Learning Courage: Child Labour as Moral Practice in Northeast Brazil

This article explores the moral dimensions of child labour as cultural practice in Northeast Brazil. It reveals a link between children's participation in labour and local constructions of childhood as a period of ontological uncertainty and impending transition. Through detailed ethnographic exegesis, the article reveals the symbolic dimensions surrounding children's engagement in productive endeavours, and shows how the local opposition between ‘work’ and ‘play’ arises out of an encompassing moral process. The article critiques the tendency within protectionist influenced anthropological literature to acknowledge the important contribution that children make towards material survival, while denying that contribution any deeper cultural significance.     

René Girard and the Mimetic Nature of Eating Disorders

French historian and literary critic René Girard (1923–2015), most widely known for the concepts of mimetic desire and scapegoating, also engaged in the discussion of the surge of eating disorders in his 1996 essay Eating Disorders and Mimetic Desire. This article explores Girard’s ideas on the mimetic nature and origin of eating disorders from a clinical psychiatric perspective and contextualizes them within the field of eating disorders research as well as in relation to broader psychological, sociological and anthropological models of social comparison and non-consumption. Three main themes in Girard’s thinking on the topic of eating disorders are identified and explored: the ‘end of prohibitions’ as a driving force in the emergence of eating disorders, eating disorders as a phenomenon specific to modernity, and the significance of ‘conspicuous non-consumption’ in the emergence of eating disorders.     

Encountering nature through fieldwork: expert knowledge,modes of reasoning,and local creativity

The concept of ‘relation’ has been central to the anthropological reworking of the nature/culture and nature/society dichotomies. However, ecology is relational in a way that has often been ignored or dismissed in contemporary socio‐cultural anthropology. This article shows that there is more to ethnoecology than an ethnocentric form of analysis representing other people's understandings of the natural world through the prejudiced lens of Western scientific classifications. Three ‘fieldwork on fieldwork’ experiments involving encounters between natural scientists and indigenous communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Southern Guyana are discussed to illustrate the heterogeneity of human knowledge, the role of expert knowledge in intercultural communication, and the need to differentiate ecological reasoning from moral reasoning.     

Gratuitousness: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Interiority

Interiority—an individual's inner consciousness, the continual conversation one has with oneself–remains an anthropological terra incognita. Literature has been less circumspect in this regard; fiction might be said to be ‘truer’ than social science in its efforts and intent to deal with how individual consciousness feels in the everyday and is immanent in social life. In this article I argue for recognising interiority as a crucial focus of anthropological endeavour, and I outline a possible way in which interiority might be evidenced as irrupting onto the social scene. Interiority makes its paradoxical appearance in social settings in the form of a strangeness, an individual purity and integrity, for which the term ‘gratuitousness’ is apposite. The language of individuals' interior conversation is routinely contained within the language of public exchange; on occasion it bursts these bounds. In both cases, I contend, interior conversation is an existential norm, which holds a key to understanding social life. The course of the article is to review, briefly but critically, disciplinary tendencies which have rendered individual interiority an impossible or irrelevant anthropological theme. A method of interiority is then outlined by way of an anthropological reading of two literary texts. The article ends by reconsidering the potential of an anthropology project that has a concern for interiority. The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the individual's command, and that are his exclusively as well as inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individuality.     

In the shadow of industry: a study of culturization in Papua New Guinea

The activities of extractive industry have recently been framed by a language of corporate social responsibility that relies on a system of legibility and objectification. This process reifies ‘cultural units’, abstracting them from the rules of kinship, migration, and exchange that ensure social and economic security. I refer to this process and the ideology of ‘development’ that accompanies it as culturization and examine it in the context of oil extraction in Papua New Guinea's Kutubu region. Drawing on debates on the indigenization and politicization of ‘culture’, I present culturization as a process that relies on rules of inheritance and property to impose a structure of difference in contexts of extractive industry that ignores the intricacies of sociality that ultimately give life meaning. The aim of the paper is to both illustrate the consequences of this process and consider cognate ideas of ‘culture’ vis‐à‐vis ‘sociality’ to emphasize their mutual theoretical importance to contemporary anthropological inquiry.     

Omarakana revisited,or ‘do dual organizations exist?’ in the Trobriands

Omarakana is arguably the most renowned village in the Trobriand and anthropological worlds. It is the very centre and wellspring of the North Kiriwinan universe and thus a sacred site, serving as the home of the Tabalu chiefly paramountcy. For us anthropologists, it is ground zero for our field methodology, thanks to Malinowski's pioneering research, and probably Melanesia's most hierarchical polity. Ironically, though, very little is actually known ethnographically about Omarakana's spatial layout. In this article I seek to compensate for that deficiency, arguing that Omarakana's seemingly concentric contours encode transformations of indigenous symbolism involving recurrent metaphors drawn from at least three conjoined semantic contexts of wide distribution across the Austronesian sphere and beyond: the double bisection of ‘male’ versus ‘female’; the botanical imagery of ‘base’, ‘body’, ‘tip’, and ‘fruit’; and various elements of ‘canoe’ symbolism. This alternative view of Omarakana's spatio‐temporal plan sheds new light on various additional dimensions of Trobriand sociality and cosmology while elaborating classic and contemporary anthropological theories of dualism.     

Feral ecologies: the making of postcolonial nature in London

Through an ethnography of parakeets and other denizens in London, this article expounds the concept of the feral and foregrounds its purchase for an anthropological inquiry into urban life. Ecological, cultural, and political connotations of ferality impinge upon evaluations of what counts and is allowed to flourish as metropolitan nature. Ferality is constructed through nativist and racial taxonomies which promote a biopolitics of eradicating parakeets. At the same time, parakeets trigger new ‘recombinant' ecological associations when they enter into relations with other avian life. They also foster affective alignments with people that create possibilities for a more just politics of dwelling. The feral recasts London's metropolitan nature as postcolonial and opens up novel ways of doing urban anthropology.     

‘Demo version of a city’: buildings,affects, and the state in Astana

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official ‘propaganda of emotion’ is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered ‘the state’ a plausible, if contradictory, ‘fictional reality’.     

When ‘blood speaks’: naming the father and the mystics of kinship in Dominica,Eastern Caribbean

This article explores the mystical implication of fathers in reproduction in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean. It traces naming acts that assign paternity at various points in the filial life course, each attempting to disambiguate paternity. Confronting a recurring anthropological problematic – the problem of paternity (paternity's inherent putativity) – the article argues that Dominicans contest uncertain physical fatherhood through the proverb ‘blood speaks’. The article elaborates how relatedness reveals itself in the subtle bodies of kin at three moments: through a local version of the couvade (‘sympathetic pregnancy’); in elders’ post-partum ritual scrutiny of children's bodies for familial resemblances; and during serendipitous encounters in later life. The article highlights how physical fatherhood is disclosed in fathers’ and children's symptoms, appearances, and sensations, revealing their kinship in transpersonal terms. Therefore, blood ‘speaks’ to counter broad-brushed narratives of Caribbean fatherly absence by revealing the physical and spiritual significance of fatherhood. Herein, the article revives classic anthropological debates on legitimacy, the couvade, and Caribbean kinship, whilst contributing to contemporary theorizations of blood and naming.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

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.     

Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender,technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

Only rarely is Vietnam's global heavy industry studied from an anthropological perspective in either its gender or its class dimensions. This article contributes new insights into the ways in which the interagential dynamics of gender and technology from shopfloor to engineer offices coproduce social orders in contesting and perpetuating essentializing notions of femininity and masculinity. Blue-collar and white-collar women working in heavy industrial workplaces represent a minority in ‘a man's world’, ambiguously both disidentifying and identifying with notions of a typical ‘female character’ vis-à-vis ‘male character’. Women working in heavy industry, the article shows, generate ‘disruption’ by reconfiguring conventions regarding gendered occupation, redefining gendered engagement with technology, and recalibrating images of femininity and masculinity. Doing so means carving out new opportunities and/or provoking crisis in a patrilineal universe. The article analyses the intricate ways in which women's engagement with technology is empowering while simultaneously reinforcing gender- and class-specific inequalities in socialist Vietnam's global market economy.     

More than a mountain: the contentious multiplicity of Tindaya (Fuerteventura,Canary Islands)

The mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands) has been surrounded by controversy since the mid-1990s. It is, at once, a listed indigenous site, a protected natural environment, a mining resource, and the designated location of a monumental intervention by artist Eduardo Chillida, consisting in digging a grand cubic cave in its interior. This article conceptualizes Tindaya as a contentious multiplicity and analyses the mountain's competing enactments. The state's Tindaya is a ‘partitioned’ mountain, an entity split into different dimensions (cultural and natural; interior and exterior) that can be both legally protected and excavated. In contrast, activists have enacted a ‘holistic’ mountain, characterized by the inseparability of its multiple ‘values’ (archaeological, geological, environmental) and the need to protect it as a single whole. These two enactments constitute ‘worlding’ practices connected to opposing understandings of the relationship between heritage, nature, and the future. For the state, the mountain is an asset to be exploited, an opportunity to bring about prosperous futures fashioned after the spectacular projects of the metropolis. For the activists, Tindaya represents a unique opportunity to rethink the island's development model and to put indigenous heritage and environmental concerns at its centre. Tindaya's unresolved multiplicity is therefore political in the broadest sense: it is a reminder that reality can be otherwise.     

Aspects of the semantics of emotions and feelings in Dalabon (South‐Western Arnhem Land,Australia)

This article describes two of the principal roots allowing the expression of emotions and feelings in Dalabon, an endangered language of South‐Western Arnhem Land. The first root, kangu, ‘belly’, is depicted linguistically as the location of emotions induced by interpersonal relationships. The belly is thus presented as the locus of good and bad moods generally and of conflict more specifically. Furthermore, the material properties of the belly—its fluidity in particular—impact on one’s temper and ability to deal with others in an ideologically prescribed manner. Speakers describe ritual manipulations undertaken on the belly of young infants in order to shape their temper. Kangu‐no may thus be described as a malleable interface between the person and the outside world, principally other people. The second root, yolh, may at first sight translate as ‘feelings’, either good or bad, but also means ‘appetite’, ‘drive’, ‘pep’. Yolh‐no is associated with the most intimate part of the person, one’s own aspirations that are independent of interactions with others. Although yolh‐no connotes the core self and kangu‐no, the belly, connotes relatedness to others, they are conceived as physiologically connected, so that material properties of the belly impact on the self. Thus, the semantic analysis of Dalabon, along with related anthropological observations, unveils an explicit conceptual and cultural attention to the distinction between emotions and feelings (as respectively defined in the article) and to the autonomy of the person within a constraining social framework. The article shows how this concern echoes and challenges both anthropological and philosophical considerations.     

Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’

This article examines ‘Asian electronic music’, a generally progressive diasporic South Asian scene which fuses electronic dance music beats with instruments/sounds traditionally associated with the subcontinent, and how it became embedded into ‘majoritarian’ Indian nationalism. In India, the music's perceived ‘fusion’ aesthetic became emblematic of an emergent India which was economically prosperous while ‘respecting’ its cultural heritage. Using the case of an album which remixed India's national song, Vande Mataram, this article explores the convergences and divergences between Asian electronic musicians in Delhi and Hindu nationalists. The article concludes that the musicians in Delhi did not lend to Hindu nationalism. However, they perhaps gave secular Indian nationalism a ‘cool’ gloss. Ultimately, the production and consumption of Asian electronic music in Delhi raises significant questions regarding the scene's relationship to Indian nationalisms.     

Living in a Clinic: The Power of Public Health Promotions

Drawing on an anthropological study of the Cessnock area of New South Wales, this paper considers the politics of recent health promotion campaigns in Australia, placing the new ‘healthist’ discourse in its historical context. Whereas Cessnock people were once said to be bestial, or childish, or sick, they are now said to be fat. Whereas Methodism was once prescribed as the solution, doctors now order a rational and maximising attitude to life. It is argued that the undoubted seriousness of Cessnock's health ‘problem’ and the undoubted good will of the health promoters do not remove the danger of cultural imperialism.     

The Magic in the Magic Pudding

This paper offers a narrative interpretation of Norman Lindsay's remarkable children's story, The Magic Pudding. Entering into the spirit of the tale, it seeks to evoke its magic as well as understand it, advocating an approach to the analysis of narrative that is as celebratory as it is critical. Making reference to James Clifford's discussion of ethnographic allegory, it draws on Michael Taussig's analysis of commodity and other forms of fetishism to argue that the pudding can be construed as a fetish object expressive of concerns and tensions haunting the Australian imaginary. The paper addresses such things as the interplay of class, race and sex in Lindsay's story, equality and exclusion, wealth without work, beards and hats and whatnot. In doing so, it responds to the humour and metaphorical play that is the source of the tale's popular appeal by offering the reader a little of its own—not a whole pudding's worth perhaps but at least enough to whet the appetite.     

Western Desert and Native Title: How Models Become Myths

A number of litigated Australian native title cases concern lands located within the area of Australia known as the Western Desert. In these cases, legal arguments concerning the nature of the land‐owning group and the ‘society’ at the time of colonisation have inevitably drawn on anthropological writings about Western Desert local and social organisation. The impetus for this paper was provided by the Yulara case, a compensation claim over the township of Yulara near Uluru, in which the trial judge concluded that land tenure systems in the Western Desert are based on patrilineal principles. One of the significant factors in the Court's decision was an apparently uncritical acceptance of early anthropological models and data, which had reported supposedly patrilineal socio‐territorial organisation in the Western Desert. Researchers currently working in this region and Indigenous peoples themselves, however, reject this model. In this paper, we question the validity of some of the earlier investigations, and propose an alternative understanding of Western Desert territorial organisation based on data gathered from one of the Pitjantjatjara‐speaking people's neighbouring dialectal groups, which is also consistent with most of the other recent and extensive work done in this cultural bloc.     

Interior Landscapes and External Worlds: the Return of Grand Theory in Anthropology1

This paper argues that the retreat from ‘theory’ characteristic of the postmodernist turn in anthropology has not had the impact on the ethics and politics of disciplinary practice that was hoped for. One reason for this is the problematic relationship between cultural relativism and identity politics which has paralysed the critical project in the discipline and prevented a more radical interrogation of two fundamental questions: ‘what is anthropology?' and ‘who is the anthropologist?'. Discussions in anthropological writing on hybridity and postcoloniality have more often highlighted the hybrid nature of `informants' than that of ‘anthropologists’. Feminist, native and minority writing in the discipline are areas where these questions have been seriously addressed through debates on positionality and location. However, the impact of these discussions on the politics of knowledge in the discipline are rarely recognised by ‘mainstrean anthropology’. One particularly noticeable lacuna is the fact that so little attention is paid to disciplinary education and its impact on theorising. Anthropology, rather than turning away from theory, should spend more time ‘anthropologising’ the concepts of ‘value’, ‘relativism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘comparison’ which underlie disciplinary theorising. The paper concludes by arguing for a return to theory in anthropology accompanied by a critical politics.     

Women,warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond

‘Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social‐philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it focuses on women's differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to ‘agency’ that turn it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social science art.