Western knowledge is often linked to universality and spatial transferability while indigenous knowledge is considered to be part of a traditional and outdated way of life. Development agencies, The World Bank and Higher Education Institutions alike have sought to reconcile these two apparently discrete forms of knowledge. In recent times the value of indigenous knowledge has come to be recognised in various fields including medicine, agriculture, science and education. Alongside this has been growing recognition that if communities and universities are to engage as co-workers in finding solutions to trans national issues then there has to be meaningful dialogue between the epistemologically different knowledge systems.

The conclusion reviews the content of the book; the characteristics of the District Court as an institution, the nature and features of District Court language and discourse, and how this relates to its workload and procedure; participants in the criminal process and their use of language; the new LEP defendant and how the LEP case compares to the Irish case, linguistically and substantively; historical language issues in Irish courts and development of the current language provision system; problems of organisation and quality. It then presents the paradox of a willingness to provide services with an unwillingness to assure the quality of those services and finds that this relates to assumptions about interpreter competence, the effective management of services, an over-emphasis on the importance of interpreter provision, and the minor nature of District Court offences.

This chapter shows that the intensive networks of sociality instantiated by Facebook have more in common with the way anthropologists have imagined personhood. This is common in places such as Melanesia than with the kind of familiar tale of digital technology as a vehicle for fashioning individualised selves. It gives some reasons why an Indo-Trinidadian believes the person met on Facebook is closer to the fundamental truth of that person than when met that same person face-to-face. The chapter then looks at the Akedah that is the biblical story of Kierkegaard Abraham's preparedness to sacrifice Isaac. The story has been the inspiration for a vast amount of literature and philosophy. The Akedah is the moment which sees the birth of religion as the more modern, ethically orientated, and monotheistic form as opposed to the more mythic-based systems of cosmology that precede it.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a critical reflection on the relationship between cosmology, ontology, and alterity in recent anthropological writings. It discusses abandoning ideas about wholes that are naturally pre-given and of cosmos being the medium of their structural and psychic integration. The book explains critiques of the notion that cosmology can be seen as a functionally differentiated and distinct part of the total social order to be studied alongside other parts, including kinship, economy or politics. It then illuminates the cosmological conditions and possibilities of Hindi divinity, now in the guise of Paidatali, a goddess-cosmos from Andhra Pradesh, as well as Siva. Finally, the book reveals the abiding role that different technological forms play in sustaining cosmological concerns at the heart of contemporary life in the West.

This chapter offers reflections on the relationship among wonder, cosmology, ontology, and anthropology as stimulated by two sources. They are the author's fieldwork among the Arosi of the island of Makira in Solomon Islands and the author's engagement with current trends in anthropological approaches to ontology. In order to suggest a logical and historical relationship among wonder, cosmology, ontology, and anthropology, the chapter discusses a few propositions laid out in syllogistic style. Arguing that Arosi poly-ontology resists assimilation to nondualism as the full extent of 'their vision of the world', the chapter presents the ethnography, not as evidence that ethical nondualism is fatally flawed or vitiated by counterfactuals. It points finally to the ways in which the nondualist meta-cosmology evident in much of the anthropology of ontology entails an ethical agenda that furthermore returns to the concept of wonder.

This chapter provides a discussion of major features of stranger-king formations punctuated by specific examples. Stranger-kingships produce ethnically divided societies even as they conjoin them often in a realm identified with an autochthonous people. The chapter also discusses the connection of the cosmo-logics of stranger-kingship. The rule of strangers may be established by violent or peaceful means, by ruse or even by the solicitation of the native people desirous of a chief of their own for their own good reasons. In any event, at some point early on it becomes contractual, thus constituting a system of complementary rights and powers. Incorporating the native groups, the stranger-king is incorporated by them; greater than society, he is domesticated by it. This Janus-faced figure appears notably at the installation rites of the original hero's royal successors, where representatives of the indigenous people often play a significant role.

Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey is a contemplation of cosmological and mythological proportion upon the trajectory of humankind from its beginnings into the future and ultimately towards its own metamorphosis and potential re-origination. This chapter is concerned with the way the film's argument builds through the structural arrangement of its images both with regard to the participants in the action of the film. The chapter argues that 2001 is a development within and an expression of the cosmological and ontological orientations of contemporary European and American cum globalising thought. These are taking form in the context of spectacular scientific and technological achievements and in what appear to be significant political and economic shifts. Kubrick takes a look at humanity from multiple perspectives including, as far as possible, from outside the position of human being itself.

This chapter discusses ritual frames and political centres of power in China and Taiwan. Chinese doctrines of ritual say that their performance makes manifest celestial principles and proper conduct, which again is a matter of balance, adjustment to change and, particularly for death rituals. The death rituals include the exemplary performance of filial duty to the dead. Any one of the materialisations of the cosmology presented in the chapter could be elaborated into the rest of the ritual sequence of which it is a part. Instead of doing this, the chapter draws attention to the activity of centring on various spatial scales and in its own temporality. One purpose of including in a description of rituals a description of exercises for health is to show that they share a conception of the materiality of life, namely the existence in all things and bodies of a vital substance called qi.

In order to understand certain projects of ethical self-cultivation or transformation, this chapter considers the ontological, cosmological, and anthropological assumptions and ideas in relation to which these activities are enacted. To understand such projects of self-cultivation necessitate the addition to the standard focus on social relations of a new attentiveness to relations with oneself, or with aspects of oneself what is termed as auto-relations. The chapter outlines the basic ontological, cosmological, and anthropological principles that underpin Sivanadiyars' attempts to work on their relations with their overlord (lord Siva), their selves and the various inhabitants (sentient and non-sentient) of the world around them. Finally, it explores the concept of auto-relationality in light of James Laidlaw's discussion of universalist and particular moral claims, the moi conception of self and what Morten Axel Pedersen identifies as the intensional self.

This chapter focuses on a film that directly deals with gaining control of fire and which resonates with traditional myths of the kind that Claude Lévi-Strauss has studied: Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire. It explores Annaud's film from the standpoint of one fateful artistic decision that ramifies through the whole: specifically, the decision to cast the dawn of humanity as an epic rather than a myth. The chapter explores the themes often encountered in traditional mythologies, and which are also present in an interesting form in Annaud's film. The consequences of Annaud's recasting of myth as epic can be best illuminated through comparison to another cinematic human-origin scenario that is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both films have numerous resonances with human origins as recounted in traditional mythologies and can be profitably and appropriately analysed in relation to the latter.

This chapter explores some cosmologies abroad in present-day Russia. They represent what people understand to be universally valid knowledge about the cosmos, the earth, and humanity's place in such a vast environment, an amalgam of ancient and the most up-to-date knowledge. The cosmologies discussed are eminently political cosmologies. They are aimed to change power relations in the world and some versions are explicitly directed against what is seen as Euro-American values and global domination. Referring to the case of Kalmykia, a small republic inside Russia, the chapter shows that the people themselves are concerned to make deliberate arguments to the effect that politics and cosmos are mutually constitutive. It suggests that to employ 'ideology' in a Karl Marx-derived sense would indeed point a dagger at the heart of cosmology, since such a critical usage de-reifies terms, notes their strategic character, and assigns ideas to a particular social origin.