009 the SPSS company announced that it was being acquired by IBM for $US 1.2 billion. Despite predictions to the contrary,1 statistics rapidly became the most important quantitative tool in the anthropological repertoire (Chibnik 1985). In addition to simulation and statistical analysis, anthropologists have also made use of more recent developments such as social network analysis and data mining. Wasserman and Galaskiewicz (1994) note that although much of the founding work in social network analysis was carried out by anthropologists (even to the extent of significant software contributions such as SONET), sociologists quickly overtook much of the field. Also under the rubric of tools would be the use of electronic communications (Dow 1999), content analysis (Anderson and Brent 1990), and presentation of content with electronic media (see Banks [1994] for scepticism on its impact in cultural anthropology, and Clarke [2004] on the impact of electronic media in archaeology representations).

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COMPUTERS AS DOMAIN OF ENQUIRY At the same time as anthropologists were inventing new uses for computers as tools of cultural analysis, computers were reinventing culture. In contrast to the use of computational tools, in which anthropology was a late adopter relative to other disciplines, ethnography of computational domains was recognized as an appropriate method quite early in the public use of the Internet, both within anthropology itself (cf. Gray and Driscoll 1992; Escobar 1994; Correll 1995) as well as related disciplines (Ito 1996; Beynon-Davies 1997; Räsänen and Nyce 2006). Indeed, the greatest change may have been the rise of new hybrid disciplines that drew from both, such as human−computer interaction, as I will discuss shortly. An early controversy for anthropologists concerned the relation between virtual and physical worlds. The ecstatic, utopian pronouncements of the early 1990s (cf. Benedikt 1994) proclaimed virtual worlds in which race, gender and class had disappeared. These gradually gave way to studies which investigated how virtual and physical dimensions of both identities and communities were intertwined (cf. Escobar 1994 on ‘tacking’; Nakamura et al. 2000). While the new category of ‘cyberethnography’ elicited a great deal of academic excitement, redefining traditional fundamental notions such as ‘participant observation’ and ‘fieldwork’, it also held strong practical value for applied anthropology. The economic boom of the late 1990s was fundamentally due to the rise of the Internet, and with it came new job opportunities for anthropologists. The work of Lucy Suchman and her colleagues at Xerox Parc is often cited as having pioneered these new fields of application. However, Suchman (2000) notes that it is important to distinguish between the rise of new fields such as HCI, computer-mediated communication and computer supported cooperative work, and a more general increase in ‘industrial anthropology’, which also occurred in the late 1990s.

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ANTHROPOLOGY OF NANOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY It might be tempting to frame the imbrications of anthropology and computing as merely an idiosyncratic aspect of information technology: anthropology had to adapt because that is what the rest of the world was doing. However, other emerging technologies have become similarly intertwined. Biotechnology, for example, offered exciting new tools in the case of DNA tracing (e.g. Friedlaender 2007), important new opportunities for applied anthropology in forensic and medical fields (Singer and Baer 2007), and new domains of inquiry (Palsson 2007). While nanotechnology has not yet offered new tools, the passion for anthropological inquiry in a science that has just been born is extraordinary: Toumey’s (2007) overview cites a directory of 30 anthropologists in nanotechnology, a special issue of Practicing Anthropology devoted entirely to the subject, and numerous other signs of a thriving subdiscipline (doctoral dissertations, large numbers of panel sessions, etc.; see also Susanne Küchler’s chapter in this volume). It’s hard to imagine this kind of extensive anthropological activity over the birth of computers in the 1950s. Why is anthropology now so eager to live in the belly of the technological beast? Part of the reason is no doubt financial: whether operating under the dubious authority of colonialism, or as partners in coldwar era development, anthropologists were needed in the Third World. The fact that other domains of employment are now beckoning is clearly part of the shift. In the case of nanotechnology, investigation of societal dimensions has been part of national mandates. For example the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), founded in 2001, now regulates programmes among 25 federal agencies, and all of these are required to take into account the ELSI (ethical, legal and societal implications) of research funded by the NNI. But the change is not purely a matter of following the money; these shifts

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in locating ‘fieldwork’ are also part of the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline.

THEORETICAL SHIFTS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY As noted above, social studies of science and technology over the last century began with the assumption that science and technology represent universal, objective principles of nature, and therefore must transcend cultural influence. But along with the shift toward greater entanglement with emerging technologies came greater scepticism towards this divide; perhaps too much scepticism in some cases. As Greenfield (2000) puts it, anthropology ‘took postmodernism on the chin’. While it was useful to expose some dubious claims that ethnography was simply producing apolitical, objective truths, at times this postmodern scepticism could question the basis for empiricism altogether. In the latter case, such work merely flipped to the opposite extreme, providing a relativist mirror image of objectivism, in which reflexive questioning of epistemology outweighed all other aspects of investigation. As a corrective to this extreme, the coconstruction thesis, in which both nature and humans have agency, has been one of the most important frameworks for social studies of science and technology. Foundational publications include Michel Callon’s (1986) famous study of the resistance of scallops to their enrolment by scientists; Bruno Latour’s (1987) laboratory ethnographies and resulting formulation of the ‘parliament of things’; Donna Haraway’s (1997) ‘material-semiotic hybrids’; and Andrew Pickering’s (1995) ‘Mangle’ in which humans, machines and nature perform a ‘dance of agency’. However, it is important to take into consideration the role that non-technological anthropology played in this transition. Consider, for instance, the US White civil rights workers in the late 1960s: in the wake of the Black Power Movement, many were

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surprised to hear that they were no longer wanted in Black communities. They were told that they should focus on organizing political activities in White communities instead (Carson 1995). In a similar vein, the benevolence that First-World anthropologists could once assume they represented in relation to indigenous populations had worn thin by the 1970s.2 Several White American anthropology graduate students I spoke to in the late 1980s told me that they were going to restrict their studies to White Americans because doing otherwise would simply reinscribe the oppressive power relations of the past. Of course that was a small number, living at the postmodern extremes; but even traditional anthropologists could feel the seismic shift that made their ethical and theoretical grounds less secure. And, as social studies of science and technology included anthropology itself as a science (e.g. in the reflexive moves of the Writing Culture anthology referred to earlier in the chapter), these shifting grounds were increasingly difficult to dismiss as someone else’s battle. Thus, the change to anthropological studies of emergent technologies offered not only the positive attractions of new tools, new domains and new areas of application but also a temptation to escape from the negative aspects of anthropology’s past. Both the positive aspects, as well as this escapist (dare I say ‘White flight’?) dimension may have diminished the opportunities for Third World (and ‘Fourth World’ in the sense of indigenous) communities to benefit from anthropological projects. I do not bring this up as a condemnation of anthropology of emerging technologies. Rather, my aim is to point out the ways in which the shift in focus has left a gap: lots of anthropology of indigenous culture is still being done, and lots of new anthropology of emerging technology has been generated, but little exists at the intersection. The remainder of this chapter will examine that small overlap in hopes of encouraging its further development.

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INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES The comparative study of knowledge has been an important part of anthropology since its inception. Whether motivated by colonial powers looking for resources for economic exploitation, theorists demonstrating how social constructs are imposed on conceptions of nature, or development researchers seeking a synthesis of cultural tradition and contemporary activities, understanding how local or marginalized knowledge is constituted and propagated has been a fundamental component of anthropological research. The category of ‘local knowledge’ is itself a contested field: for example, Mexican scientific institutions might be marginalized relative to those of the United States; Mexican peasants relative to elite Mexican scientists; and indigenous (native language speaking) groups in Mexico marginalized relative to Spanish-speaking peasants (Hartigan forthcoming). Here I will focus on the indigenous category.3 I will refer to understandings of indigenous knowledge systems here as ‘ethnoknowledge’, leaving aside for the moment the earlier caution that all knowledge is ethnoknowledge. The vast majority of the research in ethnoknowledges has focused on biology, in particular ethnobotany and ethnomedicine. Journals in these areas, for example, include Ethnobotany Research and Applications, the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Medical Anthropology, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. In computational and physical sciences, however, there has been less emphasis. One exception is ethnoastronomy. It is represented by a single journal, Archaeoastronomy, although research on this subject is published in other venues such as Journal for the History of Astronomy. Why the concentration on these three science and technology disciplines − biology (primarily botany), medicine and astronomy − out of the hundreds that exist in the contemporary academy? One possibility is that other

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analogous bodies of knowledge simply do not exist. If your existence is configured around figuring out which plants are useful, how to stay healthy and which seasonal events can be predicted by celestial changes, then botany, medicine and astronomy are where your expertise will lie. Another possibility, taking a more reflexive look at anthropology, is that the reason for the emphasis on these three disciplines lies as much in the anthropologists as it does in their informants. To what extent has the concept of ‘primitive society’ become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Both may have relevance: while the focus on biology, medicine and astronomy probably does reflect indigenous concerns, recent work shows that we can broaden the scope of anthropological research to encompass ethnoknowledges related to emerging technologies.

FROM ETHNOMATHEMATICS TO ETHNOCOMPUTING Anthropologists and other researchers have revealed sophisticated mathematical concepts and practices in the activities and artefacts of many indigenous and vernacular cultures (e.g. Ascher 1990; Closs 1986; Crump 1990; D’Ambrosio 1990; Eglash 1999; Gerdes 1991; Urton 1997; Zaslavsky 1973; for a theoretic overview, see Eglash 1997). These practices include geometric principles in craft work, architecture and the arts; numeric relations found in measuring, calculation, games, divination and navigation; and a wide variety of other artefacts and procedures. In some cases the ‘translation’ to Western mathematics is direct and simple: counting systems and calendars, for example. In other cases the maths are ‘embedded’ in a process − iteration in bead work, Eulerian paths in sand drawings, etc. − and the act of translation is more like mathematical modelling. In the case of direct translation, we need only provide evidence for the practice itself to show that it has the epistemological status of mathematical knowledge: no one doubts

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that addition and subtraction in Mayan numerals is equivalent to its analogues in Western arithmetic. But in the case of mathematical modelling, one must provide evidence that there is a cognitive process that is reflected in the mathematical model. To put it another way, we need to make sure that this is emic mathematics rather than etic mathematics. However, an emic mathematical model can often be extended beyond the examples that the original cognitive process offers. While this creates a potential danger of attributing more complexity than exists in the traditional practice, it is also valuable in that it allows indigenous communities to extend their knowledge into sophisticated emerging technologies, where they can be applied to education, development and further research. Let’s take a simple example. In spring 2000 the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded my work creating software that allows K-12 students to use simulations of various cultural practices for maths and science education (www.csdt.rpi.edu). We received an invitation to visit the Shoshone-Bannock Reservation in southern Idaho, and found that their beautiful beadwork would be a likely subject for merging maths education and simulation. The web page for this tool (‘Virtual Bead Loom’) begins by showing the prevalence of four-fold symmetry in Native American design in general, and for the bead loom in particular. The web-based software allows the user to enter x and y coordinates for bead positions. Together with colour choice, this allows for the creation of patterns similar to those on the traditional loom. We also put together a ‘cultural background’ section showing how the concept of a Cartesian layout can be seen in a wide variety of native designs: Navajo sand paintings, Yupik parka decoration, Pawnee drum design, and other manifestations of the ‘Four Winds’ concept. One native student, at first sceptical about combining technology with native design, suddenly ‘got it’. When she realized that we were making an ethnomathematics claim (i.e. presenting evidence that Native Americans had developed an equivalent to

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the Cartesian coordinate system before Descartes), she said, ‘They will never let you get away with this.’ ‘Who won’t let us get away this?’ we asked. ‘White people’, she responded. One feature in the prototype allowed students to enter three coordinates to get a triangle. But these virtual bead triangles often had uneven edges, whereas the original ShoshoneBannock beadwork always had perfectly regular edges (Figure 4.4.2.1). It turned out that our programmer had adopted a standard ‘scanning algorithm’, which he found online, for the triangle generation. The scanning algorithm fills in any polygon, given the coordinates of the vertices. But, somehow, the traditional beadworkers had algorithms in their heads that produced a different result. After a few conversations with them, it became clear that they were using iterative rules; e.g. ‘subtract three beads from the left each time you move up one row.’ We developed a second tool for creating triangles, based on iteration, but kept the first in the VBL as well for comparison so that students could compare the standard scanning algorithm with that used by the Shoshone beadworkers. In the next generation of that software, students will be able to custom-design their own algorithms, and thus ‘reverse-engineer’ the wide variety of iterative patterns they find in traditional beadwork. There are several points that can be drawn from this example. We found that the category of ‘ethnomathematics’ was itself too restrictive, and that some of the most important aspects of the process were better described as ‘ethnocomputing’ (in this case, iteration). Earlier we asked why most of the ethnoknowledge work was limited to certain categories, and considered the ‘obvious’ answer: ‘other categories such as computer science would be impossible, since traditional hunter-gatherer groups did not have things like computers.’ But that assumption now seems suspect in light of these algorithmic aspects of traditional beadwork. We need not assume that indigenous groups are

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Figure 4.4.2.1 Comparison of uneven steps in Virtual Bead Loom (VBL) triangle (left), and even steps in Shoshone-Bannock beadwork (right).

restricted to the maths, science and technology of first- or second-grade school classrooms. In fact, the ethnocomputing rubric has been applied to a growing number of examples, ranging from fractals in African architecture to cellular automata-like behaviour in the game of Owari (Eglash 1999; Tedre et al. 2001; Tedre and Eglash 2008). It is worth noting here that the assumption that indigenous knowledge systems must be ‘primitive’ or simplistic is not the only barrier. Equally problematic is the mystification of indigenous knowledge by ‘New Age’ advocates, who make wild claims (e.g. that Zen Buddhists or Hindu priests knew subatomic physics 2,000 years ago). Such claims make use of vague analogies (e.g. that the phrase ‘all is one’ refers to the probabilistic character of particle trajectories) and serve only to discredit legitimate knowledge comparisons (Restivo 1985). The Owari example is particularly significant since it has been extended by professional mathematicians to generate a new series of proofs and theorems (cf. Bruhn 2008). This is clearly indicative of more than vague analogies.

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Thus, it is important to develop guidelines and methods to help determine how we can know whether or not a mathematical (or computational) model is appropriate as an emic description of indigenous knowledge. The bead loom example provides the following: 1 Explanatory narratives by informants: they described an explicit process which could then be translated to algorithmic form. 2 Variant use of a specific ‘design theme’: if there was only one beadwork algorithm for a triangle, we might suspect that this was rote memorization. But the fact that there is a wide variety of iterative patterns indicates that the artisans have reflected on an algorithmic process as a source of innovation. In a related study for a Navajo weaving simulation, one weaver told me her mother had refused to teach her one of the more complicated patterns, and so she had to figure it out by looking at the blanket: in my terminology, reverse-engineering the algorithm from its output. 3 Correlations across different domains: the basic underlying structure of the grid and its four-fold symmetry can be seen not only geometrically but also in domains such as medicine (sand paintings), cosmological symbolism (Four Winds, Four Directions, Four sacred poles of the tipi), etc.

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INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY As a final example, I will look at the intersections between indigenous knowledge and nanotechnology. Again, the connection at first seems unlikely: the nanosciences concern the structuring of materials at the molecular scale, less than 100 nanometres, and often involve expensive and sophisticated apparatus. Yet there are several cases in which indigenous knowledge systems make use of nanoscale phenomena in ways that challenge our assumptions about their limitations with respect to emerging technologies. In ordinary steel production in the ancient world, sharpness and strength would be opposing trade-offs: increasing carbon content for sharpness would make it more brittle, and decreasing carbon content for strength would prevent it from holding an edge. The only exception was the mysterious ‘Damascus Steel’ used in Middle Eastern sword making from about AD 1100 to 1700. We now know that these smiths were able to achieve this extraordinary combination of sharpness and strength due to the presence of carbon nanotubes and nanowires in their steel (Reibold et al. 2006). This special type of steel was called wootz, and was developed in India perhaps as early as 300 BC, and was used to forge the blades. Indian metallurgists used ores from particular mines that included alloying trace elements such as vanadium and molybdenum (Verhoeven et al. 1998). The disappearance of wootz steel in the eighteenth century is attributed to the diminishing supply of Indian ores with the proper trace elements. This is a remarkable result in itself, and nicely illustrates the idea that traditional knowledge can include manipulation or use of material properties relevant to nanotechnology. But if we stop there, we leave the impression that wootz was simply an interesting artefact from the ancient past, and science merely tells us what the ancients failed to understand. Such a view leaves out the active role that wootz has played throughout

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the history of metallurgic science. Scientific analysis of wootz is nothing new; Europeans have long been aware that there was something special about it, and this mystery has inspired a great deal of important metallurgical research. Nineteenth-century British physicist Michael Faraday, for example, proved that the wavy pattern on wootz blades was due to an inherent crystalline structure and not a mechanical mixture of substances. Faraday’s later experiments with metallic colloids, in which he suggested that size differences in extremely small metal particles could produce colour changes, has been cited as the birth of nanoscience (Edwards and Thomas 2007). Other European wootz experimenters included Reaumur in France (1722), Bergman in Sweden (1781) and Anossoff in Russia (1841). Cyril Smith, who held positions as both a professor of metallurgy and historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s, recovered the work of Reaumur, translating it into the modern idiom of a multi-scale architecture where crystalline, molecular and atomic processes have mutual influence on each other. Smith’s student Greg Olsen, now a professor of material science, later developed software to ‘design’ steel using this model of multi-scale processes, and again involved wootz steel in these studies (Davis 2001). In summary, wootz steel as an example of nanotechnology in traditional knowledge is not merely a matter of historical curiosity. It was a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989) through which Western and non-Western metallurgists have maintained a dialogue over the last four hundred years. Far from being an irrelevant historical artefact, it is an example of indigenous knowledge that is still driving innovation and investigations in our era. Other remarkable examples of ‘retrospective’ nanotechnology include Maya blue, a 1,200-year-old pigment with extraordinary resistance to biocorrosion, mineral acids and alkalis (Sanchez del Rio 2006); Native American use of quartz crystals to generate piezoelectric charges for flashes of light for

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ceremonial purposes (Powers 1986); and plant extracts such as resins and saps. One of the most potent examples in the area of plant extracts is an investigation of Spiniflex resin that is taking place through collaboration between the indigenous people of the Myuma Group in northwest Queensland and the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture. The Research Centre’s Director, Professor Paul Memmott, notes that the project includes faculty in botany, bionanoengineering, chemistry and architecture, as well as Aboriginal community members ranging from elders with traditional knowledge to postgraduate student Malcolm Connolly, who conducts experiments in harvesting and regrowth of the plant. For broader discussion of the intersections of indigenous knowledge and nanotechnology − in particular, an analysis of the indigenous formulation of ‘personhood’ in living organisms as an entrance to understanding the technical dimensions of non-human agency − see Eglash (2011).

CONCLUSION We can better understand the intersections of anthropology and emerging technology by thinking about three different domains: technology as tool (ranging from physical gadgets to mathematical tools such as statistics); technology as domain of enquiry (cyberethnography, anthropology of science and technology); and resonance between local knowledge (especially indigenous knowledge) and technology. Although indigenous connections have been well explored in terms of ethnobotany, ethnomedicine and archaeoastronomy, emerging technologies such as computational mathematics and nanotechnology have received less attention. These connections between indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies are not merely romantic valorizations or vindications; they are signposts for future pathways in social anthropology. For example, we see

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a great deal of effort given to engineering and design attempts to utilize biomimicry: studying termite mounds for thermal regulation of buildings, or seed burrs as the inspiration for Velcro. The pharmaceutical industry has realized that similar connections can be found by examining the plant utilizations of indigenous cultures. But plant compounds do not exhaust the material culture of indigenous societies. As new dimensions of these traditional systems are described, it is critical that they happen through frameworks that respect indigenous intellectual property rights. Indigenous knowledge constitutes important cultural capital that indigenous societies and their allies can apply to contemporary challenges in developing sustainable ways of life. As we see in the case of pharmaceuticals, the advantages that these hybrid fusions of indigenous and emerging technologies carry are not limited to indigenous populations. The fractals that are apparent in aerial photos of traditional African village layouts, for example, have a self-similar geometry because they reflect self-organizing political economies. Technosocial forms of selforganization such as Wikipedia or Open Source Software are often touted as models for how we might reorganize society to be more equitable or sustainable, but these indigenous examples of emergent systems could also be translated into underlying principles or illustrations. The connections to computational frameworks are one way to make such translations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0634329.

NOTES 1 For example, Kay (1971) predicts that anthropologists will make greater use of abstract algebras.

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2 Of course there were plenty of resentments before the 1970s, but less reflexive ethnographic practices did not require that they be reported, or that practices be changed. 3 Why focus on indigenous knowledge? Partly for ethical reasons: indigenous groups constitute some of the most threatened societies. Partly because bodies of knowledge that have evolved over many centuries, in direct interaction with ecological elements, have extraordinary depth. And partly for their intersection: indigenous and ecological survival is interconnected.

REFERENCES Anderson, Ronald E. and Brent, Edward E. Jr (1990). Computer Applications in the Social Science. Philadelphia: PA: Temple University Press. Ascher, M. (1990). Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing. Axtell, R., Dean, J., Epstein, J., et al. (2002). ‘Population Growth and Collapse in a Multi-Agent Model of the Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley’. In P. Baily (ed.), Agent Based Modeling in the Social Sciences. Washington, DC: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Banks, Marcus (1994). ‘Interactive Multimedia and Anthropology: A Skeptical View.’ Anthropological Multimedia 1: 1−6. Benedikt, Michael (1994). Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Beynon-Davies, Paul (1997). ‘Ethnography and Information Systems Development: Ethnography of, for and within IS development.’ Information and Software Technology, 39(8): 531−540. Bruhn, Henning (2008). ‘Periodical States and Marching Groups in a Closed Owari.’ Disc. Math. 308: 3694−3698. Callon, Michel (1986). ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.’ In John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 196−233. Carson, Clayborne (1995). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Chibnik, Michael (1985). ‘The Use of Statistics in Sociocultural Anthropology.’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 14: 135−157. Clarke, Catherine (2004). ‘The Politics of Storytelling: Electronic Media in Archaeological Interpretation

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and Education.’ World Archaeology, 36(2): 275–286. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds). (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Closs, M. P. (ed.) (1986). Native American Mathematics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Correll, S. (1995). ‘The Ethnography of an Electronic Bar.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 (3): 270–298. Crump, T. (1990). The Anthropology of Numbers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Ambrosio, U. (1990). Etnomatematica. Sao Palulo: Editora Atica. Davis, E. (2001). “Forging the Dragonslayer.” Wired. 9.02, 136–143. Dow, James (1999). ‘The Early History of Electronic Communication in Applied Anthropology.’ NAPA Bulletin 19. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Edwards, P. P., Thomas, J. M. (2007). “Gold in a Metallic Divided State-From Faraday to Present-Day Nanoscience.” Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 46: 54805486.Eglash, R. (1997) ‘When Math Worlds Collide: Intention and Invention in Ethnomathematics.’ Science, Technology and Human Values, 22(1): 79−97. Eglash, R. (1999). African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Eglash, R. (2011). ‘Nanotechnology and Traditional Knowledge Systems.’ In Donnie Maclurcan (ed.), Nanotechnology and Global Sustainability. New York: CRC Press. Escobar, A. (1994). ‘Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture.’ Current Anthropology, 35(3), 211–232. Fischer, Michael (1994). Applications in Computing for Social Scientists. New York: Routledge. Friedlaender, J. S. (ed.) (2007). Genes, Language, and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 118−140. Gerdes, P. (1991). Lusona: Geometrical Recreations of Africa. Maputo: E.M. University Press. Gray, C. and Driscoll, M. (1992). ‘What’s Real About Virtual Reality? Anthropology of, and in Cyberspace.’ Visual Anthropology Review, 8(2): 39−49. Greenfield, Patricia (2000). ‘What Psychology Can Do for Anthropology, or Why Anthropology Took Postmodernism on the Chin.’ American Anthropologist, 102(3): 564−576.

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Griffiths, P. and Hill, I. D. (1985). Applied Statistics Algorithms. Chichester: Ellis Horwood. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Hartigan, J. (2010). ‘Looking for Race in the Mexican Book of Life: INMEGEN and the Mexican Genome Project.’ Online at: http://unmlive.unm.edu/2010/ 10/13/looking-for-race-in-the-mexican-book-of-life/. Houtman, G. (1995) Interview with Michael Fischer. Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, No. 12, pp. 5–8. Howell, N. and Lehotay, V. A. (1978). ‘AMBUSH: A Computer Program for Stochastic Microsimulation of Small Human Populations.’ American Anthropologist, 80: 905−922. Ito, M. (1996). ‘Theory, Method, and Design in Anthropologies of the Internet.’ Social Science Computer Review, 14(1): 24−26. Kay, P. (1971). Explorations in Mathematical Anthropology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kunstadter, P., Buhler, R., Stephen, F., and Westoff, C. F. (1963). ‘Demographic Variability and Preferential Marriage Patterns.’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 21: 511−519. Latour, Bruno (1987). Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Nakamura, Lisa, Kolko, Beth and Rodman, Gilbert (2000). Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. Palsson, Gisli (2007). Anthropology and the New Genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, agency and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powers, M. (1986). Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality pg 200 London: The Univ. of Chicago Press. Räsänen, M. and Nyce, J. M. (2006). ‘A New Role for Anthropology? − Rewriting “Context” and “Analysis” in Human Computer Interaction Research.’ In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human−Computer Interaction: Changing Roles. NordiCHI ‘06, 14−18 October 2006, Oslo Norway. New York: ACM Press, pp. 175−184.

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Reibold, M., Paufler, P., Levin, A., Kochmann, W., Pätzke N., & Meyer, D. (2006). “Materials: Carbon nanotubes in an ancient Damascus sabre.” Nature 444, 286. Restivo, Sal (1985). The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Singer, Merrill and Baer, Hans (2007). Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Suchman, Lucy (2000). ‘Anthropology as “Brand”: Reflections on Corporate Anthropology.’ Published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Available online at: http://www.lancs. ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/suchman-anthropologyas-brand.pdf Star S.L. & Griesemer J.R. (1989). “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39”. Social Studies of Science 19 (4): 387–420. Tedre, Matti and Eglash, R. (2008). ‘Ethnocomputing.’ In Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Tedre, Matti, Kommers, Piet and Sutinen, Erkki (2002). ‘Ethnocomputing. A Multicultural View on Computer Science.’ IEEE Conference ICALT 2002, Russia, September 9−12. 2002. Online at: http://www.cs. joensuu.fi/~ethno/articles/ethnocomputing_ ICALT2002.pdf Toumey, Chris (2007). Expeditions to na-no-tech, Anthropology Today, February 2007, Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 23–25. Urton, Gary (1997). The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Verhoeven, J., Pendray A., & Dauksch, W. (1998) “The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades.” J of Met. 50, 58-64.Wasserman, Stanley and Galaskiewicz, Joseph (1994). Advances in Social Network Analysis: Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Zaslavsky, Claudia (1973). Africa Counts. Boston, MA: Prindle, Weber & Schmidt.

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4.4.3 From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation Dominic Boyer

When one speaks of media and mediation in social-cultural anthropology today one is usually referring to communication and culture. This is to say, when anthropologists use the term ‘media’, they tend to remain within a largely popular semantics, taking ‘media’ to mean communicational media and, more specifically, communicational media practices, technologies and institutions, especially print (Peterson 2001; Hannerz 2004), film (Ginsburg 1991; Taylor 1994), photography (Ruby 1981; Pinney 1997), video (Turner 1992, 1995), television (Michaels 1986; Wilk 1993; Abu-Lughod 2004), radio (Spitulnik 2000; Hernandez-Reguant 2006; Kunreuther 2006; Fisher 2009), telephony (Rafael 2003; Horst and Miller 2006), and the Internet (Boellstorff 2008; Coleman and Golub 2008; Kelty 2008), among others. These are the core areas of attention in the rapidly expanding subfield of anthropological scholarship often known as the ‘anthropology of media’ or ‘media anthropology’, which has spent much of the last 40 years researching how the production and reception of communicational media texts and technologies have enabled or otherwise affected processes of cultural production and reproduction more generally. There is, of

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course, nothing wrong with this established focus on communication, and media anthropology has certainly thrived, particularly in the past 20 years, cementing its subdisciplinary substance and legitimacy through, among other things, a series of fine review articles (Spitulnik 1993; Ruby 1996; Mazzarella 2004; Coleman 2010), edited volumes (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005), professorial chairs and research and training centres (e.g., the USC Center for Visual Anthropology, the Program in Culture and Media at NYU, the Programme in the Anthropology of Media at SOAS, the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at Manchester University, the MSc in Digital Anthropology at University College London, among others), and research networks (e.g., EASA’s media anthropology listserv: http:// www.media-anthropology.net). Yet, as my fellow practitioners of media anthropology would likely agree, it is very difficult to separate the operation of communicational media cleanly from broader socialpolitical processes of circulation, exchange, imagination and knowing. This suggests a productive tension within media anthropology between its common research foci

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(which are most often technological or representational in their basis) and what we might gloss as processes of social mediation: i.e. social transaction in its broadest sense of the movement of images, discourse, persons and things. The problem of mediation obviously raises the question of practices of communicational media-making and media-receiving, which media anthropologists have addressed at length, especially in the last 20 years. But mediation also raises the question of how we should conceptualize ‘media’ in the first place. To paraphrase one of Marshall McLuhan’s more effective provocations (1964), if one understands media as extensions of human instrumental and semiotic capacities then why should wheels, money and clocks, for example, not also be considered alongside broadcast media such as newspapers, radio and television? Along the same lines, why could the anthropological study of roads and migration, currency and finance, commodity chains and values, and the formation and dissemination of expert knowledge, not be productively connected to anthropological research on communicational media under the rubric of a broader anthropology of mediation? Alongside the emergence of new, more narrow iterations of media anthropology (‘cyberanthropology’, for example) we are indeed beginning to see a movement in media anthropology that more centrally highlights mediating practices, technologies, spaces, materials and institutions beyond those of communicational media. In the long run, the further development of anthropology of mediation may help to counteract the inevitable fissile tendency of subdisciplinarity by knitting contemporary media anthropology research more effectively into long-standing anthropological discussions (for example, concerning exchange and knowledge). In this chapter, I briefly describe the historical consolidation of media anthropology as a subfield of anthropological inquiry and move from there to explore the current horizons of media anthropology, including the project of connecting research

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on media to work on social mediation more generally.

MEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY ALWAYS AND NOW Compare the opening statements from two articles that have sought to define an emergent field of ‘media anthropology’: After long decades of neglect the anthropological study of media is now booming … . Given anthropology’s late arrival at the study of media and communication, what can our discipline hope to contribute to this long-established field of interdisciplinary research? What is, in other words, the point of media anthropology? and Media anthropology is nothing new. Media and anthropology have been inalienably linked since the beginning of anthropology.

It is only slightly surprising to someone familiar with this field that the first statement, the one that suggests media anthropology is a relatively contemporary area of focus, was published two years ago (Postill 2009: 334). The second statement, meanwhile, the one that argues that anthropology has engaged media both as research object and as method of communication since its beginning, was published 35 years ago (Eiselein and Topper 1976: 123). The statements are less contradictory than they at first appear; indeed, each tells part of the truth about the history of media anthropology and each reveals something about contemporary concerns over the integrity of media anthropology’s subdisciplinary identity. As Eiselein and Topper contend, it is indeed true that anthropologists have concerned themselves with media for a long time and that anthropologists have always used media to publicize their research findings. Nevertheless, media only really emerged as a specialized topic of research and ethnographic interest for anthropology in the 1940s as part of the explosion of interest across the human sciences in studying the cultural,

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social, political and psychological effects of broadcast communication. This moment cannot be disentangled from popular and political concerns with fascist and communist movements’ use of film, radio and print for purposes of political mobilization and pacification (see, e.g., Lazarsfeld 1940; Lazarsfeld and Merton 1943), and as a result early broadcast communication studies had a distinctly critical edge (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). Communication studies played a relatively small role in anthropology in the 1940s but they were certainly present (e.g., Bateson 1943; Meadow 1944; Powdermaker 1947) and, likewise, often oriented by a critical sense of the massive cultural impact of broadcasting. Writing of her path-breaking (and to this day, still unparalleled) field research on the Hollywood studio system, Hortense Powdermaker (1950) explained her concern with the manipulative tendencies of broadcast communication: I am concerned with opening up the general problem of movies as an important institution in our society. A unique trait of modern life is the manipulation of people through mass communications. People can be impelled to buy certain articles and brands of merchandise through advertising. Columnists and radio commentators influence political opinions. Movies manipulate emotions and values. … In a time of change and conflict such as we experience today, movies and other mass communications emphasize and reinforce one set of values rather than another, present models for human relations through their portrayal by glamorous stars, and show life, truly or falsely, beyond the average individual’s experiences. (quoted in Askew and Wilk 2002: 162)

Although, in certain respects, Powdermaker’s motivation sounds uncannily contemporary, the historical immediacy of fascism and communism also played a major role in her analysis: Hollywood represents totalitarianism. Its basis is economic rather than political but its philosophy is similar to that of the totalitarian state. In Hollywood, the concept of man as a passive creature to be manipulated extends to those who work for the studios, to personal and social relationships, to the audiences in the theaters, and to the characters in the movies. The basic freedom of being able to

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choose between alternatives is absent. The gifted people who have the capacity for choice cannot exercise it; the executives who technically have the freedom of choice do not actually have it, because they usually lack the knowledge and imagination necessary for making such a choice. (quoted in Askew and Wilk 2002: 169)

As the area studies revolution of the 1950s and 1960s vastly expanded the professional ranks of anthropology and accelerated the specialization and internal segmentation of anthropological knowledge-making both geographically and thematically, broadcast communication research lost some of its vitality but never disappeared entirely (e.g., Honigman 1953; Mead and Metraux 1953; Wolfenstein 1955; Crawford 1965; Weakland 1966). Meanwhile, the 1950s and 1960s saw the growing involvement of anthropologists in debates within the humanities over the cultural implications of historical transitions between regimes of orality, literacy and electronic media. Although the impact of literacy was acknowledged in the 1940s as well (Ransom 1945), the institutionalization and mass popularity of television in the post-war period, combined with intellectual anxiety at the decline of print culture, seems to have been the more immediate catalyst for a rethinking of the historical significance of the rise of literacy and its impact upon culture and communication (e.g., Innis 1950; Ong 1958; McLuhan 1962, 1964; Havelock 1963). McLuhan’s provocations about the ‘re-tribalization’ of modern man in the new environments of electronic mediation appeared to strike a particularly strong chord with anthropologists, many of whom objected to his portrait of ‘primitive’ non-Western cultures of the ‘ear and mouth’ and to his generally mediacentric (or, to use my preferred term, ‘medial’) theory of all human experience and knowledge. In his review of The Gutenberg Galaxy in American Anthropologist, for example, Dell Hymes criticized McLuhan both in substance and analytic model: The book, however, cannot be trusted, as more than stimulation. The over-simplified view of

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types of society and character gets facts wrong. […] The contrast between oral and typographic communication is carried to ludicrous extremes, as a vehicle of cultural criticism and historical explanation. It can no more stand against an adequate view of human history than any other singleminded exegesis known to us. The author’s mode of reasoning is such that involvement and importance (particularly of print) is transformed into primary characteristic and determinant, sometimes with a footing in the evidence, sometimes by sheer assertion. (Hymes 1963: 479)

Debates over orality and literacy continued to be an active concern in the human sciences until the 1980s (e.g., Goody 1968; Eisenstein 1979; Ong 1982; Anderson 1983; Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986; Michaels 1988) and indeed have been more recently, if sporadically, revisited by anthropologists (Hirschkind 2006; Cody 2009) and others (Boyarin 1993; Johns 1998). But media anthropology achieved its earliest iteration of subdisciplinary identity around a different set of conversations concerning methods and theory of visual communication. Building upon critical anthropological scholarship on broadcast communication as well as upon anthropologists’ increasing incorporation of film and photography among their ethnographic techniques (e.g., Bateson and Mead 1942; Rouch 1955; Marshall 1958; Asch 1968; Gardner and Heider 1968), anthropological studies of visual communication, or ‘visual anthropology’ as it came to be known, articulated a loose net of research problems, institutions, techniques, conversations and (multimedia) texts that was tightened into the texture of a subdisciplinary community in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a number of active proponents (Collier 1967; Ruby 1975; Chalfen 1978) who worked to establish new research and training programmes and journals to help stabilize the subdiscipline. Jay Ruby, one of these key figures in the consolidation of visual anthropology, offers a retrospective narrative of subdisciplinary fission from an uninterested mainstream: Visual anthropology has never been completely incorporated into the mainstream of anthropology.

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It is trivialized by some anthropologists as being mainly concerned with audiovisual aids for teaching. The anthropological establishment has yet to acknowledge the centrality of the mass media in the formation of cultural identity in the second half of the twentieth century. Consequently, visual anthropologists sometimes find themselves involved with the research and thinking of professional image makers and scholars from other disciplines − visual sociology, cultural studies, film theory, photo history, dance and performance studies, and architectural theory − rather than with the work of other cultural anthropologists. (Ruby 1996: 1345)

And, indeed, much as Ruby argues, visual anthropology solidified a very generative area of anthropological scholarship in the 1970s and the 1980s, refining both a theoretical language and methodological techniques of production and analysis (Worth and Adair 1970, 1972; Ascher 1985; Michaels 1986, 1994) that would help legitimate the even more ambitious and multimedial media anthropology that was to come. The mid-1980s to mid-1990s were a ripe moment for a transition between visual and media anthropology. Communicational media innovations from cable and satellite television to VHS and digital recording technology to cellular (mobile) telephony to the rise of the Internet radically transformed the possibilities and practices of both radial (e.g., broadcast) and lateral (e.g., intersubjective, node to node; see Boyer 2010: 87−88 on the distinction between the ‘radial’ and ‘lateral’ potentialities of electronic mediation) communications across the world during this period and anthropologists, as chroniclers of the contemporary, took notice. In this respect, Postill’s description of media anthropology’s relatively recent origins is accurate as well. The consolidation of media anthropology as a distinct subfield in anthropology is best dated to the 1980s and 1990s, although there was a great deal of interest in and attention to mediated communication beforehand, and although many key subdisciplinary institutions, such as training programmes, professorships, journals, review articles, and the like, emerged only later.

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Yet, given the empirical size and complexity of both visual and media anthropology, the idea of a transition between them in the 1980s and 1990s is a conceit for my own storytelling purposes. We must recognize that visual anthropology continues to maintain an institutional life apart from media anthropology. But even if the former continues to resist being institutionally absorbed into the latter, and even if the spokespersons of the latter tend to erase their historical dependence upon the scholarship and institution-building of the former, visual and media anthropology are closely aligned today. At the risk of irritating colleagues on both sides of the spectrum, I would say that the insurrectional, innovational energy of visual anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s passed over into media anthropology during the 1990s and that, much to Ruby’s enduring grief perhaps, the majority of the ‘anthropological establishment’ probably now views visual anthropology as a subset of media anthropology rather than the other way around. The experiments, research and debates surrounding ‘indigenous media’ in the 1980s and 1990s provided a natural pivot point for the transition from visual anthropology to media anthropology. The expanded territorial reach of satellite broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s ignited fierce debates across the world over what kinds of images and messages the new broadcast platforms would carry, by whom and for whom. At the same time, the proliferation of new, much more portable and inexpensive modes of televisual production, reception and archiving like videorecording, also created new possibilities for local cultural expression. The hybrid media activism and media analysis of anthropologists like Eric Michaels (1986), Faye Ginsburg (1991, 1993) and Terry Turner (1992, 1995), as well as the emergence of a broader analytic literature on the intersection of Western and non-Western modes of televisual communication (Graburn 1982; Brisebois 1983; Ang 1985), captures very well anthropology’s first engagement of the

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seemingly paradoxical trend toward greater globalization and localization of broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s. More than this, the passionate debates that followed about the significance of interventions like the Kayapo Video Project and Australian Aboriginal television − particularly as to whether non-Western use of Western televisual technology enabled or disabled nonWestern cultural knowledge and representation (Faris 1992; Turner 1997; Weiner 1997) − attracted broader interest outside visual/ media anthropology and helped cement the subdiscipline’s status as a locus of cuttingedge anthropological research (see, e.g., Marcus 1995). This was also the time when ‘mediation’ became a significant presence within the analytical language of media anthropology. Faye Ginsburg, for example, utilized the term to distinguish her work on indigenous media from more formalist projects in visual studies and visual anthropology: ‘I am concerned less with the usual focus on the formal qualities of film as text and more with the cultural mediations that occur through film and video works’ (1991: 94; see also Morris 2000). The redistribution of emphasis from cultural form to process meant, as Michaels, Ginsburg and Turner all advocated, greater attention to the cultural agency of media producers (and receivers). And, production and reception studies became, it is true, the dominant field research and ethnographic foci of media anthropology during the 1990s and 2000s, eliciting particularly rich veins of research and scholarship on advertising (Moeran 1996; Dávila 2001; Mazzarella 2003), on journalism (Bird 1992; Pedelty 1995; Boyer 2000; Peterson 2001; Ståhlberg 2002; Hannerz 2004; Hasty 2005; Bishara 2006) and on televisual and cinematic media (Miller 1992; Abu-Lughod 1993; Wilk 1993, 1994; Dornfeld 1998; Mankekar 1999; Armbrust 2000; Larkin 2008; Salamandra 2008). Production and reception studies have an obvious complementarity with each other, which produces the image of holistic coverage of media phenomena even though some,

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perhaps many, media anthropologists have never been entirely satisfied with a production−reception polarity within media analysis. There is something ‘deeply incommensurate’ (Abu Lughod 2004: 24) in the ethnographic sites implied by production and reception, an incommensurability that is difficult to close without appeal to an encompassing third term like ‘the nation’ or ‘the public’. In this respect, the model seems to reproduce a structural paradox or tension in broadcast communications themselves in which centralized broadcast loci radiate messages to portable reception devices and mobilized receivers (Williams 1974: 19−21). And, for this reason, it is better equipped to analyse points of production and reception than, for example, the dense networks of lateral messaging among media ‘users’ that have increasingly come to characterize mediated communication as more and more messaging takes place across platforms like mobile phones and the Internet. Under such circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to segment ‘producers’ and ‘receivers’ as distinct analytical, let alone social, categories and, as such, the justification of studying one or the other (or even both as complementary phenomena) has been increasingly pressured. In more or less subtle ways, an emergent media anthropology of Internet-based communication has sought to refunction the production−reception polarity toward studies of networked producing, circulating and receiving users (Miller and Slater 2000; Coombe and Herman 2004; Kelty 2005; Reed 2005; Boellstorff 2008; Coleman and Golub 2008; Postill 2008; Boyer 2010), especially hackers, programmers and gamers. This scholarship has deepened research attentions already present in early generations of media anthropology (for example, to questions of cultural reproduction, temporality, sociality, publicity, and of political and social imagination and subjectivity). And, it has also explored new questions more closely tied to the technologies and institutions of ‘digital culture’ such as recursivity

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(the participation of media users in reshaping the capacities and operations of their own media use) and virtuality (the constitution of alternative selves and environments).

FRONTIERS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MEDIATION I think it would be wise not to underestimate the impact of the destabilization of midtwentieth-century broadcasting regimes in terms of opening new ethnographic and theoretical horizons in media anthropology. As noted above, this destabilization was catalysed in part through the innovation, circulation and institutionalization of new electronic information and communication technologies, many of which diminished the centralized authority and radial messaging patterns of broadcasters while simultaneously enhancing the possibilities of feedback and lateral modes of messaging among ‘receivers’. Broadcasting has, needless to say, by no means disappeared, but as the lively public discourse on institutional crises in print media and television attest, broadcasting is not what it used to be and media anthropology has also transformed as a result. Contemporary media anthropology today is, for example, much more likely than it was even 10 years ago to take ‘circulation’ and ‘exchange’ as conceptual problems of equivalent significance to those of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ (e.g., Kelty et al. 2008; Schiller 2009; Shipley 2009). But rather than viewing the rise of issues like circulation and mediation (and ‘publicity,’ e.g., Urla 1995; Warner 2002; Briggs 2005; Kelty 2005; Mazzarella 2006; Keane 2009) to ethnographic and theoretical prominence in media anthropology as simply an adaptation to a new environment of communicational media, we might also understand their emergence as framed historically by the collapse of coldwar geopolitics and geoeconomics, by the rise of market (neo)liberalism on a global basis, and by a concomitant exploration throughout the human sciences of analytical

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models based on liquidity and flow (e.g., Hannerz 1992; Appadurai 1996; Bauman 2000). I find it striking and not incidental, for example, that the anthropology of mediation has achieved impressive resonance in the anthropology of religion and political anthropology (de Vries and Weber 2001; Eickelman and Anderson 2003; Meyer and Moore 2006; Engelke 2010), particularly among scholars who, following Mazzarella’s call for greater attention to problems of mediation and immediation (2006), have analysed the ‘immediating’ tendencies of governmental and religious forces that seek to dampen the intensely mediational qualities of post-1980s globalization under discourses of singular religious or secular truth-regimes (Eisenlohr 2006, 2009; Allen 2009; Keane 2009). The intersection of politics, religion and media remains a very promising frontier for media anthropology (and the anthropology of mediation). Likewise, I predict an inevitable further expansion of valuable research on Internet and mobile communication practices. A number of anthropologists are in the process of researching social networking software like Facebook and Twitter, for example, and I think it is fair to expect that this will become a very active area of media anthropological research and conversation in the near future (Miller 2011), although it is also one that is already showing the signs of pressing for a new subdisciplinary iteration under the banner of ‘digital anthropology’ or ‘cyberanthropology’ (Escobar 1994; Budka and Kremser 2004). The description of the new (2009) MSc in Digital Anthropology Programme at University College London offers an excellent example of the rationale for further (sub)subdisciplinary fission rooted in the ubiquity and influence of digital information and communication technology: Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to PowerPoint, Google Earth and Second Life. Museum displays migrate to the internet, family communication in the Diaspora is dominated by new media, artists work with digital films and images. Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to

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understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us to acknowledge, understand and engage with them. (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/digitalanthropology/about.php)

I do not have the space here to either confirm or deny such portraits of the revolutionary power of digital information and communication technologies. The current and future forms of digital culture are, at any rate, a subject of much lively debate in media anthropology as in public culture more broadly (Boyer 2007). What is less often observed is how the seemingly increasing plurality of contemporary modes of communicational mediation has crystallized anxieties among media anthropologists about the status of their subdisciplinary jurisdiction and identity. For example, a 2005 e-seminar sponsored by the EASA media anthropology network (see http://www.media-anthropology. net/) posed the question ‘What is media anthropology today?’ and discussed how to articulate its objects and methods. During the e-seminar, Sarah Pink wondered how far to let media anthropology move in the direction of a more general anthropology of mediation: Is [media anthropology] a mass media anthropology or is it an anthropology of anything that mediates (which, taking it to its conclusion, could mean an anthropology of anything ...), or rather any sorts of practices that involve ‘media’?

Daniel Taghioff commented: I think there is a possible solution to the problem of defining the Anthropology of Media in terms of ‘mediation’ and that spilling over into all forms of practice. … The Anthropology of Media could be sited in the study of the relationships between these more explicitly identified mediated practices, and the implicit mediated aspects of other practices. This has the advantage of siting the discipline ethnographically in the practices of those involved, rather than founding it on a priori notions of media and mediation.

Later in the debate, Eric Rothenbuhler suggested that finding an integrative definition for media anthropology was less important

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than considering media anthropology’s status as an epistemic phenomenon itself: One of the interesting things about ‘media anthropology’ is the sudden currency of the term. The label was little used until recently and suddenly it seems very right for very many purposes. … It may be useful to see ‘media anthropology’ as, at the moment, a phenomenon of intellectual history. It is a coming to terms, a moment of recognition of realities that had been waiting to be seen. My own experience [of] the last few years is that everyone likes the term, most respond as if it helps them recognize something, like yeah, I see that. Only a few later ask for a definition.

Rothenbuhler is certainly correct to highlight the historicity of media anthropology’s subdisciplinary identity and to suggest that it speaks to retrospective stock-taking as much as to a future research agenda. At the same time, I think that Pink’s and Taghioff’s reflections on media and mediation signal a growing desire within media anthropology to expand its purview beyond communicational media research. This frontier is already being explored by several scholars interested in the intersection of semiotic, social and material aspects of mediation, including Matthew Hull’s work on documents and bureaucracy (2003), Kira Kosnick’s work on media and migration (2007), Cymene Howe’s research on televisionary forms of sexual rights activism (2008) and Dimitris Dalakaglou’s work on roads, space and identity (2010) to name just a few. But these zones of intersection offer many opportunities for further intervention as well. In my own recent research on media and knowledge, for example, I have discussed the relationship between the industrialization of electronic computation and the rise of cybernetic models of social theory as well as the relationship between the digital media practices of news journalists and their informatic understandings of their work and its significance in the world today (Boyer 2010). Pluralizing our conceptualization of both media and mediation is, as I argued at the outset, a strategic subversion of media anthropology’s long-standing assumption that it should focus principally on problems of communication and meaning.

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At the same time, Pink’s and Taghioff’s comments also signal that moving media anthropology in the direction of an anthropology of mediation is an unsettling idea as well. A more expansive commitment to studying social mediation in all its forms and processes could compromise to a certain extent the jurisdictional locus of communicational media that has proved so fruitful for media anthropology over the past several decades. It could be viewed as ‘watering down’ the research and discourse agenda of media anthropology to the ‘anthropology of anything’. But to follow that metaphor to another conclusion, perhaps watering down the communicational focus of media anthropology would also enhance its epistemic ‘liquidity’ and allow its work to flow more effectively into the groundwater of ‘mainstream’ anthropological research and theory. ‘Anthropology of anything’ is, after all, another way of saying ‘anthropology’ and I think producing anthropologically meaningful research is a much more important goal for media anthropology than the defence of a subdisciplinary jurisdiction or identity. For one thing, I hope that this essay has demonstrated that media anthropology has always had a broad, dynamic and somewhat fluid core jurisdiction. For another, many of media anthropology’s most generative moments (like indigenous media research of the 1980s and 1990s) succeeded precisely because they addressed wider anthropological debates on aspects of social mediation such as representation, technology, exchange and knowledge. In the end, sealing ourselves into a subdisciplinary discourse network, however lively and expanding, seems to me a greater risk than dissolving a sense of unitary subdisciplinary identity and purpose that was never terribly unitary to begin with.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1993. Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest. Public Culture 5(3): 493−513.

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Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2004. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Allen, Lori. 2009. Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada. American Ethnologist 36(1): 161−180. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Armbrust, Walter (ed.). 2000. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Asch, Timothy. 1968. The Feast [film]. Ascher, Robert. 1985. Myth onto Film. Anthropologia Visualis 1(1): 37−39. Askew, Kelly and Richard Wilk (eds). 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bateson, Gregory. 1943. Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, 5: 72−78. Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bird, S. Elizabeth. 1992. For Enquiring Minds. Knoxville, TE: University of Tennessee Press. Bishara, Amahl. 2006. Local Hands, International News: Palestinian Journalists and the International Media. Ethnography 7(2): 19−46. Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boyarin, Jonathan (ed.). 1993. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Boyer, Dominic. 2000. On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany. Cultural Anthropology 15(4): 459−491. Boyer, Dominic. 2007. Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm. Boyer, Dominic. 2010. Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology). Anthropological Quarterly 83(1): 73−96.

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Briggs, Charles L. 2005. Communicability, Racial Discourse and Disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 269−291. Brisebois, Debbie. 1983. The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. Anthropologia 25(1): 103−118. Budka, Philipp and Manfred Kremser. 2004. Cyber Anthropology − Anthropology of CyberCulture. In S. Khittel, B. Plankensteiner and M. Six-Hohenbalken (eds), Contemporary Issues in Socio-cultural Anthropology: Perspectives and Research Activities fr