The article discusses the dispersion of candomblé imagery, practices and aesthetics in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia. It shows that the spirit possession cult has become a trademark for the Bahian state and a major ‘symbol bank’ for groups as varied as the Bahian gay movement, environmental pressure groups and black activists. As candomblé enters ever new circuits of Bahia's representational economy, and finds itself dressed in ever new ideological garments, the classic anthropological construction of candomblé as a ‘religion’ and an ‘African universe in Brazil’ no longer manages to capture the wild variety of Gestalten in which candomblé makes its public appearance. The case of candomblé therefore challenges the boundedness of our anthropological categories of thought.

This article presents a contextualised, interpretative analysis of the debate about the word neger that took place in the Norwegian mass media during the winter of 2000–01. The aim is to contribute ethnographic material and analytical perspectives to the comparative analysis of the current reinforcement of ethnic national boundaries as a reaction to extra-European immigrants to Europe and the accompanying normalisation of racial discourses. On the one hand, Norwegian mainstream reaction draws on the same sort of racial ideas and boundary-constructing practices found in other European countries. On the other, the contributors to the debate drew on a complex set of discourses and exhibited particular points of emphasis. For many majority Norwegians a specific collective memory and a corresponding national self-image are currently at stake. In this self-image Norway is always outside imperialism and colonialism, and innocent in relation to the colonial legacy. The analytical argument of the paper is that when people construct racial boundaries, they draw on a mixture of discourses, rooted in different social realms, with different histories and degrees of legitimacy. The self-evidence of racial categories derives from the legitimacy of well established historical themes, concepts and lines of conflict. As the debate about the word neger unfolded over time, majority hegemony was challenged, rearticulated and reconfirmed.

Thinking about the future, we are obliged to rethink conventional accounts of our history. Alternative histories challenge received ideas about the development of British social anthropology. Some have put in question the precise nature of the Malinowskian revolution. Others reopen debates about the relationship between anthropology and colonialism (or, more broadly, about the relevance of social anthropology to policy questions). And the oral tradition insistently reminds us that private histories may undermine what we think we know about the great figures of the past. As we consider the prospects for European social anthropology, other questions impose themselves. One has to do with the institutional rivalries between social anthropology and sociology, and between social anthropology conceived of as a social science and the cultural anthropology dominant in the United States.

With the expansion of anthropology to new objects, the definition of its boundaries has become so fuzzy as to warrant questions about its unity. Method rather than content offers possible common ground to various breeds of anthropologist, provided that it is taken to mean what they really do rather than what they say they do. In discussing three operations that enter into their common practice (description, comprehension and explanation), it is argued that anthropology amounts less to a specific method answering to strict epistemological requirements than to a certain style of knowledge building on the universal workings of intersubjectivity.

A social anthropologist venturing into an interdisciplinary field at the University of Cambridge describes some of the hazards of equipping herself with ethnographic skills. The ethnographic object is the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park, a government-funded enterprise intended to create ‘knowledge [about human genetics]…validated through the critical appraisal of research findings, ethical, legal and social analysis and the inclusion of a consumer perspective’. It is deeply concerned with law, norms and society. The author will attempt to explain the indirection of her approach to studying this phenomenon – through an activity (a seminar series) organised off-site, focused on means (interdisciplinarity) not ends, and raising an apparently extraneous topic (forms of ownership) for discussion.