In October 1992 two transmigrants were murdered, and their heads removed, by Nuaulu from south Seram, eastern Indonesia. Until these events, head-taking had been assumed to be part of Nuaulu history. Media coverage and the court case which followed confirmed the prejudices of non-Nuaulu in the Moluccas about Nuaulu practices, and forced anthropological observers of Nuaulu life to re-assess their interpretation of the role which the idea of taking heads might play in contemporary belief. In this paper, direct knowledge of these events is used to examine the relationship between what we know about historical Nuaulu practices of head taking, current beliefs, and the circumstances of the 1992 homicides. It is suggested that analyses which see these events as a culturally eroded but otherwise unmodified version of what went before are fundamentally mistaken. It is concluded that the so-called ‘traditional’ features of contemporary homicides must be set against some ‘imagined past’ rather than what is necessarily historically authentic.

Anthropologists have in recent decades discussed the various processes taking place during ethnographic fieldwork, critically analysing the production of the ‘other’ within anthropological contexts. This paper claims that the emphasis on the ‘other’, even though important in some contexts, can be limited and inadequate in reflecting the complex processes taking place in ethnographic fieldwork. The discussion, taking as an example ethnographic fieldwork among WoDaaBe in Niger, stresses the importance of looking at intersections and the dialectical nature of the ethnographers' multiple identities, focusing especially on ‘racial’ identity and gender as two points of interacting identifications.

The article explores the analytical implications of dissolving the self/other dichotomy that historically has shaped anthropology's relation to its objects of study. It suggests that in order to study these implications we must explore the ethnographic field as an arena for intersubjective interaction in which the ethnographer and his or her informants struggle to impose social roles and cultural categories on the other. The article which draws on field data from the Peruvian Andes argues that an inquiry into the native registration, catalogisation, and indexation of the ethnographer allows for an examination not only of how the people under study classify non-natives but also how they conceptualise themselves. It also proposes that anthropological insight is produced in the shifting positions as insider/outsider and the blurred boundaries between what is defined as included/excluded.

As of the 1960s, anthropologists from different national traditions have tended to agree upon an interpretation of Marcel Mauss' The Gift. The essay, it is believed, amounts to a theory of exchange whose primary feature is the identification of the gift with the spirit of the donor. This approach, emphasising ‘exchange’ and its ‘spiritual aspects’, is significantly different from the interpretation offered by Mauss' contemporaries, who stressed its references to law, to obligations and to total prestations. Tracing references to The Gift in the work of anthropologists and placing them within a precise chronological order, the paper identifies the moment in which a particular spin has been produced and analyses the social conditions that contributed to the establishment of a doxa in the field. By showing how a particular representation of Mauss' essay became taken for granted, this case-study offers methodological tools to be used in the appraisal of other episodes in the history of social anthropology.

Anthropology has shown hardly any progress since the Second World War. This is both for general reasons which affect all the sciences, and for reasons specific to anthropology which aggravate these general problems. If the works of Hocart were better known, it would be seen that they provide a way out of this sorry state of affairs. To justify this argument, this article presents the central epistemological principles of the author of Kingship, and the guiding lines of his general theory of ritual.

This paper examines how Malinowski used his fieldnotes to write ‘Baloma’. Twelve of Malinowski's field notebooks, written during his first stay in the Trobriand islands are reviewed. It explores the relationship between Malinowski's fieldnotes and the structure and contents of the ethnographic text. Other issues discussed in this paper include: the use of data for making the text, the self description of the ethnographer's research path, and the influence of theoretical inputs in the way of reporting. It is argued that Malinowski increased the validity of his ethnography by including in the text the following three elements: fieldwork data, information about the research process, and theoretical assumptions. Thus, he inaugurated a new way of writing up ethnography. With ‘Baloma’, ethnography took the form of a continuous constructive process, involving the tasks of doing fieldwork and writing – two related phases of the ethnographic process. Thanks to his experience in the Trobriands, Malinowski came to revolutionise ethnography, not only as a fieldwork process, but also as a written product.