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.

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.

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 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.

L'article examine une alliance électorale survenue en 2001 dans une petite ville du nord de la France, dirigée par le parti communiste depuis 1929. Cette alliance intervient alors qu'une loi récente sur les regroupements de communes renforce une marginalisation de la ville amèrement ressentie par ses acteurs politiques, avec une acuité que redouble une situation de dissidence interne au parti communiste, lui-même marginalisé au niveau national. Cet exemple permet de montrer un double processus contradictoire: la retraduction du localisme sous l'angle de la ‘résistance’ au libéralisme par la municipalité; la ‘normalisation’ politique qui s'opère par la rationalisation des instances politiques locales qu'illustre ici le regroupement intercommunal.

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 three essays in this special section of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale are unusual in many respects, yet they represent a central aspect of what I believe to be the journal's intellectual mission. Twentieth-century European social anthropology has, under the influence of its predominantly British and French ancestors, concentrated on socio-cultural phenomena. If other European traditions in anthropology or ethnology maintained relationships with archaeology, folklore and literature, socio-linguistics, or biological anthropology, they were overshadowed by these dominant social anthropological traditions. The dominant European traditions themselves, while keeping up with North American cultural anthropology, rarely connected systematically with the other three of the North American ‘four fields’: linguistics, archaeology and biological anthropology. That is unfortunate, especially in the case of the latter. North American anthropology cannot be understood without going back on the scientific use of the biological category of ‘race’ that Franz Boas tried to combat by highlighting the notion of culture. Likewise, one cannot get a good sense of the history of European anthropology without attempting to understand why the history of social anthropology usually erases its historical origins in the biological inspiration that determined the work of figures like Cuvier, Prichard, Desmoulins and Darwin (see Huxley 1900 [1865]; Stocking 1973). We are still the heirs of Durkheim, Malinowski and Boas, for whom biology was, so to speak, the ‘significant other’ of the science of culture and society.

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.

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.

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.

In Tonga, transgender men and heterosexually-defined men form sexual and romantic relationships. However, these relationships are unthinkable to mainstream society because they are incommensurable with the three dyadic principles that define gender, particularly the covenant between sisters and brothers. Transgender persons seek different solutions to this dilemma, which include the exploitation of the symbolic and material resources that the outside world offers, although all solutions run the risk of aggravating their abjection. Abjection is thus the product of multiple dynamics of boundary formation, including gender, kinship, and marriage, as well as the delimitation between locality and the outside world.

There are three ways of construing the relationship between anthropology and science. First, we can speak of the anthropology of science. This includes anthropological studies of scientific institutions, forms of knowledge and ways of working. Second, we can speak of anthropology between science and society. In this field, anthropologists have been looking at the impacts of scientific knowledge and practices on social life, and how people have responded to them. Third, we can speak of anthropology as science. By this I do not mean to revive the old debate over whether anthropology is a science or an art. I intend rather to signal anthropology's potential contribution to the scientific understanding of human beings and their forms of life.

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.

This paper discusses the notion of debt in Pesillo, a Quichua community in Northern Ecuador. Using data from the Andes, a region underrepresented in the anthropological literature on exchange, and focusing on practices and relations of debt, that is, a topic little analysed in both economic anthropology and Andean ethnography, this paper demonstrates that debt is a category permeated with spiritual, moral and legal meaning. Following the arguments of Malamoud (1988) and comparing Andean material with ethnographic findings from Asia, this paper argues that debt is an important expression of a wider system of exchange that shows the proactive, performative behaviour of the people involved in it, and that it provides a privileged entrance to the understanding of the links between economy, exchange and culture.

Of the diverse calls for a self-consciously ‘Darwinian’ anthropology, none is particularly satisfactory. In this paper I review five such calls and discuss their shortcomings in the light of anthropological knowledge. These are (i) the call to model cultural variation as genetic; (ii) the call to interpret all human social behaviour as ‘fitness-maximising’; (iii) the theory of memes; (iv) the use of chimpanzees as models for human behaviour; and (v) Darwinism as an evangelical ideology. I conclude with a programme for an inclusive, scientific anthropology that is consistent with Darwinian biology.

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.

How can biological and social anthropologists today relate to each other's work? Using my research in biological anthropology as an example, I show that the African great apes sometimes engage in meaning-making as they act together. That is, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos communicate, especially through gesture, in contingent and creative ways, going beyond a mere exchange of signals to achieve co-construction of meaning. I argue that when biological anthropologists join social anthropologists in studying meaning-making, the two disciplines are inherently in relation.

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.

Bridge, Simon, Ken O'Neill and Stan Cromie. 2003. Understanding enterprise, entrepreneurship and small business (second edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. xxiii + 520 pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 0 333 96499 3. Pb.: £25.99. ISBN: 0 333 98465 X.

Burns, Paul. 2001. Entrepreneurship and small business. Basingstoke: Palgrave. xxiv + 418 pp. Pb.: £29.99. ISBN: 0 333 91474 0.

Shield, Renée Rose. 2002. Diamond stories. Enduring change on 47th Street. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. xiii + 233 pp. Pb.: $29.95. ISBN: 0 8014 3989 2.

Kloosterman, Robert, and Jan Rath (eds.). 2003. Immigrant entrepreneurs. Venturing abroad in the age of globalisation. Oxford: Berg. xix + 331 pp. Hb.: £45.00. ISBN: 1 85973 634 3. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN: 1 85973 639 4.

Les activités commerciales et les petites et moyennes entreprises sont au cœur de ces quatre ouvrages. Mais il s'agit là de leur unique point commun, et ces livres développent des perspectives sur le sujet qui différent plus qu'elles ne se ressemblent. Le passage en revue de ces publications est donc l'occasion de tirer profit de cette juxtaposition hétéroclite et de distinguer trois approches des activités commerciales:

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.