Island history affects faunal composition: the treeshrews (Mammalia: Scandentia: Tupaiidae) from the Mentawai and Batu Islands,Indonesia

The Mentawai and Batu Island groups off the west coast of Sumatra have a complicated geological and biogeographical history. The Batu Islands have shared a connection with the Sumatran ‘mainland’ during periods of lowered sea level, whereas the Mentawai Islands, despite being a similar distance from Sumatra, have remained isolated from Sumatra, and probably from the Batu Islands as well. These contrasting historical relationships to Sumatra have influenced the compositions of the respective mammalian faunas of these island groups. Treeshrews (Scandentia, Tupaiidae) from these islands have, at various times in their history, been recognized as geographically circumscribed populations of a broadly distributed Tupaia glis, subspecies, or distinct species. We used multivariate analyses of measurements from the skull and hands to compare the island populations from Siberut (Mentawai Islands) and Tanahbala (Batu Islands) with the geographically adjacent species from the southern Mentawai Islands (T. chrysogaster) and Sumatra (T. ferruginea). Results from both the skull and manus of the Siberut population show that it is most similar to T. chrysogaster, whereas the Tanahbala population is more similar to T. ferruginea, confirming predictions based on island history. These results are further corroborated by mammae counts. Based on these lines of evidence, we include the Siberut population in T. chrysogaster and the Tanahbala population in T. ferruginea. Our conclusions expand the known distributions of both the Mentawai and Sumatran species. The larger geographical range of the endangered T. chrysogaster has conservation implications for this Mentawai endemic, so populations and habitat should be re‐evaluated on each of the islands it inhabits. However, until such a re‐evaluation is conducted, we recommend that the IUCN Red List status of this species be changed from ‘Endangered’ to ‘Data Deficient’. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2014, 111 , 290–304.     

The Evil Eye (għajn) in Malta: Grappling with Skinner’s pigeons and rehabilitating lame ducks1

In this paper, I construct a plea for superstition and examine the ways in which contemporary scholars use the term to denote irrational belief. ‘Superstition’ has, throughout history, been used as a derogatory term denoting inferior and dangerous beliefs. Examining the process whereby people continue to believe that which they deem irrational, I adopt a reflexive and phenomenological approach. Focussing on the evil eye (g?ajn) in Malta and the Mediterranean, I redefine ‘superstition’ as the product of an intrasubjective antinomy between orthodoxy and its subversion.     

Encountering the ‘Other’: Pilgrims,Tourists and Boatmen in the City of Varanasi

Contemporary studies of tourism in the ‘Third World’ often focus on the farreaching economic, cultural and environmental consequences of tourism on local populations. Scholars have argued that guest/host interactions reflect a relation of domination in which, much like imperialism, wealthy Western tourists travel in search of the exotic Orient. The tourists are then served and catered to by local communities who are dependent on their business. Such polarities tend to privilege the ‘guests’ as the purveyors of change, while the creative and innovative practices of the host group are rendered invisible. In this paper, I examine the boatmen of Varanasi and their role as culture brokers, negotiating the sacred city for visitors who include pilgrims, domestic and foreign tourists. Concentrating mostly on the relationship between the boatmen and foreign tourists, I look at the multiple strategies and tactics that boatmen have developed to satisfy their needs and desires to their own advantage. Such techniques vary according to the visitors and their desired experience. Thus, the boatmen are quick to ‘tune in’ to those with whom they are dealing. Moreover, the close encounters that boatmen have with tourists enable them to view Western culture as well as their own local culture critically.     

The Production of Tradition and Culture in the Japanese Wedding Enterprise

In this article I examine the production of culture in the contemporary commercial Japanese wedding. This is analyzed in relation to the theoretical discourse of ‘the invention of tradition’. However, while this ‘invention’ is usually related to political motivations, I discuss the invention of tradition and of culture for economic motivations. I offer a broader perspective of tradition and culture and show how flexible these two may be as they are manufactured, played with or imagined. The contemporary wedding consists of both ‘traditional-Japanese’ and ‘Western’ inventions. These are regarded here as cultural constructs which both play a significant role in the construction of contemporary Japanese cultural identity.     

Perverse Frictions: Pride,Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.     

Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations,alternative education,and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle-class families

This article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle-class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self-aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child-centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.     

Procreation,Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.     

Kombinowanie: agency,informality, and the poetics of self in Highland Poland

This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities – kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a ‘master‐trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Górale (Highland) behaviour. By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.     

Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non‐native: self‐determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self‐determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833‐1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982‐present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British‐introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

Cyprus,ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage

This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the preservation of it as an unintended consequence of ‘freezing’ development. It also examines how ethnic groups and individuals may come to evaluate their ‘own’ heritage negatively, specifically as an inconvenient cultural load, in efforts to develop ideologically specific or socially ‘progressive’ identities.     

Niche construction,adaptive preferences,and the differences between fitness and utility

A number of scholars have recently defended the claim that there is a close connection between the evolutionary biological notion of fitness and the economic notion of utility: both are said to refer to an organism’s success in dealing with its environment, and both are said to play the same theoretical roles in their respective sciences. However, an analysis of two seemingly disparate but in fact structurally related phenomena—‘niche construction’ (the case where organisms change their environment to make it fit to their needs) and ‘adaptive preferences’ (the case where agents change their wants to make them fit to what the world has given them)—shows that one needs to be very careful about the postulation of this sort of fitness–utility connection. Specifically, I here use the analysis of these two phenomena to establish when connecting fitness and utility is and is not possible.     

Mentawai’s endemic,relictual fauna: is it evidence for Pleistocene extinctions on Sumatra?

Aim The four Mentawai islands, south‐west of Sumatra, have long been isolated from the remainder of Sundaland, resulting in a high level of endemism. We examined the distribution of 151 species of the Mentawai Islands in Sundaland and assessed various processes that may have resulted in the various biogeographical patterns. Location Southeast Asia, particularly the Mentawai Islands and nearby large landmasses (Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia). Methods We compared the faunal composition of the Mentawai Islands for selected taxa (43 mammals, 92 reptiles and 16 amphibians) with that of the four nearby large landmasses of Sundaland using morphological comparisons and the most recent molecular phylogenetic analyses available in the literature. These comparisons yielded sister taxa, which were used to simulate species absence data for the four Sundaland landmasses under several scenarios to investigate how patterns of species absence could have arisen. Results In contrast to our expectations, several Mentawai species did not have their closest relatives on neighbouring Sumatra, but rather on the more distant Borneo, Java or Peninsular Malaysia. For mammals, the similarity between species from Mentawai and Borneo was greater than that observed between species from Mentawai and Sumatra. We conclude that the relationships represent traces of species historically distributed throughout Sundaland that became extinct in Sumatra during the Pleistocene. For reptiles and amphibians the observed pattern of species absences generally resembled the simulated pattern expected under the scenario of absence rates increasing with landmass isolation, whereas for mammals we observed more species than expected missing from Java and Sumatra, and fewer than expected from Borneo. Main conclusions The potential extinctions on Sumatra probably had two causes: changes of climate and vegetation during the Pleistocene and environmental impacts from the Toba supervolcanic eruption.     

Racism,disadvantage and multiculturalism: towards effective anti-racist praxis

Measuring ethnicity in any society is a challenge. Given world immigration patterns, many countries face a growing dilemma in determining the cultural antecedents of their populations. A further complication is the reality that such determination occurs within the political and nationalistic settings where ethnic‐cultural groups may be potent forces in their own right. As societies mature and evolve, there is an increasing tendency for populations, especially those with many generations of residence in the country, to see themselves as ‘indigenous’ to the society in which they live. Canada is not alone in having to deal with the fluidity of the concept, ‘Canadian’, ‘American’, ‘Australian’, ‘Yugoslav’, and ‘Soviet’ are parallel concepts in other countries of multiple ethnic composition. Using 1991 National Census Test results, the article explores some of the parameters of the indigenous category ‘Canadian’. In particular, the location in Canada and mother tongue of respondents reporting ‘Canadian’ as the ethnic origin of their parents and grandparents or as their own ethnic identity are important indicators for this emerging ethnic category.     

History,Houses and Regional Identities

The Indonesian government authorises particular modes of representations of the diverse cultural traditions of the archipelago which are subservient to the display of a national culture in the pursuit of national unity. The ‘Taman Mini Indonesia Indah’ theme park in Jakarta manifests the authorised version of difference, as do regional museums. In the province of South Sulawesi, under the guiding influence of local scholars, the provincial government has developed its own theme park which, in the manner of the Jakarta park, uses house forms as emblems of the cultural diversity found in the province. This paper investigates the historical sensibilities displayed in the park, those of the planners and those of the people who live in and use the park. The planners have tried to avoid the use of ersatz forms, with a stress on cultural ‘authenticity’ in the creation of the displays. They have made the park a showcase for an expression of a regional sensibility about the historical genesis of the place of the province in the modern world, giving their own traditions a centrality which is lacking in expressions of culture authorised by the national government.     

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.     

Local vs. Trans-regional Perspectives on Southeast Asian ‘Indianness’

This article is an attempt to define the concept ‘(Southeast Asian) Indianness’ through a comparative approach based on a local vs. trans-regional perspective. I shall analyse the complex relationships that develop between a translocal, urban and literate Indo-Aryan Great Tradition and a local, rural and oral Little Tradition. First, I shall tackle the question of whether literacy has any socio-religious relevance and endeavour to identify its relationship to orality. I will subsequently analyse the (re-) Indianisation process as a socio-political construct and will finally propose some re-readings of ‘Aryapheresis’ (i.e. ‘Indian [ārya] Transplant’ [phérein]), which I believe has been applied wrongly in some cases, to some Southeast Asian Indian-based socio-cultural realities.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

‘We've got team spirit!’: ethnic community building and Japanese American youth basketball leagues

This article examines the role co-ethnic youth basketball leagues play in shaping ethnic community among third- and fourth-generation Japanese American youth. With dwindling rates of Japanese immigration, increased rates of out-marriage, and fewer cultural hubs available, finding a thriving ethnic community has become a particular challenge for later-generation Japanese Americans. Drawing from ethnographic data, I argue that even among highly ‘assimilated’ Japanese Americans, youth basketball leagues serve as an active space for constructing and preserving ethnic community and social networks. I demonstrate how through social, cultural, and spatial interactions facilitated by sports, some Japanese Americans have found a sense of ethnic ‘connectedness’ within basketball leagues while performing their own renditions of ethnic identity that is simultaneously attentive to fluid local and global connections. These findings illuminate the role and importance of sport through which Japanese Americans challenges the racial contours of American-ness and belonging while claiming their place, locally, nationally, and transnationally.