Contemporary Africa through the theory of Louis Dumont

Abstract This article responds to a trend in recent anthropological scholarship in Africa that has overemphasized a lack of social organization following the advancement of neoliberal reforms across the continent. Using a theoretical framework informed by the theory of Louis Dumont, I show that social organization remains an important analytical topic in times of crisis, and that this is best apprehended through an analysis of values. The ethnographic focus of this article is Pentecostal Christianity as it is practiced on the Zambian Copperbelt. In this particular African context, Pentecostalism is animated by an overarching value that I call "moving," which is in turn made up to two sub-values: charisma and prosperity. By exploring how Pentecostal believers navigate the hierarchical relationship between these two sub-values, we are given a clear picture of the social world that Pentecostal adherence makes possible

A Forgotten Adivasi Landscape: Museums and Memory in western India

This article focuses on processes of remembering, forgetting and re-remembering. It examines a fundamental tension between the project of retrieving an adivasi past, initiated by an adivasi museum in rural western India, and the social and material landscape surrounding it, characterised instead by fragmentation and separation from the identity of adivasi. The article reflects on a collaborative research project between the researcher, young adivasi curators and inhabitants of the area adjoining the museum. It shows how, while curators engaged in a project of recuperation, at the same time, they were distancing themselves from their traditional identity by joining reform movements and new religious sects. Processes of memory and forgetting, however, also co-existed. People held multiple identities and the process of retrieving the past also called for transformation and reform. The article is a timely contribution to debates about adivasi identity, social transformation and religious reform. It also offers a reflection on the new role of indigenous museums and their potential to address a ‘crisis of postcolonial memory’ (Werbner 1998). Finally, it contributes to discussions of methodology with a focus on the collaborative process of collecting and its role in eliciting or preventing certain kinds of memories

Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

This paper sets out two main arguments. In part one, a description of the adherents of the various intellectual disciplines and religious faiths in premodern India is given, each having developed distinct and different imagined bodies; for example, the body described in Tantric circles had little or nothing in common with the body described in medical circles. In part two, an account is given of the encounter between Ayurvedic anatomy and early colonial European anatomy which led initially to attempts at synthesis; these gave way to an abandonment of the syncretist vision of the body and the acceptance of an epistemological suspension of judgment, in which radically different body conceptualizations are simultaneously held in unacknowledged cognitive dissonance