In spite of their long experience in the analysis of folk knowledge on nature and of the large number of contributions devoted to the relations societies entertain with their environment, anthropologists today are hardly ever consulted at a time when environmental issues have become crucial. In particular, the way knowledge about living beings is organised along different levels is barely taken into account. While the first level is the acknowledgment of the diversity of beings and is manifested through the attribution of naming terms, the second illustrates how each society orders this diversity. The examples used here mainly belong to the vegetal domain. Last, at a third level, encompassing the whole of society, we can see that it is not so much the individuals which constitute the diversity of the living as the elements that constitute them.

The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the transnational world created by south Asian migrants. It argues that labour migration forges global pathways, routes along which people, goods, places and ideas travel. The need is, the article argues, to recognise the class dimensions of this movement and the significance of both strong and weak ties in determining emergent forms of cultural transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnic and religious worlds discussed in the paper – of Pakistani Muslim religious sufis and working class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’ – cut across national boundaries and are centred beyond Europe. The global highways along which Pakistani labour migrants travel also carry goods, brides and tourists. Like the Melanesians of whom Strathern writes that they make places and sentiments ‘travel’, Pakistani migration involves the metonymic movement of ceremonial objects such as food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery which personify moral ‘places’. And it is through these that new global ethnic social worlds are constituted. Global families and trans-national marriages reconfigure the local through global connections, while still being marked by economic class and status.

Two categories of reference constitute the social organisation of Albanese society. The notion of fisi (‘lineage’) represents the first, which is typifying, segmentary and holistic, while the second, classifying, linear and individualising is represented in the notion of lisi i gjakut (‘tree of blood’). These categories do not oppose each other as both pertain to a common logic of patrilineal filiation. Unlike the segmentary regime, the linear one does not allow to account for the previous generations. Thus, when a large number of collateral parents acknowledge themselves as being part of a common ‘tree of blood’, they still have to qualify this through a second symbolic and hereditary marker which, from a vertical axis, will complete the lack of memory and/or of ramification. A fixation of the patronymic name in the broad sense - the transmissible family name - becomes then necessary. This ordered complementarity between the segmentary and the linear reveals itself as a sociological operator the hierarchical nature of which allows the transactional opening in strategic relations oriented towards the other.

My purpose here is to alert you to how culture is loose on the streets of Norway - as indeed in much of the rest of the world. The expression ‘loose on the streets’ is not mine. I take it from the anthropologist Paul Bohannan who thus characterises a phenomenon of our times. ‘Culture’ has run astray. And it is now being used helter-skelter to promote all kinds of special interests.

But can a concept that has gone awry function as a fitting frame for the encounter between immigrants and Norwegians? My own answer is no. And I shall propose an alternative that can better facilitate mutual respect and understanding.

This paper explores some of the ongoing debates about culture and the concept of culture as it is used and deployed in the Norwegian public sphere, what we would call ‘norsk offentlighet’. More specifically, I am interested in the part played by anthropology and anthropologists in influencing the meanings and usages of such a key indigenous concept as culture. My interest was particularily spurred by the general debates on culture and immigrants which dominated the media in the mid-nineties, and in which anthropologists were actively engaged.

Hybrids of modernity. Anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition. By Penelope Harvey. London: Routledge. 1996. ix + 398 pp. Pb.: £13.99. ISBN 0 415 13045 X.

Contesting art. Art, politics and identity in the modern world. Edited by Jeremy MacClancy. 1997. Oxford: Berg. x + 253 pp. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN 1 85973 139 2.

Difference as manufacture/difference as contest

One of the exhibition-maker's prerogatives is making culture materialise by means of objects, images and texts. While by no means all exhibitions are defined as art, aesthetic presentation can transmute all sorts of unlikely items (of science, history, folklore, regions) into the most astonishing eyefulls, not least through the reproduction and circulation of photographic images of such artefacts beyond the confines of the museum (see, for example, Purcell and Gould 1986). The exhibition-maker's emphasis on choreography, composition and narrative, depends very clearly on aesthetic/technical effects produced by designers, photographers, technicians, carpenters, public relations men and many others, which together envelop an exhibit in a physiognomic as well as a purely visual atmosphere (cf. Taussig 1994). Despite the tendency in some circles to individualise the artist, or indeed the author of an exhibition, both are engaged in socially embedded enterprises albeit in rather different ways. Saying that the exhibition frame (architecture, design, technology, timing, occasion) works to accentuate the contents by adding meaning, presupposes an actively engaged collection of people before the event. Such spectacles presuppose an audience, of course, just as artists' work presupposes a market.

Violence et vérités. Un royaume du Rajasthan face au pouvoir colonial. Par Denis Vidal. Paris: EHESS. 1995. 398 pp. 200 FF. ISBN 2 7132 10186.

Violence and truth. A Rajasthani kingdom confronts colonial authority. By Denis Vidal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997. 258 pp. Rs 450. ISBN 0 19 564 105.

In this convincing and often elegant essay, Denis Vidal argues that the British colonial presence in India has not only imposed unprecedented perceptions of violence and order on Indian society, but also led to redefinitions of pre-existing forms of conflict and their reinterpretation, both at local and regional levels. To document these complex processes of interaction, the argument is based on an ethnohistorical recapturing of the little Rajasthani kingdom of Sirohi. Exploring the diverse forms of protest traditionally favoured by the different communities present within its administrative and political arena and considering each as representative of specific interests, the attempt is first to illustrate how threats of suicide and challenges of armed rebellion or mass migration constituted major traditional resources to implement the course of a social setting through a continuous flux of claims and tensions. These older modes of dissent, qualified by the colonial authorities as ‘impulsive’ and ‘criminal’, were considered mere symptoms of instability and disorder. They became modalities in the expression of discontent and the initiation of arbitration. In turn, they also became progressively discredited by those who were accustomed to resort to them when realising they could no longer induce the negotiations and debates they had opened in the past. This growing awareness caused them slowly to be replaced by different modes of protest more susceptible to be heard, and to meet the attention of the new powers they opposed, while initiating unprecedented forms of dialogue that could favour a compromising agreement to the involved parties after having, so to speak, established their divergent issues within compatible grounds of discursivity.