CONSULTING KU JLOPLE: SOME HISTORIES OF ORACLES IN WEST AFRICA

Historical comparison of oracles in west Africa, mainly during the nineteenth century, shows how divination practices may alter. In the cases explored here, reputation, range of users, economic growth, and political influence interacted as these oracles developed; some at sites with internal and overseas trade access became complex, large-scale operations. But by about 1900, colonialists felt threatened by their secular and their spiritual power and smashed them physically, though not spiritually. Contextualized comparison shows that the many people who were involved as oracle organizers and supplicants must have had different motivations and interests. Some methodological implications of the findings are considered. As in many powerful secular organizations, access to insider knowledge was blocked, but oracular reputation was important, and the oracles had competitors. Success derived partly from collecting intelligence, with simultaneous advertisement that emphasized the mysterious power of their operations.     

Parallel and divergent landscapes: cultural encounters in the ethnographic space of Tuareg medicine

This essay explores the dialogue between the local quest for healing and the anthropological quest for healing knowledge, and local assessments of knowledge-power relationships in these processes. The context is medical discourse among the Tuareg of Niger Republic, West Africa, and my research experiences among these people. I examine local medical specialists and their traditional and changing practice in terms of how they perceive and respond to wider knowledge and power systems that impinge on local health care. Paramount in these systems are central state policies and medical anthropological research on healing, as these intersect in a postcolonial and post-separatist/rebellion setting. The essay analyzes parallels between the exchange of medicine and the exchange of knowledge and reflects upon how anthropological knowledge of African healing systems is constructed in an environment highly charged with power and danger--of political violence and economic crisis. The broader issue addressed here is how to give greater empowerment to local residents' voices in their "indigenous critique" of the medical anthropological project.     

Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire

The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them.     

Accusations of Genital Theft: A Case from Northern Ghana

Occurrences of panic attacks associated with belief in genital retraction have been described in the anthropological and psychological literature in terms of culture bound reactive syndromes. Similar phenomena occur widely in West Africa, where they are reported as cases of penis snatching. Explanations for these phenomena range from the biomedical emphasis on pathology to the social psychological emphasis on altered perceptual sets. This paper provides a narrative of an accusation of genital theft in a rural West African settlement. Drawing from ethnographic information, it will be argued that the case is best explained in light of social relations, definitions for in-groups and out-groups, and local knowledge concerning witchcraft and divination. Local explanations for the case conform to both biomedical and social psychological models.     

Dual Logic and Cerebral Coordinates for Reciprocal Interaction in Eye Contact

In order to scientifically study the human brain’s response to face-to-face social interaction, the scientific method itself needs to be reconsidered so that both quantitative observation and symbolic reasoning can be adapted to the situation where the observer is also observed. In light of the recent development of dyadic fMRI which can directly observe dyadic brain interacting in one MRI scanner, this paper aims to establish a new form of logic, dual logic, which provides a theoretical platform for deductive reasoning in a complementary dual system with emergence mechanism. Applying the dual logic in the dfMRI experimental design and data analysis, the exogenous and endogenous dual systems in the BOLD responses can be identified; the non-reciprocal responses in the dual system can be suppressed; a cerebral coordinate for reciprocal interaction can be generated. Elucidated by dual logic deductions, the cerebral coordinate for reciprocal interaction suggests: the exogenous and endogenous systems consist of the empathy network and the mentalization network respectively; the default-mode network emerges from the resting state to activation in the endogenous system during reciprocal interaction; the cingulate plays an essential role in the emergence from the exogenous system to the endogenous system. Overall, the dual logic deductions are supported by the dfMRI experimental results and are consistent with current literature. Both the theoretical framework and experimental method set the stage to formally apply the scientific method in studying complex social interaction.     

Are We all Natural Dualists? A Cognitive Developmental Approach*

The article takes to task the well-established anthropological claim that non-Western peoples are free from the traps of dualistic thinking. Although Vezo informants in Madagascar produce statements that could be used to support such a claim, experimental procedures that target their inferential reasoning reveal that they systematically differentiate between mind and body, between the biological processes that determine the organism and the social processes that shape personhood. This suggests that there is a significant discrepancy between people's explicit linguistic statements and their implicit theoretical knowledge. Moreover, developmental data show that such implicit theoretical presuppositions are essential to the production and transmission of cultural knowledge. Thus, Vezo children, who do not as yet differentiate between the biological mechanism of birth and the social mechanism of nurture, are still unable to grasp a salient aspect of Vezo culture, namely the causally integrated set of ideas that guide the way adults classify the social world. These findings have significant theoretical and methodological implications for the constitution of anthropological knowledge.     

Toward a Marxian anthropology? Bare,abstract, mobile,global

Anthropology has conventionally taken as some of its most cherished foundational categories the precise opposites of the key concepts that animate this inquiry: rather than “bare life,” anthropology has tended always to emphasize the fullness and complexity of social and political life; instead of labor in the abstract, which we recognize in its commodified form as “labor-power,” anthropology has produced exquisite inventories of concrete laboring activities and the “cultural” content of productive work; against the impermanence and mutability of lives characterized by their mobility, the ethnographic enterprise has been deeply attached to the sedentarist presuppositions of lasting settlement, dwelling, and “community”; and contrary to the task of apprehending space on a global scale, ethnographic study has been overwhelmingly localized and place-bound. Rethinking these elementary premises of the ethnographic endeavor and situating these critical concepts at the center of our epistemological frameworks are crucial theoretical and practical tasks for any meaningful social inquiry today. In this regard, the Marxian theoretical arsenal is simply indispensable. But, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.     

Encountering nature through fieldwork: expert knowledge,modes of reasoning,and local creativity

The concept of ‘relation’ has been central to the anthropological reworking of the nature/culture and nature/society dichotomies. However, ecology is relational in a way that has often been ignored or dismissed in contemporary socio‐cultural anthropology. This article shows that there is more to ethnoecology than an ethnocentric form of analysis representing other people's understandings of the natural world through the prejudiced lens of Western scientific classifications. Three ‘fieldwork on fieldwork’ experiments involving encounters between natural scientists and indigenous communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Southern Guyana are discussed to illustrate the heterogeneity of human knowledge, the role of expert knowledge in intercultural communication, and the need to differentiate ecological reasoning from moral reasoning.     

The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among "Native" Anthropologists

In this article, a linguistic anthropologist reviews the growing literature on the possibilities and problematics of understanding "native" anthropology and its implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. The author examines the centrality of language for "native" scholars in negotiating their legitimacy in the field. Confessions of failure by native scholars and their dilemmas with translation illuminate the dialogic and political nature of ethnographic inquiry, particularly when research is conducted in "home" communities. Moreover, native ethnographers' critical reflexivity regarding their subject positionings and "voice" may constitute a counterhegemonic rhetorical strategy for negotiating multiple accountabilities. Self-identification as a native scholar is seldom a means through which researchers "play the native card" via a noncritical privileging of their "insider" status. Instead, claiming native status may act tactically as both a normalizing and an exclusivizing endeavor, as well as a signif ier of the decolonization of anthropological thought and practice. The author considers these and other critical implications of native anthropological research in relation to her own multisited research on African American linguistic and cultural practices focused on hair care. [Keywords: "native" anthropology, language, representation, reflexivity, translation]     

Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief

In this article, I examine anthropological conceptions of religious belief by concentrating on the problems that arise in employing them in socioreligious fields characterized by pluralism, a high degree of mobility in changing religious affiliation, and by what Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have called "anti-syncretism" (1994). Instead of discarding the concept for anthropology, however, as some scholars have proposed, I suggest that indigenous discourses referring to and practices of belief represent an important field of anthropological inquiry, particularly as concerns non-Western forms of Christianity. In this article, I argue that people's ideas of and experiences with spiritual entities engender particular ways of talking about and practicing belief. Analyzing religious practices among the Zambian Gwembe Tonga, it is shown that some conceptual problems can be overcome by shifting the focus from belief as a stable and perpetual interior state of religious practitioners to the practice of cyclically regenerating a condition of internalized "believing."     

On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures

This article argues for a new anthropology of the life course, one founded in indeterminacy and innovation. The fact that vital life events are rarely coherent, clear in direction, or fixed in outcome dramatically limits the usefulness of the life cycle model. In its place, I propose a unit of social analysis based in aspiration rather than event. I call this the vital conjuncture—integrating the "vital" of demographic vital events with Bourdieu's conception of the conjuncture of structure and action. Vital conjunctures suggest a new way of aggregating life history experiences and thus working between the individual and the social, free from the stultifying assumption of Stapes de vie. To illustrate the usefulness of the concept of "vital conjuncture, I focus on motherhood among young, educated Beti women in southern Cameroon. I demonstrate that rather than a clear threshold into female adulthood, here motherhood is a loosely bounded, fluid status. Contrary both to folk intuition and to the assumptions of a life cycle framework, Beti motherhood is not a stable status. Beti women who have borne children are not necessarily mothers, at least not all the time. Motherhood, instead, constitutes a temporary social status, an agent position that can be inhabited in specific forms of social action. The material offers perhaps an extreme example of what I argue is a more general phenomenon: "life stages" emerge only as the result of institutional projects, their coherence should be an object, rather than an assumption, of ethnographic inquiry. [Keywords: life course, Africa, demography, vital conjuncture]     

On mechanistic reasoning in unexpected places: the case of population genetics

A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic reasoning in process-oriented sciences, such as molecular biology and neuroscience. This paper shifts focus to assess the role of mechanistic reasoning in an area where it is neither obvious nor expected: population genetics. Population geneticists abstract away from the causal-mechanical details of individual organisms and, instead, use mathematics to describe population-level, statistical phenomena. This paper, first, develops a framework for the identification of mechanistic reasoning where it is not obvious: mathematical and mechanistic styles of scientific reasoning. Second, it applies this framework to demonstrate that both styles are integrated in modern investigations of evolutionary biology. Characteristic of the former, applied population genetic techniques provide statistical evidence for associations between genotype, phenotype, and fitness. Characteristic of the latter, experimental interventions provide causal-mechanical evidence for associations between the very same relationships, often in the same model organisms. The upshot is a richer perspective of how evolutionary biologists build evidence for hypotheses regarding adaptive evolution and a general framework for assessing the scope of mechanistic reasoning across the sciences.     

Cognitive and Geographic Maps: Study of Individual Variation Among Tojolabal Mayans

Disease and geography are related domains for Tojolabal-Maya. Using multidimensional methods, we compare two domains: (1) individual cognitive "maps" from disease terms and (2) hand-drawn maps, both with one another and with an official topographic map. Multivariate study of individual informant data demonstrates correspondence of the axes of maps. Least squares fitting of dimensional representations using a method specifically modified for ethnosemantic data allows meaningful comparisons both among and within informants, and with an aggregate from a related survey of 33 informants as well. These multivariate operations help integrate individual data, sampled simultaneously for several domains, tasks, and occasions, with aggregate data. For semantic domains, we achieved rapprochement between psychological and anthropological approaches. [disease, folk theories, ethnosemantics, cognition, multivariate, Tojolabal-Maya]     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

Among the Peoples of the Agreste of Pernambuco

Anthropology, despite its historic role in both creating and dismantling the American racial worldview, seems barely visible in contemporary scholarly and public discussions of "race." The authors argue that race should once again be central to anthropological inquiry, that cultural and physical anthropologists must jointly develop and publicly disseminate a unified, uniquely anthropological perspective. They suggest ways to proceed and identify internal barriers that must be overcome before the anthropological voice can be heard.     

Anthropological Models of Incest Laws in the United States

The incest laws of the fifty states are esoteric folk models or norms. The fifty state laws seem haphazard in their prohibitions and do not scale. However, using two different approaches, anthropological models may be constructed to explain the data.     

Reestablishing "Race" in Anthropological Discourse

Anthropology, despite its historic role in both creating and dismantling the American racial worldview, seems barely visible in contemporary scholarly and public discussions of "race." The authors argue that race should once again be central to anthropological inquiry, that cultural and physical anthropologists must jointly develop and publicly disseminate a unified, uniquely anthropological perspective. They suggest ways to proceed and identify internal barriers that must be overcome before the anthropological voice can be heard.     

Firewalking: Explanation and the Mind-Body Relationship1

With specific reference to the Anastenaria, a firewalking ritual performed in the North of Greece, this paper discusses the problem which phenomena such as firewalking poses for anthropological discussion. The relationship between the mind and the body and their existence in the social world is addressed, as I search for a way in which anthropological discourse can approach an explanation of an individual's ability to walk on burning coals unharmed. A brief look at the various explanations provided by different disciplines follows a more detailed review of scientific inquiry into this phenomenon. A critical discussion of the notions of trance, possession and altered states of consciousness introduces the subjective/objective dichotomy. The question is asked: How does the body exist in the world and to what extent does there remain a distinction between body, mind and object?     

Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology

This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of "toxicogenomics." Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a "systems toxicology" that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity while fulfilling their historic mission of producing results relevant to regulatory, legal, and clinical decision making. Although there is now a robust body of anthropological work on the sciences—in practice, as sites of cultural production, and as cultural and political-economic forces in a variety of domains—a relatively underdeveloped theme is subject formation within the sciences. This article directs ethnographic attention toward understanding how scientific imaginaries take shape and interpolate technical, biomaterial, political-economic, social, cultural, and ethical elements. We map such efforts in contemporary toxicogenomics as an instance of "civic science."     

Advancing science through mining libraries, ontologies, and communities

Life scientists today cannot hope to read everything relevant to their research. Emerging text-mining tools can help by identifying topics and distilling statements from books and articles with increased accuracy. Researchers often organize these statements into ontologies, consistent systems of reality claims. Like scientific thinking and interchange, however, text-mined information (even when accurately captured) is complex, redundant, sometimes incoherent, and often contradictory: it is rooted in a mixture of only partially consistent ontologies. We review work that models scientific reason and suggest how computational reasoning across ontologies and the broader distribution of textual statements can assess the certainty of statements and the process by which statements become certain. With the emergence of digitized data regarding networks of scientific authorship, institutions, and resources, we explore the possibility of accounting for social dependences and cultural biases in reasoning models. Computational reasoning is starting to fill out ontologies and flag internal inconsistencies in several areas of bioscience. In the not too distant future, scientists may be able to use statements and rich models of the processes that produced them to identify underexplored areas, resurrect forgotten findings and ideas, deconvolute the spaghetti of underlying ontologies, and synthesize novel knowledge and hypotheses.