What is the future of the disciplinary label ‘social anthropology’? The localised intellectual universes within which we carry out our early training as anthropologists are constantly penetrated and challenged by universal trends. At the same time, due to their relative independence, these local intellectual universes play an important role as spaces where intellectual reproduction can carry on in relative independence from the global hegemonic voices. In this paper I argue for a more complex approach to the concept of ‘alterity’, claiming that the constant discourse of self-accusation concerning anthropology's past and its essential ‘westernness’ hides the complexity of the interactions that went into the construction of the anthropological cannon which we are today reproducing globally. Today's anthropology has become increasingly symmetrical.

The article discusses the dispersion of candomblé imagery, practices and aesthetics in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia. It shows that the spirit possession cult has become a trademark for the Bahian state and a major ‘symbol bank’ for groups as varied as the Bahian gay movement, environmental pressure groups and black activists. As candomblé enters ever new circuits of Bahia's representational economy, and finds itself dressed in ever new ideological garments, the classic anthropological construction of candomblé as a ‘religion’ and an ‘African universe in Brazil’ no longer manages to capture the wild variety of Gestalten in which candomblé makes its public appearance. The case of candomblé therefore challenges the boundedness of our anthropological categories of thought.

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.

This article presents a contextualised, interpretative analysis of the debate about the word neger that took place in the Norwegian mass media during the winter of 2000–01. The aim is to contribute ethnographic material and analytical perspectives to the comparative analysis of the current reinforcement of ethnic national boundaries as a reaction to extra-European immigrants to Europe and the accompanying normalisation of racial discourses. On the one hand, Norwegian mainstream reaction draws on the same sort of racial ideas and boundary-constructing practices found in other European countries. On the other, the contributors to the debate drew on a complex set of discourses and exhibited particular points of emphasis. For many majority Norwegians a specific collective memory and a corresponding national self-image are currently at stake. In this self-image Norway is always outside imperialism and colonialism, and innocent in relation to the colonial legacy. The analytical argument of the paper is that when people construct racial boundaries, they draw on a mixture of discourses, rooted in different social realms, with different histories and degrees of legitimacy. The self-evidence of racial categories derives from the legitimacy of well established historical themes, concepts and lines of conflict. As the debate about the word neger unfolded over time, majority hegemony was challenged, rearticulated and reconfirmed.

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.

Thinking about the future, we are obliged to rethink conventional accounts of our history. Alternative histories challenge received ideas about the development of British social anthropology. Some have put in question the precise nature of the Malinowskian revolution. Others reopen debates about the relationship between anthropology and colonialism (or, more broadly, about the relevance of social anthropology to policy questions). And the oral tradition insistently reminds us that private histories may undermine what we think we know about the great figures of the past. As we consider the prospects for European social anthropology, other questions impose themselves. One has to do with the institutional rivalries between social anthropology and sociology, and between social anthropology conceived of as a social science and the cultural anthropology dominant in the United States.

In this article I analyse material from a video ethnography of British domestic laundry processes to examine different individual approaches to the sensory nature and evaluation of clean and dirty laundry. Drawing from recent work in the anthropology of the senses I suggest that an analysis of different individual sensory experiences of and narratives about modern western laundry processes can lead to a series of anthropological reflections about how these are constitutive of identities, moralities, human agency and processes by which conventions change.

After a couple of decades of post-modernist debate, time is ripe to reassess the unity of anthropology as a distinct field of knowledge. Many disciplines study culture and quite a few have embraced ‘ethnography’ and fieldwork. The distinction of anthropology is not, therefore, implied simply by a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (fieldwork). I shall argue that the distinction derives from a particular way of relating to the object and pertaining to both the relations in the field, and the way in which these relations infuse the resulting knowledge. By tracing the development of anthropology through various ‘turns’ and delineating the contours of a particular mode of anthropological attention, the article makes a case for the vitality and pertinence of the anthropological field, which it owes to the power of bringing the ethnographic and the epistemological into coincident view.

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.

With the expansion of anthropology to new objects, the definition of its boundaries has become so fuzzy as to warrant questions about its unity. Method rather than content offers possible common ground to various breeds of anthropologist, provided that it is taken to mean what they really do rather than what they say they do. In discussing three operations that enter into their common practice (description, comprehension and explanation), it is argued that anthropology amounts less to a specific method answering to strict epistemological requirements than to a certain style of knowledge building on the universal workings of intersubjectivity.

The article considers the relationship between the ideological notion of the person and personhood established interpersonally in socialist East Germany. It criticises theories of resistance arguing that both narratives ‘conversationally’ depend on one another. This is explored with regard to a socialist transition ritual, in which ideological and social values come together. Through their co-existence in this ambiguous setting the two narratives reinforce one another. This understanding of a co-dependency of ideology and grass-roots practices is as yet largely absent from the literature. It is, however, necessary in order to understand moral debates and cultural continuity in present eastern Germany.

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.

A social anthropologist venturing into an interdisciplinary field at the University of Cambridge describes some of the hazards of equipping herself with ethnographic skills. The ethnographic object is the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park, a government-funded enterprise intended to create ‘knowledge [about human genetics]…validated through the critical appraisal of research findings, ethical, legal and social analysis and the inclusion of a consumer perspective’. It is deeply concerned with law, norms and society. The author will attempt to explain the indirection of her approach to studying this phenomenon – through an activity (a seminar series) organised off-site, focused on means (interdisciplinarity) not ends, and raising an apparently extraneous topic (forms of ownership) for discussion.

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.

In 1956, P. E. de Josselin de Jong published a paper on the participants view of their culture. He examined discrepancies between the views of the researcher and those of the participants concluding that ‘participants show awareness of structure when the structural principle is supported by an ideal, and is therefore of importance for them’. In this paper I examine the complex interaction in Inuit studies between views of participants, often integrating outsiders' perceptions, and those of researchers, reconstructing participants' views in terms of their own ideas and values.

At a time when the world is facing profound challenges and transformations (the erosion of human rights, the destruction of the environment, the criminalisation of immigrants and the resurgence of fundamentalisms of all sorts – to name just a few) the need for the anthropological study of political processes has hardly ever been greater. In fact, the unique sensitivity and commitment of anthropology to culture, translation, lived experiences, people's views and everyday practices, holism and context, comparison, long-term fieldwork and ethnographic detail, deconstruction and reflexivity (all features generally less present in other fields of studies) make the discipline's engagement with things political quite necessary. However, to meet this demand, both scholars and students of (political) anthropology need an updated conceptual tool-kit.

In many ways, nomadic and pastoral communities live at the fringes of the contemporary nation-state: literally, since for historical and political reasons they often inhabit its border regions; and metaphorically, as they often find themselves at a considerable distance from the seats of power and decision-making. These communities also occupy a rather ambivalent position in the modernist imagination: they are regarded on the one hand as ‘authentic’, on the other as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’; as either preserving a delicate natural balance between man and nature or sharing a deeply rooted, irrational, ‘love’ for their animals; as proud, fierce and independent, or as stubborn, traditionalist, a hindrance on the way to development.