Relationships in motion

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana among initiates of the male diviner-cult of Ifá, this paper addresses the classical anthropological conundrum of how to make sense of practitioners’ contention that initiation transforms them into «new people». Taking into account the role of divination in «calling» neophytes, it is shown that Ifá initiation involves an accumulation of relationships with deities and fellow initiates that are «internal» in the sense that they pertain to the very definition of the neophyte as a person. It is argued that for such a notion not to appear logically absurd («apparently irrational») it is necessary to revise radically a series of analytical assumptions regarding the nature of change, obligation and personhood.À partir d’une ethnographie de terrain parmi les initiés au culte de divination masculine d’Ifá à La Havane, un problème classique en anthropologie est abordé : que veulent dire les praticiens quand ils affirment que l’initiation les transforme? En se penchant sur la façon dont la divination fait sentir aux néophytes qu’ils sont « appelés », on constate que cette initiation permet une accumulation de rapports avec des déités et avec d’autres initiés. Ces rapports sont internes au sens où ils concernent la définition du néophyte en tant que personne. Pour que cette idée ne paraisse pas comme une absurdité du point de vue logique, il faut reconsidérer en profondeur une série de présupposés concernant la nature de cette transformation et les notions d’obligation et de personne

Earthquake Citizens: Disaster and Aftermath Politics in India and Nepal

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola

Money, Love, and Fragile Reciprocity in Contemporary Havana, Cuba

Among low-income Havana residents, men frequently give money and other forms of material support to women in whom they have a romantic interest. For women, men's material contributions are expressions of responsibility and care. While men share this view to a degree, they sometimes have more ambiguous emotions regarding such practices. These tensions in different views of gendered reciprocity are influenced by large-scale changes that have taken place in Cuban society since the 1990s. Although, traditionally, state socialism has embraced ideas of gender egalitarianism and women's independent income, the post-Soviet period has seen the emergence of new inequalities, dependencies, and marginalizations that threaten earlier, socialist understandings of intimacy. The importance that women currently place on material wealth in terms of their views of a desirable partner highlights the gendered consequences of Cuba's contemporary economic transformations and their complex interplay with individuals' aspirations for love.Peer reviewe

The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

"Worlds otherwise": Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/ or oppositional in any straightforward sense

Estimando a necessidade: os oráculos de ifá e a verdade em Havana

O objeto deste artigo é o conceito de verdade tal como se articula no oráculo de Ifá cubano; seu objetivo é ilustrar a fecundidade de um "método ontográfico" que procure mapear as premissas ontológicas do discurso nativo por meio da produção de conceitos que, não sendo os conceitos nativos eles mesmos, constituam equivalentes aproximados destes. Enfatizando a afirmação dos praticantes de que o Ifá é infalível, propõe-se que os vereditos divinatórios devem ser entendidos como verdades necessárias, isto é, como enunciados que não poderiam não ser verdadeiros. Em seguida, mostrando que, do ponto de vista das concepções comuns de verdade, a necessidade modal dos oráculos só pode parecer um absurdo dogmático, procura-se avançar uma conceitualização alternativa que concorde com as convicções dos informantes, examinando um complexo de conceitos e práticas associados ao oráculo a fim de avaliar as premissas que garantem a verdade e sua emergência na prática do Ifá.<br>This article analyzes the concept of truth as employed by Ifá oracles in Cuba; its aim is to illustrate the fertility of an 'ontographic method' dedicated to mapping the ontological premises of native discourse through the production of concepts which, while not the native concepts themselves, comprise close equivalents to them. Emphasizing practitioners claims that the Ifá is infallible, it is proposed that divinatory verdicts should be understood as necessary truths, that is, as statements which cannot not be true. Then, after showing that from the viewpoint of common place conceptions of truth, the modal necessity of oracles can only appear a dogmatic absurdity, I propose an alternative conceptualization which agrees with the convictions of informants. This involves examining a complex of concepts and practices linked to the oracle in order to evaluate the premises which ensure truth and its emergence in Ifá practice

Hiru zirikatze ontologiko

The article seeks to clarify some of the basic premises of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in contemporary anthropology. Taking off from two examples that reveal some of the distinguishing characteristics of this anthropological approach, the article shows that, understood as a strictly methodological intervention (above all as a technology for anthropological description), the ontological turn involves deepening and radicalizing three anthropological tenets that have a long history in our discipline, namely reflexivity, conceptualization and experimentation. Translator: Alonso Rodrigo Zamora Corona.En este artículo se trata de aclarar algunas de las premisas fundamentales del llamado “giro ontológico” de la antropología actual. Presentando dos ejemplos de estrategia de argumentación que demuestran rasgos importantes de este abarcamiento antropológico, en el trabajo se señala que, entendido como una intervención estrictamente metodológica –sobre todo como una tecnología de descripción antropológica–, el giro ontológico se caracteriza por su profundización y radicalización de tres exigencias antropológicas que tienen raíces largas en la historia de nuestra disciplina, a saber, la de reflexividad, la de conceptualización y la de experimentación.Artikulu honen helburua da egungo antropologian “bira ontologiko” deitutakoaren oinarrizko premisa batzuk argitzea. Horretarako, argumentazio estrategiaren bi adibide aurkeztuko dira, antropologiaren eremu horren ezaugarri garrantzitsuak erakusten dituztenak; lanean adierazten den bezala, esku-hartze antropologiko huts gisa ulertuta –antropologia deskribatzeko teknologia gisa batez ere–, gure diziplinaren historian sustrai luzeak dituzten antropologiaren hiru exijentziatan sakontzea eta erradikalizatzea dira bira antropologikoaren ezaugarriak, alegia, erreflexibotasunean, kontzeptualizazioan eta esperimentazioan