Social Analysis

Across many world regions, the informal slaughter of livestock occupies an important place in rural day-to-day realities. This article examines killing goats on São Jorge Island to show how attention to slaughter enhances our understanding of gendered selfhood, human–animal relations, and the impacts of depopulation. Building on ethnography of smallholder farmers who see their masculinity and livelihoods endangered by demographic decline, I argue that their idea of agrarian cultivation underwrites verbal hostility against animals. Male farmers’ concept of cultivation, here conceived as productive order-making between a threatening ‘natural’ and a desirable ‘domestic’ domain, is hence an ambivalent moral idiom. In moments of slaughter, the frustration about the difficulties of cultivation is expressed as men deriding goats to salvage a desired image of manhood and competence.

This article contributes to discussions around a post-secular anthropology that seek to engage seriously with religious traditions and theology. Conversations in Morocco with Muslims who experienced possession by jinn spirits point to the importance of recognition. To understand those experiences risks translating them into my concepts. Recognizing them accepts that what the other says has significance. They call me to visit the broader Islamic tradition that they creatively draw on in an effort to decenter my own thinking and to open up to possibility. This space for possibility and the limits of understanding are explored by putting into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as critique of Descartes's dualism of mind and world, with a discussion in the Islamic tradition, between al-Ghazālī and Ibn Sīnā.

Luo orphaned children derive their conceptualization of home from historical ideologies of patrilineal kinship and the local discourses of belonging situated within properly constituted marriage. Contrary to older literature that presents home as a domestic spatial arrangement, orphans understand home as a relational pathway that safeguards growth. We show that orphans use their notion of home to express feelings of vulnerability and apply their agency against adult-initiated fosterage practices. The article contributes to an enhanced understanding of Luo sociality and promotes a dynamic anthropology of relationships and child anthropology by unpacking the facets of childhood vulnerability. Our analysis points to analytic themes of contradictions and paradox in Luo kinship values in relation to child support and ambivalence in how children's agency is exercised in fosterage arrangements.

In the preface to his Second Discourse, on the origin of inequality and whether or not it could be justified by natural law, Rousseau cast a disapproving eye over the ample contemporary literature on the topic: “Among the most serious writers, one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. Without speaking of the ancient philosophers, who seem to have tried their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles” (Rousseau 1992 [1755]: 13). In The Dawn of Everything (2021), the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow breathe new life into this classical polemical tradition. They begin by criticizing the current fashion for essays that appeal to the immemorial past to justify their frequently banal and conservative analysis of the present. Steven Pinker, Yuval Harari, Robin Dunbar, Jared Diamond, Walter Scheidel, Francis Fukuyama, and Ian Morris are explicitly named as so many variations on the liberal mystification of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow's self-proclaimed “new history of humanity,” however, runs the risk of leaving the reader with the same disappointment the author of the Second Discourse expressed over the proliferation of unwarranted stances. It is worthwhile, therefore, stating very clearly, and from the start, what separates this particular text from its peers.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay “Les mathématiques de l'homme,” originally published in 1956, is the least known of all his publications. It is also arguably his most prescient, capturing the enduring possibilities and latent pitfalls in anthropology's relationship with mathematics that have continued to beset the discipline to the present day. The aim of presenting a new translation of this essay is to prompt reflections on the changing landscape of research on and teaching of anthropology, which is still as tangled up with the philosophy and practice of mathematics as it was then.