Literacy in Greek allowed the turn-of-the-century Cretan authorities to regulate property transfers with increasing precision in the specification of value and location. Against the resulting official logic, however, everyday practices and knowledge – associated with the culture of the departing Turks – came to symbolise the highly valued pleasures of social intimacy. This article thus illustrates the conversion of historical process and experience into mutually opposed forms of symbolic capital.

This article aims to shed light on a relatively neglected aspect of ethnic identity politics: namely, situations in which groups contest the ownership of ethnic practices. These conflicts suggest that symbols of ethnic affiliation are most usefully interpreted as a type of ‘inalienable possession’, a category conceived by Annette Weiner for analysing the symbolic dimensions of property and the exchange of goods.

A micro-state located on the frontier between Spain and France in the middle of the Pyrenees, Andorra was a very poor country traditionally based on pastoralism. It has become nowadays a free trading zone involved in commercial and financial international flows. In this article, we analyse the structural and strategic role of the frontier as it defines the economic system of the country and the lifeways of its inhabitants. We also discuss the various forms of endogenous frontiers (social, legal and cultural) which divide people and make of Andorra a society organised through significant internal segmentation. The country also hosts a large proportion of foreign workers next to a national and hegemonic minority based on the control of political power and the preservation of old privileges.

In anthropology, the debate on time traditionally opposes the universalists to the relativists. This article attempts to escape the opposition, claiming that while anthropology cannot demonstrate the existence of a universal individual notion of time, it can unveil a number of general characteristics of ‘social time’ which transcends the relativity of its representations. Using a Papua New-Guinean case study, a minimal definition of ‘social time’ is then provided, along with the hypothesis that every society requires at least two different and hierarchically ordered conceptions of time. This co-existence of diverse times questions in turn the category of history as an analytical tool in anthropology.

Focusing on local cognitive orientation and practice, described as producing ‘a sense of place’, the article discusses how macro-political processes associated with the UN's decolonisation programme affect the atoll society of Tokelau in the South Pacific. Local orientation is expressed as a general tendency to represent relationships in spatial terms. Political practice takes the form of fighting for ascendancy. It is shown to be attached to a qualitatively different way of life than that connected to institutions established as infrastructural prerequisites for achieving nationhood. The balancing act Tokelauans, along with their political counterparts, achieve represents a genuine case, one which may in turn serve as a model for experimenting nationhood elsewhere.

This article is a case study which deals with the consequences of a conflict among the Wodani. It describes the irruption of a Cargo Cult in this remote region of New Guinea, a series of incests provoked by the millenarian ideology, followed by murders and internecine war within the Kundiyau clan and, finally, the attempt to resolve these disorders through the organisation of a homicide payment, which, thanks to an unexpected juridical fiction, is collected not from the murderer but from a clan-brother of the incestuous prophet. These developments allow us to consider a number of more general questions: the notion of incest, of clan affiliation and personal identity in Wodani society; the compensation system allowing for the establishment of an equivalence between human lives and means of payment; the eschatological doctrine explaining the reproductive function of shell money; the theory of causality and juridical responsibility justifying a fictitious charge of murder; and finally, the future of the traditional currency in a society which is now compelled to reformulate its cosmological principle of compensation.

Where the world ended. Re-unification and identity in the German borderland. By Daphne Berdahl. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999. xiii + 294 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 520 21477 3.

Disparate diasporas. Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community. By Edmund T. Gordon. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. xiv + 330 pp. Pb. ISBN 0 292 73857 9.

Inside the revolution. Everyday life in Socialist Cuba. By Mona Rosendahl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. x + 197 pp. Pb.: £11.95. ISBN 0 8014 8412 X.

Burden of dreams. History and identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. By Catherine Wanner. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1998. xxvii + 255 pp. Pb.: £15.50. ISBN 0 271 01793 7.

Four books, four ethnographies, four resolute answers to a question that anthropologists are subjected to so often: does the discipline's relevance go beyond the specificity of small-scale community study? Or, in other words, can anthropology transcend the social, geographical, methodological and epistemological limits seemingly imposed on it by its ethnographic focus? Can it contribute to analyses of wider political and ideological phenomena such as revolutions or the post-communist transition? These four monographs, based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, Germany, Nicaragua and Ukraine, are convincing in their univocal answer. The answer is yes.

Naked science. Anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power and knowledge. Edited by Laura Nader. New York and London: Routledge. 1996. xvi + 318 pp. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN 0 415 91465 5.

The scientific revolution. By Steven Shapin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1996. xiv + 218 pp. Pb.: £9.50. ISBN 0 226 75020 5.

These two valuable scholarly volumes emerge from different disciplinary traditions in the study of western science – anthropology (Nader) and history (Shapin). Yet they are both informed and shaped by recent developments in the social studies of science. The authors endeavour ‘to portray science as the contingent, diverse and at times deeply problematic product of interested, morally concerned, historically situated people’ (Shapin 1996: 165). Writing in the shadow of recent controversies in the USA about the legitimacy of such portrayal, Shapin anticipates that he may be accused of trying to ‘expose science’ (p. 165), while Nader is unapologetically determined about the pursuit of ‘naked science’ – that is, of science stripped of its ideological pretensions and assumptions.