Archaeology takes up material fragments from distant and recent pasts to create narratives of personal and collective identity. It is, therefore, a powerful voice shaping our current and future social worlds. Feminist theory has to date made little reference to archaeology and its projects, in part because archaeologists have primarily chosen to work with normative forms of gender theory rather than forge new theory informed by archaeological insights. This paper argues that archaeology has considerably more potential for feminist theorizing than (...) has so far been recognized. In particular it is uniquely placed to build theory for understanding change, transition and transformation over extended time periods, a potential explored through an archaeological case study of Pacific Northwest Coast people. In conclusion, some possibilities for expanding this case study into a wider comparative perspective are sketched out. (shrink)

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism, Strathern’s about relatives and kinship – both of which (...) concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke’s own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern. (shrink)

Rabbi HaCohen Kook’s essay on vegetarianism and peace, first published in instalments in 1903–4, and reissued 60 years later, is the only treatise in rabbinic Judaism on the relationship between humans and animals. It is here examined as central to his ethical beliefs. His writings, shaped by his background as rabbi and mystic, illuminate the history of environmental and applied ethics. A century ago, he perceived the main challenge that confronts reform movements: multiculturalism.

Industrial melanism, according to the traditional explanation, amounts to niche construction since it involves changes in predation pressure. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine selection without niche construction. This cannot be what Laland, Odling-Smee & Feldman mean. They offer convincing examples, but they should provide a better definition of “niche construction” to indicate how their view supplements traditional evolutionary biology.

In order to explain some of the paradoxes and mysteries of the artist's cross cultural experience in Kiribati, he constructed an Artist's Book depicting through visuality, anecdote and reflection, his research process, engaging with current visual perceptions through negotiation with the past. In Kiribati previous encounters with Europeans and Islanders was dominated by English and I Kiribati with significant contributions by French missionaries. Each viewed the other through cultural filters of identity, which were informed by concepts of myth-historical, often heroic (...) pasts, modified by contemporary purpose such as power, trade, evangelism or personal gain. The method of transmission of beliefs about the past differed fundamentally as the Europeans were predominately informed by writing and the I-Kiribati by orality and performance. The non-literary epistemology of the I Kiribati contributed to a cosmology of non-iconic symbols that defined belief systems and social structures. These symbols connected place and space with time, self and group identities. The research found that the all surrounding visual symbol system of sacred meeting house, dwelling and canoe ) could be partly understood as an ongoing struggle since Deep Time, between the forces of the Ocea n represented by Bakoa, The Shark, and that of the triumph of the coming onto the Land and its people represented by Tabakea, The Turtle. The performative outcome of this triumph and the spirit of identity it engenders is expressed primarily in the ubiquitous I Kiribati Dance. The Artists Book is inspired by the creative classic I Kiribati form of oratory known as Te Kuna, using a structure analogous to the symbolic forms of narrative of Oceanic Voyaging traditionally employed by the I Kiribati. Differences in visual perceptions across cultural interface are understood not only as having the potential for conflict but also as providing positive dynamic force by the interchange of understood differences. The project contributes specifically to the ethnography of English and I Kiribati, semiotic systems and visual epistemologies, indicating directions towards positive outcomes in cross-cultural encounters. (shrink)

This article focuses on the philosophy underpinning the non-mainstream body modification practices of `Modern Primitives'. This subculture seeks inspiration in the body modification techniques and bodily rituals of so-called `primitive societies'. Establishing their prioritization of body, sexuality, community and spirituality as analytical links, the author shows that these self-perceived radical opponents of Western modernity nonetheless remain captured in its foundational discursive assumptions. The author argues that the movement's enthusiastic turn towards `primitivism' represents a particular identity strategy within the late modern (...) condition. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis, the author argues that the primitivist discourse originated as an ideology within colonialism and has informed the construction of the Western self-image. Modern Primitives' notion of `primitivism' is seen as a postcolonial legacy of this tradition of `othering', which inevitably reproduces stereotypes of racialized people. (shrink)

Increasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that culture refers to a kind of social form that is entity-like, territorialized, marked by a high degree of shared beliefs and coalescing into patterns of key values (...) that animate a broad range of cultural performances and representations. Ironically, anthropologists and other scholars in cultural studies have overwhelmingly come to reject this view of culture. Arguably, then, the move in psychology to attend to cultural environments has paradoxically further distanced it from the fields most concerned with cultural forms. This essay reviews this state of affairs and offers a proposal how a more nuanced appreciation of cultural life can be articulated with theories and methods familiar and available to psychologists. (shrink)

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them (...) whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose. (shrink)

This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the (...) space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the `primitive', the first part of the article strives to demonstrate the latter's significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. In the second section, it is contended that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post-`primitive' age. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural alterity is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the `primitive' has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. (shrink)

Franz Boas’ articulation of a new historicist and relativistic framework for anthropology stands as the founding moment of the discipline. Accordingly, scholars have sought to trace its source and inspirations, often concluding that Boas’ thought was shaped almost exclusively by his German background and characterized by a foundational methodological tension. Here, I instead show that Boas’ most creative early work benefitted from close interaction with debates in psychology and that his methodological reflections were part of the much wider series of (...) discussions in North America engendered by the importation of the German Geistes-/ Naturwissenschaft debate. Central to such debates, as well as to anthropological ones in these years, were the contested definitions of the human mind and of knowledge. Recovering this shared focus reveals the importance of such questions to Boas’ early writings, allowing us to better reconstruct his views on anthropology and to appreciate how he approached the question of how to justify the bounding of human knowledge into specific disciplines. (shrink)

In the standard native tradition of Albanian studies, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed their own ultimate goal of constructing national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. In this article, I show how and why an articulate analysis of the main intellectual traditions and their impact can provide fresh insights into grasping the cultural particularism of Albanian studies. Methodologically, a new picture of knowledge production must arise if we consider the historical, cultural, political and ideological terrain (...) on which certain influential ideas and practices in Albanian studies of people’s culture have emerged. The aim, then, is not to provide an exhaustive picture of a positive knowledge of culture and society, but to show the urgent need for avoiding any adoption of concepts that might be pure reconstructions of arbitrary and timeless structures and values, while rejecting any approach in terms of survivals and folklorism. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non-human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal (...) rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the search, among philosophers and activists, for a universal rational ethical foundation of animal rights, to which natural sciences’ findings can give support, with sociocultural anthropologists’ focus on the embeddedness of human/animal relationships in symbolic systems and in political relationships. In spite of the paradigmatic shifts intervened in a century and half of sociocultural anthropology, I show, through a critical review of the recent works of Ingold, Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Kohn, that even today this difference in approach is far to be overcome. (shrink)

This article examines the respective interpretations of the Arrernte tribe of central Australian Aborigines adopted by the English biologist Baldwin Spencer and the German missionary Carl Strehlow. These interpretations are explored in relation to the broader theoretical debates in the theory of myth that took place in England and Germany in the latter half of the 19th century. In Britain, these debates were initially shaped by the comparative philology of F. Max Müller, before being transformed by the evolutionism of Edward (...) Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer. The article shows how the research of Spencer and Strehlow was both influenced by and exerted an influence upon these theoretical debates, before assessing their research findings in relation to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the theories of myth offered by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Hans Blumenberg. (shrink)

This article traces some of the transformation that the fields of folk psychology and anthropology underwent in the late nineteenth century. Ludwik Fleck, in developing his sociology of knowledge, drew on both of these fields; a legacy that makes it possible to conceive of his epistemology as a theory of communication. Fleck, in grounding his understanding of the relationship between sociality and communication on insights from these two disciplines, proposed the morphological concept of an organic formation of all scientific knowledge. (...) Naturalising knowledge production in this manner, Fleck postulated a program of deciphering, reading, and translation that would relate all forms of knowledge back to the rules and conditions of its making. In this morphological conception of the processes of knowledge production, Fleck’s sociology bears significant similarities with the description of social institutions by French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, who also drew on insights from late-nineteenth-century folk psychology and anthropology. (shrink)

For decades, the ecstatic rituals of the Sufi brotherhood of the ‘Isawa have attracted the attention of European travelers and journalists as they pass through the Maghreb. Through the texts of these external observers, I will show the paradoxes of these images of the ‘Isawa centered on emphasizing the violent and irrational character of their ritual practices, while at the same time awakening a morbid curiosity to find an explanation for what the witnesses presented as pathological extravagances. With the rise (...) of Islamic reformism and the interests of Franco-Spanish colonial policy, rituals were progressively domesticated from the 1930s onwards, and partially converted into spectacle, with the aim of avoiding a corporal and ritual disorder that challenged the new colonial order. (shrink)