Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619844370
Jens Kreinath, M. Shapiro
Although we intuitively ‘know’ that play and ritual sometimes constitute one another—and that the boundary between them is so thin that at times it simply evaporates—we, nonetheless, continue to attribute the kinds of transformations that rituals enable mainly to the domain of the sacred and the kinds of transformations enacted through play to the mundane (to paraphrase Durkheim’s now obsolete term ‘profane’). In that sense, we artificially distinguish between social triviality and phenomenality as two predetermined modes of action and perception. The fact is, however, that our research interlocutors, the subjects of our ethnographic analyses, often do not distinguish at all between play and ritual. This is especially prominent in events that seem to blend elements of both these
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619890426
K. O’Neill
A growing number of essays authored by anthropologists invoke the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The rise of this quiet tide deserves some reflection, not only because anthropological references to Levinas keep coming but also because very few of these efforts ever end up in discipline-specific journals. They tend to get pushed toward philosophical and theological venues. Why is this?
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499618785529
Anjum Alvi
The essay aims to identify the ethical dimension of the relation of the self with the Other/Beyond as an indispensable aspect of human existence that underlies and forms a premise for any cultural phenomenon, and thus constitutes an unavoidable perspective in anthropology. By juxtaposing modern and non-modern perspectives on value, self, and freedom, this essay reclaims the ethical dimension for the cultural dominant of modernity from which, through the imposition of the self, it has been lost from sight. The argument for the ethical dimension is centrally embedded in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and anchored in different philosophical and theological concepts. It is exemplified by the event of Pope John Paul II's death, which is taken as a synecdoche for his life and work that allows us to redefine the interrelated topics of religion and ritual as statements of ethics.
{"title":"Levinas and ethics: The death of Pope John Paul II","authors":"Anjum Alvi","doi":"10.1177/1463499618785529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618785529","url":null,"abstract":"The essay aims to identify the ethical dimension of the relation of the self with the Other/Beyond as an indispensable aspect of human existence that underlies and forms a premise for any cultural phenomenon, and thus constitutes an unavoidable perspective in anthropology. By juxtaposing modern and non-modern perspectives on value, self, and freedom, this essay reclaims the ethical dimension for the cultural dominant of modernity from which, through the imposition of the self, it has been lost from sight. The argument for the ethical dimension is centrally embedded in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and anchored in different philosophical and theological concepts. It is exemplified by the event of Pope John Paul II's death, which is taken as a synecdoche for his life and work that allows us to redefine the interrelated topics of religion and ritual as statements of ethics.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"157 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499618785529","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44643302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619841212
Jens Kreinath
Paradigmatic shifts in anthropological theory shape the ways in which play and ritual are conceptualized. By demarcating these shifts, the argument is made that an analysis of both play and ritual must start with the possibility of choice as distributed among participants who engage in play and ritual as forms of social practice. Taking the dynamics of framing in play and ritual and the patterns emerging in social interaction as a point of departure, the configuration of ‘fractal dynamics’ is introduced to relate play and rituals as emerging through recursive processes of framing social interaction. Based on rituals of saint veneration among Arab Alawites in southernmost Turkey, it is argued that not only are forms of ritual interaction among devotees at pilgrimage sites playful but also that ritual interactions of devotees with the saint are a form of existential play of chance and disguise. By taking into account the myth and social cosmology that institutes such rituals of veneration and interaction with the saint, it is concluded that these rituals of veneration and interaction with the saint as a non-human agent play with frames of reference. This is done in similar ways, as when the saint acts as a trickster or symbolic type and is perceived by devotees as playing with their perception through disguise and simulation. The reconfiguration of play and ritual through ‘fractal dynamics’ does not only explain the changing dynamics of social configurations in religious interactions with non-human agents, but it also helps to account for probability and choice—and simulation and disguise—in social situations that border the religious and mundane.
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619835372
Joseph Streeter
Suspicion of the concept of belief is now widely held among anthropologists. To determine whether this suspicion is justified, we must understand what belief is. Yet the question of how we are to reach an understanding of belief has not received much attention among anthropologists, who tend to assume that they know what belief-ascriptions entail whenever they criticize the use of the concept. But is this assumption warranted? This paper addresses this question by going back to a central text in the history of anthropological debate about belief, Rodney Needham’s Belief, Language, and Experience. It focuses particularly on Needham’s use of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, arguing that Needham systematically misunderstands Wittgenstein’s work and misses the challenge that Wittgenstein poses to his own guiding assumptions about psychological concepts. The author argues that the failure of Needham’s critique of belief has broader implications. Although recent critics of belief are not motivated by Needham’s concerns, their understanding of belief-ascriptions, and so of the nature of belief, is continuous in important respects with the understanding that structures Needham’s work. If this is really a misunderstanding of belief, as Wittgenstein’s discussions of the concept suggest, then it follows that their criticisms are no more compelling than Needham’s. More specifically, it suggests that, like Needham, they are not really talking about belief at all. The author develops this argument with a discussion of the critiques of belief in the work of Joel Robbins and of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Martin Holbraad.
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619844102
M. Shapiro
Relations between play and ritual are notoriously problematic. While play tends to produce doubt, uncertainty and paradox, ritual instead clarifies, authenticates and refines the moral order. Focusing ethnographically on a celebration for the Divine Holy Spirit (Divino Espírito Santo) in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, in this article I nonetheless move away from this common juxtaposition of ritual and play as mutually exclusive conceptual frameworks. I argue that we can instead imagine play and ritual as dynamic, processual experiences, which frequently merge when they are enacted together in highly symbolic public events. Seen in this light, ritual and play do not necessarily differ as rigid, predefined, conceptual frames, but rather as experiences that unfold in different forms: the experiential dynamic of play-scenarios is felt as horizontal deregulation, while the experiential dynamic of rituals converges towards and linear hierarchization. I consequently suggest more broadly that such dynamic terms as ‘pulsation’, ‘intensity’ and ‘rhythm’ better explicate the enduring social effects of public events in which the unequivocal and the ambiguous incessantly reconstitute each other.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-13DOI: 10.1177/1463499620923546
L. F. Duarte
This article aims to unravel the lines that have carried the cosmological conception of ‘life’ in Western culture into our times, and to explore how this trajectory illuminates current philosophical and anthropological thought. Since the 18th-century vitalism has been a major arena of discussion about the phenomena of nature and life, in parallel with broader romantic emphases on flux, totality, dialectics, and preserving the embeddedness of nature and culture, or things and people. Distinguishing between life as the phenomenological experience of existence and the cosmological conception of the vital condition is central to my argument. I focus upon the latter dimension to show that awareness of the long-range history and present complexity of those conceptions contributes to the contextualization of the contemporary interest in life.
{"title":"The vitality of vitalism in contemporary anthropology: Longing for an ever green tree of life","authors":"L. F. Duarte","doi":"10.1177/1463499620923546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620923546","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to unravel the lines that have carried the cosmological conception of ‘life’ in Western culture into our times, and to explore how this trajectory illuminates current philosophical and anthropological thought. Since the 18th-century vitalism has been a major arena of discussion about the phenomena of nature and life, in parallel with broader romantic emphases on flux, totality, dialectics, and preserving the embeddedness of nature and culture, or things and people. Distinguishing between life as the phenomenological experience of existence and the cosmological conception of the vital condition is central to my argument. I focus upon the latter dimension to show that awareness of the long-range history and present complexity of those conceptions contributes to the contextualization of the contemporary interest in life.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"131 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620923546","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46955508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1177/1463499620912964
A. Andre
If homo economicus exists anywhere, surely he must be found among financial traders. Amid the shouting and shoving of trading pits and the manic clicking and phone slamming of electronic trading desks, the atomized, rational, self-interested agency of neoclassical economic theory appears to emerge. Ethnographers of traders have refuted atomism and instead proposed a socially embedded but still rational and self-interested agent: an embedded homo economicus. I take this critique a step further and argue that traders are neither rational nor self-interested. Certainly, traders present themselves as rational and self-interested, but a ‘thick’ understanding of their social performances and cultural forms proves otherwise. My analysis focuses on the practice of friendly betting among Chicago traders. Despite its competitive appearances, friendly betting constitutes a non-rational, non-self-interested system of gift exchange and evinces why the myth of embedded homo economicus is both beguiling and false. This conclusion cuts to fundamental issues of agency and practice, and calls for widespread scepticism of theories of rational self-interest. As neoclassical economic theory and market ideology spread around the globe and rational self-interest becomes increasingly normalized, we must be wary of confirmation bias and remember the old ethnographic principle that people aren’t always what they say they are.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499618814598
Martin Palecek
Although the concept of culture was severely criticized in the second half of the twentieth century, its explanatory use has not been abandoned. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have more recently used the concept in models and theories of culture. This use renews the hope that the concept of culture can be explanatorily useful within the social sciences, especially since the new definition of culture connects with both the idea of evolution and with the other natural sciences. In this paper, I analyze the models of cultural evolution developed by Cultural Evolutionary Science (CES), more specifically gene-culture coevolution theoretical models and dual-inheritance theories. I argue that even if CES scholars mostly claim that for them, culture is equal to information, some of these models have aspirations to bring back cultures as discrete units that resemble the social anthropological models of culture that have been already abandoned. I discuss evolutionists’ and social anthropologists’ objections to these models. I claim that despite the popularity of cultural evolutionist theories, social scientists (cultural anthropologists and historians, for example) should remain skeptical about the possibility that this approach can assume an explanatory role for a concept of culture.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499618805916
Ashley Lebner
In light of renewed questions about the relationship between anthropology’s past and future, two radicalizations of the British tradition are particularly worth exploring: those of Talal Asad and Marilyn Strathern, arguably the most widely read anthropologists beyond the discipline, and the most regularly misunderstood. Asad and Strathern are rarely engaged together because the anthropologies that their works have inspired operate quite separately, their mutual implications left unexplored. And yet, tracing the development of Asad’s and Strathern’s respective work reveals a deep resonance, beginning with their training in the concern with translation, which owes more to Malinowski than anthropologists today are generally aware. The paper argues that reading Asad and Strathern together can help mitigate the over-cultivation of the “concept” in recent anthropology, multiply insights into the constitutive relations among anthropology, science and the secular, and refine perspectives on the legacy of British anthropology and on anthropology’s future politics.
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