Becoming a Christian in Fiji: an ethnographic study of ontogeny

By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke girls and boys between 7 years, 10 months and 13 years old. The broader objective is to demonstrate, first, how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and, secondly, how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it.     

Rains gone bad, women gone mad: rethinking gender rituals of rebellion and patriarchy

This article reconsiders the argument that 'rituals of rebellion' be seen as women's ritual response to everyday patriarchal structures – an argument originally suggested by Gluckman, but recently evoked by Spencer, the Creiders, and others – in light of recent anthropological theorizing on gender. Using as an example one such women's ritual among the Ihanzu of Tanzania, I show how this particular formulation reduces complex notions of gender and gender practices to unnuanced, monolithic, and all-encompassing gender-systems, both in everyday and ritual realms. This it does, first, by conflating gender ideals with gender behaviours and, second, by ignoring people's conflicting ideas about gender. By problematizing these contradictions, I demonstrate how Ihanzu women's rites are not about rebellion but gender complementarity, played out by women dancers embodying both genders simultaneously. Above all, this case compels us to rethink, fundamentally, 'rituals of rebellion' and 'patriarchy'.     

Painful Memories: Ritual and the Transformation of Community Trauma

This paper explores the question of how ritual can heal community pain or trauma. Drawing together recent insights into the ideological nature of healing with a focus on ritual process, I argue that in cases of social violence and healing, ritual's ability to assuage pain is linked to the ways in which it draws pain into the process of reconstructing memory. The argument is illustrated through an examination of how the Betsimisaraka of east Madagascar used rituals of cattle sacrifice to transform the pain they experienced during an anticolonial rebellion that took place in 1947.     

Ethnicity and Shared Meanings: A Case Study of the "Orphaned Bones" Ritual in Mainland China and Overseas

ABSTRACT   Several theories of ethnicity emphasize the analysis of intergroup relations. They neglect, however, the conflation of ideas and values structuring these relations—notably the cross-cultural aggregates of shared cultural meanings that underlie forms of cooperation and competition between interacting groups. In this article, I explore this kind of process through a multisite ethnography of the Xiu gugu ("refining of orphaned bones"), a ritual that the Chaozhou people of northeast Guangdong province, an ethnic subgroup of the Han, perform periodically. The celebration of this rite in Chaozhou is compared to versions resulting of the ritual in Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist contexts. In the latter case, close conceptions of malevolent death underlie a fascinating interethnic cooperation, with most of the unfortunate dead whose bones are "refined" during the Chaozhou ritual being Thai.     

Sexuality and the Art of Seduction in Sinhalese Exorcism

In the interest of extending an understanding of ritual aesthetics this paper examines Sinhala exorcism as a domain of seduction. The analysis centres on a major Sinhala ritual held only for women, and its related mythology, in which sexuality is conceived as being destructive of regenerative processes. The rite engages seductive forces to break the destructive dynamic. The argument develops into a general discussion of the ‘logic’ of Sinhalese exorcism and how the aesthetic and seductive forces of rite are able to break the paradox of contradiction which is also integral to the ritual process. The article stresses ritual as a dynamic of both depth and surface, the two aspects being in complementary relation.     

Name Rituals And Acts Of Feeling Among The KayapÓ (Mebengokre)

This article analyses great name rituals among the Gê-speaking Kayapó (Mebengokre) of central Brazil. Ritual organization compels a temporal and spatial co-ordination of exchanges between diverse categories of relations so that nuclear family ties are differentiated. As the fundamental site of this process of differentiation, the House undergoes various transformations in its organization during the ceremonial period and its centrality in Kayapó social thought derives from this, rather than from the attribution of an enduring corporate identity. Analysis of Kayapó ritual allows us to extend Rappaport's ideas about the relation between the invariant and variant messages in ritual, since the production of sentiment is a central task of ritual activity and such sentiments are necessary for the reproduction of formal order in ritual.     

Syncretism and the Politics of the Tingkeban in West Java

For the rural Sundanese of West Java who identify with Nahdatul Ulama Islam, the tingkeban is considered a mandatory ritual to be conducted for a woman who is seven months pregnant. However, like other local practices around birth, the tingkeban has come under state and urban modernising influences that have attempted to displace some of its elements as ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion’ and to discredit many of these as superstitious and backward. This paper examines the ritual elements of the tingkeban that produce and reinforce local cosmological and ontological ideas about the nature of personhood and society, and, in particular, how the ritual highlights the ambivalent status of the villagers within broader relations of power such as the Indonesian State and other forms of Islam existing in Indonesia. The paper also explores how the assumptions within the ideology of modernisation propagated under the last years of the Suharto regime coincide with assumptions in scholarly work such as those underlying Geertz's depiction of the syncretic nature of Javanese religion.     

Developmental plasticity and the evolution of parental effects

One of the outstanding challenges for evolutionary biologists is to understand how developmental plasticity can influence the evolutionary process. Developmental plasticity frequently involves parental effects, which might enable adaptive and context-dependent transgenerational transmission of phenotypic strategies. However, parent-offspring conflict will frequently result in parental effects that are suboptimal for parents, offspring or both. The fitness consequences of parental effects at evolutionary equilibrium will depend on how conflicts can be resolved by modifications of developmental processes, suggesting that proximate studies of development can inform ultimate questions. Furthermore, recent studies of plants and animals show how studies of parental effects in an ecological context provide important insights into the origin and evolution of adaptation under variable environmental conditions.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

(Re)Creating Rituals through Contemporary Dance

After fieldwork on the ten-hour performance “Insomnia 2–In Memoriam” about rituals and death, the author asks how the deRothfils company makes life meaningful through audience interaction with this dance creation. She explores the notion of ritual for performance analysis, drawing on Catherine Bell’s framework. She examines four dimensions of the performance, each showing how various aspects of ritual are generated: reviving esthetic features, fulfilling social needs through collective encounters, experiencing strong affects, and offering a space for existential reflection. The article concludes with a more general question of how this artistic process produces knowledge.     

Does phenotypic plasticity initiate developmental bias?

The generation of variation is paramount for the action of natural selection. Although biologists are now moving beyond the idea that random mutation provides the sole source of variation for adaptive evolution, we still assume that variation occurs randomly. In this review, we discuss an alternative view for how phenotypic plasticity, which has become well accepted as a source of phenotypic variation within evolutionary biology, can generate nonrandom variation. Although phenotypic plasticity is often defined as a property of a genotype, we argue that it needs to be considered more explicitly as a property of developmental systems involving more than the genotype. We provide examples of where plasticity could be initiating developmental bias, either through direct active responses to similar stimuli across populations or as the result of programmed variation within developmental systems. Such biased variation can echo past adaptations that reflect the evolutionary history of a lineage but can also serve to initiate evolution when environments change. Such adaptive programs can remain latent for millions of years and allow development to harbor an array of complex adaptations that can initiate new bouts of evolution. Specifically, we address how ideas such as the flexible stem hypothesis and cryptic genetic variation overlap, how modularity among traits can direct the outcomes of plasticity, and how the structure of developmental signaling pathways is limited to a few outcomes. We highlight key questions throughout and conclude by providing suggestions for future research that can address how plasticity initiates and harbors developmental bias.     

National Celebration or Local Act of Reconciliation? Public Ritual Performance and Inter-Ethnic Relations in an Australian City

This is a study of the reshaping of Australia Day celebrations in Lismore, a small city in New South Wales, which was motivated by an attempt to make the celebrations inclusive of Indigenous people and to portray the Australian nation as unified rather than divided along lines of race and culture. It shows how and why a group of local people went about reconstructing the Day's events, and how this helped to shape (but not to homogenise) the symbolic messages conveyed. The analysis demonstrates how the specific changes were located structurally both in local initiatives concerning the relationship between Indigenous and White Australians, and also in a wider State and Federal context affecting this relationship. The nature and significance of the changes made to Australia Day are analysed by drawing on the anthropology of performance and other work on public ritual.     

Food as the Holographic Condensation of Life in Sri Lankan Rituals

This paper seeks to elaborate the dynamics through which food acquires potency in shaping human life and organisation as it takes shape in enacting ritual transformation. I argue that whereas life and various existential concerns get condensed from the fringes of the social order into ritual, food further holographically condenses the existential concerns of life with which it is entangled as an assemblage. As such, it turns into a centripetal force in ritual by constituting a means that enables ritual and somatic transformation to materialize in the matter of food and thus in helping to render ritual effective. To grasp this complex process we will look at the basic dynamic of holographic condensation throughout the different ways in which various foods ritually enact the regeneration of life in the astrological New Year and the Sātuwe anti-sorcery healing rite in a Sinhalese Buddhist village in the North-Western province of Sri Lanka.     

Making developmental science accessible,usable, and a catalyst for innovation

ABSTRACT

The rapidly moving frontiers of neuroscience, molecular biology, and epigenetics—combined with extensive research in the behavioral and social sciences—are dramatically expanding our understanding of how children develop, how that process can be disrupted, how to get it back on track when it does get derailed, and how to keep it from going off track in the first place. The challenge for educators, other practitioners, policymakers, and change agents across sectors lies in our collective ability to transform cutting-edge knowledge into design principles and concepts that can inform an actionable game plan. The first step in addressing this challenge is the need to identify the most important factors that affect individual variation in learning and behavior—a task that demands recognition of the inextricable interaction between environmental influences and genetic predispositions. Building on this foundational understanding, progress toward substantially better life outcomes for all children will require attention to three objectives: (1) making complex science understandable and accessible for strategically targeted audiences; (2) making credible knowledge usable for educators, other practitioners, parents, policymakers, and civic leaders; and (3) leveraging continuing advances in science to build an R&D platform that drives innovation across multiple sectors within a dynamic ecosystem. The opportunities to leverage scientific insights to catalyze fresh thinking and test new ideas in practice and in policy are plentiful and growing, while the barriers to progress remain formidable. The time to seize the opportunities and overcome the barriers is now.     

Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away: Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual"

Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between individuals, and ritual serves uniquely to reaffirm this mutuality at the level of both individual behavior and conventional meaning. Through a study of male greetings among olive baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis), this paper illustrates how ritual in Rappaport's sense may indeed intensify cooperation in socially complex but nonlinguistic contexts by establishing a behaviorally transparent means of certifying otherwise opaque individual intentions. Thus, not only may ritual sanctify symbolic communication, but it also may have played a crucial role in its evolution, [ritual, sociocultural evolution, religion and society, symbolic communication, olive baboons, primate social behavior]     

UNVEILing connections between genotype,phenotype, and fitness in natural populations

Understanding the links between genetic variation and fitness in natural populations is a central goal of evolutionary genetics. This monumental task spans the fields of classical and molecular genetics, population genetics, biochemistry, physiology, developmental biology, and ecology. Advances to our molecular and developmental toolkits are facilitating integrative approaches across these traditionally separate fields, providing a more complete picture of the genotype‐phenotype map in natural and non‐model systems. Here, we summarize research presented at the first annual symposium of the UNVEIL Network, an NSF‐funded collaboration between the University of Montana and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which took place from the 1st to the 3rd of June, 2018. We discuss how this body of work advances basic evolutionary science, what it implies for our ability to predict evolutionary change, and how it might inform novel conservation strategies.     

Transgressing community: the case of Muslims in a twenty-first-century British city

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK – a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain – to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about ‘Muslim community’ in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the ‘war on terror’. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them.     

The Dance of Power: Ritual and Agency among Unionized American Health Care Workers

The authors illustrate the roles of agency and structure as workers, management, and a union representative use ritual encounters for their own ends in an American hospital. They also discuss the symbolism of the union contract as a charter for ritual and indicate how it and the structure that defines it subvert the broader goals of the union.     

Of Shrimps and Spirit Possession:Toward a Political Ecology of Resource Management in Northern Madagascar

I present a case of ntual innovation and spirit possession in northern Madagascar that builds on Rappaport's interests in the systemic nature of human-environmental interactions, the relationship between the various levels of political scale, and the interaction between meaning and material relations. I go beyond his formulations in questioning concepts of homeostasis and dynamic equilibrium, and instead propose to understand perturbations as inherent in a system and a source of systemic transformation. In this analysis, I place ecological relations and ritual within an explicitly political framework and examine the processes of social and material change. In drawing on the concept of cognized models, I also illustrate how historical memory and ritual enactments provide ideological frameworks for negotiating control over the use and management of the environment, [ecosystem, political ecology. Madagascar, spirit possession, ritual]     

Teaching critical thinking in a developmental biology course at an American liberal arts college

We all expect our students to learn facts and concepts, but more importantly, we want them to learn how to evaluate new information from an educated and skeptical perspective; that is, we want them to become critical thinkers. For many of us who are scientists and teachers, critical thought is either intuitive or we learned it so long ago that it is not at all obvious how to pass on the skills to our students. Explicitly discussing the logic that underlies the experimental basis of developmental biology is an easy and very successful way to teach critical thinking skills. Here, I describe some simple changes to a lecture course that turn the practice of critical thinking into the centerpiece of the learning process. My starting point is the "Evidence and Antibodies" sidelight in Gilbert's Developmental Biology (2000), which I use as an introduction to the ideas of correlation, necessity and sufficiency, and to the kinds of experiments required to gather each type of evidence: observation ("show it"), loss of function ("block it") and gain of function ("move it"). Thereafter, every experiment can be understood quickly by the class and discussed intelligently with a common vocabulary. Both verbal and written reinforcement of these ideas dramatically improve the students' ability to evaluate new information. In particular, they are able to evaluate claims about cause and effect; they become experts at distinguishing between correlation and causation. Because the intellectual techniques are so powerful and the logic so satisfying, the students come to view the critical assessment of knowledge as a fun puzzle and the rigorous thinking behind formulating a question as an exciting challenge.