Withdrawal: Booher,Adam & Kathryn Oths. The last bonesetter: An encounter with Don Felipe. DVD/PAL, 27 mins,colour. Watertown,Mass: DER, 2018. $295.00 (institutional use). Reviewed by Howard Reid

The above article from Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, published online on 5 December 2022, in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been withdrawn by agreement between the journal Editors in Chief, Hannah Knox, Adam Reed, Chika Watanabe, and Thomas Yarrow, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The withdrawal has been agreed due to a technical error at the publisher that caused the article to be mistakenly published online although its author has not signed the journal's publishing license.     

Anthropology in Disneyworld: Rapport,Gardner, and the ‘Discipline‘ of Social Anthropology

This article examines the response by Rapport to the critique made by Gardner of his book Transcendent Individual. Rapport eschews the idea of discipline in relation to anthropology. This is connected to his distaste for any hint of social determinism, and his eulogising of the essay format as the most suitable means of conveying human contrariety. His approach necessarily leads him to embellish his accounts of what the world is like with visions of what it should be like if only everyone adopted his literary and liberal stance. A contrary ‘manifesto’ is here presented: the job of social anthropology is to explain actual historical societies, and one cannot simply appropriate the subject so that it now becomes about a kind of never‐never land. Rapport's approach, far from leading to a glorification of individuality, leads only to a monochrome vision which paints all human beings as reductively ‘aesthetic’, ignoring, and rendering impossible the explanation of all institutionalised forms of belief and practice, not least those brutal forms which, says Rapport, inspire his work.     

Instagram-City: New Media,and the Social Perception of Public Spaces

How are we to recognize the social dimension of place without limiting ourselves to the physical? What tools can we use? What happens when we deal with new public spaces in a large and complex metropolitan reality? Things become complicated. But some new information technologies offer us the possibility of capturing an enormous quantity of data and images published by users online, using various applications designed for tablets and smartphones. Perhaps the most common one is Instagram: one of the most relevant mass phenomena in the era of social media, for having implemented a process of democratization of artistic photography, and the sharing of moments of everyday life. In the case of Le Centquatre and Place de la République, two very different public spaces in Paris, Instagram was used as a tool for documentation, as an observatory in the search for urban dynamics and the changes that are underway in contemporary society.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.