ABSTRACT Throughout Europe, the arrival of irregular migrants in recent years has triggered the expression of nativist anxieties, witnessing a broad recourse to violent rhetoric and the embrace of exclusivist models of national and regional community. With an ethnographic focus on migrant resettlement in Sicily, this paper argues that the elaboration of a cosmopolitan ethic that rejects the politics

ABSTRACT Following an acrimonious referendum on European Union membership, the UK was plunged into chaos as people attempted to negotiate a deeply divided domestic political landscape. In Scotland, things were further complicated by the independence question and the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) call for a second independence referendum. In light of the Brexit result, since 2016 many citizens of

ABSTRACT This collection highlights the diverse and complicated ways that violence becomes axiomatic, namely through political rhetoric, epistemological impositions, and colonial legacies. Considering how axiomatic violence emerges from events of rupture as well as slow-moving structural inequalities, authors interrogate both the novelty and mundane quality of the current political moment. Approaching

ABSTRACT The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their

ABSTRACT The discourse on tolerance has become axiomatic for political and cultural life in the era of (post-)liberal modernity. In the event of any form of violence, the discourse is invoked as a ‘solution’ to ‘intolerance’. But what if we considered the tolerance discourse itself as an axiom of violence? Its discursive labour creates configurations of power relations that transform the existing human

(2021). Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon's Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Powerful Things: The History and Theory of Sacred Objects. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Broken Cities: Inside the Global Housing Crisis. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Cricket, Kirikiti and Imperialism in Samoa, 1879–1939. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Just as people require territory to live and to develop traditions, spirit beings require human minds that can represent them as real in order to exist and develop distinctive characteristics. Both human beings and spirit beings tend to gather in mutual support groups, bound by cultural compatibilities to secure their needs. Like human societies, culturally different spirit groups can come

ABSTRACT The thylacine, commonly associated with its Tasmanian extinction, also existed on the Australian mainland up until 3000–3500 years ago and is depicted in rock art sites in various locations around Australia. This lengthy period since extinction means we know little about Aboriginal Australians’ connections with this animal. This paper draws on available evidence to explore these thylacine

(2021). From the Bukarikara: The Lore of the Southwest Kimberley Through the Art of Butcher Joe Nangan. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 205-206.

(2021). Kava Rootz. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 206-208.

(2021). Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore. Anthropological Forum. Ahead of Print.

(2021). The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 217-220.

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue Qualifying Sociality through Values interrogates the relationship between sociality and values, two concepts that have gained increasing traction in anthropology, but which have not previously been jointly considered. It presents the twofold agenda of the special issue which is to explore how sociality is valued and how values affect sociality. It opens

ABSTRACT While much theoretical work on value takes point of departure in what adults presumably value, this chapter addresses the valuing work children do. Articulating ideals of ‘being social’ and ‘being oneself’ as good forms of personhood, Danish teachers oblige children to enact a good form of ‘being together as a class’, a sociability considered vital to democratic society. Drawing on discussions

ABSTRACT This article explores how changing environmental conditions and practices connect with shifting forms and valuations of sociality in a Ngaju Dayak village in the radically transformed peatlands of southern Borneo. It proposes that the production of values and social relations is indivisible from the production of a livelihood through material means and dwelling in the local environment. The

ABSTRACT This article uses a myth of the Luangans of Indonesian Borneo to reflect upon the value of sociality and its role in promoting well-being in their healing rituals. In these rituals, sociality with nonhuman beings and between participants is crucial, yet insufficient for, and sometimes at odds with, success. The article describes the multiple modes and valences of this ritual sociality, and

ABSTRACT What can we learn about values and how they shape sociality by looking at a murder? In this article, I look closer at the different and conflicting values involved in the social events leading up to an accidental killing of an outside visitor to a village in the northern highlands of the Philippines. I examine how these values were inherently instable and how this instability contributed to

ABSTRACT This paper explores the concepts of value and sociality in the lives of human subjects living in the village of Ara, South Sulawesi, Indonesia in the 1980s. Every individual engaged in several forms of sociality that were associated with different sets of values. As members of noble houses and kingdoms, they interacted with nonhuman subjects such as ancestor spirits and valued their ascribed

ABSTRACT This afterword to the Qualifying Sociality through Values special issue reflects on the challenge, aptly considered by each contributor, to revamp and rejuvenate the sociality concept in light of the ethical turn. It poses three questions. Firstly, just how important are values for sociality? That is, to what extent is social action really conceived and executed through values? Secondly, how

ABSTRACT This paper is an analysis of organised armed conflict, as occurs among the Huli speaking population of Papua New Guinea’s Hela Province. I argue that Huli warfare is viewed from a Huli perspective in historical terms, and that Huli wars are fundamentally fought over the control and authority over the historical narrative, and therefore the control and authority over resources into the future

(2021). Money Counts: Revisiting Economic Calculation. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 210-212.

(2021). Oceans Apart: Greed, Betrayal and Pacific Rugby. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 208-210.

(2021). Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 220-222.

(2021). The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 222-224.

ABSTRACT Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emu, which has been a publishing phenomenon in Australia, argues that Aboriginal people were not ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers in 1788, but were farming. This article sets the argument of the book within the context of the views of archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as other historians, about Aboriginal agriculture. Some have argued that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers

(2021). Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 215-217.

(2021). Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 213-215.

ABSTRACT This essay serves as an introduction to the articles in this special issue, Stranger Races, dealing with how indigenous peoples use the white Other in constructing their identity. I review key issues in anthropological debates over alterity and relations between former colonisers and indigenous peoples. Addressing the hegemony and power related to constructed identities in postcolonial settings

ABSTRACT Palang is a word used in an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR meaning people of a broadly white appearance. It is similar, in sound and semantic range, to words found in many Asia Pacific languages of indicating the West, Westerners, and things originating in the West. The Kantu palang is furthermore linked to other categories of human difference, including ethnicity, possession

ABSTRACT In Benin, as in many postcolonial settings, views of foreign ‘Others’ figure prominently in local discourses about identity and morality. Most of these characterisations centre on whites or other foreigners, known as Yovó in the Fon language of Southern Benin. While Yovós are stereotypically and disapprovingly believed to hold a distaste for African food and culture, they are praised for their

ABSTRACT While there is much scholarship deconstructing ‘mainstream’ Australian perceptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, there has been little attention to how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples perceive non-Indigenous Australians. Yet such perceptions are telling of cultural difference and the circulation of power in a neo-colonial state. In this paper, we focus on Bininj/Yol

ABSTRACT In the thought-provoking papers that constitute ‘Stranger Races: Reflections on Alterity in Constructions of the Self’, the authors make clear that our always already social confrontation with alterity is complex, multifaceted and context sensitive. They also make clear that thinking about alterity is a central, if not the central, element of anthropological study, an endeavour that sheds

ABSTRACT Through a study of love magic, this paper examines the ways in which sexual desire is culturally mediated among the Lelet of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The Lelet regulate sexuality heavily through what Foucault refers to as ‘prescriptive discourses’ which severely constrain expressions of sexuality, especially for women, who are construed as properly lacking sexual desire. While women

ABSTRACT This introduction takes a critical look at the heterogeneous corpus of social science research on climate change and Christian religion. The central concern is to present analytical alternatives to the universalist-essentialising approaches which, on the basis of a supposedly inherent contradiction between science and religion, exclude or devalue Christian contestation and modification of

ABSTRACT Pacific Islanders often respond emotionally and with recourse to their religious beliefs when faced with news about the projected consequences of climate change. In view of these responses, this paper argues that Pacific Islanders frequently combine their emotions with their religiosity in their efforts to shape their future. A case study of the atoll state of Kiribati illustrates this point

ABSTRACT Most research on climate change in South Pacific island communities has privileged people’s observations of physical environmental change with less attention paid to how people interpret the causes of these changes. Increasingly, more studies are focusing on how communities are receiving messages about environmental degradation, and from whom they are receiving them. This case study draws

ABSTRACT Based on the cross-referencing of ethnographic materials collected in Fiji and Vanuatu, this article explores the diverse ways faith and climate change are connected together and how these connections are sustained and transformed over time. It does so through the prism of three ‘practices of assemblage’ identified by Tania Murray Li, namely forging alignments, authorising knowledge, and reassembling

The anthropology of South America has a long tradition of documenting indigenous lifeways that defy categorisation according to Western frameworks. Contributors to anthropology’s recent ‘ontologica...

ABSTRACT To this day, the robed remains of mummified monks are venerated as ‘living Buddhas’ in northeastern Japan. Widely believed to have mummified themselves through strict adherence to ascetic regimen, temple patrons claim that these living Buddhas are capable of transmitting telepathic messages and curing disease, even of saving lives in the real time of disaster. In this article, I examine the

In Arnhem Land, Yolηu people of all ages are mad for mobile phones and buy them ‘all the time’ (96). Phone & Spear is a rich, ambitious book that reports on their relationship to the digital world....

ABSTRACT Tourists to Africa covet close encounters with dangerous wildlife, revelling in the simulation of the primal risks of the savannah, and yet they expect to be kept safe. Similarly, many tourists wish to engage with exotic local people, but in ways that ensure they feel comfortable socially and physically. Safari guides in the Okavango Delta fulfil these desires by facilitating close encounters

ABSTRACT This introduction sets out some of the key themes addressed by the papers in the special issue on ‘Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific’. Disasters are now widely understood not as ‘natural’ phenomena but as events or processes that unfold at the intersection between natural or artificial hazards and human populations. We review some of the effects of the naturalisation of

A book like this one on the Calais ‘Jungle’, the most extraordinary form of informal refugee encampment ever realised in the core of Western Europe, was much needed. Michel Agier adopts an original...

(2019). Acting for Others: Relational Transformations in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 413-415.

(2019). Correction. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. (vi)-(vi).

(2019). Retraction: Comment on Anthropology: Why it Matters. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 433-433.

during their lives. Only at death are there transactions of objects that represent a detachable part of the person. It is only then that a person is no longer able to act for himself or herself or for close kin. At this point, a man or woman becomes what is known as a ‘dividual’ and their relational parts can be substituted for objects. Bonnemère’s productive critique of a key tenet in The Gender of

selves more fully in the social contexts in which their users live and work. Although the ethical concerns of design (clients) and anthropology (human subjects) remain distinct, according to Miller this ‘distinction is dissolving’ (94). Miller subsequently states that ‘[n]aturalistic inquiry [participant observation] and qualitative research methods have become staples of design research’ (100). In

ABSTRACT Museums are our memory banks. They tell us where we have come from. They also allow us to imagine where we are heading. Which is why it should trouble us that there has never been a truly Australian museum. Each of our state and federal museums has been built on Aboriginal collections, and each has been built on distinctly Western or European concepts, values, categories and practices. Some

ABSTRACT In 2006, the Indonesian state re-recognised Confucianism as an official religion, but this did not have the straightforwardly positive consequences that either Confucianist revivalists or some theorists of recognition might have predicted. Revivalists were often – but not always – gripped by feelings of outrage and moral torment, whilst the pace of the revival itself was very uneven. These

ABSTRACT The establishment and use of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) groups is now the established route towards conservation in large parts of the Pacific, especially in Fiji. One of the main strengths of CBNRM that is often mentioned is its adaptability to different contexts and to changing objectives among stakeholders, an aspect thoroughly tested by events such as ‘natural’

ABSTRACT In many ethnographies, deities reflect social structures, represent power relations, or serve as a resource for individuals. However, believers usually do not doubt the existence of deities and their agency: that is, their ability to act and initiate change. The gap between these points of view narrows in the religious experiences in the Indian Himalayas. There, the local population, who communicate

ABSTRACT Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial

contexts, at least partly as a result of what Marshall Sahlins calls ‘structures of the conjuncture’. Social actors react to events by evoking their own cultural categories that help them to handle immediate contingencies. Crisis and mess are now often evoked in order to conceptualise current dynamic social processes. This book shows that neither crisis nor mess have any essence. We see them in a series

(2019). Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 409-411.

(mostly white), that sixty per cent were of retirement age, that most were lesbians, several had children and about a third had been married to men (77). In the chapter on their relationship to the land they seem to be fairly affluent and come from middle-class backgrounds whereas in the chapter on aging they seem to have become working-class or lower middle-class, which seems to be based more on income