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Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the early twentieth century, travellers and explorers of the Tibetan-speaking world have reported a host of beliefs concerning the existence of households of mysterious poisoners allegedly killing their guests and visitors. Hitherto, no one has explained the phenomenon. This paper examines the role of poisons in Tibetans' social life and imagination by exploring the interface between cosmology, the economies of fortune, and hospitality in Northwest Yunnan, a Sino-Tibetan border region where fears of poisoning proliferate against a background of tourist development following its nomination as China's official 'Shangri-la'. By unfolding the figure of the parasite, this paper argues that poisoning fears disclose the profound anxieties underlying the cosmography of the flows of fortune and vitality mobilized in the constitution of ritual kinship and relatedness in hospitality settings. Poisoning fears draw on the traumatic events in which the flows of one's reproductive energies are imagined to be parasitized or ultimately severed. Résumé Depuis le début du vingtième siècle, les voyageurs et les explorateurs des régions de langue tibétaine rapportent d'innombrables croyances sur l'existence de maisons où de mystérieux empoisonneurs assassineraient invités et visiteurs. Personne n'a encore pu expliquer ce phénomène. L'auteur étudie ici le rôle des poisons dans la vie sociale et l'imagination des Tibétains, en explorant l'interface entre cosmologie, économie de la chance et hospitalité dans le nord-ouest du Yunnan, une région frontalière sino-tibétaine où la crainte de l'empoisonnement prolifère dans un contexte de développement touristique faisant suite à la désignation de la région comme « Shangri-la » officiel de la Chine. En dévoilant la figure du parasite, l'article avance que les craintes d'empoisonnement révèlent les angoisses profondes qui sous-tendent la cosmographie des flux de la fortune et de la vitalité, mobilisés dans la constitution de la parenté rituelle et de l'apparentement dans le cadre de l'hospitalité. La crainte de l'empoisonnement s'appuie sur les événements traumatisants par lesquels on imagine que le flux des énergies reproductives de l'individu peut être parasité, voire interrompu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unstable mode of hospitality underpins an important ethnographic finding among the Nuosu of Southwest China: namely the notion that each person 'hosts' his or her own soul, which takes the form of a 'soul-spider' residing on the outer surface of the human body. Famous for their slaveholding practices, which were disbanded by the Chinese in 1956-7, the Nuosu nowadays take 'captive guests', to underscore lineage rankings within their spidery cosmology. Exploring the captive position of outsiders - including anthropologists - to the Nuosu home, the paper gives a case study of an 'inhospitable' dispute between a shaman and his employer at an ethnological institute. Showing why every host wishes to prevent the captive guest from ever reciprocating his or her hospitality, the paper introduces the Nuosu 'spider-slave complex', which entails gathering the fullness of life through attachments to the lineage, captive guests, and the person's own soul-spider. Résumé Les matériaux ethnographiques recueillis auprès des Nuosu du Sud-ouest de la Chine font apparaître un mode d'hospitalité instable : l'idée que chaque personne « héberge » son âme, sous la forme d'une « araignée de l'âme » résidant sur la surface externe du corps humain. Connus pour leurs pratiques esclavagistes abolies par les Chinois en 1956-57, les Nuosu prennent aujourd'hui des « invités captifs » pour souligner les positions des lignages dans leur cosmologie arachnide. En réfléchissant à la captivité des étrangers, y compris les anthropologues, dans la maison nuosu, l'article présente le cas d'une controverse « inhospitalière » entre un chaman et son employeur dans un institut d'ethnologie. En montrant pourquoi les hôtes veulent toujours empêcher leurs invités captifs de leur rendre leur hospitalité, l'auteure décrit le « complexe esclave-araignée » des Nuosu, qui implique que la plénitude de la vie s'obtient par des rattachements à son lignage, aux invités captifs, et à sa propre araignée de l'âme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity-obsessed cultures of urban and semi-urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more 'modern', allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in 'modernized' forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits well-travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire - that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category 'family' cross-culturally. In any of its variations, the 'family' exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize - to bring into being - social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the 'real world', despite the fact that patriliny as 'instituted fantasy' downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re-purposes 'the symbolic' and 'imaginaries', categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite ideological rhetoric to the contrary, identity changes and authenticity depend on social experience – the lived interactions of individuals as well as the broad range of political-economic, historical, and personal factors that shape those interactions. Because governments influence social experience, they can shape identities of their populations. Plains Aborigines in colonial Taiwan became Han Taiwanese after Japanese authorities banned footbinding. Local Han became Tujia, and Prmi became both Pumi and Tibetan in China's nation-wide ethnic identification project. However, deliberate attempts at manipulation do not always succeed. The social experience of daily discrimination countered colonial authorities' efforts to make Han Taiwanese into Japanese, contrary to the claims of more recent nostalgic narratives. Narratives of unfolding – partisan stories about the development of a people over time – push the notion, useful to contemporary political authorities, that ethnic identities are fixed because they are based on culture and ancestry and that their authenticity is an ontological absolute derived from origins in antiquity. Analytic distinction of ideological rhetoric from the social experience of individuals allows a better understanding of the socially constructed processes of identity formation and authentication. Résumé Bien que la rhétorique idéologique soutienne le contraire, les changements d'identité et l'authenticité dépendent de l'expérience sociale, autrement dit des interactions vécues aussi bien que de nombreux facteurs politico-économiques, sociaux et personnels qui donnent forme à ces relations. En influant sur cette expérience, les gouvernements peuvent modeler l'identité de leurs populations. Les aborigènes des plaines de Taiwan sont devenus des Han quand les autorités coloniales japonaises ont interdit le bandage des pieds. Les Han locaux sont devenus des Tujia, et les Prmi sont devenus aussi bien des Pumi que des Tibétains dans le projet d'identification ethnique national chinois. Les tentatives de manipulation ne sont cependant pas toujours couronnées de succès. L'expérience sociale d'une discrimination quotidienne a battu en brèche les efforts des autorités coloniales de transformer les Han de Taïwan en Japonais, quoi qu'en disent les récits nostalgiques postérieurs. Les récits de déploiement, narrations partisanes du développement d'un peuple dans le temps, avancent la notion (utile pour les autorités politiques contemporaines) que les identités ethniques sont fixées parce qu'elles se fondent sur la culture et les ancêtres et que leur authenticité est une vérité ontologique absolue, liée à leurs origines antiques. En distinguant par l'analyse la rhétorique idéologique et le vécu social des individus, on peut mieux comprendre les processus, socialement construits, de formation et d'authentification de l'identité. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portuguese-speakers, when asked about their personal names, often respond with a notion of the ‘truth of’ their names. Basing itself on ethnographic data collected by the author in Macao (southern China), Bahia (Brazil), and Portugal, the article interprets this notion of truth as a form of ontological weighing that postulates the unitariness of the person by reference to a subjection to a bureaucratic order and to a cultural and linguistic universe associated to it. Résumé Interrogés sur leur nom personnel, les lusophones incluent souvent dans leur réponse une notion de « vérité » de ce nom. Sur la base de données ethnographiques recueillies par l’auteur à Macao (Sud de la Chine), à Bahia (Brésil) et au Portugal, le présent article interprète cette notion de vérité comme une forme d’évaluation ontologique qui présuppose l’unité de la personne par sa sujétion à un ordre bureaucratique et à l’univers culturel et linguistique associéà celui-ci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1990s, ‘neoliberalism’ has grown in importance as an explanatory trope for socio-cultural anthropologists. This article seeks to unravel the various strands of neoliberalism's anthropological meaning and demonstrate the blind spots of using neoliberalism as an overarching trope. I begin by analysing the contradictions between two common forms of theorizing neoliberalism. The remainder of the article then focuses the initial discussion by examining a particular case: suzhi discourse in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Suzhi may be glossed as human quality, and suzhi discourse refers to the myriad ways in which this notion of human quality is used in processes of governing contemporary China. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments of those who explain suzhi discourse in terms of neoliberalism and suggest ways in which this discourse might be contextualized more fruitfully than as a form of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I shall argue that most religious ritual is a performance that not only invokes but also performs communication. The ethnographic material from which I derive this argument is from China, in particular the temple rituals of local festivals. My argument is that a deep obeisance of welcome and departure that is both like and not like the normal ritual of greeting marks a religious from a non-religious ritual occasion and place. It is a ritual doubling that makes the honoured guest also a host. Religious ritual is a medium, and as a medium it is double in another sense. It is deference and deferral, a repeated transmission of obeisance to authority that has the authority of repetition. As well as doubling, religious ritual is excessively communicative. The medium is a performance not only of invitation and departure but also of communicative response, and it repeats this communication as a test of communicative response over and over again. Religious ritual performs both the opening and closing of communication, both the seeking and the responsive reciprocation of gift offerings with bounteousness. It is shadowed by the possibility of no response, of giving offence, of being abandoned. This possibility is acknowledged by being prevented, while the possibility that the performers are their own responders is disavowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is the celebration of the Dai New Year in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, an area of great diversity in Yunnan Province, China. The Dai are a people of southwest China and Southeast Asia and are classified by the Chinese state as one of the country's fifty-five ‘minority nationalities’ or ‘ethnic groups’. Through an exploration of the spectacular processions and boisterous practices of water splashing which are important features of Dai New Year, complex power plays among the diverse peoples of Xishuangbanna are illuminated. These festivities reveal the intricate processes by which aspects of Dai experience (including Theravada Buddhism, increasing ‘ethnic tourism’, and interaction with the state) interplay in such a way as to contribute to the changing and multiple images of what it is to be Dai. Attention is also given to the carnivalesque cacophony of the water splashing engaged in by celebrants, which subtly signals the possibility of other ways of being whilst also generating a sense of solidarity amongst the peoples of Banna as distinguished from outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]