In Euro-American kinship biogenetic substance has been considered as a fact of nature as well as a symbol of diffuse and enduring solidarity. In this paper I analyse how changes in the facts of biogenetic substances induced by research, and the application of genetics in human reproduction, imply also changes in their capacity to symbolise social solidarity of kinship. Is nature still a symbol of kinship? If so, what kind of human nature is a biotech nature? The ethnography is based on fieldwork in two clinics of assisted reproduction in Barcelona (Spain), mainly among egg donors and receivers. I analyse the ideas of inheritance, identity and similarity between members of a family and attempt to answer the following questions. What does it mean to share biogenetic substances in the context of assisted reproduction? How do egg donors understand the genetic link with an unknown offspring? How do they understand the biogenetic substance made with their donated eggs? How do receivers understand the biogenetic substance made in the laboratory? How do they appropriate the biogenetic substance? How do they relate genetic links, gestational links and descent links?

In land claims cases presented by aboriginal peoples the burden of proof rests normally with the claimants. They have to substantiate the assertion that the territory in question was in their possession at the time it was colonised and that they formed ‘an ordered society’ according to characteristics defined by the law, or that their usage is acceptable as customary law. In such cases anthropologists are often called upon as expert witnesses for the plaintiffs or the court. This article discusses the framing of anthropological knowledge produced within the legal context. In this context of opposing arguments constituted by a hegemonic order of alleged rationalism (or often ‘common sense’ masquerading as rationalism), the reliability of information is established or dismissed through a process of opposing questioning by the parties' attorneys. This testing of anthropological knowledge may at times challenge a dominant perspective within the discipline, namely that which underscores notions of the past as constructed upon premises of the present, or the flexible and adaptive quality of most social entities. The anthropological perspective emphasises culture not as a cluster of established institutions, customs or forms of social organisation, but as responsive to changing internal and external conditions. In so doing, the perspective may invite the court's suspicion of being fuzzy, biased and unreliable. The article argues that, rather than abandoning our discipline's stance of refuting essentialist versions of ‘cultures’ in order to adjust our testimony to the legal profession's preconceived ideas of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ as objective criteria of legal treatment, we should propagate the need for a pluralist conception.

Culture and citizenship have frequently been regarded as concepts for separate disciplines and the anthropological focus on culture has distracted attention from the concept of citizenship. Although sociologists have traditionally neglected the cultural dimension of citizenship, I argue that citizenship is an inherently cultural concept, which projects it firmly into the realm of anthropology. Whether the relationship between citizenship and culture is explicit as in the Baltic States, or denied as in the case of France, I argue that the concept of ‘culture-blind’ citizenship is impossible and that anthropologists can have a significant input into the understanding of contemporary citizenship.

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 examines an indigenous complex of ideas about illnesses, misfortunes and trances in relation to the concept of ‘intercorporeality’, as discussed by Weiss and Waldby. Intercorporeality helps us understand some Nayaka senses of batha, and sheds light on the relational nuances of this indigenous notion. Batha suggests another rendition of intercorporeality, which does not pluralise the individual's ‘inside’ as a composite embodiment of exterior relations, classes and hierarchies. Rather, this indigenous category underscores the sense of an irreducible plurality of ‘relatives’, each joined to all the others, constituting a web of mutualities that transcend classes and boundaries, including even human/non-human.

Developing an earlier analysis of milk kinship allegiance in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Pakistan – elaborated along the lines of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of Serbian spiritual kinship – this essay appropriately returns to other ethnographies of adoptive kinship in Southeast Europe. I examine a hitherto neglected account of milk kinship and child fosterage in the Caucasian statelet of Abkhazia, comparing its tributary formations of clientage with apparently similar institutions of milk kinship documented in the Balkans. It is suggested that reiterated ties of milk kinship were often combined with spiritual sponsorship among both Muslim and Christian populations of Southeast Europe, comprising reciprocal allegiances of co-parenthood between asymmetrically ranked but allied descent lines. The comparative anthropological implications of these composite ‘alternative social structures’ of constructed kinship – orchestrating feudatory allegiances and inter-ethnic alliances throughout Southeast Europe – are discussed in the conclusion. This indicates the broader theoretical significance of Hammel's Serbian ethnography in understanding the social and political assortment of ‘elementary structures’ of adoptive kinship in peripheral regions throughout western Eurasia, where milk kinship orchestrated by women has often played a formative political role.

Bridge, Simon, Ken O'Neill and Stan Cromie. 2003. Understanding enterprise, entrepreneurship and small business (second edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. xxiii + 520 pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 0 333 96499 3. Pb.: £25.99. ISBN: 0 333 98465 X.

Burns, Paul. 2001. Entrepreneurship and small business. Basingstoke: Palgrave. xxiv + 418 pp. Pb.: £29.99. ISBN: 0 333 91474 0.

Shield, Renée Rose. 2002. Diamond stories. Enduring change on 47th Street. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. xiii + 233 pp. Pb.: $29.95. ISBN: 0 8014 3989 2.

Kloosterman, Robert, and Jan Rath (eds.). 2003. Immigrant entrepreneurs. Venturing abroad in the age of globalisation. Oxford: Berg. xix + 331 pp. Hb.: £45.00. ISBN: 1 85973 634 3. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN: 1 85973 639 4.

Les activités commerciales et les petites et moyennes entreprises sont au cœur de ces quatre ouvrages. Mais il s'agit là de leur unique point commun, et ces livres développent des perspectives sur le sujet qui différent plus qu'elles ne se ressemblent. Le passage en revue de ces publications est donc l'occasion de tirer profit de cette juxtaposition hétéroclite et de distinguer trois approches des activités commerciales:

Caldwell, Sarah. 1999 [Oxford India Paperbacks 2001]. Oh terrifying mother. Sexuality, violence and worship of the goddess Kali. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xvii + 320 pp. Pb.: 495Rs. ISBN: 019 565 7696.

Flood, Gavin (ed.). 2003. The Blackwell companion to Hinduism. Oxford: Blackwell. xiv + 599 pp. Hb.: £85.00. ISBN 0 631 21535 2.

Michaels, Axel. 2004. Hinduism, past and present (translated by Barbara Harshav). Princeton: Princeton University Press. xviii + 430 pp. Hb.: £42.95. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0 691 08952 3/08953 1.

Smith, David. 2003. Hinduism and modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. xii + 250 pp. Hb.: £50.00. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN 0 631 20861 5/20862 3.

Anthropologists of Buddhism are familiar with descriptions of Buddhists in which the author wonders whether what they are observing is ‘really’ Buddhism. In the case of Hinduism, confronted close up, the dominant attitude is more likely to be fascination. If observers of Hindu rituals rub their eyes, it is not usually because they are stricken by epistemological doubt about the very status of what they are observing. Scepticism about Hinduism tends rather to be meta-doubt, doubt experienced by theorists trying to grapple with the task of providing an overall picture of Hinduism, doubt about whether there is such a thing as Hinduism in the larger sense at all. In short, with Buddhism the assumption seems to be: it does exist, but village Buddhism isn't really it. In the case of Hinduism the ontology is the other way around: Hinduism certainly exists in villages, but does it exist as an institution spanning millennia and the whole of South Asia? In the past some Panjabis returned their social identity as ‘Hindu Mussalman’ in the census. Many Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains used to be happy to be considered as a variety of Hindu, and some still so consider themselves today. Others describe themselves as ‘secular Hindus’. In other words, Hindu in this sense means approximately ‘Indian’ (though sorting out that historical and conceptual conflation is precisely the problem). Thus some influential scholarly voices have recently argued that really there is no such thing as Hinduism, and that, even if Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and the rest exist as separate religions, Hinduism does not. It contains several religions within it perhaps, but it is not itself a religion.