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The article offers an ethnographically embedded analysis of a UK‐based Jewish‐Muslim inter‐community network to contribute to anthropological research into the ethical efforts that groups seen as polarized invest in negotiating boundaries of difference. The article makes two sets of arguments. First, it suggests that sometimes such groups have to negotiate not one but several 'borders across difference' and follow diverse ethical routes to navigate them depending upon how they conceptualize these borders. Second, it shows that in negotiating different sets of boundaries, network members often use techniques that at first glance appear to be artificial or even superficial in that they build on formal rules and/or contain no promise of achieving a consensus on issues important for the participants. However, I argue that these seemingly superficial efforts could still be seen as ethical endeavours underpinned by a strong commitment to inter‐group solidarity and that they could be best understood as what Ruth Sheldon has described in her recent intervention in the ethics of Jewish ethnography as the movement between surface and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the constitutive role of blame in kinship as a practice in a low‐income neighbourhood in India's capital city, Delhi. Using ethnographic data, I show how women with serious or chronic illness express blame towards kin for their failures in critical moments: for not providing care during illness, not fulfilling kinship obligations, and even for causing or exacerbating illness. As relationships rupture to reveal the underlying precariousness of kinship, women use blaming statements, accusations, and critique to leverage toeholds of power and take matters into their hands against their families' wishes. Yet even as women forge a degree of agency through blaming practices, I show that these practices can lead, paradoxically, to the repair and reconstitution of kinship. This article builds upon existing scholarship that addresses both the failure of kinship as a system of mutual support and the work of kinship repair in similar marginal contexts in north India characterized by neglect, which render women vulnerable to negative effects. My focus on blaming acts offers a new angle on this intimate terrain, illustrating how women enact the social practice of blame to reshape the dynamics and terms of kinship relations, rather than reconciling themselves to kinship failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the styles of enquiry involved in Lowland South American Amerindian shamanic and narrative discourse genres. The article argues in favour of the existence of an Amazonian mode of thinking strictly related to formulaic composition, commonly found in different verbal poetic genres and its contemporary transformations into written texts published as books by Amerindian researchers and narrators. Taking into account philosophical and anthropological discussions about speculative thinking, this study aims to revise the role of narrative verbal genres in Amerindian ethnology and its ontological backgrounds, as well as offering an alternative perspective on the contrast between writing and oral traditions. The article is based on translations of songs and testimonies collected among the Marubo of Western Amazonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What good is anthropology?" Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi‐Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such as the first generation of postcolonial anthropologists in India, as they confronted the question whether India may be seen as a settler colony. How was such a spirit born? As one possible beginning, I offer a creation myth for the birth of anthropological sensibility, located in a key moment of the Ramayana, when its tribal/lower‐caste poet‐author, Valmiki, begins to enunciate differently, after witnessing an act of human, settler violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic, structural, and enacted violence. Today, continued inequality at local and global levels is deeply complicated by corporate globalization and climate change. Ethnographic research and anthropological engagement is urgent and critical, requiring our persistence to redress social wrongs through supportive, generous partnerships, as advocates and as outspoken witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development—from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society—the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging not just the finished product, when critique is so easily possible, but the process of development, as the work is yet underway. Such engagement is enabled by how people leverage their commitments, stances, and manner of being there along the way and over time. To better enable the impact of anthropology in this work, anthropologists would be well served by engaging more with these kinds of applied questions as a part of their training and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts are in turn produced by political economies of development expertise and academic knowledge production. Indeed, social anthropology's core research practices were shaped by its configuration within political economies of colonial governance, and they were perpetuated through the expansion of university systems. We should, then, stop sustaining the fictions that our work is situated outside political economies of interest or that we write purely in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, we need to be more transparent about the economies that determine the kinds of knowledge we produce and the political implications of what we authorize as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex‐soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to avoid portraying their unlikable traits, internal contradictions, or troubling actions that do not advance our arguments. Ethnography often reveals florid complexity in structures or systems, but it creates simpler depictions of the people who inhabit these forms. Yet, since anthropology has long aimed to holistically capture the truth of social life, it should allow more space in ethnographic narrative for complicated protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do passion and poetry play in our research‐based quest to promote social justice? In this piece—a manifesto of sorts—I make a case for prioritizing both passion and poetry in our ethnographic writing. Such a commitment will allow our insights to be learned, our interlocutors' and our own voices to be heard, and our policy recommendations to be heeded. But writing poetically from a place of passion is just the first step. User‐friendly, public writing deserves a sociologically friendly platform. Hence, in the second part of this manifesto, I outline a series of steps that I recommend our discipline take in order to radically scale up our commitment to practice an engaged anthropology. Such tactics will allow us to more realistically promote our knowledge as we advocate for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's "meta," or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anthropology reaches maturity, its contributions are likely to grow. This is because the discipline's practitioners, in writing parochial ethnography, can link a respect for individual difference to our understanding of global humanity. Such a practice aligns with the growing political struggle to retain meaning in an expanding world. Moreover, anthropology's commitment to life as lived research, including private domains and engagement with digital worlds, will also become more significant, while anthropology's ethos of empathy will expand beyond the human. Reaching maturity will require a further repudiation of inequality and colonialism, developing a different relationship to theory, philosophy, and engaged anthropology, as well as fostering a much wider commitment to global education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology and its marquee method, ethnography, have recently been promoted as an analytical key for unlocking problems faced in other domains. This review addresses two books that argue for the value of this anthropological lens: Anthro‐Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, by Gillian Tett, and How to Think like an Anthropologist, by Matthew Engelke. The differences between these works highlight the risk of deploying anthropology as a means to other ends, without subjecting those ends to the same theorization and scrutiny as one's topic or methods. While these authors demonstrate that there is significant value that the anthropological toolkit can provide, both in life and in business, there remains a fine line to be drawn between the instrumentalization of the discipline and the broader pursuit for knowledge and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity is everywhere. From biology to genomics, from anthropology to public policy, experts are marveling at the complexity of the phenomena they study. Yet in recent years, scholars have warned against taking all of this complexity at face value. In this spirit, this article frames "complexity" as an epistemic artifact traceable through particular histories and traditions of knowledge‐making. Attributions of relative complexity to different societies have a long history in anthropology. Archaeologists, in particular, have defined and redefined, debated and deconstructed complexity, leaving behind a lively textual trail. Examining this trail as a case study, the article investigates some of the different and sometimes conflicting logics behind what gets to count as complex, when, and why, as well as behind the more general expansion of complexity's reach in recent decades. By doing so, it exemplifies a way of approaching complexity as an anthropological problem and as a dominant problematic of our times. [knowledge, complexity, epistemology, archaeology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY: In this essay I situate my recent on‐going series of drawings, Things that Art, which investigates and deconstructs the ideas of collection and labeling in order to consider how scholars might creatively think with and through methods used by artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article, I question regional context as primary context in anthropological analyses. I argue that the idea of historical continuity in a geographical locality/region might prevent us from understanding not only radical change, but also more gradually emerging social patterns that connect the ethnography to very different kinds of histories and places. Concretely, I focus on the global Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, and as an experiment, I ask whether it is possible to go to ‘Pentecost’, instead of going to Melanesia. With ‘going to Pentecost’ as a heuristic device, I suggest it is possible to overcome methodological challenges in the study of global religious movements. In this article, I thus trace the practices and articulations of my interlocutors as part of a wider Pentecostal universe. I show how notions of seeing, borders, separations, and protection are crucial in ‘Pentecost’, and I connect this to key Christian ideas and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar argue convincingly in Anthropology's Politics that US-based academics face harassment and threats to their careers if they publicly reject US militarism in the Middle East and criticize the Israeli state in their teaching, research, and public speaking. Their analysis of five generations of anthropologists demonstrates that knowledge production is always political, but the thematic chapter organization-graduate school, getting hired, and handling job conflicts-does not explore the historical conjunctures in which the cohorts were formed. The authors' assertion that the American Anthropological Association's practice of issuing public statements ignores the Middle East and criticism of US policies is clear, yet the association's history of opposition to US policies globally is uneven and episodic. Anthropology's Politics is an important and well-researched book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If 'co-presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry' (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a 'troubled landscape' in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co-presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field - one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists' intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent 'ontological turn', notably the long-standing questions of what it means to 'take seriously' and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problematic of the activist/academic relationship has been a source of sustained concern for radical Geographers over the past 15 years. Drawing on my personal experience within the radical climate movement(s), this paper looks to develop on the commitments of militant research, contribute to the development of militant ethnography as a research approach and consider the subsequent implications for thinking through the activist/academic problematic. Elaborating on the epistemological distinction between 'truth relaying' and 'knowledge production', it is contended that militant research is an orientation and process synonymous with the disavowal of positivist knowledge and the construction of situated partisan knowledge(s). Rather than the (social) science of transmitting truth, research thus becomes the art of producing tools you can fight with. From this perspective, the activist/academic problematic is not a 'neutral' problem but a product of a certain way of knowing associated with the academy. The paper concludes that our concern should not be to navigate between (and thus reiterate) the fields of 'activism' and 'academy', but to surpass the problematic altogether. We are tasked not with reproducing the university in its current form, but reimagining it as a machine for the production of other worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding social processes (trajectories of relationships among stakeholders), political constraints, cultural aspects and public opinions is essential for efficient design, sustainability and evaluation of restoration operations. However, few restoration projects involve the participation of social sciences., The ecological restoration of the Rhône River involved increasing flow below dams and better connecting floodplain channels at multiple sites along the river. Therefore, it provided a unique opportunity to identify the commonalities and differences among social processes associated with ecological restoration., We used qualitative analyses of speeches and interviews with stakeholders to understand their relationship to the Rhône. These analyses revealed that social values, relating local residents to the river, played a major role throughout the restoration projects., The comparison of social processes among three sites of the Rhône shows that they generally followed three stages: managing a crisis, transforming the relationship to the river and valuing the local social space (the territory)., Consistent patterns emerging across sites included the following: (i) the role of a local public figure able to mobilise stakeholders in supporting the restoration project; (ii) the importance of the organisation of the stakeholder community and its commitment to the project; and (iii) the major role of interactions between local and national levels. Variation across sites also occurred and may be related to unforeseen events such as political changes and natural hazards (e.g. floods and pollution)., Involving social science in restoration projects requires taking into account commonalities in social processes as well as the diversity of local experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fieldwork sketches of Arthur Bernard Deacon, made in Vanuatu in 1926-27, give us insight into the early methodologies of social anthropology and into the role of images in anthropological ways of thinking. Here I develop a perspective on field sketches that explores them not only as visual mediations of the fieldworker's subjectivity, but also as genre pieces that indicate very particular forms of training in 'how to see.' I draw out the visual conventions, ways of thinking and seeing, that underscore the different strategies that Deacon used in his drawing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important concept in geography and the social sciences. The rise of mobility, circulation and transnational networks has been paralleled by academic scholarship on un-parochial others: diasporas, travellers and itinerant social groups. However, the role of nonhumans as participants in and subjects of cosmopolitanism has received scant attention. This paper seeks to develop a 'more-than-human' cosmopolitanism that accounts for the presence of nonhuman animals and entities in stories of circulation and contact. Through a multi-sited ethnography of elephant conservation in India and the UK, the paper illustrates how animals become participants in forging connections across difference. Through their circulation, elephants become cosmopolitan, present in diverse cultures and serving banal global consumption. The paper then illustrates how cosmopolitan elephants may be coercive, giving rise to political frictions and new inequalities when mobilised by powerful, transnational environmental actors. It concludes by discussing the methodological and conceptual implications of a more-than-human cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A table of contents for the "American Ethnologist" is presented.

The article discusses how anthropologists describe the artistry of their scholarly production. It is stated that ethnography involves creativity and observation, and anthropologists take lively interest in the artistic and technical creativity of what they study. It is mentioned that unevenness is a characteristic of anthropological writing; and in every ethnography, some parts are fine-tuned and attentive to every detail, whereas other aspects of social life appear to be fading.

The article presents a response on professor Jadran Mimica's analysis of the study regarding the authenticity of Melanesian ethnography. The author recognizes Mimica's analysis on the issue and explains three main themes to address the issue that can contribute to the important discussions in anthropology and the theorization of modernity and modernization. He also argues that the historical consciousness in Porgera was dynamic and reflective.

Beller, Bender, and Medin question the necessity of including social anthropology within the cognitive sciences. We argue that there is great scope for fruitful rapprochement while agreeing that there are obstacles (even if we might wish to debate some of those specifically identified by Beller and colleagues). We frame the general problem differently, however: not in terms of the problem of reconciling disciplines and research cultures, but rather in terms of the prospects for collaborative deployment of expertise (methodological and theoretical) in problem-driven research. For the purposes of illustration, our focus in this article is on the evolution of cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A singularly influential sense of 'material worlds' has been developed by actor-network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between 'humans' and 'non-humans'. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Conseil d'Etat. Interestingly, this study turns out to be not so much an actor-network theory of law as occasion to add a new dimension to the material worlds of actor-networks, namely, the communicative dimension of 'regimes of enunciation'. My hypothesis is that this distinction between the sociality of actor-networks and the logic of enunciation is problematic because it uncritically adopts the premise that there is an institution such as 'law' that has to be explained or materialized by social science, thereby diminishing the critical energy that the theory of actor-networks or of dispositifs might bring to the study of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, community psychology has been interested in cultural matters relating to issues of diversity and marginalization. However, the field has tended to understand culture as static social markers or as the background for understanding group differences. In this article the authors contend that culture is inseparable from who we are and what we do as social beings. Moreover, culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history of power. The authors propose a decolonizing standpoint grounded in critical social science to disrupt understandings of cultural matters that marginalize others. This standpoint would move the field toward deeper critical thinking, reflexivity and emancipatory action. The authors present their work to illustrate how they integrate a decolonizing standpoint to community psychology research and teaching. They conclude that community psychology must aim towards intercultural work engaging its political nature from a place of ontological/epistemological/methodological parity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology has seen major challenges regarding methods, epistemologies, and how one writes ethnographically. As practicing ethnographers and poets, we focus on one among many vibrant new styles of anthropological scholarship: ethnographic poetry. As poetry appears more regularly in scholarly venues, anthropologists may wonder how to create ethnographic poetry and toward what end. To address this, we begin with definitions of ethnographic poetry in relation to ethnography and ethnopoetics. We then consider how poetry may help anthropologists to write insightfully about how we and other people live. Drawing on our own poetry, and that of others, we explore how form affects meaning and ethnographic insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a previously-published essay from "The Yale Review" which was presented at a symposium on social sciences in which the author attempted to define his version of the social science sociology, which includes discussions of terms such as institutional ethnography, and the sociological views of writers and scholars such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Hana Brown, and Immanuel Wallenstein. The author describes institutional ethnography as our everyday doings which are coordinated with those of others, of which we are mostly unaware. He discusses Ben Agger's theory of sociology which includes multiculturalism, the Frankfurt School of thinking, and postmodernism.

By and large, anthropology's reflections on the concept of evidence have been couched within other discussions – on truth, knowledge, and related concerns. This essay, which introduces the special issue, makes the case that evidence deserves more considered attention in its own right. Drawing on the small but growing body of literature in social and cultural anthropology that does address questions of evidence, I situate the articles here in relation to several anthropological conversations, suggesting in the process how an exploration of evidence can shed light on three key issues: anthropology's standards of judgement, the potentials within interdisciplinary collaboration, and the benefits of a public anthropology. Résumé De manière générale, les réflexions de l'anthropologie sur le concept de preuve ont été imbriquées dans d'autres discussions concernant la vérité, la connaissance et d'autres questions connexes. En ouverture de ce numéro spécial, le présent essai avance que la preuve mériterait une attention plus spécifique pour elle-même. À partir d'un corpus restreint mais grandissant d'études en anthropologie culturelle et sociale consacrées à la question de la preuve, l'auteur situe les articles réunis ici par rapport à plusieurs conversations anthropologiques, en suggérant comment une exploration de la preuve peut faire la lumière sur trois grandes questions : les critères de jugement de l'anthropologie, les possibilités offertes par une collaboration interdisciplinaire et les avantages d'une anthropologie publique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers who note the increasing popularity of bioethics discussions often complain that the social sciences are poorly represented in discussions about things like abortion and stem-cell research. Critics say that bioethicists should be incorporating the methods and findings of social scientists, and should move towards making the discipline more empirically oriented. This way, critics argue, bioethics will remain relevant, and truly reflect the needs of actual people. Such recommendations ignore the diversity of viewpoints in bioethics, however. Bioethics can gain much from the methods and findings from ethnographies and similar research. But it is misleading to suggest that bioethicists are unaware of this potential benefit. Not only that, bioethicists are justified in having doubts about the utility of the social science approach in some cases. This is not because there is some inherent superiority in non-empirical approaches to moral argument. Rather, the doubts concern the nature of the facts that the sciences would provide. Perhaps the larger point is that disagreements about the relationship between facts and normative arguments should be seen as part of the normal inquiry in bioethics, not evidence that reform is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's investment in and calls for public anthropology are one symptom of the profound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology as it moved away from the four-field organization of anthropology into an alignment with certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of “theory.” In anthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing fieldwork, that produce it. This article is an examination of this reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. It asks whether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-field as well as topical) in the new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical strength of the discipline of archaeology is that its access to the material record of human history extends well beyond the written record and includes societies and cultures unaffected by Western colonialism and capitalist penetration. Bringing to light the social relations of earlier time periods, archaeology plays a critical role in documenting the full range of human variation, a role that cannot be filled by ethnography, history, or ethnohistory with their shorter temporal spans. By questioning essentialist notions of binary gender systems, gender research in archaeology can lead to a reevaluation of long-standing disciplinary assumptions about the nature of household organization, subsistence and craft production, ritual performance, and the structure of ancient states. The materiality of gender relations and gender identities in the archaeological record allows archaeologists to conduct historical comparisons of ancient, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic time periods to document changes as well as continuities in human social conditions. In so doing, archaeologists are able to expose ancient social scenarios that are distinctive from contemporary arrangements and thus widen the scope of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the way in which the constitutive condition of anthropology, often dismissed as ‘colonial’, is still inherent in anthropological practice. It is argued that anthropologists are still answering a ‘call of the unknown’ by which to expand the horizon of the modern social imaginary. The vehicle of this discussion is found in early Arctic ethnography, not least in the works of (Danish) Knud Rasmussen. It is shown how ancient images of the far northern world and its people persistently infiltrated the ethnographic descriptions, and how the ‘unknown’ is perceived through ‘known’ images. Nevertheless, the relationship between the known and the unknown is far from stable, because new horizons open and close in the process of understanding and description. This is still the case, and the result is a fluid field of knowledge that serves as a repository of doubt about canonical categories. Résumé Le présent article discute la manière dont la condition constitutive de l'anthropologie, souvent récusée comme « coloniale », est demeurée inhérente à la pratique anthropologique. L'auteur affirme que les anthropologues répondent encore à un « appel de l'inconnu » qui pousse àélargir l'horizon de l'imaginaire social moderne. Sa discussion se base sur les premiers travaux d'ethnographie arctique, en particulier ceux du Danois Knud Rasmussen. L'article montre comment les anciennes images du Grand Nord et de ses peuples ont imprégné durablement les descriptions ethnographiques, et comment « l'inconnu » est perçu au travers d'images connues. Pourtant, la relation entre le connu et l'inconnu est loin d'être stable car de nouveaux horizons s'ouvrent ou s'effacent au fil du processus de compréhension et de description. C'est encore le cas aujourd'hui, et il en résulte un champ mouvant de connaissance susceptible de remettre en cause les catégories canoniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the article of Viranjini Munasinghe on the concept of creolization in the Caribbean and in social and cultural theory. She says that the disciplinary quality of the concept of creolization raises questions about the relationship between theory and ethnography. An alternative point of view about the character, importance, and relationships among ethnography, empiricism, and theory for examining the concept of creolization is offered.

In (2001), Mendelberg finds support for her theory that implicit racial appeals, but not explicit ones, prime racial resentment in opinion formation. She argues that citizens reject explicit appeals, rendering them ineffective, because they violate widespread egalitarian norms. Mendelberg's innovative research, however, suffers from several limitations. We remedy these deficiencies using two randomized experiments with over 6,300 respondents. We confirm that individuals do tend to reject explicit appeals outright, but find that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit ones in priming racial resentment in opinion formation. In accounting for the differences between previous research and our own, we show that education moderates both the accessibility of racial predispositions and message acceptance. This suggests that the necessary assumptions of Mendelberg's theory hold only for different and exclusive subsets of the general population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early-20th-century ‘legal realists’ and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of political and legal processes. Studying the ‘social life of human rights’ would involve focusing on, inter alia, the performative dimensions of human rights, the dynamics of social mobilization, and the attitudinal changes of elite and nonelite social actors towards formulations of ‘rights’ and ‘justice,’ both inside and outside the legal process. I conclude with a review of recent anthropological research on human rights epistemology and evaluate its implications for human rights policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology's analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who critically engage the human rights regime share a common problem—that of the ‘iron cage’ of legal instrumentalism. I conclude that an ethnographic method reconfigured as a matter of what I term circling back--as opposed to cultural description—offers a respite from the hegemony of legal instrumentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Karen culture, the family is traditionally the basic unit for the education of the child. In the early 1970s, when Jonni Odochao began to notice that children could not relate to their elders or respect them, he surmised that the problem stemmed from the modern education system and its increasing influence upon youth values, behaviour and ways of thinking. To counter this trend he set in place a two-pronged strategy. Inspired by an old Karen saying, a wide-ranging alliance of persons with complementary expertise was established to advocate legislative change. In addition, Karen culture was reflected upon and revived by integrating traditional knowledge into the curricula of local schools. For the Karen, the ultimate goal is to be better understood by the society at large and to re-establish their role as guardians of the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers insights into the concept of nationalism and anthropology in response to a related theory presented by social anthropologist Aleksandar Boškovic. Topics discussed include the relationship between nationalism and anthropology according to Boškovic, the role of myth and history in the paradigm of nationalism, and the distinction between ethnology and anthropology.

Through an ethnography of unauthorized migration from El Salvador to the United States, I explore "clandestinity" as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality. Unauthorized migrants who are en route to the United States have to make themselves absent from the spaces they occupy. When they become clandestine, such migrants embody illegality; in some cases, they literally "go underground" should they die and be buried en route. Because their presence is prohibited, unauthorized migrants do not fully arrive even when they reach their destinations. There are parallels between the ways that migrants are present in yet absent from nations, and the ways that ethnographers are present in yet absent from the field. This ethnography of migrants en route therefore suggests how anthropological knowledge practices also produce realities that are hidden, yet known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on colonial nostalgia as a distinctively anthropological problem. Attempt to sketch some of colonial nostalgia's crucial dimensions as a social phenomenon to suggests how people might more productively engage with it in ethnographic terms; Nostalgia in both popular and academic contexts; Argument that nostalgia is shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles and that it can only be understood in particular historical and spatial contexts.

Analyzes the anthropological models of social memory for former settlers in Algeria. Details on the nature of popular historical memory; Exploration of the composite character of memory; Description of colonial assimilation.

Many British social anthropologists have been asked in recent years to provide expert evidence for use in legal appeals by asylum seekers. This article describes the administrative and legal decision-making procedures to which asylum claims are subject. It considers how the courts respond to ‘objective evidence’ from ‘country experts’ such as anthropologists, comparing this to legal approaches to evidence from medical experts. The problems which arise – especially in relation to the key issue of an asylum seeker's ‘credibility’– are analysed with reference to diverse forms of reasoning among social scientists and lawyers, and their different understandings as to the nature of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust has latterly become an important focus of enquiry across the social sciences, and this article reflects critically upon the current literature on the basis of ethnographic research into the transactions of small companies in several sectors of Indian industry, and the reorganization that is taking place in Indian family business groups in the context of economic globalization. It is concluded that much of the argument about the increasing importance of trust in the context of globalization is misplaced, and that it serves an ideological function. The problem of business management in India is that of bringing about change in the institutional framework and in business behaviour in a context in which these changes confront a culture of ‘selective trust’ amongst groups of people in specific social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with Margery Wolf, professor emeritus of the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, and currently secretary of the American Anthropological Association. This interview takes the occasion of Professor Wolf's recent retirement to offer a retrospective on the importance of her work for cultural anthropology. Throughout her career, Wolf maintained a unique approach to writing ethnography. She began as a writer and brought that sensibility into her anthropological work.