Auditing War

I made a mistake a few months ago. It was the sort of mistake I have made repeatedly and yet one I always reflect upon with the same measure of surprise. It started when colleagues in Bosnia alerted me to the fact that Bosnia and Kosovo, unlike other neighbouring countries in the former Yugoslavia, were to be excluded from a new relaxing of EU visa requirements. Indignant and overflowing with hypothetical rationales as to why Bosnia and Kosovo might be excluded, rationales that I presumed might have been contrived to obscure ‘real reasons’, a colleague and I went onto the internet to find an explanation (which I tacitly understood would only be a justification, the ‘real’ reasons left un-enunciated). We eventually read that the countries in question had failed to meet a variety of requirements—we can already call them indicators—that would signal their readiness to enjoy the new visa regime. My error resided precisely in the presumption that these alleged ‘failures’ on the parts of the states involved, concealed some more pertinent truth.  In fact, these ‘failures’ had everything to do with visibility and transparency and nothing to do with rationales hidden beneath an exercise in accountability that might measure ‘readiness’. That is, the entire dilemma had everything to do with what Marilyn Strathern poignantly referred to as ‘what visibility conceals’ (2000: 310)

'The Creativity of Social, Political and Religious Life'

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression

'The Legal Thing in Swaziland: Res Judicata and Divine Kingship'

Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the concerns about the place of objects and materiality in analytical strategies, and the obligation of ethnographers to question their assumptions and approaches. The team of leading contributors put forward a positive programme for future research in this highly original and invaluable guide to recent developments in mainstream anthropological theory

When is Law and Custom not Customary Law?

This study endeavours to re-think debates about the competing values of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in Swazi law (and politics) by considering the extent to which the characterisation of the Swazi legal system as ‘dual’ is an apt description of the state of affairs. While the country seems to exhibit a straightforward instance of post-colonial, state-law pluralism, where both a ‘received’ and ‘customary’ code of law obtain, the paper will argue against this assessment. by suggesting that what Swazis term ‘Swazi law and custom’ cannot be equated with what Swazi statute understands as the ‘customary law’, the article hopes to suggest the need for a similar re-consideration of the term ‘tradition’ in Swazi political debate