Artifacts of history: events and the interpretation of images

Amongst other things, this paper argues that a kind of anthropology, referred to by Strathern as modernist anthropology, has no reason to refer to artifacts except as illustrations. They are merely useful examples to illustrate information the anthropologist has provided about a given social/cultural context, e.g. to illustrate a worldview

Property, Substance, and Effect

This title draws on Strathern‚Äôs interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations come into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge brought together here. Twenty years have not diminished interest in the book‚Äôs opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist‚Äôs ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Wherever one lives, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for the lateral reflection afforded through the ‚Äúethnographic effect.‚Ä

Comparing Concerns—Some issues in organ and other donations: Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lecture:

In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of organ and tissue donation, and the debates to which current practices give rise. Donation is only one of several modes of procurement, organs only one kind of body part that can be donated, and people offer comparisons just as commentators do. Perhaps here is an answer to the question of how to make a reasonable account out of a fraught and infinitely expandable nexus of public concerns. Is it possible to conserve the complexity of the issues while not letting the sheer quantity of information run away with  itself? Would following through the comparisons do the trick

Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes

A return to Deleuze and Guattari’s famous figure of the rhizome, this paper turns the philosophical idea around by asking what we might learn, from their openended exposition of it, about plants. The account at once reduces the rhizome to its cultivated varieties and enlarges the notion of a plant by the people joined to it. A stimulus comes from the recent World Heritage designation of a site in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, for its evidence of the prehistoric cultivation of plants preferentially propagated by vegetative means. Following Haudricourt’s early exposition of the yam and the implications of cloning as a way of life (as well as a way of thought), the paper elaborates on what is indissolubly tied to the rhizome as a cultivated plant, people’s actions. Rhizomic plants are well described as multiplicities. Some questions are asked about the nature of diverse contrasts that are or are not implied. The burden of ethnographic demonstration is with the Papua New Guinean material; the provisional nature of the rest will be apparent.Riprendendo la celebre figura del rizoma elaborata da Deleuze e Guattari, questo articolo capovolge l’idea filosofica per chiedersi cosa si possa imparare da questa riflessione aperta riguardo alle piante. Allo stesso tempo, il resoconto riduce il rizoma alle sue varietà coltivate e allarga la nozione di pianta alle persone ad essa associate. Uno stimolo proviene dalla recente designazione di Patrimonio dell’umanità di un sito del Monte Hagen, Papua Nuova Guinea, per aver fornito la prova della coltivazione preistorica di piante riprodotte principalmente attraverso modalità vegetative. Seguendo la precorritrice descrizione di Haudricourt sull’igname, e le implicazioni sulla clonazione come stile di vita (oltre che come modo di pensare), l’articolo riflette su un tema che è indissolubilmente legato al rizoma inteso come pianta coltivata: le azioni della gente. Le piante rizomatiche sono descritte accuratamente come molteplicità. Alcuni interrogativi posti riguardano la natura dei diversi contrasti che sono o non sono implicati. L’onere della dimostrazione etnografica riposa su materiale proveniente da Papua Nuova Guinea, mentre la natura provvisoria del resto risulterà evidente

Ethnographic Advocacy Against the Death Penalty

This article develops the concept of “ethnographic advocacy” to make sense of the humanizing, open‐ended knowledge practices involved in the defense of criminal defendants charged with capital murder. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork with well‐respected figures in the American capital defense bar, as well as my own professional experience as an investigator specializing in death penalty sentencing mitigation, I argue that effective advocacy for life occurs through qualitative knowledge practices that share notable methodological affinities with contemporary anthropological ethnography. The article concludes with a preliminary exploration of what the concept of ethnographic advocacy might reveal about academic anthropology\u27s own advocative engagements

The inter-American regional system and world unity.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe inter-American regional system, the oldest functioning international organization had its early beginnings in 1826 with the Bolivarian Congress, gained its majority with the First, International Conference of American States in 1890, and matured into the present highly organized mechanism for international peace and progress with the Charter of the Organization of American States in 1948. The original union of American republics has developed gradually and evoked through this evolution principles and practices predicated on good faith, mutual understanding, and cooperative spirit. [TRUNCATED