Fifteenth Century Problems for the Twenty-First Century Gift: Human Tissue Transactions in Ethnically Diverse Societies

The language of the ‘gift’ continues to be drawn upon in attempts to encourage altruistic organ and tissue donation. My aim here is to consider the anxieties that come into focus when this rhetoric is deployed in the context of ethnic minorities and, moreover, their donation practices are situated within universalistic discourses of charity and the gift. The article considers ideas of the body, debt, obligation, relationality, and solidarity, and how these fit within the overarching projects of society, modernity, and democracy when the market figures as an ever more prominent feature of such projects. Drawing on a variety of examples, the piece reflects on the movement of tissue across ethnically and culturally marked corporeal boundaries and highlights the tensions that arise from refusal as well as acceptance of such transactions

Counterparts: Clothing, value and the sites of otherness in Panapompom ethnographic encounters

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Anthropological Forum, 18(1), 17-35, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00664670701858927.Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. ‘Development’ as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native self‐judgments are located ‘at home’ for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter

The Regeneration Games: Commodities, Gifts and the Economics of London 2012

This paper considers contradictions between two concurrent and tacit conceptions of the Olympic ‘legacy’, setting out one conception that understands the games and their legacies as gifts alongside and as counterpoint to the prevailing discourse, which conceives Olympic assets as commodities. The paper critically examines press and governmental discussion of legacy, in order to locate these in the context of a wider perspective contrasting ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ Olympics – setting anthropological conceptions of gift-based sociality as a necessary supplement to contractual and dis-embedded socioeconomic organizational assumptions underpinning the commodity Olympics. Costbenefit planning is central to modern city building and mega-event delivery. The paper considers the insufficiency of this approach as the exclusive paradigm within which to frame and manage a dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy arising from the 2012 games

Domestication as innovation : the entanglement of techniques, technology and chance in the domestication of cereal crops

The origins of agriculture involved pathways of domestication in which human behaviours and plant genetic adaptations were entangled. These changes resulted in consequences that were unintended at the start of the process. This paper highlights some of the key innovations in human behaviours, such as soil preparation, harvesting and threshing, and how these were coupled with genetic ‘innovations’ within plant populations. We identify a number of ‘traps’ for early cultivators, including the needs for extra labour expenditure on crop-processing and soil fertility maintenance, but also linked gains in terms of potential crop yields. Compilations of quantitative data across a few different crops for the traits of nonshattering and seed size are discussed in terms of the apparently slow process of domestication, and parallels and differences between different regional pathways are identified. We highlight the need to bridge the gap between a Neolithic archaeobotanical focus on domestication and a focus of later periods on crop-processing activities and labour organization. In addition, archaeobotanical data provide a basis for rethinking previous assumptions about how plant genetic data should be related to the origins of agriculture and we contrast two alternative hypotheses: gradual evolution with low selection pressure versus metastable equilibrium that prolonged the persistence of ‘semi-domesticated’ populations. Our revised understanding of the innovations involved in plant domestication highlight the need for new approaches to collecting, modelling and integrating genetic data and archaeobotanical evidence

The cultural side of value creation

The question of how organizations create value has become a central question for understanding inter-firm competition and performance differentials. Much of the work on the topic emphasizes the importance of technological innovation for improving operational efficiency and/or product functionality . Accordingly, much of the work in the area has focused on understanding the development of technological capabilities and the dynamics of competition among different technologies. Whereas this line of research has contributed greatly to our understanding of value creation through technology performance improvement, it has also left unexplored the strategies for differentiating products on the basis of their cultural significance. Yet, research in a wide variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology, to cultural sociology, and consumer behavior shows that consumers value products not only for their functional and technical performance, but also for their cultural meanings. The infusion of products with cultural meanings enables consumers to use these products to make statements about their personal and social identity and status. It is therefore well understood that consumers derive value not only from what products do (functional value), but also from what they signify in a given social group (symbolic value). While strategy scholars recognize that product meanings are a source of differentiation and generate price premia (Porter, 1980), they also tend to view the activities that generate them – e.g. branding – as a part of the marketing strategy of the firm. More generally, strategy research has been criticized for its reluctance to delve into the demand side of value-creation. Rooted in disciplinary assumptions about atomistic consumers with idiosyncratic preferences, strategy researchers view demand as largely exogenous and ignore its cultural embeddedness in social conventions that define the cultural meanings of objects and shape consumption choices. As a result, they have given limited attention to the question of how firms can strategically manage the symbolic value of their products. In this paper we propose a cultural perspective on value creation that can direct strategic organization research toward the systematic investigation of how producers engage with the cultural meaning systems that supply frameworks for interpretation and valuation of goods. To guide research in this direction we first discuss how products acquire cultural significance and then outline three core implications of these ideas for the strategy and organization of firms. First, we discuss how recognizing the cultural significance of products shifts attention from technological innovation that alters product functionality to cultural innovation that alters their cultural significance. Second, we explain the need to develop distinct cultural resources that enable firms to identify and exploit opportunities for cultural innovation. Third, we draw attention to the need for cultural intent defined as developing an explicit strategy for utilizing cultural resources to achieve specific cultural positioning for the firm’s products

Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship

Art and the Twenty-First Century Gift: Corporate Philanthropy and Government Funding in the Cultural Sector

Marcel Mauss’s work on the archaic gift contributes to understandings of corporate and government support of arts organisations, or ‘institutional funding’. His approach allows us to see institutional funding as a gift that is embedded in a system of exchange wherein gifts come with a variety of obligations, and self-interest and disinterestedness are inseparable. The institutional gift operates through money and contracts; nevertheless, it entails obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate. This system of obligations has been joined, in the contemporary institutional gift, by another obligation: the obligation to ask. Institutional funding of the arts has acquired additional twenty-first century elements. The article elaborates these, using the UK as an example. It also argues that the ambivalence felt by some members of the arts world about institutional funding stems, in large part, from the obligations inherent in the gift. The recent imposition of the neo-liberal model into the arts is an intrinsic part of the exchange between institutional funders and arts organisations. Given that Mauss’s work is strongly anti-liberal and anti-utilitarian, it is ironic that his ideas should prove so useful for understanding a form of twenty-first century gift in which neo-liberalism plays such a crucial role

The bashful and the boastful : prestigious leaders and social change in Mesolithic Societies

The creation and maintenance of influential leaders and authorities is one of the key themes of archaeological and historical enquiry. However the social dynamics of authorities and leaders in the Mesolithic remains a largely unexplored area of study. The role and influence of authorities can be remarkably different in different situations yet they exist in all societies and in almost all social contexts from playgrounds to parliaments. Here we explore the literature on the dynamics of authority creation, maintenance and contestation in egalitarian societies, and discuss the implications for our interpretation and understanding of the formation of authorities and leaders and changing social relationships within the Mesolithic

Market, morality and (just) price: the case of recycling economy in Turkey

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors? own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception

(B)ordering South of Lebanon: Hizbullah’s identity building strategy

International audienceThis paper examines the importance of the Lebanese southern borderland area in the political strategy of Hizbullah's identity building. It highlights how Hizbullah succeeded in its quest to become a major political player in Lebanon by using South Lebanon. The main hypothesis is that this borderland area has been ordered and bordered by Hizbullah to create a common identity among the Lebanese Shi'i population based on a Shi'i religious involvement and the " duty " of armed resistance against Israel. To support this idea, I will rely on a theoretical framework articulating space and identity building and will refer to concepts provided by Middle Eastern studies. In the first part of the paper, I will discuss the conditions of the emergence of the group of solidarity and how it articulates to the religious Shi'i ideology. Then, I will highlight the " lebanonization " process Hizbullah undertaken at the end of the civil war and how during the 1990s it transformed the South into a sanctuary. Finally, I will show how Hizbullah enforced the national legitimacy of its social, political and military actions before targeting the state apparatus