On the Resilience of Superstition

The concept of “belief” has always been taken seriously by anthropologists and philosophers; nevertheless, it has led to a long series of perplexities. To the contrary, the concept of “superstition” has simply been discarded as ethnocentric. The first has been pushed aside for its logical uncertainty; the second for its ethical uncertainty. Yet, the two concepts seem to be surprisingly resilient in face of the continued exercise of anthropological questioning. Furthermore, their capacity for survival appears to be connected precisely to that which connects them: superstition is unfounded belief but the issue of the foundation of belief is at the centre of the anthropological and philosophical perplexities that have haunted the concept of belief. In this paper I examine two examples – one of them a short story by Joseph Conrad – in order to show that today we can look differently at what superstition may be

Lusotopy as Ecumene

In order to avoid the sociocentric proclivity to identify language with culture and nation, thus echoing the language of empire, this paper follows the suggestions of Kroeber, Hannerz, and Mintz in taking recourse to the concept of ecumene. It aims to show that the concept can be applied profitably to the spaces and moments that integrate the vastly differentiated worldwide network of relations resulting from the historical expansion of the Portuguese. To that extent, Lusotopy is a space of human cohabitation structured by amity

Xará: Namesakes in Southern Mozambique and Bahia (Brazil)

In Maputo (Southern Mozambique) and Bahia (Brazil), the most commonly used word to refer to namesakes is xara´ – a word of Amerindian origin. Although the institutions in question diverge considerably in each of these contexts, the two usages come together in that the sharing of a personal name establishes an alliance not only between the two persons involved but also among their relations. In this way, it is argued that the namesake institution is both supervening upon filiation and is a way of closing the local universe of relatedness upon itself. By superimposing a set of crossing ties, the namesake institution consolidates the entities at play and their relations. Nevertheless, much like filiation, upon which it is dependent, the namesake relation is one of co-responsibility and fusion between the partners, not of reciprocal responsibility. The latter is the product of the triangulation that such relations of alliance produce

“La soglia degli affetti: considerazioni sull’attribuzione del nome e la costruzione sociale della persona”

This is an article (in Italian) about name attribution and the social construction of persons in Bahia (NE Brazil

Portugal and the Dynamics of Smallness

The problem of smallness is no longer one that countries like Portugal have to face alone, but one that faces the whole world. The world today is small in the sense that there are no empty spaces out there anymore; we have reached the limits of the model of growth that drove modernity. That model was imperial and wasteful of resources, and it has increasingly turned against itself. The smallness of Portugal, both in political and economic terms, is no longer alone a Portuguese problem, but one of global dimensions: in environmental, legal, financial and social terms

The ethnographic present revisited

The old methodological injunction to focus on the ethnographic present has been taken negatively to mean a refusal of history. In this paper, I propose that the notion of ethnographic present be used conjecturally to reflect the situated nature of all ethnographic research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio