Laughing when you shouldn't Being "good" among the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia

Batek people describe their many laughter taboos with utmost seriousness, and in ethical terms of good and bad. Despite this, people often get it wrong—sometimes laughing all the more when the taboos forbid it. Because laughter can be ambiguous and impossible to control, being wrong can be accepted without the need for discussion or reflection. People thus act autonomously while holding deeply shared ethical orientations. Here, ethics can be both culturally predefined and shaped by individuals, as when it comes to laughter people draw on individual and shared concerns in an ad hoc, flexible manner. Laughter's tangled contradictions thus demonstrate that people's understandings of being “good” are mutually implicated with their understandings of what it means to be a person in relation to others

Where have all the kin gone? On hunter-gatherers’ sharing, kinship and scale

This book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), TropicMicroArch 623293 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187754_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot)

Un cosmos connecté « pair à pair »

La parenté intime qui fonde les minuscules communautés de chasseurs-cueilleurs s’étend aux non-humains, ceux-ci étant souvent considérés comme des sortes de parents plutôt que comme des personnes d’un autre type. Cet article aborde les limites d’une approche des mondes des chasseurs-cueilleurs qui partirait de l’opposition binaire « égalitaire/hiérarchique ». Ces concepts imposent à leurs communautés des problématiques économiques et politiques modernes, ainsi que l’idée selon laquelle la société est constituée d’individus commensurables pouvant être comparés et évalués, et donc considérés comme égaux (ou non). Je soutiens ici que les chasseurs-cueilleurs forment des « communautés de parenté » plus qu’humaines, composées de membres hétérogènes aux liens multiples et sans mesure commune. Les chasseurs-cueilleurs conçoivent la société dans un idiome local de parenté, kinship en anglais, cette conception se rapprochant de ce que signifierait la parenté si le suffixe -ship de kinship renvoyait à un « compétence », comme dans horsemanship (« équitation », litt. : « la compétence du cavalier »), plutôt qu’à un « état », comme dans dictatorship (« dictature »). Leurs communautés de parenté subsistent grâce à un travail habile de connexion, lequel implique un réseau ouvert dont les divers membres sont constitués par la coopération participative elle-même. Ma proposition est que les fins de l’« égalitarisme » portent notre attention sur une alternative connective de type chasseur-cueilleur, un cosmos connecté « pair à pair ».The intimate kinship basis of minuscule hunter-gatherer communities extends to non-humans, who are often regarded as kin of sorts rather than as different sorts of persons. This paper addresses the limits of approaching the worlds of hunter-gatherers starting from the binary terms « egalitarian » and « hierarchical ». These concepts impose onto their communities economic and political modern issues, as well as the notion that society is constitutive of commensurate individuals who can be compared and evaluated, and thus be regarded as equal (or not). I argue here that hunter-gatherers form more-than-human « kinship communities » composed of multiply-connected and incommensurate heterogeneous members. Hunter-gatherers figure society in a local kinship idiom, where their sense of kinship approximates what the term would signify if we read its suffix -ship as « skill » (as in horsemanship) rather than « position » (as in dictatorship). Their kinship communities subsist in skillful connection-work, which involves an open-ended network whose various members are constituted by participative cooperation itself. The end of « egalitarianism », I propose, opens our attention to a hunter-gatherer connective alternative, a « peer-to-peer » connected cosmos

“ANIMISMO” REVISITADO: PESSOA, MEIO AMBIENTE E EPISTEMOLOGIA RELACIONAL

O animismo se projeta na literatura como uma religião simples e uma epistemologia falha, em grande medida porque até hoje foi visto a partir perspectivas modernistas. Neste artigo, teorias da antropologia, das clássicas às mais contemporâneas, são criticadas. A partir do caso etnográfico de um povo caçador coletor, explora-se como funcionam as ideias animistas no contexto das práticas sociais, com atenção às construções locais de pessoa relacional e suas relações com as percepções ecológicas do meio ambiente. Oferece-se uma reformulação do animismo enquanto uma epistemologia relacional

What is analysis? Between theory, ethnography, and method

Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms-for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism-these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodological: entanglements, assemblages, ontologies, technologies of description, epistemic partnerships, problematizations, collaborative anthropology, the art of noticing, and so onPeer Reviewe