A Shared Intentional Space of Witch-Hunt and Sacrifice

In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is ‘the other side of sacrifice’ in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpose of sacrificing the accused witch for the healing of the community. The argument hinges on the alignment of the space intended by sacrifice and the space revealed by the appearance of the witch – as both articulating an engagement with ‘the very source of life’ (Hubert & Mauss 1964: 98).     

The Untold Sacrifice: The Monotony and Incompleteness of Self-Sacrifice in Northeast Brazil

There is no such thing as an accidental sacrifice. Sacrifice is always pre-meditated, and if not entirely goal-oriented, at the very least inherently meaningful as a process in itself. This paper is about how we might begin to understand sacrifices that do not conform to these rules. It concerns the question: does sacrifice exist outside of its (often) dramatic, self-conscious elaboration? Within the Brazilian Catholic tradition everyday life – ideally characterised by monotonous, undramatic, acts of self-giving – is ‘true sacrifice’. For ordinary Catholics, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering ‘free’. In this paper I describe, ethnographically, the work entailed as one of ‘revelation’ and use the problems thrown up to reflect upon both the limits and advantages of Western philosophical versus anthropological understandings of Christian sacrificial practices to date.     

Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors

This article considers counterhegemonic sacrifices as a means of social intervention, and in doing so explores the social efficacy of non-ritual sacrifice in the modern era. Ethnographically, this article examines the way Israeli conscientious objectors succeed in having their refusal of military service and the social costs they incur understood as sacrifices by the Israeli public. Ex-soldiers accumulate social capital in light of public perception that they have ‘paid the price’ for their beliefs. Other ethnographic contexts that further elucidate the ability of socially abject to use sacrifice to counterhegemonic effect are presented. I claim that the recognition of sacrifice depends on an intersubjective combination of sacrificial intention and community recognition. This article suggests that the meaning of sacrifice is determined by how sacrifice is used and understood in social context, and as such breaks ranks with literatures on sacrifice concerned with the intrinsic coherence of ritual sacrifice.     

Crossing the buffer: ontological anxiety among US evangelicals and an anthropological theory of mind

Scholars describe the dominant model of mind in the United States as secular: bounded, private, supernaturally inert, and the locus for self and identity. I argue that US charismatic evangelicals live with the secular sense of a seemingly immutable boundary between the immaterial mind-self and the material world – what Charles Taylor might call ‘boundedness’ – but at the same time, their commitment to supernatural connection means they imagine the mind-world boundary as porous under certain circumstances: a brittle, fragile buffer between the natural and the supernatural. To allow this porosity, charismatics develop strategies for crossing the buffer, which include spoken prayer, powerful emotions, playful modes of pretend, and bodily rupture or ‘breaking in’. These strategies provide evidence that the supernatural is real. Yet practitioners remain anxious about the relationship between these supernatural experiences and the scepticism around them. This ‘ontological anxiety’ becomes visible in three ways. First, charismatics cultivate intense bodily sensations that demonstrate the reality of God. Second, they describe their experience with a ‘common-sense realism’. Finally, charismatics are disturbed by the incoherence between their evangelical and secular impulses around the possibility of mental action.     

The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or,rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’

This article revisits well‐travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire – that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category ‘family’ cross‐culturally. In any of its variations, the ‘family’ exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize – to bring into being – social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the ‘real world’, despite the fact that patriliny as ‘instituted fantasy’ downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re‐purposes ‘the symbolic’ and ‘imaginaries’, categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators.     

Why is the world green? The interactions of top–down and bottom–up processes in terrestrial vegetation ecology

A classic question in plant ecology is “why is the world green?” That is, if plants are food for animals why do not animals eat all the available food – changing a ‘green world’ into a ‘brown world’. We first reviewed this question in 2009 and now revisit our arguments in the light of new data and new thinking. Here we argue that (1) the top–down bottom–up dichotomy is probably too simple for understanding a complex system – such as vegetation – rich in feedback processes. (2) Nevertheless it appears that bottom–up processes are generally more important for maintaining the presence of some sort of vegetation while top–down control process are generally more important in determining the type of vegetation at a site. (3) Although this review mainly takes a qualitative and experimental approach to the question, we also argue that simple well-known mathematical models from population ecology can be very informative in thinking about the types of explanations for the green world phenomenon, and demonstrating that it is rarely a simple choice between one form of control or another.     

Loving recognition: a proposal for the practical efficacy of love as a public virtue

The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a structuring of social interaction by means of affective appreciation of individual others. I understand love as the human capacity and the human practice of respecting the individuality of other lives. The desirous appreciation and affirmation of another ‘I’ – the loving attention – serves to surmount the customary ‘category‐thinking’ by which the world is normally apprehended: the generalizing, homogenizing, and stereotyping that characterize a culture's symbolic identification of the world. Loving recognition is such that the individuality of another life, its precious integrity and uniqueness, may be socially accommodated.     

‘Bridges to cash’: channelling agency in mobile money

Encountered by mobile money professionals – industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone‐enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’ – the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of ‘mobile money agents’, the people ‘on the ground’ or ‘in the field’ who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny – and not mobile money agents themselves – as its object. It seeks to understand how ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.     

The prizefighter's three bodies

Based on three years of participant observation and apprenticeship in a black boxing gym on Chicago's South Side, this article reconstructs the prizefighter's lived sense and experience of corporeal instrumentality, aesthetics, and ethics ‐ the ‘three bodies’ that together define the distinctive, ‘aisthesis’ of pugilistic practice as corporeal craft and ghetto trade. This serves to argue that professional boxing offers not so much an opportunity for economic betterment as the promise of social difference and even transcendence: the professional ethic of sacrifice enables boxers to tear themselvesfrom the everyday world and to create a moral and sensual universe ‘sui generis’ wherein a transcendent masculine self may be constructed.     

Genuinely made up: camp,baroque, and other denaturalizing aesthetics in the cultural production of the real

The link that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau forged a long time ago between the ‘real’ and the ‘natural’ has proved to be indissoluble. Time and again, contemporary constructions of the real mobilize all that can be linked to nature. Inauthentic, by contrast, is that which is fabricated, made up, artificial, the all‐too‐evident result of human design. In Bahia, Brazil, the author encountered a completely different mode in the cultural production of the real. Analysing the performance of a Bahian drag queen who goes by the name of Gina da Mascar, the author discusses ‘camp’ and ‘baroque’ as registers that foster a sensibility for (and appreciation of) cultural forms that are ‘truly false’. He shows how the appeal of these registers – their persuasiveness, their form of truth‐telling – resonates with the sensibilities of people whose biographies are marked by radical discontinuities, and he argues that these registers might be understood as a popular articulation of the Lacanian understanding that symbolic closure is an impossibility.     

IS GLOBAL ETHICS MORAL NEO‐COLONIALISM? AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ISSUE IN THE CONTEXT OF BIOETHICS

This paper considers the possibility and desirability of global ethics in light of the claim that ‘global ethics’ in any form is not global, but simply the imposition of one form of local ethics – Western ethics – and, as such, a form of moral neo‐colonialism. The claim that any form of global ethics is moral neo‐colonialism is outlined using the work of a group of ‘developing world bioethicists’ who are sceptical of the possibility of global ethics. The work of virtue ethicists is then introduced and compared to the position of the developing world bioethicists in order to show that the divide between ‘Western’ and ‘non‐Western’ ethics is exaggerated. The final section of the paper turns to the practical arena and considers the question of global ethics in light of practical issues in bioethics. The paper concludes that practical necessity is driving the creation of global ethics and thus the pertinent question is no longer ‘Whether global ethics?’, but ‘Why global ethics?’.     

Hmong infrapolitics: a view from Vietnam

Drawing upon notions of indigenization of modernity, agency and resistance in the context of an egalitarian society – the Hmong in northern Vietnam – I explore whether agency that is directed at diverting modernization is automatically intentional and patent, whether under certain circumstances it becomes resistance, and whether it is necessarily a project. I suggest the Hmong in Vietnam use infrapolitics while being tactically selective about modernity. I note that agency and the power to act appear and evolve in context and must be studied in relation to the specific circumstances that have formed the acting subjects. My argument relates to Sahlins’ proposition that ‘Local societies everywhere have attempted to organise the irresistible forces of Western World system by something even more inclusive – their own system of the world, their own culture.’     

Selfish altruism,fierce cooperation and the predator*

This paper suggests a new way to think about a famous question: what explains cooperation in nature and in particular in humans? I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two ‘teammates’ in the presence of a predator (passing and shooting in two-on-one situations) is one of the fundamental conceptual building-blocks for understanding these phenomena because in such a situation the fact that life is packaged in many distinct enclosures (and not in one big monolithic blob) can unfold its comparative advantage. I show how, in the presence of a predator, cooperative equilibria emerge among entirely selfish teammates if we infinitesimally bias the lead player in the selfish direction or assign a computational burden on the predator due to the presence of a teammate. I argue that ‘predators’ are common in the biological jungle but also in everyday human settings. Intuitively, this paper builds on the simple idea – a familiar one to a biologist observing the natural world but perhaps less so to social scientists – that everybody has enemies.     

Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene

This article explores how ecological change transforms children and child-rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim ' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.     

Cephalopod Cognition in an Evolutionary Context: Implications for Ethology

What is the distribution of cognitive ability within the animal kingdom? It would be egalitarian to assume that variation in intelligence is everywhere clinal, but examining trends among major phylogenetic groups, it becomes easy to distinguish high-performing ‘generalists’ – whose behavior exhibits domain-flexibility – from ‘specialists’ whose range of behavior is limited and ecologically specific. These generalists include mammals, birds, and, intriguingly, cephalopods. The apparent intelligence of coleoid cephalopods (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish) is surprising – and philosophically relevant – because of our independent evolutionary lineages: the most recent common ancestor between vertebrates and cephalopods would have been a small wormlike organism, without any major organizational structure to its nervous system. By identifying the cognitive similarities between these organisms and vertebrates, we can begin to derive some general principles of intelligence as a biological phenomenon. Here, I discuss trends in cephalopod behavior and surrounding theory, and suggest their significance for our understanding of domain-general cognition and its evolution.     

The multiple dimensions of racial mixture in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: from whitening to Brazilian negritude

Abstract

The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions – namely, ‘whitening’, ‘Brazilian negritude’, ‘national identification’ and ‘non-essentialist racialism’ – and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics.     

Enskillment inhibited: ‘industrial gardening’ in Britain

Horticulture – like many other traditional crafts in Britain – is said to suffer from a ‘skills problem’. A recent survey suggests that one of the reasons for this is increased outsourcing of horticultural work from public employers to private contractors. While anthropologists have generally acknowledged the politics of learning, they have had little to say about enskillment in work contexts which have been reconfigured in a way that leaves hardly any room for institutionalized methods of learning. Private gardening contractors are an example of such a work context, and in this article I scrutinize their practices to show the various ways in which enskillment is inhibited. Rather than referring to the concept of ‘deskilling’ – usually evoked in discussions of skills problems – I employ the notion of an inhibition of enskillment in order to emphasize that every feature that fosters skill also has a ‘shadow side’ to it which bears a potential to inhibit skill. Implicit in this argument is a critique of neoliberal work practices which shape enskillment as well as the natural environment.     

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists.     

Use and influence of composite indicators for sustainable development at the EU-level

Considering the on-going strive towards new, alternative indicators to measure our societal development pathways, and the fact that policy indicators remain largely enigmatic with regard to their patterns of embeddedness in institutional decision-making processes, it appears necessary to work towards reducing our lack of understanding of their interactions with policy-making. In the present paper, we focus on exploring the significance of composite indicators for policy making in the particular policy environment of the EU-institutions. Our research is underpinned by the conviction that such indicators are not systematically used directly, but have an indirect influence on policy making that needs to be better understood. Our analytical framework – in order to analyse the ways in which composite indicators enter policy processes – is characterised by the distinction between the ‘use’ and the ‘influence’ of indicators on the one hand, and on the other hand between 3 types of factors: indicator factors, policy factors and user factors. Our empirical results show that while most of the academic attention and political debate around indicators has tended to focus on ‘indicator factors’, such quality attributes actually mattered relatively little in our setting as determinants of indicator influence. This rejects the idea that the robustness of evidence would lie exclusively in its technical quality and in the independence of its producer, and instead calls attention to the processes of evidence-construction. Simultaneously, ‘user factors’ (beliefs and representations of policy actors) and ‘policy factors’ (institutional context) were crucial as explanatory factors of the policy mechanics we identified.     

To harness traits for ecology,let’s abandon ‘functionality’

Traits are measurable features of organisms. Functional traits aspire to more. They quantify an organism’s ecology and, ultimately, predict ecosystem functions based on local communities. Such predictions are useful, but only if ‘functional’ really means ‘ecologically relevant’. Unfortunately, many ‘functional’ traits seem to be characterized primarily by availability and implied importance – not by their ecological information content. Better traits are needed, but a prevailing trend is to ‘functionalize’ existing traits. The key may be to invert the process, that is, to identify functions of interest first and then identify traits as quantifiable proxies. We propose two distinct, yet complementary, perspectives on traits and provide a ‘taxonomy of traits’, a conceptual compass to navigate the diverse applications of traits in ecology.