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This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1976, the Sahrawi national liberation movement known as the Polisario Front anticipates state sovereignty in Western Sahara by organizing into the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Southern Algeria. Drawing on excerpts from the life-histories of six Sahrawi women who contributed to build the SADR's early social and physical infrastructures, this paper presents practices of public remembrance as coextensive to a history-making labour of social regeneration that seeks international recognition for the Sahrawi nation, as well as to pass on nationalist moral values and political desire across time. The life-worlds of the Sahrawi generation these six women belong to have undergone considerable structural changes brought about by Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the Polisario Front in the 1970s, war, forced displacement, and a 1991 UN mediated ceasefire. Highlighting the on-going vitality of anticolonial nationalisms, this paper offers an account of how elderly Sahrawi female militants seek to socially regenerate the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through their production of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the challenges and possibilities of combining archival and ethnographic methods in the field of 'communal' violence studies in India. Drawing insights from debates among historians and anthropologists on the multifarious interactions between archives and ethnography and reflecting on the empirical case of persistent violence between Muslims and Christians in southern India, it argues for a creative synthesis of these two modes of inquiry for an adequate understanding of 'communal' violence and riot inquiry commissions in India. First, the paper critiques how colonial and postcolonial Indian archival reports problematically inscribe violence between any religious communities (such as Muslims and Christians) in the same narrative as the predominant case of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Second, it illuminates how archival ethnography can be an effective way of studying violence between religious communities and thus transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the paper introduces a nuanced approach, called 'ethnography of archiving', to detail the judicial and nonjudicial discourses and bureaucratic manoeuvring involved in the creation of an archival report, thereby unravelling the power relations, mediating processes, manipulations and bureaucratic performances that make commission reports problematic even today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Mission Raquez, a French ethnographic expedition through Laos to collect material for the Marseille Colonial Exposition of 1906. This paper discusses the location of extant material and considers the ethnographic methods used on the mission in conjunction with anthropological study, mass media, and popular celebrity in turn of the century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centered on the dalla, the Omani coffee pot, this paper considers how the social practices and knowledges induced by its material form and function organize different forms of perceptual skills. These skills habituate ways of seeing that become a means towards examining the shift from the religio–ethical relationships that defined the shari'a society of the last Ibadi Islamic Imamate that ruled the interior of the region (1913–1955) to those that define 'heritage' as part of Omani modern nation state building today. As a coffee server in the Imamate era, the dalla facilitated a history that was primarily moral in nature, oriented towards God and divine salvation. From 1970 onwards, as a visual symbol, it became an integral part of a national linear chronicle of progressive historicity. Through a shift in authoritative time, rationales of temporality, ethics and history were reconfigured, displacing an Imamate while establishing a modern-day Sultanate in its place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In approaching history as a site of scholarly analysis and activist praxis, the papers in this volume open up new ways to think ethnographic and archival methods together. This afterword considers how these activist ethnographic representations work as part of the ethical and analytic commitments of contemporary anthropology more broadly. I ask what possibilities are opened when we as scholars think with other people's struggles. Such dialogic encounter is a way in which activist anthropologies create possibilities for new imaginative frontiers and shared projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to 'settle accounts' with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Qing emperors, who ruled over China from 1644 to 1911, managed to bring large parts of Inner Asia under their control and extended the territory of China to an unprecedented degree. This paper maintains that the political technique of patronage with its formalized language, its emphasis on gift exchange and expressions of courtesy is a useful concept for explaining the integration of Inner Asian confederations into the empire. By re-interpreting the obligations of gift exchange, the Qing transformed the network of personal relationships, which had to be reinforced and consolidated permanently, into a system with clearly defined rules. In this process of formalization, the Lifanyuan, the Court for the Administration of the Outer Regions, played a key role. While in the early years of the dynasty, it was responsible for collecting and disseminating information concerning the various patronage relationships with Inner Asian leaders, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its efforts were directed at standardizing and streamlining the contacts between ethnic minorities and the state. Through the Lifanyuan, the rules and principles of patronage were maintained in a modified form even in the later part of the dynasty, when the Qing exercised control in the outer regions more directly. The paper provides an explanation for the longevity and cohesiveness of the multi-ethnic Qing Empire. Based on recently published Manchu and Mongol language archival material and the Maussian concept of gift exchange, the study sheds new light on the changing self-conception of the Qing emperors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the changing role of wealth and movements of money in investigators' evolving anthropological imagination of the social structure of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its relationship with its surrounding in key moments of Antimafia investigations in one Sicilian province over the past 40 years. The routes of money, which initially marked exchange-based relations between two otherwise mutually extraneous actors, gradually indexed a more complex combination of reciprocity, exchange, and redistribution both within the mafia legally constructed and in its relationship to its surrounding. At the same time, the public and official anthropological imaginary of the mafia-politica nexus permits only exchange between mutually-external parties or reciprocity as an entity-creating internal thread. As a result, the complexity of wealth, which investigations reveal by 'following money,' requires constant reduction to individual bearers of monetary worth and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinctions between 'wealth' and 'money' such as the competing classifications of 'bridewealth' and 'brideprice' have a long pedigree in anthropology. Equally important has been the terminological struggle between 'shell-money' and 'shellwealth'. In this paper, I explore the ways in which a well-known example, Tolai tabu, circulates in the twenty-first century. I argue that whilst describing it as a form of wealth (in contrast to market-based idioms such as 'money' or 'price') continues to make sense, this distinction only comes into being from certain perspectives. In an era of rapidly emerging socio-economic inequality, the best starting point is not an assumed holistic opposition between Western commodity idioms and their non-Western Other. Ethnographic observation reveals how perspectives on tabu that stress its difference and similarity from money come in and out of being in different conversational contexts as an attempt to shape the limits of future relations and obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Cold War, India maintained a policy of non-alignment, first in relation to China and later in relation to the US and USSR. This policy allowed India to receive support from both superpowers during the Cold War, and bolstered Jawaharlal Nehru’s efforts to craft a secular nation that would modernize rapidly along socialist lines. As is inevitably the case, reality proved more complicated than policy. The political context became messy, and myriad translations of socialism in regional contexts pulled at the seams of Nehru’s dream, particularly in the rural areas he sought to modernize through dams, irrigation projects, and infrastructural development. In this paper, I interrogate Cold War socialism at its highly translated margins through the work of Sant Tukdoji Maharaj, a singer-saint from rural Eastern Maharashtra whose influence was local, national, and international. Tukdoji was many things to many people: a devotional singer, a Gandhian, a champion of progressive land reform, an international spokesperson for World Peace, and a supporter of nuclear defence at the Chinese and Pakistani fronts. Tukdoji’s music absorbed influences from beyond rural Maharashtra, but many of his songs obscure the depth of his international political engagements and the complexity of his intersecting ideologies. Through close readings of his songs and writings, this article explores how Tukdoji Maharaj adapted cosmopolitan political ideas to particular contexts, crafting each cultural translation to be optimally intelligible and impactful for a given audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a method of collections building within the practice of natural history, the exchange of duplicate specimens was carried out by anthropology curators and collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper examines exchanges resulting from a three-month tour of European museums by Smithsonian Institution Curator of Ethnology Otis T. Mason in 1889. Framed by the idea of a network of social and institutional ties, we evaluate the role of specimen exchange in the development of anthropology and museums on an international scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this paper is to document the ongoing shift from communicative to cultural memory of war and post-war events in the Czech Republic by using an example of a local struggle about a memorial for German inhabitants of a Czech town killed in June 1945. Thanks to an anthropological and social geographical approach based on interviews, family memory research, observations, and analysis of archive materials, it is possible to reconstruct the local and international sources of the post-1989 collective memory of the German past in Central Europe. This memory is still in constant conflict with the pre-1989 version of Czech national history which had contemptuously marginalized its German component. The communicative memory of the German past has entered the public space and tries to become a permanent part of the Czech cultural memory, but it is not a straightforward process, mainly due to the continuously strengthening nationalistic framing of memory within Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on four decades of field research on the Danube-Tisza interfluve, the Western zone of the Great Hungarian Plain, this paper places the “overheating” of the post-Cold War era in alongue duréeperspective. The first section traces a millennium of history in terms of multi-directional migrations and civilizational encounters of various kinds: between sedentary agriculturalists and pastoral nomads, between Christian and Muslim agrarian orders, and between capitalist and socialist industrial orders. The Hungarian variant of Marxism-Leninism (unlike most other variants) relied considerably on material incentives to households. It attached high priority to transforming the countryside, which experienced an effervescent involution or “overheating” in the last decades of socialism. Since 1991, however, the market socialist synthesis has given way to a peripheral variant of Western market capitalism. Overheating is no longer a phenomenon of the rural economy, which has lost the dynamism of the socialist decades and experiences deprivation in absolute as well as relative forms. Rather, overheating is to be observed in the symbolic dimension of political legitimation, as populist political parties vie with each other in nationalist rhetoric. This overheating was evident in negative attitudes towards strangers seeking to transit this part of Hungary in the summer of 2015, a migratory process which provided a challenge to the whole of the European Union. It is argued that these attitudes in rural Hungary can be explained in terms of the ressentiments of a population which has been palpably thrown back into an underdog position on the margins of Western capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 2013 elections, the Sicilian city of Messina voted-in a mayor from the Cambiamo Messina dal Basso (CMDB) movement. Perceived as a Messiah sent to save the city from years of political and economic mismanagement, it soon became clear that it would not be easy for him to negotiate the bureaucracy of the traditional clientelist political establishment. This paper explores how the CMDB movement has come to terms with negotiating bureaucratic and structural time while attempting to maintain their Messianic ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the past is used to interrogate the present under conditions of social and economic crisis. It focuses on the ways national history and personal historicity blended in the media frenzy and public reactions generated in the summer of 2014 by archaeological discoveries in a burial mound in Northern Greece that captured the attention of the nation for many months. During a time of intense debate over the privatization of national resources, growing demands for Nazi war-crime reparations, and increasing pauperization, popular speculation over the mound as a hiding place for priceless treasures was very often informed by mistrust towards the state, its representatives, and its experts. I look into history and culture to investigate how the past in conditions of crisis and uncertainty can weigh heavy in peoples’ identity claims, social demands, and moral economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The worship of dead Inca kings, because it aimed at preserving the deceased's bodily integrity, reveals constituent aspects of royal personhood. Underpinning these practices was the conception that the dead's agency was conveyed through corporeal substances, which therefore required constant acts of sustenance. This paper examines the bodily practices and material substances that shaped the king's physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king's faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule he thus stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king's appropriation of state resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An early nineteenth-century British voyager, Captain Hall, published in 1818 an account of his landing at Okinawa Island and encounter with the court nobility of what was still at that time the Kingdom of the Ryukyus: Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo [Ryûkyû] Island in the Japan Sea. The paper asks: Why did the Ryukyuans respond to the unannounced entry into their waters by two British naval ships by a seemingly boundless hospitality? With a sideline view on the Sahlins-Obeyesekere controversy, the author proposes that even as the Ryukyuans were eulogizing the entry of the British by showering them with one-sided attention and acknowledging their royal credentials, they tried at the same time to make a bid for their departure. They might have been deploying ritual techniques apparent still today: of welcoming and (subsequent) sending-off in one single act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What Western academic literature described as ethnic or cultural Tibet in fact implies something composite and processually constructed: Tibet then often appears as a typical example for explanations of collective identity (and ethnicity). Such approaches increasingly are applied in present-day anthropology and historical studies, highlighting the historical conditions and the politically, socially and ideationally constructed features of identity. In Tibet, identity-building was strongly related to the spread of Buddhism. The new religion was introduced in the time of the Tibetan Empire (seventh to ninth century), but it was only its later spread (from the eleventh century) that led to the effective, all-embracing establishment of Buddhism in the Highlands. It was interlinked with regionally different forms of political manifestations—the founding of Buddhist kingdoms at the periphery and the emergence of monastic hegemonies in the central regions. These developments correlated with processes of conversion, which in its narrative model is described as an act of conquest, taming and civilizing the physical universe and which in theory actually never ends. Apart from considering current anthropological discussions of the phenomenon of religious conversion, this paper will include a comparative view of the history of Christianization in early medieval Europe (especially in Western Europe—the Frankish kingdom and the barbarian zones North of the Rhine and the Danube, fifth to tenth century). Inter alia this also raises questions about the initial social forces and interests promoting the new religion's adoption, and to what extent formal similarities with the Tibetan case are ascertainable in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]