Recent anthropological theories on violence are predominantly concerned with processes of othering in increasingly postmodern societies, analysing how identity may lead to violence. A second approach, however, focuses on the production of social solidarity within violent groups, asking how violence can be constitutive of identity. While the former talks about social purification, sacrifice, diaspora and displacement, the latter highlights the aggressive, transgressive and often ludic practices of perpetrators of violence operating in young male urban cohorts. This article uses both theories in discussing an ethnic–religious movement known to its militants as both ‘fun’ and violent. It analyses how the effervescence of group aggression may lead to ethnocide and martyrdom.

In South Canara, landowners claiming chiefly descent stage the nema, once the central occasion on which chiefs displayed and renewed their power. Through semantic analysis of the nema's syntax the authors show how the meaning of ritual statements are rooted in the context of action, in an age where chiefdoms no longer exist. Analysing specific cases, the authors show how the staging of a nema is a risky venture, claiming or defending positions of a highly political nature. The nema acts to construct important actors who structure the imagined community of Tulunadu, claimed as the homeland of the Tulu-speaking population. The bhutas to which the ritual is dedicated, both legitimise and contest the hierarchy and symbolise the moral values of the community. At the same time, each performance encodes new elements into a continuous production of meaning, rooted in myth, informed by events, and linked into complex traditions and systems of knowledge.

The Australian kinship system type has been a topic of much discussion and of considerable misinterpretation among scholars. It has been characterised as not distinguishing siblings from cross-cousins and as allowing marriage between classificatory siblings. Based on Elkin's work and on data gathered in a desert community and in Alice Springs, the aim of this paper is to propose a coherent interpretation of the Aluridja system, in which terminology has to be distinguished in accordance with the context of reference.

This text examines a series of family conflicts, judicial battles and political struggles having as their main stage the city of Salta, situated in the extreme north-west of Argentina. This constellation of events merges with the political chronology of the country: it begins in 1946, the year of Juan Perón's election as president, and ends in 1955, when he was overthrown by a coup d'état. The objective of the text is to analyse the relations between sentiments and actions associated with social spaces of different natures and scales, such as the space of the ‘good families’ of Salta, of the ‘spirit’ of the Argentine north-west, or of the people from Argentina's interior and of those from its centre. By studying the relationships between native conceptions of intimacy and publicity that are at play in this case, the article proposes an outline of a social phenomenology of the social space concerned with the temporal dimension of social life.

Maurice Bloch has rejected Jack Goody's ‘autonomous’ theory of literacy for being deterministic and eurocentric. The Merina of Madagascar, says Bloch, have adapted literacy to local purposes. Rather than altering their (oral) knowledge system, bringing it closer to European models, literacy has actually extended this system. In this article I apply Bloch's insight to another Austronesian people: the Iban of Sarawak. While agreeing that his indigenist ‘ideological’ approach is helpful in some cases (e.g. Christian prayer books that extend pagan notions of ancestry), it can also blind us to the wider realities of developing countries where literacy is both a ubiquitous ideal and an unevenly distributed resource. To overcome the ideological–autonomous impasse, I suggest (a) closer cooperation between literacy and media anthropology and (b) more geopolitical rigour when comparing social units.

The disagreement between writers such as Goody and writers who have taken a similar line to myself is not over whether literacy can be involved in great social changes, whether it can facilitate communication and the storage of information or whether it has become, in many places, a mechanism for operating social distinction. We are all agreed about this. In fact, all the points the author makes about the Iban, as he generously acknowledges in several places in the paper, are points I have made myself in relation to the Merina in a number of articles reproduced in How we think they think (Bloch 1998; originally Bloch 1968, 1989, 1994).

Historical context

On 14 January 1989, twenty-two anthropologists from twelve western European countries assembled in Castelgandolfo, outside Rome. The Wenner-Gren Foundation provided the necessary funding and Professor Bernardo Bernardi from the University of Rome found the ideal setting: the think-tank of the ENI, the Italian state petroleum company. We were supposed to discuss the possibility of creating an European association of anthropologists. We represented ourselves, not universities, departments or professional associations, and we were not committed to anything in advance. The original plan was to have a preliminary discussion, exploring possibilities and trying to find a common scholarly ground in a new and renovated political climate in Europe. During the meeting we realised that the development of the discipline in countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal, the consolidation in the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, and the vitality of the old centres, Great Britain and France, constituted a base for a closer cooperation in teaching and research. Moreover, the lack of viable and strong national institutions in many countries was seen as an incentive for launching the association. After two days of meeting the European Association of Social Anthropologists was established. Adam Kuper was elected as the chairperson and Raymond Firth and Claude Lévi-Strauss, symbolically representing the two ‘great traditions’, were nominated as honorary members. We decided to set up a register of anthropologists, publish a newsletter, organise postgraduate courses and start the recruitment of members.

‘At this millennial transition, the human capacity to envision imaginary worlds seems to be shifting into high gear. For anthropologists and others, greater concern with how ideas and power converge seems eminently warranted.’

Eric R. Wolf, Envisioning power, 1999

The arrival in 1999 of Eric Wolf's last book Envisioning power. Ideologies of dominance and crisis generated much excitement. Long the standard bearer for political economy in anthropology and often credited with bringing Marxism to anthropology, Wolf had not published a major monograph since Europe and the people without history, which in 1982 defined Marxian anthropology. A very different book, in a very different time, Envisioning power represented Eric Wolf's attempt to highlight the importance of ideology in the exercise of power through looking at three societies in crisis: the post-contact Kwakiutl, the pre-contact Tenochca and National Socialist Germany.