The anthropology of ontology (religious science?)

Through engagement with a range of recent publications, this article offers a mini‐ethnography of wonder discourses in the anthropology of ontology, leading to a rethink of the concept of religion. It has sometimes been suggested that science and religion are antithetical orientations to the experience of wonder: whereas science seeks to banish wonder by replacing it with knowledge, religion remains open to wonder in the face of the unknowable. With this criterion of difference in view, this article identifies certain trends in the anthropology of ontology that appear to enjoin and pursue open‐ended wonder in ways that might be read as constituting anthropology as religious science. This coincidence of supposed opposites recommends, I conclude, a relational account of religion.     

Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article

This review article is a critical evaluation of recent ethnographic contributions and theoretical debates concerning cargo cults. It examines how Foucault's genealogical and discursive methodologies can be used in a way that undercuts their valuable insights. The recent self‐reflexive turn, where anthropology focuses on the moral politics of its own discourses, can lead to a silencing of the moral political discourses of others. Moreover self‐reflexivity can become an authorising strategy for academics keen to downplay race and resistance in millenarian movements where these are important features.     

Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual,Society and Anthropology

Gregory Bateson laid stress on treating anthropology as a ‘non‐specialist’ subject which would draw upon, and hence illuminate the interdependence of, all the human sciences in its endeavour to tackle what he called the `vast intricacies' of socio‐cultural complexity. What was called for was an ‘abductive’ project which would qualitatively or aesthetically identify certain vital `patterns' which connected different arenas of human experience. By this means, anthropology could hope to disinter specific sociological and psychological laws. In the manner of Bateson, this paper sets out to describe and isolate one such law: the random workings of the individual human mind. These workings are considered abductively across a range of different but related discourses: ethnographic, aesthetic, political and moral. It is argued that to appreciate the randomness of the individual mind is to gain important insight not only into the diversity of human culture and society but also the singularity of human being. An appreciation of human randomness and its ramifications, it is concluded, may serve as the basis not only of explanation but also a sense of moral value and beauty in anthropological analysis.     

To see that which cannot be seen: ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile

In this article, I explore different visual practices performed by Pehuenche Indigenous healers and state public health professionals in Southern Chile. While non‐Indigenous health workers seek to make ‘traditional’ Pehuenche healing visible within or alongside their own ‘modern’ practices, Pehuenche people are concerned with making visible the evil spirits whose ‘eating’ of persons produces illness. Focusing in particular on different healing practices triggered by the existence of Pehuenche spiritual illnesses that are ‘seen’ by both Indigenous healers and state professionals, this article discusses how different ontologies ground differences between the Indigenous healers and what they ‘see’; as well as how a broader and substantive binary between Pehuenche and non‐Pehuenche realities goes above and beyond these multiplicities. By exploring and discussing the endurance of Pehuenche cosmo‐political relations in a world inhabited by visible and invisible eaters, I hope to create awareness about how a failure to recognize these different realities limits current multicultural policies in Southern Chile, and Indigenous health policies more broadly. At a more theoretical level, the following ethnographic account sheds light on unresolved tensions between the ways ontological difference has been conceptualized within the so‐called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).     

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.     

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.     

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of two Committee on Special Education meetings for one adolescent girl. Drawing on two years of ethnographic data, I look across the two meetings and demonstrate that the second-year CSE meeting is wrought with three contradictions. This article suggests the need to look to institutional discourses and cases of subjective experiences in order to understand the process of social reproduction in the anthropology of disability.     

Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’

This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's ‘showcase city’ of the left, ‘Red Bologna’, in which to be ‘red’ is ubiquitous but each person's ‘red’ is a different thing: being ‘red’ (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the ‘field’ as a location and the ‘field’ as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the ‘equivocal location’: a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.     

Cough sweets and angels: the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary in Sufi practice in Lebanon

This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous in Sufi practice in Lebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing, Max Weber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. For Weber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropology of ethics, I claim on the contrary that the extraordinary has its ordinary ethics too. In so doing I not only add to the anthropology of wonder but also challenge those who would argue that anthropology's especial focus is on the ordinary, to the exclusion of its opposite. If this is not to be mere piety, sorting out what belongs to which category will prove challenging. Especially within the anthropology of religion, one can hardly do with one without the other.     

Life as a process of making in the Mixe Highlands (Oaxaca,Mexico): towards a ‘general pragmatics’ of life

In contrast to Western philosophy, which has considered the distinction between life and the living to be fundamental, anthropology seems not to have given much thought to the difference between the two. However, the existence of an entity called ‘The One Who Makes Live’ among the Mixe, an Amerindian group living in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, proves that ethno‐theories of non‐Western peoples often make the distinction between the characteristics and vital processes of living beings (growth, degeneration, reproduction, etc.), on the one hand, and the more or less personified causes that produce them, on the other. Given these circumstances, this article pursues a two‐fold objective. First, based on the results of ethnographic inquiry, it tries to describe the categories of nonhuman agents with which the Mixe understand this production or making of the living. Second, it suggests that, in parallel with numerous approaches developed by anthropologists past and present, the anthropology of life would benefit from an approach based on a ‘general pragmatics’ in order to better understand the diversity of conceptions of life.     

‘The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts

This paper examines certain key concepts of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, with a view to a clearer understanding of its proposed methodology. It situates the ontological approach within the historical and intellectual conflicts through which it arose, outlining its motivations and the challenges it poses to traditional fieldwork methods and theory. The concepts of ‘radical alterity’ and ‘incommensurability’ are examined as intellectual as well as political concepts, highlighting their historical contingency on the politics of colonisation. Following from this, the notion of ‘ontological self-determination’ is analysed with respect to my fieldwork with the Dongria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha, India; I show how an application of the ontological methodology allows a better understanding of certain conflicts within current discourses and practices of nationhood and development.     

Civil society and healing: Theorizing women's social activism in post-soviet Ukraine

This article suggests a new tack on ‘NGO-graphy’ by setting up a dialogue between medical anthropological theories and the existing literature on postsocialist civil societies. Using data from Ukraine, I integrate recent critiques of ‘civil society’ discourses with an ethnographic investigation of the ambiguous personal transformations that social activism has generated for some women NGO leaders. The article asserts that, by applying the insights of critical-interpretive medical anthropology to the study of postsocialism, we can better track the dynamics of political, social, and personal change through which institutions are created, meaning-making surrounding self and society is negotiated, and powerful discourses are wielded to assert and contest the social worth of persons and groups.     

The anthropologist as photographer: The visual construction of ethnographic authority

“The Anthropologist as Author"—Clifford Geertz's formulation is emblematic of a theme of anthropology in the 1980s, ethnographic writing. Ethnographic photography, however, was barely a subject of consideration. Reviewing Evans‐Pritchard's The Nuer, a book widely re‐read in the writing culture debate, this article investigates not only the author's visual construction of ethnographic authority. It also reveals ethnographic photography as a medium, which can undermine this authority in a subtle yet compelling manner. Thus concentrating on the medium itself this paper investigates the uneasy relationship between photography and anthropology, and proposes an approach to ethnographic photography that goes beyond the questions of representation.¹     

Beyond authenticity: The discourse of tourism in ethnographic and experimental film

This paper explores the relationship between postmodern ethnographic and experimental filmmaking. Recent shifts in both modes of film praxis away from modernist paradigms of anthropology and aesthetics have disclosed a rich field of nonscientific, non‐visionary common ground. Theoretical issues that help to define this inter‐penetration of film modes include allegory, tourism and intertextuality. Films by Jonas Mekas, Trinh Minh‐ha, David Byrne and Paula Gaitan are discussed with the aim of indicating the scope, the potential and the problems of postmodern ethnography.     

"I Wasn't Scared of Them, They Were Scared of Me": Constructions of Self/Other in a Midwestern Hair Salon

This article describes how a group of black women read culture, class, and other social relations, analyzing the process and skill of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues in allowing individuals to navigate across multiple discourses. I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in a Midwestern hair salon. Such research seeks to strengthen ties between the disciplines of anthropology and education, and relatedly between those who work within universities, classrooms, and everyday settings.     

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.     

Ontological (in)Security and African Pentecostalism in Ireland

The last number of years has seen the mushrooming of African Pentecostal churches, especially Prosperity Gospel churches, in the post-recession industrial landscapes of Ireland. This article aims to explore the growth of African Pentecostalism in Ireland from both the perspective of embodied and affective religious experience and the conditions for the possibility of those religious experiences. This article is based on several years of ethnographic research among African Pentecostals in Ireland. It attends especially to the sensorious forms of worship and the Jesus walks that Pentecostals organise to transform the Irish symbolic landscape. Drawing on recent anthropological theory, the article draws out the contradictions, doubts, boundaries and limitations perceived and lived in totalising Pentecostal discourses and practices. Here, we develop the concept of ontological (in)security in order to theorise these doubts and limitations as well as the power of contemporary Pentecostalism in late modernity.     

Class-Based Chronicities of Suffering and Seeking Help: Comparing Addiction Treatment Programs in Uganda

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article looks at changing discourses and practices in the field of mental health care in Uganda. In particular, it analyzes two psychotherapeutic institutions designed to treat drug- and alcohol-addiction, and their accessibility and affordability for people from different class backgrounds. The first center is a high-class residential facility near Kampala which offers state-of-the-art addiction therapy, but is affordable only for the rich. The second center, a church-funded organization in Northern Uganda, cares mainly for people from poor, rural families who cannot afford exp/tensive treatment. Comparing the two centers provides important insights not only into the temporalities of mental illness, substance abuse and mental health care, but also into broader socio-economic dynamics and understandings of suffering in contemporary Uganda. The term ‘class-based chronicities’ refers to the way both the urgency with which people seek treatment (when has someone suffered enough?) and the length of treatment they receive (when is someone considered ‘recovered’?) are highly class-dependent. On a theoretical level, the article shows how psychotherapeutic models operate as philosophical systems which not only impact on treatment practices, but also produce different addiction entities and addiction-related subjectivities. As such, it contributes to an emerging anthropology of addiction.     

Resituating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology

This critical essay examines the place of educational discourse in contemporary anthropology. I address the growing influence of "cultural studies" frameworks in anthropology—especially in research on popular culture, media, and identity—and the corresponding neglect of specifically educational discourses and practices, in and out of schools. To illustrate, I briefly examine recent research by four noted cultural anthropologists who mention the effects of schools at their field sites but pay insufficient attention to complex educational discourses and practices. Then I address the reasons why most contemporary anthropologists outside the subfield of "anthropology of education" ignore or downplay the role of modern schools in structuring identities and power relations, both locally and globally. I end with a programmatic synthesis: to recognize and account for the continuing power of schools in most contemporary ethnographic sites, even as we broaden our vision of "education" and extend our analytic tools well beyond schools. This resituating of educational discourse in anthropology might accomplish two important things. First, it could arrest the trend toward subfield specialization and provide a more unifying research program. Second, it would promote anthropology's renewed engagement with some of the most pressing problems of democracy and public policy, fostering an organic link between our multiple roles as teachers, researchers, and institutional actors, [education, identity, cultural studies, ethnographyJ