Structures, Realities, and Blind Spots

In discussing the exchange between Caws and Hanson (AA, Vol. 78, 1976) the nature of the theory and reality that anthropologists must consider in dealing with social and cultural phenomena is examined. There is no objective structure in the phenomena we study, our constructs always being colored by changing conditions. The assumption of an unchanging human nature has long been an obstacle to progress in the anthropological enterprise . [semantics, language, models, structure, anthropological theory]     

Corsets,Culture and Contingency: Reflections on Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock1

This article turns an anthropological sensitivity onto a literary text from its own society. It takes Joan Lindsay's novel ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ and ‘reads’ it in the light of ideas prominent in recent anthropological writings (the ideas of Lévi-Strauss are particularly used): it also articulates an interpretation by using notions current in modern literary and cultural analysis. The article points out that Lindsay's text has most commonly been interpreted as being about mysterious natural forces injurious to man. Whilst the text explores the disjunction between nature and culture, the article interprets the text as exploring the nature of cultural institutions and cultural processes.     

The Meaning of the Steps is in Between: Dancing and the Curse of Compliments

This paper shows how Yolngu dancing embodies statements about being‐in‐the‐world and being‐with‐others and, from a performance perspective based on participation, explores the sensuous and affective nature of intercorporeality. By focusing on virtuosity and the practice of the ‘curse of compliments’, the paper argues that the meaning of Yolngu dancing is between the steps, between the performers and other participants in a ceremony—in the empathic space one enters through dancing. Empathy, both in the context of Yolngu performance and of engagement in fieldwork, is thus a modality of co‐presence and co‐presencing, an encounter at a level of intensity which opens the way to an ever‐deepening involvement with others.     

Comment: Got Language? Law, Property, and the Anthropological Imagination

This comment reflects on the legal (specifically, proprietary) tropes of linguistics, and the linguistic tropes of legal anthropology.It suggests analogies between discussions around "language rights" in contemporary political struggles, and discussions around the delineation of objects and subjects in anthropological theory. Such analogies may help side-step the relativism-universalism impasse that has beset the critique of rights and the critique of the objectification of language. [Keywords: language, law, anthropological theory, value]     

Stone Men of Malekula on Malakula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography

This article examines the resonances of the voluminous ethnography, ‘Stone Men of Malekula’ (SMM) in contemporary Vanuatu. Anthropological research is politically charged in Vanuatu, in part because of how the weighty materiality of archival forms exercise significant local authority. However, alongside respect for this ‘evidential’ material is a healthy scepticism of anthropological authority. SMM, written by the maverick anthropologist John Layard in 1942 (based on fieldwork in 1914–15), has returned to Vanuatu in many guises over the years. It is used as formal evidence in land disputes and as a bone of contention within competing claims. Tracing the ways in which culture is written, read and materialized, exposes the paradoxes of knowledge and politics not only within anthropological critique but in Vanuatu villages.     

Ancestors, magic, and exchange in Yolngu doctrines: extensions of the person in time and space

The article draws on the association drawn by Munn between Aboriginal ancestral transformations and the moral order, and the theory of partible persons, in order to re-examine Yolngu doctrines and related practices to do with totemic ancestors and their traces, magic and sorcery, and exchange. It argues that all three broad domains draw on beliefs about intrinsic relations between part and whole, image and object, and the intrinsic powers of bodily substance and spirits of the dead. These domains imply the extension of persons in time and space, and each relates to a rather distinct aspect of the moral-political order. The article shows that the strong dichotomy drawn by Durkheim and his followers between 'religion' and 'magic' obscures the connections between these domains, and neglects the instrumental aspect of Yolngu ancestral doctrines and practices.     

Bioarcheology has a “health” problem: Conceptualizing “stress” and “health” in bioarcheological research

This article provides a critical historical overview of the stress concept in bioarcheological research and critically evaluates the term “health” in reference to skeletal samples. Stress has a considerable history in 20th century physiological research, and the term has reached a critical capacity of meaning. Stress was operationalized around a series of generalized physiological responses that were associated with a deviation from homeostasis. The term was incorporated into anthropological research during the mid-20th century, and further defined in bioarcheological context around a series of skeletal indicators of physiological disruption and disease. Emphases on stress became a predominate area of research in bioarcheology, and eventually, many studies utilized the terms “health” and “stress” interchangeably as part of a broader, problem-oriented approach to evaluating prehistoric population dynamics. Use of the term “health” in relation to skeletal samples is associated with the intellectual history of bioarcheological research, specifically influences from cultural ecology and processualist archeology and remains problematic for two reasons. First, health represents a comprehensive state of well-being that includes physiological status and individual perception, factors that cannot be readily observed in skeletal samples. Second, the categorization of populations into relative levels of health represents a typological approach, however unintentional. This article advocates for the integration of methodological and theoretical advances from human biology and primatology, while simultaneously incorporating the theoretical constructs associated with social epidemiology into bioarcheological research. Such an approach will significantly increase the applicability of bioarcheological findings to anthropological and evolutionary research, and help realize the goal of a truly relevant bioarcheological paradigm. Am J Phys Anthropol 155:186–191, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Anthropology's ‘impact’: a comment on audit and the unmeasurable nature of critique

The UK government has recently made higher education funding of anthropological research partially dependent on its social ‘impact’. Based on work in higher education and fifty interviews with anthropologists trained in Britain, this article analyses the implications of these impact requirements. It shows that anthropologists generally share government desires for their work to have a societal effect, but that impact, as understood in the United Kingdom's dominant research measurement exercise known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), is marked by a series of important practical and conceptual limitations. On a practical level, it underestimates the social effects of teaching, relies on an overly limiting notion of evidence, and significantly restricts the scope of permissible research. On a conceptual level, impact measurement cannot fully grasp the nature or effect of anthropology, insofar as the latter is a critical science that contributes to the constant renewal of audit's own politico‐epistemic foundations. This exposes an important limitation of audit practices more widely, which has so far received little scholarly attention: audits are in several ways incapable of grasping sociocultural critique.     

Monological versus dialogical consciousness: two epistemological views on the use of theory in clinical ethical practice

In this article, we argue that a critical examination of epistemological and anthropological presuppositions might lead to a more fruitful use of theory in clinical-ethical practice. We differentiate between two views of conceptualizing ethics, referring to Charles Taylors' two epistemological models: 'monological' versus 'dialogical consciousness'. We show that the conception of ethics in the model of 'dialogical consciousness' is radically different from the classical understanding of ethics in the model of 'monological consciousness'. To reach accountable moral judgments, ethics cannot be conceptualized as an individual enterprise, but has to be seen as a practical endeavor embedded in social interactions within which moral understandings are being negotiated. This view has specific implications for the nature and the role of ethical theory. Theory is not created in the individual mind of the ethicist; the use of theory is part of a joint learning process and embedded in a cultural context and social history. Theory is based upon practice, and serves practical purposes. Thus, clinical ethics support is both practical and theoretical.     

Reconciling international human rights and cultural relativism: the case of female circumcision

How can we reconcile, in a non-ethnocentric fashion, the enforcement of international, universal human rights standards with the protection of cultural diversity? Examining this question, taking the controversy over female circumcision as a case study, this article will try to bridge the gap between the traditional anthropological view that human rights are non-existent -- or completely relativised to particular cultures -- and the view of Western naturalistic philosophers (including Lockeian philosophers in the natural rights tradition, and Aquinas and neo-Thomists in the natural law tradition) that they are universal -- simply derived from a basic human nature we all share. After briefly defending a universalist conception of human rights, the article will provide a critique of female circumcision as a human rights violation by three principal means: by an internal critique of the practice using the condoning cultures' own functionalist criteria; by identifying supra-national norms the cultures subscribe to which conflict with the practice; and by the identification of traditional and novel values in the cultures, conducive to those norms. Through this analysis, it will be seen that cultural survival, diversity and flourishing need not be incompatible with upholding international, universal human rights standards.     

Distinct families of cis-acting RNA replication elements epsilon from hepatitis B viruses

The hepadnavirus encapsidation signal, epsilon (ε), is an RNA structure located at the 5' end of the viral pregenomic RNA. It is essential for viral replication and functions in polymerase protein binding and priming. This structure could also have potential regulatory roles in controlling the expression of viral replicative proteins. In addition to its structure, the primary sequence of this RNA element has crucial functional roles in the viral lifecycle. Although the ε elements in hepadnaviruses share common critical functions, there are some significant differences in mammalian and avian hepadnaviruses, which include both sequence and structural variations. Here we present several covariance models for ε elements from the Hepadnaviridae. The model building included experimentally determined data from previous studies using chemical probing and NMR analysis. These models have sufficient similarity to comprise a clan. The clan has in common a highly conserved overall structure consisting of a lower-stem, bulge, upper-stem and apical-loop. The models differ in functionally critical regions-notably the two types of avian ε elements have a tetra-loop (UGUU) including a non-canonical UU base pair, while the hepatitis B virus (HBV) epsilon has a tri-loop (UGU). The avian epsilon elements have a less stable dynamic structure in the upper stem. Comparisons between these models and all other Rfam models, and searches of genomes, showed these structures are specific to the Hepadnaviridae. Two family models and the clan are available from the Rfam database.     

Imprinting on the Heart: Photography and Contemporary Yolngu Mournings

This article examines the ways photographs of the recently deceased have come to occupy a central place in Yolngu grieving practices. Harnessing the potentially traumatic ontological qualities of oscillating absence–presence that are inherent in such images, I show how Yolngu in Northern Australia use this affective force as a way to refigure and reconstitute embodied and sensuously mediated relationships between the living and the dead. With vision simultaneously allowing corporeal permeability and expansion, mourners impress the image of the deceased within them, through the eyes to the heart as the fleshly organ of affect, associative recollection, and lived intersubjectivity.     

In response to the continuum model for fauna research: a hierarchical, patch-based model of spatial landscape patterns

Models of nature are implicitly influenced by the scale of observation of the processes on which they are founded. The continuum model and the hierarchical patch-based model are two alternate approaches for the spatial modelling of fauna distribution. The continuum model aggregates continuous approximations to individual landscape characteristics, whereas the hierarchical patch-based model constructs a hierarchy in which classifications of landscape characteristics describe an interconnected series of patches. We propose the hierarchical patch-based theory for models of population distributions and landscapes in which the spatial patterns can be effectively represented by mosaics at the variety of levels within the set of individual process models. Given that observations are typically made as points or pixels, and that discrete boundaries exist in both natural and human-modified landscapes, we suggest that the hierarchical patch-based method has many applications in conservation and management.     

Sick Again,Well Again: Sorcery,Christianity and Kinship in Northern Aboriginal Australia

This article concerns the ways in which Yolngu people of the Galiwin'ku settlement in northern Australia employ contemporary constructions of sorcery doctrines and Christian practices to rearticulate their kinship relations. In particular, I discuss the adaptation of sorcery ideas and accusations to present-day circumstances and the Christian healing processes that have emerged alongside traditional healing behaviours and biomedicine. Sorcery and Christianity at Galiwin'ku, I argue, are intertwined ethical models that enable the person and community to heal over and over again in accordance with the vicissitudes of postcolonial life. They continue the moral imperative of ‘looking after’ kin even as the net of ‘looking after’ has expanded to encompass new experiences, behaviours, and persons.     

Encountering nature through fieldwork: expert knowledge,modes of reasoning,and local creativity

The concept of ‘relation’ has been central to the anthropological reworking of the nature/culture and nature/society dichotomies. However, ecology is relational in a way that has often been ignored or dismissed in contemporary socio‐cultural anthropology. This article shows that there is more to ethnoecology than an ethnocentric form of analysis representing other people's understandings of the natural world through the prejudiced lens of Western scientific classifications. Three ‘fieldwork on fieldwork’ experiments involving encounters between natural scientists and indigenous communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Southern Guyana are discussed to illustrate the heterogeneity of human knowledge, the role of expert knowledge in intercultural communication, and the need to differentiate ecological reasoning from moral reasoning.     

In Memoriam

A key element of the self‐critique in contemporary anthropology centres on the idea that categories such as culture and society have exaggerated human differences. This paper argues that the work of Anthony Cohen, which has attempted to frame “localities” as a new anthropological object, can be criticized on similar grounds. A close reading of Cohen's theoretical and ethnographic writings shows that the “anthropology of locality”, while claiming to be a critique of nationalhomogenization, in fact replicates ata lower level of scale features of the national units. Consideration of this particular example of the exaggeration of (local) difference, moreover, occasions reflection on the wider critique of generalization within anthropology.     

A Social Ecology of Stingless Bees

Here we highlight two ontologically different modes of care and management of endemic stingless bees in Australia. While Indigenous Yolngu and backyard beekeepers both engage in caring for stingless bees, neither way of living with bees would classically be defined as ‘domestication’, yet bees are encompassed within the ‘home’, or domus. This requires a different perspective in relation to the kinds of multispecies connections between humans and other beings. We propose that the key difference between Aboriginal Australians hunting for sugarbag on country and beekeeping in the backyard is in the way bee populations are maintained and in the degree of ecological separation from the surrounding environment. For Yolngu the domus is the bush. Backyard beekeeping involves modes of care that separate bees from outside predators, pests and other detrimental elements, while the Yolngu relationship with bees is primarily concerned with maintaining the integrity of the surrounding ecology, or the homeland.     

Yoga and fetishism: reflections on Marxist social theory

Classical social theory – including Marxist social theory – is based on a critique of the relationship between religion and society. The philosophical underpinning of this is the question of consciousness and the projection of consciousness onto things. Drawing on contemporary anthropological and philosophical theories of fetishism, this article engages with Marx's critique of religion and the recovery of social value by way of an analysis of yoga. Two interrelated claims are made. First, yoga represents a paradigm shift in the historical development of religious consciousness. A critical analysis of this development extends the fetishization of social relations in things to the level of self-consciousness in the body. Second, a critique of yoga's fetishization of the body and consciousness extends and expands Marx's critique of obscured social value and enables a more holistic ecological politics concerning the value of life.     

The Law of the Land: A Review Article

This is a review article of the book Native Title Corporations: A Legal and Anthropological Analysis from the point of view of anthropology. I begin by highlighting the development of Anglo‐Australian social anthropology from such figures as Radcliffe‐Brown and Fortes, who were heavily influenced by regulatory and normative models from the domain of legal and judicial scholarship and speculate on the contemporary conditions by which this original social anthropological metaphor has apparently achieved a new literalisation. I criticise the legalistic appropriation of anthropological and ethnographic methodology that this book makes explicit, and finally, I express scepticism for the future success of the prescribed body corporate, as described in the Native Title Act (1993), as a model for the possession, transmission and elaboration of indigenous rights to country.