Nationalism and the ‘idiocy’ of the countryside: The case of Serbia

The mobilization of the countryside has direct consequences for political discourse about national values and in times of social crisis, the ‘conservatism’ of the countryside has the potential to assume an aggressive, offensive posture. When rural mobilization is accompanied by religious revival, group loyalty and so‐called ‘traditional’ values are sacralized. When rural mobilization, ethnic mobilization, and religious revival occur simultaneously, it signifies that the society is undergoing profound destabilization. Examining the case of Serbia, this article argues that while Serbia is, in cultural and social terms, predominantly rural in character, Titoist Communism imposed the values of the city on that culture, while the 1987 coup by Slobodan Milosevic represented, among other things, the triumph of the countryside over the city in Serbia.

This article begins by characterizing the countryside in cultural terms, provides documentation of the importance of rural traditions in Serbian society, documents the rural character of the Serbian national movement, connecting its ideology and behaviour with populist appeals, and examines the contribution made by the Serbian Orthodox Church to the mobilization of the Serbian countryside.     

Contesting the ‘model minority’: racialization,youth culture and ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ nights

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.     

The language of systematics,and the philosophy of ‘total evidence’

This contribution analyses the primacy of classification over generalization, and the philosophy of total evidence that emerges from the relation of homology to character statements. Primary conjectures of homology are basic character statements, i.e. statements that predicate properties of organisms, properties that are instantiated by those organisms and/or their parts. Secondary conjectures of homology are embedded in a second‐level (metalinguistic) discourse that turns on the coherence or incoherence of those basic character statements relative to a hierarchy. The coherence or incoherence of character statements is a logical relation between statements, not a causal (historical) relation between organisms. The choice of the hypothesis of relationships that is supported by the largest set of coherent basic character statements is based on the empirical presupposition that the properties referred to by the set of coherent character statements are grounded in causally efficacious relations of inheritance and ontogeny, and co‐instantiated because they are inherited through common ancestry (Hennig's auxiliary principle). Unless that empirical presupposition is causally grounded, phylogeny reconstruction is of an inherently probabilistic nature, whether under parsimony or other models of analysis. The causal grounding of a coherent set of character statements typically seeks a link between character statements and causally efficacious generative mechanisms for morphological characters (as is defeasibly indicated by topology and connectivity), or secondary structure information for molecular characters.     

‘Agent Plus’ and ‘Practical Reasoner’: A Comparative Study of the Ethical Person

This paper explores an understanding of the person in terms of practical reason. Based on my fieldwork among the Jenu Kurumba and on ethnographic data on four other communities, I analyse how these five communities conceptualise the ethical person. To understand these concepts, I consult studies of an anthropology of ethics concerned with practical reason. Additionally I draw on Charles Taylor's concept of the ‘agent plus’ and Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of the ‘practical reasoner’. I argue that both Neo-Aristotelian notions are fundamentally important for understanding the concepts of the ethical person among the five cultural formations investigated in this paper.     

Group I introns and gnra tetraloops: remnants of ‘The RNA world’?

GNRA tetraloops, found in high frequency in natural RNAs, make loop-receptor interactions, stabilizing the tertiary structure of Group I introns, a class of small RNAs. Analyzing 230 Group I introns, to study the distribution and sequence pattern of the GNRA tetraloops, we suggest that these features reflect the ancestral nature of these catalytic molecules, in a prebiotic RNA world. The adenosine rich GNRA tetraloops would have interacted with each other through long range RNA-RNA interactions to form higher order structures forming potential sites that render the propensity for the short RNAs to bind to metal ions from the prebiotic pool, aiding them to act as metalloenzymes.     

‘The Mind of Christ’: Financial Success,Born-again Personhood,and the Anthropology of Christianity

In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday school teacher – Rick Betcher – and his life as a ‘Christian businessman.’ Anthropologists and other scholars have shown great interest in how matters of money figure in the culture of Protestantism. Using Rick's self-designed Sunday school class, The Mind of Christ, I argue that conceptions of personal financial success among born-again Christians are structured by the prevailing model of born-again personhood – the New Mind.     

‘Black and white,a significant contrast’: Race,humanism and missionary photography in the Pacific

Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white’, a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality .      

Controversy,Islam and politics: an exploration of the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ affair through the eyes of British Muslim elites

In September 2012, a video entitled ‘Innocence of Muslims’ was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Muslims was markedly different. This article traces the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ affair from the eyes of those involved in formal Muslim-governmental relations. It explores what the new controversy tells us about the representation of Muslim communities in the process of political engagement since the Rushdie affair. It considers the experiential disconnect that exists between Muslim and political actors in contemporary Britain before exploring three important political factors – the cultural, representational and geopolitical – that influence and impact upon Muslim–governmental relations.     

The nature of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ contractions in the coxal muscles of the cockroach

An investigation was carried out to examine in detail the mechanical responses of the coxal muscles of the cockroach using an isometric recording technique, and at the same time attempts were made to correlate these responses with the electrical events of neuromuscular transmission. It has been possible to show that the different mechanical responses are not due to intrinsic properties of the muscle fibres as suggested by Becht and Dresden, but appear to be related to differences in motor nerve innervation of the different muscles.     

Racism as social policy: The Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, 1939–1945

This article is concerned with the successive stages of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme between 1933 and 1945. The ‘euthanasia’ programme was ordered by Hitler, and implemented by an ad hoc bureaucracy which bypassed the normative institutions of the state. It also relied upon the active complicity of academic psychiatrists and some directors of mental institutions. This article traces the successive stages of the programme and demonstrates the several links between the murder of the mentally handicapped and the subsequent extermination of the Jews. It then examines the ideological, scientific and social context of these policies, particularly emphasizing the role of cost‐cutting considerations in welfare policy during and after the Depression. It also stresses developments in psychiatric medicine which led otherwise ‘progressive’ psychiatrists to contemplate killing ‘incurable’ patients. The article then examines the impact of Nazi policy on specific institutions and individuals, sometimes with the aid of interviews and material from relatives of the victims concerned. The article also considers sources of individual opposition to these policies, and attempts by the regime to overcome mass distaste for its policies by skilful use of film propaganda. These passages in the article are based upon analysis of the films themselves. The article offers no theoretical, philosophical, or psychological, general explanations or conclusions, regarding the policies it analyses and describes.     

‘Playing Like Men’: The Extramarital Experiences of Women in Contemporary Japan

Women's sexuality in Japan has persistently been linked to reproduction, while men's sexuality is associated with play, and the patriarchal structure of Japanese society even endorses male infidelity. In recent years, however, there are indications, especially in the popular media in Japan, that many married women are ‘playing like men’ by turning to extramarital activities to re-negotiate the meaning of sexuality and the bounds of marriage. While their behaviour can be interpreted as autonomous acts of affirming themselves as subjects of their own desire, dominant power structures still exist in Japanese society to restrict women's sexuality. This article examines the growing ‘gender instability’ in marriage in Japan as married women navigate through the morally contentious realm of extramarital activities to negotiate a new sense of self, and argues for sexuality as an increasingly embattled terrain for socio-historical manoeuvrings, media enticements, marital strategies, and personal insurgencies in postindustrial Japan.     

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: The role of religion in mediating and challenging the ‘model minority’ and other civic boundaries

This article examines how Korean Americans use the cultural resources of religious communities to mediate race, ethnic, and socio-economic boundaries that have consequences for civic life. Specifically, I compare involvement of Korean Americans in second-generation Korean congregations to those in multiethnic churches. I find Korean Americans who participate in second-generation Korean churches use religion to largely reproduce images of Korean Americans as model minorities, and implicitly distance themselves from those whom they perceive as less financially successful. In contrast, Korean Americans in multiethnic congregations use religion to emphasize the commonality Korean Americans have with other minorities. By using a cultural framework that allows for the agency of individuals in identity and group boundary construction, this work more generally shows the potential for new Americans to use the cultural resources of local organizations to change existing ethnic and racial boundaries in the United States.     

‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics

More than broadly agreeing on the need for a critical deconstruction of the very foundations of anthropological theory and practice aimed at uncovering the elements implicitly excluded from analysis, the silences in a reasoning process and the blind spots in observations, the author stresses need to distinguish between this kind of deconstruction, which is positive and essential for any knowledge-building activity, and another deconstruction which can lead to hyper-relativism. The second tendency, baptized 'postmodernism' and highly popular in the USA, is a largely overblown enterprise of deconstructive dissolution which, if carried to its logical conclusion, threatens to submerge social anthropology in the rising tide of 'Cultural Studies'. Postmodernist theory is a somewhat eclectic mixture of (often contradictory) ideas borrowed from such French thinkers as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, which is advanced in support of the idea that a 'science of man', in other words, a set of systematic observations, analyses and findings subjected to testing and verification, is not possible. The author here explains why he takes the opposite view.