Social Analysis

In recent decades, members of Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy have been exhibiting self-denial, stringency, and unwillingness to enter the workforce despite material hardships. Public discourse has long considered theirs an 'intentional poverty', yet the parsimoniousness attributed to them and its presumed intentionality are losing credibility. I use the concept of credit—in both its economic and its normative sense—to analyze social regulation among Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy. I look at the community's efficiency in redistributing its members' resources through interconversion of social and material goods. I go on to identify the limits that self-regulation comes up against under capitalist pressures and show how these pressures express themselves in ultra-Orthodox norms and practices. Finally, I relate credit and credibility to the larger issue of excess in the present day.

This article examines the 'gendered field' of kaolinite clay production and its integration into the local socio-cultural universe of the Balengou of the Western region of Cameroon. Kaolinite clay is produced and ingested mainly by women, especially during pregnancy so as to ensure that their children are born 'clean'. Used as a herbal additive, the clay is also believed to be imbued with sacred qualities and has a symbolic role in various communal rituals. Although geophagy—the practice of eating earth—is associated with harmful health effects, the various affordances offered by kaolinite clay as a valuable object of material culture constitute a specific entanglement of nature and culture. This study makes a modest contribution to the literature on the 'politics of value' and on the relationality of human/non-human interactions.

More than a state ideology, the concept of 'Revolution' holds multiple meanings for Cubans. A historic moment, the government, the country, the people—Revolution is any one of these and all of them at once. How, then, do people experience a permanent Revolution in their daily lives? The interactions between biomedicine, alternative health practices, and the syncretic system of beliefs known as Santería have important implications for the socialist project of the Revolution. As a central concern of Revolution, health provides a particularly clear example of the interaction between revolutionary ideology and practice. This distinction elucidates the epistemological and experiential complexity of Revolution, providing the Cuban state with a powerful signifier that allows it to adapt to situations of crisis, continuously reinvent itself, and be in a permanent state of Revolution.

This essay argues that the way in which black, brown, and white youngsters in the Netherlands are taking on a new anti-essentialist version of black identity fabricated by the culture industry offers a mode of post-racialism in multicultural Europe. This new version of black identity is based upon the liberating potential in Black Atlantic music forms. Yet questions remain as to whether this potential is only temporary and whether it still bears traces of older modes of racial and gender exclusivism.

Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 465 pp. ISBN 9780822343448.

Randi Gressgård, Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 190 pp. ISBN 9781845456665.

John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 236 pp. ISBN 9781869141783.

Henrietta L. Moore, Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 242 pp. ISBN 9780745636467.

Christian Krohn-Hansen, Making New York Dominican: Small Business, Politics, and Everyday Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 312 pp. ISBN 9780812244618.

David Pedersen, American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 304 pp. ISBN 9780226653396.

Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 196 pp. ISBN 9780857454980.

Christoph Wulf, Anthropology: A Continental Perspective, trans. Deirdre Winter, Elizabeth Hamilton, Margitta Rouse, and Richard J. Rouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 408 pp. ISBN 9780226925066.

Peter Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 328 pp. ISBN 9780226047614.

Rane Willerslev, On the Run in Siberia, trans. Coilín ÓhAiseadha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 216 pp. ISBN 9780816676279.