Literacy in Greek allowed the turn-of-the-century Cretan authorities to regulate property transfers with increasing precision in the specification of value and location. Against the resulting official logic, however, everyday practices and knowledge – associated with the culture of the departing Turks – came to symbolise the highly valued pleasures of social intimacy. This article thus illustrates the conversion of historical process and experience into mutually opposed forms of symbolic capital.

Assessing anthropology's relation to the powers external to it requires not merely a history of anthropological ideas, but also an appraisal of the changing political economic arenas within which the discipline developed. That field was structured by capitalist development and the formation of nation-states and their rivalries in imperialism and colonialism, as well as by the rise of new educational regimes, institutions and disciplines. Anthropology was shaped not only by the growth of professional clusters within it, but also by the often contradictory demands generated by the interplay of elements in the field of forces that surrounded it.

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.

This article aims to shed light on a relatively neglected aspect of ethnic identity politics: namely, situations in which groups contest the ownership of ethnic practices. These conflicts suggest that symbols of ethnic affiliation are most usefully interpreted as a type of ‘inalienable possession’, a category conceived by Annette Weiner for analysing the symbolic dimensions of property and the exchange of goods.

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.

This paper considers the connections between religion, ritual and politics in the works of Clifford Geertz and Maurice Bloch and confronts their approaches with some examples of ritual from Nepal. lt is suggested that both writers have great strengths, often not those conventionally ascribed to them, but both attempts to put forward a theory of ritual are undermined by the assumption that ritual is just one kind of thing in all the contexts in which it appears. The Nepalese examples are set out in line with a schematic typology, which, it is suggested, provides a possible basis for a historically grounded and generalising approach to the anthropological study of ritual.

In the west of Ireland, fosterage and adoption are correlated with illegitimacy. No one would be so cruel or foolish as to abandon one's own child unless there was a powerful reason for doing so. Conception out of wedlock is one such reason. This article attempts to carry out an analysis which is not theoretical but contextual or situational. It examines the ideology of kinship and family relationships and their associated social values in rural western Ireland. The aim is to bring meaning to the life and experiences of a particular individual, an illegitimate child fostered on a family farm in the west of Ireland, by means of an exploration of the ideology of blood and its social reverberations.

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.

A micro-state located on the frontier between Spain and France in the middle of the Pyrenees, Andorra was a very poor country traditionally based on pastoralism. It has become nowadays a free trading zone involved in commercial and financial international flows. In this article, we analyse the structural and strategic role of the frontier as it defines the economic system of the country and the lifeways of its inhabitants. We also discuss the various forms of endogenous frontiers (social, legal and cultural) which divide people and make of Andorra a society organised through significant internal segmentation. The country also hosts a large proportion of foreign workers next to a national and hegemonic minority based on the control of political power and the preservation of old privileges.

In anthropology, the debate on time traditionally opposes the universalists to the relativists. This article attempts to escape the opposition, claiming that while anthropology cannot demonstrate the existence of a universal individual notion of time, it can unveil a number of general characteristics of ‘social time’ which transcends the relativity of its representations. Using a Papua New-Guinean case study, a minimal definition of ‘social time’ is then provided, along with the hypothesis that every society requires at least two different and hierarchically ordered conceptions of time. This co-existence of diverse times questions in turn the category of history as an analytical tool in anthropology.

This paper discusses the author's fieldwork experiences in the 1980s and subsequently in the 1990s after the collapse of state socialism. The analysis compares young workers of Csepel, an industrial district of Budapest, to Hungarians of Transylvanian Romania. In seeking to understand the changes that have been taking place in these communities and their implications for anthropologists, the author explains why the self-reflective analyses of previous fieldwork achieved within state socialist societies are now lacking and often showed scholarly bias. As ideologically unattractive as this statement may appear, it has to be acknowledged. And moreover, since post-communist social forces bring in different types of power relations, a new departure for studying East and Central Europe is here advocated.

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.

Is Mauss so original that nobody before him had opened an anthropological way to study the gift? A philosopher of Hungarian Law, Somlò published in 1909 ‘Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft’ (The circulation of valuables in primitive society). In one of the numerous footnotes of his essay on the gift, Mauss mentions this book, stating that Somlò: ‘inaugurates the path we shall ourselves undertake’. In spite of this remarkable acknowledgment, Somlò seems to have left no trace in a domain where Malinowski, Thurnwald and Mauss himself among many have become classical references. How then to account for Somlò, a possible predecessor of Mauss?

Focusing on local cognitive orientation and practice, described as producing ‘a sense of place’, the article discusses how macro-political processes associated with the UN's decolonisation programme affect the atoll society of Tokelau in the South Pacific. Local orientation is expressed as a general tendency to represent relationships in spatial terms. Political practice takes the form of fighting for ascendancy. It is shown to be attached to a qualitatively different way of life than that connected to institutions established as infrastructural prerequisites for achieving nationhood. The balancing act Tokelauans, along with their political counterparts, achieve represents a genuine case, one which may in turn serve as a model for experimenting nationhood elsewhere.

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.

This article is a case study which deals with the consequences of a conflict among the Wodani. It describes the irruption of a Cargo Cult in this remote region of New Guinea, a series of incests provoked by the millenarian ideology, followed by murders and internecine war within the Kundiyau clan and, finally, the attempt to resolve these disorders through the organisation of a homicide payment, which, thanks to an unexpected juridical fiction, is collected not from the murderer but from a clan-brother of the incestuous prophet. These developments allow us to consider a number of more general questions: the notion of incest, of clan affiliation and personal identity in Wodani society; the compensation system allowing for the establishment of an equivalence between human lives and means of payment; the eschatological doctrine explaining the reproductive function of shell money; the theory of causality and juridical responsibility justifying a fictitious charge of murder; and finally, the future of the traditional currency in a society which is now compelled to reformulate its cosmological principle of compensation.

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.

Where the world ended. Re-unification and identity in the German borderland. By Daphne Berdahl. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999. xiii + 294 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 520 21477 3.

Disparate diasporas. Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community. By Edmund T. Gordon. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. xiv + 330 pp. Pb. ISBN 0 292 73857 9.

Inside the revolution. Everyday life in Socialist Cuba. By Mona Rosendahl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. x + 197 pp. Pb.: £11.95. ISBN 0 8014 8412 X.

Burden of dreams. History and identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. By Catherine Wanner. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1998. xxvii + 255 pp. Pb.: £15.50. ISBN 0 271 01793 7.

Four books, four ethnographies, four resolute answers to a question that anthropologists are subjected to so often: does the discipline's relevance go beyond the specificity of small-scale community study? Or, in other words, can anthropology transcend the social, geographical, methodological and epistemological limits seemingly imposed on it by its ethnographic focus? Can it contribute to analyses of wider political and ideological phenomena such as revolutions or the post-communist transition? These four monographs, based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, Germany, Nicaragua and Ukraine, are convincing in their univocal answer. The answer is yes.