By looking at narratives and practices of the self that enable ordinary Javanese to approach the ‘invisible world’, this article brings to light some fragments of a moral economy that unites understandings of the nature, extent and limits of the human will with political expression. In interacting with the spirit world – whether through the playful jailangkung or Nini Thowok games, or the tragic and violent stealing-spirits (thuyul) or the lynching of suspected sorcerers – ‘magic’ designates the moment when the frontiers of the visible become blurred and the will itself is de-individualized in the circulation between human and non-human agents. In this way, the article reflects on the paradoxical affirmation and denial of self of, on the one hand, meditation and ascesis, and on the other, communitarian ‘autochtonous’ violence, and asks how this specific expression of the political subject is to be understood without either reducing bodily processes to speech events or essentializing an ‘Asian’ view on individualism.

In this article, I contribute to recent efforts to correct aid organizations' ethnocentric representations of so-called street children. These organizations tend to impose a modern Western notion of childhood that portrays young people from around the world as passive objects of adult subjectivity. Using ethnographic data collected among two bandas (gangs) of so-called street children in Mexico City, I argue that the alternative is not necessarily to portray them in the image of the modern Western adult – as subjects or agents capable of authoring their own actions – but instead to recognize the specificity of the relationship among personhood, action, and sociality in a particular cultural context. Marilyn Strathern's writings on the gift economy help conceptualize this relationship among those of the bandas, who, rather than authoring their own actions, are caused to act by others.

This paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by ‘antagonism’ in what the paper terms the ‘nationalist imaginary’. Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence of a national enemy is at the core of the ‘defensive’ mobilisations we call nationalisms. It posits that the ‘inside’ of identity formation is not only shaped by but also grounded on the ‘outside’ of the perceived antagonism of an other.

The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, usually looked upon as an instance of colonial picturesque, may in fact be seen as a missing link in the history of French anthropology. Anthropology, both a symbol and an instrument of the new Native policy promoted by the organisers, played a key role in the project of displaying to the public the diversity of the peoples of the empires. The Exhibition provided a venue for anthropological conferences and opportunities for fieldwork, as it gave a prominent place to ethnographic documents, native artefacts and performers. In a sense, it appears as a rehearsal for the Museum of Man that was to be the heart of the discipline.

Have you ever contemplated writing an introduction to anthropology, based either on your own teaching or on the things you wished you'd been taught? If not, you may not have noticed quite how many social anthropologists have already done so. They receive little critical attention – it is hard to spot a review of such books in the academic journals. Despite being a ubiquitous and influential anthropological genre, they gain more disdain than critical attention. They may have been avidly read as part of our first encounter with the discipline, but we are unlikely to have looked at one since, save to recommend them to potential new student recruits. Yet introductions and textbooks hold up a mirror to the disciplinary gaze and, read historically, reveal the changing wrinkles of anthropologists' self-perceptions. Under the guise of reviewing three recently published introductions and textbooks, I revisit some older ones to explore how the relationship between teacher and taught has changed over time. How do such texts conceptualise the discipline, their potential readers and students, and the learning process itself? How do they lay out their wares – glossy and welcoming, or scholarly and intense?

The issues raised in Brian Barry's new book are among the most important and the most difficult facing contemporary anthropology. They evince at once the global arena in which anthropological writings now appear, the correspondence between the technical language anthropology uses and the rhetoric of political engagement employed by anthropology's ‘subjects’ to further their ‘rights’, and, thereby, the inevitably political character of anthropology's own pronouncements. The issues centre on the ontological nature of culture.