Social Anthropology

Although the history of anthropology shows various shifts in the way sexuality has been theorised, studies of the relation between sexuality and bodily sensations have remained limited. In this article I explore the concept of body‐sensorial knowledge to understand the relation between the social significance of sexuality and erotic sensations. I argue that the sensual qualities of sexuality are mediators and shapers of social knowledge that help to understand how causal relations, such as the reconfiguration of culture, gender and sexuality in postcolonial Kenyan society, are registered in people's self‐perceptions.

The US military presence in Korea has had unintended consequences in an entertainment district in Seoul, where competing performances of masculinity function as a key place‐making strategy. Itaewon's suspense – the uneasy positioning of the neighbourhood between allure and repulsion – arises out of a suspension of the area between contesting sovereignties, and at times allows fraternal bonding between an unlikely cast of actors. With Itaewon's multifarious identities increasingly becoming commodified, the democratic liberalisations (which have partly emerged from and partly acted upon the place of Itaewon) have ironically also opened the gates for rampant economic liberalisation.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur la transmission du savoir dans le . Dans ce culte afro‐cubain, la concurrence, colorant les relations entre coreligionnaires, place toute information sous le sceau du secret. Cette concurrence se distille au sein d'un même groupe initiatique, de sorte qu'il est illusoire pour un initié d'espérer recevoir une instruction religieuse complète auprès de ses initiateurs. Dans une approche pragmatique, l'objectif ici est de révéler la mécanique de la transmission entre initiés et d'examiner quel type de relation est instaurée par les modalités particulières de cession des savoirs dans le .

This article is an exercise in comparing narratives that depict the ‘presence’ of Haitians in Cuba. It focuses on the creative forms through which groups of and , formally designated , are experimenting with new modes of creating relationships with kin, histories, places and times. Rather than emerging exclusively from the memories of past experiences of immigration and the belonging to ‘communities’, these actors seem to emphasise that histories apparently associating them with certain bounded existential territories can in fact be created and recreated in multiple forms, mediated by diverse objects and events, and apprehended through a critical perspective, albeit one subject to personal interpretations.

This article surveys European neo‐Pagan and Native Faith movements that have emerged in the context of pan‐regional developments, new political configurations, environmental concerns and globalisation. While all engage with indigeneity, two broad trends are identified under the Pagan/Native Faith umbrella: (1) the adaptation of Anglo‐American Pagan traditions (e.g. Wicca, Druidry, neo‐shamanism, Goddess spirituality) to local contexts, thereby indigenising them in various ways, (2) the reconstruction of indigenous European religious traditions in connection with contemporary identity politics. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses the indigenising project of Maltese neo‐Pagans, a project characterised by adaptation and inventiveness within the local Catholic context.

This article explores how Indian IT workers who have been hired on short‐term contracts in Germany negotiate their racialisation as fast, cheap and disposable. They elaborate modes of freedom that take advantage of the pace of work and its varied temporalities while simultaneously developing a critique of corporate coding as limiting mobility. Their critique upends the usual way that freedom and ownership are conceived, since they try to own the code they write rather than making claims for ‘open’ or ‘free’ software. Indian IT workers’ strategies demonstrate the need for a reconsideration of the meaning of freedom within corporate coding economies and neoliberal knowledge regimes more generally. This article develops a concept of ‘proprietary freedom’ to do so.