This article discusses human alterations to the landscape in a lowland Papua New Guinea society, arguing that the ways in which people structure their practical, everyday interactions with the physical environment can embody culturally-specific theories of memory, forgetting and the political uses of knowledge.

L'article examine une alliance électorale survenue en 2001 dans une petite ville du nord de la France, dirigée par le parti communiste depuis 1929. Cette alliance intervient alors qu'une loi récente sur les regroupements de communes renforce une marginalisation de la ville amèrement ressentie par ses acteurs politiques, avec une acuité que redouble une situation de dissidence interne au parti communiste, lui-même marginalisé au niveau national. Cet exemple permet de montrer un double processus contradictoire: la retraduction du localisme sous l'angle de la ‘résistance’ au libéralisme par la municipalité; la ‘normalisation’ politique qui s'opère par la rationalisation des instances politiques locales qu'illustre ici le regroupement intercommunal.

The three essays in this special section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale are unusual in many respects, yet they represent a central aspect of what I believe to be the journal's intellectual mission. Twentieth-century European social anthropology has, under the influence of its predominantly British and French ancestors, concentrated on socio-cultural phenomena. If other European traditions in anthropology or ethnology maintained relationships with archaeology, folklore and literature, socio-linguistics, or biological anthropology, they were overshadowed by these dominant social anthropological traditions. The dominant European traditions themselves, while keeping up with North American cultural anthropology, rarely connected systematically with the other three of the North American ‘four fields’: linguistics, archaeology and biological anthropology. That is unfortunate, especially in the case of the latter. North American anthropology cannot be understood without going back on the scientific use of the biological category of ‘race’ that Franz Boas tried to combat by highlighting the notion of culture. Likewise, one cannot get a good sense of the history of European anthropology without attempting to understand why the history of social anthropology usually erases its historical origins in the biological inspiration that determined the work of figures like Cuvier, Prichard, Desmoulins and Darwin (see Huxley 1900 [1865]; Stocking 1973). We are still the heirs of Durkheim, Malinowski and Boas, for whom biology was, so to speak, the ‘significant other’ of the science of culture and society.

There are three ways of construing the relationship between anthropology and science. First, we can speak of the anthropology of science. This includes anthropological studies of scientific institutions, forms of knowledge and ways of working. Second, we can speak of anthropology between science and society. In this field, anthropologists have been looking at the impacts of scientific knowledge and practices on social life, and how people have responded to them. Third, we can speak of anthropology as science. By this I do not mean to revive the old debate over whether anthropology is a science or an art. I intend rather to signal anthropology's potential contribution to the scientific understanding of human beings and their forms of life.

Of the diverse calls for a self-consciously ‘Darwinian’ anthropology, none is particularly satisfactory. In this paper I review five such calls and discuss their shortcomings in the light of anthropological knowledge. These are (i) the call to model cultural variation as genetic; (ii) the call to interpret all human social behaviour as ‘fitness-maximising’; (iii) the theory of memes; (iv) the use of chimpanzees as models for human behaviour; and (v) Darwinism as an evangelical ideology. I conclude with a programme for an inclusive, scientific anthropology that is consistent with Darwinian biology.

How can biological and social anthropologists today relate to each other's work? Using my research in biological anthropology as an example, I show that the African great apes sometimes engage in meaning-making as they act together. That is, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos communicate, especially through gesture, in contingent and creative ways, going beyond a mere exchange of signals to achieve co-construction of meaning. I argue that when biological anthropologists join social anthropologists in studying meaning-making, the two disciplines are inherently in relation.

Darwinian accounts of human evolution are riven by a fundamental paradox. While asserting a principle of continuity between human populations and their evolutionary antecedents, they also posit a point of origin from which separate processes of culture and history rise up from a universal baseline of evolved human nature. But the belief in this nature rests on a confusion surrounding the notion of genetic information. Human capacities are not genetically pre-specified but emerge within processes of ontogenetic development that are at once historical and evolutionary. Replacing the ‘population thinking’ of the Darwinian paradigm with a ‘relational thinking’ that focuses on the dynamics of developmental systems leads us to a new vision of anthropology, as a science of engagement in a relational world.

Chilver, E. M., et Ute Röschenthaler (dir.). 2001. Cameroon's tycoon. Max Esser's expedition and its consequences. Oxford: Berghahn. xx + 204 pp. Pb. (broché). $25.00/£17.00. ISBN: 1 57181 310 1.

Muller, Jean-Claude. 2002. Les rites initiatiques des Dìì de l'Adamaoua (Cameroun). Nanterre: Société d'ethnologie. 131 pp. Pb. (broché). €22.50. ISBN: 2 901161 52 9.

Regis, Helen A. 2003. Fulbe voices. Marriage, Islam and medicine in northern Cameroon. Boulder: Westview. xxiii + 175 pp. Pb. (broché). $18.00. ISBN: 0 8133 3816 6.

Parmi les pays d'Afrique, le Cameroun est l'un de ceux qui attirent le plus d'anthropologues. Après la première guerre mondiale en effet, cet ancien protectorat allemand fut divisé entre Britanniques et Français, ce qui explique sans doute pourquoi de nombreux chercheurs de cultures anthropologiques différentes s'y sont intéressés. Foyer présumé de diffusion des langues bantoues, son extraordinaire diversité culturelle (environ 150 ethnies pour 15 millions d'habitants), comprenant aussi bien les pygmées de la forêt équatoriale que les sociétés hiérarchisées des Grassfields ou encore les Peul et montagnards du Sahel, en fait un pays particulièrement riche pour des études anthropologiques. Plusieurs livres récents en apportent la confirmation.

Goodman, Felicitas D. 2001. Maya apocalypse. Seventeen years with the women of a Yucatán village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. xx + 544 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0 253 33908 1.

Hervik, Peter. 2003. Mayan people within and beyond boundaries. Social categories and lived identity in Yucatán. New York and London: Routledge. xxxi + 214 pp. Pb.: £18.99. ISBN: 0 415 9426 7.

Nash, June C. 2001. Mayan visions. The quest for autonomy in an age of globalisation. New York and London: Routledge. xix + 303 pp. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN: 0 415 92861 3.

More than half a century after Robert Redfield first used his rural–urban continuum to explain cultural change in Mexico, Mayan scholars now contend with subtly different and equally paradoxical scales: the individual and collective, agency and constraint, continuity and change, participant and observer, and, of course, the local and global. We live in a world where information, identities, beliefs, cognition, social relations, economies and politics are no longer isolated phenomena but rather linked to the global network that connects us all. Yet, on the other hand, we live and have collective beliefs, social concerns, ideas of self and intimacies that appear and feel more local than global. June C. Nash, Felicitas D. Goodman and Peter Hervik deal with the paradoxes of our contemporary world by utilising distinct styles, theories, methods, individuals and means of analysis in their representations of the lives and struggles of the Mayan people of Mexico.