In spite of recent criticisms the concept of ethnicity should be retained in anthropological analysis to designate more or less coherent cultural entities. These entities will be fluctuating of course, due to their position in a larger social space where women, goods, ideas and institutions are exchanged. Ethnicity is not, as some have argued, a colonial invention, but an incontestable anthropological fact, where identity is nurtured by otherness. Ethnicity does not of itself have a political vocation: traditional African states were more often than not pluri-ethnic. The ‘national’ phenomenon, the convergence of the State and ethnicity is rare in pre-colonial African history. The nation-state is a modern phenomenon, the product of a more or less arbitrary manipulation by an elite having a certain number of ethnic features: a political re-modelling of collective identity.

In countries where orality is by far the principal mean of communication, poetry has a key role in shaping people's imagery and conception of their role in society. Many studies on Somali's orature have focused on religious poetry as a political arena, as well as on poetry itself as a representation of historical and political cultural concerns. In this article I assume that the Muslim religious arena in Somalia also provides cognitive maps of power and gender relations in society and that the production/reproduction of religious poetry constitutes a way continuously to negotiate the image inherent in such maps. The production and reproduction of religious poetry in the Somali's country is intertwined with the bodily rhythmical movements and ecstatic experiences people undergo when participating in dikri celebrations; such bodily experiences cannot be disentangled from the poetry itself. In the article I analyse Sufistic experiences as they are one of the relevant context of the production/reproduction of religious poetry in Somalia. In particular, I focus on women's Sufistic experiences in rural contexts which are usually neglected in the study of Somali religious spheres, and poetry.

Focusing on local cognitive orientation and practice, described as producing ‘a sense of place’, the article discusses how macro-political processes associated with the UN's decolonisation programme affect the atoll society of Tokelau in the South Pacific. Local orientation is expressed as a general tendency to represent relationships in spatial terms. Political practice takes the form of fighting for ascendancy. It is shown to be attached to a qualitatively different way of life than that connected to institutions established as infrastructural prerequisites for achieving nationhood. The balancing act Tokelauans, along with their political counterparts, achieve represents a genuine case, one which may in turn serve as a model for experimenting nationhood elsewhere.

As an anthropologist working on citizenship, I cannot but be delighted to see what has sometimes been perceived as an ‘illegitimate’ object for the discipline attracting growing interest. While in such matters, it is often difficult to distinguish clearly between different lines of arguments that are entangled in complex ways, I will try to organise my comments around two themes: a critical discussion of Nic Craith's approach to citizenship as being so much informed by a ‘culturalist’ approach to culture that it cannot avoid certain traps; and my proposals for an alternative way of discussing relationships between identities and citizenship from an anthropological perspective.

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.

The reconfiguration of Europe following the end of the Cold War has gone through various phases, some of them closely connected to the emergence of the so-called new right in Western Europe's political landscape. Here I propose the concept of ‘neo-nationalism’ as an anthropological approach to comparative analyses of these phenomena, which may be understood as a new variant of nationalism in post-colonial and post–Cold War contexts of globalised re-adjustment. Ethnographic examples indicate that fear of downward social mobility and the ‘angry white men’ syndrome represent common core elements on a social level. By charismatic appeals and performances, neo-nationalist leaders pursue mass mobilisation against enemies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Although neo-nationalism may appear to be stagnant today, the current atmosphere of crisis in the EU could provide opportunities for a next phase of neo-nationalist re-orientation and competitive engagement.

What does it mean to be Swiss? Or, how to justify the existence of the Swiss nation? Within a country defined by cultural heterogeneity, a pervading influence is exerted by what has to be labelled an Alpine myth over any idea and practice to legitimate a national unity. Today, for a great number of people, the Alpine myth is still a widely shared belief that serves to unite the country. But for those who no longer believe in such a founding myth, the question of the very existence of Switzerland is a more and more relevant one, as it becomes increasingly difficult to define what holds together the various parts of the country.

This article is about personal identity documents and bureaucratic space in Peru. In applying for and renewing a range of personal documentation, individuals trace and re-trace steps through the streets and official buildings of Cuzco in Peru's southern highlands. This movement is highly visible in an unusual urban setting characterised by complex overlays of Incan, colonial, republican and contemporary administrative spaces. While the state constructs personal identification in the process, bodily lessons of citizenship are conveyed through spatial interaction with bureaucratic room. Active participation and varying degrees of acquiescence in these documentary peregrinations visibly legitimise the state presence and dominion on the urban scene. Thus, citizens are created through the sequence of bureaucratic identification on the one hand, and on the other, the state is made evident through the dynamic movement of people through the identification process. Bodily movement both integrates bureaucratic space and is integrated by such places.

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.

Historical context

On 14 January 1989, twenty-two anthropologists from twelve western European countries assembled in Castelgandolfo, outside Rome. The Wenner-Gren Foundation provided the necessary funding and Professor Bernardo Bernardi from the University of Rome found the ideal setting: the think-tank of the ENI, the Italian state petroleum company. We were supposed to discuss the possibility of creating an European association of anthropologists. We represented ourselves, not universities, departments or professional associations, and we were not committed to anything in advance. The original plan was to have a preliminary discussion, exploring possibilities and trying to find a common scholarly ground in a new and renovated political climate in Europe. During the meeting we realised that the development of the discipline in countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal, the consolidation in the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, and the vitality of the old centres, Great Britain and France, constituted a base for a closer cooperation in teaching and research. Moreover, the lack of viable and strong national institutions in many countries was seen as an incentive for launching the association. After two days of meeting the European Association of Social Anthropologists was established. Adam Kuper was elected as the chairperson and Raymond Firth and Claude Lévi-Strauss, symbolically representing the two ‘great traditions’, were nominated as honorary members. We decided to set up a register of anthropologists, publish a newsletter, organise postgraduate courses and start the recruitment of members.

In this article I explore the imaginative and practical links that the Gitanos of Jarana, in Madrid, make with other Gitanos and Gypsies elsewhere. What kind of diaspora do they see themselves as belonging to? The context to my investigation is the fast growth of both Gypsy Pentecostalism and Roma international political activism – two movements that, in very different ways, call for the unity of all Gypsies/Roma worldwide. Their efforts contrast greatly with the world-views and attitudes of many of the people of Jarana who reject social harmony and cohesion as paths to community-making.

A great bureaucratic machine works, as its subdued humming testifies, between and within sentient motifs. A social agent, who is a patient/agent within a series of self-proliferating motifs, does not need to know its reason in order to function within it. What is crucial for the reproduction of the bureaucratic machine are the part-to-part and part-to-whole cause and effect relationships between these sentient motifs combined with the performance of a beautiful, monolithic facade. As described by Kafka (and to a lesser extent Foucault), power is architecturally immanent in the modern bureaucratised world. I propose to use an action-centred biographical model of Alfred Gell (which he developed to analyse processes of decorative pattern formation) to capture how the immanent power of architecture works.

This paper explores the consequences of the observation that the ritual structure of the Maltese festa, or saint's feast, is the inverse of the classic rite de passage that served as a model for Maurice Bloch's theory of ritual. Where that theory emphasises the conservatism of ritual structure, I argue that its inverse – in the festa – emphasises the agency inherent in ritual practice. Uncovering such agency requires a move away from the study of ritual per se towards an analysis of ritualisation, and from analysis that places ritual at the centre of the maintenance of authority – and through it historical continuity – to one that sees ritual as a critical site for the struggle over authority, and therefore for the unfolding of historical process through practice.

The paper presents Louis Dumont's point of view on the ‘tribes’ of India according to his controversy with F. Bailey in Contributions to Indian Sociology. I focus in particular on the influences of the Europeanist experience and on the Maussian formation of Dumont on his later perspective in the Indian field. One can then see that what Dumont called the ‘local point of view’ was his specific perspective (adapted from Robert Hertz's legacy) regarding the Indian ‘tribes’. The last part of the article tries to show that this ‘point of view’ is still fruitful in as much as it combines holistic and ethnohistorical perspective, here particularly on the relations between the ‘tribes’ and the ancient local kingdoms.

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.

The meaning of citizenship in any given historical period and in any nation-state resides in the way that people conceive of the relationship between themselves and the state. The nature of this relationship has historically been inextricably tied to questions of democracy and where sovereignty lies. Within the modern period, at least since the Levellers in England in the 1640s and 1650s, rival conceptions of the equality of citizens and the sovereignty of the people have been the site of moral and political conflict and, in some famous instances, revolution. Throughout the French revolution, ideas of citizenship were continually being revised and fought over. Even within the relatively narrow confines of France's Second Republic (1848–51), rival conceptions of citizenship implying quite distinct notions of civil equality and political liberty fed deep political struggles. ‘The democrats’ desire was to incorporate social equality into republican citizenship, while the socialists believed it to be inseparable from revolution in relation to capital and labour' (Furet 1995:425). Smashing the ancien régime was only the beginning of a long and bloody struggle for equality before the law.

This article is a case study which deals with the consequences of a conflict among the Wodani. It describes the irruption of a Cargo Cult in this remote region of New Guinea, a series of incests provoked by the millenarian ideology, followed by murders and internecine war within the Kundiyau clan and, finally, the attempt to resolve these disorders through the organisation of a homicide payment, which, thanks to an unexpected juridical fiction, is collected not from the murderer but from a clan-brother of the incestuous prophet. These developments allow us to consider a number of more general questions: the notion of incest, of clan affiliation and personal identity in Wodani society; the compensation system allowing for the establishment of an equivalence between human lives and means of payment; the eschatological doctrine explaining the reproductive function of shell money; the theory of causality and juridical responsibility justifying a fictitious charge of murder; and finally, the future of the traditional currency in a society which is now compelled to reformulate its cosmological principle of compensation.

Drawing on fieldwork among ‘racist’ white youths in Southeast London, this paper considers the ethical dilemma which arises for the ethnographer when the increasing proximity that developing empathy with her informants implies, is jeopardised because the disposition she is expected to adopt is at odds with what she feels it is right for a person to become. Is her only option to distance herself from what belonging amongst her informants entails? Or could such a crisis help her to understand that resistance and conflict are intrinsic aspects of the learning processes through which any person is continuously making sense of their own social position vis-à-vis others?

George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (Eds.). 2001. Witchcraft dialogues. Anthropological and philosophical exchanges. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 344 pp. $26.00. ISBN 0 89680 220 5.

Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Eds.). 2003. Magic and modernity. Interfaces of revelation and concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 390 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0 8047 4464 5.

Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (Eds.). 2001. Magical interpretations, material realities. Modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, 253 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0415 258677.

Magic is alive and well! Long banned from progressive ethnographic accounts for its implications of backwardness and primitivism, the concept of magic has been reclaimed from its prior function as a negative trope in the constructions of the exotic other and recast to elucidate a wide variety of social processes and practices. Like other once maligned but now rehabilitated conceptual tools of the anthropologist's kit – fetishism and syncretism are two that come to mind – magic has gained a new lease on life to judge from these three recent publications focused on the occult and its ever visible place in contemporary societies the world over. If the volumes under review can be said to share anything, it is precisely an interest in the newly discovered use of magic as an analytical category as well as the intent to contribute to the framing of this renewed anthropological interest. Despite their divergent analytical foci and their distinct uses of interchangeable terms such as the occult, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment to describe local realities, all three propose approaches to the problem of magic that are both enlightening and rewarding for their attention to people's lived experience. All three also present collections of generally well-written and interpretively provocative essays that cover a wide range of issues from a wide range of cultural or historical spaces.