What is ‘social anthropology’ today? How should a journal with that title attempt to negotiate its global scope, its particular lines of descent, its kinship relations? Since Jean-Claude Galey's declaration of intentions in the first issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (Galey 1992), no comparable assessment of the future of the journal, and of the field at which it is directed, has appeared in its pages. In the previous issue, Eduardo Archetti reflected on the journal's past ten years. He provides much food for thought and insight, but – showing a modesty that is as characteristic of my predecessor as it is out of proportion with his actual editorial achievements – says little about where the journal could or should be headed. It seems appropriate, therefore, to formulate a more explicit statement of editorial intent on the occasion of the first issue to appear under my direction.

Recent anthropological theories on violence are predominantly concerned with processes of othering in increasingly postmodern societies, analysing how identity may lead to violence. A second approach, however, focuses on the production of social solidarity within violent groups, asking how violence can be constitutive of identity. While the former talks about social purification, sacrifice, diaspora and displacement, the latter highlights the aggressive, transgressive and often ludic practices of perpetrators of violence operating in young male urban cohorts. This article uses both theories in discussing an ethnic–religious movement known to its militants as both ‘fun’ and violent. It analyses how the effervescence of group aggression may lead to ethnocide and martyrdom.

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.

In this article, I contribute to recent efforts to correct aid organizations' ethnocentric representations of so-called street children. These organizations tend to impose a modern Western notion of childhood that portrays young people from around the world as passive objects of adult subjectivity. Using ethnographic data collected among two bandas (gangs) of so-called street children in Mexico City, I argue that the alternative is not necessarily to portray them in the image of the modern Western adult – as subjects or agents capable of authoring their own actions – but instead to recognize the specificity of the relationship among personhood, action, and sociality in a particular cultural context. Marilyn Strathern's writings on the gift economy help conceptualize this relationship among those of the bandas, who, rather than authoring their own actions, are caused to act by others.

In South Canara, landowners claiming chiefly descent stage the nema, once the central occasion on which chiefs displayed and renewed their power. Through semantic analysis of the nema's syntax the authors show how the meaning of ritual statements are rooted in the context of action, in an age where chiefdoms no longer exist. Analysing specific cases, the authors show how the staging of a nema is a risky venture, claiming or defending positions of a highly political nature. The nema acts to construct important actors who structure the imagined community of Tulunadu, claimed as the homeland of the Tulu-speaking population. The bhutas to which the ritual is dedicated, both legitimise and contest the hierarchy and symbolise the moral values of the community. At the same time, each performance encodes new elements into a continuous production of meaning, rooted in myth, informed by events, and linked into complex traditions and systems of knowledge.

As anthropologists forge a more engaged anthropology, it is important to combat the stereotypes of the discipline that the public holds. The recent controversy over Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado fed on two of these stereotypes: the ‘evil imperial anthropologist’ who does harm to the ‘good subaltern’ native, and the vision of anthropology as a discipline split between ‘scientists’ and ‘postmodernists’. Neither stereotype reflects the research that anthropologists are currently conducting on critical social issues such as immigration, race relations, health care and indigenous land rights. In order to overcome this disjunction between image and reality, we need, first, to transform our relations with the public; second, continue to change our relations with the communities we study by viewing them as equal partners in research and educational activities; and, third, work out effective ways of researching critical social issues that will expand the influence of anthropology in policy debates. I provide examples from the United States of efforts to accomplish these three goals: the AAA's project for a museum exhibit on ‘Understanding race and human variation’, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, and recent research projects on Medicaid Manage Care and welfare reform.

In the context of events on and after 11 September 2001, this paper examines the genre of macro-scenarios, one-big-thing stories, which entered public debate in the post-Cold War period: ‘the clash of civilisations’, ‘the end of history’, ‘the coming anarchy’ etc. It is argued that anthropologists, as they engage with a wider public, should attend to such macro-scenarios, offering ethnographically based critiques of their oversimplifications, but without resorting only to ethnographic qualifications, exceptions and miniatures. Comparative perspectives toward emergent regularities in social life may still allow macro-anthropological contributions to public debates over possible, desirable or undesirable futures.

This paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by ‘antagonism’ in what the paper terms the ‘nationalist imaginary’. Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence of a national enemy is at the core of the ‘defensive’ mobilisations we call nationalisms. It posits that the ‘inside’ of identity formation is not only shaped by but also grounded on the ‘outside’ of the perceived antagonism of an other.

The Australian kinship system type has been a topic of much discussion and of considerable misinterpretation among scholars. It has been characterised as not distinguishing siblings from cross-cousins and as allowing marriage between classificatory siblings. Based on Elkin's work and on data gathered in a desert community and in Alice Springs, the aim of this paper is to propose a coherent interpretation of the Aluridja system, in which terminology has to be distinguished in accordance with the context of reference.

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.

The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, usually looked upon as an instance of colonial picturesque, may in fact be seen as a missing link in the history of French anthropology. Anthropology, both a symbol and an instrument of the new Native policy promoted by the organisers, played a key role in the project of displaying to the public the diversity of the peoples of the empires. The Exhibition provided a venue for anthropological conferences and opportunities for fieldwork, as it gave a prominent place to ethnographic documents, native artefacts and performers. In a sense, it appears as a rehearsal for the Museum of Man that was to be the heart of the discipline.

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.

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 paper discusses critically the concept of ‘appropriation’ and evaluates the usefulness of applying the term in the analysis of cross-cultural communication in a global world. Specifically, I look at contemporary art practices that involve the ‘appropriation’ of ideas, symbols and artefacts from other cultures. Early twentieth century theories of cultural change and cultural contact (in German-speaking anthropology, the United States and Britain) were clearly interested in the ‘migration’ of particular elements (symbolic and material) across cultural boundaries, but suffered from a holistic view of bounded cultures. Recent theories of cultural globalisation on the other hand do not pay sufficient attention to the individual actors (as opposed to groups of individuals) in cross-cultural contact. Hybridisation, creolisation, transculturation and other concepts focus more generically on mixtures of different cultural practices in entire societies, but less on individual strategies. Appropriation then is reevaluated as a hermeneutic procedure, an act of dialogical understanding, by which individual actors negotiate access to, and traffic in, symbolic elements which have no fixed meaning.

Maurice Bloch has rejected Jack Goody's ‘autonomous’ theory of literacy for being deterministic and eurocentric. The Merina of Madagascar, says Bloch, have adapted literacy to local purposes. Rather than altering their (oral) knowledge system, bringing it closer to European models, literacy has actually extended this system. In this article I apply Bloch's insight to another Austronesian people: the Iban of Sarawak. While agreeing that his indigenist ‘ideological’ approach is helpful in some cases (e.g. Christian prayer books that extend pagan notions of ancestry), it can also blind us to the wider realities of developing countries where literacy is both a ubiquitous ideal and an unevenly distributed resource. To overcome the ideological–autonomous impasse, I suggest (a) closer cooperation between literacy and media anthropology and (b) more geopolitical rigour when comparing social units.

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).

This essay argues that the Hindu notion of auspiciousness, adherence to propitious timings, inauguration ceremonies and other practices that are conducive for success in future dealings has become pivotal for the definitions of Hindu middle-classness in India. First the concept of auspiciousness and the debate that ranged in relation to it in the 1980s and early 1990s is reviewed. Then, some ethnographic sketches of housing among Hyderabadi new middle-class Hindus are presented. In social practice centred around auspiciousness, Hindus who identify themselves as middle class find a way of creating social value and respectfulness which does not derive directly from the hegemonic notions of hierarchy, purity and caste. While not rejecting the principles of hierarchical social relations, new middle-class Hindus remodel notions of social honour from within by stressing auspiciousness instead of purity.

The issues raised in Brian Barry's new book are among the most important and the most difficult facing contemporary anthropology. They evince at once the global arena in which anthropological writings now appear, the correspondence between the technical language anthropology uses and the rhetoric of political engagement employed by anthropology's ‘subjects’ to further their ‘rights’, and, thereby, the inevitably political character of anthropology's own pronouncements. The issues centre on the ontological nature of culture.

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.