This article is about personal identity documents and bureaucratic space in Peru. In applying for and renewing a range of personal documentation, individuals trace and re-trace steps through the streets and official buildings of Cuzco in Peru's southern highlands. This movement is highly visible in an unusual urban setting characterised by complex overlays of Incan, colonial, republican and contemporary administrative spaces. While the state constructs personal identification in the process, bodily lessons of citizenship are conveyed through spatial interaction with bureaucratic room. Active participation and varying degrees of acquiescence in these documentary peregrinations visibly legitimise the state presence and dominion on the urban scene. Thus, citizens are created through the sequence of bureaucratic identification on the one hand, and on the other, the state is made evident through the dynamic movement of people through the identification process. Bodily movement both integrates bureaucratic space and is integrated by such places.

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.

This article emphasises a universal value which both accepts and transcends the cultural division of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Instead of the usual western notion of one body and one self, the self of a Punjabi person is constituted through its relation to a plurality of bodies and is thus principally defined less as a value in itself than in its relation to other persons. To elucidate this, first the conceptual distinctions between the concept of the person and that of the self are pointed out. Second, it is shown that the category of the person in the Punjab is context-sensitive and that it transcends the physical boundary of the body.

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.

What does it mean to be Swiss? Or, how to justify the existence of the Swiss nation? Within a country defined by cultural heterogeneity, a pervading influence is exerted by what has to be labelled an Alpine myth over any idea and practice to legitimate a national unity. Today, for a great number of people, the Alpine myth is still a widely shared belief that serves to unite the country. But for those who no longer believe in such a founding myth, the question of the very existence of Switzerland is a more and more relevant one, as it becomes increasingly difficult to define what holds together the various parts of the country.

The ordinarinesses and simultaneities of experience

Journeys with Flies is a lyrical account of time spent between 1973 and 1994 among Mbanduru, Zhu and Tswana in the Kalahari desert. An extract from an opening section, ‘Entries’ (pp. 18–19), reads as follows:finding in an abandoned geology camp used in a premature hunt for oil on the Yukon coast in the 50s a rusted can of strawberry jam pulled open with our fingers scooping out the contents ravenous for sugar and fat our supply plane fogbound for weeks at Inuvik pilot biscuit and the caribou we shot thin in the calving season keeping us full but unsatisfied when the plane finally arrived we ate butter by the handful and had roaring diarrhea all that night that never lost the light of day . . .At Nwama, Eiffel-rust rain etched across chalcedony-green afterlight sucked out of the mid-Atlantic where the rainbow arc of the sunken sun is gliding toward North America.I can imagine that to be an organic reality, a function of the electrical charge of light clinging to its own perimeter and to reflections of important earth features – Guatemalan jungles could furnish the green for those bound to that place – wind carrying Eiffelcolor down with the shape blown into the rain. You can’t be in only one place at a time – how could you find the way there, or ever return?Coffee boiled for an hour in milk constantly skimmed so that it is like hot cocoa with a different taste, bitter roots roasted on a fire, and long after dark, the milking done, huge bowls of fresh clabbered yogurt . . .all this milk. Just a month ago there was practically none; only cows with newly dropped calves had enough so that some could be taken for people to drink.Those were hard days:look at usthinness is taking us’. Journeys with Flies is a literary-anthropological attempt to treat the perennial existential question of identity, an attempt to do justice to the commonalities of human embodied experience and to adumbrate a language of their conveyance.