This article is about personal identity documents and bureaucratic space in Peru. In applying for and renewing a range of personal documentation, individuals trace and re-trace steps through the streets and official buildings of Cuzco in Peru's southern highlands. This movement is highly visible in an unusual urban setting characterised by complex overlays of Incan, colonial, republican and contemporary administrative spaces. While the state constructs personal identification in the process, bodily lessons of citizenship are conveyed through spatial interaction with bureaucratic room. Active participation and varying degrees of acquiescence in these documentary peregrinations visibly legitimise the state presence and dominion on the urban scene. Thus, citizens are created through the sequence of bureaucratic identification on the one hand, and on the other, the state is made evident through the dynamic movement of people through the identification process. Bodily movement both integrates bureaucratic space and is integrated by such places.

The paper suggests that instead of talking about identities, inherited or acquired, it would be more in keeping with the realities of the globalising world to speak of identification, a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged. The frantic search of identity is not a residue of the pre-globalization times not yet fully extirpated but bound to become extinct as the globalization progresses; it is, on the contrary, the side-effect and by-product of the combination of globalising and individualising pressures and the tensions they spawn. The identification wars are neither contrary nor stand in the way of the globalising tendency: they are a legitimate offspring and natural companion of globalisation and far from arresting it, lubricate its wheels.

Abstraction is an important concern in the modern west. This article describes two social aspects of abstraction. The first is the ways that it is associated with certain sorts of people (the abstracting agent), to show some of the forms that abstraction can take in western thought. The second is the ways that it is institutionalised, especially in economic activity in western society over the past few centuries (institutional abstraction), to show some of the factors that account for its cultural form and salience. Abstraction can be viewed ambivalently, and the article concludes with a consideration of how this ambivalence is expressed in a common western understanding of economic life.

This paper deals with the ways of life obtaining in the western half of the Central Highlands of western New Guinea at the eve of the colonial era. It analyses headmanship and the disposal of the fruits of intensive agriculture making use of the Great Men – Leader – Big Man typology conceptualised by Godelier and Lemonnier in their analyses of east New Guinea Highlands ways of life. While Ekagi-me, living near the Paniai lakes, conformed to a Big-Man type social formation, the way of life of the Grand Valley Dani did not fit the typology.

This article uses ethnographic material from the Fuyuge of highland Papua and other Melanesian peoples critically to examine the attribution of modernity to Melanesia. Of related concern to this critical focus is that of periodisation, and the periodisation of modernity in Melanesia. Each ethnographic instance that is drawn upon is situated further in the historical past. The Melanesian past is used in this manner in order to address two questions: is it possible to periodise modernity in the Melanesia context; and, if so, when was modernity in Melanesia? The answers to both these considerations suggest that modernity cannot be likened to mass consumption or the individual, theoretical assumptions prevalent in current depictions of modernity in Melanesia. Rather, modernity is a temporal predicament connected to formations of political (state) power and its agendas of local intervention.

This article considers two forms of action among Miskitu adolescents, both of which encode in ritualised form anxieties and desires concerned with the imminent categorical transition from adolescence to adulthood. The first of these is a masked dance known as ‘mosko’ which is performed mainly by both young unmarried man and women in the village of Kakabila. The second is a supposedly culture-bound, and evidently contagious, condition known as ‘grisi siknis’ which afflicts mainly young unmarried women in Miskitu-speaking communities throughout eastern Nicaragua and Honduras. Analysis of this material suggests that where rituals directly enacting transformations to adulthood are absent, modes of action allowing individuals to express concerns surrounding this change of status are likely to be particularly dramatic.

From its late eighteenth century beginnings until the early twentieth century, the House of Rothschild was the greatest of the European banks. Its success was due not only to the financial skills of the partners but also to their innovative strategies in the sphere of kinship and marriage. The structure of the bank was dependent on the family's unique rules of succession and marriage. It was organised into five branches, each in a different country, originally directed by one of the five sons of the founder, Mayer Amschel. The branches were linked by ties of fraternity, reinforced by repeated endogamous marriages. These marriages were normally contracted between the children of partners. Given the rule, established by Mayer Amschel, that only the founder's sons and, later, their sons and sons sons could become partners, the most common pattern was for a man to marry his father's brother's daughter.

This paper compares social networks mobilised through claims of ownership in Euro-American and Melanesian contexts. It addresses the debate between Strathern (1996) and Latour (1993) regarding the length of networks formed in these societies. Examples are drawn from compensation claims against the Lihir gold mine in Papua New Guinea. The paper also considers Pietz (1997) discussion of nineteenth-century British laws relating to compensation. The aim of the paper is to examine the effects of ownership strategies on other social categories and practices, including competing assessments of the environmental impacts of mining and the value of human life.

This article emphasises a universal value which both accepts and transcends the cultural division of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Instead of the usual western notion of one body and one self, the self of a Punjabi person is constituted through its relation to a plurality of bodies and is thus principally defined less as a value in itself than in its relation to other persons. To elucidate this, first the conceptual distinctions between the concept of the person and that of the self are pointed out. Second, it is shown that the category of the person in the Punjab is context-sensitive and that it transcends the physical boundary of the body.

The environment has become a powerful locus for the negotiation of cultural identity in Europe. The problem of local resistance to the creation of new conservation areas compels us to question how tropes of cultural alterity shapes environmental programmes in the rural margins of the European Union. In Sardinia, the allochronism deployed in explanations of criminality has also framed discourses promoting a new Italian national park. Converging visions of social and ecological backwardness have naturalised the cultural distance between those who see the Sardinian forest as a local resource protected by indigenous traditions, and those who see it as a European or global resource endangered by local ignorance and violence. Local resistance to the park operates in a range of symbolic and material modes, opening ambiguous political spaces in which to challenge European and environmentalist constructions of history, modernity and backwardness.

A state formation in the national order of things seems unthinkable without the state's everyday and ritual attempts to fashion ideas about what makes its people a people. This paper argues that we should examine makings of national populations in terms of historical constructions of cosmologies. The author analyses how one modern state, the Dominican Republic, produced particular ideas about ‘the Dominican people’. Dominican elites and the Dominican state made the Dominican population's origins ‘white, Hispanic and Catholic’ by claiming descent from Christopher Columbus. From the late 1870s, the Dominican republic has taken for granted that Columbus's tomb was in Santo Domingo. The state claimed that his remains had been buried on Dominican land. It appropriated the navigator's dead body as a material and symbolic resource for making essentialising and territorialising notions of the Dominican people. Bones of ancestors and heroes may be important vehicles of validation in modern political struggles, struggles which simultaneously concern identities and territories. Being ‘objective’ artifacts, bones root, incorporate and authorise territorialised identity claims. The making of Dominican ideas about Columbus as a Dominican ancestor has been tied to construction of notions of white supremacy – or racism. The author argues that the Dominican state's ideas and practices were, and are, detrimental to black Dominicans. These ideas and practices also hurt Haitians who cross the Haitian-Dominican border in search of means of livelihood.

The co-existence field in Israel is a rather loose array of NGOs and government sponsored organisations. Its main trajectory since the 1980s was structured meetings between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel at intermediate and secondary school levels. It is, ostensibly, a mutual affair, enabling actors on both sides to experience each other first hand as a means to improve relations and reduce tension. A closer examination, however, reveals that key aspects of the field were in designed primarily for Israeli consumption. Palestinian participants and moderators thus tend to become objectified, mere illustrations in an all-Israeli debate which takes place, as it were, above the Palestinian's head.

The history of the field is briefly sketched, followed by an analysis of the theoretical, ideological and political assumptions of two of the main schools of thought within it. The role of Palestinians is then examined, using input from ethnographic interviews and content analysis of published material. This becomes the basis for an alternative historicisation of the field, re-framed within the political and social context of Israel since 1977.

What does it mean to be Swiss? Or, how to justify the existence of the Swiss nation? Within a country defined by cultural heterogeneity, a pervading influence is exerted by what has to be labelled an Alpine myth over any idea and practice to legitimate a national unity. Today, for a great number of people, the Alpine myth is still a widely shared belief that serves to unite the country. But for those who no longer believe in such a founding myth, the question of the very existence of Switzerland is a more and more relevant one, as it becomes increasingly difficult to define what holds together the various parts of the country.

The well-known Chinese emblem yin and yang, studied through the relations between ‘rites and music’, is present in contemporary Chinese society as a fundamental hierarchical opposition. The rite rang ‘handing over for getting’ is explored through given modern performances, those of the rock Pekingese musicians in the 1990s. During the dancing parties, the rock groups ‘hand over’ their places forming a series of groups representing each other on stage, founding in that way a holist community. During the banquet of the rock concert that gather the communist power, represented by the official organisers of such an event, and the popular, represented by the rock musicians, the inviting official ‘hands over’ his central place to the star singer. This ritualistic gesture putting together two different parts of the society shows that the rock music and the power share the same values.

This paper considers issues of representation, in particular, the positioning of the ethnographer. It demonstrates a shift from the anthropologist's concern about how to position herself in the field to that of the perspectives of specific participant-informants. Acquiring knowledge about one's own society must consider both academic pressure to stand outside the frame, and the notion that the ethnographer is always situated. The article explores how an indigenous ethnographer in Guyana becomes both insider and outsider for the participant-informants. This positioning of the ethnographer emerges from the participants-informants’ concerns and perspectives.

The ordinarinesses and simultaneities of experience

Journeys with Flies is a lyrical account of time spent between 1973 and 1994 among Mbanduru, Zhu and Tswana in the Kalahari desert. An extract from an opening section, ‘Entries’ (pp. 18–19), reads as follows:finding in an abandoned geology camp used in a premature hunt for oil on the Yukon coast in the 50s a rusted can of strawberry jam pulled open with our fingers scooping out the contents ravenous for sugar and fat our supply plane fogbound for weeks at Inuvik pilot biscuit and the caribou we shot thin in the calving season keeping us full but unsatisfied when the plane finally arrived we ate butter by the handful and had roaring diarrhea all that night that never lost the light of day . . .At Nwama, Eiffel-rust rain etched across chalcedony-green afterlight sucked out of the mid-Atlantic where the rainbow arc of the sunken sun is gliding toward North America.I can imagine that to be an organic reality, a function of the electrical charge of light clinging to its own perimeter and to reflections of important earth features – Guatemalan jungles could furnish the green for those bound to that place – wind carrying Eiffelcolor down with the shape blown into the rain. You can’t be in only one place at a time – how could you find the way there, or ever return?Coffee boiled for an hour in milk constantly skimmed so that it is like hot cocoa with a different taste, bitter roots roasted on a fire, and long after dark, the milking done, huge bowls of fresh clabbered yogurt . . .all this milk. Just a month ago there was practically none; only cows with newly dropped calves had enough so that some could be taken for people to drink.Those were hard days:look at usthinness is taking us’. Journeys with Flies is a literary-anthropological attempt to treat the perennial existential question of identity, an attempt to do justice to the commonalities of human embodied experience and to adumbrate a language of their conveyance.

This interview with Professor Adam Kuper of Brunel University took place in London in July 2000. It is divided into three sections. In the first, Professor Kuper outlines the background to and summarises the main arguments of his most recent book, Culture. The Anthropologists’ Account (Kuper 1999b), relating these to the issues of postmodernism, biological determinism and the ‘intellectually impoverished heritage’ of social anthropology in Britain. He then moves on to discuss in turn the relationship between theory and ethnography, ethical issues in fieldwork and the nature of anthropology as a cross-cultural, comparative discipline. Finally, Kuper considers the role played by EASA in the development of a sense of ‘common project’ among European anthropologists, addressing in particular the history and place of British social anthropology within this enterprise, as well as the question of language.

The papers contained in this Dossier were originally presented at a roundtable discussion at the Sixth Biennial EASA Conference (Krakow 2000). Several of the papers contain explicit or implicit reference to Charles Stewart's pre-circulated abstract for the roundtable which stated the following: The majority of anthropologists are virtually card-carrying secularists. In this respect they conform to theories of secularization which contend that the further we proceed into modernity the less significance religion will have for people. Yet when it comes to writing about societies on the basis of empirical research, anthropologists are often forced to reject the secularization thesis. The people we study often embrace a vast array of old and new religions and practice them in ways that Weber never dreamed of. The emergent anthropological orthodoxy on secularization is that it hasn’t happened. That anthropologists should hold personal convictions quite different from those of the people they study is not novel. In the case of religiosity, secularism, anti-secularism and non-secularism, the positions of anthropologists are, however, part of the overall picture. They are part of the phenomenon under study. A better contextual understanding of anthropologists’ secularist convictions might therefore improve our ability to analyse religion in the modern world. The central purpose of the roundtable discussion was to explore this gap between ‘our’ secularism and ‘their’ religion by historicising it and submitting it to empirical and reflexive consideration. At the same time we must ask how those anthropologists who do embrace religion in their personal lives can situate themselves within the overall secularist ethos of professional anthropology. Can these anthropologists provide special insight into the non-secularisation of world societies?

Like the other social sciences, anthropology operates with secular premises of logic and empiricism. These tenets have manifold implications for those anthropologists who do ordinarily embrace religion in their lives, as well as for those anthropologists who have religious experiences during fieldwork. Must religious convictions and feelings be set to one side in order for one to engage in anthropological research? Must anthropology be secularist in order to proceed? Or can anthropologists begin to factor their own religious backgrounds, beliefs and experiences into their research and writing? These are some of the questions that must now be addressed in the current epistemological environment where reflexivity has become a component of objectivity

To ‘provincialise’ Europe is to undertake the enormously difficult task – because of the intractable paradoxes involved and the blind alleys encountered at every turn – of demonstrating what from a certain perspective should be obvious enough: that Europe is not the centre of the world, but only a small group of nations occupying a small region of the world that has attracted attention to itself during the last few centuries – an instant in the wider scheme of things. It is to show that far from being the source of all legitimate signification, Europe and more broadly the west is simply one among many other such sources – past and, no doubt, future ones; and that therefore it cannot decide for all of us, once and for all, what it means to be. To provincialise Europe, in short, is to try and make room in the world for other ways of being.