Social Anthropology

The problem addressed in the paper is that professional trade does not appear on the horizon of the national innovation system in Norway. Everyday trade in everyday goods, retailing, appears as a white spot on an otherwise fairly comprehensive map of the economic process. An ethnographic account would render a view of it as a terrain teeming with life and activity and depending on innovations to play the role it does in the national economy. In line with basic approaches in economic anthropology, I explore three sets of conditions that contribute to generate this particular white spot – the rationality of economic theory, the priorities of institutions in the political economy and a classificatory schema in which professional trade is categorically ‘matter out of place’. The innovation system is portrayed as reproducing a certain reality, ‘vicious cycle of “reality”’, and the concluding discussion is about how the grounded and experimental anthropological approach makes it possible to dismantle and explore such certainty.

This article explores Internet development and use at an Arts College in Tanzania in relation to translocal and transnational linkages. Chuo Cha Sanaa Bagamoyo, or Bagamoyo College of Arts, is the only institute for training of arts professionals in East Africa. The College has a high status on the national art scene and is well known throughout the region and internationally. In this article, the introduction and subsequent use of the Internet is analysed in relation to the social composition and cultural positioning of Chuo Cha Sanaa Bagamoyo. I will argue that the social embeddedness of the Internet represents an intensification of translocal and transnational relations and imageries, while underscoring a sense of locality and national identity.

In considering the challenges and opportunities likely to be faced by social anthropologists over the coming 20 years, this paper begins with a recognition of the critical role of institutional structures and processes, especially practices of evaluation and assessment, in the future trajectory of our discipline. The core of the article critically explores two general modalities of assessment and evaluation: deliberative processes, of which peer review is a classic example, and more formal techniques focused on particular quantitative indicators such as citation factors and impact analysis. The discussion draws upon ethnographic work on and from the midst of such bureaucratic sites, on tracking in some detail the conflation of descriptive and evaluative practice embedded in the forms of quantitative metrics, and on current critical examinations of both deliberative and analytical strategies. The article argues that deliberative, consultative peer review can lead to much more acute, textured and realistic outcomes for such reviews, whether of programmes or individuals, than can a reliance solely on bibliometrics. I also suggest that scholarly associations such as EASA have a particular role to play both in arguing for the value of serious collegial engagement in such work and in modelling, in ways with which social anthropologists are deeply familiar, how such qualitative reviewing might be responsibly and proactively pursued.

We are told we are living in an age of globalisation; that in this age we are bedevilled by ‘new wars’ and that to combat such wars we should impose ‘benign imperialism’. The ‘new wars’ standpoint is said to be the ‘most illuminating’ representation of contemporary warfare. The present paper has four tasks. The first critiques the ‘new wars’ perspective. The second proposes an alternative ‘global wars’ approach, which suggests that certain of the conflicts termed ‘new wars’ might be usefully understood as neo‐colonial forms of old colonial global warring. The third formulates and empirically supports a ‘global warring hypothesis’ that explains why such warring is increasing in the current conjunction. The fourth task is to decide whether the ‘new wars’ representation is, indeed, ‘illuminating’. In the course of performing these chores readers encounter a bull in the china shop and learn that taking place is taking [violently] place.