Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This is an exercise in the re-making of knowledge. Stimulated by certain recent writings on bodily activity, the author returns to a section of an earlier work (in The Gender of the Gi, Strathern 1988) that had felt incomplete at the time of writing, as well as to some ethnographic material from Melanesia that she thought she knew. The new context deflects attention away from some original preoccupations onto the manner in which two anthropologists and a philosopher ascribe agency to persons.

Renewed anthropological attention to money and finance is welcome. However, recent attention to the ghosts in the financial machine neglects the infrastructures of payment that make finance possible. Following professionals and policymakers into the clearance and settlement of payments - the means of value transfer - affords insight into an industry hotly contested by new entrants and by a few critics who find in its business model a defiance of market logic. The tolls and fees of private payment infrastructures pose challenges to critical analyses of capitalism as well as to the public interest in payment, even as they are essential to the forms and functions of value transfer. Everyday exchanges are tolled, large-scale transfers are not: the article suggests that payment is a pressing political concern, as well as an analytical one.

'Naturalism' is invoked with increasing frequency by anthropologists as a distinctively Western ontology which posits a shared unitary nature, upon which are overlain multiple 'cultures', 'perspectives', or 'worldviews'. But where, if at all, is this ontology to be found? Anthropologists working outside Europe and America have in various ways been urging colleagues to challenge 'our' naturalism in order to be able to take seriously alternative ethnographic realities. In the meantime, anthropologists and STS scholars who study European or American settings ethnographically have increasingly been arguing that 'we' were never (quite) naturalist to begin with. This double move shores 'naturalism' up as a conceptual object, but renders it ethnographically elusive, a perpetually receding horizon invoked in accounts of something else. This introduction explores this paradox and presents the subsequent articles' various experiments with what might seem an impossible task: the ethnography of naturalism itself.

Anthropologists, eager to bring out the originality of the people whom they study, have claimed that in contrast to a singular 'nature' in the West, Amerindian ontologies have many natures. But should fascinating accounts of Amerindian ways of world-making presume so much about the 'West'? is is what we doubt. Taking 'Western' not as a region but as a style, we explore Western animal/human relations by describing various ways of enacting 'meat'. Using excerpts - cuts - from our eldwork materials, we contrast the investment in the tastiness of lambs in a Spanish butcher store with concern for meat contamination in FAO safety regulations. Next, we juxtapose the relevant 'meats' within two classes in a vocational school in the Guatemalan highlands. In one, meat is the centrepiece on a neatly ordered plate, while the other concerns itself with the nutrients that meat contains. 'Western meat', then, is not one. It is multiple.

Some anthropologists have argued that Euro-American culture is naturalist, anchored to the belief in a coherent, unitary universe in which natural laws operate. From a close ethnographic inspection, however, the allegedly naturalist sciences emerge as heterogeneous practices, engaging with complex and not quite coherent objects. Following one such object - an earthworm - allows me to show that the earthworm science that studies it has no univocal object, but rather one that is multiple. At the same time, scientists successfully engage in practices that seek to hold together the incoherent earthworm/s and the world/s in which it is/they are being practised. It is in this way that coherence may still be achieved. Exploring the gaps between multiple ontologies and coordinating practices allows for the emergence of a sharper, practice-attentive understanding of science and its naturalist achievements. If it is true that a single, unitary Nature is nowhere to be found, the analysis presented here shows how a transient, contingent, multiple, and - yet - still bound-together nature may result from careful coordination practices.

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in a chimpanzee sanctuary in Catalunya, and contributes to contemporary theoretical debates surrounding Viveiros de Castro's recent injunction for anthropologists to 'take seriously' the worlds of their ethnographic interlocutors. Taking seriously apparent contradictions in keepers' reflections on the care of chimpanzees, the concept of 'doublethink' is introduced as a heuristic in order to appreciate both their practices of boundary maintenance and the strong inter-species relationships which proliferate at the sanctuary. Anthropologies of Euro-American naturalism must be ready to appreciate both the apparently unbridgeable dualisms utilized and enacted by their interlocutors, and the simultaneous disappearance, dissolution and intermittent irrelevance of these dualisms in their interlocutors' encounters and reflections. The article concludes with a rethinking of the alienability/inalienability of others' worlds.

Drawing on fieldwork with researchers and technicians involved in a scientific project in the Brazilian rainforest, this article explores specific aspects of climate science in the Amazon. It suggests that taking science seriously anthropologically requires an investigation into the relation between endo-anthropology and exo-anthropology. This is done recursively by exploring a particular way in which what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' are achieved and negotiated in the scientific practice under study. Researchers and technicians 'do' some crucial distinctions with data, and the article points to the importance of the flux of data and the boundaries and sides that emerge from the control of that flux.

This article compares recent anthropological accounts of animist and perspectivist ontologies with evolutionary explanations of animal behaviour in contemporary behavioural ecology. It argues that some unexpected echoes between these two very different ways of encountering non-humans raise a set of fascinating issues both ethnographic and theoretical. On the ethnographic side, thinking of behavioural ecology as akin to a 'naturalist perspectivism' illuminates some of the complex ways in which the discipline deals with worries about anthropomorphic projection. On the theoretical side, the comparison raises some questions about the ease with which us/them contrasts associated with the recent 'ontological turn' in anthropology find themselves echoing contrasts internal to Western philosophical and scientific debate. The resulting problem of mirroring (the concern that 'others' may be called upon to play the role of an anti-'us', rather than encountered on their own terms) is in turn considered as an analogue of the scientific problem of 'anthropomorphism', and some potential responses to both are considered.

Proposal 1: Anthropology Beyond the Human Eduardo Kohn

Ethnographic attention to human-animal relations in Amazonia reveals the constitutively semiotic nature of all life.This helps us appreciate more broadly the ways in which semiotic logics that are not necessarily human or language-like underlie the modes by which thoughts and lives form associations. This changes our understanding of relationality, arguably anthropology’s central concern.

Proposal 2: Humans as Niche Constructors, as Primates and with Primates: Synergies for Anthropology in the Anthropocene Agustín Fuentes

Humans are primates and consummate niche constructors. If we hope to be both relevant and successful investigators in the multispecies word of the Anthropocene, we need an anthropological practice that places humans and other organisms in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces. Ethnoprimatology and a constructivist evolutionary theory help us move towards a place where the biological and social are folded into an integrative anthropology, in which a myriad of entangled agents and theoretical perspectives are central in investigating the processes of becoming human.

Serguei Alex Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009

Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011

Stephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 304, 2011