Of pubs and platforms

This article argues for a more explicit concern with sociality in anthropology, illustrated through a study of one of the oldest English platforms for sociality: the English pub. Using an approach derived from the study of social media, the pub is analysed in terms of the balance between structural (mainly commercial) forces and agency (mainly the desire for particular kinds of sociality). Following an introduction to the English pub, the article considers how pubs exert control over which population they serve. The next section, shows how groups of people colonize pubs, regardless of the pub's intentions. This is followed by a discussion of the various responses by pubs to this colonization. The final section, ‘Scalable sociality’, demonstrates how these processes combine to produce a phenomenon called scalable sociality, which is also a definition of social media: a series of platforms that can be sited along various scales and parameters of sociality. This is important because a similar tension between, on the one hand, commercial or state forces and, on the other hand, the development of new forms of sociality is increasingly common within many topics studied by anthropologists.     

Reflecting on Loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have ‘lost their culture,’ as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as ‘kastom.’ The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another.     

“Now he walks and walks, as if he didn’t have a home where he could eat”: Food, Healing, and Hunger in Quechua Narratives of Madness

In the Quechua-speaking peasant communities of southern Peru, mental disorder is understood less as individualized pathology and more as a disturbance in family and social relationships. For many Andeans, food and feeding are ontologically fundamental to such relationships. This paper uses data from interviews and participant observation in a rural province of Cuzco to explore the significance of food and hunger in local discussions of madness. Carers’ narratives, explanatory models, and theories of healing all draw heavily from idioms of food sharing and consumption in making sense of affliction, and these concepts structure understandings of madness that differ significantly from those assumed by formal mental health services. Greater awareness of the salience of these themes could strengthen the input of psychiatric and psychological care with this population and enhance knowledge of the alternative treatments that they use. Moreover, this case provides lessons for the global mental health movement on the importance of openness to the ways in which indigenous cultures may construct health, madness, and sociality. Such local meanings should be considered by mental health workers delivering services in order to provide care that can adjust to the alternative ontologies of sufferers and carers.     

Leftamap Kastom: The Political History of Tradition on Tanna,Vanuatu

The history of evaluation and definition of kastom on Tanna exemplifies its utility in attempts to reformulate social groups by reworking group charter myths, and its manipulation in political events by rival organizations seeking a customary legitimacy. On Tanna, where political prestige and authority depend heavily on the control and communication of knowledge, kastom knowledge as political capital enjoys enhanced status following the rehabilitation of kastom at the national level. Pro-kastom groups on Tanna, such as the John Frum cultists, have benefited from this positive evaluation of kastom, but some anomalies and sources of conflict remain in the fusion of kastom with Christianity and modernism. People argue over their respective domains and the fields of their application. Alternate definitions and uses of kastom invoke disunity and political competition at the local level, in contrast to national emphases on kastom as symbol of political unity and shared identity.     

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment,ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

Since Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.     

REDD Policy Impacts on Indigenous Property Rights Regimes on Palawan Island, the Philippines

Several Southeast Asian states have been working feverishly to design and implement REDD policy frameworks to fulfil their commitment to global climate change mitigation. In doing so, state agencies will be challenged to design REDD plus policies that value and conserve forest carbon in ways that align with national policies and local priorities for managing forest landscapes defined by complex property rights regimes. However, as with other market-based policies, the expeditious delivery of REDD could bypass critical analysis of potential interactions with national tenure regimes, customary property rights, and local livelihoods. Drawing on the case of Palawan Island—a forested frontier island in the Philippines—we examine how nascent REDD policies can articulate with state sanctioned tenure, customary tenure, and forest uses in changing livelihood contexts. This paper draws on research among Tagbanua and Pala’wan people to illustrate how complex and changing tenure structures, commodity markets and livelihood dynamics may influence how REDD plus interventions affect indigenous customary lands and forest use. We argue that the ability of indigenous forest users to maintain stored carbon and improve livelihoods is contingent upon the ‘socio-material’ form of carbon—a commodity defined in relation to the resources and social processes of which it is part.     

Kastom and Anticolonialism on Malaita: “Culture” as Political Symbol

Most Melanesians invoking ideologies of kastom have, in becoming Christianized and partly Westernized, hearkened back to ways now lost or abandoned. But the Kwaio of Malaita are preoccupied with kastom, while traditional religion, social organization and exchange still prevail. Why and how? The Kwaio are compared with Kwara'ae and other Malaita peoples concerned with kastom - many Christianized, others clinging to old ways.     

Ninth National Annual Ceramic Art Exhibition at Syracuse Museum

This article addresses accountability issues that affect music education policy and implementation in the neoliberal education system. Using examples from education reform in Ontario, Canada, the author argues that two forms of accountability imbalances fostered by the neoliberal state—hierarchical answerability over communicative reason and top-down over bottom-up policymaking—allow the use of music curricula for political ends, to the detriment of curricular integrity and classroom delivery. The article also discusses how central governments that are responsible for developing standardized music curricula and allocating resources in an accountability vacuum may tacitly establish that "basic" subjects such as literacy, numeracy, and science are "more mandatory" than a mandated music curricula. The article concludes by recommending ways in which the centralized development of music education policy and resource allocation can be made more equitable both for those who encounter the curriculum at the local level and for the subject.     

Development through paper deals: space and politics of value in peri-urban India

The article looks at contestations over space in peri-urban India. It studies the acrimonious responses in defense of a local marketplace that occupied public land against the sovereign project of highway expansion in peri-urban West Bengal. It posits an opposition between two aspects of state governance—rational–legal and magical—that shape the contentions. In the rational–legal mode, the expansion of the highways represents the official development goals of progress. The magical aspects of the state engender the circulation of officially approved illegal chits that give occupying migrant villagers’ claim to the space around the highway. The ethnography looks at the affective economy of illegal chits that political parties and local bureaucracies use to bring migrating villagers within their ambit. It explores how illegal chits embody the state’s legible presence in the villagers’ everyday lives, their kinnetworks, communities and transform individual affective orientations toward space. In these new modes of simultaneous “space” and “place” making, public land is understood less as commons, but more as a stretch that could be divided among individuals and households aspiring to be “developed” or upwardly mobile by excluding others. The essay contends that emergence of the “right to the city” as a collective right requires a double-edged critique. A simple celebration of the subversive potential of the magical aspect of the state vis-à-vis its rational–legal mode may not be helpful for a politics of value that seeks to challenge the idea of value (or what makes life worth living) embedded in the wider neoliberal development discourse.     

Suspending disbelief—of Wynne-Edwards and his reception

Critique of Wynne-Edwards' views on population regulation and sociality suppose a population of discrete, mutually exclusive groups essential to his thought. Yet both his past and present work focus on continually distributed, philopatric populations; his critics have argued the untenability of a position never his own. Wynne-Edwardsian ‘group selection’ focuses on local population productivity under philopatry. A ‘group’ is a local confluence of genotypes which need not be reified, and group selection consists of the differential replication (hence heritability) of the local social environment in which a genotype is embedded. Differential productivity contingent on social environment can eliminate some relational structures on genotypes in favor of others, creating an expanding wave of population productivity as in Wright's shifting balance metaphor. Such a process is inherent in the evolution of reciprocity, where cooperators must cluster to successfully invade a population of defectors. Regulation of resource exploitation in continuously distributed populations may be modeled as overlapping n-person Prisoner's Dilemmas, where each individual participates in several distinct commons and defection represents local over-exploitation of resources.     

Olfaction and Taste: Invasive Odours and Disappearing Objects

The metaphorisation of sight and hearing, the objective senses, dominate the founding ideas, or philosophemes, of Western philosophy. The senses of taste and smell are of little relevance in the formation of conceptual knowledge or in classificatory systems; they are, by virtue of their dissolving objects, incapable of giving objective knowledge in Western metaphysics. Derrida and Ulmer developed a metaphorology that exploits the chemical basis of the subjective senses of taste and smell. The anthropology of the senses takes this questioning of metaphysics into issues of how olfaction and taste function in sociality. In the routine practices of everyday life, is olfaction able to create the sense of community that it does in rituals? Or, has the repression of smell in humanity's evolution towards ‘civilisation’ muted the connective ability of multiple odour particles? In a culture and metaphysics that presumes the separability of the self from the other and the self from the object, is there a place for senses that make a nonsense of separation and objectivity through their state of meaningful dissolution? Through philosophy's metaphorisation, has taste been stripped of its sensuousness and made a sense for aesthetics and not flavours and textures? In a metaphorics premised in judgement and discernment, can taste be a sense that founds sociality? In blurring the boundaries between self and other that are necessary to form and maintain the distinction, the dissolvability of smell and taste makes another metaphorics and other socialities possible. Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying—bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other’. As perception and the perceived—both are united—smell is more expressive than the other senses (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979:184).     

Birds and Kastom Banyans of South Pentecost: Kastom in AntiColonial Struggle

In the traditionalist villages of south Pentecost, kastom has long been a bulwark against European influences, both Christian and secular. However, their retention of the famous gol land dive ritual has brought the south Pentecost people under pressure from tourism, whose great allure masks the risks of a rise of kastom as commodity, packaged for sale, and of the erosion of kasfom's centrality as living practice. Pressures to conform to a pure kastom (i.e. unadulterated by any non-indigenous elements) distort the realities of a dynamic kastom that has long incorporated useful elements of alien material culture into everyday living.     

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.     

Warts and All

A closer examination of the ways archaeological knowledge is spoken about and represented locally provides significant insights into social divisions and power struggles within Peru. In an account of the ambivalent relations between archaeologists and local experts in the prehispanic past, this article considers how the authority that enables the construction and maintenance of sociopolitical models (such as the ‘nation’) is itself constructed, not just from above, but also at the local level. The relationship between power and authority grants legitimacy to historical discourses justifying sociopolitical inequality and reinforces the centralized power structure of the Peruvian state. The article discusses the implications of these local perceptions for archaeology, both as a discipline practiced within the local setting, and as a category through which the Peruvian government expresses tropes of a unified modern identity.     

Material Poetics of a Malay House

Material objects call to us and structure our being. They are not passive, while we are active—rather, they embroil us in their lives as much as we engage them. Hence, sociality is not solely a human function but necessarily involves environments and artefacts. The notion of material poetics is, in this sense, a mutually shaping matrix that affects social life and thought. This philosophy is explored through an encounter with a Malay house. The house is in many ways liminal—a place in which thought and image dwells. It is traditional, yet unique; it holds and expresses history, yet that history is elsewhere and legendary; is Malay but with Chinese decorations, which articulate hybridity; is specifically local, yet involved in national and international flows. It embraces both oscillation and direction. The house is made of wood. This paper takes up this element, showing how the wood not only shelters, but also leads us to venture out to a garden of trees and a dream of jungles where encounters with things, stories and myths subvert our normal categories and expectations. The house leads us places and clears things for us, leading us into a new social field.     

The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China

Negative emotions such as anger, and community responses to their expression are culturally and politically conditioned, including by dominant medical discourse on anger’s somatic and psychic effects. In this article I examine local genres of anger expression in Beijing, China, particularly among marginalized workers, and address culturally specific responses to them. Through majie (rant), xiangpi ren (silenced rage), and nande hutu (muddledness as a more difficult kind of smartness), workers strategically employ anger to seek redress for injustices and legitimate their moral indignation while challenging official psychotherapeutic interventions. Those who seek to regulate anger, mostly psychosocial workers acting as arm’s-length agents of the state, use mixed methods that draw on Western psychotherapy and indigenous psychological resources to frame, medicalize or appease workers’ anger in the name of health and social stability. I demonstrate how the two processes—anger expression and responses to it—create tensions and result in an ambiguous and multivalent social terrain which Chinese subjects must negotiate and which the state attempts to govern. I argue that the ambivalence and multi-valence of anger expressions and state-sponsored reactions to them render this emotion both subversive vis-à-vis power and subject to manipulations that maintain social order.     

An ‘authentic’ Aboriginal product: State marketing and the self‐fashioning of Indigenous experiences to Chinese tourists

China's burgeoning outbound tourist market has become a priority for Australian tourism, with national and state tourism reports advocating for ‘China‐ready’ marketing, policy and planning and increased industry training around Chinese consumer behaviour and preferences to capitalise on this market. However, studies demonstrate that Chinese tourists are generally not interested in Indigenous tourism experiences. Nevertheless, the state of Victoria is adamant about investing in Indigenous‐themed tourism products which are considered appropriate for Chinese preferences in an attempt to attract tourists from this growing inbound market. This article presents a review of relevant state government policies relating to Indigenous tourism alongside a case study of the tourism experiences developed and provided by Gunditjmara people along the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in southwest Victoria. We demonstrate the ways that notions of ‘authenticity’ continue to shape, and constrain, Indigenous economic engagement and participation via tourism, and discuss the impact of these notions on the provision of Indigenous tourism products and experiences for Chinese and other visitors. We argue that the marketing of Gunditjmara tourism to fluctuating market demand highlights the arbitrariness of Australian governments' policies with respect to Indigenous development, and call for policymakers to focus renewed attention on the local aspirations of Indigenous entrepreneurs.     

Population survey and management strategies of free-roaming dogs (Canis familiaris) on Saipan,Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

The island of Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, is populated by free-roaming dogs who were introduced during World War II. The local nonhuman animal control agency manages this population; however, the demographic information and public perception of this population remain unknown. To characterize the free-roaming dog population, an island-wide survey on Saipan was conducted. Photographic, mark-recapture data were used to estimate the population size per land type. Age, sex, sociality, and behavior per land type were documented and associations between these variables were tested using G tests. The effects of land type and urbanization on dog abundance were also analyzed. Lastly, in-person surveys provided data on the public perception of free-roaming dogs. Four main findings are reported: (a) The population size of free-roaming dogs on Saipan is estimated at 21,316. (b) Most dogs encountered were sentry adults. (c) Dog abundance increased with urbanization level and was highest in urban areas. (d) The public perceived free-roaming dogs as a health concern and suggested the implementation of leash laws and sheltering initiatives. This article discusses potential and existing population management strategies for free-roaming dogs on Saipan.     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.