Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction

Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction . Barbara Y. Butler. and D. Troy Case, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005. 807 pp.     

Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique

This article analyses the large-scale popular urban uprisings that shook Mozambican cities on 1 and 2 September 2010, following the government's announcement of successive rises in the price of public transport fares and basic commodities. Using ethnographic material from the city of Chimoio and the capital Maputo, the following work highlights the organisational character of the ‘strikes’ (greves), as the popular uprisings were called, and explores them as a new form of organising political discontent. Comparing them to other historical and contemporary popular uprisings, this article argues that the strikes violently and rhizomically generated ephemeral and egalitarian forms of political authority and order that simultaneously confronted, replicated and undercut the aspects of Mozambican statehood. Deploying Durkheim's notion of effervescence, the work further argues that the creative fervour, multisemic aspects and festive character of the popular uprisings need to be recognised; thus, this analysis challenges the reductive labelling of these events as ‘riots’ or ‘food riots’.     

Xavante Ritual Hunting: Anthropogenic Fire,Reciprocity, and Collective Landscape Management in the Brazilian Cerrado

Conservation attention to indigenous hunting with fire in the cerrado largely focuses on sustainability as construed in scientific terms rather than according to indigenous points of view. Towards the goal of reframing the debate in terms more congruent with indigenous perspectives, I address how the Xavante (A’uw?) view ritualized and collective hunting, including hunting with fire, as indispensable means of acquiring gifts by which to celebrate important events, express feelings of respect and gratitude towards others, promote positive social values among male youth, and maintain the group’s ethnic identity. In particular, ritualized exchanges of game meat are necessary and culturally appropriate means of expressing esteem for others at some of life’s most important moments. For the Xavante, the social imperative to give and receive gifts of meat during weddings and initiation ceremonies motivates efforts to maintain the collective hunting with fire tradition in a manner that ensures its long term environmental viability.     

Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women's Ritual Wailing: Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse

Ritual wailing performed during funerals provides Warao women with a vehicle for individual and collective expression and a crucial point of access to political processes. When asked about the significance of these musical and texted laments, women emphasize the importance of crying "right alongside each other." This article examines the musical and poetic elements that enable wailers to produce a collective discourse while retaining the distinctiveness of individual voices. I argue that the polyphonic and intertextual character of laments plays an essential role in the cultural construction of women's social power; specifically, these performance dynamics engender special forms of subjectivity that enable women to produce a discourse whose "truth" and "strength" resist reappropriation.     

Revenants That Cannot Be Shaken: Collective Fantasies in a Maroon Society

All societies possess and cherish group fantasies, programs of travels through imaginary space. Although such culturally shaped flights of the imagination influence collective behavior, they are neither an acknowledged part of public discourse nor coterminous with "implicit" or "covert" culture. Two strikingly different fantasies of Suriname's Maroons reveal the main dimensions of collective fantasies.