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.

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.

Anthropology's language of society, which is one of the discipline's major achievements, did not arise by taking into account the possibility that other societies might have their own language of society. In the example of the Cubeo mourning ceremony, a traditional interpretation argues that its instrumental value is to resolve the emotional rupture brought on by death. Viewed in its own terms, however, the ritual is an elaborate contemplation of death and of the conditions of adultery, violence and sorcery, which the Cubeo understand give rise to death. This paper elucidates the Cubeo language of society, which is expressed in ritual terms, and their consciousness of sociality.

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.

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.

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.

Originally designed by an emerging sociology upon the model of the social corps as defined by Ancien Régime society, the notion of community retains an anti-individualist flavour delivered in terms of a global ideological value. Yet, the nineteenth-century Russian slavophile movement provides an appropriate example to demonstrate how, through the construction of ‘collective actors’ endowed with consciousness and proper will, the ‘community’ as a principle constituted for holistic societies a powerful factor of modern acculturation.

The contemporary ‘communautarism’ is one of its distant avatars which, far from being opposed to individualism, intensifies it by reducing all collective forms of belonging to subjective claims and choices.

The new forms of entrepreneurship that constitute the Mauritian economic landscape – modelled very often by ethnic traits – where the plantation activities are mixed with business, cannot be understood independent of the long history of the island. The double French and English colonial system has conditioned the emergence of the liberal society of today. The communal system that was born out of the independence movements has transformed the centrality of the State in a periphery coordinating and managing ethnic relations. New relations are engaged between the civil society and the State in order to harmonize the political cultural links with the contemporary external relations.

The Kutchi Saraswat Brahmins have served in the past many business communities, perticularly the Lohana, Bhatia and Bhansali. After having explored the relations these communities had between each other and with these Brahmins, the article focusses upon the existing contemporary links these last and the Kutchi Lohana of Bhuj and Pune. Since the Kutchi Saraswat have often followed the Lohana in their successive migrations, their networks tend to be coextensive and this is ascertained by crossing the data from the censuses made by their caste associations. The study combines data from field surveys and several caste publications.

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

After the publication of my ethnography on the dual organisation of a German village, I returned to the field to present it to the people. Villagers invited the local press to write about the book presentation. When a review article appeared in a national newspaper, television and radio stations tried to establish contacts with the villagers as well as with myself. The paper will reflect upon the complexity of power and representation, and will identify the different discourses, which emerged from the interplay of several agencies: television, press and radio, as well as different fractions and voices from the village itself mobilised. Conflicting ideas of cultural authenticity, relational difference, confidentiality, and the tensions between representation in speech and in writing will be examined. The case study throws light on the facets of reading, understanding, misunderstanding and interpretation in the politics of ethnographic writing.

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.

Modern manufacturing concepts are new to the developing countries like India where massive industrialisation has taken place only in the last two to three decades. Beset with problems of productivity and quality, Western and Japanese management concepts are being tried vigorously with little success. It is almost becoming apparent that such concepts as the Japanese JIT can succeed best only when practised by Japanese people in Japanese environment. Does this mean that the culture of a country and indigenous perceptions need to be integrated to evolve a model that will succeed in a particular region?

A recent pilot study done in South India revealed the presence of such a link. It proposes that the conflicts between modern and indigenous concepts at the workplace should be the object of an in-depth study and that if approached from an anthropological point of view could provide a successful model of such dynamics.

Indian indigenous economic concepts are supplemented by comparative fundamental concepts both present in Japan and Europe.

The lack of an autochthonous frame of the notion of ‘frontier’ in Trieste, a coastal town in the north-east of the Adriatic Sea, calls for an anthropological reflection on its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history. The analysis of its social structure and evolution as a free port established by the house of Habsburg constitutes the place of departure for the observation of the tension between feudal, national, imperial and universal forms of political sovereignty within the context of a society composed of different linguistic and religious traditions. The centrality of the ancient municipal reference is recognised as the main factor of continuity and social integration among these groups and their principles of political identification.

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.

Entering the field. New perspectives on world football. Edited by Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti. Oxford: Berg. 1997. 319 pp. Hb.: £14.95. ISBN 1 85973 198 8.

Until a few years ago, dedicating an academic volume to the anthropology of football would have seemed a mere diversion, little more than an intellectual whim. In spite of their important social repercussions, sports in general and football in particular were considered minor, even irrelevant, objects of study. Condemned by the majority of intellectuals as an ‘opium of the people’ at the service of the authoritarian or democratic powers that be, academics ceded the sporting terrain to other more or less organic intellectuals, such as sports journalists and a few assorted essayists and writers (such as Eduardo Galeano [1995] and Manuel Vazquez Montalban [1995], who have published poetic accounts of football and its metaphors). Until recently, only one of the many aspects of the football scene, not surprisingly its most problematic and morbid, had captured the attention of social researchers: stadium violence associated with hooliganism. One might ask, then, echoing Marc Augé (1982: 59), if ‘the timidity of the human sciences with regard to important modern day rituals is not due to the fact that those who would observe and analyse such rituals are too close to them?’ However, as Fabio Dei (1992: 7) has pointed out, ‘the anthropological relevance of football is related to its strong affinity with a series of classic themes in the discipline: ritual, sacrifice, violence, symbolic communication, etc’. Why have anthropologists, specialists in distant peoples and exotic rituals, taken so long to visit tribes much closer to home, yet perhaps no less exotic? By considering the football tribes of Manchester United, Flamengo or Football Club Barcelona, anthropologists can observe modern forms of totemism and segmentarity.

The concept of ‘ethnographic present’ as discussed in methodological texts in our discipline has been very badly served. In fact, the concept could be methodologically very useful. Instead of continuing to be frightened by the ‘functionalist’ bogeyman, we should usefully apply the phrase ‘ethnographic present’ to speak of the awareness of the conjunctural nature of all ethnography.

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.

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.