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In 2018, the Inter-American Court delivered the first – and so far, only – judgment against Brazil on Indigenous land rights. This leading decision upheld the state's failure to comply with human rights obligations due to the non-removal of non-Indigenous individuals from the territory of the Xukuru people. Such an issue, namely, insecure land tenure affects Indigenous peoples worldwide. The decision's outcome consolidated a critical trend in international law concerning the concept of Indigenous lands: a place where Indigenous peoples have their residence and holistically develop their life, which states must actively protect, according to Article 21 of the American Convention read in conjunction with Article 1.1 and 2 thereof. By analyzing secondary sources (inter alia, ethnographies and court documents), this paper addresses the role of social (or cultural) anthropology regarding expert evidence in the Xukuru land claims. It articulates the Brazilian and Inter-American legal framework on expert evidence and Indigenous land rights with the literature on 'anthropological expertise' and 'cultural expertise', which includes the branches of forensic social anthropology and expert social anthropology. This analysis underscores the evolving challenges concerning expert evidence in legal-administrative procedures on the national and international levels. It argues that cultural anthropologists acting as experts on these levels need different sets of skills, which should be developed through special training. Thus, this paper amplifies the interdisciplinary dialogue between law and social anthropology on the topical issue of human rights adjudication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In north-central Cambodia, Indigenous minority communities along with the Prey Lang Forest are rapidly transforming market-independent ecologies toward market-dependent existences. Through this transition, maintaining access to resources, to status and to politically advantageous connections remain the 'hinges' around which other epistemic propositions revolve. The prowess required to capture these vital elements of social life directly from the potent forest is not the same as that required in a market-dependent environment. The two worlds of practice are connected in an intimacy that only consumption can create, and as the market eats the forest the stark difference in social organisation emerges as a point of contention on multiple fronts. In this space, 'Indigenous' propositions about 'reality' gain purchase, even as 'Indigenous' economies are at best constrained, but often foreclosed by market relations. This collision prompts new political and economic possibilities and new classifications for contestation. Drawing together ethnographic data and epistemology at the 'ontological turn', this paper investigates two classificatory anomalies: Indigenous capital accumulation and a silent earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an edited volume on laughter and joking by way of exploring the relative marginalisation of humorous phenomena within the anthropological literature. In framing a new body of work in the area, rather than suggesting a collective thesis or unified theoretical approach to humorous phenomena, it argues for the necessity and value of detailed ethnographic descriptions of laughing and joking behaviours. In particular, it proposes that such ethnographically specific approaches provide important analytical perspectives on how people in post-colonial and increasingly global social fields manage enduring and emergent social inequalities. In conclusion, the paper suggests that whilst the capacity of anthropologists to write about joking will always be mitigated by the 'you-had-to-be-there' syndrome, it is this same contextual immediacy that defines the ethnographic endeavour and methodology. As such, laughter and humour represent not only important dimensions of social life to be better understood, but important perspectives on the understandings we already take for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In commenting on the papers in this special issue, I begin by discussing the need for anthropologists of the western Pacific to study ways individualism is emerging in the region and to attend in doing so to major Western theories of individualism. I then discuss the features of Macpherson's model of possessive individualism that make it particularly useful for anthropological work. Turning to the papers included here, I consider how they have taken up, challenged and extended Macpherson's ideas by putting them to work in understanding societies that engage the market to a greater or lesser extent but do not draw on it for their dominant models of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research conducted with Bardi and Jawi people, two Indigenous groups from the Northwestern Kimberley region of Western Australia, the aim of this paper is to approach the complexities related to Indigenous tourism in Australia through the politics of knowing and not-knowing as embodied by Indigenous tour guides and non-Indigenous tourists. It examines the notion of knowing (or not-knowing) and its usages by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the context of their tourist encounter. ‘Knowing’ represents an important aspect through which Aboriginal people and their non-Indigenous guests negotiate their interactions. In particular, the paper shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous expectations from tourism lead actors to adopt divergent positions and to assert renewed claims in relation to knowledge or knowing, casting new light on issues of self-representation and empowerment in the domain of Indigenous tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing - as problems both for anthropology and conservation science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Europe, the arrival of irregular migrants in recent years has triggered the expression of nativist anxieties, witnessing a broad recourse to violent rhetoric and the embrace of exclusivist models of national and regional community. With an ethnographic focus on migrant resettlement in Sicily, this paper argues that the elaboration of a cosmopolitan ethic that rejects the politics of exclusion can be met with ambivalence by local people who share neither the middle-class sensibilities of refugee advocates, nor their access to the public funds by which it is possible to earn income as social service and resettlement workers. Consequently, migrant advocacy is dogged by the widespread presumption that its aims are not necessarily altruistic, and that the apparatus of migrant resettlement is staffed by actors best positioned to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities presented by the migrant crisis. At the same time, newcomers' incorporation into the body politic as a reserve army of labour, and the expectation imposed upon them to adapt to host communities and contribute productively to the local economy in any way they can, represents a key element of migrant marginalisation that even their own advocates do not explicitly question. Finally, this marginalisation is further exacerbated by contemporary populist rhetoric that positions newcomers as an existential threat to the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on tolerance has become axiomatic for political and cultural life in the era of (post-)liberal modernity. In the event of any form of violence, the discourse is invoked as a 'solution' to 'intolerance'. But what if we considered the tolerance discourse itself as an axiom of violence? Its discursive labour creates configurations of power relations that transform the existing human affairs and relations into fixed conditions and categories of difference. Instead of taking tolerance as an analytical proxy, this paper ethnographically elucidates how the tolerance discourse is refused and resisted with the social grammars, practices and ethical vernaculars of care, mercy and solidarity. By focusing on the spaces of public kitchens in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ethics of immediacy they engender, I explore the actually existing forms of living with difference beyond the threshold of tolerance discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of litigated Australian native title cases concern lands located within the area of Australia known as the Western Desert. In these cases, legal arguments concerning the nature of the land-owning group and the 'society' at the time of colonisation have inevitably drawn on anthropological writings about Western Desert local and social organisation. The impetus for this paper was provided by the Yulara case, a compensation claim over the township of Yulara near Uluru, in which the trial judge concluded that land tenure systems in the Western Desert are based on patrilineal principles. One of the significant factors in the Court's decision was an apparently uncritical acceptance of early anthropological models and data, which had reported supposedly patrilineal socio-territorial organisation in the Western Desert. Researchers currently working in this region and Indigenous peoples themselves, however, reject this model. In this paper, we question the validity of some of the earlier investigations, and propose an alternative understanding of Western Desert territorial organisation based on data gathered from one of the Pitjantjatjara-speaking people's neighbouring dialectal groups, which is also consistent with most of the other recent and extensive work done in this cultural bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will compare and contrast the Austronesian symbolic elements of the two social formations within which I have conducted extensive ethnographic and archival research, that of the highly egalitarian Buid of Mindoro, Philippines and that of the equally hierarchical Makassar of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. I will demonstrate both that their cosmological structures are built out of common symbolic elements and that these structures could be used to legitimate vastly different political systems. The common symbolic elements included a gendered cosmos inhabited by a series of parallel societies composed of animal, human and spirit subjects; the conceptualisation of human sociality as generated by shared experience within a nested series of bounded spaces; and the ability of certain agents to move between these spaces by way of specialised training, vehicles and portals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchy is often discussed in anthropology in terms of models that are specific to, and to an extent determinant of particular cultures. For example, the contrast between Big Man and Chief drawn by Sahlins not only appears as an emanation of distinction between two cultural orders in his account, but also as being a fundamental determinant of that cultural distinction. Likewise, the Dumontian conception of hierarchy that has been applied to a number of recent analyses of Oceanic societies is also one that emanates from and is foundational to the establishment of a distinction between Western and Indian societies. In this paper, I explore an alternative conception of emerging hierarchies in the South Pacific, that do not fit so easily into such schema. Based on fieldwork in East New Britain, I argue whilst such issues are sometimes locally glossed in terms of an ideal-type opposition between Western and local cultures, that often an understanding of these different hierarchies is not so easily contained within such a perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older people constitute a growing proportion of the urban population and are encountered in all kinds of spaces and neighbourhoods across cities. This article argues that urban seniority and elderly care are a fruitful, new lens to study how inhabitants on the social margins create urban space and social cohesion. This article draws on ethnographic research in the cities of Zanzibar, Tanzania, and Muscat, the capital of Oman. Many older inhabitants of cities experience frailty, serious health problems, or even disabilities and are no longer able to work or make a living, which pushes them towards the social margins. The ethnographic examples and reflections in this article illustrate, first, how cities can be investigated from the perspective of social and spatial marginality. Second, they show how urban dwellers' social positions can shift between the margins and centres of an urban society depending on their health and access to unequal spaces of ageing and care. And third, the paper analyses how some elders respond to marginality by taking up transnational and cosmopolitan agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses causes of institutionalised human sacrifice through analyses of cross-cultural data sets, extending previous cross-cultural research that found significant ecological predictors of human sacrifice in population pressure and environmental circumscription measures. Societies with human sacrifice have intensive agriculture, fixed residence and high population density. However, human sacrifice is not significantly correlated with these, nor many other ecological measures (agricultural potential, protein, total food, food storage adequacy, and famine risk). It was found, however, that human sacrifice is significantly and independently predicted by population pressure and an overall measure of war for land and resources. This paper reports additional analyses of correlates of institutionalised human sacrifice in political variables, particularly geopolitical dynamics and intra- and inter-group relations. Multiple linear regression shows human sacrifice has independently significant correlation with: highest levels of political organization based on alliance or confederacies, chief executive of group selected by a ruling family, internal war for resources, and population stress. Binary logistic analyses found alliance/confederacies as the highest form of political integration and internal war for resources remained significant predictors in the model. These findings are interpreted as supporting arguments that human sacrifice is motivated by ecological factors and plays a role in political activity in inter-group intimidation through power displays. These findings are related to patterns of political action involving network versus corporate strategies and contrast of a terroristic-volunteristic dimension of implementation of political strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin this paper with a nod to ‘the beginning’ by linking smoke to fire, and fire to humankind. Bound up in this deep history of smoke and humanity is a dichotomy cleaving humans from animals and the west from the rest. Taking smoke at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri community in central Australia as my subject, I aim to destabilise some of the certainties entrenched in this dichotomy. Smoke, of course, is nigh impossible to pin down, literally as well as conceptually. So rather than trying to immobilise it, I follow in smoke’s own fashion and waft across different kinds of fires and different kinds of analytical approaches. Ethnographically, I draw a narrative picture of the different ways in which smoke at Yuendumu permeates everyday life by considering the smoke of breakfast fires, signalling fires, cooking fires during storms, caring-for-country fires, and the scent of cold smoke on blankets, clothes, and bodies. Analytically, I move from smoke and how it relates to embodied Warlpiri ways of being in the world, to smoke and childhood socialisation, including baby smoking rituals. From there I shift to the smoke of caring-for-country fires, and on to smoke, memory, odourphilia, and odourphobia. I conclude by pondering the potential of a smoke-like approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going back a half century to the classic essays of Benedict Anderson ('The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture') and Lucien Hanks ('Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order') shows both the value and the limitations of anthropology's move to meaning and increasingly intensive, site-specific fieldwork. While Anderson and Hanks pioneered the study of indigenous meanings, an approach which came to dominate Southeast Asian anthropology and area studies, they did so from a broadly comparative regional perspective unlike today's culture-specific approach and its stand-alone ethnographies. Their breadth suggests why Anderson and Hanks's insights into just two cultures have enlightened research all across the region and beyond. Here, to build on their work, our analysis suggests Javanese and Thai notions of power are variations on a regional complex wherein Southeast Asians domesticate power to lead a safe, prosperous and moral life in an otherwise dangerous and amoral world. More broadly, Anderson and Hanks's essays exemplify how a regional perspective can help us improve as fieldworkers and advance as theorists. In the end, better ethnography will require better ethnology and area studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the theory of possessive individualism and its critique are present in recent economic restructuring in the western Pacific. These papers show that, although the theory of possessive individualism is not new, the moral basis of the critique of that specific form of social identity varies. I discuss how the inception of the concept emerged alongside the critique of this form of personhood, and then examine the emergence of possessive individualism at the time of independence in the Pacific Islands. Finally, I outline the moral basis of the critique of possessive individualism for the contemporary period, and suggest that the theory of possessive individualism advances by outlining the terms of it own critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper portrays critical ethnography in the sense that it explores ethnography's relationships with the larger world in which it is embedded, rather than critiquing methodological or theoretical issues internal to its practice.1 My approach is autobiographical: I aim at what troubles me about anthropology, both as it constitutes a way of confronting the world and as a profession; and I conceptualise the ties that link anthropology and public life through my own experiences as an anthropologist and citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the ways in which Bob Tonkinson’s classic ethnography of intercultural contact on the margins of the Australian Western Desert influenced my own analysis of Kakadu National Park’s joint management. I draw on my own notes and reflections of a particular period towards the end of my PhD fieldwork and beginning of data analysis to illustrate the difficulties these and other data presented. I argue that key aspects of Tonkinson’s book showed me how I might begin to analyse a contradictory and confusing sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bob Tonkinson's dual ethnographic interest in Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific led him to a realisation of the relative poverty of historical anthropology of Aboriginal Australia compared to the efflorescence of work on cultural transformation in the Pacific exemplified by theKastomdebate. In some of his later work on the Mardu he attempted to correct this by reporting developments among the Mardu as they occurred. This paper will borrow some of the mid-level theorising about cultural transformation in the Pacific to suggest a revision of the colonial history of another Australian desert group: the Warlpiri. One way to do this is to extract from theKastomdebate the more general theme of the transformation of self-objectifications of cultural practice over colonial history and the importance of identity development in relation to the colonisers. It will focus on a comparison of the self-objectifications of two generations of intermediary figures. Key figures in the first generation embraced work and, unlike the Mardu at Jigalong, Christianity, but as part of a relatively thorough-going separation of Aboriginal and Whitefella domains. The later intermediary figures, through their unusually high level of education, added skills in a variety of new self-objectifying discourses as ‘traditional owners’, practitioners of ‘two-way’ educational and media projects and as bearers of Indigenous rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By analysing a multi-dimensional urban Australian Aboriginal identity performance, this paper identifies and problematises commonplace cultural assumptions about the constitution of humour as a form of anxiety release, and the understanding of humour as cloaking aggression. It raises analytical questions about how identity construction illuminates complex links among anxiety, weakness and laughter as well as links among humour, repair and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how popular jokes about White women and their sexuality are utilised by Cook Islanders to negotiate relationships with outsiders, particularly Western tourists. These jokes serve to unsettle tourist images of erotic paradise populated with welcoming island women and, further, offer a humorous commentary on the inequities of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), concerns about culture, about possessing and appearing as a culture, are highly salient and contested. This is in part an outgrowth of commercial and state agencies promoting their products and policies through distinct images of PNG's myriad cultures. These agencies seek to incite forms of possession, as individual consumers and as national citizens. In a different but allied manner, concerns with appearing as a culture are part of long-standing Melanesian coercive relations, where people seek to be recognised in publicly valued ways. The paper addresses the interactions between these modes of appearance across a range of examples from PNG ethnography to elucidate how contemporary PNG peoples make themselves up into different kinds of cultural 'things' that are displayed, mutually recognised and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) allows Indigenous Australians to lay claims to traditional country located on unalienated Crown land. The Act also admits claims to compensation for the loss of traditional country that has been appropriated and made subject to freehold or other forms of tenure. The Yulara case discussed here was historically important. It was the first case mounted to determine appropriate compensation for the extinguishment of native title. In a compensation claim, the Indigenous applicants must first establish that (taken together) they are both (i) the rightful heirs to ancestral holders of native title and (ii) that they still maintain the traditions and customs of their forebears (phase 1). Once their holding of native title has been established at law, the applicants may then enter their claim to monetary compensation for the 'extinguishment' of their native title over designated lands (phase 2). In the Yulara case, it was found that the applicants were not constituted as a group of recognisable native title holders whose rights to country were rooted in those traditional laws and customs that obtained when the Yulara lands were officially brought under the dominion of British authorities 'at sovereignty' (1824). The case could not, therefore, proceed to a hearing of the compensation phase. Eight issues concerning the proper performance of the anthropologist as expert witness in native title matters were raised by the trial judge in the Yulara case. This paper deals with the bearing of the judge's observations on those anthropological representations that may be made in future native title cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign’ migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into Wampar territory, where they find wealthy Wampar make good marriage partners. From peaceful relations with ‘foreigners’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the situation has changed to the extent that Wampar now have plans for driving men from other ethnic groups out of their territory. Within two generations, ideas of changeable cultural otherness have developed into stereotypes of unchangeable bodily differences. In this paper, I describe (1) changes in the perception of foreigners, and in the definition of ‘foreigner’ itself, (2) body images of the Wampar, and (3) conditions for these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of litigation has become an important strategy for customary land claims for the Orang Asli, the aboriginal people of Peninsular Malaysia. Increasing displacement from their customary territories, and having exhausted other official avenues, the Orang Asli are resorting to legal measures to protect their rights. Several landmark cases in the Malaysian courts favouring Orang Asli rights have given the Indigenous People hope in the legal system. However, lawsuits are risky, require an enormous amount of time and resources, and take a toll on the communities and others involved in the process. Relying on the court process risks reifying state power, reinscribing unequal power dynamics, and reinforcing essentialised notions of indigenous 'culture' and 'tradition'. In this article, I draw upon my long-term research on Orang Asli activism and my experience serving as an expert witness in several Orang Asli customary land claims to discuss the limits and possibilities of social anthropological knowledge in the legal arena. Focusing on the Malaysian context, I reflect upon the challenges of speaking across different fields, translating social anthropological research into a form legible to the legal process, and the dilemma of being complicit in reifying hierarchies of knowledge. I consider how social anthropologists in their cultural expertise role might use the legal space to centre Indigenous knowledge, and challenge the more static understanding of indigenous culture and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the intersection of evangelism, ethnography and linguistics in the work of two missionaries living among Aboriginal communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carl Strehlow was one of several German missionaries working in central Australia in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. J. R. B. Love met Strehlow briefly in 1913, but did not become a fully committed missionary himself until the 1920s. This paper first considers Strehlow’s evangelical, linguistic and ethnographic interests in relation to some of his German contemporaries, before comparing his approach to that of the younger, Presbyterian, Love to elucidate the inter-relationships between evangelism, linguistics and ethnography in the 1890s and early twentieth century in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introductory essay presents a genealogy, admittedly partial, of Robert Tonkinson’s theorisation, focusing upon how his mode of conceptualising the ethnographic issues he has traversed is basically a dialectical approach. In part such conceptualisation is understandable in terms of how his background has brought together a number of contrasting perspectives—detailed ethnography of specific situations and an abiding ‘uncontrolled’ comparative perspective, Aboriginal Australia and Melanesia, British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and others. The approach that he has developed in synthesising all these influences in his ethnographic and theoretical work has a powerful precedent in the ‘dynamic theory’ of Raymond Firth. This heritage helps explain both the convergence of Bob’s analyses with contemporary practice theory and the dialectical mode of argumentation he has adopted throughout his analyses, although he uses such terms as ‘paradoxes’, ‘adaptive strategies’, and ‘accommodations’ rather than thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The introduction concludes by analysing how the articles contributed to this special issue build upon Tonkinson’s work in providing their own original syntheses for analysing their own research situations, in some cases also understandable as ‘paradoxes’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thailand's Shan people are Buddhists but their ideas of power as protection are not explained with reference to Buddhism. Juxtaposing their ideas with the cases made for Thai and Javanese helps clarify commonalities and specificities within Southeast Asia. My understanding of power in Shan terms derives from fieldwork encounters. I trace how my understandings grew with repeated fieldwork and with my increasing embedding in social networks in the research community. Former strangers are now close friends and semi-family. Examining this process helps clarify power's embedding and negotiation in social relations. Powerful beings are in theory free from the consequences of their actions, but in real life they are entangled in shifting networks of mutual obligations, exchanges and benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the aesthetics of ethnographic labor in Papua New Guinea. Historical background of ethnography as a form of textual production; Author's idea about ethnography; Use of complicity in the changing mise-en-scene of anthropological fieldwork.

Discusses the articles in this issue of the "Anthropological Forum". Overview of trends in the anthropology of tourism; Tensions within the Australian Aboriginal social order created by Aboriginal ownership of cattle in the Kimberley region of Australia; Contribution of German ethnologist Erhard Eylman to the field of Australian Aboriginal studies.

Though race is rooted in ideas of biological essentialism, language is one of the key modalities through which it is realised in everyday practice. Recent attention in linguistic anthropology has been directed at raciolinguistics: the ways race is constructed as a social category through discourse and interaction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in English language schools located in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, I explore the ways language practices are ascribed to groups of people based on racialised appearances through the schools' promotional activities. Advertising for these schools juxtaposes images of white bodies with brand names that performatively invoke a range of modernising sentiments, establishing an indexical connection between foreign language and new forms of subjectivity. Against the backdrop of Chinese discourses of neoliberal self-improvement, English allows people to narrate their transformations from local to global social actors while transcending the limitations of their own ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many ethnographies, deities reflect social structures, represent power relations, or serve as a resource for individuals. However, believers usually do not doubt the existence of deities and their agency: that is, their ability to act and initiate change. The gap between these points of view narrows in the religious experiences in the Indian Himalayas. There, the local population, who communicate with local deities via mediums, face an epistemological problem: how to be certain that they are, indeed, talking with their gods. Furthermore, the believers are aware that they play a role in the decisions of the gods. These two aspects of the religious experience are expressed in the gradual transition of the gods from a Pahāṛī to a pan-Hindu identity, an indication of the way in which the agency of the gods is being challenged and is subject to negotiation by the locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current collection of articles includes a discussion of Austronesian peoples living in modern nations situated in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Melanesia. It thus crosses many long-established boundaries in area studies which tend to develop their own theoretical dialects. While there are many valid reasons for these theoretical discussions, a shift in focus from geographically defined areas to what might be called 'Greater Austronesia' brings to light new sets of theoretical problems. Our central concern is the extent to which Austronesian societies value social hierarchy over egalitarianism, and the extent to which political leadership is determined through a rule of succession or other form of status ascription, through the competitive achievements of individuals, or actively resisted in the first place through various mechanisms such as the mandatory sharing of wealth, the denigration of ambition, or the dispersal of populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designed to provide temporary shelter to the displaced, in protracted refugee situations camps become places of long-term residency and undergo processes of urban change. The complex realities of protracted encampment challenge the dichotomy between the city (as a norm) and the camp (as an exception) that underpins dominant theoretical models of refugee camps. Instead, the theoretical lens of urban margins allows us to circumvent this binary and analyse the camps from the perspective of their relation to the city and the state. Rather than a specific location, this article approaches urban marginality as a condition produced by unequal power relations behind the enforcement of a particular urban order. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it draws on the case of Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Unlike the majority of studies on Palestinian camps that focus either on top-down politics of exclusion or political agency of camp residents, the article examines how different actors, interests and modes of exercising power (both formal and informal) intersect in camp space and produce, as well as resist and subvert, the condition of urban marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the institutional perspective of a university, student strikes mark a time of heightened disorder. In this contribution, I turn this perspective around and analyse a student strike at the University of Goroka in the Papua New Guinea highlands as an order-making project instead. The observed student strike established an alternative regime among students, which was reinforced through a sense of having achieved a superior sophistication of order through the effective, and affective, alignment of minds and bodies into a single entity. Placing the achievement of collective unity in relation to what appears as Melanesian notions of order on one hand, and recent re-evaluations of the psychology of crowds within anthropology and sociology on the other hand, I explore conceptual connections in the work of 'mediation' between order making in Melanesia and contemporary (critiques of) affect theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In anthropology, decision-making has mainly been studied from two perspectives: rationalist and ethnographic. These approaches lack a theoretical basis which would integrate their findings in a coherent manner. Taking inspiration from Tugendhat and Berthoz, this article argues that a way out of this impasse is to conceptualise decision-making as an action. At the same time, this conceptualisation allows us to establish a continuum of decision-making processes from simple through complex to fundamental, and to understand these processes as malleable across milieux, societies and cultures. This article also goes beyond this by discussing the decision-making process that led a Hausa villager from Niger to decide not to migrate. This discussion shows that the anthropological literature has largely overlooked a type of decision that could be called a ‘maturing decision’. It also sheds light on the role of emotions in decision-making and on the constitutive role of emic ideas about decision-making in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travelling from my old heimat, Germany, I joined in September 2015 a group of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Bible translators on a two-week long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This journey offered further probing into Anangu attachments to place that, until then, I had only known through ethnographic research in their desert homelands in northern South Australia. In the present article, I explore how and why the Anangu Christians forged links with biblically inscribed places to which they had no ancestral ties. What they did bring is a deep-seated sense of emotional connection with Jesus abiding in heaven, and here the pilgrimage was a chance to anchor this relationship in his land – to emplace Christ. Notable in this process of shifting the presence of Jesus from heaven to earth was the pilgrims’ moral concern to keep separate the emplaced stories of their ancestral lands on one hand, and the grounded narratives of the Christian Scriptures on the other. In Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans’ terms, their approach was one of ‘incommensuration’, a strategy to avoid moral conflict by refusing to make comparisons between religious traditions. My article may thus be read as an ethnographic contribution towards the understanding of an Australian Indigenous ethics of placemaking across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has been trying to unify its diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities under one coherent national identity. Queer Singaporeans, however, suffer from a double alienation from the nation. While socially ostracised by the existing anti-sodomy Section 377A and the queer-unfriendly state policies that it justifies, they also suffer from that inability to identify with the nation called the ‘Great Affective Divide’. In this essay, I aim to achieve two goals. Firstly, I invoke the idea of cultural citizenship as I ethnographically investigate the efforts that queer Singaporeans make to overcome their national estrangement, particularly an event called ‘Pink Dot’. While such efforts do not receive universal support from queers, they are essential in the development of a better understanding of it means to be citizens of Singapore. Secondly, rather than wanting to remain socially marginal and critical of the norm, queers actually express their desire for national inclusion through Pink Dot. Yet, I argue that it would be erroneous to read this desire as ‘homonationalism’. As such, Pink Dot provides a fertile example that counters the conventional view within Queer Studies that queers always resist the hetero-patriarchal norm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how Fiji Islanders of diverse ethnic backgrounds living in Japan's Kantō area reflect on and constitute community life in the diaspora. While they occasionally refer to the ‘community’ and speak about its social value, get-togethers of significant numbers occur infrequently. Ultimately, a Fijian-centred community is virtually absent in the everyday lives of Japan-based Fiji Islanders. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Tokyo Metropolis and its neighbouring prefectures, this contribution suggests that for Fiji Islanders in Kantō, talking about ‘community’ serves two particular purposes: on the one hand community discourses create an emotional bond, both among the migrants and between the migrants and their place of origin. At the same time, discourses on the relevance of the community without undergoing efforts to maintain it, serve as strategies of navigating self and belonging in a critical and reflexive way. As migrants’ social lives are complex and shaped by numerous economic, spatial, and individual disjunctures, Kantō Fiji Islanders contextually configure and extend their social relations with regard to their socio-cultural heritage, their place of residence in Japan, theirgaikokujin(foreigner) status, and their life-work cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following overview of the existing literature relating to Aboriginal childhood and adolescence across Australia is intended to support the development of this potentially strong interdisciplinary research field. It presents a select number of works in historical context, concluding with critical comments and supplemented by additional references presented according to type of study. No claim is made to have covered the literature exhaustively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his classic 1909 article, 'Classificatory systems of relationship', A. L. Kroeber argued for a universal procreative or genealogical grid that is largely independent of external causation and therefore directly revelatory of the structure of the human mind. Kroeber's argument is brought to bear upon the so-called 'new kinship studies', particularly upon the lack of such a grid posited in these studies, and is shown to be ethnographically more sensitive. It is, moreover, philosophically more liberating, precisely because it posits the mind's independent activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issues concerning Schneieder's views on kinship. It explores the theory of procreation and co-fatherhood among the Yanomami. It examines the work of Alfred L. Kroeber, a pioneering linguistic anthropologist, on Zuni kinship terminology. According to Kroeber, kinship terminology as linguistic phenomena follows a logic inherent to the linguistic system itself. Also, it analyzes the relational terminology system at Zuni which includes the full linguistic repertoire of forms of social classificational nomenclature both in referential and reciprocal address usages.

The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndt's writing at times obscured the core insights that he had about Yolngu society, and partly as a consequence Australian anthropology has not yet made the best use of the immense richness of his ethnographic legacy. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndt's writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical joking relationship has fascinated anthropologists for decades, especially in relation to African societies. The existence of joking relationships in Aboriginal Australia has also been noted in ethnographies, but rarely described in a way that acknowledges that kinship-mediated humour can actually be creative and funny. Kinship is obviously central to an understanding of these relationships, but the institutions that engender joking relationships have (surprisingly) rarely been discussed in detail for any Australian Aboriginal group. Taking the Bininj Kunwok and Dalabon-speaking peoples of western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory as a case study, I seek to demonstrate a generalisation that, in this part of Australia, joking relationships index the absence of actual affinity. The pretentious bluster, vulgarity and teasing of joking relationships ironically echo appropriate ways of behaving with actual affines. Whereas respect and avoidance are the hallmarks of interaction between actual affines, one jokes with a class of potential affines with whom actual affinity is not envisaged or has been renounced. The two forms of behaviour are intimately linked. Respect for affines is the default form of behaviour and the markedness of the departure from this expectation in joking relationships signals the existence of a different type of affinal relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. 'Development' as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native self-judgments are located 'at home' for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, the authors convened a session entitled 'Public Anthropology' at the Australian Anthropology Society's annual conference. The session examined the development of a specific stream of public anthropology in the USA and Britain and its articulation by writers such as Robert Borofsky in the aftermath of the Yanomami controversy and Richard Werbner in the African context. In pursuing this discussion, we identify three key characteristics that distinguish public anthropology: the broader application of ethnography to urgent and political social issues in a way that shows the profoundly relational nature of current crises to historical, political and local events and forces; a focus on this approach as a central aspect of training, particularly at the postgraduate level; and an active and accessible engagement in public discussion and debate. We present a short case study from Skidmore's research on disease, suffering and the health system in Burma to illustrate ways in which a public anthropology approach could represent the current health crisis in Burma in an effective manner. Drawing also on the work of our fellow panellists, we argue for the timeliness of the development of a public anthropology stream in Australia and for the deliberate inclusion of public anthropology in the Australian Anthropology Society's mandate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article is a critical evaluation of recent ethnographic contributions and theoretical debates concerning cargo cults. It examines how Foucault's genealogical and discursive methodologies can be used in a way that undercuts their valuable insights. The recent self-reflexive turn, where anthropology focuses on the moral politics of its own discourses, can lead to a silencing of the moral political discourses of others. Moreover self-reflexivity can become an authorising strategy for academics keen to downplay race and resistance in millenarian movements where these are important features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several responses to the article "Yulara and future expert reports in native title cases," by Basil Samson which was published in the March 2007 issue of the journal. One reader proposes that the anthropological testimony was an attempt at skillful between native legal doctrine, the anthropological archive and the evidence of the Aboriginal claimants. Meanwhile, another reader expressed that applicant parties would have recourse to native title judgment more favorably.

Presents information about the critical ethnography in Oceania. Concerns on politics of reception; Reciprocal challenge of Oceanic anthropology to its audiences; Contradictory values on the idea of anthropology among regional scholars and in Oceanic public discourse.

Outlines some experiences of the author as an Ōiwi in the anthropological slot in Hawaii. Confrontation on the slotted relationship between an anthropologist and native peoples; Presentation of the critical ethnographic practice and political conditions; Arguments on the unsettled conditions of modern anthropology.