Encounters between foreign tourists and people of different cultural background become very common in a globalised world. The nature of this exchange in cultural terms relates questions of identity construction and the emergence or creation of difference. This article addresses tourist-‘native’ encounters in a semiotic perspective, which helps to reveal its essentially contested aspects. The empirical study relates to the Suri people of southern Ethiopia, a small ethnic group of agro-pastoralists only recently ‘discovered’ by the tourists and displaying notable aggression towards them. Suri reject their role in the ‘tourist game’ of creating realist experience of the Other, and staunchly assert their own identity and would-be equality towards these affluent visitors.

In the context of the trend in kinship studies towards an emphasis on native understandings, L. Holy has proposed a definition of kinship as a culturally specific notion of relatedness deriving from shared substance and its transmission. This paper examines the case of the Dangaura Tharu, Nepal, among whom relatedness is thought of less in terms of substance than as a system of relations to divinities for which men and women act as vehicles in different ways and through different aspects of their substance. It is suggested that an emphasis on the sharing and transmission of substance may sometimes reflect our own assumptions rather than indigenous constructions of substance and relatedness.

The new forms of entrepreneurship that constitute the Mauritian economic landscape – modelled very often by ethnic traits – where the plantation activities are mixed with business, cannot be understood independent of the long history of the island. The double French and English colonial system has conditioned the emergence of the liberal society of today. The communal system that was born out of the independence movements has transformed the centrality of the State in a periphery coordinating and managing ethnic relations. New relations are engaged between the civil society and the State in order to harmonize the political cultural links with the contemporary external relations.

After the publication of my ethnography on the dual organisation of a German village, I returned to the field to present it to the people. Villagers invited the local press to write about the book presentation. When a review article appeared in a national newspaper, television and radio stations tried to establish contacts with the villagers as well as with myself. The paper will reflect upon the complexity of power and representation, and will identify the different discourses, which emerged from the interplay of several agencies: television, press and radio, as well as different fractions and voices from the village itself mobilised. Conflicting ideas of cultural authenticity, relational difference, confidentiality, and the tensions between representation in speech and in writing will be examined. The case study throws light on the facets of reading, understanding, misunderstanding and interpretation in the politics of ethnographic writing.

This paper focuses on two important strands in the development of recent social theory. While arguments for reflexivity have tended to construct the researcher as a disembodied analytical consciousness, concerns with embodiment seem to focus on the bodies of others. This paper starts from the assertion that the researcher is an active embodied participant in social processes and this has important implications for the focus of analysis while offering opportunities for the development of social theory in relation to concepts of ‘community’, ‘social group’ and insiderness/outsiderness which seem to have been central concepts for considerations of identity.

The Tsachila Indians of Ecuador are portrayed in diverse ways by the people who deal with them. Furthermore, they display a clear internal diversity that increases the difficulty, during the fieldwork, for the interaction with them and, afterwards, for the comprehension of their society. These two aspects, of what may be considered the same reality, suggest that our present concepts, concerning cultural boundaries, cultural contents, the individual, the person, and social and ethnical units, must still be reconsidered.

Language and solitude. Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg dilemma. By Ernest Gellner. Edited by David Gellner. Foreword by Steven Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Hb.: £35. ISBN 0521 630029. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0521 639972.

Nietzsche (1994: no. 25) described ‘a knowledge of the conditions of culture’ as ‘the enormous task of the great minds of the next century’. It was necessary to ‘surpass all previous knowledge’ in this way in order for humankind to ‘carry onward the banner of the Enlightenment’ and establish a form of government ‘embracing the whole earth’. If humankind was to avoid destroying itself, then it had to set itself the ‘ecumenical goal’ of a world morality which was based on ‘a scientific standard’. Although he would not have liked me for saying so,Gellner is relatively dismissive of Nietzsche as a peddler of ideas concerning ‘the pathogenic origins or consequences of universalism and aggression-denying conscience’ which paved the way towards extreme and racist nationalism (1998: 25). it has been Ernest Gellner who has recently and most vigorously taken up the Nietzschean challenge in anthropology, combining knowledge of culture, government, morality and science. Gellner has endeavoured to come to terms with culture while appreciating science as a universal form of knowledge and also the need for equally universal forms of polity and morality.