Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

In 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’?     

The Anthropology of Personal Identity: Intellectual Property Rights Issues in Papua New Guinea,West Papua and Australia

This paper discusses large‐scale genealogical work at three projects in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Australia and considers three questions: in what respects is genealogy intellectual property (IP) and, if so, who owns it; what were the regimes of permissions that permitted the collection of genealogical knowledge in each of the three cases; and what duty of care do collectors/curators of genealogical knowledge have in respect of preservation and safeguarding against improper use? It is argued that a new form of ‘emergent’ knowledge arises in which intellectual property rights (IPR) are unclear. What is more certain is that anthropologists owe a ‘cultural heritage duty of care’ towards genealogical information. The key criterion is that anthropologists must be in a position, and allowed by those who employ them, to guarantee ‘unbroken oversight’ of genealogical materials regardless of what media they are on or how they are stored.     

Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods,Rethinking Materiality

How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the law's ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The assumption is that what changes is not the shape of the box called invention, but the objects that are made to fit that box. But in fact while new technologies produce new innovations, the very concept of invention has not just expanded but undergone substantial qualitative change. The wave of inventive activity associated with the industrial revolution led to an unprecedented reliance on patenting, but as the law articulated ways to protect those inventions, it also took their emblematic form—the machine—as the template for the legal concept of invention. Analogously, the recent reinterpretations of patent law to enable the protection of living organism and biological entities have challenged and modified the traditional machine-inspired concept of invention, initiating a trend toward a more developmental one. The information-based inventions discussed here may elicit a reconceptualization of invention in yet another way.     

Intellectual property protection for plant-related inventions in Europe

The economic and political issues that accompany the commercial growing of genetically modified crops, as well as the risk of transgene spread, are often top of the agenda for debate. But one important aspect is frequently overlooked--the intellectual property protection of plant-related inventions. What protection does European patent law afford to such inventions, how does it compare with the United States law and what are the consequences of the differences between them?     

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.     

Theory from the South: Or,how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa

‘The Global South’ has become a shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the ‘Global North’ spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the Northern Hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, and ethnic conflict, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? In what measure? What might this mean for the very dualism on which such global oppositions rest? Drawing on recent research, primarily in Africa, this paper touches on a range of familiar themes—law, labor, and the contours of contemporary capitalism—in order to ask how we might understand these things with theory developed from an ‘ex-centric’ vantage. This view renders some key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.     

Consent, commodification and benefit-sharing in genetic research

The global value of the biotechnology industry is now estimated at 17 billion dollars, with over 1300 firms involved as of the year 2000. ^{2 2} Holland, S . Contested Commodities at Both Ends of Life: Buying and Selling Gametes, Embryos and Body Tissues . Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2001 ; 11 : 263 – 284 .
It has been said that ‘What we are witnessing is nothing less than a new kind of gold rush, and the territory is the body.’ As in previous gold rushes, prospectors are flooding into unexplored and ‘wide open’ territories from all over the world, with possible ramifications for exploitation of Third World populations. These territories are also the Wild West of bioethics insofar as the law has very little hold on them: existing medical and patent law, such as the Moore and Chakrabarty cases, exert little control over powerful economic interests in both the United States and Europe. In the absence of a unified and consistent law on property in the body, the focus is increasingly on refining the consent approach to rights in human tissue and the human genome, with sensitive and promising developments from the Human Genetics Commission and the Department for International Development consultation on intellectual property. These developments incorporate the views of vulnerable genetic communities such as Native Americans or some Third World populations, and should be welcomed because they recognise the power imbalance between such groups and First World researchers or firms. However, they also highlight the continued tension about what is really wrong with commodifying human tissue or the human genome. Where’s the injustice, and can it be solved by a more sophisticated consent procedure?     

Do ‘we’ ‘do’ God? Linda Woodhead & Rebecca Catto (eds), Religion and change in modern Britain. London: Routledge.

What does it mean to talk of the religion ‘of’ a given country? I reflect on an edited volume dealing with religion in Britain and consider two related themes: the secular considered as ‘absence’ or ‘presence’, and the siting of religion not in conventional denominations or ritual practices but in spaces of encounter between religions, and between the so‐called ‘religious’ and ‘secular’.     

Animism,fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world

Animistic or ‘relational’ ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g. Latour) announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism, however,late modern or ‘post-modern’ anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature will be excused for taking them more seriously than their predecessors. It is incumbent on them to analytically sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask why pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people will tend to deal with culture/nature or subject/object hybridity in such different ways. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism can be understood as alternative responses to universal semiotic anxieties about where or how to draw boundaries between persons and things.     

Wild justice and fair play: cooperation,forgiveness, and morality in animals

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about ‘wild justice’ and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism.’ My major arguments center on the following ‘big’ questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does ‘being fair’ mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual's reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual's brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions.     

Companion-Animal Caregiver Knowledge,Attitudes, and Beliefs Regarding End-of-Life Care

Although awareness of end-of-life care is growing within the veterinary field and there appears to be consumer demand for these services, it is unclear exactly what caregivers know about end-of-life options for their companion animals. Are companion-animal caregivers aware of the range of options for their nonhuman animals? What do they value most highly for their nonhuman animals at the end of life? Answers to these and other related questions about caregiver perceptions are important because what they know about end-of-life care and how they approach decision-making for their companion animals will shape the kind of care an animal receives. This article presents the results of a large survey exploring companion-animal caregivers’ knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about end-of-life care, including in-home euthanasia, hospice and palliative care, financial commitment to end-of-life care, insurance usage, and level of comfort in providing care (e.g., subcutaneous fluids) in the home.     

The reification of concrete work in Egyptian film production

The anthropology of cinema has been instrumental in describing the ‘unseen’ labour invested in making films. What has been less explored is film workers’ erasure of each other's concrete effort in a similar manner. This process is what I call ‘reification’. Extending Georg Lukács's reflections, I argue that the relations of production throughout the film-making process seem to be transformed into relations between things (images and sounds) in a recurring pattern. In Egypt, this transformation impacts every juncture in commercial film production, and film workers manage its continuous impact via conventional means of recognition towards their concrete work. The overarching project is to understand, on the one hand, how the serial erasure of concrete work contributes to creating the film as a commodity and, on the other hand, how workers find value in their work under conditions where their effort is consumed by the things that they produce.     

Conclusion: Energy ethics and ethical worlds

What happens when the effects of our ethical actions stretch beyond, often far beyond, first- and second-person phenomena? What happens when one person's richly textured ethical world is another's profound violation? Energy offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through the questions posed by ethical worlds. Ethical worlds gesture both to the supra-individual, supra-present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics, and to the expansive geographies and timescapes in which the effects of our ethical practices ramify. Ethical worlds, fields, or landscapes are not bordered by first- or second-person experiences, but rather they intersect and interfere with one another often at great distance, often over multiple generations, and certainly not equally. Ethical practices in more powerful fields spill out, invade, and give shape to ethical practices in other ethical fields. What does it mean to start to see and feel and analyse at these ethical crossroads? In particular, what might it mean to acknowledge that structure, power, and interest – which are too often arrayed against close ethnographic attention to individual and shared experience – are not ‘larger forces’ but other ethical worlds, equally amenable to ethnographic attention?     

Counterpolitics of Liberation in Contemporary China: Corruption,Law, and Popular Religion

This article explores the hidden transfers between law and religion by focussing on the conditions of existence of ‘liberated’ peasant subjects in contemporary China. The post-Maoist era sought to create new citizens from the collectivised Maoist masses who are subject to market reforms and a new politics of ‘governing through law’ (fazhi). At the same time, new religiousities have blossomed in the Chinese countryside. Representing ‘feudal superstition’, their collective practices remain illegal until today. I argue that, beyond the issue of belief, contemporary ‘feudal superstition’ does not represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenets of Chinese secularism from the perspective of ‘failed’ peasant subjects. Where the realities of market liberalisation and governing through law are experienced as corruption, feudal superstition recreates the conditions to realise liberated peasant subjects: a participatory local public sphere, political visibility, investments in the public good, and a new collective property.     

Meaning in Nature: Organic Manufacture?

The paper examines Marcello Barbieri’s (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. Highlighting debate within the biosemiotic community, it focuses on what the volume offers to those who explain human intellect in relation to what Turing called our ‘physical powers.’ In scrutinising the basis of world-modelling, parallels and contrasts are drawn with other work on embodied-embedded cognition. Models dominate biology. Is this a qualitative fact or does it point to biomechanisms? In evaluating the 18 contributions, it is suggested that the answers will shape the field. First, they will decide if biochemistry and explanatory reduction can be synergised by biosemantics. Second, they will show if our intellectual powers arise from biology. Does thinking use—not a language faculty—but what Marko? and colleagues call semiosis by the living? Resolution of such issues, it is suggested, can change how we view cognition. Above all, if the biomechanists win the day, cultural models can be regarded as extending natural meaning. On such a view, biomechanisms prompt us to act and perceive as we model our own natural models. This fits Craik’s vision: intellect gives us the alphanumerical ‘symbols’ that allow thoughts to have objective validity. For the biomechanist, this is explained—not by brains alone—but, rather, by acting under the constraints of historically extended sensoria.     

Forensic culture as epistemic culture: The sociology of forensic science

This paper explores whether we can interpret the notion of ‘forensic culture’ as something akin to what Knorr-Cetina called an ‘epistemic culture’. Can we speak of a ‘forensic culture’, and, if so, how is it similar to, or different from, other epistemic cultures that exist in what is conventionally called ‘science’? This question has important policy implications given the National Academy Science’s (NAS) recent identification of ‘culture’ as one of the problems at the root of what it identified as ‘serious deficiencies’ in U.S. forensic science and ‘scientific culture’ as an antidote to those problems. Finding the NAS’s characterisation of ‘scientific culture’ overly general and naïve, this paper offers a preliminary exploration of what might be called a ‘forensic culture’. Specifically, the paper explores the way in which few of the empirical findings accumulated by sociologists of science about research science seem to apply to forensic science. Instead, forensic science seems to have developed a distinct culture for which a sociological analysis will require new explanatory tools. Faithful sociological analysis of ‘forensic culture’ will be a necessary prerequisite for the kind of culture change prescribed by external reformist bodies like the NAS.     

Co-existence between the traditional societies and wildlife in western Serengeti, Tanzania: its relevancy in contemporary wildlife conservation efforts

This paper seeks to show how the traditional societies in western Serengeti have coexisted and continue to coexist with wildlife. It also recognizes the relevancy of this coexistence in furthering contemporary conservation efforts although there are practical constraints to putting this into practice. The following questions are examined: (1) How did/do traditional societies in Serengeti interact with their nature? (2) Which traditional management institutions governed/govern interaction between people and wildlife species, resources and ecosystems and, how do they operate? (3) Which factors were (or are) responsible for erosion of traditional management institutions? (4) What can the traditional practices offer to contemporary conservation efforts and what are the limitations? The paper identifies four ways in which traditional institutions and practices can contribute to current conservation efforts: regulating the overexploitation of resources; complementing the current incentives aiming at diffusing prevailing conflicts between conservation authorities and communities; minimising the costs of law enforcement and; complementing the modern scientific knowledge in monitoring and responding to ecosystem processes and functions. The practical constraints likely to limit adoption of these practices are presented as: methodological complications of acquiring indigenous knowledge; prevailing historical conflicts; human population growth; poverty and lack of appreciation among the conservation planners and managers. In conclusion the need to address the current constraints in order to achieve effective taping of the existing potentials is emphasized.     

Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual,Society and Anthropology

Gregory Bateson laid stress on treating anthropology as a ‘non‐specialist’ subject which would draw upon, and hence illuminate the interdependence of, all the human sciences in its endeavour to tackle what he called the `vast intricacies' of socio‐cultural complexity. What was called for was an ‘abductive’ project which would qualitatively or aesthetically identify certain vital `patterns' which connected different arenas of human experience. By this means, anthropology could hope to disinter specific sociological and psychological laws. In the manner of Bateson, this paper sets out to describe and isolate one such law: the random workings of the individual human mind. These workings are considered abductively across a range of different but related discourses: ethnographic, aesthetic, political and moral. It is argued that to appreciate the randomness of the individual mind is to gain important insight not only into the diversity of human culture and society but also the singularity of human being. An appreciation of human randomness and its ramifications, it is concluded, may serve as the basis not only of explanation but also a sense of moral value and beauty in anthropological analysis.