Equality, Inequality, and Exchange: Comments on "A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossell Island"

Comments on: JOHN LIEP. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. ISBN: 978-87-7934-446-4 I mention that good ethnographies appear after the fact to be based on good fortune because John Liep looks for all the  world like one of those lucky types for whom this generalization holds true. Interested in economy and exchange, he found his way to Rossel Island, where people happen to operate what from some angles has to be seen as the most complex currency system in the world, one that turns on 34 different, ranked kinds of currency tokens, not counting state money,  and that features a welter of more or less unusual ways of moving those currencies around between people in transactions that shape marriages, funerals, and almost all of the other most important social institutions of Rossel Island life. As Liep  (p. xviii)1 puts matters, the complexity of the Rossel Island currency system makes it “an anthropological freak”—the kind of one-off limit case in the range of global variation that so often provides the materials for ethnographic success stories.  What better basis than fieldwork among the Rossel Islanders could there be, then, for making pointed interventions into disciplinary debates about the nature of exchange

Jean-Philippe Deranty. Beyond Communication: A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy

JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY. Beyond Communication: A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. 500. ISBN: 978-90-04-17577-8

Response

I am grateful to the editors of Suomen antropologi for inviting two such engaged and stimulating responses to Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life, and to Minna Opas and Mika Vähäkangas for writing them. For a work that has been interdisciplinary from its inception—initially written by an anthropologist as a set of lectures to be delivered to an audience of academic theologians—it is hard to imagine a better pair of respondents. Both Opas and Vähäkangas are gifted ethnographers who know anthropology well, but at the same time they come to the book, respectively, from the study of religion and from theology. This gives these comments a welcome parallax view on the anthropology/theology relationship. As Opas and Vähäkangas both note, the dialogue between these two disciplines has been quite active lately, and their insightful responses raise important issues for that discussion

Ritual Pluralism and Value Pluralism: On why one ritual is never enough

It appears that every religious tradition contains within its repertoire of enjoined or encouraged actions more than one ritual. This article pursues the question of why this should be so. It develops an answer by making two basic claims. The first is that all societies are marked by the presence of more than one value. The second is that one thing rituals do is allow people to realize one value at a time in fairly full form—something people rarely accomplish in daily life, but that is important for them if they are to come to understand and develop a genuine attraction to these values. If both of these claims hold, then one reason religions need to offer more than one ritual is that people hold more than one value and they need separate rituals to be able to learn about and to experience what it is like to realize each of them in full form. The article concludes with a brief reflection of the importance of its analysis of value and ritual for the study of situations of religious pluralism

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND VALUE PLURALISM: RITUAL AND THE ANEGEMENT OF INTERCULTURAL DIVERSITY

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND VALUE PLURALISM: RITUAL AND THE ANEGEMENT OF INTERCULTURAL DIVERSIT

RESPONSE TO COMMENTATORS

RESPONSE TO COMMENTATOR

Universal behavior in fragmenting brittle, isotropic solids across material properties

A bonded particle model is used to explore how variations in the material properties of brittle, isotropic solids affect critical behavior in fragmentation. To control material properties, a new model is proposed which includes breakable two- and three-body particle interactions to calibrate elastic moduli and mode I and II fracture toughnesses. In the quasistatic limit, fragmentation leads to a power-law distribution of grain sizes which is truncated at a maximum grain mass that grows as a non-trivial power of system size. In the high-rate limit, truncation occurs at a mass that decreases as a power of increasing rate. A scaling description is used to characterize this behavior by collapsing the mean squared grain mass across rates and system sizes. Consistent scaling persists across all material properties studied although there are differences in the evolution of grain size distributions with strain as the initial number of grains at fracture and their subsequent rate of production depend on Poisson's ratio. This evolving granular structure is found to induce a unique rheology where the ratio of the shear stress to pressure, an internal friction coefficient, decays approximately as the logarithm of increasing strain rate. The stress ratio also decreases at all rates with increasing strain as fragmentation progresses.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure

Onde no mundo estão os valores? Exemplaridade, Moralidade e Processo Social

Este artigo constitui um ensaio sobre valores. Trata de aportar uma resposta social e psicologicamente realista à questão de onde as pessoas descobrem valores no mundo. Pretende ser uma contribuição aos crescentes debates antropológicos sobre a moral e sugere que o tema dos valores deve ser central nesses debates. Os valores, penso eu, são aquilo que, pelo menos em parte, nos levam a desejar fazer o bem. O que as pessoas de fato farão depende não só de como equilibram os desejos concorrentes despertados por diferentes valores, mas de como equilibram esses desejos com os sentimentos de dever que distintos fatos morais também despertam. Na origem deste ensaio, está a noção de que existe alguma relação entre valores, desejos e ações morais que vale investigar. Começo discutindo a perda, por parte das ciências sociais, da fé na noção de cultura e do problema que daí advém de como falar sobre onde se encontram os valores no mundo. O que pretendo propor aqui é: se aceitarmos ser pouco provável existirem valores plenamente compartilhados, como julgavam os antropólogos, porque já não podemos supor que eles sejam parte de um fenômeno duradouro e disseminado chamado cultura – então, teremos de enfrentar uma nova questão, qual seja, a de onde existem valores no mundo. Quero sugerir que os valores existem, primeiramente, naquilo que vou chamar de exemplares ou exemplos, ou que, pelo menos, as pessoas os encontram no mundo pela primeira vez desta forma. Por fim, quero propor que os exemplos são concretizações de valores únicos em sua plenitude

L’anthropologie entre l’Europe et le Pacifique

Je suis très honoré de prononcer la Sir Raymond Firth Memorial Lecture cet après-midi. Très honoré et, pour être honnête, un peu intimidé. Intimidé tout d’abord par l’immense héritage de Sir Raymond Firth lui-même, cet homme qui s’est consacré sans relâche à l’étude des îles du Pacifique tout au long de sa très longue vie, et l’un des rares dont on peut vraiment dire qu’il a contribué à poser les fondements de cette discipline encore relativement jeune qu’était l’anthropologie. Mais intimidé ..