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Many ethics review bureaucracies present signed, written forms administered at a single point in time as the default, best‐practice method for obtaining and documenting consent to participate in research. The demand is emblematic of ethics review committees’ insistence on form over function, their failure to understand the cultural contexts of field research, and erroneous assumptions about research methods. Ethnographers responding to an international survey argued that written consent may not protect participants, may mask unethical research, and may often be inappropriate for legal, cultural, political or historical reasons. We suggest the dominance of written consent reflects culturally specific views of paper, writing, signatures, and contracts grounded in particular historical imaginations of the authenticity of the signature and the power of writing and forms. Construed by ethics review institutions as culturally universal, the signed consent form has come to take on the qualities of a fetish. [research ethics, informed consent, signatures, forms, research ethics committees, institutional review boards]

Book Review Fischer, Michael M.J.Anthropology in the meantime: experimental ethnography, theory, and method for the twenty‐first century. 452 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2018. £23.99 (paper)

Objectives: Immunoglobulin A dominates mucosal surfaces and is a biomarker of interest in populations with a high disease burden. The objectives of this work are to describe an ELISA for IgA and test the stability of storage on filter paper for human milk and saliva collection to be used in remote field locations. Methods: A two-site sandwich ELISA for IgA was developed. To test filter paper storage capabilities under field conditions, 248 matched whole and dried human milk filter paper samples and 251 matched whole and dried saliva samples were collected from northern Kenyan women. Whole samples were frozen in liquid nitrogen while dried samples were stored at ambient temperature for up to 8 weeks. Recovered dried IgA levels were compared to whole IgA levels and adjusted for time stored at ambient temperature. Results: The lower limit of quantification for this assay is 10.1 ng/ml. Linearity of dilution for human milk and saliva samples was excellent. High and low-control coefficient of variation values across plates were 9.1 (341.8 ng/ml) and 9.4% (132.5 ng/ml). IgA was detected in all whole and dried samples. There is a moderate concordance between dried and whole samples (R2 = 0.62). There is a small but significant effect of time stored, with a loss of ∼1 μg/ml per day (P = 0.0052). Conclusions: This IgA assay is a cost-effective alternative to commercial secretory IgA kits. Human milk and saliva can be stored on filter paper for up to 8 weeks. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2011. © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

The creative and ever-expanding appropriations of bureaucracy and documents on the part of Amazonian peoples today transcend simple dichotomies between orality and literacy, state and non-state power, and domination and resistance. The papers collected here highlight the specific forms taken by such engagements and the ways in which they assume a key role in local political processes, offering new perspectives on issues ranging from the everyday workings of the state to local theories of language and materiality. In this introductory essay we draw particular attention to the importance of documents as mediators which facilitate new forms of communication; to the prevalence of bureaucratic magic and ritual; and to the ways in which regional bureaucratic and documentary processes are closely linked to both wealth and violence.

Resumen El presente articulo explora un caso de aprendizaje de la burocracia venezolana, que los Sanema experimentan a traves de su participacion en los proyectos sociales de la Revolucion Bolivariana de Chavez. Este analisis se enfoca en la capacidad de maniobra que genera el papeleo burocratico, y contribuye a la comprension de las formas de movilidad y la experiencia del Estado de manera somatica en la Amazonia contemporanea. Los nuevos patrones de movimiento que involucran un desplazamiento hacia y desde las ciudades, los tramites cotidianos y maniobras efectuadas en diversas esferas sociales, no solo deben entenderse en relacion con el Estado y su omnipresencia burocratica, sino tambien como practicas congruentes con las costumbres tradicionales de ‘viajar en busca de conocimiento’ que involucran un vinculo estrecho entre movilidad fisica y social. Asi, los Sanema utilizan la experiencia burocratica adquirida en este ambiente politico para conseguir sus propios objetivos, en lugar de aquellos del Estado.

The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) project represented here through papers by Thomas Lewis, Aaron Stalnaker, Hans Lucht, and Lee Yearley (with responses) was motivated by the judgment that the trend toward a focus on virtue ethics, with attendant concern for techniques of forming selves, creates an opportunity for a dialogue with ethnographers. I argue that the CSWR essays neglect social and institutional considerations, as well as overdrawing the distinction between “formalist” and virtue approaches to the study of comparative ethics.

In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state's military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but simultaneously expected them to show written proofs of their reliability. In the following decades, this contradictory experience made many indigenous people view ID documents and other written records as objects with a force of their own, with the capacity to deflect state violence and shape major aspects of a group's collective history. Drawing on the concept of “state fetishism,” I analyze the peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by focusing on the historical and current experiences of the western Toba and the Wichi. In particular, I explore how Toba and Wichi views of ID papers include ideological forms of reification of social practice but also critical interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation.

This has been a very difficult review to write. In part, the difficulty stems fromthe books under review themselves. They are both extremely impressive albeitvery different collections. One consists of a series of working papers whose pro-visionality is belied by their acuity. The other consists of a series of tightly fo-cused essays by anthropologists, historians, and legal scholars which workexceptionally well together, forming a volume that puts forward a strong, coher-ent, and important agenda for studies of law and culture. The challenge in writ-ing this review does not just derive from the quality of the work but also from itssubstantive focus: the institutional and intellectual histories and trajectories ofinterdisciplinarity in the university today (which Strathern investigates, ethnography-style, and which Pottage and Mundy’s volume exemplifies) and the relationshipbetween interdisciplinarity, society (broadly defined), and science (also broadlydefined) in the makeup of persons, things, and their relations