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This essay draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences—on "personae" and "paper technology"—to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology's success lay in its practitioners' ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This essay shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski's seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork—a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley in western India displaced more than 30,000 families, mostly from Indigenous communities. Many of those displaced were resettled in regions that had a starkly different ecological and social composition from the mountainous areas they were forced to leave. In this paper we draw on the anthropology of landscape, linguistic anthropology, and ethnophysiography to chart the transformation of referential landscape terminology in the indigenous Bhili language as a result of displacement and subsequent resettlement. We focus on semantic domains covering ecological features such as soil, rivers, and forests, as well as the use of land for functional purposes. In doing so, we demonstrate how bridging conceptual and perceptual ethnographic approaches to landscape provides a more holistic view of displacement that encompasses both the memories of the places left behind as well as the unfolding process of resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an analysis of local politics through an ethnographic exploration of headship. It approaches the experience and enactment of politics by describing a day in the life of a headman in rural lowland Myanmar to show how an individual embodies and fashions headship through successive social settings. More specifically, this ethnographic device is a way to analyze what a headman, as a situated figure and a political institution embedded in a local society, mediates in context. The paper discusses how a headman composes with multiple layers of responsibilities and chains of relationships, delineating uncertain boundaries between the personal, the political, and the government domains that partly organize local politics. While updating the literature on Bamar lowland society after more than half a century of dictatorship, the paper suggests a position from which we might reconsider the village headman as an ethnographic starting point for an anthropology concerned with history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books acquired by the journal "Current Anthropology." It includes the books "Armenian folks arts, culture, and identity," "The philosophical roots of anthropology," "Ritual, power, and gender: Explorations in the ethnography of Vanuatu, Nepal, and Ireland," and "Skywatchers: A revised and updated version of Skywatchers of ancient Mexico."

In the Global South, disability is often lived as a family experience. The spatiotemporal context in neoliberal India, characterized by rapid social and cultural change disrupting traditional family structures and creating the possibility for the emergence of new and alternative kinship imaginaries. This paper positions disability within families, to explore intrahousehold dynamics around care work and caring. Using a contextual approach to disability and care, it is the purpose of this paper to capture these micro- and macro-level dynamics in the context of urban families in contemporary India through ethnographically informed fieldwork. The discussion is positioned on the cusp of disability and feminist scholarship and activism. Care is considered as a multidimensional polysemous concept that is both universal and specific in definition and scope; labor, affect, and justice are its predominant components as it intersects with disability. Historically, the biological family is most germane to care. It is families that continue to matter as a critical source of survival for disabled people particularly in low-income countries; and in many instances, they also play the dual role of being oppressive toward the disabled family member(s) to whom they provide support. Gender is a critical structuring principle in the organization of care throughout the life cycle, given women's centrality in procreation, childcare, and the larger domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage "new" researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bat is often portrayed as a vampire, a taxonomic monstrosity, and a source of the worst evils. Whenever pandemics occur, such as the one currently spread by SARS-CoV-2, this animal is quickly identified as a "reservoir of emerging pathogens" and is among the first to be blamed. Yet many human groups live in daily contact with multiple bat species and eat their flesh, which they praise for its medicinal benefits. Such groups see the bat as a "companion species" with which they cohabit and establish cooperative relationships. In this paper, we use recently gathered ethnographic data from Southeast Asia to show how humans imagine bats and enter into relationships with them. By blurring the boundaries between nature and society, this animal has made itself an appropriate subject of study for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of most current political anthropology tends to be the modern nation-state, and relatively few works address questions posed by other state formations. Focusing on the Moroccan makhzan and the non-state institutional environment in which it operated, this paper argues for a more sustained engagement with alternative traditions of political thought and practice. It does this by drawing on historical ethnography from Morocco and southwestern Algeria, and through a sustained reciprocal comparison with parts of the classic European literature on the concept of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several books related to ethnology including "Remember Your Relations: The Elsie Allen Baskets, Family and Friends," by Suzanne Abel-Vidor, Dot Brovarney and Susan Billy, "Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society," by Irwin Altman and Joseph Ginat, and "Annotated Bibliography of Tibetan Medicine 1789-1995," by Jurgen C. Aschoff.

At the same time as, in Paris, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl experimented with the concept of "participation," at Harvard, William James undertook a parallel trajectory by taking recourse to the notion of "the vague." For him, vagueness described the fact that reality is richer than any and all conceptualizations. In light of the ethnographic material provided by contemporary developments in the ethnography of pharmaceuticals, this paper mobilizes James's concept of vagueness by reference to Lévy-Bruhl's participation in order to develop instruments for capturing ethnographically the complexities of entanglement and emergence in human sociality. The paper concludes that indeterminacy and underdetermination are doors of entanglement as they both limit and make possible the constitution of entities in sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room—an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self—what would be very much the way traditional anthropology has come to imagine animism. Rather, by turning such an understanding of agency on its head, we take the animacy of the in-between as the starting point from which life unfolds. According to Tim Ingold's work on the subject, this view is consistent with the cosmologies of people traditionally described as "animists." Yet unlike conventional understandings of the term, Ingold describes this ontology as an openness to a world in becoming. Here what brings things into existence is not an animating principle inscribed within them, but rather the potential of the field of relations in which they are embedded. We suggest that this analytical reversal can provide us with a novel framework for the analysis of infrastructures. Accordingly, we argue that roads' doings cannot be understood as active subjectivity or a function of their material resilience. Instead of connecting, roads should be understood as growing out of connections—as an "in-between" in which their doing is also their undergoing. We will make this argument through ethnographic cases from Pakistan, Nepal, China, Myanmar, and Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a priest's wife, Froibirg, who donated a manuscript to the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern in 1055 and was remembered by the monks as an "uxor presbiteri" until the eighteenth century. Although Froibirg appears in the historical record only once during her lifetime, the broader social and religious contexts of her donation were richly documented by the communities with which she was associated: the monastery of Benediktbeuern, the cathedral community of Augsburg, and the eleventh-century church, which was deeply concerned with the "problem" of clerical marriage around the time of her gift. By focusing on Froibirg and on her social role as a priest's wife at the mid-eleventh century, the paper considers the celibacy movement from the standpoint of individuals and communities, rather than clerical denunciations or restrictive papal legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article considers the residual transcripts generated by a female ethnographer, Ruth Landes, through her notations, poetry, scribblings and other forms of data found in the archives. I show how these residual transcriptions are clues that serve as testaments to experiential bonds—both visible and yet hidden in Afrolatinx religions. Residual transcriptions operate as living archives that pose methodological challenges to how we think about the connections between ephemerality, temporality, and material culture. I consider the unofficial transcriptions found in an archive such as marginalia and scraps of paper with scribbled reflections and more data‐driven field notes as sites from which to theorize a new approach to archival and ethnographic methods. These notations, I argue, create their own pattern of events that make one aware of the alternate temporalities that archives can produce. Drawing on Afrolatinx ritual aesthetics and practices, specifically the spiritual séance tradition, I show how residual transcriptions tell circuitous stories about unverifiable yet vital connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the corporeal and affectual dimensions of the relation between people and objects in Western societies as seen through the lens of notions of "ensoulment" held by the Yanesha of Western Amazonia. Ethnographic evidence suggests that processes of ensoulment play a crucial role in the relation between people and objects, bodies, and artifacts in Indigenous Amazonia. Expressed in corporeal terms as a transfer/absorption of vitality and in affectual terms as the communication of sets of affects and social agency, ensoulment is always a two-way process. Through the analysis of Western perceptions on a broad variety of objects, I explore how the Amazonian notion that artifacts are constitutive of bodies and bodies are constitutive of artifacts plays out in Euro-American contexts. I argue that despite the dominance of the scientific paradigm, notions of ensoulment and transfer of agency between people and objects persist in Western popular perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents coproduced ethnographic material concerning the development of mental healthcare services in Oxfordshire, UK. Our collaborative working method highlights arbitrary events and connections in both individual lives and in the lives of institutions. We introduce the analytic concept of happenstance to make sense of this. Happenstance helps us theorize how chance arises in particular social contexts, contains both randomness and patterning, and becomes entwined with agency. The notion of happenstance thus enables us to retain a sense that chance is social and makes links between individuals or institutions and their social surround independently of structuration or habitus. The anthropology of bureaucracy has focused on the clumsiness of institutional mechanisms and the strategies people adopt in response. We suggest a new angle, combining happenstance with Ian Hacking's notion of "ecological niche" to suggest how an openness to happenstance might create a different kind of evolving institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of Malinowski's ethnographic theory is inscribed in a wider modernist environment, which set the ground for the emergence of new epistemological projects. Viktor Shklovsky's attempt to inaugurate a scientific study of literature was one of these. The article juxtaposes Shklovsky's early works ("Art as device" and Resurrecting the word), where he interprets the descriptive style of Lev Tolstoy, with Malinowski's experiments with storytelling and narrative technique (in Argonauts , but also in his letters to James Frazer). These two intellectual projects have common ancestors (folklore studies and comparativism), arose in the same modernist age, and came into contact again when, later on, structuralist theory redefined both linguistics and anthropology. The likeness between the respective scientific endeavors posits an immediate question: why is Russian formalism left out when anthropologists reconstruct their disciplinary kinship diagram? Not merely an attempt to spot non-Western European traces in the history of social anthropology, the paper considers Shklovsky's contribution to contemporary debates on ethnographic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores critical ways that migrant groups engage in diverse forms of resistance. In this comparative case study, we draw on our longitudinal ethnographic research on migrant groups, particularly those that are characterized as undocumented, with a focus on the ways in which they engage in activism and resistance in China and the United States, respectively. We aim to expand the literature about comparison by asking: how is comparison understood differently through the lens of crisscrossing, and what productive insights can be uncovered through this theoretically informed approach? What implications might crisscrossing have for studying grassroots level resistance from migrants across borders? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long been aware that theoretical perspectives guide ethnographic research and scholarly production. More recently the reflexive turn in ethnography laid bare the importance of the ethnographer's social position and unequal power relations. This paper focuses on these and other semiconscious forces, as well as contingent events, that prime ethnographers to focus on some things but not others. Prior graduate training and an era's intellectual zeitgeist often frame research goals. The investigator's mental map, age, maturity, psychological state, experience, and innumerable experiences outside university training similarly influence research. Chance events in the field add further complications. Focusing on my own half-century trajectory in the Andes, this paper examines how these forces shaped my research and ultimately the production of anthropological knowledge, reinforcing the need to bring these sometimes-distorting constraints into conscious reflection, as well as the utility of sequential research in the same community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of "figuring out" and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children's experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we describe and conceptualize the simplest tools imaginable, especially in relation to distinctions between found, minimal, and repurposed objects? Most ethnographic accounts pay little attention to them, and neither does the organization of museums and the anthropological curriculum. Addressing the literature on the theory of tool use, this paper argues why rudimentary objects observed ethnographically, such as used as containers, scrapers, whetstones and strike-a-lights, should not be neglected. The argument is illustrated with reference to data on the Nuaulu people of Seram, eastern Indonesia. The main exception to this neglect has been archaeological, in the context of understanding the earliest possible human tools, and in animal behavior studies where the very idea of tool use is being interrogated. Holistic claims about tools require that we understand the scale and significance of minimal tools both for modern nonindustrial peoples and for ordinary people living and working in industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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.)

Economic concepts have a double status. They are elaborated for scientific purposes, but they are also used in the real world, especially by decision makers. In this paper I focus on the latter aspect and address the question of the uses of these concepts in welfare reform. I base my reflections on the case of the renewal of welfare-control policy in France. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork on the daily practices of welfare control provide the occasion to confront the economic vulgate of welfare reform with the actual situations of welfare recipients and ground a critical evaluation of the effect of reforms inspired by this vulgate. By doing so I propose a basis for a socioanthropological critique of the political implications of economic concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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 paper identifies a significant interpretive issue for prehistoric archaeology: distinguishing adult ritual actions from the activities of children in the archaeological record. Through examining ethnographic accounts of recent huntergatherer children and reconsidering archaeological patterns and assemblages in light of these data, we explore how the results of children's play can be--and likely have been--misinterpreted by archaeologists as evidence for adult ritual behavior in prehistoric contexts. Given that children were a significant component of past hunter-gatherer (and other) societies, the fact that the material components of their activities overlap tremendously with items used in adult rituals must be routinely considered by archaeologists if we are to reconstruct robust understandings of past peoples all over the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines the process of “place‐making” among Africans in Japan. Ethnographically, this paper explores how these places operate for the Africans who frequent them, underscoring how these particular sites function as “points of sociality.” Through an ethnography of a Tokyo neighborhood and an African establishment, I show how places are made African through a unique set of conditions. This essay demonstrates how, in some instances, African place‐making offers sites from which various forms of African nationalisms come together through continent‐based community formations in Japan. By drawing upon scholarship on space, place, identity, race, and public communality, it explores the multifaceted ways these “made places” assist Africans as they navigate the difficulties of life in Japan. I argue that “place‐making” can be operationalized within the broader context of a changing Japanese society in order to understand the emergence of African places within Japanese space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical scholarship on the banishment of subjectivity from experimental psychology led me to explore a current theoretical enterprise in literary and cultural studies that goes by the name "affect theory." This approach, tied to contemporary neuroscience research, at once joins the effort to banish subjectivity from human experience and introduces the apparently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality. The potentiality revealed by affect theory lies deep in the human brain, hidden below the level of conscious intentionality. Affect theory draws on a long history in the human sciences going back to the late nineteenth century. Therefore, in this paper I take a fresh look at the early history of experimental psychology from the vantage point of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898. I intend this early anthropological approach to subjectivity to serve as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the later banishment of subjectivity from the methods used in experimental psychology and from the models proposed in affect theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While analyses of numerals typically focus on presenting morphological and phonological data as well as on comparative historical analyses of the numeral systems of related languages, numerals are rarely analyzed as indices of the kinds of cultural information seen in such semantic fields as, e.g., kinship terminology. On the contrary, an examination of the two counting systems of Elem Pomo reveals a network of sociocultural connections. This paper presents an analysis of these two systems and suggests that locating the data gained through an in-depth linguistic analysis within their proper sociocultural context can both clarify an understanding of these two counting systems and inform language planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the quest by physical anthropologists in Japan for the origins of the Japanese. A major focus of this research has been the Ainu people of the northern island of Hokkaidō, who have recently been declared an indigenous people of Japan. The relationship between mainstream Japanese and the very much living community of the Ainu has been the subject of over 100 years of research. Integral to research has been the collection of Ainu skulls, skeletons, and artefacts that have provided a critical if controversial resource for physical anthropologists. This has all been against the backdrop of changing political ideologies about the so-called purity of the Japanese. In the post-World War II period, with the loss of empire, the idea of Japan as a homogeneous nation took hold, and it was only in the last two decades that this notion has been discredited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethno-linguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating "peoples" in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the fioodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, social stratification, economy, and ecology were all recursively intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the Indo-European words commonly treated as kinship terms. The traditional approach fails to explain such linguistic and historical phenomena as the use of the reflexes of these terms mostly in the plural as markers of belonging to certain social groups or as terms pertaining to authority and headship. Reinterpretation of the traditional reconstruction enables one to regard the etyma in question as classifiers of age-sex groups and provides a coherent explanation of unexpected semantic shifts such as the terminological identification of grandparents of both sexes with grandchildren. Consequently, the paper argues that patriarchal clan society was not the earliest form of Indo-European social organization as has been believed and that the latter seems to have been based on age-sex stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the outline of an anthropological political ecology that fully acknowledges the constructedness of nature while suggesting steps to weave together the cultural and the biological on constructivist grounds. From tropical rain forests to advanced biotechnology laboratories, the resources for inventing natures and cultures are unevenly distributed. The paper proposes an antiessentialist framework for investigating the manifold forms that the natural takes in today's world. This proposal builds on current trends in ecological anthropology, political ecology, and social and cultural studies of science and technology. The resulting framework identifies and conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated nature regimes-organic, capitalist, and techno-and sketches their characteristics, their articulations, and their contradictions. The political implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the strategies of hybrid natures that most social groups seem to be faced with as they encounter, and try to stem, particular manifestations of the environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world becomes more complex, the work of anthropology, both theoretical and practical, becomes more demanding. People at the local level are increasingly being drawn into larger circuits through economic linkages, demographic processes, social interactions, and flows of information that transcend local and national boundaries. Such global linkages and the new embeddedness they produce require more sophisticated approaches to ethnography. This paper proposes social network analysis as a valuable approach to that end. The concept of embeddedness, which is central to the social networks perspective, is introduced. Hierarchical embeddedness of the local level in the larger society, economy, and polity is distinguished from domain embeddedness, the interpenetration of different fields of activity. Network studies of two ethnographic cases, gift giving among Kung and ritual celebrations in a Javanese village, illustrate the potential of social network analysis for investigating embeddedness. The paper concludes with substantive and methodological suggestions for the study of embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyandry has long been viewed as an anomalous form of marriage that raises fundamental questions about variability in human kinship systems. This paper integrates and evaluates a set of hypotheses derived from sociocultural anthropological and evolutionary biological theories of polyandry against data collected on the Nyinba, a well-studied ethnically Tibetan population living in northwestern Nepal. In this population, polyandry is fraternal, it is the normative form of marriage and highly valued culturally. Nonetheless, certain polyandrous marriages fail—men occasionally leave their natal households and abandon their joint marriages. In exploring the reasons for these marital breakdowns and the characteristics of men who instigate them, this paper offers a new perspective on the presumed contradictions of polyandry and a more fruitful approach to understanding how polyandrous practice comes to be perpetuated from one generation to the next. It also contributes to discussions about how sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives may provide complementary viewpoints for ethnographic data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the international conference entitled "Ethnic Traditional Culture and Folk Knowledge" which was held in Moscow on March 21-24, 1994, organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Papers being presented covered an array of geographical settings and historical context from authors coming from U.S. and Western Europe along with Argentina, India, Israel, Kuwait and from other former Soviet Republics.

The article comments on the paper of E. Wilmsen entitled "On the Search for (Truth) and Authority: A Reply to Lee and Guenther," which was published in volume 34 of the "Current Anthropology" journal. Wilmsen claimed that the mid-19th-century, Dobe region was an area of mercantile activity. The author remarks that Wilmsen's evidence for the early penetration and subjugation of the Nyae Nyae-Dobe by merchant capital is entirely incorrect, revealing an error and misrepsentation unrivaled in recent anthropology, citing the detailed 19th-century maps where the Nyae Nyae-Dobe was represented as virtual blank from the period of Wilmsen's alleged mercantile boom.

The article presents the author's reply on the comments made to his article "The New Guinea High Lands: Region, Culture Area, or Fuzzy Set?" The author admits that the focus of his paper is not the highland peoples of New Guinea but the New Guinea Highlands. The purpose of his article was to criticize anthropologists on the use of their notions on the region.

Recent critics of anthropological theorizing and ethnographic authority have claimed "reflexivity," "polyphony," and "dialog" as core values for anthropology's self-deconstruction. This paper examines this claim and these values with a particular emphasis on their (perhaps unintended) institutional consequences. It argues that the boundaries of reflexivity constructed in "postmodernist" discourse (focusing mainly on authority in texts) have been framed in ultimately misleading and surprisingly unreflective ways that diminish both the legitimacy and the logic of postmodernist claims. Thus, this paper is intended in part to defend the traditional bases of ethnography's authority, but more significantly it intends to suggest how anthropology can be reflexive in ways unelaborated by postmodernist critics. It also attempts to show how a particular "totalizing" theoretical stance (one that locates the logic and reproduction of power and authority in society as a whole&including academic institutions& rather than in texts alone) can dispel some of the "paradoxes" left unaddressed by postmodernist critics. An ironic effect of postmodernists' eschewing anthropology's self-definition as a science is an indirect institutional legitimation of the kinds of scientisms that postmodernists find most reprehensible (e.g., biological and economic reductionism). Moreover, postmodernist "privileging" of experience unintentionally reproduces the epistemology of Western individualism in the name of its radical deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper participates in the discussion of ethnography as text. It seeks to articulate more clearly the distinction between "writing" and "composing" culture and to explore the consequences of this distinction for authorial authority. Ethnography need not always be written, for the dominance of the printed text is a historical phenomenon. Printed matter has certain characteristics that are artifacts of its physical nature and should not be confused with the information inscribed on the page. Practical experience in developing a large multimedia database about ancient Greek society is here used to problematise certain assumptions about how author and reader relate to one another with a view to extending the discussion of how culture can be represented and subsequently explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the failure of anthropology, at least since the 1970s, to look at the big picture: what the four fields can contribute to each other. It focuses on kinship as a key example, on other aspects of sociality, and on language and symbolic thought. I argue that an understanding of humanity as a whole, and especially hunter-gatherers, is important for grasping the nature of the human species. Cultural or social anthropology progressed to a large extent through kinship studies, and it is here also that we should look. The transformation of a Ju/'hoan kinship structure to a Khoe one is used as one key example. The deeper history of language itself is another. After these examples, I return to general issues, including the ways in which the diverse branches of anthropology, especially social anthropology and linguistic anthropology, serve to enlighten each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline an integrated framework for the study of culture, called evolutionary cultural anthropology, that highlights culture and its interactions with biology and ecology. Applied research during Ebola outbreaks and several decades of research with hunter-gatherer children of the Congo Basin are utilized to illustrate evolutionary cultural anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separately from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function and evolutionary history is equally misguided. An integrative anthropology moves past dichotomous perspectives and seeks to entangle the "inside" and "outside," methodologically and theoretically, to move beyond isolationist trends in understanding the human. In this paper I illustrate the underlying rationale for some anthropological lack of engagement with neo-Darwinian approaches and review contemporary evolutionary theory discussing how, in combination with a dynamic approach to human culture, it can facilitate integration in anthropology. Finally, I offer an overview of the human niche concept and propose a heuristic framework as a set of shared assumptions about human systems to help frame a sincerely anthropological and emphatically evolutionary approach to the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 30 months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a high-poverty, crime-ridden area in metropolitan Buenos Aires, this paper scrutinizes the political character of interpersonal violence. The violence described here is not the subaltern violence that, thoroughly documented by historians and social scientists, directs against the state, the powerful, or their symbols. It is a violence that is neither redemptive nor cleansing, but it is deeply political in a threefold sense: (a) it is entangled with the intermittent and contradictory form in which the police intervene in this relegated neighborhood, (b) it has the potential to give birth to collective action that targets the state while simultaneously signaling it as the main actor responsible for the skyrocketing physical aggression in the area, and (c) it provokes paradoxical forms of informal social control as residents rely on state agents who are themselves enmeshed in the production of this violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts–rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)–and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben's (1998) distinction between bare and qualified life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston (2008) describes as "insurgent" and "differentiated" citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in contexts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty produces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben's emphasis on sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history's effects, and life's possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press 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.)

The author comments on several papers in which anthropologists explore instances of omission and/or silencing in their earlier ethnographic research. She discusses the distinction between omissions and silences as well as possible reasons behind the omissions according to one of the authors, Jim Weil, including decisions about what is pertinent or irrelevant to a study. She also describes the significance of the authors' efforts to address such omissions and silences in their work.

Using long-term research in a Navajo community as an example, this paper examines how the social construction of anthropological research (including theoretical frameworks and writing strategies) shapes the silences and omissions in any particular historical period. Gender, ethnicity, age, and economic/political transformation also play roles unveiling some omissions while creating others as relationships shift and deepen over decades. I outline three major periods: the 1960s, when a social science model that emphasized theoretical problems, data analysis, and objectivist prose held sway; the 1970s, when feminist anthropology reoriented analysis to a focus on women, power, and authority; and the "dialogic turn," when ethnography began to include women's voices, the presence of the anthropologist in the text, and attention to the power relationship between the researcher and the interviewee. Each period entails its own omissions and silences, but acknowledging them allows anthropologists to make more provisional conclusions and be forward looking, seeking ways to shift our future theoretical frameworks and reinterpret our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Anthropological Reasoning" by Marilyn Strathern which calls for examining the ties that bind anthropology. She applauds Stratern's move to tackle the historical precedents of either self-scrutiny or the dyad nature-society. She explores another shift in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kinship thinking in Europe. She also examines the relevance of Strathern's article to anthropology.