Shown but not Shared,Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non‐restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter‐indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter‐Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo‐colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.     

How the Tiwi Construct the Deceased’s Postself in Mortuary Ritual

ABSTRACT

In this paper I will discuss Tiwi mortuary rites as a transformative, relational process in which the deceased’s postself is created. The deceased’s self is fashioned and manifested after death through a series of ritual practices performed by specific relatives. This approach allows me not only to stress the concern Tiwi people show about being remembered after death but also how this concern defines each participant’s ceremonial role and constitutes one of the mortuary ritual’s major aims. The deceased will be remembered as portrayed in the final rites.     

Genuinely made up: camp,baroque, and other denaturalizing aesthetics in the cultural production of the real

The link that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau forged a long time ago between the ‘real’ and the ‘natural’ has proved to be indissoluble. Time and again, contemporary constructions of the real mobilize all that can be linked to nature. Inauthentic, by contrast, is that which is fabricated, made up, artificial, the all‐too‐evident result of human design. In Bahia, Brazil, the author encountered a completely different mode in the cultural production of the real. Analysing the performance of a Bahian drag queen who goes by the name of Gina da Mascar, the author discusses ‘camp’ and ‘baroque’ as registers that foster a sensibility for (and appreciation of) cultural forms that are ‘truly false’. He shows how the appeal of these registers – their persuasiveness, their form of truth‐telling – resonates with the sensibilities of people whose biographies are marked by radical discontinuities, and he argues that these registers might be understood as a popular articulation of the Lacanian understanding that symbolic closure is an impossibility.     

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.     

The crisscrossed agency of a toast: Personhood,individuation and de‐individuation in Luzhou,China

This article addresses debates over individuation in China through consideration of guanxi‐relational feasting in Luzhou, Sichuan. I draw on Ortner's theorisation of subjectivity and agency to probe the often taken‐for‐granted question of cultural personhood which informs social action. Although the social imaginary in Luzhou is increasingly colonised by symbolic individualism, I propose that dominant local notions of personhood and agency, operating within feast practice, continue to define this process. By attending to three aspects of Yan's ‘individualisation thesis’, I demonstrate how local models of person and agency are indispensible to a fuller understanding of social life. Considering the important role ritual speech habits (largely trained in de‐individuating feasting) continue to play in socialising actors to economic institutions and power relationships more generally, individuation in China today remains a largely nominal and aspirational, if symbolically potent and potentially transformative, project.     

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.     

‘Children are the food sent by God’: culinary imagery and the making of persons in the Cameroon Grassfields

The article explores aspects of personhood as these emerge through rites of passage and culinary imagery in Batié, an eastern Grassfields polity in west Cameroon. Food appears as a gendered medium which, by being exchanged, cooked, and ingested by persons – and by collectives perceived as persons – has the power to transform others (persons and collectives) and make them act. Persons and collectives are revealed, at the different stages of their ceremonial journey, as the outcome of similar processes – exchange, cooking, and ingestion of food – occurring each time on different scales, and thus displaying fractal properties. Introducing a split between agent and (cause of) agency, the article finally suggests that agents’ successive (ritual) transformations are the result of their own actions as well as the actions of (‘individual’ or ‘collective’) others upon them.     

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.     

Bazar,Big Kites and Other Boys' Things: Distinctions of Gender and Tradition in Balinese Youth Culture

Balinese society is undergoing rapid change, but remains discursively situated in a ‘timeless’ ethos of cultural tradition. This tension can be observed in relation to the cultural activities of the island's young people, particularly the young men. The staging of bazar (neighbourhood fundraising parties), the making of ogoh‐ogoh (giant papier‐mâché effigies to mark Nyepi, the Balinese New Year) and the competitive flying of oversize kites are–despite their sometimes contentious reception from older generations—popularly dubbed as ‘traditional’ expressions of Balinese youth culture. This recourse to tradition must be viewed in relation to two pervasive discourses: that of adat (customary law) and ajeg (a new protectionist ethos in the discourse on Balinese cultural identity). This paper argues that in contemporary urban Bali, male youth culture finds its most visible expressions in relation to the abiding standards of established public ritual and the equally abiding gender divisions that serve to guarantee the reproduction of ‘traditional’ social life. Rather than fighting aggressively against the grown‐up norm, these expressions replicate the public culture of the adult world—while drawing on global and national youth styles—and strive towards the expression of a specifically ‘Balinese’ youth culture.     

Syncretic Persons: Sociality,Agency and Personhood in Recent Charismatic Ritual Practices among North Mekeo (PNG)

This paper explores the syncretic accommodations made by North Mekeo (PNG) villagers arising from recent historical encounters with Catholic (Sacred Heart) missionaries over issues of ritual authenticity and effectiveness, personhood, and agency in a wider field of Christian evangelism and globalisation. Through a careful examination and comparison of pre‐existing ritual notions and practices (e.g., sorcery techniques, mortuary ritual performance, gender rituals) and the recent trends of commodification and enthusiastic Catholic charismatic performance, what might appear to be incongruous religious beliefs and practices are shown to possess numerous remarkably compatible similarities at the level of explicit cultural categorisation and ritual enactment. In accord with long‐standing anthropological arguments, recent North Mekeo syncretism thus consists of an integrated, albeit transformed rather than ‘confused’, mixing of indigenous and exogenous religious elements. Further, in this analysis of recent Melanesian religious change syncretism implies a novel conceptual convergence between syncretic processes and the dynamics of personhood, sociality and agency as construed in the framework of the ‘new Melanesian ethnography’.     

Founders,ancestors, and enemies: memory,family, time,and space in the Pernambuco sertão

This article concerns the use of narrative and genealogical frameworks among sertanejos, the inhabitants of the hinterlands (sertão) of Pernambuco in the Northeast of Brazil, in the process of grouping and differentiating families. It explores how accounts produced by different people are linked by shared memories of past conflicts – such as cangaço and questões de família (lit. ‘family issues’). Through conceived and lived relationships among relatives and the correlated concepts of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ current in this social formation, I look to identify the different meanings attributed to time and space, inscribed in the collective memory, and implicated in the moving configurations of ‘family’ in a cognatic universe.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

Under the Law of God: mimesis and mimetic discipleship among Jewish‐affinity Christians

Messianic Judaism, a network of congregations that incorporate Jewish ritual into evangelical worship, is one branch of a fast‐growing trend among Christians globally towards ‘Jewish affinity’. Drawing on a multi‐site comparison in North America, this article examines one of Messianic Judaism's most significant internal debates: should non‐ethnically Jewish ‘gentile believers’ (GBs) obey biblical laws? It argues that GBs do not simply imitate Jews badly, as outsiders and their own leaders often believe. Rather, their actions are best characterized as mimesis in two complementary forms: mimesis of Jews and ‘mimetic discipleship’ of Jesus‐the‐Jew. Taken together, these forms offer a heuristic tool sufficiently capacious to explain both individuals’ propensity for Jewish practice and the socially specific ways it is constructed. I conclude that Jewish affinity reflects a key problem in contemporary Christianity, namely what happens when people in one religion (Christianity) come to believe that their God incarnated in the body of a man they now associate with another religion (Judaism)?     

The wedding of two trees: connections,equivalences, and subjunctivity in a Tamil ritual

A wedding between two trees in a Tamil village reveals that a tree can be more than, while still remaining, a tree. It needs to be a tree because trees do certain things. It can be made more than a tree, however, through a logic of homological connections which temporarily create equivalences between trees and divinities. The wedding (kalyanam), a ubiquitous Tamil ritual form which pertains not only to marriage, creatively and subjunctively opens up new possibilities to change ‘it could be’ and ‘it should be’ to ‘let it be so’. The wedding of two trees seeks to materialize ideal situations and outcomes by mobilizing the aliveness of trees, a quality they share with humans and animals, without positing personhood, identity, or confusing categories. In making this argument, I question choices of comparators in anthropological analyses which posit a holistic ‘non-West’ against a dualistic ‘West’ and contrast a taken-for-granted ‘us’ with ‘our’ really rather different ‘others’.     

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.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter‐gatherer societies

It has become standard practice within feminist anthropology to repudiate any essential relationship between the biological body and cultural identity. In recent years, the ongoing deconstruction of the body has come to seem the only ‘natural’ fact. By contrast, this article seeks to reconnect sex, power, and culture in a positive sense, by identifying a political system in which power is kept in motion through the body. Literally dancing it out, organized Mbuti or Yaka gender groups perform a recurrent ritual repartee where power is continually churned up and funnelled back and forth between coalitions. The graphic somatic language that emerges through these dances suggests an alternative power‐principle: kinetic, erotic, and fundamentally non‐coercive. Here, the drawing back of the collective eye to the anatomical nature of power, with the simultaneous ritual de‐privatization of ‘biology’, explodes the body out into a collective political force. The cultural visibility of the female procreative body in such contexts is striking. Using the core theme of dialogism, I rethink the creative potential of sexual duality, and work towards a new understanding of gender, power, and the body.     

Do ‘we’ ‘do’ God? Linda Woodhead & Rebecca Catto (eds), Religion and change in modern Britain. London: Routledge.

What does it mean to talk of the religion ‘of’ a given country? I reflect on an edited volume dealing with religion in Britain and consider two related themes: the secular considered as ‘absence’ or ‘presence’, and the siting of religion not in conventional denominations or ritual practices but in spaces of encounter between religions, and between the so‐called ‘religious’ and ‘secular’.     

On human correspondence

In this article I offer an overture to social life, starting from the premise that every living being should be envisaged not as a blob but as a bundle of lines. I show that in joining with one another, these lines comprise a meshwork, in which every node is a knot. And in answering to one another, lifelines co‐respond. I propose the term ‘correspondence’ to connote their affiliation, and go on to show that correspondence rests on three essential principles: of habit (rather than volition), ‘agencing’ (rather than agency), and attentionality (rather than intentionality). I explain habit as ‘doing undergoing’, agencing as a process in which the ‘I’ emerges as a question, and attention as a resonant coupling of concurrent movements. I discuss the ethical and imaginative dimensions of correspondence under the respective rubrics of care and longing. Finally, I spell out the implications of a theory of correspondence for the way we approach classic themes of anthropological inquiry, including kinship and affinity, ecology and economy, ritual and religion, and politics and law. In a coda, I suggest that anthropology, too, must be a discipline of correspondence.     

Playing with perspectives: spirit possession,mimesis, and permeability in the buuta ritual in South India

The aim of this study is to investigate spirit possession through the lenses of mimesis, permeability, and perspectivity. Recent studies have explored the significance of perspective exchange as reciprocal subjectification. At the same time, the importance of reflexive self‐awareness amid perspective exchange has been noted. Linking studies on perspective exchange with those on spirit possession, this article tries to show an alternative understanding of perspective exchange as the de‐subjectification and generative transformation of self and other. Focusing on the buuta ritual in South India, I examine perspective exchange as the capability for freeing oneself from one's subjectivity enough to let various perspectives come and go through the permeable self. Being permeable and reflexive, the buuta impersonator plays with multiple perspectives to transform both his and others' perspectives to enable all to become ‘real’ humans in relation to the deity.