The notion of the ‘invisible’, which is at the heart of representations of sorcery in Gabon, does not refer to a metaphysical backstage world, but to the asymmetrical relationship which unites sorcerers and their victims. It is a relationship of predation (predator versus prey) and of perception (seeing without being seen versus being seen without seeing). The victim can look for deliverance in the initiatory visions of the Bwete Misoko which paradoxically enable one to see the invisible, therefore reversing the sorcery relation. In the end, sorcery and counter-sorcery have to do with perception.

In this article I analyse material from a video ethnography of British domestic laundry processes to examine different individual approaches to the sensory nature and evaluation of clean and dirty laundry. Drawing from recent work in the anthropology of the senses I suggest that an analysis of different individual sensory experiences of and narratives about modern western laundry processes can lead to a series of anthropological reflections about how these are constitutive of identities, moralities, human agency and processes by which conventions change.

The article considers the relationship between the ideological notion of the person and personhood established interpersonally in socialist East Germany. It criticises theories of resistance arguing that both narratives ‘conversationally’ depend on one another. This is explored with regard to a socialist transition ritual, in which ideological and social values come together. Through their co-existence in this ambiguous setting the two narratives reinforce one another. This understanding of a co-dependency of ideology and grass-roots practices is as yet largely absent from the literature. It is, however, necessary in order to understand moral debates and cultural continuity in present eastern Germany.

The article critically interrogates an influential theory of Françoise Héritier and her associates that purports to explain Islamic milk kinship as the symbolic product of a peculiar Arab folk-physiology of lactation whereby breastmilk is supposed to be transformed male semen. In Part One, this somatic conjecture is shown to be unsubstantiated by extant ethnographies of milk kinship in the Middle East and North Africa. Reviewing its legal and social histories in Part Two, I indicate that the common deployment of Islamic milk kinship to cement clientage between status unequals, excluding their marital alliance, conditioned its clerical reckoning and symbolic legitimation on analogy with natal kinship. Its similar recognition in eastern Christian canon law, together with its structural parallels in spiritual kinship, suggest broader comparative anthropological prospects for comprehending this culturally distinctive – but by no means unique – Islamic institution of adoptive affiliation and clientage.

At a time when the world is facing profound challenges and transformations (the erosion of human rights, the destruction of the environment, the criminalisation of immigrants and the resurgence of fundamentalisms of all sorts – to name just a few) the need for the anthropological study of political processes has hardly ever been greater. In fact, the unique sensitivity and commitment of anthropology to culture, translation, lived experiences, people's views and everyday practices, holism and context, comparison, long-term fieldwork and ethnographic detail, deconstruction and reflexivity (all features generally less present in other fields of studies) make the discipline's engagement with things political quite necessary. However, to meet this demand, both scholars and students of (political) anthropology need an updated conceptual tool-kit.

In many ways, nomadic and pastoral communities live at the fringes of the contemporary nation-state: literally, since for historical and political reasons they often inhabit its border regions; and metaphorically, as they often find themselves at a considerable distance from the seats of power and decision-making. These communities also occupy a rather ambivalent position in the modernist imagination: they are regarded on the one hand as ‘authentic’, on the other as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’; as either preserving a delicate natural balance between man and nature or sharing a deeply rooted, irrational, ‘love’ for their animals; as proud, fierce and independent, or as stubborn, traditionalist, a hindrance on the way to development.