The paper suggests that instead of talking about identities, inherited or acquired, it would be more in keeping with the realities of the globalising world to speak of identification, a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged. The frantic search of identity is not a residue of the pre-globalization times not yet fully extirpated but bound to become extinct as the globalization progresses; it is, on the contrary, the side-effect and by-product of the combination of globalising and individualising pressures and the tensions they spawn. The identification wars are neither contrary nor stand in the way of the globalising tendency: they are a legitimate offspring and natural companion of globalisation and far from arresting it, lubricate its wheels.

This article uses ethnographic material from the Fuyuge of highland Papua and other Melanesian peoples critically to examine the attribution of modernity to Melanesia. Of related concern to this critical focus is that of periodisation, and the periodisation of modernity in Melanesia. Each ethnographic instance that is drawn upon is situated further in the historical past. The Melanesian past is used in this manner in order to address two questions: is it possible to periodise modernity in the Melanesia context; and, if so, when was modernity in Melanesia? The answers to both these considerations suggest that modernity cannot be likened to mass consumption or the individual, theoretical assumptions prevalent in current depictions of modernity in Melanesia. Rather, modernity is a temporal predicament connected to formations of political (state) power and its agendas of local intervention.

This paper compares social networks mobilised through claims of ownership in Euro-American and Melanesian contexts. It addresses the debate between Strathern (1996) and Latour (1993) regarding the length of networks formed in these societies. Examples are drawn from compensation claims against the Lihir gold mine in Papua New Guinea. The paper also considers Pietz (1997) discussion of nineteenth-century British laws relating to compensation. The aim of the paper is to examine the effects of ownership strategies on other social categories and practices, including competing assessments of the environmental impacts of mining and the value of human life.

A state formation in the national order of things seems unthinkable without the state's everyday and ritual attempts to fashion ideas about what makes its people a people. This paper argues that we should examine makings of national populations in terms of historical constructions of cosmologies. The author analyses how one modern state, the Dominican Republic, produced particular ideas about ‘the Dominican people’. Dominican elites and the Dominican state made the Dominican population's origins ‘white, Hispanic and Catholic’ by claiming descent from Christopher Columbus. From the late 1870s, the Dominican republic has taken for granted that Columbus's tomb was in Santo Domingo. The state claimed that his remains had been buried on Dominican land. It appropriated the navigator's dead body as a material and symbolic resource for making essentialising and territorialising notions of the Dominican people. Bones of ancestors and heroes may be important vehicles of validation in modern political struggles, struggles which simultaneously concern identities and territories. Being ‘objective’ artifacts, bones root, incorporate and authorise territorialised identity claims. The making of Dominican ideas about Columbus as a Dominican ancestor has been tied to construction of notions of white supremacy – or racism. The author argues that the Dominican state's ideas and practices were, and are, detrimental to black Dominicans. These ideas and practices also hurt Haitians who cross the Haitian-Dominican border in search of means of livelihood.

The well-known Chinese emblem yin and yang, studied through the relations between ‘rites and music’, is present in contemporary Chinese society as a fundamental hierarchical opposition. The rite rang ‘handing over for getting’ is explored through given modern performances, those of the rock Pekingese musicians in the 1990s. During the dancing parties, the rock groups ‘hand over’ their places forming a series of groups representing each other on stage, founding in that way a holist community. During the banquet of the rock concert that gather the communist power, represented by the official organisers of such an event, and the popular, represented by the rock musicians, the inviting official ‘hands over’ his central place to the star singer. This ritualistic gesture putting together two different parts of the society shows that the rock music and the power share the same values.

This interview with Professor Adam Kuper of Brunel University took place in London in July 2000. It is divided into three sections. In the first, Professor Kuper outlines the background to and summarises the main arguments of his most recent book, Culture. The Anthropologists’ Account (Kuper 1999b), relating these to the issues of postmodernism, biological determinism and the ‘intellectually impoverished heritage’ of social anthropology in Britain. He then moves on to discuss in turn the relationship between theory and ethnography, ethical issues in fieldwork and the nature of anthropology as a cross-cultural, comparative discipline. Finally, Kuper considers the role played by EASA in the development of a sense of ‘common project’ among European anthropologists, addressing in particular the history and place of British social anthropology within this enterprise, as well as the question of language.

To ‘provincialise’ Europe is to undertake the enormously difficult task – because of the intractable paradoxes involved and the blind alleys encountered at every turn – of demonstrating what from a certain perspective should be obvious enough: that Europe is not the centre of the world, but only a small group of nations occupying a small region of the world that has attracted attention to itself during the last few centuries – an instant in the wider scheme of things. It is to show that far from being the source of all legitimate signification, Europe and more broadly the west is simply one among many other such sources – past and, no doubt, future ones; and that therefore it cannot decide for all of us, once and for all, what it means to be. To provincialise Europe, in short, is to try and make room in the world for other ways of being.

La médiatisation de la guerre ethnique en ex-Yougoslavie et surtout les aléas de son dernier épisode déroulé au Kosovo sont devenus depuis longtemps monnaie courante en France comme dans les autres pays occidentaux qui ont participé à étouffer le conflit par les moyens de la force de frappe. Les raisons de cette médiatisation ont été multiples, politiques et politiciennes, suivant l’engagement des uns et des autres, mais aussi, je dirais, par déformation professionnelle, médiatique ou intellectualiste. Rares ont été malheureusement les tentatives de démystifier tant soit peu cette donne. Dans le cénacle de la société savante, parmi ceux et celles qui se sont préoccupés des guerres ethniques en ex-Yougoslavie, Véronique Nahoum-Grappe s’est proposée, du haut du séminaire sur la violence dirigé par Françoise Héritier au Collège de France, de réfléchir sur le fait social de la cruauté et son usage politique. Je me suis intéressé plus particulièrement à son article, car il me paraît tout à fait symptomatique d’un certain type d’approche qui est malheureusement assez répandue et que je qualifierai volontiers d’intellectualiste et d’ethnocentriste, ou mieux, d’intello-centriste.