Objects on the loose

What happens to the relations involved in ownership when faced with new claims and challenges? This article looks at three examples of the way in which Mongolians are managing claims to resources and responding to new regimes of ownership. In each case, recourse to models of ownership based on masters and custodians are marshalled and extended to suit new contexts. I suggest that these should not be viewed as modern responses to the inequalities of current economic and social life [cf. Comaroff and Comaroff. 1999, May. Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist, 26(2): 279–303], nor should they be viewed as a historical remnant from some previous social life. Rather, and here I follow Tsing [2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2015a. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2015b. Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity. In Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website, March 30, 2015. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/656-salvage-accumulation-or-the-structural-effects-of-capitalist-generativity], they may be viewed as an outcome of an innovative ‘friction’, or ‘salvage economy’, between global and local realities that gives rise to what Gibson-Graham [2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press] argues is a heterogeneous capitalist landscape, here manifested in Mongolia’s dramatically rising and falling mineral economy.     

Veiled Nannies and Secular Futures in France

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.     

Mambu phone home

Mambu: A Melanesian millennium, by Kenelm Burridge. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995 [reprinting of original 1960 edition with new preface]. 296pp., appendices, index. ISBN 0–691–00166–9 (paperback).     

The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: masculinity and national belonging

This paper explores an unprecedented series of violent acts against ‘gay’ Indonesians beginning in September 1999. Indonesia is often characterized as ‘tolerant’ of homosexuality. This is a false belief, but one containing a grain of truth. To identify this grain of truth I distinguish between ‘heterosexism’ and ‘homophobia,’ noting that Indonesia has been marked by a predominance of heterosexism over homophobia. I examine the emergence of a political homophobia directed at public events where gay men stake a claim to Indonesia's troubled civil society. That such violence is seen as the properly masculine response to these events indicates how the nation may be gaining a new masculinist cast. In the new Indonesia, male–male desire can increasingly be construed as a threat to normative masculinity, and thus to the nation itself.     

Leges sine moribus vanae: does language make moral thinking possible?

Does language make moral cognition possible? Some authors like Andy Clark have argued for a positive answer whereby language and the ways people use it mark a fundamental divide between humans and all other animals with respect to moral thinking (Clark, Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000a; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000b; Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 37–43 and discussion, 44–61, 2002). I take issue with Clark’s view and argue that language is probably unnecessary for the emergence of moral cognition. I acknowledge, however, that humans unlike other animals seem to posses what Haugeland in Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002) terms ‘norm-hungriness’: an idiosyncratic need or desire to create and abide by a multitude of norms. Our peculiar norm-hungriness, I suggest, depends on what can be called florid control rather than on language.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism.; Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology.

Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. Clark Spencer Larsen. ed. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 320 pp.
Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology. Clark Spencer Larsen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 248 pp.     

Ethnography through Thick and Thin

Ethnography through Thick and Thin, George E. Marcus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 275 pp.     

Book reviews

COHORT FERTILITY: NATIVE‐WHITE WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES: P. K. Whelpton, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1954, XXV + 492 pp. $6.00.

COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT AND POPULATION IN TAIWAN: George W. Barclay, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1954, xviii, 274 pp., $5.00.     

Further Readings in Geomicrobiology

The Biology of Cyanobacteria. N. G. Carr and B. A. Whitton (eds.). Botanical Monographs, Vol. 19. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, U.K., 1982 (also University of California Press), xi + 688 pp., $75.00 (U.S.); £42.00 sterling, hardcover.

Earth's Earliest Biosphere: Its Origin and Evolution. J. William Schopf (ed.). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1983. With 67 tables, 97 figures, and 47 photographs, xxv + 543 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $42.50.     

Ethnicity in the USSR and the CIS

After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Anatoly M. Khazanov. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. 311pp.
Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia. Victor A. Shnirelman. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. 98 pp.
In the Soviet House of Culture:. Century of Perestroikas. Bruce Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 225 pp.     

Islamic faith as a cultural dimension to ethnic relations

Ralph Grillo, 2015 Muslim Families, Politics and the Law. A Legal Industry in Multicultural Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, xvi + 337 pp. £75 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-4724-5121-7

John R Bowen, 2010 Can Islam Be French? Pluralism And Pragmatism in a Secularist State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, xi + 230 pp. $23.95 (paperback) ISBN978-0691-13283-9

John R Bowen, 2012 Blaming Islam. Cambridge: MIT Press, 144 pp. $15.95 (paperback) ISBN 978262017589     

Quasi-independence, fitness, and advantageousness

I argue that the idea of ‘quasi-independence’ [Lewontin, R. C. (1978). Adaptation. Scientific American, 239(3), 212–230] cannot be understood without attending to the distinction between fitness and advantageousness [Sober, E. (1993). Philosophy of biology. Boulder: Westview Press]. Natural selection increases the frequency of fitter traits, not necessarily of advantageous ones. A positive correlation between an advantageous trait and a disadvantageous one may prevent the advantageous trait from evolving. The quasi-independence criterion is aimed at specifying the conditions under which advantageous traits will evolve by natural selection in this type of situation. Contrary to what others have argued [Sterelny, K. (1992). Evolutionary explanations of human behavior. Australian Journal of Philosophy, 70(2), 156–172, and Sterelny, K., &; Griffiths, P. (1999). Sex and death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press], these conditions must involve a precise quantitative measure of (a) the extent to which advantageous traits are beneficial, and (b) the degree to which they are correlated with other traits. Driscoll (2004) [Driscoll, C. (2004). Can behaviors be adaptations? Philosophy of Science, 71, 16–35] recognizes the need for such a measure, but I argue that she does not provide the correct formulation. The account of quasi-independence that I offer clarifies this point.     

From Margin to Center: From Medical Anthropology to Cultural Studies of Science

Writing at the Margins: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Arthur Kleinman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 314 pp.
Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective. Robert A. Hahn New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 327 pp.
The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Allan Young. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 327 pp.     

Dis-orienting Paraphilias? Disability, Desire, and the Question of (Bio)Ethics

In 1977 John Money published the first modern case histories of what he called ‘apotemnophilia’, literally meaning ‘amputation love’ [Money et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 13(2):115–12523, 1977], thus from its inception as a clinically authorized phenomenon, the desire for the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs was constituted as a sexual perversion conceptually related to other so-called paraphilias. This paper engages with sex-based accounts of amputation-related desires and practices, not in order to substantiate the paraphilic model, but rather, because the conception of these (no doubt) heterogeneous desires and practices as symptoms of a paraphilic condition (or conditions) highlights some interesting cultural assumptions about ‘disability’ and ‘normalcy’, their seemingly inherent (un)desirability, and their relation to sexuality. In critically interrogating the socio-political conditions that structure particular desires and practices such that they are lived as improper, distressing and/or disabling, the paper constitutes an exercise in what Margrit Shildrick [Beyond the body of bioethics: Challenging the conventions. In M. Shildrick and R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the body: Postconventional challenges (pp. 1–26). New York: MIT Press, 2005] refers to as “postconventional ethics”.     

Migration, Transnationalism, and Belonging: Movements in the Nation-State

Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 366 pp.
When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration. Sheba Mariam George. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. 259 pp.
In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration. Nancy Foner. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 327 pp.     

God’s punishment and public goods

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I test whether the likelihood of supernatural punishment—indexed by the importance of moralizing “high gods”—is associated with cooperation. Dominic Johnson is a fellow in the Princeton University Society of Fellows. He holds a D.Phil. in biology from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in political science from Geneva University. His research revolves around the evolutionary biology of human behavior and how this impacts on conflict, cooperation, politics, and religion. His recent book, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions, was published in 2004 by Harvard University Press.     

Book review

H. D. Holland, The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1984. 94 tables and 230 figures, xii + 582 pp., $75.00; paper $24.00.     

Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony

Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in. Colony. Rudolph Mrázek. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 368 pp.     

After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua.; Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism.

After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua. Florence E. Babb. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 304 pp.
Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman. eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 443 pp.