The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tende…[Read more]

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new…[Read more]

Media workers have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. However, branding is not an inevitable practice — it is…[Read more]

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The Line of Control arbitrarily bifurcates Neelum valley, Kashmir into Pakistan and India. While the border attempts to constrain and categorize, the daily movements and flows of human and more-than-human bodies via “unofficial” routes and routines generate an understanding of Kashmir that is not dependent on geopolitics. Neelum as sculpted and…[Read more]

Little India is a rich historical and ethnographic examination of a fascinating example of linguistic plurality on the island of Mauritius, where more than two-thirds of the population is of Indian ancestry. Patrick Eisenlohr’s groundbreaking study focuses on the formation of diaspora as mediated through the cultural phenomenon of Indian ancestral…[Read more]

C. Lloyd Morgan is mostly known for Morgan’s canon (1894), still a popular and frequently quoted principle in comparative psychology and ethology. There has been a fair amount of debate on the canon’s interpretation, function, and value regarding the research on animal minds, usually referring to it as an isolated principle. In this paper we…[Read more]

Aus der Integration von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKT) mit dem vielfältigen Fach »Archäologie« (vgl. Daly – Evans 2006) resultiert ein Studienfeld, das sich eingehend mit einem umfangreichen Pool unterschiedlicher Aspekte der IKT in der Archäologie auf theoretischer und praktischer Ebene beschäftigt (vgl. Costopoulos 2…[Read more]

Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site…[Read more]

Social practices and contingencies always exceed the neoliberal models by which people currently try to contain
the inherent unpredictability of accomplishing social tasks with others, such as getting a job. Contradictions in
neoliberal logics emerge when people try to live according to neoliberal precepts, engaging with other social…[Read more]

Die Tierphilosophie ist eines der lebendigsten Felder der Gegenwartsphilosophie. Im Mittelpunkt stehen bislang die Frage nach dem Geist der Tiere, das Problem des Tier-Mensch-Unterschiedes und die Themenfelder der Tierethik. Die auf drei Bände angelegte »Philosophie der Tierforschung« wirft einen neuen Blick auf dieses Gebiet und ergänzt es dur…[Read more]

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how the Angolan refugees living in Zambia during the Angolan civil war used their divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. To many people, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of small articles drawn in…[Read more]

As cestas de adivinhação de Angola, da Zâmbia e da República Democrática do Congo tornaram-se mundialmente conhecidas pelo seu fascinante conteúdo: várias dezenas de peças imbuídas de simbolismo. Vidas em Jogo apresenta este simbolismo em acção. As cestas de adivinhação, transformadas em oráculos, são entendidas pelos seus utilizadores c…[Read more]

n her article, Silva considers the significance of similarity and polythetic classification in ritual practice and ritual theory. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances and his descriptive method, and building on the work of R. Grimes, R. Needham, and, J. Z. Smith, Silva bring out the similarities among three different types o…[Read more]

The statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia, Africa, do not fully agree. While researchers rightly stress the importance of observation, analysis and interpretation in basket divination, going so far as to describe diviners as scientists, they fail to recognize that…[Read more]

In this article, the author explores basket divination, a technique found in Zambia and neighboring countries, as a form of material religion. Mores specifically, the author shows that in basket divination the idea of objectivity (objective knowledge) is directly associated with the materiality of the oracle used for divining. In the Luvale…[Read more]

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In…[Read more]

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of mor…[Read more]

Samuzala lived through colonialism in Angola, the liberation war, the civil war that followed independence, forced displacement to Zambia, and a landmine accident resulting in amputation. At different points in his life, Samuzala was a trader, a migrant, a refugee, and an amputee. In engaging with Samuzala’s life story, a narrative of movement, w…[Read more]

Reification, fetishism, alienation, mastery, and control – these are some of the key concepts of modernity that have been battered and beaten by postmoderns and nonmoderns alike, with Bruno Latour, a nonmodern, discarding them most recently. Critical of this approach, which creates a rift between moderns and nonmoderns, the author engages in d…[Read more]