Abstraction is an important concern in the modern west. This article describes two social aspects of abstraction. The first is the ways that it is associated with certain sorts of people (the abstracting agent), to show some of the forms that abstraction can take in western thought. The second is the ways that it is institutionalised, especially in economic activity in western society over the past few centuries (institutional abstraction), to show some of the factors that account for its cultural form and salience. Abstraction can be viewed ambivalently, and the article concludes with a consideration of how this ambivalence is expressed in a common western understanding of economic life.

This article considers two forms of action among Miskitu adolescents, both of which encode in ritualised form anxieties and desires concerned with the imminent categorical transition from adolescence to adulthood. The first of these is a masked dance known as ‘mosko’ which is performed mainly by both young unmarried man and women in the village of Kakabila. The second is a supposedly culture-bound, and evidently contagious, condition known as ‘grisi siknis’ which afflicts mainly young unmarried women in Miskitu-speaking communities throughout eastern Nicaragua and Honduras. Analysis of this material suggests that where rituals directly enacting transformations to adulthood are absent, modes of action allowing individuals to express concerns surrounding this change of status are likely to be particularly dramatic.

From its late eighteenth century beginnings until the early twentieth century, the House of Rothschild was the greatest of the European banks. Its success was due not only to the financial skills of the partners but also to their innovative strategies in the sphere of kinship and marriage. The structure of the bank was dependent on the family's unique rules of succession and marriage. It was organised into five branches, each in a different country, originally directed by one of the five sons of the founder, Mayer Amschel. The branches were linked by ties of fraternity, reinforced by repeated endogamous marriages. These marriages were normally contracted between the children of partners. Given the rule, established by Mayer Amschel, that only the founder's sons and, later, their sons and sons sons could become partners, the most common pattern was for a man to marry his father's brother's daughter.

The environment has become a powerful locus for the negotiation of cultural identity in Europe. The problem of local resistance to the creation of new conservation areas compels us to question how tropes of cultural alterity shapes environmental programmes in the rural margins of the European Union. In Sardinia, the allochronism deployed in explanations of criminality has also framed discourses promoting a new Italian national park. Converging visions of social and ecological backwardness have naturalised the cultural distance between those who see the Sardinian forest as a local resource protected by indigenous traditions, and those who see it as a European or global resource endangered by local ignorance and violence. Local resistance to the park operates in a range of symbolic and material modes, opening ambiguous political spaces in which to challenge European and environmentalist constructions of history, modernity and backwardness.

This paper considers issues of representation, in particular, the positioning of the ethnographer. It demonstrates a shift from the anthropologist's concern about how to position herself in the field to that of the perspectives of specific participant-informants. Acquiring knowledge about one's own society must consider both academic pressure to stand outside the frame, and the notion that the ethnographer is always situated. The article explores how an indigenous ethnographer in Guyana becomes both insider and outsider for the participant-informants. This positioning of the ethnographer emerges from the participants-informants’ concerns and perspectives.

The papers contained in this Dossier were originally presented at a roundtable discussion at the Sixth Biennial EASA Conference (Krakow 2000). Several of the papers contain explicit or implicit reference to Charles Stewart's pre-circulated abstract for the roundtable which stated the following: The majority of anthropologists are virtually card-carrying secularists. In this respect they conform to theories of secularization which contend that the further we proceed into modernity the less significance religion will have for people. Yet when it comes to writing about societies on the basis of empirical research, anthropologists are often forced to reject the secularization thesis. The people we study often embrace a vast array of old and new religions and practice them in ways that Weber never dreamed of. The emergent anthropological orthodoxy on secularization is that it hasn’t happened. That anthropologists should hold personal convictions quite different from those of the people they study is not novel. In the case of religiosity, secularism, anti-secularism and non-secularism, the positions of anthropologists are, however, part of the overall picture. They are part of the phenomenon under study. A better contextual understanding of anthropologists’ secularist convictions might therefore improve our ability to analyse religion in the modern world. The central purpose of the roundtable discussion was to explore this gap between ‘our’ secularism and ‘their’ religion by historicising it and submitting it to empirical and reflexive consideration. At the same time we must ask how those anthropologists who do embrace religion in their personal lives can situate themselves within the overall secularist ethos of professional anthropology. Can these anthropologists provide special insight into the non-secularisation of world societies?

Like the other social sciences, anthropology operates with secular premises of logic and empiricism. These tenets have manifold implications for those anthropologists who do ordinarily embrace religion in their lives, as well as for those anthropologists who have religious experiences during fieldwork. Must religious convictions and feelings be set to one side in order for one to engage in anthropological research? Must anthropology be secularist in order to proceed? Or can anthropologists begin to factor their own religious backgrounds, beliefs and experiences into their research and writing? These are some of the questions that must now be addressed in the current epistemological environment where reflexivity has become a component of objectivity

Charles Stewart asked us to respond to the following challenge: ‘Are the majority of anthropologists virtually card-carrying secularists?’ At first, this might seem the sort of outdated question that historians debated heatedly thirty years ago. On further elaboration, however, it turns out to be centrally tied up with the issues that have been puzzling so many of us over the past decade, concerning modernity and the role of anthropology in the negotiation of global hegemonies.

In questioning secularism and the limits of secularism, I see two possible lines of inquiry: first, the critical assessment of the intellectual and historical secular foundations of anthropology and the evaluation of how this secular foundation of our science has affected our understanding of religion and society. And, second, the exploration of how, in writing and practice, anthropology interacts with the secular or religious states and societies we live in and communicate with: in other words, our positioning as social scientists with political and ethical responsibilities and possibly with a certain amount of bias due to this privileged status.

According to Charles Stewart there is ‘an emerging consensus’ among anthropologists that secularisation hasn’t happened. Is this in fact so? I would argue that there is no such consensus, and that if there is, it is wrong. There is a consensus, no doubt, that the strong secularisation thesis, as held in the 1950s – the idea that there had been, and would continue to be, a unilinear, inevitable and irreversible evolution from religious belief to rationality and consumerism – was naïve and indefensible. The strong secularisation thesis has evidently been falsified by, among other things, the rise of religious fundamentalisms (Kepel 1994). But broadly understood, and putting aside such straw men, secularisation has happened and is happening. The overall trend is for the role, power, scope and influence of religious institutions to be in decline – of course, this is just a generalisation, not a force of history; there are plenty of counter-currents and no particular situation can be predicted in terms of it. Yet I am somewhat surprised that some contributors should wish to deny this trend of the longue durée.

Secularism defines the orientation of most contemporary thought in the philosophies and social sciences. So much an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment, their secularism manifests the potency of human thought finally liberated and liberating, a demythologizing force that replaces God with Man, that sees human beings as the architects of their own destinies. This is the thoroughgoing argument of the discipline of anthropology regardless of conceptual or methodological orientation. Secularism also declares knowledge, all branches of valid knowledge to be grounded in rationality, a rationality guided by the rule of reason and usually that defined in European and North American Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment discourses. Here the commitment of anthropology is less certain and considerably divided. What constitutes reason and rationality is at the root of much anthropological endeavour and the history of debate over theory and method in the discipline resounds with its irresolution. In many ways the dominating figure of Kant looms over anthropological discourse (even in his current Nietzschean extension or rejection) but there is a deep suspicion as to whether ideal or transcendental reason is independent of its daily or ordinary articulations in routine practices. In other words, abstract reason is always directed and filled with cultural assumptions constructed in the dynamics of a contemporary history. All reason and rationality is of this order. Scientific or logical Reason is no exception and anthropologists argue the problematics of this fact when applied to the rigorous exploration and understanding of human practices which are formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. Such a problematic is compounded in a view, held by many anthropologists, that all human beings are in one way or another authorities as to what is the nature and meaning of being human. In other words, the authority does not rest with any particular and historically specifically located body of human beings, no matter how politically, economically or technologically dominant. In fact, forms of practical knowledge or reason constructed in such contexts of dominance may distort and subdue other forms of practical knowledge that otherwise may yield understanding of both a specific and more general nature. Louis Dumont's annoying point, anathema to many, but a development from the great Marcel Mauss, is that the mythologised realities of an India of his investigation refuse comprehension through the individualistic terms of a European modernism. Simultaneously, serious attention to such Indian discourse (perhaps most tragically revealed in the very crisis of its colonial demythologisation or securalisation) provides insight into the nature of colonial structurings and the kinds of reconfigurations of the human subject underway in recent European and North American history.

The recent case of Steve Thoburn, a local grocer in Sunderland, convicted because of his refusal to sell products by the imperial kilo (Scott 2001), demonstrates how ‘Europe’, and its laws are increasingly encroaching on the daily lives of many. Europe, no longer simply a geographical space with various imaginings attached, has become a centre of decision making whose rules extend to its vast populace. Cris Shore, tackling the growth of the bureaucratic influence of Europe in his recent work, rightly points out that: ‘The construction of the EU represents the most exciting and profound development in European politics and society of the twentieth century. It therefore deserves careful and rigorous analysis’ (p. xi).