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Axel Sommerfelt's paper for the symposium organized by Fredrik Barth ahead of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is given a broader readership in this issue. This biography provides some background to the perspectival differences between Axel Sommerfelt and Barth, that revolve around issues of political inequality, experience and historicity. Axel Sommerfelt shared Barth's anti-essentialist view on ethnicity, but did not fully embrace the instrumentalist underpinnings of Barth's perspective. He was theoretically influenced by the Manchester school, and directed attention to political domination from the point of view of the dominated, a focus that grew out of his ethnography from Ruwenzori in Uganda. Judicial institutions constituted an important arena for the negotiation of ethnic boundaries, and specifically, Toro-Konzo relations were partly shaped in judicial contexts that Toro controlled, under British protectorate supervision. His interest in resistance was also influenced by his upbringing in Norway during Nazi occupation. [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, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead 'out of place', I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual 'separation'. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic 'total war', which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a preliminary biographical exploration, this article provides an introductory study into Raymond Firth's early research, as it initially related to Māoridom. Using archival and creative collaborative techniques to look at anthropology's contemporary past, it contends that Firth is amongst the earliest founders of the ethnographic approach known as 'the anthropology of/at home'. A significant interest in the biographic description of anthropologists is currently taking place. As a newly developing self-conscious genre, the intellectual biography is becoming central to the way in which the discipline writes its own history. This paper not only provides an introduction into Firth's Māori work (as found in his MA and PhD research), but also demonstrates the use of experimental methods in creating an 'archaeology of us'. In seeing the lesser known and largely disregarded elements of Firth's personal history as a poorly investigated type of biographical data, I suggest that such interdisciplinary approaches are essential in conducting biographical research. Despite two Festschrifts honouring Firth's contributions to the discipline, there is as yet no lengthy biography of this acclaimed economic anthropologist. He was 'born and bred' in Aotearoa/NZ, but migrated to the UK in 1924 to pursue his doctorate. By tracing the early career path and initial written output of one of the longest lived and most influential ethnographers/ethnologists in the discipline's legacy, this paper contributes to expanding the biographical genre – both regarding antipodean academic history, as well as in dealing with international migration, the movement of ideas and social anthropology's diasporic intellectual landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Klaus Neumann's critical approach to Pacific history which attends to the 'trash' of the past – 'the irrelevant, the insignificant, the marginal, and the negligible' – this paper revisits the margins of our sources. Captions, doodles, annotations and other forms of marginal trash need to be addressed in their own right, and for the light they shed on the main body of source materials, whether textual, audio-visual, or artefactual. The folio drawings produced by the Russian anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay in Oceania between 1871 and 1883 provide an exemplary if fragmentary archive through which the interplay of the central and the marginal, the visual and the textual, can be considered. The visual richness of his sketches and the scope for historical and ethnographic analysis and reconstruction are considerably enhanced and extended by focusing on his many marginal scribbles, which include obvious captions as well as stray observations, word-lists, and other commentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Austria in wider discussions around the repercussions of colonial violence on a global scale. It focusses on the ways in which anthropological disciplines fashioned specific ideas of racial and ethnographic belonging both within and outside the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Understanding how Austrian knowledge production relied on and participated in colonial expropriation sheds light on the significance of the post-colonial for a nation that did not establish formal colonial rule overseas. The unearthing of the mortal remains of people and other forms of colonial exploitation such as geological extraction were deeply intertwined; they were often conducted within the very same expedition. These processes of colonial dispossession continue to be operative today. Anthropological and other 'collections' from colonial contexts that are housed in European institutions speak to the currency of these issues. This paper argues that different conceptions of time – of the relation between past and present – complicate ongoing negotiations of the meaning of Austria's colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ethnographic qualities of nineteenth-century sociographic journalism. It examines texts published in English, French, and Spanish journals, magazines, and serials, which deal with social behaviours, types, and institutions of the modernizing societies. By focusing on the representational techniques with which these 'social sketches' approach the social world and the ways the authors reflect on ethnographic authority and representation, this paper aims at situating early journalism among the founding genres of ethnography and social study. [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]

The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controversy, and these concerns persisted into a second generation as evolutionism was marginalized and prehistoric archaeology matured. Although the eolith debate finally floundered in the debris of the “epistemic rupture” between the world of Victorian evolutionism and late twentieth-century anthropology, some of its technical pre-occupations—particularly in relation to what we would now call ethnographic analogies and in terms of the techniques for distinguishing artefacts from geofacts—persist and are very much current issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how an expanding Mexican state sought the insights of ethnographic theory and practice between the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the Instituto Nacional Indigenista Coordinating Center in los Altos de Chiapas and its relationship with national and foreign researchers active in the same area, I show how ideas about gender affected the organization of health services, the hiring of indigenous promotores, and the differential treatment of women and men traditional medicine healers as well as anthropology graduate students and researchers. The article is organized around two conceptually distinct though, in reality, overlapping spaces: (1) the anthropologist's fieldwork site and relations between informants, professors, and students and (2) the Mexican state's provision of health services. Even if gender was not an automatic category of exclusion or inclusion of the researcher into a local community, ethnographic insights were formed through fieldwork practices that were determined in part by gender difference and relations among researchers and their subjects. Ultimately, both anthropologists and the Mexican state indigenous agency grew to rely informally on gender as a category of expertise for gaining access to indigenous women in particular, even if the "gender intermediaries" who helped achieve this access were frequently unpaid and received little formal recognition or reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Callon's [2005. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller's Critique of The Laws of the Markets.”Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter6 (2): 3–20] concept of agencement, together with Latour's [1987.Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] concept of immutable combinable mobiles to illustrate how Henry Devenish Skinner, ethnologist and anthropology lecturer at the Otago Museum and University sought to form and shape Māori identity, history, culture and populations as subjects of liberal government. It does this through an exploration of Skinner's fieldwork and collecting practices. The paper suggests that forms of analysis mediated through the American History School, and the culture area concept were deployed during the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in New Zealand (between 1919 and 1940) to produce ethnographic authority that then acted as a point of connection between scientific networks and the colonial administrative field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores how the reconstruction of a Baroque castle in Transylvania became an indirect strategy to speed up its restitution to the former owners. It also analyses the reactions that this reconstruction and the request for its restitution triggered among the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic village where the castle is located. The castle used to belong to a famous Hungarian aristocratic family but became nationalized as state property under the post-1945 communist regime. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the debates around the legal status and cultural value of the Bánffy castle reveal how various actors, ranging from the NGO experts, the lawyers supporting the heir, the state institutions, the local authorities, and the villagers engaged with one another in a struggle about meaning and value that was carried out through a struggle over competing temporalities. All of these actors strategically carved up the past, seeking particular historical periods that would ground and justify their own (legal or symbolical) claims over the castle. In response to the calls of external actors to remember a history that did not exist, such as an idyllic narrative of mutual cooperation between the castle and the village before the communist period, the villagers strategically used the divide between communism and postcommunism. They did so to both justify their past actions, including their alleged participation in the castle's ruination, as morally sound, and to reject foreign experts' attempts to idealize the interwar period and deny any value to the communist times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2008 marked not only the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claude Levi-Strauss, but also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the founder of Italian cultural anthropology, Ernesto De Martino. De Martino died in 1965, leaving a legacy of extensive fieldwork research in Southern Italy, original works, an incomplete manuscript (entitled La Fine del Mondo), and an impressive set of suggestions regarding theory and research methodologies that deserve further exploration. In this paper, using the well known De Martinian “principle of critical ethnocentrism”, I focus on finding relationships between the theoretical and ethnographical activity of De Martino and so-called “post-colonial” thought. In particular I show how, in his first fieldwork experience in Lucania, De Martino could be considered the first post-colonial ethnographer, especially through his questioning of the role of subaltern people in making history and culture, and through his attempt at transforming social relationships into a “colonial situation”. Nevertheless, in spite of De Martino's deep commitment at transforming both his ethnological practice and his actual engagement with his subjects, his actual realization of the principle of “critical ethnocentrism” was somewhat vitiated. This paper attempts to tackle the reasons for this failure of promise. Principal among these was the constant, if somewhat hidden, presence of his mentor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, in De Martino's work, even in those situations where De Martino believed himself to be firmly distancing himself from Croce. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that an understanding of such a “failure” is actually instructive if we wish to understand the relationship between the “anthropologist/researcher” and the “subaltern”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares my anthropological monograph about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa. It aims to compare two representational strategies of an historical figure—on the one hand, that of an anthropologist writing for a wider audience of expert social scientists and Islamic scholars and, on the other hand, an indigenous devotee who knew the saint well, claiming divine inspiration in his writings intended to honour his departed saint and to sacralize his name. The paper interrogates the fuzzy boundary between hagiography and ethnography, literary and descriptive text, fact and fiction, truth and myth, history and archeology in order to raise questions about the limits of dialogical anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores some of the consequences of using archival materials produced by an anthropologist's informants. What happens when a resident from a rural area of Cuba is hired to write about the “world”, a term used by Carl L. Withers, in which he, his relatives and his neighbours live? By reading letters and other papers sent during the late 1940s, and kept by Withers for more than thirty years, my hypothesis is that his informants took seriously their capacity to create something other than a simple “testimony”. Withers's principal informant, created himself, his neighbours, strange beings and the world in which they cohabited as a certain type of artefact, as “data”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I review recent contributions to theories of resistance and agency in the context of anthropology of Egypt. Drawing on ethnography conducted in Egypt after the January 25th Revolution and then after the election of Mohamed Morsi as President, I analyse the mass mobilization movement in Egypt called Tamarod. Tamarod led the effort to have twenty-two million Egyptians sign a call for President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to step down, and mobilized an estimated twelve million to come on the street for a mass demonstration on 30 June, after which Morsi was removed from power. Rather than critique the notion of Tamarod as resistance, as a dupe of the Military, or as the legitimate voice of the Egyptian people and their agency, I argue that Tamarod made visible, and rendered available for political goals, a social infrastructure of communicative channels in Egypt. More generally, the paper shows concretely, and as concomitant processes, how agency is embedded in infrastructure and how infrastructure is upended in uprisings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on a transfer of a museological model from the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial Indochina, the paper examines the failure to create an ethnographic museum. The paper analyses, on the one hand, the collecting practices in the field and the circulation of knowledge, people, and objects from metropole to colony and vice versa. On the other hand, it seeks to highlight why Rivet and the École Française d'Extrême-Orient focused their research programme on the Montagnards from 1932 onwards at a time when French administration attempted to control the Highlands due to its strategic importance in terms of controlling Indochina. The concern with establishing ethnographic collections in Indochina extending from 1920s to 1938 attests the ways in which museums could be evolved in the governance of colonial populations. However, this concern underestimated the very fact that ethnographic museums differed for metropolitan populations and for colonizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between a particular photographic archive, Indigenous Australians and early ethnography. Colonial ethnographers, Spencer and Gillen, travelled throughout Central and Northern Australia in 1901 and 1902. Their experiences in the town of Borroloola with the local Indigenous peoples, in particular the Yanyuwa people, are contrasted to their experiences in other regions that they travelled through. While at Borroloola, Spencer and Gillen photographed a number of Yanyuwa men and women. In 1981, the repatriation of those images back into the community facilitated discussion about the appropriate positioning of each individual in Yanyuwa systems of kinship, and debate around the ceremonial details recorded, informing new layers of social memory. Yanyuwa elders expressed joy at viewing, naming and positioning the long deceased kin but when the identity of the person could not be recalled, responses conveyed a deep sense of loss. This paper explores the response to one of these photographs and explores in detail the resonances that this one photograph holds for the Yanyuwa community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses loyalty and disloyalty among soldiers serving in the Soviet army in the border war with China in the 1960s. It argues that loyalty and disloyalty can be seen as differently weighted patterns of social attachment. In both cases, these are partial and changeable, but the two differ in that loyalty involves a paring down of diverse ties in order to elevate an object of commitment ‘beyond reason’, whereas disloyalty consists in the perverse retention of attachments in contradistinction to whatever has been designated loyal. Ethnography is drawn upon to suggest the actual complexity of individual cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the potential of cultural anthropology to reinvigorate the study of Arab media and to help deepen our understanding of the complexity of media practices in the changing Middle East region. Drawing on critical theory and recent ethnographic work, the paper is an attempt to refocus the study of Arab media within cultural anthropology. It argues that the study of the evolving Arab mediascape calls not so much for consolidating the field within the purview of the discipline of media and communication, but for a cross-disciplinary, theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of localized practices that is amenable to articulating overlapping dynamics of correspondences and disjunctions set in motion by mass-mediated everyday life processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs' materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives. Taken by the government anthropologist F. E. Williams in 1922 in the village of Ukiaravi, this portrait of the two young boys Kauei Ove and Kauri demonstrating a string-figure is one of some ninety-six glass plates produced by Williams during his eight-month trip to the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Viewed with communities, this photograph generated a series of conversations about a set of relations involving the mimetic faculties of Crocodile Monitor Lizards, the growth of knowledge through bodily transformation during male initiation, and various modes of history telling and making. In examining these relationships and the ways in which they unfolded around engagements with this glass plate, I contribute to discussions about the nature of fieldwork and the productive possibilities that connecting source communities to their photographic and archival legacies has for them, museums and the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Values of honourable courtship are expressed in dance and this paper is an ethnographic reconstruction of a Greek island dance called the sousta practised on the Dodecanesian island of Rhodes during the interwar period (1925-1940). Its performance was a dynamic interplay of gender roles that mediated romance and moved the performers toward the resolution of marriage. The aim of the paper is to elaborate on values ascribed to men and women during the occasion of dancing at a village wedding in southern Rhodes. The interplay of grace (hari) and honour (timi) will locate why and how men reveal through hari and why women are concealed through timi during the dance performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest among anthropologists and historians in more in-depth engagements with social silence, in this special issue we argue for a theorization of silences that is at once more robust and open to the particular; a theorization, we suggest, that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility, and uncertainty of interpretation. We ask what it means to trace silences, and to include traces of silence in our ethnographic representations. What qualifies as silence, and how does it relate to articulation; to voice, visibility and representation? How can silences be sensed and experienced viscerally as well as narratively? And how do we think with and start interpreting silences in the face of potential unknowability? The contributions to this special issue suggest that tracing silences, through a range of modes and methods, and in the historical, social and political ways in which they emerge and are enacted in the particularities of people's lives, is a crucial task for historians and anthropologists alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an approach for working with vernacular texts in ethnographic archives. It examines Dinka song texts collected in (South) Sudan by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (between 1947 and 1951), now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Songs were central to developing Lienhardt's ethnographic analysis; they are also an exciting and unique record of popular and artistic expression at the time of his research. The songs he transcribed offer perspectives on life under colonial rule that are often occluded in the documentary and ethnographic record (including Lienhardt's own writing). In this article, I examine a selection of songs, showing that to be understood today they must be seen as both a product of Lienhardt's data collecting practices and works of art in their own right. It is possible to usefully recontextualize these songs by triangulating between Lienhardt's published work, his unpublished field notes and other academic studies in South Sudanese history and anthropology. Importantly, these songs must be treated as verbal arts – and read with an appreciation of their aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Their meaning and significance is not always straightforward, in fact they are often deliberately opaque. Any interpretation must embrace these 'difficult' aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sources of information about Australian Aborigines from various sources. Views of founder of modern International communism Karl Marx's on theories of economist Robert Thomas Malthus; Use of Australian Aboriginal Ethnography by archeologist Lewis Henry Morgan; Sources of information of Morgan's knowledge about Australian aborigines.

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]

The Csangos are an ethnic/religious minority from Moldavia, Eastern Romania. They are defined as legitimate subjects by two antagonistically nationalizing projects: the Hungarian and the Romanian one. I am not trying to discover some “authentic” or “hybrid” identity that would explain away the ambiguities connected with this ethno-religious group. The Csangos appear, in this paper, as mutating historical forms and figures, made up through fateful events and part of “historical ontologies”. Because of their specific position inside opposed nationalisms, they can provide theoretical insights into the constituting of nationalizing narratives, ethnography and social sciences in East and Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the interrelationships, historically and culturally, between ethnography, silence, torture and knowledge. As a key methodology for anthropology, and increasingly other academic disciplines, ethnography has also become a broader cultural value. In the context of the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline the epistemology implicit in ethnography is discussed with reference to he cultural meanings of silence and of torture. The influences of Classical and Enlightenment ideas of the foundation of truth in agonistic performance on modernist science and social research provide a context for discerning the pragmatic convergence between ethnography and torture, especially in recent attempt to weaponize culture and recruit social scientists to military counter-insurgency campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces and contextualizes Istikhara, Islamic dream incubation practice, as a way to approach the dynamics of Muslims' inner and outer worlds as an interrelated process of embodied well-being. We introduce an anthropologically informed debate on healing dreaming in Islam and Islamic healing dreaming practices. Based on our research, we discuss ethnographic examples of Istikhara as practised by British Pakistanis, Pakistanis and last but not least a case study from a corner of the Muslim world, Muslim Bosnia. We explore a shared propensity to dream, though a culturally informed one, and situate the practice into a general economy of Muslim well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a cultural anthropological approach to investigate an indigenous Australian perspective on atmospheric phenomena and seasons, using data gained from historical records and ethnographic fieldwork. Aboriginal people believe that the forces driving the weather are derived from Creation Ancestors and spirits, asserting that short term changes are produced through ritual. By recognizing signals such as wind direction, rainfall, temperature change, celestial movements, animal behaviour and the flowering of plants, Aboriginal people are able to divide the year into seasons. Indigenous calendars vary widely across Australia and reflect annual changes within Aboriginal lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersections between masculinity, migration and marital strategies through both a historical and ethnographic focus on the everyday lives of Turkmen men from Northern Afghanistan working in Turkey. While the economic rationales of migration (in response to war and poverty) have been studied previously, this is the first time the intertwined nature of the marital and migratory strategies of Afghan men have been examined in a diaspora context. This involves examining the connections between strategies of self-making as adult males through marriage and strategies of capital accumulation as migrant workers. Moreover, providing for one's family, rather than the desire for individual fulfilment, is a key signifier of a caring and loving man and one of the many ways in which men in Afghanistan assert and perform their masculinity. The argument presented in this article seeks to go beyond the notion that young Turkmen men from Afghanistan are merely conservative in their attitudes to marriage in terms of compliance to parental choice of partners. Rather, it seeks to highlight the importance of the maintenance of social networks that require the upholding of moral and material obligations towards familial and kin elders to the livelihood strategies of these men. This argument integrates Afghan men (and especially Turkmen men) into wider discussions of patriarchy and family life in globalizing contexts rather than simply treating them as an exception to broader socio-economic trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unsung alumnus of the Manchester School, Axel Sommerfelt (b. 1926) published little during his career, but has nevertheless had a major impact on contemporary Norwegian anthropology. Following six years as a lecturer in Salisbury, he taught at the University of Oslo from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. This article traces his intellectual itinerary. Beginning with a re-study of Fortes's Tallensi material, Sommerfelt later carried out fieldwork on inter-ethnic relations in south-western Uganda. He distinguished himself from his Norwegian colleagues through an interest in colonial history, nationalism and structural power which tends to be absent from Fredrik Barth's work. Sommerfelt's teaching and mainly unpublished writings reveal him as a supporter of a strong empiricist programme and a skilled Africanist who would have been a worthy contributor to the Manchester School, had he only published his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do soldiers recall and voice their wartime experiences when the war they fought is under scrutiny? How do they inscribe the recollection of private affairs in a potentially contested colonial past? Drawing from an ethnography of war memory and focusing on an artillery unit's deployment in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, in 1971, this article tackles both the soldiers' memories and the military reports about the unit's length of service. It articulates and contrasts the formulaic order of the official account with the veterans' affective storytelling, to unearth the cracks that run beneath the reconfiguration of colonial war violence in Angola. Soldiers' narratives, it will be argued, avoid the wars' dystopic potential by dislocating attention to the affective reverberation of the past and by silencing accounts of bloodshed. And yet, they are unable to fully de-politicize their wartime stories, as soldiers unwittingly disclose episodes of sexual violence against African women, hence exposing the enduring entanglements of sexuality, race and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of 'network societies'. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses original ethnographic data to document the kinds of informal diplomacy conducted by members of a transnational kinship group embedded in both the Syrian and the Russian regimes. As such it provides a rare ethnographic perspective on international relations of strongmen regimes in Syria and Russia. Relatively few studies have explored relationships of cooperation between modern political regimes which are mediated by transnational kinship networks. Rather than approaching transnational kinship networks as instrumental channels that states use to achieve their purposes, the article argues that this network has been able to colonise the Syrian state, by deploying violence on an urban scale and maintaining high-ranking diplomatic connections on a transregional scale. It also argues that such networks should not be understood by negation, as the absence of formal institutions, or as an alternative to the 'real channels' of diplomacy. From the perspective of the autocratic Asad regime, they have arguably provided a more durable infrastructure, through a period of global ideological change and regional realignment, than Baathist political institutions and diplomatic cadres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways militant (Maoist) unionism has affected labour relations in industries within an industrial area in the mid-hills of Nepal. Much of the ethnography of industrial factories around the globe, I argue, has stressed workers' growing precarity and the deteriorating conditions of employment. This article, however, outlines a case of a different trajectory, where militant unionists managed to successfully challenge precarious labour conditions in larger factories within the industrial area. Yet, as I also show, such successful union interventions in the relationship between capital and labour remain limited to large factories, and over the past years union activism has been in decline. I give various reasons for the decline in labour activism including the changing political context, the continuous antagonistic relationship between Nepal's two major unions which is historically rooted in violence, and the shift from radical militant unionism to a more bureaucratic and standardized form of unionism at the central level. In doing so, the article opens a new dialogue between the ethnography of work, labour history, and the social study of radical political groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, and especially since the start of the 'refugee crisis', a number of research, NGO, and policy initiatives have channelled resources to representing refugees through artistic endeavours. The underlying assumption in such projects is that art offers refugees a significant avenue to tell their story and acquire a 'voice' that is otherwise restricted in contexts of limited rights. In this article we aim to complicate some of the straight-forward assumptions underlying the connections between art and the representation of displacement and loss through ethnographic research conducted with professional Syrian artists in Istanbul. With an emphasis on 'refugee art', such artistic projects force artists to conform and identify with this category, silencing more complex processes of identification and subjectivity, communal historical continuities and personal loss, as well as artistic aspirations and expressions. The article demonstrates that the aestheticisation of displacement and loss produces an 'unspeakability' (Weller, Robert. 2017. "Salvaging Silence: Exile, Death, and the Anthropology of the Unknowable." Anthropology of this Century 19 [Online publication]. Accessed June 6, 2019. http://aotcpress.com/articles/salvaging-silence/) of personal experience and trauma, and, in some cases, a permanent withdrawal from artistic production. As much as artists experience this as a form of imposed silencing, they also articulate their withdrawal as a tactic of agentive creativity. We, therefore, argue that unlike in the modern art practices described by Sontag (1983 [1982]. "The Aesthetics of Silence." In A Susan Sontag Reader, 187–188. Harmondsworth: Penguin), this 'permanent silence' is not an elitist, individualistic and dehistoricizing strategy. This context of conflict and protracted displacement reveals multifarious silences that are both results of unequal politics of representation but also tactics of reclaiming identity and artistic integrity, and of maintaining continuities between past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study traces the trajectory of Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (GCOS) as they give voice to their parents' and their own previously silent embodied memory. Impacted by the pedagogic experience of state-engineered high school trips to sites of Holocaust atrocity and the promotion of GCOS testimony, ethnographic interviews disclose GCOS critique of parental silence. GCOS aim to usurp their parents' role as 'authentic' carriers of memory by salvaging the silenced past and performing state-enlisted public testimony. The GCOS trajectory from familial silence to publically enlisted and performed voice is for some however contingent upon GCOS 'authentic' embodied memories of silent Holocaust-related relations with their parents – children of survivors (COS) or with grandparent-survivors. Other GGOS warn of the 'flattening effect' of public voice on the authenticity and emotional complexity of familial silent memories. Moving beyond unidirectional relations between voice and silence, where voice emancipates silenced pasts or silence absences voice, GCOS accounts reflexively depict the complex bidirectional and mutually qualifying trajectories between testimonial voice and familial silence. Descendant accounts permit for a deconstruction of the binary and univocal reading of embodied silence and voice and a reconceptualization of survivor/descendant authenticity. Implications regarding the inherent limits of silence and voice and the related challenges facing the subfield of Anthropology of Silence are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a historical study of ethnographic practices in non-academic fields of culture. It examines the practices and artefacts of cultural production in post-war Turkey and reveals that in the long 1950s popular as well as elite culture lived through an 'ethnographic moment' in which ethnographic authority was elevated to be the dominant criterion for the evaluation of good work. During this ethnographic moment, artists, writers and journalists turned their professional practices into ethnographic fieldwork, forged distinction based on their ethnographic methodology, and excluded armchair practitioners as amateurs. By focusing on four main fields – folklore, painting, cinema, and photojournalism – in post-war Turkey, this study disentangles the history of ethnographic practices from the narrower scope of the history of anthropology/sociology and situates it in an overarching account of cultural encounters with the others. In this period, any form of representation of the others was expected to be based on intersubjective intimacy, first-hand experience, and local knowledge. Modern ethnographic methodology was the zeitgeist of public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the reader to the hitherto hardly noticed ethnographic work of the renowned Prussian intellectual und politician Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt is best known for his theoretical contributions to various fields of study, including anthropology and liberalism. Complementing this predominant view, the article focuses on Humboldt's observations during his travels and stays abroad, thus showing that he also conducted empirical research. Humboldt's accounts of the French, Spaniards, and Basques are interpreted against the background of his liberal anthropology. In this way, the article shows that Humboldt gained new anthropological insights through ethnographic research, especially about liberal constitutions and the connections between body and mind, and between individual and community. This new look at Humboldt's anthropological work also throws a light on the relationship between anthropology and liberalism, which is often regarded as problematic in more recent publications. The article thus contributes not only to the history of anthropology, but also to current discussions on the crisis of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nascent subfield of the anthropology of history criticizes the historicist bent of Western historiography and calls for attention to alternative historicizing practices, especially non-Western ones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that former Lebanese and Palestinian detainees held in Syria have developed a range of such practices in order to have their testimonies about their detention taken seriously in Lebanon. Against a background of institutionalized amnesia and deep political and sectarian divisions, the state refuses to treat them as political detainees. Other publics are more sympathetic, but the ability of ex-detainees to persuade them is limited by these audiences' historicist presuppositions, particularly their expectations that detainees' accounts rely on a linear chronology with a clear progression from past to present and that detention narratives provide evidence that can be critically compared and corroborated. In this regard they also implicitly reject the model, bequeathed by the Holocaust, of the inarticulate victim as guarantor of a testimony's authenticity. Consequently, the anthropology of history should resist the temptation to map historicist and non-historicist forms of history onto a West/non-West split. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elusive bodies of undocumented migrant women in Turkey. Specifically, I engage with the extent to which the legal normalization of the culture of honour results in routinized sexual violence against undocumented migrant women and in impunity for the perpetrators. On the one hand, I pursue the critique of honour as an essentalized, generalized and timeless notion about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, I ponder whether our efforts to battle such stereotypical explanations may occasionally result in giving short shrift to the reality of sexual violence as experienced by those who bear the brunt of it. In avoiding culturalizing honour and yet recognizing its continuing cultural power, I take my inspiration from the concept of ethnographic refusal to navigate a potentially lethal terrain in which migrants, activists, and academics enact, with converging and discrepant stakes, deliberate or unwitting engagements with the demands of 'honor'. I suggest that being cognizant of the kinds of ethnographic refusals we undertake to foreground or avoid the discomfiting aspects of honour as a gendered norm can aid us in our pursuit towards yet thicker ethnographies of exactly where and when honour continues to matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution draws on ethnography conducted in Istanbul to analyse the Museum of Shame, an amateur exhibition dedicated to the memory of leftist militants who were victims of state violence following the 1980–1983 military coup in Turkey. This museification is the work of a group of ex-revolutionaries and can be considered a cultural practice that challenges statist historiography and creates a mnemonic community. By exhibiting the possessions of murdered militants, it inscribes their personal experiences into collective frames and fosters intergenerational transmission. Its temporality reflects the ethos of the revolutionary fighter, turning mourning into a political statement. However, though this museum practice allows the community to become an agent of history, it is unable to encompass the varying experiences of ex-militants. Its aestheticization of violence and its moral injunctions limit the extent of social solidarity and advance essentialisms that contribute to the construction of marginality from the inside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its importance, life at sea, as well as the labour of those who toil in these waters, often remains murky to those on land. Based on ethnographic research onboard cargo ships and ashore at Mission to Seafarers (MtS) and other seafarer clubs this essay emphasizes the centrality of care and capture in shaping the global shipping economy. Drawing insights from an anthropological archive of capture, this essay highlight the multi-faceted ways in which care and capture define maritime labour on land and sea and where the ultimate form of captivity is abandonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five 'dimensions' that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever 'field' we are investigating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tsushima’s community festival commemorates Tsushima’s admirable borderland diplomacy in the pre-modern East Asian politics. This indigenous historicization in performance, nevertheless, fails to resonate with ethnographic reality: anthropological fieldwork revealed that local culture differs considerably from postcolonial ritual imaginings and historicity, illuminating a discontinuity between the past performed and the present observed. A rupture exists between borderland imagery as a coherent Japanese state boundary and the ethnographic reality of an uneven liminal frontier between Korea and Japan. In order to make sense of the ethnographic ruptures, this article constructs the border-centric ethnohistory through the lens of and experiences of the border, defying a state-centric past. I de-essentialize border-state relationship, accentuating border spontaneity and contingency between and beyond the power of sovereignty - a paradoxical Janus-faced process of contradiction and negotiation. I argue that it is Tsushima’s historical metamorphosis that stands out in history, not its subjugation to the power of either state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century journalism has rarely been an object of attention in the humanities and social sciences – despite its political and cultural significance and its documental value. This article explores the verbal-visual social sketch, as it has evolved as a journalistic genre on the expanding market of periodicals in early nineteenth-century Europe. The social sketches (often referred to as ‘panoramic literature’) provide rich ethnographic micro-analysis and often relate to debates held by statisticians, moralists, folklorists, and ethnologists. This article, rather than providing a close reading analysis of selected texts, attempts to trace a genealogy of the sketch of society from a history of knowledge perspective. After placing the consolidation of the social sketch within its socio-medial contexts, the article considers various literary and epistemic ‘regimes’ that have preconditioned and influenced the evolution of this verbal-visual genre of social observation and formulates cross-genre and interdisciplinary perspectives on the refinement and institutionalization of social inquiry throughout the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses a collection of 26 watercolour drawings which portray ethnographic types from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. These drawings, presently kept at the British Library, were made for John Locke by his servant Sylvester Brounower during Locke’s exile in the Netherlands in the 1680s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]