George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (Eds.). 2001. Witchcraft dialogues. Anthropological and philosophical exchanges. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 344 pp. $26.00. ISBN 0 89680 220 5.

Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Eds.). 2003. Magic and modernity. Interfaces of revelation and concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 390 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0 8047 4464 5.

Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (Eds.). 2001. Magical interpretations, material realities. Modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, 253 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0415 258677.

Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologist's kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. Despite their divergent analytical foci and their distinct uses of interchangeable terms such as the occult, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment to describe local realities, all three propose approaches to the problem of magic that are both enlightening and rewarding for their attention to people's lived experience. All three also present collections of generally well-written and interpretively provocative essays that cover a wide range of issues from a wide range of cultural or historical spaces.

Entering the field. New perspectives on world football. Edited by Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti. Oxford: Berg. 1997. 319 pp. Hb.: £14.95. ISBN 1 85973 198 8.

Until a few years ago, dedicating an academic volume to the anthropology of football would have seemed a mere diversion, little more than an intellectual whim. In spite of their important social repercussions, sports in general and football in particular were considered minor, even irrelevant, objects of study. Condemned by the majority of intellectuals as an ‘opium of the people’ at the service of the authoritarian or democratic powers that be, academics ceded the sporting terrain to other more or less organic intellectuals, such as sports journalists and a few assorted essayists and writers (such as Eduardo Galeano [1995] and Manuel Vazquez Montalban [1995], who have published poetic accounts of football and its metaphors). Until recently, only one of the many aspects of the football scene, not surprisingly its most problematic and morbid, had captured the attention of social researchers: stadium violence associated with hooliganism. One might ask, then, echoing Marc Augé (1982: 59), if ‘the timidity of the human sciences with regard to important modern day rituals is not due to the fact that those who would observe and analyse such rituals are too close to them?’ However, as Fabio Dei (1992: 7) has pointed out, ‘the anthropological relevance of football is related to its strong affinity with a series of classic themes in the discipline: ritual, sacrifice, violence, symbolic communication, etc’. Why have anthropologists, specialists in distant peoples and exotic rituals, taken so long to visit tribes much closer to home, yet perhaps no less exotic? By considering the football tribes of Manchester United, Flamengo or Football Club Barcelona, anthropologists can observe modern forms of totemism and segmentarity.

In the west of Ireland, fosterage and adoption are correlated with illegitimacy. No one would be so cruel or foolish as to abandon one's own child unless there was a powerful reason for doing so. Conception out of wedlock is one such reason. This article attempts to carry out an analysis which is not theoretical but contextual or situational. It examines the ideology of kinship and family relationships and their associated social values in rural western Ireland. The aim is to bring meaning to the life and experiences of a particular individual, an illegitimate child fostered on a family farm in the west of Ireland, by means of an exploration of the ideology of blood and its social reverberations.

After the publication of my ethnography on the dual organisation of a German village, I returned to the field to present it to the people. Villagers invited the local press to write about the book presentation. When a review article appeared in a national newspaper, television and radio stations tried to establish contacts with the villagers as well as with myself. The paper will reflect upon the complexity of power and representation, and will identify the different discourses, which emerged from the interplay of several agencies: television, press and radio, as well as different fractions and voices from the village itself mobilised. Conflicting ideas of cultural authenticity, relational difference, confidentiality, and the tensions between representation in speech and in writing will be examined. The case study throws light on the facets of reading, understanding, misunderstanding and interpretation in the politics of ethnographic writing.

From the editor

This new section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale – one of the experiments with different genres and formats referred to in the editorial for this issue – is meant to report on recent initiatives within the global field(s) of social anthropology or on recent trends traceable in different anthropological traditions (the less well known in particular). Consisting of relatively short statements (approximately 2500 words), the format allows for reports on plans and efforts rather than achievements, reviews of the scholarly paradigms and events of the past decade rather than the books of last year, and opinions about the directions in which global events are, or should be, pushing social anthropologists. We are proud that the World Anthropologies Network is the first initiative to be presented within this new framework.

This paper discusses the author's fieldwork experiences in the 1980s and subsequently in the 1990s after the collapse of state socialism. The analysis compares young workers of Csepel, an industrial district of Budapest, to Hungarians of Transylvanian Romania. In seeking to understand the changes that have been taking place in these communities and their implications for anthropologists, the author explains why the self-reflective analyses of previous fieldwork achieved within state socialist societies are now lacking and often showed scholarly bias. As ideologically unattractive as this statement may appear, it has to be acknowledged. And moreover, since post-communist social forces bring in different types of power relations, a new departure for studying East and Central Europe is here advocated.

The issues raised in Brian Barry's new book are among the most important and the most difficult facing contemporary anthropology. They evince at once the global arena in which anthropological writings now appear, the correspondence between the technical language anthropology uses and the rhetoric of political engagement employed by anthropology's ‘subjects’ to further their ‘rights’, and, thereby, the inevitably political character of anthropology's own pronouncements. The issues centre on the ontological nature of culture.

There are three ways of construing the relationship between anthropology and science. First, we can speak of the anthropology of science. This includes anthropological studies of scientific institutions, forms of knowledge and ways of working. Second, we can speak of anthropology between science and society. In this field, anthropologists have been looking at the impacts of scientific knowledge and practices on social life, and how people have responded to them. Third, we can speak of anthropology as science. By this I do not mean to revive the old debate over whether anthropology is a science or an art. I intend rather to signal anthropology's potential contribution to the scientific understanding of human beings and their forms of life.

Specialists of shamanism have often focussed on the symbolic transformations of the world that a shaman may realize by using ritual language. In this perspective reflexivity appears as an external way to comment upon the nature and effectiveness of ritual action. This article tries to show that the ritual use of language can be equally used to define the nature of the ritual performer. This pragmatic definition of the enounciator constitutes a kind of reflexivity, defined as the problem of self-definition of the ritual agents, included within the domain of ritual action. In conclusion, an hypothesis on the perlocutionary effect of this kind of ritual use of language is formulated.

Originally designed by an emerging sociology upon the model of the social corps as defined by Ancien Régime society, the notion of community retains an anti-individualist flavour delivered in terms of a global ideological value. Yet, the nineteenth-century Russian slavophile movement provides an appropriate example to demonstrate how, through the construction of ‘collective actors’ endowed with consciousness and proper will, the ‘community’ as a principle constituted for holistic societies a powerful factor of modern acculturation.

The contemporary ‘communautarism’ is one of its distant avatars which, far from being opposed to individualism, intensifies it by reducing all collective forms of belonging to subjective claims and choices.

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.

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.

What is ‘social anthropology’ today? How should a journal with that title attempt to negotiate its global scope, its particular lines of descent, its kinship relations? Since Jean-Claude Galey's declaration of intentions in the first issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (Galey 1992), no comparable assessment of the future of the journal, and of the field at which it is directed, has appeared in its pages. In the previous issue, Eduardo Archetti reflected on the journal's past ten years. He provides much food for thought and insight, but – showing a modesty that is as characteristic of my predecessor as it is out of proportion with his actual editorial achievements – says little about where the journal could or should be headed. It seems appropriate, therefore, to formulate a more explicit statement of editorial intent on the occasion of the first issue to appear under my direction.

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 deals with the ways of life obtaining in the western half of the Central Highlands of western New Guinea at the eve of the colonial era. It analyses headmanship and the disposal of the fruits of intensive agriculture making use of the Great Men – Leader – Big Man typology conceptualised by Godelier and Lemonnier in their analyses of east New Guinea Highlands ways of life. While Ekagi-me, living near the Paniai lakes, conformed to a Big-Man type social formation, the way of life of the Grand Valley Dani did not fit the typology.

The essays in this issue of Social Anthropology examine how religious ideas and actions become the object of reflection among the people holding religious beliefs and participating in religious activities. Reflexivity has become a popular term within current cultural and social sciences, and the exploration of religious reflexivity may be seen simply to reflect a more general ‘reflexive turn’. In anthropology the ‘reflexive turn’ is related to the self-consciousness of intellectual operations in a double sense as far as it has been concerned with the nature of both scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge. On the one hand anthropology has gone through a period of self-scrutinisation of scientific modes of representation, claims to truth and ethical standards. While taking itself as an object, anthropology has at the same time also been informed by phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to the object of study, stressing self-knowledge, multivocality and the negotiation of meaning. It is probably no coincidence that the notions of agency, identity, personhood, experience, consciousness, etc. have gained priority in anthropological research carried out under the aegis of the reflexive turn. Conversely, the preference of reflexivity is due to more than paradigmatic constraints; it is commonplace to point out the inherently reflexive character of anthropology, even when it is carried out at home. As the minimal definition has it, anthropology is a means to see the other as self and the self as other.

Where the world ended. Re-unification and identity in the German borderland. By Daphne Berdahl. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999. xiii + 294 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 520 21477 3.

Disparate diasporas. Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community. By Edmund T. Gordon. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. xiv + 330 pp. Pb. ISBN 0 292 73857 9.

Inside the revolution. Everyday life in Socialist Cuba. By Mona Rosendahl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. x + 197 pp. Pb.: £11.95. ISBN 0 8014 8412 X.

Burden of dreams. History and identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. By Catherine Wanner. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1998. xxvii + 255 pp. Pb.: £15.50. ISBN 0 271 01793 7.

Four books, four ethnographies, four resolute answers to a question that anthropologists are subjected to so often: does the discipline's relevance go beyond the specificity of small-scale community study? Or, in other words, can anthropology transcend the social, geographical, methodological and epistemological limits seemingly imposed on it by its ethnographic focus? Can it contribute to analyses of wider political and ideological phenomena such as revolutions or the post-communist transition? These four monographs, based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, Germany, Nicaragua and Ukraine, are convincing in their univocal answer. The answer is yes.

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.

Must all knowledge and practice be conceived of as ‘cultural’? Does all difference ultimately reduce to cultural difference (and is this an essential form of difference in the constitution of humankind)? Do all notions of citizenship inevitably protect and promote particular cultures (and groups) over and above others? These are some of the questions that Máiréad Nic Craith's article stimulates us to address.

The co-existence field in Israel is a rather loose array of NGOs and government sponsored organisations. Its main trajectory since the 1980s was structured meetings between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel at intermediate and secondary school levels. It is, ostensibly, a mutual affair, enabling actors on both sides to experience each other first hand as a means to improve relations and reduce tension. A closer examination, however, reveals that key aspects of the field were in designed primarily for Israeli consumption. Palestinian participants and moderators thus tend to become objectified, mere illustrations in an all-Israeli debate which takes place, as it were, above the Palestinian's head.

The history of the field is briefly sketched, followed by an analysis of the theoretical, ideological and political assumptions of two of the main schools of thought within it. The role of Palestinians is then examined, using input from ethnographic interviews and content analysis of published material. This becomes the basis for an alternative historicisation of the field, re-framed within the political and social context of Israel since 1977.