This section, ‘Re-defining Europe: perspectives from socio-cultural anthropology’ is the outcome of the plenary panel of the same title, convened at the eighth conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Vienna, in September 2004. The essays' common frame of reference is given by the complex and contradictory processes of transformation and redefinition that Europe is currently going through. Juergen Habermas (2001) observed that the most recent phase in these processes, after years of post-communist priorities for explicit market economy values, may be characterised by a ‘return of the political’, which has shaped global processes in a number of unprecedented, complex and tragic forms since 11 September 2001. If Habermas's diagnosis is accepted with certain qualifications, these renewed political aspects also contribute in new ways to the manner in which Europeans redefine themselves, as much as they are being re-defined by others. In view of these heterogeneous forms of re-defining Europe on all levels, this may indeed be the right moment also to re-examine established and somewhat worn-out notions and concepts of identity itself (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). The contested processes of re-defining Europe are profoundly shaped by those new global contexts of the present Habermas was referring to. Opposing or supporting the American-led coalition presence in Iraq, promoting or criticising negotiations with potential new European Union member countries or choosing one or other position with regard to an EU constitution: all these important decisions, struggles and debates concern the future of Europe, the future of identities in Europe and the positioning of Europe in shifting global contexts.

The current globalization of the world is resulting on entire regions suffering sudden structural reconfigurations through the re-organization of economic activities of industrial towns and agrarian landscapes. Contemporary Western societies have seen industries and its associated values move away to cheaper locales, replaced by a services economy focused on providing leisure to these urban dominated societies. Postindustrial landscapes, characterized by economic decay, depopulation, and abandonment, followed by reinvestment, resettlement, and rejuvenation, are not unique to the last century. But what marks out the last thirty years of the twentieth century is the technological revolution in travel and communication, accompanied by the rise of modern environmentalisms.

This introduction and the essays that it prefaces are taking forward a growing debate on how to re-theorize the concept of social nature, by reflecting upon it under the specific light of postindustrial social formations. They look at how nature is imagined and pursued as an aesthetic, a moral compass, and as diverse locations inside and outside the cultural and material separations already made in the social construction of industrial space. The emergence of distinct postindustrial social imaginaries, where divisions like folk and rational thought are not only questioned but also newly remade, is of particular interest to this collection of essays.

The debate on the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is one of the newest facing anthropology. Yet its theoretical foundation is not new. It is implicit in both Kalahari revisionism and its opposite, the ecological approach that treats hunter-gatherers as exemplars of primal culture. It is also reminiscent of the earlier views of Wilhelm Schmidt, whose vision of the earliest culture circle was represented by living hunter-gatherers. That said, the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ is more complex than earlier models; and its opponents, such as Adam Kuper, must struggle against both philosophical premises (which are relatively easy to challenge) and practical arguments in favour of keeping the notion (which are more resilient). This paper focuses on the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate in Africanist anthropology, but its wider aspects include the interconnections of theoretical premises within diverse schools in the discipline and the general relation between anthropological theory and practical politics.

The dominant language ideology of contemporary Europe assumes standardized languages. In the political economic context of accelerated global migration and increased European unity, this ideology creates contradictions for speakers. The paper describes six types of contradiction that arise for non-elite speakers whose practices diverge from the ideals of standardization but who nevertheless find themselves judged by those ideals. Other contradictions arise for political elites. They come t believe that differences of standard language preclude a unified European public sphere, and fail to notice the intertextual processes and media circulations across standard languages that create politically significant publics.

During the 1997–2000 period, the Confédération Paysanne (CP), a union of French family farmers, played a central role in politicizing the French debate over GM crops. This paper is broader than an analysis of the CP's fight against industrial and post-industrial agriculture. It also explores the ways in which French family farmers, disenfranchised for decades from industrial agriculture, have become key figures in defining new notions of agricultural quality in both a national and international context.

While the first part of the paper traces the rise of ‘quality agriculture discourse’ (QAD) as a form of governmentality that normalizes perceived environmental and social issues associated with industrial agriculture, the second half analyzes the way in which the CP utilizes QAD in developing and legitimizing their broader social and agricultural vision and agenda, both within and beyond the context of the French debate over GM crops. As I will illustrate, while the CP establishes GM crops as the symbol of industrialized and ‘place-less’ agriculture, they establish ‘quality’ as the symbol of agricultural place-attachment. By studying the CP's anti-GMO campaign, we may better appreciate the ways in which disenfranchised groups of family farmers are appropriating techniques of governance to promote their own post-industrial agendas.

Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the ‘indigenous peoples’ notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept – ‘a useful tool for political persuasion’ – and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's ‘third solution’ along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the ‘indigenous peoples’ concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them.

In this paper I outline the institutional history of forestry and conservation in Mexico and describe changing understandings of fire and forest production. Industrial forestry has lost legitimacy with urban audiences, whilst conservation and biodiversity protection have gained increasing moral authority and financial clout. Conservationists in Oaxaca see forests as a location for biodiversity protection and ecotourism. Conservationists' representations of logging and agropastoral fires are widely supported by urban audiences, and may threaten the economic base of Mexico's community forestry movement. Paradoxically, these conceptions of nature suppress the ecological knowledge both of conservationists and rural people.

The past is not simply a present seen from the vantage point of its own futurity, but rather a social construct that only emerges referentially and selectively, inevitably formed and transformed by means of re-experience and interpretation. As Jan Assmann (1992) outlines, cultures of remembering represent the technologies by means of which we elaborate meaningful constructs from the experience of the past. Thus, while the past may structure the present to some extent, memory allows us to structure the past in relation to the present. This is not to say that we are free to mould history to our taste. To the contrary, the fact that we often cannot access the past again in any direct referential manner once it has been lived implies that it may gain an influence over us that escapes the normal mechanisms of remembering, objectification and forgetting. In this light, the slave trade is not only an empirical set of events from which we are shielded by the apparently unbridgeable distance of chronological time, but – in its untold horror and its traumatic impact – it is also a social reality that still reverberates on both sides of the Atlantic; an ineffable past–present, often elided from explicit discourse but insistently recurring in manifold non-discursive performative genres. European culture emphasises ‘memory work’ as an explicit means of coming to terms with traumatic pasts, allotting responsibility and expiating guilt as a means of achieving closure, while the American descendants of African slaves continue to revitalise inherited, remembered and reconstructed ritual practices and to elaborate a verbal discourse on the African origins of the Atlantic diaspora. But Africa itself remains doggedly silent on the issue of slavery.

The genealogy of postcolonial and subaltern studies is traced by focusing on the postmodern and postcolonial critique of democracy. The appropriation of Indian subaltern studies by Africans and Afro-Americans is then analyzed; and the effort, made to position contemporary African art in the context of an upsurge of multiculturalism at the international level. Attention is then turned to the debate about postcolonialism among persons associated with this trend. Two contradictory characteristics of postcolonialism and subalternism are exposed: the indigenous, nativistic withdrawal into one's self and the new routes opened toward universalism.

This article examines the ful[ecy ]ga dance performed by the palace kwifn society in the Cameroon Grassfields chiefdom of Oku. The argument is made that many aspects of the dance evoke the capture and detention of slaves and the forced labour of the colonial era, and that while political elites use the dance to project the political violence of the palace onto exogenous forces, the young cadets re-appropriate it to draw connections between the past and present political role of the palatine elite. Highlighting the psychological effects of dissociation and belatedness in the light of the traumatic effects of the salve trade, the article proposes that the fragmentation of chronological time and linear history associated with trauma may not only represent pathological symptoms, but also a means of bearing witness to political violence and domination – be they historical or contemporary.

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.

The reconfiguration of Europe following the end of the Cold War has gone through various phases, some of them closely connected to the emergence of the so-called new right in Western Europe's political landscape. Here I propose the concept of ‘neo-nationalism’ as an anthropological approach to comparative analyses of these phenomena, which may be understood as a new variant of nationalism in post-colonial and post–Cold War contexts of globalised re-adjustment. Ethnographic examples indicate that fear of downward social mobility and the ‘angry white men’ syndrome represent common core elements on a social level. By charismatic appeals and performances, neo-nationalist leaders pursue mass mobilisation against enemies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Although neo-nationalism may appear to be stagnant today, the current atmosphere of crisis in the EU could provide opportunities for a next phase of neo-nationalist re-orientation and competitive engagement.

As convenors of the Younger Scholars' Forum for the 2004 EASA Conference in Vienna, we were charged with devising an international panel that would address the general theme ‘Face-to-face. Connecting distance and proximity’. Our panel, originally entitled ‘When communication ends …’, was thus a provocation to think ethnographically about the relationships through which anthropologists habitually conduct fieldwork. In particular we wanted to provoke discussion on what we termed ‘the discomfort of proximity’ and to think further about fieldwork circumstances in which anthropologists might actually seek to establish ‘distance’ rather than ‘proximity’ while in the field. Anthropologists tend to assume that the quality of their ethnographic evidence depends on the quality of interaction and communication with their interlocutors. This after all is why we continue to fight for the chance to carry out long-term fieldwork and insist on the necessity of proficiency in local languages. There is furthermore a common disciplinary assumption that close and intense relationships enable a sense of identification (albeit partial and vicarious) with those with whom we carry out the research. Our ethnographic understandings thus depend on finding ways of overcoming distance as we strive to transform the mutual ‘strangeness’ of the early stages of fieldwork into a more cosy proximity through which some degree of mutual understanding might be achieved. After all, the quality of our ethnographic knowledge is fundamentally based on the relationships between the researcher and those individuals she or he is living with.

The transatlantic slave trade did not simply produce a history of dislocation and disruption in Africa. In the Cross River region, trade simultaneously inspired cultural innovation and transregional exchange. This contributed to the creation and dissemination of numerous associations and cult agencies. Not only did freemen own such institutions but also their slaves who had taken the knowledge of them along from their Grassfields homes. This paper explores the dissemination histories of some of these institutions as well as the relationship and mutual fears of both the slaves and their masters. While associations and cult agencies of the latter continue to be prominent in the Cross River region, the slaves institutions have largely disappeared.

In recent years the consumption of shade grown coffee has expanded rapidly in North America, becoming an established sector of the growing green products market. The certified shade grown coffee market is influenced by North American fantasies of pure, untouched nature and romantic portrayals of small coffee farmers as natural conservationists, eager to protect birds, biodiversity, and natural resources. These Northern constructions of habitat and eco friendly agricultural production directly influence the regulations constituting the shade grown certification system. Consequently, farmers seeking shade grown certification and access to the sustainable coffee market confront a rigid certification system whose requirements may appear irrational and excessive within a local agricultural system.

The Grassfields of Western Cameroon have provided the coastal areas of the Bight of Benin with a constant flow of slaves and subsequently of migrant labour from the end of the 18th century onwards. The hierarchic organisation of the Grassfields kingdoms, the intensification of agricultural and craft labour, the slave trade and political violence combined with an ideology of benevolent protection by kings and notables to engross cadets and women with a working ethos that was carried by slaves all the way to the coastal societies where it has created an enduring stereotype to the present day.

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.

Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2003. National performances: The politics of class, race and space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xvi + 289 pp. Pb.: $21.00. ISBN: 0 226 70359 2.

Dávila, Arlene. 2004. Barrio dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the neoliberal city. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. xi + 260 pp. Pb.: $19.95. ISBN: 0 520 24093 6.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The transformation of social capital in a Boston barrio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 246 pp. Pb.: $21.00. ISBN: 0 226 76292 0.

The three works discussed here all focus on transnational, reterritorialised Puerto Rican communities in the United States by studying the urban neighbourhoods or barrios they live in, using different methods and highlighting different themes in their approaches to the topic. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas' work studies the dynamics of nationalism and transnationalism in Chicago's Puerto Rican barrio; Arlene Dávila studies processes of gentrification and neoliberal policies in Spanish Harlem, the main New York barrio; and Mario Luis Small uses the case of Villa Victoria, a barrio in Boston, to illustrate the workings of social capital in poor neighbourhoods. All three studies place a strong emphasis on spatial factors, paying special attention to intersections of class, ethnicity or ‘race’, and space in the cities studied. In this, mirroring the cultural turn in geography, these studies indicate a ‘spatial turn’ in anthropology (Low 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). Especially when researching transnational communities, such efforts to ‘locate culture’, with emphases on the shifting role of space and place, are indispensable. However, many earlier urban anthropological and sociological studies have tended to neglect these aspects of the city, while early Chicago School theories displayed a tendency towards ecological determinism.

The Cuban male esoteric sodality abakuá has long been interpreted as a transatlantically displaced version of the type of secret society known as ekpe or ngbe in the Cross-River region of south-eastern Nigeria and south-western Cameroon. While not disputing such attributions of African origins, this essay seeks to trace the contours of an alternative history of abakuá. My aim is to confront “objectivist” accounts of the diffusionary history of ekpe and abakuá with the ways in which contemporary members of Cuban abakuá ritually produce relations to an African past which they create by performing it into being in the New World present.