What is the future of the disciplinary label ‘social anthropology’? The localised intellectual universes within which we carry out our early training as anthropologists are constantly penetrated and challenged by universal trends. At the same time, due to their relative independence, these local intellectual universes play an important role as spaces where intellectual reproduction can carry on in relative independence from the global hegemonic voices. In this paper I argue for a more complex approach to the concept of ‘alterity’, claiming that the constant discourse of self-accusation concerning anthropology's past and its essential ‘westernness’ hides the complexity of the interactions that went into the construction of the anthropological cannon which we are today reproducing globally. Today's anthropology has become increasingly symmetrical.

This special section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale originates in a symposium organised in December 2003 at Leiden University by the ethnological debating club WDO. As students of cultural anthropology and development sociology at this university, we were ‘facing fieldwork’, both retrospectively, in the task of making sense of our – relatively short – field research required for the Leiden MA thesis, and prospectively as future PhD students hoping for an extended stay.

After a couple of decades of post-modernist debate, time is ripe to reassess the unity of anthropology as a distinct field of knowledge. Many disciplines study culture and quite a few have embraced ‘ethnography’ and fieldwork. The distinction of anthropology is not, therefore, implied simply by a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (fieldwork). I shall argue that the distinction derives from a particular way of relating to the object and pertaining to both the relations in the field, and the way in which these relations infuse the resulting knowledge. By tracing the development of anthropology through various ‘turns’ and delineating the contours of a particular mode of anthropological attention, the article makes a case for the vitality and pertinence of the anthropological field, which it owes to the power of bringing the ethnographic and the epistemological into coincident view.

In the epistemological reflexivity characteristic of recent work, there has been a relative negligence of the experience of intensive fieldwork. Yet, it is in explicating the structure and nature of relationships which constitute fieldwork, linking rapport and empathy as anthropological experience to historically located, social experience and a self-reflexivity of the anthropological/fieldworker self that we can renew the methodology of intensive fieldwork in the making of anthropological understanding and anti-colonial ethnography. This is explicated through a comparative ethnography of one fieldworker in two fieldsites, widely divergent in time, place, and fieldwork techniques. In both the contexts of Rajasthan, India and Leiden, The Netherlands, the separate self-interests of the observer and the observed in listening, hearing, telling and doing created the limited mutuality vital to processes of anthropological learning and analysis.

This article explores some of the methodological and theoretical challenges that occur in research contexts where the anthropologist is categorically unwelcome. Based on significant episodes from her own fieldwork on the homecoming of African Americans to Ghana, the author discusses the double edge of positionality as both structural placement and invididual agency – for the researcher as well as his or her interlocutors. The article aims at htree points: First, it critically discusses the notion of White invisibility that still underlies much of our scholarship. Second, it deals with the possible hiatus between methodological presumptions and the actual behaviour of the researcher in the field. Third, it questions the assumption of the superiority of ‘anthropological’ as opposed to ‘local’ knowledge.

In 1956, P. E. de Josselin de Jong published a paper on the participants view of their culture. He examined discrepancies between the views of the researcher and those of the participants concluding that ‘participants show awareness of structure when the structural principle is supported by an ideal, and is therefore of importance for them’. In this paper I examine the complex interaction in Inuit studies between views of participants, often integrating outsiders' perceptions, and those of researchers, reconstructing participants' views in terms of their own ideas and values.

As an anthropologist working on citizenship, I cannot but be delighted to see what has sometimes been perceived as an ‘illegitimate’ object for the discipline attracting growing interest. While in such matters, it is often difficult to distinguish clearly between different lines of arguments that are entangled in complex ways, I will try to organise my comments around two themes: a critical discussion of Nic Craith's approach to citizenship as being so much informed by a ‘culturalist’ approach to culture that it cannot avoid certain traps; and my proposals for an alternative way of discussing relationships between identities and citizenship from an anthropological perspective.

Must all knowledge and practice be conceived of as ‘cultural’? Does all difference ultimately reduce to cultural difference (and is this an essential form of difference in the constitution of humankind)? Do all notions of citizenship inevitably protect and promote particular cultures (and groups) over and above others? These are some of the questions that Máiréad Nic Craith's article stimulates us to address.

The meaning of citizenship in any given historical period and in any nation-state resides in the way that people conceive of the relationship between themselves and the state. The nature of this relationship has historically been inextricably tied to questions of democracy and where sovereignty lies. Within the modern period, at least since the Levellers in England in the 1640s and 1650s, rival conceptions of the equality of citizens and the sovereignty of the people have been the site of moral and political conflict and, in some famous instances, revolution. Throughout the French revolution, ideas of citizenship were continually being revised and fought over. Even within the relatively narrow confines of France's Second Republic (1848–51), rival conceptions of citizenship implying quite distinct notions of civil equality and political liberty fed deep political struggles. ‘The democrats’ desire was to incorporate social equality into republican citizenship, while the socialists believed it to be inseparable from revolution in relation to capital and labour' (Furet 1995:425). Smashing the ancien régime was only the beginning of a long and bloody struggle for equality before the law.

It is always encouraging when an essay generates discussion and particularly when it attracts reactions from such eminent academics as Catherine Neveu, Nigel Rapport, Alexandra Ouroussoff and Christina Toren. The significance of culture for citizenship is a topic of relevance for anthropologists and sociologists alike, and all of the responses endorse the central theme of my essay, which is to suggest that anthropologists can make a particularly useful contribution to the study of citizenship. However they do not necessarily support all aspects of the case I make, and I am grateful to the editor for permission to include a very brief rejoinder here.

Kochakova, Natalia B. (ed.). 2002. Ethnologica africana. In memory of Dmitri Alexeyevich Olderogge (in Russian, with English summaries). Moscow: Muravei. 384 pp. No price given. ISBN: 5 89737 129 6.

Kemper, Steven. 2001. Buying and believing. Sri Lankan advertising and consumers in a transnational world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. x + 264 pp. Pb.: $20.00. ISBN: 0 226 43041 3. Malefyt, Timothy de Waal and Brian Moeran (eds.). 2003. Advertising cultures. Oxford: Berg. xiv + 220 pp. Pb.: £16.99/$24.95. ISBN: 1 85973 678 5. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling smoke. Advertising and globalisation in contemporary India. Durham NC: Duke University Press. xxii + 365 pp. Pb.: $22.95. ISBN: 0 8223 3145 4.