‘The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts

This paper examines certain key concepts of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, with a view to a clearer understanding of its proposed methodology. It situates the ontological approach within the historical and intellectual conflicts through which it arose, outlining its motivations and the challenges it poses to traditional fieldwork methods and theory. The concepts of ‘radical alterity’ and ‘incommensurability’ are examined as intellectual as well as political concepts, highlighting their historical contingency on the politics of colonisation. Following from this, the notion of ‘ontological self-determination’ is analysed with respect to my fieldwork with the Dongria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha, India; I show how an application of the ontological methodology allows a better understanding of certain conflicts within current discourses and practices of nationhood and development.     

Anthropology at Home in Australia

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

Epistemic artefacts: on the uses of complexity in anthropology

Distinctions between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ have enjoyed a long and varied career in anthropology. Simplicity was once part of a collective fantasy about what life was like elsewhere, tingeing studies of tribal life with human longing for simpler ways of being. With the reflexive turn and the rise of cultural critique, simplicity has been all but excommunicated in favour of widespread diagnoses of complexity. In this article, I tease out some transformations in the uses of complexity in anthropology, and weave in some critical responses to these uses, spanning many decades, from within the discipline. I pay special attention to recent critiques by anthropologists who are beginning to grow weary of complexity as both an end‐in‐itself for scholarship and an empirical diagnosis. For these critics, complexity is deeply entwined with anthropological methods and knowledge practices. Drawing on these critical views, I suggest that complexity may be an epistemological artefact, rather than something that can be diagnosed ‘out there’, and offer a way of reframing complexity as a ‘dominant problematic’ in anthropology and beyond.     

Art and anthropology for a sustainable world

Both art and anthropology, this article proposes, are future-oriented disciplines, united in the common task of fashioning a world fit for coming generations to inhabit. The first step in establishing this proposition is to show how the objectives of anthropology differ from those of ethnography. Anthropology, it is argued, establishes a relation with the world that is correspondent rather than tangential, that prioritizes difference over alterity, and that places presence before interpretative contextualization. The second step is to rethink the idea of research – to show how, as an open-ended search for truth and a practice of correspondence, research necessarily overflows the bounds of objectivity. Art and anthropology, then, and not natural science, are exemplary in the pursuit of truth as a way of knowing-in-being. The third step is to show that only if it is conceived in this way can research be conducive to the processes of renewal on which our collective futures depend. Thus research as correspondence is a condition for sustainability. But sustainability is nothing if it is not of everything. We have to begin, therefore, with the idea of everything as a plenum, in which each apparent addition is really a reworking. The article concludes with some reflections on the proposed synergy of art and anthropology for education, democracy, and citizenship.     

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment,ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

Since Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.     

Beyond the senses: perception,the environment,and vision impairment

The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non-vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.     

Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change

The Anthropocene is the scientific label given by earth scientists to the current epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a political label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. This article critically explores what I call ‘the Anthropocene idea’ and the condition of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ through selected anthropological writing about recent planetary change and through analysis of current events in a specific ‘vulnerable’ location. By considering recent events in The Bahamas, I arrive at an orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement offers an open‐ended conceptual framework for the critical examination of the Anthropocene idea as it influences the symbolic and material realities of contemporary Anthropocene spaces.     

‘Anthropologists are Talking’:About Islam,Muslims and Law in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

In contemporary Europe, Islam and Muslims are rightly or wrongly often perceived as the ‘other’. Among the central foci of concern in many Western European countries with a significant presence of Muslims, the law has featured prominently in recent years. What can anthropology tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with liberal and secular laws and the state? Perhaps no other contemporary scholar in anthropology has written more extensively about these issues than Professor John R. Bowen. As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Bowen engaged in a public conversation with Professor Oddbjørn Leirvik and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway on 27 September 2011. Due to technical failures, the conversation had to be re-recorded at the Grand Hotel in Oslo on 28 September 2011.     

Mediat(iz)ing Catholicism: saint,spectacle, and theopolitics in Lima,Peru

This article examines the annual public procession in Lima, Peru, of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) in relation to issues at the intersection of Catholic Christianity, media, and political authority. Through a theopolitical lens alert to the intermeshing of political sovereignty and authority with theological (Catholic) worldviews, I inquire into media and the Señor de los Milagros procession along three key intersecting themes that link scales of local and global Catholicism: performance, identity/belonging, and control. Key to my argument is the idea of the miraculous (lo milagroso), a culturally resonant register of embodied affective experience with compelling power, which points to how senses of belonging, authority, and ‘proper’ Catholic subjecthoods are intensified by Catholicism's diffusion through new mediatic forms, especially in church-generated productions. A consideration of media technologies, mediation, and Catholicism nuances theoretical assumptions within the anthropology of Christianity, and also suggests that the anthropology of religion should attend more closely to mediation and mediatization as newer media infrastructures – channelling flows of information, images, and affects – extend ‘the religious’ into other social spheres.     

Times of debt: heterochrony and bank loans in rural Mongolia

Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor-creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.     

The ethics of efficacy in North India's goonda raj (rule of toughs)

This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co‐ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self‐centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.     

Relation fonctionnelle entre la masse grasse,les plis cutanés,le déficit ou l'excédent pondéra et le « poids théorique idéal

Underscoring a functional relation between fat mass, skinfolds, under or overweight and the ‘ideal theoretical weight’, constitutes a fundamental datum in anthropology. Indeed, this relation, which differs according to age, sex, ethnic group and physical activity, provides information on the distribution of fat contained in the skinfolds, the under or overweight and the ‘ideal theoretical weight’. The value of this relation lies not only in limiting the use of the corpulence index (W/H²) as an indicator of fat mass, but above all in the importance of physical activity and in the existence of a significant change in the distribution of fat according to the factors mentioned above.     

Emancipating ethics: an autonomist reading of Islamic forms of life in Russia

This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation – in this case, ‘halal living’ – are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist theory (a) is helpful in conceptualizing the friction between ethical projects (however quietist) and dominant moral/political orders; (b) has the potential to broaden anthropological conversations on virtue beyond existing fault lines (notably between what I call ‘traditionist’ and ‘liberal’ theoretical families) as well as conceptual silos (‘religion', ‘secularity’); and (c) can help us envision a radical, politically engaged anthropology of ethics.     

Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non‐native: self‐determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self‐determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833‐1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982‐present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British‐introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.     

Journeying Between Desire and Anthropology: A Story in Suspense

Anthropology is a discipline based on the motif of the journey and ‘the myth of the eternal return’. This is the journey out to the ‘other’in order to return to constitute ‘self, and this movement is a movement of desire. The desire is for wholeness, for self‐presence, for a unified self. It is a desire for origins. And this desire is evident in anthropological practices as it is in myths and fairytales—all tell stories that speak of the desire for a separate, an original, self. Yet ‘the myth of the eternal return’reveals that the enactment of the story is itself originating. The origin is not a thing to be hunted down and appropriated—it is no thing. Like the archetypes which flow through stories, it is alive in the telling. The story I tell in this paper is about my own desires. It speaks of the desire to undergo the rite of passage of anthropology, and of how this journey was interrupted by the anthropologist who always journeys before me. And yet. it is through the inextricable relations with the writings of the “other‘ anthropologist that alluring moments of different desiring are fleetingly revealed. In the end. my relations with anthropology tell of a paradox: of the desire for a transcendental journey in order to constitute self and the seductive desire for immersion—to lose self, the story remains in suspense.     

Gratuitousness: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Interiority

Interiority—an individual's inner consciousness, the continual conversation one has with oneself–remains an anthropological terra incognita. Literature has been less circumspect in this regard; fiction might be said to be ‘truer’ than social science in its efforts and intent to deal with how individual consciousness feels in the everyday and is immanent in social life. In this article I argue for recognising interiority as a crucial focus of anthropological endeavour, and I outline a possible way in which interiority might be evidenced as irrupting onto the social scene. Interiority makes its paradoxical appearance in social settings in the form of a strangeness, an individual purity and integrity, for which the term ‘gratuitousness’ is apposite. The language of individuals' interior conversation is routinely contained within the language of public exchange; on occasion it bursts these bounds. In both cases, I contend, interior conversation is an existential norm, which holds a key to understanding social life. The course of the article is to review, briefly but critically, disciplinary tendencies which have rendered individual interiority an impossible or irrelevant anthropological theme. A method of interiority is then outlined by way of an anthropological reading of two literary texts. The article ends by reconsidering the potential of an anthropology project that has a concern for interiority. The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the individual's command, and that are his exclusively as well as inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individuality.     

The impasse of modernity: personal agency,divine destiny,and the unpredictability of intimate relationships in Morocco

Following the romantic vicissitudes of Ghizlan, a professional woman in her thirties, this article explores the expectations and unexpected outcomes of love in a rapidly changing Moroccan town. Imagined as a pure and elective union between two individuals, love manifests itself in Ghizlan's lived experience as a dangerous adventure along the thin line between human agency and divine destiny, personal desires and social constraints. In the wake of the Islamic revival, a purified idea of ‘Islamic modernity’ provides the religious imagination and vocabulary with which Ghizlan recomposes the unfulfilled promises of love and discusses recent developments in Morocco. Interweaving love and destiny, Ghizlan's reflections reveal a perspective on agency and (inter)subjectivity that exceeds intentionality, desire, and rational understanding. Highlighting the fundamental roles of human passions and transcendental powers in people's ethical and existential journeys, this article hopes to contribute to an emerging ‘anthropology of ethics and freedom’. It broadens current anthropological debates by interrogating the very meanings of choice, freedom, and responsibility in a world where personal agency meets human powers, divinely preordained futures, and material contingencies.