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.

The article is a contribution to an ethnology of communication and an attempt to combine ordinary and formal acts of language so as to recapture the ethos or art of living by which Merina peasants form their harmonious ideal of mutual understanding, enticing humans to self control and to refrain from expressing pronounced disagreements. Central to them is the idea that any activity (of speech or action), any relation to the external world is loaded with danger.

Society here shares the conviction that the inherent insufficiencies of humankind condemn it to commit mistakes, thus inciting it to prudence. An examination of blames and prohibitions and an analysis of the various recourses to divination and to astrology complete the study of agrarian and ritual calendars. One discovers here a whole phenomenology of previson and prevention mobilised to alleviate unfavourable consequences and to withdraw from chance a destiny rendered more previsible.

In the venture, the author mobilises a whole recession of ethnographies borrowed from published sources and direct observation, joining to them essays on the language of maxims and proverbs – ohabolana – displayed as poetry during contests and challenges – hain teny – (Paulhan), contrasting daily, or ordinary, modes of expression to oratory speeches mobilising the authority of a whole social hierarchy as in the marriage kabari. The use of a sacred language along with the presence of multiple layers of reality shows that, contrary to what the modern universe of values experiences, social – socio-emotional – issues have precedence over operational finalities: a philosophy of the golden mean through which the Merina demonstrate how their common sensical forms of knowledge and anxiety derive from daily pragmatics themselves being constituted by social relationships.

In October 1992 two transmigrants were murdered, and their heads removed, by Nuaulu from south Seram, eastern Indonesia. Until these events, head-taking had been assumed to be part of Nuaulu history. Media coverage and the court case which followed confirmed the prejudices of non-Nuaulu in the Moluccas about Nuaulu practices, and forced anthropological observers of Nuaulu life to re-assess their interpretation of the role which the idea of taking heads might play in contemporary belief. In this paper, direct knowledge of these events is used to examine the relationship between what we know about historical Nuaulu practices of head taking, current beliefs, and the circumstances of the 1992 homicides. It is suggested that analyses which see these events as a culturally eroded but otherwise unmodified version of what went before are fundamentally mistaken. It is concluded that the so-called ‘traditional’ features of contemporary homicides must be set against some ‘imagined past’ rather than what is necessarily historically authentic.

It is argued that multiple discourses and discursive practices pertaining to similar topics co-exist within any one society and that these may be constituted through symmetrical or asymmetrical relations. Drawing upon some ideas by Alfred Gell about the nature of relations, I use the concept of androgyny. By this is meant that certain persons (but not all) and certain items (but not all) contain within them the potentiality for emerging in certain contexts as gendered in a male or female mode. Gender is then not only relational, but also processual. These selected persons and things can do so only by virtue of their position in the relational system of the Lio which, in turn, is cosmologically constituted.

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.

Belief may refer not only to the content (knowledge, ideas), but also to the believer's attitude (i.e. belief in the dispositional sense – the believer's state of mind). Belief is not necessarily a matter of absolute conviction. It may well call up issues of religious reflexivity. There are degrees of commitment, shifts and changes of attitude. An unsuccessful attempt in a Sepik village to heal a man with joint pains provides here the main example to show how the participants' views about the healing ritual may vary and change. Among the factors identified are differences between public statement and private opinion; the effects of hope and suggestion; variations in attention and state of mind; change with perspective and time; whether to take things as meant literally or metaphorically.

Medical treatment almost anywhere may become a sharp source of doubt and question. Belief in healing has a long history of conviction, the wish to believe, and error. The search to avoid bias and subjective judgement led in biomedicine to the elaboration of a method for evaluating the efficacy of treatment – the randomised controlled clinical trial – which has gained wide acceptance. Despite differences of scope and attitude, some similar issues of authority and persuasion, experience and evidence are involved in the reflexive questioning of both religion and science.

In this article I explore the imaginative and practical links that the Gitanos of Jarana, in Madrid, make with other Gitanos and Gypsies elsewhere. What kind of diaspora do they see themselves as belonging to? The context to my investigation is the fast growth of both Gypsy Pentecostalism and Roma international political activism – two movements that, in very different ways, call for the unity of all Gypsies/Roma worldwide. Their efforts contrast greatly with the world-views and attitudes of many of the people of Jarana who reject social harmony and cohesion as paths to community-making.

The article explores the analytical implications of dissolving the self/other dichotomy that historically has shaped anthropology's relation to its objects of study. It suggests that in order to study these implications we must explore the ethnographic field as an arena for intersubjective interaction in which the ethnographer and his or her informants struggle to impose social roles and cultural categories on the other. The article which draws on field data from the Peruvian Andes argues that an inquiry into the native registration, catalogisation, and indexation of the ethnographer allows for an examination not only of how the people under study classify non-natives but also how they conceptualise themselves. It also proposes that anthropological insight is produced in the shifting positions as insider/outsider and the blurred boundaries between what is defined as included/excluded.

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.

As of the 1960s, anthropologists from different national traditions have tended to agree upon an interpretation of Marcel Mauss' The Gift. The essay, it is believed, amounts to a theory of exchange whose primary feature is the identification of the gift with the spirit of the donor. This approach, emphasising ‘exchange’ and its ‘spiritual aspects’, is significantly different from the interpretation offered by Mauss' contemporaries, who stressed its references to law, to obligations and to total prestations. Tracing references to The Gift in the work of anthropologists and placing them within a precise chronological order, the paper identifies the moment in which a particular spin has been produced and analyses the social conditions that contributed to the establishment of a doxa in the field. By showing how a particular representation of Mauss' essay became taken for granted, this case-study offers methodological tools to be used in the appraisal of other episodes in the history of social anthropology.

The article reports on observations made at meetings in New York of support groups for gays and lesbians who identify as sexually compulsive. It examines the participants' – mostly males – narratives and its language, the social relationships they develop at meetings, and the impact of that experience on their lives. The article's major premise is that these meetings do not initiate a curing forum to reform an ‘addiction’. Instead, they evolve a compassionate community that engages its participants in a performative discourse on sexual behaviour and gay life style. My purpose is to extend the field of ethnographic research into unvisited domains of experience and association in contemporary urban life.

This paper explores an overlooked dimension of religious transformation in so-called 'traditional' African religious practice - embodied scepticism. Manjaco youths mimic local religious traditions in playful ways. And they are quick to criticise the ritual practices and underlying beliefs of their elders. These sceptical youths have been at the vanguard of revolutionising village-level religious practice - pushing the community at large to modify or outlaw certain religious customs and to do away with certain village spirit shrines. Such youthful scepticism has often been explained in the literature as a symptom of 'modernisation' - as youth become more cosmopolitan, as they are exposed, as it were, to alternate ways of explaining the world, they lose faith in old ways and beliefs. I criticise this model by looking at the sometimes paradoxical ways that embodied ritual practice supports or undermines local religious beliefs.

Drawing upon extensive urban anthropological fieldwork with football hooligan formations in England and Scotland, it is argued that academics have failed to examine adequately the spatial dimension underlying hooligan conflicts. The spatially affective aspects of football fandom in general are identified; via Fiske's dichotomy of locales and stations, the contestation of space inside football grounds between fans, police and club directors is highlighted. From this milieu emerge the football hooligan gatherings, which are conceived as ‘resource networks’ utilising time, identity and information (Wallman), rather than as produced by processes or ‘ordered segmentation’ (Dunning). Subsequently, the paper turns to explore the historical trajectory of football hooliganism qua spatial contest between rival fans and police. The intensification of police control strategies has helped to engender a broadening of social spaces; contexts and techniques by which hooligans may ‘legitimately’ pursue confrontations. The process is complicated further in important ‘two team’ cities, wherein many popular social spaces retain an ambiguous status for local rivals acting in ostensibly non-football contexts. The concluding discussion critically assesses the effects and cultural meanings of increased police surveillance over football fans, noting the response of some hooligans in seeking to ‘arrange’ confrontations with rivals at extremely peripheral, non-football locations.

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.

Loma religion, involving masquerade and secret cult activities, has remained largely intact in spite of continuous suppression of local religious practices in the Republic of Guinea during the decades following independence. The article aims at explaining the apparent immunity to iconoclastic practices through the analysis of a ritual of sacrifice which illustrates how the Loma conceive of religious objects as artefacts and living kinds. The study elucidates a mode of reflexivity, labelled inner iconoclasm, which refers to people's ability to reflect upon their own religious beliefs as these are generated and unfold in the course of ritual action. It is argued that various aspects of reflexivity intrinsic to ritual action are main factors explaining the apparent immunity of Loma religion to iconoclastic practices. A second belief-generating mode of reflexivity is the objectification of religion resulting from the exposure of ritual secrets and the current politicisation of ritual practice and cult organisations.

This paper discusses conventional illusory enactments, largely recognised as such by those who undertake them, drawn from two Central African male initiation rites: the novices' dramatic execution on the one hand, and the purportedly painless sacrifice of the ritual's emblematic animal on the other. In doing so, it attempts to elucidate two related forms of religious reflexivity: ritual ‘dissimulation’, centred around the manipulation of persons, and ritual ‘simulation’ founded upon the manipulation of non-persons (animals, objects, spells, images, and so forth). The actors' commitment to such performances as necessary and appropriate ones is related in the first case to the interdependent relationship that is set up between the perceptions different categories of participants have of the event they are jointly involved in, and in the second case, to the way the mediating qualities of non-persons serve to embed the participants' actions within auto-referential circuits in which relations of causality and representation converge.

In this paper, the call for a reconsideration of ‘ethnographic holism’ in anthropology is critically assessed by drawing on the author's research in the field of gender and religion. Using illustrations from a study on women's religiosity in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium, it is shown that an ethnographic holistic perspective was necessary in order to challenge a view of ‘religion’ as a sui generis, de-contextualised, and therefore un-gendered phenomenon. At the level of description and analysis a holistic approach is supported that moves beyond traditional classificatory schemes and crosses boundaries between categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. It is argued that a version that applies an essentialist notion of ‘culture’ as a bounded and reified ‘whole’ in both theoretical and certain politically dangerous appropriations must nonetheless be avoided.

This paper examines how Malinowski used his fieldnotes to write ‘Baloma’. Twelve of Malinowski's field notebooks, written during his first stay in the Trobriand islands are reviewed. It explores the relationship between Malinowski's fieldnotes and the structure and contents of the ethnographic text. Other issues discussed in this paper include: the use of data for making the text, the self description of the ethnographer's research path, and the influence of theoretical inputs in the way of reporting. It is argued that Malinowski increased the validity of his ethnography by including in the text the following three elements: fieldwork data, information about the research process, and theoretical assumptions. Thus, he inaugurated a new way of writing up ethnography. With ‘Baloma’, ethnography took the form of a continuous constructive process, involving the tasks of doing fieldwork and writing – two related phases of the ethnographic process. Thanks to his experience in the Trobriands, Malinowski came to revolutionise ethnography, not only as a fieldwork process, but also as a written product.