Alternating Ontologies: Exchange and Ritual in Anganen History

In this article I examine the changing social and historical context of exchange and ritual amongst the Anganen of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, a neglected theme in Highland ethnography. I focus primarily on the history of the incorporation of one spirit cult ritual, rimbu, and its relationship to the other major spirit cult, kabit, and just how these two cults inter-relate with two major categories of exchange—the ceremonial pig kill (yasolu) and the more ‘mundane’ forms of exchange associated with such events as marriage and death. It is the structural parallels, differences and interconnections between these two exchange categories and the two ritual types which have guided much of the historical development of local social structure until colonisation. This has resulted in a substantial, though not necessarily stable, integration of ritual and exchange which has been ‘played out’ over the approximately fifteen-year periods between yasolu pig kills. I argue that it is this set of oppositions that provides the structural basis for different potentialities for male capacity. On occasion these may be so graphically distinct that they may be called differing social ontologies, different baselines for being and action. Different aspects of rimbu were adopted from around the turn of the twentieth century until colonisation some 50 years later when both kabit and rimbu were abandoned under mission pressure. However, to talk about the adoption of rimbu and the changes to Anganen social structure which it helped to produce as ‘pre-colonial’ history is misleading to the extent that much of the impetus for change was bound up in the efflorescence of trade caused by the Australian pearling industry in the Torres Strait. I call this period ‘ante-colonial’ in order to highlight the impact of the Australians and the irony that what the Australians indirectly helped create, rimbu as a central feature to Anganen social life, was destroyed with the direct colonial presence and missionisation.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.     

Negotiating the Ritual and Social Order through Spectacle: The (Re)Production of Macassan/Yol▒u Histories1

Broadly framed in terms of performance theories by Turner and Beeman, this paper weaves together the historical, mythical, ritual and performative aspects of a 1997 encounter in Sulawesi between Yol?u (an Aboriginal people of northern Australia) and Macassans (people from southern Sulawesi, Indonesia). The focus of the paper is an indigenous opera called Trepang, which is based on the centuries‐long history of trading relations and family connections between the two groups, and the way its performance was used by the Yol?u and Macassan cast members to renegotiate their often turbulent shared history, along with the contemporary social and ritual order. In this light, Trepang can be understood as a restorative social process, a means of pursuing a common path and a way of ameliorating the discrepancies of the past—bringing the parties finally together as one. Analysing the social context in which the performance of historical ‘truths’ was negotiated, I unpack key events in the staging of this ‘play within a play’ and demonstrate the need to transgress the dualism of ritual and spectacle.     

Basotho blankets: ownership and appropriation

This article examines claims of ownership and appropriation of Basotho blankets. Ingrained in the ritual and mundane reproduction of life among the Basotho people of Lesotho, the luminous blankets and their story have enticed many to deal in them. The blankets are manufactured and trademarked by Aranda Textile Mills, and in recent years they have been adapted by Basotho fashion designers, foreign private entrepreneurs, and the Louis Vuitton fashion house and depicted in Marvel's Black Panther film. The diversity of the actors involved has created a complex field of entitlement claims. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the processes through which actors claim, appropriate, and transform the value of ‘heritage’ items. This is done by viewing the actors’ efforts as ‘scale-making projects’ across ‘regimes of value’ that aim to expand their ‘spatiotemporal control’ and by viewing the actors themselves as ‘brands’ posing as originators of value.     

Talking Pleasures,Writing Dialects. Outlining Research on Schmecka

This text is written in English so that it may reach an international academic audience. However, if all academic research comes to be outlined in English we are to lose a lot. Here, we argue this by presenting the case of schmecka. Drawing on fieldwork done in the Austrian region of Vorarlberg, we suggest that the word schmecka differs from the factual ‘flavour perception’ investigated in physiology; from the culturally informed ‘sensory experiences’ explored by anthropologists and even from the sociological ‘tasting in practice’. For one, schmecka is shared between modest good food and assembled eaters; two, it draws together the English ‘tasting’ and ‘smelling’; and three, it has positive overtones. This means that using schmecka is not just judicious when writing about ‘others’, here the people of Vorarlberg. It also, more interestingly, allows ‘us’ to write in another way: one that foregrounds valuing rather than facting.     

The Moving Image as Incident of Disappearance

The essay probes the context of an aesthetic of disappearance in recent practice in the moving image in the Philippines. This aesthetic is not one of absence but of a marked incidence of loss, in fact, an index of brutal abduction. It focuses on how both the full-length film and the installative video work mediate the idiom of the long take and the documentary respectively, to flesh out the said aesthetic. Furthermore, the latter form references a political situation in which the state is alleged to organize the scheme to dispose of certain bodies. Such disposition of expendable bodies has been called “extrajudicial,” and it is rendered cinematically in Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay [2009] and Kiri Dalena’s Time and Place of Incidence [2011] as a passage to a murder as well as to an investigation, thus complicating the feelings of abjection and melancholy and the material condition of disappearance.     

Out of words: The æsthesodic cine‐eye of Robert Gardner: An Exegesis and Interview

Anthropological evaluations of the film work of Robert Gardner have been compromised by their reluctance to engage with it as art, and more broadly, to celebrate rather than vilify the aesthetic possibilities of the genre of ethnographic film. Even recent experiments with reflexivity have done little to challenge the realism that undergirds anthropological reception of non‐fiction film. By contrast, this article and interview considers Gardner's work as both anthropology and art. In particular, it addresses the evolving dialectic of the verbal and the visual in his films, from Bhinden Harbour (1951) to Passenger (1998). It also argues that recent efforts by anthropologists to rethink the concept of culture from a post‐semiotic perspective, foregrounding corporeal embodiment in the constitution of culture as much as the self, expand the theoretical boundaries of visual anthropology. In turn, it suggests that this reorientation towards sensation and perception should allow for a more approbatory understanding of Gardner's films.     

生物人类学和人体组成学的渊源关系

随着人体组成学中文版的发行和人体组成测量培训班在中国的举行, 中国生物人类学家对人体组成测量方法在科研中的运用有了更大的兴趣。该文对人类学家,如Jindr?ich Matiegka和Stanley MarionGarn在人体组成学发展中的历史贡献做了基本的介绍。此外, 作者还以Garn博士的工作为例, 去激励中国生物人类学家开展人体组成学的研究工作。文章讨论了人体组成成分的测量方法在生物人类学中的用途, 并介绍了人体组成学的基本理论和概念及近年来人体组成学的变化: 如影像技术的发展, 影像技术作为"金标准"对评估其他人体组成测量方法的用途, 双能量x线吸收法的优势, 生物电阻分析法的广泛运用, 和多种人体组成测量方法相辅相成的现象。作者对常用的人体组成测量方法的优缺点做了比较, 并指出人体组成成分测量是人体测量方法的自然延续, 人体组成学和生物人类学的关系渊源已久; 因此中国人类学家应当更多地利用人体组成测量方法对人体差异做更深入的研究, 并注重人体差异同健康疾病和生物医学的关系, 以便让生物人类学更好地为当今社会服务。     

The Reprise of Malinowski

ABSTRACT

Ways of Baloma is a deliberate attempt to move Anthropology as a discipline by means of a new account of a classic locale for the practice. How does it manage this purpose? This essay evaluates Mosko’s attempt from the perspective of another ethnographer with long-term ethnographic research in the Kula Ring. Paradoxes abound in the book and are featured in this review. For while Malinowski’s theoretical pronouncements quickly lost their significance for most anthropologists, his Trobriand ethnography became a model in its own right. And it is this model Mosko attempts to hold up for review and revision based on his view of the contemporary theoretical state of the art. This review outlines some of the strategies and ideas, as well as the regional locale, Mosko deploys in an attempt to make a new Trobriand ethnography a model for anthropological analysis.     

Maori hapuu and their History

Current research by historians and lawyers in Maori land and fisheries claims is broaching issues of Maori kinship calling for renewed social anthropological research. In this essay I review the history of social anthropological research in Maori kinship through 1975, a lapse in this research until the late 1980s, and a recent revival. A central problem of this research has been the conceptualisation of Maori hapuu (‘subtribes’) or cognatic descent groups. A critique of the recent analyses suggests that the early failure of social anthropologists to understand hapuu in historical context continues, although in different theoretical forms. The burgeoning research by historians and lawyers, while lacking fundamental anthropological insights, suggests that hapuu cannot be separated from their specific history.     

Groundwork for the Anthropology of Belgium: An Overlooked Microcosm of Europe

Like the European Union itself, the anthropology of Europe has been slowly developing for decades. Yet compared to their colleagues working at more conventional non-Western field sites, ethnographers studying present-day Europe are focusing on a region that still exists at the margins of the discipline. Thus far, anthropologists have largely neglected Belgium as an opportunity to understand the sociopolitical culture of the European continent as a whole. Through a detailed examination of historical processes that have shaped modern Belgian society, the present article highlights how this tiny nation stands as a microcosm of Europe's past, present, and potential futures. Proffering a wide-ranging analysis of the various regional and supranational spheres that Belgians inhabit, this paper outlines how ethnographic studies of belgitude (or ‘Belgianness’) can shed light on pan-European topics that are of interest to anthropologists.     

The Australian Aborigines and the Human Past

Indifference to events which may actually have taken place between the Dreamtime and European contact is commonly held to be a salient feature of traditional Aboriginal thought. This contention contains a significant element of truth but it may have been exaggerated by some anthropologists. Structural-functionalist emphases on myth as charter led not only to the rejection of historical interpretations of Aboriginal myths which were ill-considered and naïve, but also to an excessive neglect of potentially fruitful attempts to extract from myths clues about post-Dreamtime experiences. This neglect has unduly strengthened the view that Aboriginal thought is entirely sui generis and that its supposed indifference to human history is an inescapable cultural attribute of Aboriginality. A sketch is offered for a reappraisal of the significance of Aboriginal myths for Aboriginal history.     

With or without the camera running: the work of Inuit film-making

This article argues for the critical evaluation of indigenous media, art, and aesthetic practices within local trajectories of meaning-making. Drawing on ethnographic research in Arctic Canada with a notable Inuit video and film production company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, I emphasize the value of focusing on locally defined processes of filmic production and on relational bounties accrued outside the camera's field of vision. Indigenous media-making emerges as a collaborative, adaptive, intercultural, and improvisational practice, one akin to Inuit traditions of hunting, carving, garment-sewing, tool-making, and story-telling, and celebrated for its ability to foster unique environmental relationships, material practices, and perceptual orientations. Exploring the compound and relational workings of indigenous media invites critical reconsideration of the generative potentials it holds for the practitioner-inhabitants of indigenous communities, anthropologists, and mainstream audiences more broadly.     

Partial Stories: Repeat Photography,Narratives and Environmental Change in Tanzania

Repeat photography has emerged as a popular tool for visualizing climate change yet has been employed relatively little by visual and environmental anthropologists. Based on research in Tanzania’s South Pare Mountains, this article shows how repeat photography can be a powerful method for environmental anthropologists both practically and epistemologically: repeat photography as a practice integrates well with ethnography, while the contradictions emerging through multimodal research help us reflect on the narratives about environmental change that we encounter and write ourselves. At the same time, detailed ethnography is crucial for understanding the lived experience and wider politico-economic dimensions of landscape change that are not visible through repeat photography alone.     

Orientalism in the Documentary Representation of Culture

Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an “authentic human encounter” not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently.     

Anthropology's ‘impact’: a comment on audit and the unmeasurable nature of critique

The UK government has recently made higher education funding of anthropological research partially dependent on its social ‘impact’. Based on work in higher education and fifty interviews with anthropologists trained in Britain, this article analyses the implications of these impact requirements. It shows that anthropologists generally share government desires for their work to have a societal effect, but that impact, as understood in the United Kingdom's dominant research measurement exercise known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), is marked by a series of important practical and conceptual limitations. On a practical level, it underestimates the social effects of teaching, relies on an overly limiting notion of evidence, and significantly restricts the scope of permissible research. On a conceptual level, impact measurement cannot fully grasp the nature or effect of anthropology, insofar as the latter is a critical science that contributes to the constant renewal of audit's own politico‐epistemic foundations. This exposes an important limitation of audit practices more widely, which has so far received little scholarly attention: audits are in several ways incapable of grasping sociocultural critique.     

Vatted dreams: neurophilosophy and the politics of phenomenal internalism

Despite much social‐scientific work on the neurosciences, little ethnographic and historical attention has been paid to the field of neurophilosophy. Yet anthropologists studying brain research occasionally critique neurophilosophers for reducing the mind to the brain while affirmatively citing philosophers of mind who present the mind as emerging from interactions between brain, body, and environment. This article examines the ostracized camp of so‐called ‘phenomenal internalists’ – neurophilosophers who believe that consciousness can supervene on the brain alone. This ontological commitment is driven by certain existential and political experiences from false awakenings to disenchantment with the counterculture of the 1970s. But it also draws from neuroscientific research on the dreaming brain. The inquiry concludes with a plea to anthropologists to attend to relations of detachment, both social and neural, and to reconsider their own ontological commitment to externalism in the light of dream research.     

The interface between medical anthropology and medical ethnobiology

Medical anthropology is concerned with both the causes and consequences of human sickness, and its various theoretical orientations can be grouped into four major approaches: medical ecology, critical medical anthropology, interpretative medical anthropology, and ethnomedicine. While medical anthropologists of all theoretical persuasions have examined why people get sick, the analysis and understanding of patterns of treatment has been largely confined to ethnomedicine. Historically, more emphasis has been placed on the personalistic or supernatural aspects of ethnomedical systems than on naturalistic or empirical components. While this focus has produced valuable insights into the role of ritual and belief in healing, it has led to the impression that traditional medicine is primarily symbolic. Moreover, it ignores the theoretical bases of traditional healing strategies and the practical means by which most of the world heals itself, namely plants. Recently there has been more interest in the empirical character of ethnomedical systems, and in this paper we consider the role that medical ethnobiology has played in this shift of focus. We begin with a brief history of medical anthropology to illuminate why naturalistic medicine was neglected for so long. We then review exemplary research in two areas of medical ethnobiology – ethnophysiology and medical ethnobotany – that address the study of naturalistic aspects of medical systems. We conclude with suggestions for future research at the interface between medical ethnobiology and medical anthropology that will contribute to both fields.     

In focus: Film,focus groups and working children in Bangladesh

The use of visuals in anthropological research is an established though much debated practice, both as a research tool and as a means of reporting. Pile sorts, mapping, thematic drawing, photographs, visual scales and pictorial triad testing are all visual methods that have been used in participatory and conventional ethnographic research to encourage discussion among study participants and to clarify detail. Our experience in the use of visual tools in a study conducted in 1997–98, among former child garment workers in Bangladesh, reinforces the value of the use of visuals in research. A documentary film was used in focus groups with children, most aged 10–13. The results suggest that film is a powerfully evocative tool and, combined with focus groups, is an excellent qualitative research technique. The research experience in Bangladesh also suggests that children are able to participate meaningfully in the research not in spite of but because of the use of documentary film.     

The Interdiction of Music in Islam

There is no authorisation in the Qur'an for the interdiction on music. That interdiction, when it is voiced, is the product of a conviction among some Muslims, supported by hadith (just as it is opposed with hadith) that Islam does not countenance music. In a country such as Pakistan, with a strong tradition of devotional music which (taken with the poetry, with which it is always associated) has become entwined with the identity politics of the provinces or sub‐‘nations’ which make up the vaster nation, a comprehensive ban on music would be impossible to enforce, though there are ‘ulamā’ and sectarian parties who desire it. This paper focuses on an instance where music is even harder to extricate from an accompanying text: the recitation of the Qur'ān. In the eyes of Muslims, Qur'anic recitation is not music. This denial raises further questions about the nature of music and, in particular, its involvement with the ‘extramusical’. Adorno's observations on the relation of music to language, and the anthropologist Friedson's complaint that ethnographers focus on text, at the expense of music, are examined in the light of the circumstance that the world over, music is associated with texts of one kind or another. Even when, as in the case of the ‘curing’ ritual described by Friedson, words are unimportant, or missing, music is seldom a phenomenological whole. Music ‘leans’, or is ‘leant on’: it lends its unrivalled ‘eloquence’ to many a cause, from commodity marketing to the structured working out of ritual, or, among lovers, to the remembered quality of experience. All these potentialities of music are relevant to the question of its interdiction and to the Muslim denial that the recitation of the Qur'ān is music.