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.

In Euro-American kinship biogenetic substance has been considered as a fact of nature as well as a symbol of diffuse and enduring solidarity. In this paper I analyse how changes in the facts of biogenetic substances induced by research, and the application of genetics in human reproduction, imply also changes in their capacity to symbolise social solidarity of kinship. Is nature still a symbol of kinship? If so, what kind of human nature is a biotech nature? The ethnography is based on fieldwork in two clinics of assisted reproduction in Barcelona (Spain), mainly among egg donors and receivers. I analyse the ideas of inheritance, identity and similarity between members of a family and attempt to answer the following questions. What does it mean to share biogenetic substances in the context of assisted reproduction? How do egg donors understand the genetic link with an unknown offspring? How do they understand the biogenetic substance made with their donated eggs? How do receivers understand the biogenetic substance made in the laboratory? How do they appropriate the biogenetic substance? How do they relate genetic links, gestational links and descent links?

In recent years the consumption of shade grown coffee has expanded rapidly in North America, becoming an established sector of the growing green products market. The certified shade grown coffee market is influenced by North American fantasies of pure, untouched nature and romantic portrayals of small coffee farmers as natural conservationists, eager to protect birds, biodiversity, and natural resources. These Northern constructions of habitat and eco friendly agricultural production directly influence the regulations constituting the shade grown certification system. Consequently, farmers seeking shade grown certification and access to the sustainable coffee market confront a rigid certification system whose requirements may appear irrational and excessive within a local agricultural system.

Recent anthropological theories on violence are predominantly concerned with processes of othering in increasingly postmodern societies, analysing how identity may lead to violence. A second approach, however, focuses on the production of social solidarity within violent groups, asking how violence can be constitutive of identity. While the former talks about social purification, sacrifice, diaspora and displacement, the latter highlights the aggressive, transgressive and often ludic practices of perpetrators of violence operating in young male urban cohorts. This article uses both theories in discussing an ethnic–religious movement known to its militants as both ‘fun’ and violent. It analyses how the effervescence of group aggression may lead to ethnocide and martyrdom.

During the 1997–2000 period, the Confédération Paysanne (CP), a union of French family farmers, played a central role in politicizing the French debate over GM crops. This paper is broader than an analysis of the CP's fight against industrial and post-industrial agriculture. It also explores the ways in which French family farmers, disenfranchised for decades from industrial agriculture, have become key figures in defining new notions of agricultural quality in both a national and international context.

While the first part of the paper traces the rise of ‘quality agriculture discourse’ (QAD) as a form of governmentality that normalizes perceived environmental and social issues associated with industrial agriculture, the second half analyzes the way in which the CP utilizes QAD in developing and legitimizing their broader social and agricultural vision and agenda, both within and beyond the context of the French debate over GM crops. As I will illustrate, while the CP establishes GM crops as the symbol of industrialized and ‘place-less’ agriculture, they establish ‘quality’ as the symbol of agricultural place-attachment. By studying the CP's anti-GMO campaign, we may better appreciate the ways in which disenfranchised groups of family farmers are appropriating techniques of governance to promote their own post-industrial agendas.

The current globalization of the world is resulting on entire regions suffering sudden structural reconfigurations through the re-organization of economic activities of industrial towns and agrarian landscapes. Contemporary Western societies have seen industries and its associated values move away to cheaper locales, replaced by a services economy focused on providing leisure to these urban dominated societies. Postindustrial landscapes, characterized by economic decay, depopulation, and abandonment, followed by reinvestment, resettlement, and rejuvenation, are not unique to the last century. But what marks out the last thirty years of the twentieth century is the technological revolution in travel and communication, accompanied by the rise of modern environmentalisms.

This introduction and the essays that it prefaces are taking forward a growing debate on how to re-theorize the concept of social nature, by reflecting upon it under the specific light of postindustrial social formations. They look at how nature is imagined and pursued as an aesthetic, a moral compass, and as diverse locations inside and outside the cultural and material separations already made in the social construction of industrial space. The emergence of distinct postindustrial social imaginaries, where divisions like folk and rational thought are not only questioned but also newly remade, is of particular interest to this collection of essays.

This paper makes an ethnographic contribution to the recent debates surrounding Intellectual Property. Using detailed material, it shows how intellectual resources are part of the wider whole that make up the viability of named places and kin groups among Nekgini speakers (Papua New Guinea). Identity and ownership are bound up with control over owned knowledge. This is complicated by the fact that rights to intellectual resources there do not reside in individuals, nor in simple collectivities. Some points are drawn from this ethnography to relate it to other writings on IPR, particularly those published in Social Anthropology. Comment is made on the consequences of advocating IPR, with its ultimate referent in the individual, in such situations

Developing an earlier analysis of milk kinship allegiance in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Pakistan – elaborated along the lines of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of Serbian spiritual kinship – this essay appropriately returns to other ethnographies of adoptive kinship in Southeast Europe. I examine a hitherto neglected account of milk kinship and child fosterage in the Caucasian statelet of Abkhazia, comparing its tributary formations of clientage with apparently similar institutions of milk kinship documented in the Balkans. It is suggested that reiterated ties of milk kinship were often combined with spiritual sponsorship among both Muslim and Christian populations of Southeast Europe, comprising reciprocal allegiances of co-parenthood between asymmetrically ranked but allied descent lines. The comparative anthropological implications of these composite ‘alternative social structures’ of constructed kinship – orchestrating feudatory allegiances and inter-ethnic alliances throughout Southeast Europe – are discussed in the conclusion. This indicates the broader theoretical significance of Hammel's Serbian ethnography in understanding the social and political assortment of ‘elementary structures’ of adoptive kinship in peripheral regions throughout western Eurasia, where milk kinship orchestrated by women has often played a formative political role.

This paper discusses the symbolic significance of the entry of Mozambique in the British commonwealth. British and Portuguese colonial cultures in southern Africa are contrasted and compared to reveal the tension between the dogmas of ‘assimilation’ and ‘segregation’. This tension also permeates the post-colonial situation in Mozambique, producing strong assimilationism during the socialist period and an increasing desire to combine adherence to western culture with a concomitant celebration of local ‘tradition’. As Mozambique to-day draws closer to British and north American notions of multiculturalism and ‘ethnic difference’ the article shows how these in a sense represent the logical contemporary sequels of segregation in the past.

Literacy in Greek allowed the turn-of-the-century Cretan authorities to regulate property transfers with increasing precision in the specification of value and location. Against the resulting official logic, however, everyday practices and knowledge – associated with the culture of the departing Turks – came to symbolise the highly valued pleasures of social intimacy. This article thus illustrates the conversion of historical process and experience into mutually opposed forms of symbolic capital.

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.

Culture and citizenship have frequently been regarded as concepts for separate disciplines and the anthropological focus on culture has distracted attention from the concept of citizenship. Although sociologists have traditionally neglected the cultural dimension of citizenship, I argue that citizenship is an inherently cultural concept, which projects it firmly into the realm of anthropology. Whether the relationship between citizenship and culture is explicit as in the Baltic States, or denied as in the case of France, I argue that the concept of ‘culture-blind’ citizenship is impossible and that anthropologists can have a significant input into the understanding of contemporary citizenship.

In land claims cases presented by aboriginal peoples the burden of proof rests normally with the claimants. They have to substantiate the assertion that the territory in question was in their possession at the time it was colonised and that they formed ‘an ordered society’ according to characteristics defined by the law, or that their usage is acceptable as customary law. In such cases anthropologists are often called upon as expert witnesses for the plaintiffs or the court. This article discusses the framing of anthropological knowledge produced within the legal context. In this context of opposing arguments constituted by a hegemonic order of alleged rationalism (or often ‘common sense’ masquerading as rationalism), the reliability of information is established or dismissed through a process of opposing questioning by the parties' attorneys. This testing of anthropological knowledge may at times challenge a dominant perspective within the discipline, namely that which underscores notions of the past as constructed upon premises of the present, or the flexible and adaptive quality of most social entities. The anthropological perspective emphasises culture not as a cluster of established institutions, customs or forms of social organisation, but as responsive to changing internal and external conditions. In so doing, the perspective may invite the court's suspicion of being fuzzy, biased and unreliable. The article argues that, rather than abandoning our discipline's stance of refuting essentialist versions of ‘cultures’ in order to adjust our testimony to the legal profession's preconceived ideas of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ as objective criteria of legal treatment, we should propagate the need for a pluralist conception.

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.

The environment has become a powerful locus for the negotiation of cultural identity in Europe. The problem of local resistance to the creation of new conservation areas compels us to question how tropes of cultural alterity shapes environmental programmes in the rural margins of the European Union. In Sardinia, the allochronism deployed in explanations of criminality has also framed discourses promoting a new Italian national park. Converging visions of social and ecological backwardness have naturalised the cultural distance between those who see the Sardinian forest as a local resource protected by indigenous traditions, and those who see it as a European or global resource endangered by local ignorance and violence. Local resistance to the park operates in a range of symbolic and material modes, opening ambiguous political spaces in which to challenge European and environmentalist constructions of history, modernity and backwardness.

This paper examines an indigenous complex of ideas about illnesses, misfortunes and trances in relation to the concept of ‘intercorporeality’, as discussed by Weiss and Waldby. Intercorporeality helps us understand some Nayaka senses of batha, and sheds light on the relational nuances of this indigenous notion. Batha suggests another rendition of intercorporeality, which does not pluralise the individual's ‘inside’ as a composite embodiment of exterior relations, classes and hierarchies. Rather, this indigenous category underscores the sense of an irreducible plurality of ‘relatives’, each joined to all the others, constituting a web of mutualities that transcend classes and boundaries, including even human/non-human.

The article draws on neo-Kantian themes in a study of the Jamaican nine night – the wake following a death. Using Bakhtin`s notion of ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’, and Simmel's ideas concerning the existential basis of religious belief, I investigate the nine night from multiple ethnographic perspectives. For its participants the nine night presents a vehicle in which understandings concerning the self can be explored aesthetically. Key cultural motifs are put in play, in particular ‘burlesque’ versus ‘seriousness’: actors use these to express subjective meanings within shared frameworks. By focusing of existential concerns, the nine night localises much wider social networks.

In spite of their long experience in the analysis of folk knowledge on nature and of the large number of contributions devoted to the relations societies entertain with their environment, anthropologists today are hardly ever consulted at a time when environmental issues have become crucial. In particular, the way knowledge about living beings is organised along different levels is barely taken into account. While the first level is the acknowledgment of the diversity of beings and is manifested through the attribution of naming terms, the second illustrates how each society orders this diversity. The examples used here mainly belong to the vegetal domain. Last, at a third level, encompassing the whole of society, we can see that it is not so much the individuals which constitute the diversity of the living as the elements that constitute them.

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.

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.