183 research outputs found
Reflections on hermeneutics and translocality
"This paper reflects on the issues that were brought
to the Roundtable on Hermeneutics and Translocality
held at the ZMO in 2006. I review the successive
ways in which I have drawn on the hermeneutic
philosophical tradition as an anthropologist,
emphasing the ethical dimension. Translocality
heightens the hermeneutic problem but does not
radically change it; it may entail recognizing that
everything is always already pretranslated. In reflecting
on the task and means of anthropology, I
briefly juxtapose Gadamerâs admirable deference
or modesty to Ricoeurâs dialectic of appropriation
and distanciation and to what Cavell calls the arrogation
of voice." [authorÂŽs abstract
Anthropology and the study of contradictions
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we rethink our dear notion of the âsocial agentâ through that of contradiction?Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
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 wrongâsometimes 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 âgoodâ are mutually implicated with their understandings of what it means to be a person in relation to others
Translation: The relative native
Translation by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad of: Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2002) "O Nativo Relativo." Mana, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 113-14
Expropriated from the hereafter: the fate of the landless in the Southern Highlands of Madagascar
During the period following the abolition of slavery by the French colonial government in 1896, the Southern Highlands of Madagascar was settled by ex-slaves. These early settlers constructed a foundation myth of themselves as tompon-tany, or 'masters of the land', a discourse not only equating land with tombs, kinship and ancestors, but also coupled with a skilful deployment of 'Malagasy customs'. In order to exclude later migrants who also wanted to settle, the 'masters of the land' attempted to establish control over holdings in the area. To this end, and to reinforce their own legitimacy as landholders, the tompon-tany labelled subsequent migrants andevo ('lave' or of 'slave descent') who - as a tombless people - have no rights to land. Because they have neither tombs nor ancestors, the landless andevo are socially ostracised and economically marginalised. As an 'impure people', they are not entitled to a place in the hereafter
narrating traditional iranian carpet merchants
Iranian carpet merchants developed a collective identitary narrative to enhance their capital creation in the social field of the German market, the field of Iranian foreign trade, and transnational bazari networks. This chapter goes beyond the practicalities of juggling resources across social fields: it explains the motivation behind this agency. Building on David Graeber's anthropology of value, as well as on studies about identity marketing and ethnic entrepreneurship, I show how the merchants' resources were evaluated between the 1950s and today to explain by which systems of value these social fields were shaped. From the confrontation between changing systems of value emerges Iranian carpet merchants' potential to increase the efficiency of their capital creation byâcollectivelyâtrying to redefine the meaning of their resources
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