This chapter traces the emergence and wider reception of Victor Turner’s ethnography, arguments and dominant ideas, including the social drama, liminality and communitas; and also his remarkable projection of a personal fable, which he called his ‘voyage of discovery’. There is a restlessness in Turner’s life and work that makes any account of his anthropology problematic. What yesterday’s man saw was actually blinkered, as today’s man continually realized, opening his eyes for himself and for the liberation of future generations – or so went Turner’s own tale of novelty and discovery in his intellectual history. A major challenge that this chapter addresses is twofold. On the one hand, it follows the deep continuities in Turner’s vision as a British-trained social anthropologist, a pupil of Gluckman, and a member of the Manchester School. On the other hand, the account discerns certain developments in his remaking, in America, as an influential celebrity. Now it is as if a tide once fashionably in his favour, as it swelled in America in his lifetime, has slipped away, or bubbled up for popular consumption, oddly, as a posthumous caricature. Hence the open question: What can social scientists learn about celebrity and fashion from the fate of Turner’s voyage?

Chapter 4 turns from rural research by the home town anthropologist Colson to urban research by Clyde Mitchell, whose lack of a home town in his early life and need to pay attention to railway timetables – his Scottish father worked on the South African railway – may well have been formative for a life-long disposition towards following people newly on the move, especially strangers encountering fresh situations and innovating in towns. Arguably, Mitchell’s formative disposition appears to be dual: both an affinity with mapping, navigating and finding the way through flux and complexity, and also a fascination with empirical bits of the kind a mathematician might parse. Chapter 4 complements a review of Mitchell’s seminal urban studies, especially on the Kalela dance, by giving a full account of the fiercely controversial attack, led by the Marxist sociologist Bernard Magubane, on Mitchell’s work in collaboration with A. L. Epstein. Carrying forward the interest in Gluckman’s impact, this chapter examines the nature of Mitchell’s interdependent, if ambivalent, relation with his mentor and friend, Gluckman, from whom he learned and whom, in turn, he taught, in good measure through restatements and revisions of Gluckman’s work and ideas.

This chapter covers the representations of Muslims andIslam, exploring the dominant ideas that contributeto the construction of Muslim identities in thepress. It provides an in-depth insight into thecontext of such debates and themes and will offer anassessment of the symbols used in contemporarymedia. It reveals the manner in which discoursessurrounding Muslims circulate, and considers broaderissues of integration, multiculturalism, andaccommodation debates and experiences.

This chapter reviews the work and life of Elizabeth Colson, Gluckman’s successor as head of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, through an intellectual history focused on her social biography. The account explains how and why her legacy, so rich in Central African ethnography, matters for coming generations of anthropologists. A main contention is that coming from a Midwestern town in Minnesota, distinguished by the uneasy coexistence of displaced Ojibwa Indians and white settler farmers, predisposed Colson towards concerns with discrimination, emplacement and displacement, egalitarianism and participatory democracy, and towards being a systems sceptic, who cast doubt on the utility of any model of a system as if it were something consistently well integrated as a totality. Her scepticism stands out against the approaches of other pioneering social anthropologists; so too does the creative legacy of travelling theory in her transatlantic role. Early in her long career, she introduced to British social anthropology approaches from American sociology. Her breakthrough regarding cross-cutting ties in conflict resolution called into question the utility of the mainstream structuralist model of segmentary opposition and lineage theory. This account documents the intense networking, the broad critical reviewing, and the sustained international collaboration that she accomplished.

This chapter explores how current portrayals of Islamand Muslims influence society. It does so by puttingresearch data gathered using focus groups andinterviews with non-Muslim participants in dialoguewith one another. This then leads to a discussionabout how this affects socio-political engagement,with a particular reference to the spreading ofideologies, discourses, and political capital. Thiswill be explored by looking at how mediacommunication and public debate affect communityrelations on the ground, through participantvoices.

Here we look at a range of different architectural approaches to the issue of cultural heritage destroyed in conflict and examine how these both seem to fetishize the past and can develop overly prescriptive approaches that are built on Western scientific knowledge production. I provide a deep-dive into the architectural competition run through UNESCO to rebuild al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul. I show that there was potential for this competition to have been more beneficial to the people of Mosul that might have imbued the project with the collaborative spirit that would ensure its success and the complex’s (re)incorporation into the daily lives of Moslawis. Here the master’s tools have decidedly not been successful in dismantling the master’s house. Some of the unsuccessful competition entries, however, demonstrated much-needed creativity and vibrancy, together with collaborative care and attention towards local communities and stakeholders. These included consideration of pressing climate issues, wellbeing and memory.

This chapter analyses how the findings of the researchrelate to current topical issues. It does this byexamining the data in light of recent events. Thisleads to a discussion on how socio-political eventsare informed by media discourse, and how thosediscourses continue to inform the thoughts andactions of non-Muslims on an everyday basis.

Max Gluckman’s formative years in South Africa were highly important for his masterpiece, The Judicial Process among the Barotse, and his long-term projects as a social anthropologist. This account discloses his father’s significance as a much-admired role model, a public-spirited lawyer, a cosmopolitan and liberal anglophile, who himself fought, documented and analysed a remarkable legal and political struggle in the Bechuanaland Protectorate under colonial rule. From the fact that his father lost this struggle, Gluckman learned a lesson of vulnerability; that in becoming an anti-colonial, anti-apartheid activist and public intellectual who spoke to wider audiences through the press and radio, he had to endure failure as well as success.

Chapter 10 moves the focus from colonial to postcolonial Africa, asking how anthropologists have understood the postcolonial, and how their understandings relate to those of mainstream postcolonial studies. Most anthropological approaches to the postcolonial have not been underwritten by a simple narrative periodization of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial. The colonial legacy has instead been taken as problematic and contested, to be understood in the light of deepening social inequality across postcolonial states, and in consequence sometimes freighted with nostalgia for an imaginary past of colonial or pre-colonial sociality. Thanks in part to widespread disenchantment with liberation struggles and with the postcolonial fruits of nationalism, many anthropologists of Africa have looked to the longue durée to periodize the postcolonial. Views on the general direction of change vary between the extremes of the over-optimistic Polyannas and the Cassandras, with their relentless rehearsals of disorder and apocalypse now. Their disagreement is not due entirely to differences between the postcolonies they address, but extends to opposed analyses of the local impact of global discourses on human rights and democracy, to religious movements towards grassroots ecumenism, to debates about ‘decolonization’, and beyond this to an ocean of postcolonial debate about poverty and ‘development’.

Here we look at various creative responses in visual media to issues around the ownership, destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria. In all cases the artists have responded with sensitivity and humility, always considering how their works relate to the people and communities in Syria and Iraq. They take up activist positions to probe more deeply into the histories and complex networks of relationships that have wrapped themselves around both Syrian and Iraqi cultural heritage. They demonstrate powerfully how ghosts can work in practice to destabilise and challenge the status quo. In so doing, the works looked at in this chapter frequently point to ways of conceptualising heritage reconstruction that may be more beneficial long-term to the needs and wellbeing of Syrians and Iraqis, wherever they may currently be living their lives.

The chapter starts with a reflection on the author’s positionality, especially as a British Iraq archaeologist, and how this influences key themes that run through the book regarding who heritage reconstruction is for, the limits of heritage reconstruction, heritage preservation and consensus seeking. This chapter includes several reflections that may seem provocative, perhaps even heretical, to a reader who has been digesting a Western preservationist paradigm most of their life. The author invites readers to reflect on their own positionality and how they are responding to the ideas presented here. The chapter ends with an overview of the histories of colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism as they relate to cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq.