A micro-state located on the frontier between Spain and France in the middle of the Pyrenees, Andorra was a very poor country traditionally based on pastoralism. It has become nowadays a free trading zone involved in commercial and financial international flows. In this article, we analyse the structural and strategic role of the frontier as it defines the economic system of the country and the lifeways of its inhabitants. We also discuss the various forms of endogenous frontiers (social, legal and cultural) which divide people and make of Andorra a society organised through significant internal segmentation. The country also hosts a large proportion of foreign workers next to a national and hegemonic minority based on the control of political power and the preservation of old privileges.

Is Mauss so original that nobody before him had opened an anthropological way to study the gift? A philosopher of Hungarian Law, Somlò published in 1909 ‘Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft’ (The circulation of valuables in primitive society). In one of the numerous footnotes of his essay on the gift, Mauss mentions this book, stating that Somlò: ‘inaugurates the path we shall ourselves undertake’. In spite of this remarkable acknowledgment, Somlò seems to have left no trace in a domain where Malinowski, Thurnwald and Mauss himself among many have become classical references. How then to account for Somlò, a possible predecessor of Mauss?

The ordinarinesses and simultaneities of experience

Journeys with Flies is a lyrical account of time spent between 1973 and 1994 among Mbanduru, Zhu and Tswana in the Kalahari desert. An extract from an opening section, ‘Entries’ (pp. 18–19), reads as follows:finding in an abandoned geology camp used in a premature hunt for oil on the Yukon coast in the 50s a rusted can of strawberry jam pulled open with our fingers scooping out the contents ravenous for sugar and fat our supply plane fogbound for weeks at Inuvik pilot biscuit and the caribou we shot thin in the calving season keeping us full but unsatisfied when the plane finally arrived we ate butter by the handful and had roaring diarrhea all that night that never lost the light of day . . .At Nwama, Eiffel-rust rain etched across chalcedony-green afterlight sucked out of the mid-Atlantic where the rainbow arc of the sunken sun is gliding toward North America.I can imagine that to be an organic reality, a function of the electrical charge of light clinging to its own perimeter and to reflections of important earth features – Guatemalan jungles could furnish the green for those bound to that place – wind carrying Eiffelcolor down with the shape blown into the rain. You can’t be in only one place at a time – how could you find the way there, or ever return?Coffee boiled for an hour in milk constantly skimmed so that it is like hot cocoa with a different taste, bitter roots roasted on a fire, and long after dark, the milking done, huge bowls of fresh clabbered yogurt . . .all this milk. Just a month ago there was practically none; only cows with newly dropped calves had enough so that some could be taken for people to drink.Those were hard days:look at usthinness is taking us’. Journeys with Flies is a literary-anthropological attempt to treat the perennial existential question of identity, an attempt to do justice to the commonalities of human embodied experience and to adumbrate a language of their conveyance.

As of the 1960s, anthropologists from different national traditions have tended to agree upon an interpretation of Marcel Mauss' The Gift. The essay, it is believed, amounts to a theory of exchange whose primary feature is the identification of the gift with the spirit of the donor. This approach, emphasising ‘exchange’ and its ‘spiritual aspects’, is significantly different from the interpretation offered by Mauss' contemporaries, who stressed its references to law, to obligations and to total prestations. Tracing references to The Gift in the work of anthropologists and placing them within a precise chronological order, the paper identifies the moment in which a particular spin has been produced and analyses the social conditions that contributed to the establishment of a doxa in the field. By showing how a particular representation of Mauss' essay became taken for granted, this case-study offers methodological tools to be used in the appraisal of other episodes in the history of social anthropology.

To ‘provincialise’ Europe is to undertake the enormously difficult task – because of the intractable paradoxes involved and the blind alleys encountered at every turn – of demonstrating what from a certain perspective should be obvious enough: that Europe is not the centre of the world, but only a small group of nations occupying a small region of the world that has attracted attention to itself during the last few centuries – an instant in the wider scheme of things. It is to show that far from being the source of all legitimate signification, Europe and more broadly the west is simply one among many other such sources – past and, no doubt, future ones; and that therefore it cannot decide for all of us, once and for all, what it means to be. To provincialise Europe, in short, is to try and make room in the world for other ways of being.

As convenors of the Younger Scholars' Forum for the 2004 EASA Conference in Vienna, we were charged with devising an international panel that would address the general theme ‘Face-to-face. Connecting distance and proximity’. Our panel, originally entitled ‘When communication ends …’, was thus a provocation to think ethnographically about the relationships through which anthropologists habitually conduct fieldwork. In particular we wanted to provoke discussion on what we termed ‘the discomfort of proximity’ and to think further about fieldwork circumstances in which anthropologists might actually seek to establish ‘distance’ rather than ‘proximity’ while in the field. Anthropologists tend to assume that the quality of their ethnographic evidence depends on the quality of interaction and communication with their interlocutors. This after all is why we continue to fight for the chance to carry out long-term fieldwork and insist on the necessity of proficiency in local languages. There is furthermore a common disciplinary assumption that close and intense relationships enable a sense of identification (albeit partial and vicarious) with those with whom we carry out the research. Our ethnographic understandings thus depend on finding ways of overcoming distance as we strive to transform the mutual ‘strangeness’ of the early stages of fieldwork into a more cosy proximity through which some degree of mutual understanding might be achieved. After all, the quality of our ethnographic knowledge is fundamentally based on the relationships between the researcher and those individuals she or he is living with.

This text examines a series of family conflicts, judicial battles and political struggles having as their main stage the city of Salta, situated in the extreme north-west of Argentina. This constellation of events merges with the political chronology of the country: it begins in 1946, the year of Juan Perón's election as president, and ends in 1955, when he was overthrown by a coup d'état. The objective of the text is to analyse the relations between sentiments and actions associated with social spaces of different natures and scales, such as the space of the ‘good families’ of Salta, of the ‘spirit’ of the Argentine north-west, or of the people from Argentina's interior and of those from its centre. By studying the relationships between native conceptions of intimacy and publicity that are at play in this case, the article proposes an outline of a social phenomenology of the social space concerned with the temporal dimension of social life.

‘At this millennial transition, the human capacity to envision imaginary worlds seems to be shifting into high gear. For anthropologists and others, greater concern with how ideas and power converge seems eminently warranted.’

Eric R. Wolf, Envisioning power, 1999

The arrival in 1999 of Eric Wolf's last book Envisioning power. Ideologies of dominance and crisis generated much excitement. Long the standard bearer for political economy in anthropology and often credited with bringing Marxism to anthropology, Wolf had not published a major monograph since Europe and the people without history, which in 1982 defined Marxian anthropology. A very different book, in a very different time, Envisioning power represented Eric Wolf's attempt to highlight the importance of ideology in the exercise of power through looking at three societies in crisis: the post-contact Kwakiutl, the pre-contact Tenochca and National Socialist Germany.

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.

This paper discusses conventional illusory enactments, largely recognised as such by those who undertake them, drawn from two Central African male initiation rites: the novices' dramatic execution on the one hand, and the purportedly painless sacrifice of the ritual's emblematic animal on the other. In doing so, it attempts to elucidate two related forms of religious reflexivity: ritual ‘dissimulation’, centred around the manipulation of persons, and ritual ‘simulation’ founded upon the manipulation of non-persons (animals, objects, spells, images, and so forth). The actors' commitment to such performances as necessary and appropriate ones is related in the first case to the interdependent relationship that is set up between the perceptions different categories of participants have of the event they are jointly involved in, and in the second case, to the way the mediating qualities of non-persons serve to embed the participants' actions within auto-referential circuits in which relations of causality and representation converge.

This special section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale originates in a symposium organised in December 2003 at Leiden University by the ethnological debating club WDO. As students of cultural anthropology and development sociology at this university, we were ‘facing fieldwork’, both retrospectively, in the task of making sense of our – relatively short – field research required for the Leiden MA thesis, and prospectively as future PhD students hoping for an extended stay.

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?

This section, ‘Re-defining Europe: perspectives from socio-cultural anthropology’ is the outcome of the plenary panel of the same title, convened at the eighth conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Vienna, in September 2004. The essays' common frame of reference is given by the complex and contradictory processes of transformation and redefinition that Europe is currently going through. Juergen Habermas (2001) observed that the most recent phase in these processes, after years of post-communist priorities for explicit market economy values, may be characterised by a ‘return of the political’, which has shaped global processes in a number of unprecedented, complex and tragic forms since 11 September 2001. If Habermas's diagnosis is accepted with certain qualifications, these renewed political aspects also contribute in new ways to the manner in which Europeans redefine themselves, as much as they are being re-defined by others. In view of these heterogeneous forms of re-defining Europe on all levels, this may indeed be the right moment also to re-examine established and somewhat worn-out notions and concepts of identity itself (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). The contested processes of re-defining Europe are profoundly shaped by those new global contexts of the present Habermas was referring to. Opposing or supporting the American-led coalition presence in Iraq, promoting or criticising negotiations with potential new European Union member countries or choosing one or other position with regard to an EU constitution: all these important decisions, struggles and debates concern the future of Europe, the future of identities in Europe and the positioning of Europe in shifting global contexts.

From its late eighteenth century beginnings until the early twentieth century, the House of Rothschild was the greatest of the European banks. Its success was due not only to the financial skills of the partners but also to their innovative strategies in the sphere of kinship and marriage. The structure of the bank was dependent on the family's unique rules of succession and marriage. It was organised into five branches, each in a different country, originally directed by one of the five sons of the founder, Mayer Amschel. The branches were linked by ties of fraternity, reinforced by repeated endogamous marriages. These marriages were normally contracted between the children of partners. Given the rule, established by Mayer Amschel, that only the founder's sons and, later, their sons and sons sons could become partners, the most common pattern was for a man to marry his father's brother's daughter.

The disagreement between writers such as Goody and writers who have taken a similar line to myself is not over whether literacy can be involved in great social changes, whether it can facilitate communication and the storage of information or whether it has become, in many places, a mechanism for operating social distinction. We are all agreed about this. In fact, all the points the author makes about the Iban, as he generously acknowledges in several places in the paper, are points I have made myself in relation to the Merina in a number of articles reproduced in How we think they think (Bloch 1998; originally Bloch 1968, 1989, 1994).

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.