The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the transnational world created by south Asian migrants. It argues that labour migration forges global pathways, routes along which people, goods, places and ideas travel. The need is, the article argues, to recognise the class dimensions of this movement and the significance of both strong and weak ties in determining emergent forms of cultural transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnic and religious worlds discussed in the paper – of Pakistani Muslim religious sufis and working class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’ – cut across national boundaries and are centred beyond Europe. The global highways along which Pakistani labour migrants travel also carry goods, brides and tourists. Like the Melanesians of whom Strathern writes that they make places and sentiments ‘travel’, Pakistani migration involves the metonymic movement of ceremonial objects such as food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery which personify moral ‘places’. And it is through these that new global ethnic social worlds are constituted. Global families and trans-national marriages reconfigure the local through global connections, while still being marked by economic class and status.

Ethnographies of scientific, professional and educational practices have investigated the ways in which human activity is socialised and mediated by inscription. On the other hand, it has also been stressed how the education of attention is fundamental for the acquisition of skill, involving a complex phenomenological, multi-sensorial experience. This article aims to explore vision in terms of enskilment, highlighting how the participation in relations of apprenticeship and reference to a set of shared visual artefacts are instrumental for socialising the situated, tacit and skilful knowledge of individuals into communities of practice.

Darwinian accounts of human evolution are riven by a fundamental paradox. While asserting a principle of continuity between human populations and their evolutionary antecedents, they also posit a point of origin from which separate processes of culture and history rise up from a universal baseline of evolved human nature. But the belief in this nature rests on a confusion surrounding the notion of genetic information. Human capacities are not genetically pre-specified but emerge within processes of ontogenetic development that are at once historical and evolutionary. Replacing the ‘population thinking’ of the Darwinian paradigm with a ‘relational thinking’ that focuses on the dynamics of developmental systems leads us to a new vision of anthropology, as a science of engagement in a relational world.

This article aims to shed light on a relatively neglected aspect of ethnic identity politics: namely, situations in which groups contest the ownership of ethnic practices. These conflicts suggest that symbols of ethnic affiliation are most usefully interpreted as a type of ‘inalienable possession’, a category conceived by Annette Weiner for analysing the symbolic dimensions of property and the exchange of goods.

Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the ‘indigenous peoples’ notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept – ‘a useful tool for political persuasion’ – and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's ‘third solution’ along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the ‘indigenous peoples’ concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them.

This paper discusses critically the concept of ‘appropriation’ and evaluates the usefulness of applying the term in the analysis of cross-cultural communication in a global world. Specifically, I look at contemporary art practices that involve the ‘appropriation’ of ideas, symbols and artefacts from other cultures. Early twentieth century theories of cultural change and cultural contact (in German-speaking anthropology, the United States and Britain) were clearly interested in the ‘migration’ of particular elements (symbolic and material) across cultural boundaries, but suffered from a holistic view of bounded cultures. Recent theories of cultural globalisation on the other hand do not pay sufficient attention to the individual actors (as opposed to groups of individuals) in cross-cultural contact. Hybridisation, creolisation, transculturation and other concepts focus more generically on mixtures of different cultural practices in entire societies, but less on individual strategies. Appropriation then is reevaluated as a hermeneutic procedure, an act of dialogical understanding, by which individual actors negotiate access to, and traffic in, symbolic elements which have no fixed meaning.

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.

My purpose here is to alert you to how culture is loose on the streets of Norway - as indeed in much of the rest of the world. The expression ‘loose on the streets’ is not mine. I take it from the anthropologist Paul Bohannan who thus characterises a phenomenon of our times. ‘Culture’ has run astray. And it is now being used helter-skelter to promote all kinds of special interests.

But can a concept that has gone awry function as a fitting frame for the encounter between immigrants and Norwegians? My own answer is no. And I shall propose an alternative that can better facilitate mutual respect and understanding.

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.

This article discusses human alterations to the landscape in a lowland Papua New Guinea society, arguing that the ways in which people structure their practical, everyday interactions with the physical environment can embody culturally-specific theories of memory, forgetting and the political uses of knowledge.

As anthropologists forge a more engaged anthropology, it is important to combat the stereotypes of the discipline that the public holds. The recent controversy over Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado fed on two of these stereotypes: the ‘evil imperial anthropologist’ who does harm to the ‘good subaltern’ native, and the vision of anthropology as a discipline split between ‘scientists’ and ‘postmodernists’. Neither stereotype reflects the research that anthropologists are currently conducting on critical social issues such as immigration, race relations, health care and indigenous land rights. In order to overcome this disjunction between image and reality, we need, first, to transform our relations with the public; second, continue to change our relations with the communities we study by viewing them as equal partners in research and educational activities; and, third, work out effective ways of researching critical social issues that will expand the influence of anthropology in policy debates. I provide examples from the United States of efforts to accomplish these three goals: the AAA's project for a museum exhibit on ‘Understanding race and human variation’, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, and recent research projects on Medicaid Manage Care and welfare reform.

This article presents a contextualised, interpretative analysis of the debate about the word neger that took place in the Norwegian mass media during the winter of 2000–01. The aim is to contribute ethnographic material and analytical perspectives to the comparative analysis of the current reinforcement of ethnic national boundaries as a reaction to extra-European immigrants to Europe and the accompanying normalisation of racial discourses. On the one hand, Norwegian mainstream reaction draws on the same sort of racial ideas and boundary-constructing practices found in other European countries. On the other, the contributors to the debate drew on a complex set of discourses and exhibited particular points of emphasis. For many majority Norwegians a specific collective memory and a corresponding national self-image are currently at stake. In this self-image Norway is always outside imperialism and colonialism, and innocent in relation to the colonial legacy. The analytical argument of the paper is that when people construct racial boundaries, they draw on a mixture of discourses, rooted in different social realms, with different histories and degrees of legitimacy. The self-evidence of racial categories derives from the legitimacy of well established historical themes, concepts and lines of conflict. As the debate about the word neger unfolded over time, majority hegemony was challenged, rearticulated and reconfirmed.

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.

Drawing on his work experience from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, the author discusses the relationship between the administrative and the political domain within the field of asylum policy. Of particular interest in this respect is the capacity and the willingness of the bureaucratic apparatus to appropriate political decisions; its readiness to use legal and administrative measures in order to avoid social and moral issues being made the subject of political deliberations. The author argues that this tendency, which has consequences in terms of ethnic exclusion, cannot be explained only by invoking racist motives among bureaucrats. Rather, we must look into how public officials see their own responsibilities and their own working situations in an era characterised by increasing transnational movement of people.

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.

The dominant language ideology of contemporary Europe assumes standardized languages. In the political economic context of accelerated global migration and increased European unity, this ideology creates contradictions for speakers. The paper describes six types of contradiction that arise for non-elite speakers whose practices diverge from the ideals of standardization but who nevertheless find themselves judged by those ideals. Other contradictions arise for political elites. They come t believe that differences of standard language preclude a unified European public sphere, and fail to notice the intertextual processes and media circulations across standard languages that create politically significant publics.

The article discusses the dispersion of candomblé imagery, practices and aesthetics in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia. It shows that the spirit possession cult has become a trademark for the Bahian state and a major ‘symbol bank’ for groups as varied as the Bahian gay movement, environmental pressure groups and black activists. As candomblé enters ever new circuits of Bahia's representational economy, and finds itself dressed in ever new ideological garments, the classic anthropological construction of candomblé as a ‘religion’ and an ‘African universe in Brazil’ no longer manages to capture the wild variety of Gestalten in which candomblé makes its public appearance. The case of candomblé therefore challenges the boundedness of our anthropological categories of thought.

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.

With the expansion of anthropology to new objects, the definition of its boundaries has become so fuzzy as to warrant questions about its unity. Method rather than content offers possible common ground to various breeds of anthropologist, provided that it is taken to mean what they really do rather than what they say they do. In discussing three operations that enter into their common practice (description, comprehension and explanation), it is argued that anthropology amounts less to a specific method answering to strict epistemological requirements than to a certain style of knowledge building on the universal workings of intersubjectivity.

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.