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This paper pivots around an exceptional moment of colonial missionary encounter—the attempted "murder" in the 1930s of an incarnation of Samburu Divinity (pastoralists, northern Kenya). Examining this event through a comparative focus on other strange cases of "divinicide," I elucidate certain key moments of intense metaphysical struggle that typically become effaced, forgotten, or flattened in the process of colonial witness. Focus on the ontological micropolitics of exceptional moments of the colonial encounter such as these affords us the opportunity to illuminate crucial, often elusive, even substantially forgotten dimensions of the unequal process by which shared cultural imaginaries are forged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay was written in the context of a project to set up an archive of texts in popular Swahili on an Internet web site called Language and Popular Culture (www.pscw.uva.nl/lpca/). The formulation of thoughts on commentary came as the last of four steps. Step 1 was the deposition in this archive of the original text and translations of a colonial history entitled Vocabu-laire de ville de Elisabethville (previously published in Fabian 1990a). This was followed--step 2--by the inclu-sion on the same site of the text and a translation of recorded comments made by Kalundi Mango during our work on the translation of the Vocabulaire. Step 3 was the production of a commentary I decided to write when I realized that my translation of Kalundi's comments was getting overburdened with footnotes ('Commenting Ka-lundi's comments''). Step 4--though I actually began working on it while writing the commentary--was an attempt to think through some of the theoretical and practical consequences of the Internet for ethnography based on a virtual text-archive. With the advent of the Internet, language-centered anthropology-- understood here as anthropology that conceives of research as communicative and mediated above all by language--faces a new situation. The conditions of recourse to ethnographic texts, the documents of fieldwork that are among our primary sources, have changed (or could change) radically. Traditional genres of anthropological writing (such as the scientific paper, the monograph, or the historical account) place limits on the uses of ethnographic texts (and even more so of audiovisual records); the new possibility we have of depositing these documents on web sites makes them present in ways that are bound to affect ethnographic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new reading of Franz Boas's philosophy of science and his approach to the understanding of culture and behavior. It points out that his approach had important parallels with the worldview of the major figures associated with pragmatism and suggests that a similar perspective can be useful today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]