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Abstract: Based on ethnography from Lio, Indonesia, I explore effects on values, categories, and practices that followed the introduction of Catholicism to the area. Hierarchy is treated both as a [...]

Abstract: In the absence of concepts that correspond to those of chance, luck, or fortune, how do people account for seemingly random desirable or undesirable events that occur? In this [...]

A study was conducted to investigate the participation of Norwegian social anthropologists in debates about current social, cultural, and political issues. Some of the most actively engaged anthropologists in recent years were interviewed. Findings show that most of them are motivated by a desire to communicate a nuanced perspective.

Abstract: Legislation about personal behavior, such as family law, clearly manifests concerns about individual and relational rights and duties. With a focus on adoption laws in Norway and the US [...]

With empirical material obtained from a study of transnational adoption in Norway, an argument is made for the concept of kinning. By this is meant a process by which a foetus, new-born child, or any previously unconnected person, is brought into a significant and permanent relationship that is expressed in a kin idiom. Through a locus on adoption within a cultural setting that emphasizes the flesh and blood metaphor as central for kinship, the ambiguities and contradictions embedded in the relationship between biological and social relatedness are thrown into sharp relief Questions of race and ethnicity also become pertinent to the kinning drama of adoptive parents which involves, it is argued, a process of transubstantiation of the adopted child., Resume A partir d'observations empiriques faites dans le cadre d'une etude de l'adoption transnationale en Norvege, l'auteur formule des arguments en faveur du concept de kinning (creation de liens de [...]

Some recent anthropological work on gender seeks to argue for a multiplicity of gender attributes, qualities and associated values in any given socio-cultural setting. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Lio people of eastern Indonesia, I seek to apply and test these theories empirically. Contexts may be constituted in a male or female mode of sociality and, depending on the subject position of any one person, male or female qualities may be highlighted regardless of the person's biological sex. It is also argued that discourses of kinship, social stratification, political economy or ritual may at times override those of gender., From single gender models to multiple modes of sociality It has become an anthropological truism to state that gender is socially constructed. The implications of this, however, are no longer [...]

The meaning and the emergence of the value androgyny with relation to the male and female gendered mode are explained. The position of this value is applied to the Lio ideology.