The article is a contribution to an ethnology of communication and an attempt to combine ordinary and formal acts of language so as to recapture the ethos or art of living by which Merina peasants form their harmonious ideal of mutual understanding, enticing humans to self control and to refrain from expressing pronounced disagreements. Central to them is the idea that any activity (of speech or action), any relation to the external world is loaded with danger.

Society here shares the conviction that the inherent insufficiencies of humankind condemn it to commit mistakes, thus inciting it to prudence. An examination of blames and prohibitions and an analysis of the various recourses to divination and to astrology complete the study of agrarian and ritual calendars. One discovers here a whole phenomenology of previson and prevention mobilised to alleviate unfavourable consequences and to withdraw from chance a destiny rendered more previsible.

In the venture, the author mobilises a whole recession of ethnographies borrowed from published sources and direct observation, joining to them essays on the language of maxims and proverbs – ohabolana – displayed as poetry during contests and challenges – hain teny – (Paulhan), contrasting daily, or ordinary, modes of expression to oratory speeches mobilising the authority of a whole social hierarchy as in the marriage kabari. The use of a sacred language along with the presence of multiple layers of reality shows that, contrary to what the modern universe of values experiences, social – socio-emotional – issues have precedence over operational finalities: a philosophy of the golden mean through which the Merina demonstrate how their common sensical forms of knowledge and anxiety derive from daily pragmatics themselves being constituted by social relationships.

It is argued that multiple discourses and discursive practices pertaining to similar topics co-exist within any one society and that these may be constituted through symmetrical or asymmetrical relations. Drawing upon some ideas by Alfred Gell about the nature of relations, I use the concept of androgyny. By this is meant that certain persons (but not all) and certain items (but not all) contain within them the potentiality for emerging in certain contexts as gendered in a male or female mode. Gender is then not only relational, but also processual. These selected persons and things can do so only by virtue of their position in the relational system of the Lio which, in turn, is cosmologically constituted.

In this article I explore the imaginative and practical links that the Gitanos of Jarana, in Madrid, make with other Gitanos and Gypsies elsewhere. What kind of diaspora do they see themselves as belonging to? The context to my investigation is the fast growth of both Gypsy Pentecostalism and Roma international political activism – two movements that, in very different ways, call for the unity of all Gypsies/Roma worldwide. Their efforts contrast greatly with the world-views and attitudes of many of the people of Jarana who reject social harmony and cohesion as paths to community-making.

The article reports on observations made at meetings in New York of support groups for gays and lesbians who identify as sexually compulsive. It examines the participants' – mostly males – narratives and its language, the social relationships they develop at meetings, and the impact of that experience on their lives. The article's major premise is that these meetings do not initiate a curing forum to reform an ‘addiction’. Instead, they evolve a compassionate community that engages its participants in a performative discourse on sexual behaviour and gay life style. My purpose is to extend the field of ethnographic research into unvisited domains of experience and association in contemporary urban life.

Drawing upon extensive urban anthropological fieldwork with football hooligan formations in England and Scotland, it is argued that academics have failed to examine adequately the spatial dimension underlying hooligan conflicts. The spatially affective aspects of football fandom in general are identified; via Fiske's dichotomy of locales and stations, the contestation of space inside football grounds between fans, police and club directors is highlighted. From this milieu emerge the football hooligan gatherings, which are conceived as ‘resource networks’ utilising time, identity and information (Wallman), rather than as produced by processes or ‘ordered segmentation’ (Dunning). Subsequently, the paper turns to explore the historical trajectory of football hooliganism qua spatial contest between rival fans and police. The intensification of police control strategies has helped to engender a broadening of social spaces; contexts and techniques by which hooligans may ‘legitimately’ pursue confrontations. The process is complicated further in important ‘two team’ cities, wherein many popular social spaces retain an ambiguous status for local rivals acting in ostensibly non-football contexts. The concluding discussion critically assesses the effects and cultural meanings of increased police surveillance over football fans, noting the response of some hooligans in seeking to ‘arrange’ confrontations with rivals at extremely peripheral, non-football locations.

In this paper, the call for a reconsideration of ‘ethnographic holism’ in anthropology is critically assessed by drawing on the author's research in the field of gender and religion. Using illustrations from a study on women's religiosity in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium, it is shown that an ethnographic holistic perspective was necessary in order to challenge a view of ‘religion’ as a sui generis, de-contextualised, and therefore un-gendered phenomenon. At the level of description and analysis a holistic approach is supported that moves beyond traditional classificatory schemes and crosses boundaries between categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. It is argued that a version that applies an essentialist notion of ‘culture’ as a bounded and reified ‘whole’ in both theoretical and certain politically dangerous appropriations must nonetheless be avoided.