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The paper deals with the issue of trance in anthropology, ethnomusicology and dance studies through the problem of the role of music and dance in achieving a trance state. The paper focuses on two important studies of trance. The first among them is the study Music and Trance by French ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget. In this study, Rouget examines the connection between trance and certain music and dance practices by discussing the key question: do certain musical instruments necessarily lead to trance? The second study represents the recent work of an ethnomusicologist Judith Becker, called Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing, in which Becker explores the synergy between music, emotion, and trance in an intercultural context. Although these two studies have a lot in common with each other, the key difference would be Becker's reliance on recent research in psychology and neuroscience, that led to new research approaches to music and dance. Therefore, although Becker relies on Rouget's pioneering study, almost twenty years of the difference between these studies has led to recent dialogues between anthropological and culturalist approaches on the one hand and psychological and biological research on the other. The paper will present contemporary outcomes of these debates in anthropology through recent approaches to ritual, in dance studies through the question of kinesthesia, in ethnomusicology through the affect theory, and interdisciplinary interactions between them as well.

The circulation of a literary quotation in the public space raises a number of questions: what are the intrinsic characteristics of the segment that explain its separation from the initial text? What are the different vectors of its dissemination? But also, what does this emerging formula consist of in the course of its different public, notably political and commercial, iterations? We explore these questions through the wanderings of a René Char quotation in the public space in order to shed light on the affective mechanisms at work in its popularity, but also on the resulting emotional effects of its iterative and palimpsestic reception. I build on the logic of vagueness and the notion of nexus to shed light on the affective power attached to the indeterminacy of a set of words. However, the paper also shows the role played by the precision of the contours of a specific phrasing. This combination of factors plays an essential role in our attachments to certain statements.

Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, have been central to postcolonial neoliberal environmental governance programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the complex, ambiguous and sometimes contested outcomes of CBNRM initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on archival, oral history and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, particularly in relation to indigenous Khoekhoegowab-speaking Damara / ǂNūkhoen and ǁUbun peoples, to explore two issues. First, I highlight the significance of historical colonial and apartheid contexts generating mapped reorganisations of land and human populations for memories of access and use that exceed these reorganisations. Second, I foreground a nexus of conceptual, constitutive and affective relationships with lands now bounded as CBNRM administrative units or ‘conservancies’ that have tended to be disrupted through both past events and as economising neoliberal governance approaches have taken hold in this context. Acknowledging disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships may assist with understanding who and what is amplified or diminished in contemporary globalising trajectories in neoliberal environmental governance. In particular, oral histories recording individual experiences in-depth, especially those of elderly people prompted by return to remembered places of past dwelling, can historicise and deepen recognition of complex cultural landscapes that today carry high conservation value.

Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, have been central to postcolonial neoliberal environmental governance programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the complex, ambiguous and sometimes contested outcomes of CBNRM initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on archival, oral history and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, particularly in relation to indigenous Khoekhoegowab-speaking Damara / ǂNūkhoe and ǁUbu peoples, to explore two issues. First, I highlight the significance of historical colonial and apartheid contexts generating mapped reorganisations of land and human populations for memories of access and use that exceed these reorganisations. Second, I foreground a nexus of conceptual, constitutive and affective relationships with lands now bounded as CBNRM administrative units or ‘conservancies’ that have tended to be disrupted through both past events and as economising neoliberal governance approaches have taken hold in this context. Acknowledging disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships may assist with understanding who and what is amplified or diminished in contemporary globalising trajectories in neoliberal environmental governance. In particular, oral histories recording individual experiences in-depth, especially those of elderly people prompted by return to remembered places of past dwelling, can historicise and deepen recognition of complex cultural landscapes that today carry high conservation value.

That Stella Benson’s Living Alone (1919) has received little critical attention can probably be explained both by its paradoxical articulation of absurd comedy, fantasy and psychological realism, and by the overwhelming influence of exceptional patterns and instances within the diegesis. The novel triangulates humour, magic and distress; it relies on two exceptional characters, an unnamed witch (whose magic powers jar with her inability to feel any emotions) and the heroine, Sarah Brown, who fails to interact with people around, partly because of her declining health and limited social skills. In this paper, I thus aim to contextualise the exceptionality of Benson’s novel and, drawing from affective and disability studies, to explore the ways in which the exceptional experiences of these two marginalised female characters, a seemingly all-powerful witch and a particularly perceptive disabled female protagonist, are constructed, conveyed and interrogated.