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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen. 2001. A history of anthropology. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press. 207 pp. Hb.: £45.00/$69.95. ISBN: 0 7453 1390 6. Pb.: £14.99/$22.50. ISBN: 0 7453 1385 X.

Alan Barnard. 2000. History and theory in anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 243 pp. Hb.: £45.00. ISBN: 0 521 77333 4; Pb.: £16.95, ISBN: 0 521 77432 2.

R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms. 2000. Anthropological theory. An introductory history (second edition). Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing. 599 pp. $67.75, ISBN: 0 7674 1166 8.

Thomas C. Patterson. 2001. A social history of anthropology in the United States. Oxford and New York: Berg. 212 pp. Hb.: £45.00. ISBN: 1 85973 489 8. Pb.: £14.99 ISBN: 1 85973 494 4.

If it makes sense to speak of postmodernism in social and cultural anthropology, Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) is undoubtedly one of its key texts. To judge from recent introductory texts on the history of anthropology it has become part of the identity of anthropology that this is indeed the case, for better or for worse (Barnard 2000: 169; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 147; McGee and Warms 2000: 564; Patterson 2001: 153). This also means that authors of such historical accounts become caught in what might be called ‘the predicament of history’. From a postmodern point of view any continuity through time of a discipline like anthropology is contingent and depends on changing external conditions. Nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology may have nothing more in common with twenty-first century reflexive anthropology (or any other variety) than its name, and even that may be debatable. Yet if this is so, we should be able to point out the differences between such anthropologies and account for them. The only way to do so is to consider the history of anthropology. Even if we believe history to be only a figment of our imagination, we cannot do without it, least of all if we want to understand phenomena like postmodernism.