In the cataclysmic shift from a planned to an open market economy in the early 1990s, Mongolians began to engage in a host of new ways to accumulate wealth and capital. This chapter explores the way in which wealth is achieved, across multiple spheres, through the enactment of a particular relationship. In doing so, it focuses on the way in which this relationship is enacted in the procurement of money through bank loans and the harnessing of fortune through everyday ritual acts. The chapter concludes that the way in which people procure bank loans and engage with the land masters tells us mostly about the way in which socialist power was imagined. Local bank workers, like shamans, diviners, and other middlemen, mediate between realms, issuing fortune and wealth from beings who take a share, thereby weaving the cosmologies they seek to manage.

This chapter analyses a particular site of accumulation of riches: the small-scale maize mills that dot the Mozambican peri-urban and urban landscapes. The argument in the chapter is theoretically concerned with what is sometimes analysed as cosmology's central dynamic: perceptions of the workings of creative and degenerative forces present in different social and cultural orders. Specifically, it exposes how the mill creates intense concerns through engaging households' production, substance, and accumulation. The chapter then seeks to contribute to a re-centring of the importance of cosmology and its continued creation for anthropological analyses of economic, political, and socio-cultural dynamics. It explores a particular instance where socially circumscribed productive and reproductive capacities, exemplified through the female capacities for enriching sadza through different bodily means, are challenged by an external form: the maize mill. It considers the centrality of situated and historically constituted social orders and cosmological horizons.

This chapter explores the relationship between shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia. It explores the imbrication between the invisible paths of the shamanic spirits and the equally opaque political-economic forces of postsocialist transition. In Northern Mongolia, shamanism was postsocialism: the fluid and inherently transitional and transformation manner in which the world orchestrated itself in the chaotic 1990s. In Northern Mongolia, occult phenomena like shamanism, magic, and witchcraft were an irreducible part of transition, as the chaotic state of total perpetual change through which social life was perceived to be unfolding in the 1990s. In Northern Mongolia, therefore, the invisible powers of the spirits and the opaque forces of the market are imbued with similarly labile shapes. Recognising this basic homology between the 'local' forms of shamanic cosmology and the 'global' forms of political economy is the key to understand the nature of social life in Northern Mongolia after socialism.

This chapter 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. It discusses 'how worlds are held together through the metaphysics of the human'. In relation to the eventual emergence of Western cosmology, two great ruptures of holistic cosmoses developed historically. The first emerged during what is often called the Axial Age; while the second emerged during the separation of politics from religion, sometimes referred to as the Great Separation. Cosmos acquires exteriority through the cosmic rupture, and so the capacity to be encompassed by transcendent deity. The rupture of the intra-grated holistic cosmos led to the creation of a kind of holism, in which God holds his cosmos together from its boundaries, while his primary positioning is outside his creation. He is independent of the cosmos of his creation whose parts are inter-grated.

This chapter draws upon the anthropology that deals with ritual polities and the capacitating character of cosmology in relation to politics. It reviews ritual and cosmology as offering certain possible structures of power, rank, and social mobility. The chapter shows how the unitary concept of the Christian Man can be conceived in a Vanuatu pluralist cosmology and how he is in a crucial way central to the political process of re-building society. Numerous Pentecostal movements celebrate the New Man and the New Life as their desired innovation, but not so much as their cultural convention or lived experience. The chapter expands on this vision of how the Christian Man and new forms of agency are made sense of and reinvented. For the case of Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, it also looks at how the cosmological construction of New Man works out in what we perceive to be a pluralist cosmology.

This chapter analyses Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's (CERD) evolving approach to use the disaggregated data to monitor and promote implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). It highlights the difference between two distinct types of data that CERD has elicited since its 1973 general recommendation. The first type consists of figures on the size and distribution of ethno-racial sub-populations; the second is comprised of statistics representing the living conditions of protected groups, especially in comparison to the rest of the population. The chapter tracks the debates that have shaped the Committee's policies and practices on disaggregated data over its first forty-five years using certain documents. The documents used are spanned across the Committee's history, secondary literature and ethnographic material from observation and interviews at CERD sessions.

This chapter traces the role that International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) have played in contributing to the emerging visibility of Afro-descendants in Latin America. It begins with a brief overview of historical racial discourses in the region and the emergence of a framework for Afro-descendant rights at the international level. With reference to several country examples, the chapter then demonstrates how CERD has used Concluding Observations and recommendations to draw attention to Afro-descendants in Latin America. It discusses the adoption of General Recommendation 34 (GR 34). While still too early to analyse its impact, GR 34 has opened the door for greater possibilities within the emerging normative framework on the human rights of Afro-descendants. Afro-descendants may be considered as a relatively new group in terms of human rights protections.

This chapter offers a brief reflection on the term 'racist hate speech'. It introduces relevant provisions of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), paying particular attention to Article 4, which has traditionally been the default provision for combating racist hate speech. The chapter explains the context in which General Recommendation 35 (GR 35) was adopted, before examining its ambition and objectives, as well as its concrete provisions and textual emphases. It assesses the initial impact of GR 35 and offers a tentative prognosis of how it will fare in the future. The task of drafting GR 35 provided Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) with an ideal opportunity to mount a critical examination of its own positioning on relevant issues in the past.

This chapter identifies some key aspects of the United Nations treaty system and the work of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). They have served to help and hinder the achievement of a fairer social system for those who are the main victims and survivors of racial and gender injustice. The Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted by the General Assembly in 1967 soon after the Internation Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). This was followed by the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 and during the UN Decade for the Advancement of Women. In March 2000, CERD took a momentous step by adopting General Recommendation (GR) 25 on the gender related dimensions of racial discrimination.