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This article discusses the insights of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern on the article of Michael Carrithers entitled "Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities." Strahern has commented that holism, a principle of data collecting that becomes a principle of explanation, is discredited by the empirical mind-set that imagines that it is about whole societies. The axiom and notion of holism centers on: (1) gathering everything instead of fulfilling the promise about encompassing all the relations that might be pertinent to an understanding of a society; and (2) achieving the apparently modest goal of allowing analyst pursue any connection of interest. Strahern relates the concept of interpretive clarity of philosopher Arnold Gellner where interpretation points to interest in itself and asks whether new connections can illuminate old ones. Carrithers commented on the moral certainty of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the rhetoric of U.S. President George W. Bush.

The article presents the author's criticism on the book "The Invention of Culture," by Roy Wagner. According to the author, the book seemed to expect some points that the study of culture was to fall and its continuing vitality. She pointed that the said book should be the reference point with regards to the role of culture in anthropology.

Editorial. Focuses on the efforts made on behalf of anthropology in relation to the teaching assessment of the British Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Performance of the university as an organization; Auditing role of the QAA; Marking of students' work in relation to specified learning outcome.

People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes Brazil's late twentieth-century religious transformation through the lens of an Amazonian settler family whom I call the Solanhas. Accounts of various Solanha members' shifting religious and political commitments elucidate how the perceived impossibility of constant human (as opposed to divine) friendship, a perception that also applies to the limitations of kinship, is implicated in the move from an encompassing Catholicism to an intensifying secularity. In foregrounding problems of friendship and kinship, the ethnography begins from a different premise than most studies of secularity. Anthropologists have tended to describe secularity as a condition secured by political/state secularism, which manages and produces distinctions between religion and politics. Drawing on the work of Marilyn Strathern and others, I show that relations, especially kinship and friendship, are more vital than secularism in animating distinctions among religion(s) and politics. I argue that if secularity is to be grasped more fully, the flow of all conceptual and interpersonal relations, and especially kinship and friendship in all their instability, must be brought into view. An anthropologically informed approach to secularity, and ultimately to history, should emphasize the irresolvable challenges of relating, as these challenges will remain key elements of life, knowledge, and ultimately of change in these mutable times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once "unmistakably remote even by Papua New Guinea standards" (Weiner 2002:33), Jimmy described how Chevron Niugini's discovery of oil west of Lake Kutubu in 1989 had occasioned a significant change for the Foi and their southwest neighbours, the Fasu: 'everything suddenly became defined in terms of whether a local clan was or was not a "landowner" within the petroleum development license area (PDL-2)' ( I ibid i .:34). This love of language was Jimmy's intellectual passion too, developing an "anthropology of language" (in preference to "linguistic anthropology" [Weiner 1995:33]), beginning with highly original ethnographic expositions of Foi poetry in I The Empty Place i (1991; see also Weiner and Niles 2015). Jimmy's avowed objective in this I oeuvre i was to build "social literacy" in his readership and in a manner that reflected the primacy of anthropology as a clarifying lens (see Hitchcock and Weiner 2014; Weiner 2000, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008, 2011; Weiner and Goldman 2009). Weiner's emotional engagement with the Foi is apparent in his description of their sung poetry and the paths and places (Weiner 1991), flows and deliberate interruptions (Weiner 1988:9), that their myth and sung poetry reflect. A CONJUNCTURAL FIELD In a 2002 paper, Jimmy discussed how his position in relation to his long-term Papua New Guinea fieldwork had begun to change, noting that 'external changes in the world of one's host configures one's perceptions and forces one into these different subject and analytic positions' (Weiner 2002:33). [Extracted from the article]

In 1986 Jonathan Parry's 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"' claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry's essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short 'revisionist' note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion ‘Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography’. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester – playfully and rigorously engaging with all four speakers. The presentations and the discussions that followed were wide ranging, lively and stimulating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five interdisciplinary commentaries, which engage with the lead articles through new ethnographic material, and a set of shorter commentaries by leading scholars of different disciplines. Finally, the lead authors respond to the discussion. In this debate, climate change does not emerge as a single preformed "problem." Rather, different climate knowledges appear as products of particular networks and agencies. Just as the identification of proxies creates agents (ice, mountains, informants) by inserting them into new networks, we hope that these cross-disciplinary exchanges will produce further conversations and new approaches to action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]