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Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell (eds.) (2022), Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times (New York: Berghahn Books), 204 pp., £99, ISBN: 978-1-80073-611-5 David Zeitlyn (2022), An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (New York: Berghahn Books), 142 pp., £72, ISBN: 978-1-80073-470-8 Lea Hagmann (2022), Celtic Music and Dance in Cornwall: Cornu-Copia (London: Routledge), 238 pp., £130, ISBN: 978-0-367-69141-7 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specific character of Ortiz's theory of transculturation is dependent on the Cuban context in which, and for which, it was elaborated. This article, opening with a sketch of Ortiz's place of upbringing, Menorca, as a site of brutal struggles for identity hegemony over centuries, looks at the Mediterranean context of intercommunal mixing and antagonism, arguing that rather than an ajiaco (stew) it is a field of contest wherein the coexistence of pre-existing identities depend on fragile strategies of accommodation and "making way" but where often contact with alterity results in antagonistic struggles to neutralize the impact of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 'nationalist imaginary' emerges when a group of people forms a defensive solidarity against a perceived external threat. The study focuses on the formation of such nationalist identities in Palestine and former Yugoslavia.

This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrangements between the Israeli state and the Palestinian administration forced the local community to negotiate intra-communal conflicts in the terms of an archaic and divisive idiom of tribal law that in turn accelerated the disintegration of the nationalist solidarity that had characterized intifada-period social life. The paper contends that shared perceptions of antagonistic violence are central to processes of collective identity formation, and shows that discursive shifts can, in certain contexts, give rise to new formations of identity antipathetic to those that preceded them. Key Words: Antagonism, Nationalism, intifada, Feud, Narrative

While going through numerous name changes since 1848 (when it was founded as the Journal and Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London), the periodical now known as the Journal [...]

Violence is a force for creating integrities as well as one that violates, pollutes and destroys already existing entities. In this paper I address the role of what Ariella Azoulay terms the 'political imagination' in constituting social aggregates committed to the defence of a community itself brought into being by the imagining of a force dedicated to its destruction. Such a group's perception of what Laclau and Mouffe call an 'antagonism' spurs it to mark out and defend its boundaries with violence -- a violence often manifested aggressively (pre-emptively). Collective perceptions of an other's antagonism are often overdetermined, either by historical memory or political manipulation, and it is often the case that an enemy is sited and a programme of 'defensive' violence inaugurated without any 'real' justification. Here I demonstrate, using events drawn from the formation of the State of Israel and the collapse of what is now 'Former Yugoslavia', that it is in designating an other against which destructive violence must be mobilized that an entity realizes -- through the negation of that it would negate -- what it is it fights to defend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Rachel's Tomb which is the site revered as the burial place of the Hebrew matriarch Rachel which is located at the northern entrance of Bethlehem. It mentions the fundamental character of the Jewish community in the urban population. It argues that the contemporary Palestinian peasantry could be treated as a source of information on the cultural practices of an ancient past.

FRIEDLAND, ROGER & RICHARD HECHT. xvi, 554 pp., illus., plates, bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1996 It is notoriously difficult to provide balanced academic assessments of war zone situations, especially when [...]

A long history of intercommunal relations around local holy places in historic Palestine (a history which sadly seems to be coming to a close in the current day) draws attention to what precisely is the character of the attachment felt by local residents to sacred sites. Muslim-Christian 'sharing' of holy places ( maqam, plural maqamat) can be seen to express a dependency on powers perceived of as resident in a site, and the nominal affiliation of these powers to one religion or another is often not a matter of great concern to those frequenting the shrines. It is, however, a focal concern of the officiants of the respective religions who lay claim to the sites and who seek to expunge heterodox practices and traces of ambiguous affiliation (cf. Hayden 2002; Hayden et al. 2011). I here investigate records of local usages of religious sites, largely rural, in Palestine up through the Mandate Period in order to argue that shared shrines, as opposed to those which appear to be communally homogeneous, foreground issues of agency obscured in those sites under the control of religious authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the case of Rachel's Tomb, a shrine revered at various times by various combinations of Muslims, Christians and Jews, looking at how the increasingly incommensurate ideas of local inhabitants and immigrant Jews about how the holy place should be approached led initially to a spatial separation within the shrine and then to violent, and exclusive, battles over sectarian (and increasingly 'national') properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the “divisibility” or “sharing” of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of “sharing”. It contends that inter-communal antagonisms there originate with elite struggles over the possessions of places—struggles which tend to engage political actors far from the site of the conflicts rather than local communities—and concludes that, rather than accept an “identitarian politics” which assumes a profound “civilisational” attachment of cultures to religious identities, we must carefully assess the “politics of possession” which variously play out in sites of inter-communal engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It seems vital, in the face of escalating Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian Territories and obstructionism in the "Peace Process," to theorize the cultural foundations of a process of containment and dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Symptomatic of the Israeli state program is the "wall" (a.k.a., "the Security Fence" or the "Apartheid Wall") and its radical encroachment into territory designated as the grounds of a future Palestinian state. The following essay attempts an anthropological analysis of the concept of "border" in contemporary Israeli thought and practice, and, in so doing, assesses the impact of a limitless sovereignty on both an encompassed minority population and on international relations more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Jennifer Deger on how ritual efficacy was created through the medium of a televised video and another by Elizabeth Wickett on the application of visual technologies in the development process.

Conference reviewed: Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology: Tate Modern, London, 26–28 September 2003 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]