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 paper explores some of the ongoing debates about culture and the concept of culture as it is used and deployed in the Norwegian public sphere, what we would call ‘norsk offentlighet’. More specifically, I am interested in the part played by anthropology and anthropologists in influencing the meanings and usages of such a key indigenous concept as culture. My interest was particularily spurred by the general debates on culture and immigrants which dominated the media in the mid-nineties, and in which anthropologists were actively engaged.

This paper considers the connections between religion, ritual and politics in the works of Clifford Geertz and Maurice Bloch and confronts their approaches with some examples of ritual from Nepal. lt is suggested that both writers have great strengths, often not those conventionally ascribed to them, but both attempts to put forward a theory of ritual are undermined by the assumption that ritual is just one kind of thing in all the contexts in which it appears. The Nepalese examples are set out in line with a schematic typology, which, it is suggested, provides a possible basis for a historically grounded and generalising approach to the anthropological study of ritual.

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.

In the context of events on and after 11 September 2001, this paper examines the genre of macro-scenarios, one-big-thing stories, which entered public debate in the post-Cold War period: ‘the clash of civilisations’, ‘the end of history’, ‘the coming anarchy’ etc. It is argued that anthropologists, as they engage with a wider public, should attend to such macro-scenarios, offering ethnographically based critiques of their oversimplifications, but without resorting only to ethnographic qualifications, exceptions and miniatures. Comparative perspectives toward emergent regularities in social life may still allow macro-anthropological contributions to public debates over possible, desirable or undesirable futures.

At the dawn of the twenty first century, nature, in the valley of Lillet, is represented by luxuriant forests, the return of charismatic animal species and dramatic landscapes. The valley of Lillet is located in the Catalan Pyrenees in Northeast Spain. Its complex recent history has left deep tracks on its landscape. The wilderness that currently characterizes this area is a direct result of this history. In the last two centuries this valley sequentially experienced a transition from traditional agricultural life to a modernized and hyper-industrialized mode of production. Once covered by farms and agricultural terraces, the valley became an industrial center. After the seventies and the global oil crises, mines closed and factories fled the valley, and with them most of its population. Subsequently, the landscape was ready for the postmodern takeover: protected areas and ski resorts occupied the ranges. Thus, the deindustrialization of the valley did not bring the farms back. The postindustrial landscape that emerged from the transformation is not just the product of this double transition, but the result of a simultaneous cohabitation of elements from each “period”. In postindustrial and mostly urban Catalonia, wilderness and eco-leisure have become an extremely desirable commodity. Depopulated rural Catalonia provides an ideal setting for a new wave of urban re-appropriation of the landscape.

Two categories of reference constitute the social organisation of Albanese society. The notion of fisi (‘lineage’) represents the first, which is typifying, segmentary and holistic, while the second, classifying, linear and individualising is represented in the notion of lisi i gjakut (‘tree of blood’). These categories do not oppose each other as both pertain to a common logic of patrilineal filiation. Unlike the segmentary regime, the linear one does not allow to account for the previous generations. Thus, when a large number of collateral parents acknowledge themselves as being part of a common ‘tree of blood’, they still have to qualify this through a second symbolic and hereditary marker which, from a vertical axis, will complete the lack of memory and/or of ramification. A fixation of the patronymic name in the broad sense - the transmissible family name - becomes then necessary. This ordered complementarity between the segmentary and the linear reveals itself as a sociological operator the hierarchical nature of which allows the transactional opening in strategic relations oriented towards the other.

This essay argues that the Hindu notion of auspiciousness, adherence to propitious timings, inauguration ceremonies and other practices that are conducive for success in future dealings has become pivotal for the definitions of Hindu middle-classness in India. First the concept of auspiciousness and the debate that ranged in relation to it in the 1980s and early 1990s is reviewed. Then, some ethnographic sketches of housing among Hyderabadi new middle-class Hindus are presented. In social practice centred around auspiciousness, Hindus who identify themselves as middle class find a way of creating social value and respectfulness which does not derive directly from the hegemonic notions of hierarchy, purity and caste. While not rejecting the principles of hierarchical social relations, new middle-class Hindus remodel notions of social honour from within by stressing auspiciousness instead of purity.

The Australian kinship system type has been a topic of much discussion and of considerable misinterpretation among scholars. It has been characterised as not distinguishing siblings from cross-cousins and as allowing marriage between classificatory siblings. Based on Elkin's work and on data gathered in a desert community and in Alice Springs, the aim of this paper is to propose a coherent interpretation of the Aluridja system, in which terminology has to be distinguished in accordance with the context of reference.

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.

The concept of ‘ethnographic present’ as discussed in methodological texts in our discipline has been very badly served. In fact, the concept could be methodologically very useful. Instead of continuing to be frightened by the ‘functionalist’ bogeyman, we should usefully apply the phrase ‘ethnographic present’ to speak of the awareness of the conjunctural nature of all ethnography.

Following a reflection triggered by a fieldwork episode, this paper discusses issues of faith, belief, and personal conviction within anthropological fieldwork and specifically within research carried out in contexts of belief and religious practice. Incorporating fieldwork and biographical accounts taken from research within the (Gypsy) Filadelfia Evangelical Church, I discuss the involvement of personal beliefs and attitudes in anthropological theory and practice, its consequences on the production and circulation of anthropological and interpersonal knowledge, and its importance for the construction of personal relationships within fieldwork contexts. I outline the dynamic and somewhat paradoxical character of this process by comparing two different but sequential field contexts – Lisbon and Madrid.

What is the future of the disciplinary label ‘social anthropology’? The localised intellectual universes within which we carry out our early training as anthropologists are constantly penetrated and challenged by universal trends. At the same time, due to their relative independence, these local intellectual universes play an important role as spaces where intellectual reproduction can carry on in relative independence from the global hegemonic voices. In this paper I argue for a more complex approach to the concept of ‘alterity’, claiming that the constant discourse of self-accusation concerning anthropology's past and its essential ‘westernness’ hides the complexity of the interactions that went into the construction of the anthropological cannon which we are today reproducing globally. Today's anthropology has become increasingly symmetrical.

In South Canara, landowners claiming chiefly descent stage the nema, once the central occasion on which chiefs displayed and renewed their power. Through semantic analysis of the nema's syntax the authors show how the meaning of ritual statements are rooted in the context of action, in an age where chiefdoms no longer exist. Analysing specific cases, the authors show how the staging of a nema is a risky venture, claiming or defending positions of a highly political nature. The nema acts to construct important actors who structure the imagined community of Tulunadu, claimed as the homeland of the Tulu-speaking population. The bhutas to which the ritual is dedicated, both legitimise and contest the hierarchy and symbolise the moral values of the community. At the same time, each performance encodes new elements into a continuous production of meaning, rooted in myth, informed by events, and linked into complex traditions and systems of knowledge.

In Tonga, transgender men and heterosexually-defined men form sexual and romantic relationships. However, these relationships are unthinkable to mainstream society because they are incommensurable with the three dyadic principles that define gender, particularly the covenant between sisters and brothers. Transgender persons seek different solutions to this dilemma, which include the exploitation of the symbolic and material resources that the outside world offers, although all solutions run the risk of aggravating their abjection. Abjection is thus the product of multiple dynamics of boundary formation, including gender, kinship, and marriage, as well as the delimitation between locality and the outside world.

This paper discusses the notion of debt in Pesillo, a Quichua community in Northern Ecuador. Using data from the Andes, a region underrepresented in the anthropological literature on exchange, and focusing on practices and relations of debt, that is, a topic little analysed in both economic anthropology and Andean ethnography, this paper demonstrates that debt is a category permeated with spiritual, moral and legal meaning. Following the arguments of Malamoud (1988) and comparing Andean material with ethnographic findings from Asia, this paper argues that debt is an important expression of a wider system of exchange that shows the proactive, performative behaviour of the people involved in it, and that it provides a privileged entrance to the understanding of the links between economy, exchange and culture.

Assessing anthropology's relation to the powers external to it requires not merely a history of anthropological ideas, but also an appraisal of the changing political economic arenas within which the discipline developed. That field was structured by capitalist development and the formation of nation-states and their rivalries in imperialism and colonialism, as well as by the rise of new educational regimes, institutions and disciplines. Anthropology was shaped not only by the growth of professional clusters within it, but also by the often contradictory demands generated by the interplay of elements in the field of forces that surrounded it.

In anthropology, the debate on time traditionally opposes the universalists to the relativists. This article attempts to escape the opposition, claiming that while anthropology cannot demonstrate the existence of a universal individual notion of time, it can unveil a number of general characteristics of ‘social time’ which transcends the relativity of its representations. Using a Papua New-Guinean case study, a minimal definition of ‘social time’ is then provided, along with the hypothesis that every society requires at least two different and hierarchically ordered conceptions of time. This co-existence of diverse times questions in turn the category of history as an analytical tool in anthropology.

How can biological and social anthropologists today relate to each other's work? Using my research in biological anthropology as an example, I show that the African great apes sometimes engage in meaning-making as they act together. That is, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos communicate, especially through gesture, in contingent and creative ways, going beyond a mere exchange of signals to achieve co-construction of meaning. I argue that when biological anthropologists join social anthropologists in studying meaning-making, the two disciplines are inherently in relation.

In countries where orality is by far the principal mean of communication, poetry has a key role in shaping people's imagery and conception of their role in society. Many studies on Somali's orature have focused on religious poetry as a political arena, as well as on poetry itself as a representation of historical and political cultural concerns. In this article I assume that the Muslim religious arena in Somalia also provides cognitive maps of power and gender relations in society and that the production/reproduction of religious poetry constitutes a way continuously to negotiate the image inherent in such maps. The production and reproduction of religious poetry in the Somali's country is intertwined with the bodily rhythmical movements and ecstatic experiences people undergo when participating in dikri celebrations; such bodily experiences cannot be disentangled from the poetry itself. In the article I analyse Sufistic experiences as they are one of the relevant context of the production/reproduction of religious poetry in Somalia. In particular, I focus on women's Sufistic experiences in rural contexts which are usually neglected in the study of Somali religious spheres, and poetry.