This article aims to examine our positioning process as ethnographers in the field. Drawing on my fieldwork in Israel among non-Jewish undocumented migrants who initially were extremely reluctant to cooperate with my research, I highlight the power of informants to largely dictate the conditions for an engagement with an anthropologist, and define the parameters of proximity. This power of informants, or more generally of the ‘field’, brings to the fore the existing tension between our strategic design of methods and their tactical implementation during fieldwork. By applying Bourdieu's conceptualisation of a ‘field’, I seek to emphasize both the relational configuration and habitus of actors, as generative elements that shape our interactions and position in the field. I particularly focus on our ingrained dispositions that can sometimes significantly direct our tactical management of crucial situations in the field, and shape our sense of ethics. Echoing Marcus (1995) and following Bourdieu's insights, I finally suggest that we should try to exercise self-reflexivity as an element of method before and throughout our fieldwork, rather than use it retrospectively to account for our distinctive involvement and the ways it might have impacted our informants and collected data.

Drawing on fieldwork among ‘racist’ white youths in Southeast London, this paper considers the ethical dilemma which arises for the ethnographer when the increasing proximity that developing empathy with her informants implies, is jeopardised because the disposition she is expected to adopt is at odds with what she feels it is right for a person to become. Is her only option to distance herself from what belonging amongst her informants entails? Or could such a crisis help her to understand that resistance and conflict are intrinsic aspects of the learning processes through which any person is continuously making sense of their own social position vis-à-vis others?

When I had the honour of acting as the discussant at the panel that was at the origin of this collection of essays (at the African Studies Association in Boston, 2004), I was already impressed by the quite surprising ways in which these four texts about different areas were connected. It is, of course, a beautiful quartet, each article making crucial points in its own right. But the special merit of this issue is that the texts complement each other in such seminal ways that, together, they evoke a challenging vista of hidden but none the less global currents in the dark world of the slave trade, tightly connecting the two sides of the Atlantic. In their interconnectedness the texts show that it is possible to follow secret cults and associations from the areas where people were captured to be sold as slaves, through the homelands of their captors, all the way to the other side of the Atlantic. They also show that the ambiguities of these cults and associations offer an optimal vantage point for understanding all the complexities of the slave trade configuration – especially if one wants to try and go beyond the history as passed on by the discourse of those in power (that is, the captors). Apparently the power of the secret and the ways in which it was passed on can offer quite surprising glimpses of the view-from-below, from among those who appeared to have been forced out of history.

This monumental biography is a labour of love by a distinguished anthropologist who is thoroughly at home in the regions where Malinowski carried out his most famous fieldwork. Yet more than 300 pages pass before the subject first sets foot in Melanesia. Part I of this volume deals with the formative years in Poland, where Malinowski was born in 1884, the son of a Cracow University professor who died when ‘Bronio’ was only 14. Young has a penchant for Freudian diagnoses and attaches considerable significance to this early loss; Bronio repressed his father and was mollycoddled by his mother right up to his fieldwork career (her main worry seems to have been his early baldness). The intellectual significance of his Polish background has already been widely appreciated in recent decades. Rather like Franz Boas a little earlier, Malinowski was torn between an austere natural-science method, represented in his case primarily by the ‘economism’ of Ernst Mach, and expansive literary, humanistic sympathies which he cultivated at the resort of Zakopane in the company of the ‘diabolical’ (and increasingly paranoid) Staś Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and other Bohemian decadents. The basic tensions are worked out, sometimes in lurid psycho-sexual detail, in the episodic diaries, on which Young relies heavily in this volume. The first derives from the year Malinowski spent with his mother in the Canaries, ostensibly as a health cure following the completion of his thesis on Mach. Bronio was already cultivating the obsessive preoccupation with himself and the need for self-discipline and ‘purity’ which recur in the famous diaries he kept in the Trobriand Islands. He could seldom conform for long to ‘the monogamous urge’, falling hopelessly in love with attractive Polish women who already had husbands. He also maintained a long liaison with a generous South African woman some ten years his senior (like others later, she could not always satisfy his craving for ‘subjective depth’ in correspondence).

Guyer, Jane I. 2004. Marginal gains. Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xviii + 207 pp. Pb.: £10.50/$15.00. ISBN: 0226311163.

Heusch, Luc de. 2002. Du pouvoir. Anthropologie politique des sociétés d'Afrique centrale. Nanterre: Société d'ethnologie. 240 pp. Pb.: €37.50. ISBN: 2901161677.

Depuis une vingtaine d'années sous les effets d'influences multiples et les plus diverses s'est développé, selon les pays d'appartenance, les traditions théoriques, les domaines thématiques ou les aires culturelles, une série de réflexions approfondies sur l'évolution et le devenir de l'anthropologie (Herzfeld 1997; Genest et Copans 2000). Il n'est pas exagéré de dire que la création de l'Association européenne des anthropologues sociaux qui publie cette revue est l'un des signes distinctifs de cette dynamique. L'Europe a beau rester un ‘objet anthropologique non-identifié’ la formation d'un forum nouveau ne peut que conduire à des réévaluations inédites et à des réorientations ou recompositions thématiques ou conceptuelles des traditions dominantes. Face à un post-modernisme mondialisant dont le flou n'arrive pas à camoufler l'origine nord-américaine, plus impériale ou coloniale que jamais, les anthropologies européennes, et notamment françaises, hésitent encore entre une réaffirmation des traditions des âges d'or du siècle dernier et des innovations peu visibles car réticentes à construire des spécialisations thématiques tranchées comme dans les années 1950–1960.