Social Analysis

Refuting the rationalist implication that the Nuer statement “twins are birds“ is dumb, Evans-Pritchard held that the statement should be taken as a figure of speech. Against his interpretation, I argue that the Nuer, at the time of Evans-Pritchard's research, understood their statement to be true in an ordinary sense. In effect, my argument continues to suppose that the perception of the world implicit in the Nuer statement differs in a fundamental way from that of moderns. However, instead of having to conclude that the Nuer statement about twins and birds is indeed dumb (or that we have never been modern in any distinguishing sense), my argument develops an ontological thought-experiment that theorizes the relative validity of the Nuer perception.

While focusing on its dynamics, Bruce Kapferer considers ritual as a means for readjusting the flow of life, thus undermining Claude Lévi-Strauss's vision of ritual as a vain search for continuity. This article shows the potential of Kapferer's approach for understanding the dance rituals that the Punu of Congo-Brazzaville dedicate to twins, who, as waterspirits, embody the source of life. Advancing Victor Turner's attempt to account for the generative power of ritual, it discloses the means through which these rituals afford a lived experience of revitalizing continuity whereby the part embraces the whole and a focused, self-intensifying energetic dynamic unfolds and continuously readjusts its own flow. The analysis of rhythm and its actualization in song and dance turns out to be essential in this regard.

One of the most important goals of peace-building programs around the world is the establishment of a social order that would lead to stability. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this includes a spatial reorganization of people and territory that assumes a fixed relationship between them. This spatial governmentality relies on a set of rigid assumptions about belonging, territoriality, and politics that make ethnically 'mixed' citizens spatially unmappable, bureaucratically invisible, and socially undesirable. Spanning more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in BiH, I focus on the transformation of Yugoslav mixed citizens into 'invisible citizens' in the context of post-war democratization. The experiences of these people provide a fruitful site from which to understand and critique the peace-building efforts in BiH and beyond.

The aim of this study is to draw out the structural logic of high school graduation ceremonies in general-and in Israel in particular-in order to understand their cultural meaning. The article analyzes 55 accounts of ceremonies held at Israeli-Jewish secondary schools just before the students' conscription into the army. Analysis shows that these events are organized around competing intergenerational models of the social order. Each generational unit locates itself differently vis-à-vis the state order, suspending familial loyalties in the face of loyalty to generational interests. The adults position themselves as representatives of the hegemonic order, while the students demonstrate its arbitrariness and the possibility of resisting it. Thus, the graduation ceremony structurally regulates the intergenerational encounter and the basic conflict between the family and the state on the eve of the students' enlistment.

This article revisits Agamben's concept of 'state of exception'. It argues that the postmodern state of exception is exercised not through the suspension of law, as Agamben suggests and as was the case with modern sovereignty, but through the counterfeiting of legality. The counterfeiting of law, which corrupts its meaning, is part of the broader 'corruption of sign' in the postmodern political-cultural economy. The article first details an extended case of counterfeiting of legality in the practices of business raiding, commonly termed reiderstvo, in Russia. It then describes and analyzes the main features of what I call the 'corrupt state of exception' in Russia. The article concludes with a few remarks on the paradigmatic nature of the state of exception in Russia and its consequences for legal and political anthropology.

This article examines the effects that GI (geographic indication) brands may have on the commodity producers who employ this marketing strategy. By analyzing the case of jewelry production in Valenza, Italy, and the creation of the DV brand, it demonstrates that GIs tend to impose new forms of production over the local milieu. Although based on a rhetoric about the maintenance of traditional practices, GIs enforce a techno-scientific approach over a techne-oriented understanding on the local level. Echoing Foucault's idea of disciplinary power, GIs and their regulation bodies thus become agents of a transformation of the local community and local production practice. This case suggests that these transformations of locale, which result in tension among market standards, brand regulation, and production due to the rhetoric of 'authenticity', should be reconsidered.

Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Günther Schlee, eds., Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 325 pp.

John-Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan, eds., Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 370 pp

Life Among the Poor in Cairo (London: Tavistock, 1980), 173 pp. Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 314 pp.

Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 370 pp.

Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 308 pp.

Nicole Fabricant and Bret Gustafson, eds., Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), viii, 251 pp. ISBN 978-1-934691-51-9.

Koen Stroeken, Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft, vol. 9, Epistemologies of Healing (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), xiv, 269 pp. ISBN 978-1-84545-735-8.

P. Wenzel Geissler and Catherine Molyneux, eds., Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 498 pp. ISBN 978-0-85745-092-0.

Paige West, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xviii, 316 pp. ISBN 978-0-82235-150-4.

Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xxiv, 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-82235-204-4.

Dana Rappoport, Songs from the Thrice-Blooded Land: Ritual Music of the Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia), trans. Timothy Seller, Elisabeth Coville, and Stanislaus Sandarupa (Paris: Éditions Épistèmes and Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009), 2 vols., 213 pp., 181 pp., DVD-ROM. ISBN 978-2-73511-260-9.

Geraldine Bloustien and Margaret Peters, Youth, Music and Creative Cultures: Playing for Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), xii, 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-23020-058-6.