Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Many aspects of culture that we are used to interpreting in essentialist or even tacitly evolutionist terms might better be seen as acts of self-conscious rejection, or as formed through a schizmogenetic process of mutual definition against the values of neighbouring societies. What have been called 'heroic societies', for instance, seem to have formed in conscious rejection of the values of urban civilizations of the Bronze Age. A consideration of the origins and early history of the Malagasy suggests a conscious rejection of the world of the Islamic ecumene of the Indian Ocean, effecting a social order that could justifiably be described as self-consciously anti-heroic.

The relation between biological processes and social practices has given rise to a sociobiology heavily defined through experimental, cause-and-effect theorizing, applying biology to society, culture, and individual action. Human behaviour is largely understood as the outcome of biological processes, with individual autonomy and survival, and social order and stability, prioritized. Building on an argument first made about selfhood in 1986, and about immunology from 1992 onwards, this article argues that advances in science reframe our understanding of the boundaries between self and other ('non-self'), and thereby also our awareness of the importance of risk and danger, and the social contexts that encourage or discourage social risks. Because the assimilation of difference is not only crucial to survival, but critical for creation, the argument here for 'a new sociobiology' is for a less biologically determined sociobiology. Difference can destroy, but it is necessary for adaptation and creation. A new sociobiology, therefore, must prioritize organic relatedness over organic autonomy, attraction to 'other' over concern with 'self', if the field is to advance our understanding of creation, survival, and growth.

This article examines claims about the substantive importance of black letter law for those having marriages of choice in India and offers a critique of the ways in which legal procedure is manipulated. The law is 'bent' not only by the courts and the police to undermine the intentions of legislators and to uphold conservative communal values but also by ordinary people who seek to promote their own agendas and to make moral and instrumental claims. These can make significant space for individual desires and self-choice in the realm of intimate relationships. 'Love jurisdiction' is used to explore this process of 'intermanglement' through which love, romantic relationships and moral rights in relationships get entangled (and sometimes mangled) through legal statute, procedures and everyday practices.

Building on fieldwork in Hanoi, this article uses the idea of moral cartography to explore the ethical significance attached to the expertise of mapmakers, geomancers and psychic grave-finders, fields widely esteemed in Vietnam as scientific disciplines with strong moral entailments. Of central concern are the ways such practices reflect the intertwining of the temporal and the geophysical. The material expressions of these engagements include article death goods and the photographs displayed on ancestor altars; also maps as points where histories of nationhood and family interpenetrate in forms both exalting and painful for those involved. In connecting the different markers and chronologies of Vietnam's official and familial time modes with the notion of a moralized marketplace, it is suggested that the ethical concerns of today's market socialism are being negotiated in Hanoi not only in temporal terms, but through evocations of purposefully achieving life in space.

The Bad, Fear and Blame? Comment on Bayly’s Mapping Time, Living Space Stephan Feuchtwang

Reply Susan Bayly

This article outlines three historical transitions in Kachin chieftaincy in Burma and China. Picking up where the three main theoretical models in the literature leave off (the models of Leach, Nugent and Friedman), we put forward an analysis of Kachin sociopolitical organization using new China-based material. We compare this with Burma-based material in the literature, and re-analyse the interactions between the internal dynamics of Kachin chieftaincy and the politico-economic systems in Southwestern China and Northern Burma. We argue that Kachin chieftaincy in Burma and in China shared the same logic, although this logic was manifested differently in the two countries. We offer new material for understanding the lowland polities and upland chieftaincy in Southwestern China and mainland Southeast Asia.

The public sphere has been centre stage in celebrations of India's political triumphs. Leading commentators tell us that the astonishing post-independence surge of democracy has been contingent on the rise of a new kind of sociopolitical formation: the public sphere. This article takes a closer look at the popular deliberative terrain in North India to question this claim. Drawing on research conducted in a provincial town in the North Indian state of Rajasthan, we see that where metropolitan political theorists see 'transparency' as promoting discursive and political possibilities, Rajasthani villagers see an exposure which prevents expression, communication and the making of political choices. In their view, it is secrecy and social seclusion that enable political interactions and elicit political judgments. 'The public sphere' is an unfit heuristic for locating popular politics within (and beyond) Rajasthan, where it obscures much more than it reveals.

Commenting on two articles that have appealed to the notion of 'recursivity' to articulate new directions for anthropological thinking, this piece seeks to clarify the scope of a recursive turn in contemporary anthropology, distinguishing it from elements of recursivity that have always been present in the discipline's epistemic procedures.

David Pedersen, American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 336, 2013.