Shamanism,sanity and remoteness in Russia

This article looks at the attempted trek of a ‘warrior shaman’ Alexandr Gabyshev from Yakutsk to Moscow, where his aim was to try to drive ‘the demon’ Putin out of the Kremlin. In particular, it explores Russian online responses to Gabyshev's campaign, as well as local reactions in the region where he was arrested, Buryatia. It is argued that the discourses of support are a sort of ‘removal’ (Saxer & Andersson 2019) within a nation state, establishing a deep rift between the local and distant observers. While it may take new forms, this disjunction is rooted in a long history of Russia's complicated relationship with its own orient.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 3. June 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 3 Front cover COVID-19 IN ITALY An elderly man steps outside, a bag in his hand and a mask covering his face. He stares at the wet pavement as he goes. He is wondering whether to take that onward step. His shadow on the wall magnifies his uncertainty. He is alone. It has been raining. The sun spells help. Maybe. Uncertainty and loneliness are among the emotions that we now associate with Covid-19. By 9 May, the death toll among those who had tested positive for the virus in Italy surpassed 30,000, the highest in Europe. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the paramount need has been to protect those in the most ‘vulnerable categories’, the aged and those with pre-existing conditions. Italy, as the country with the highest percentage of elderly people in Europe, has failed them. At the outbreak of the pandemic, the rushed and short-sighted resolution to transfer Covid-19 patients to nursing homes resulted in a massacre, whose scar will get deeper with time. Yet, how vital ‘the elderly’ are to society cannot be stressed enough, particularly when state family support policies are insufficient, a gap that grandparents have long been filling by taking care of their grandchildren. If uncertainty is ahead of us, so is the void left by all those ‘elderly’ men and women who will be deeply missed. In this issue, Manuela Pellegrino provides a narrative of her experience as an Italian doing fieldwork in Greece while the epidemic was in full swing. Back cover Covid-19 Rear Admiral Timothy Weber, commander of US Naval Medical Forces Pacific, speaks to members of the press moments before the hospital ship USNS Mercy departs from its base near San Diego, California, 23 March 2020. The vessel, which can host up to 1,200 medical personnel, is being deployed in support of US Covid-19 response efforts. It will serve as a referral hospital for up to a 1,000 non-Covid-19 patients should shore-based hospitals prove unable to adequately serve them. The Mercy's deployment illustrates how grave the situation has become in the US. It also reveals something about how, after decades of neglect, the country's public health infrastructures have come to rely heavily on support from military and corporate institutions. The pandemic brings to light a host of global issues, ranging from food scarcity and insecurity, mass unemployment and economic crisis, the crucial roles played by elderly people, the fate of education and schooling, the unplanned release of prisoners, the long-term consequences of ‘distancing’ directives and much more. Underlying all of these topics is a sobering observation made by medical anthropologists more than two decades ago: locally and globally, it is the poor who are most likely to contract – and die from – infectious diseases. In Salento and Silicon Valley, in Rio de Janeiro and Wuhan, the pattern has been strikingly similar – the most economically vulnerable members of society suffer disproportionately. Anthropology contributes to a fuller understanding of Covid-19 and its aftermath. Recent research has developed a more complete cross-cultural picture of recent epidemics like AIDS, SARS, Ebola and Zika. When combined with archaeological and biological knowledge of pandemics stretching back to the Black Death and earlier, the discipline adds critical historical and cross-cultural perspectives. Anthropologists have much to say about how and why communicable diseases emerge, the underlying social and environmental conditions that fuel them, and potential strategies for their effective mitigation.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 38, Number 1. February 2022

Front and back cover caption, volume 38 issue 1 QANON This QAnon supporter was part of the crowd of demonstrators at the Washington DC ‘Million MAGA March’ shortly after Trump's 2020 electoral defeat. This woman's sign alludes to ‘The Storm’, a millenarian denouement that, in the QAnon imagination, will see Trump and his supporters rounding up and arresting top Democrats so as to retake power. In this issue, McIntosh describes the verbal art with which the mysterious and oracular figure of ‘Q’ managed to enlist millions of enthusiasts through the Internet. Q specialized in cryptic messages and urged online followers to decode and interpret them. These exercises fostered the notion that supporters themselves were engaging in high-stakes interpretive work, and that a digital army of Q followers could see through fraudulent politicians and experts, ultimately garnering their own knowledge and expertise. At the same time, Q used the power of secrecy to impart the conviction that Q was connected to a new alt-right state waiting in the wings. McIntosh also argues that the alt-right — including but not limited to Q — have increasingly encouraged the idea that reality or truth may lie somewhere behind or beneath the unreliable sign vehicle. Communications from political enemies should be read with suspicion, while communications from Q and Trump alike should be decrypted for their underlying encoded meanings, particularly dark portents. This oracular semiotic ideology now thrives alongside conventional liberal understandings of rational political processes. MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Pagan shaman Gordon MacLellan, also known as Creeping Toad, is an environmental educator who helps people find their own stories in nature. Here, he is storytelling in Plas Power Woods, Wales, UK. Gordon's stories are inclusive to anyone who wants to listen without discrimination. In this issue, Susan Greenwood characterizes magical consciousness as a pan-human participatory and analogical mode of thought that underpins mythopoetic expressions ranging from the ancient narratives of the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Snake and the life-enhancing ecological stories of Gordon MacLellan to the alt-right conspiracy theories fostering racial hatred embraced by ‘shaman’ and QAnon supporter Jake Angeli, a central figure in the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. Stories and storytelling are the modus operandi of magical consciousness. Essentially amoral, magical consciousness engages the emotions and helps create meaningful patterns that encompass varieties of human expression cross-culturally. Magical consciousness manifests itself along a spectrum. It can sometimes lead to divisive actions fuelled by conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Analysis of magical consciousness may add a further dimension to the investigation of Western post-truth societies whereby the Enlightenment notion of reason and scientific facts — as the only locus of ‘truth’ — contrasts with ways of engaging with reality primarily through emotions and beliefs. A better understanding of magical consciousness may help build bridges between Western cultures and the world views of indigenous peoples. In replacing machine metaphors with metaphors drawn from nature, such understandings may help shape our future responses to our planet's ecological, economic and social crises.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 5. October 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 5 Front cover Shark attack! July 2015 marked the 40th anniversary of Jaws, the blockbuster film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel of the same name by Peter Benchley. At the time, the enormous success of the film was attributed to the way it tapped into the primal instincts of the audience, exposing people to primitive fears usually hidden in their collective unconscious. In later years, Benchley became a committed conservationist and announced that he would never again write a story in which an animal was depicted as ‘a conscious villain’. Benchley was by no means repudiating his earlier work. He claimed he was simply acknowledging that society (in his case, the USA) had moved on, that ideas about animals had progressed, and that portraying animals as villainous creatures was no longer socially acceptable. Writing from South Australia where some of the original footage for Jaws was filmed, Adrian Peace argues that great white sharks continue to be construed by many Australians as rational and ruthless killers (‘assassins’). Peace takes as problematic the idea that sharks occupy a particular place in the Australian psyche, especially when commentators draw on evolutionary psychology to explain the response to great whites in terms of an instinctual and hard wired primal fear. By carefully unpacking the current public discourse surrounding shark attacks in Australian waters, Peace provides a cultural interpretation of the relationship between Australians and great white sharks which is firmly focused on current beliefs and contemporary interpretations. Back cover EUROPE'S REFUGEE CRISIS Irish naval personnel from the LÉ Eithne rescuing migrants in the central Mediterranean, June 2015. The Irish vessel took part in Joint Operation Triton, coordinated by the European border agency Frontex and by Italian authorities. Following a series of shipwrecks off the Libyan coast, in late April 2015 European Union (EU) leaders agreed on the need to extend Triton's scope to 138 nautical miles south of Sicily. The EU is expected to finance Operation Triton throughout 2016. Several countries are participating in the operation, with vessels, helicopters, planes, and teams of border agents. Transshipping migrants takes time and is a skilled task that requires specific training. There have been cases of boats in distress capsizing upon sighting a rescue vessel, as passengers suddenly move to one side. Thus, large navy vessels usually dispatch two smaller units, approaching migrant boats from both sides. Everyone is immediately instructed to sit down, and then to don a lifejacket. How do we distinguish between a humanitarian and a border patrolling exercise? In this issue, Maurizio Albahari looks at what is by now the most serious refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 6. December 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 6 Front cover THE HOUSE GUN The world was watching when Paralympic gold medallist Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp's parents stepped into the magisterial Palace of Justice in Pretoria. At that moment they entered alien territory beyond the ken of the insular white upper class Afrikaner community, many of whom live as if poor blacks were not the very foundation and backbone of the nation. Little had changed for them except their increased fears of criminal assault by black ‘intruders’ washed up from the surrounding townships. The only defence for their beleaguered class was a latter‐day version of the Afrikaaner laager: the gated community, motion sensors, armed guards, and a private arsenal of guns – from high powered rifles to the trusty little ‘weekend special’, the house gun. Face to face with a stern and stoical Zulu judge, Thokozile Masipa, the defendant sobbed, retched, and begged for mercy from ‘My Lady’. He admitted killing his live‐in girlfriend by shooting wildly through the door of a tiny toilet cubicle, arguing that it was a mistake. As Nancy Scheper‐Hughes argues in this issue, one way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures. Back cover EATING PETS? An eating place offering dog meat for sale at a market; a common sight in South Korea. Seoul's largest cat and dog meat market opens on calendar days ending with 4 and 9 of each month. Here, on these days, ready‐cooked dog meat is also widely served all year round. One row of market stalls is entirely dedicated to shops selling mainly live dogs and chickens, animals consumed as part of a belief system that maintains that their consumption helps to regulate body temperature especially during the summer. As evidenced in the recent horsemeat controversy, British food anxieties revolve especially around maintaining a clear separation between companion animals and livestock. The Korean case, however, shows vernacular sensibilities running along different lines, principally based on local ideas about medicine and cosmology. Korean activists are presently taking a moral stance against dog meat consumers capable of tenderizing live animals for their meat. Yet even these activists voice their stance largely through emic interpretations of trans‐species relations rooted in Korean cosmology and ontology. In this issue, Julien Dugnoille looks at how Korean activists bring the issue of animal welfare to the attention of Korean society. He explores the ways in which activists deploy rescue narratives in order to attract families willing to adopt rescued animals, thus transforming people's perception of livestock animals into that of potential lifetime companions. Combined here are the Confucian virtue of impartial benevolence and 18th‐century Western moral philosophy.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 6. Decemver 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 6 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGY IN CHINA China has its own anthropology ancestors, revered today well beyond the discipline. In this photograph, former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Gu Xiulian and former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng jointly unveil a statue built to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong, China's most celebrated anthropologist. Official sources declared that the statue was intended to highlight the academic achievements of this nationally celebrated anthropologist. The Wujiang Municipal Party Committee and the Wujiang municipal government also dedicated a ‘Cultural Garden’ to ‘further expand the popularity’ and ‘enhance the influence’ of Kaixiangong village, the village in which Fei did most of his fieldwork. The Culture Garden is made up of an Exhibition Hall of the History and Culture of the Village, built in memory of Fei Xiaotong's sister, Fei Dasheng, and the Fei Xiaotong Museum. The museum explores the anthropologist's extraordinary life, highlighting in particular Fei's 26 visits to Kaixiangong. However, many Kaixiangong residents, and some government officials, were not enamoured of the commemorative statue that was erected on 23 October 2010. In his official standing pose, Fei Xiaotong was deemed ‘too distant’, and unlikely to ‘find repose’. Wu Weishan who had carried out the original official commission (and whose 31‐foot statue of Confucius was inexplicably removed from Tiananmen Square earlier this year), then visited Kaixiangong village and consulted its residents, after which he sculpted free of charge what was generally felt to be a more fitting replacement. The new statue depicts Fei relaxed and smiling in an armchair, echoing the Chinese ‘big‐tummy Maitreya Buddha’. Villagers believe this statue to be a more apt tribute to Fei's memory, and have expressed the hope that it will bring happiness to their village. Back cover BACK TO ‘CIVILIZATION’? Civilization is the name of a successful series of computer games (more than nine million units sold globally: see http://www.civilization.com ). Over the past two decades, the games have become increasingly sophisticated, not only in terms of programming, but also with respect to the background history, sociology and economics. For example, irrigation can increase food production, and granaries enable surpluses to be stored and populations to increase. The moods of the citizens matter too: ‘If a city has more happy citizens than content ones, and no unhappy ones, the city will throw a celebration for the ruler called “We Love the King Day”, and economic benefits ensue.’ Featured civilizations range from the Aztecs to the Zulu. It is not known whether Sid Meier (‘the father of computer gaming’) and his fellow game designers have ever studied anthropology. Even if they had, it is unlikely, as Chris Hann points out in his editorial in this issue, that the concept of civilization would have figured prominently in their curriculum. Civilizational analysis is a lively subfield of sociology and has never really gone away in archaeology, but it largely disappeared from anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. Hann discusses some of the reasons for this, and lends his support to recent efforts to revive anthropologists’ interest in the concept. For all its variation, Sid Meier's addictive gameplay exemplifies the fiercely competitive, often violent ethos of today's capitalist civilization. The aim of each game is to rule the world in the name of just one civilization. Hann sees affinities with recent popular books engaging with world history, which rely heavily on contemporary readers’ familiarity with IT. The big question is whether ‘killer apps’ (Niall Ferguson) and the rise of silicon intelligence at the expense of carbon (Ian Morris) will eventually eliminate civilizational pluralism.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 6. December 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 6 Front cover AI and humanity A statue by Stephen Kettle of Alan Turing, sitting pensively at one of his code‐breaking machines in Bletchley Park. Made up from half a million pieces of Welsh slate, this statue was a landmark feature for the Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition in 2012, which was curated following a public campaign to save the Turing‐Newman Collaboration Collection, a rare collection of his mathematical papers. Members of the Turing family additionally contributed some of the mathematician's personal belongings, including a teddy bear he used to practise his lectures on. Bletchley Park is now a huge heritage attraction, more so since The Imitation Game, a film based on the life of the pioneering computer scientist, came out. Previously known as the UK Government Code and Cypher School, this is now a site for the National Museum of Computing, which ncludes the huts and blocks that hosted a group of codebreakers whose work is said to have helped shorten the war by two years. In this issue, Ting Guo looks at Turing's personal trajectory in life and asks to what extent his search for artificial intelligence was inspired by considerations other than purely technical ones. To design artificial intelligence is to reproduce what is the essential ‘us’, what Pamela McCorduck refers to as an ‘odd form of self‐reproduction’. The desire for such machines, she argues, is a desire equally rooted in fear and allure, which reflects not only the drive for knowledge and human progress, but the discovery of the human self, which is itself driven by fundamental problems of being human. Back cover WORLDS IN MINIATURE Miniature worlds fascinate us. Taking familiar objects, scenes and environments and scaling them down to the minute generates a sense of wonder, forming a special connection between object and audience across which information can flow in subtle and unexpected ways. For centuries, people have used miniaturization to create tiny settlements with streets down which traffic doesn't flow and shops where no purchases are made. In doing so, they generate a fantasy, an idealized portrayal of a world they wish to see, not the one they inhabit. One of the most famous of these miniature communities is Madurodam in the Netherlands. Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year, this park seeks to replicate particular dioramas of Dutch life, employing a dedicated team of professional modellers focusing on specific aspects of Dutch architecture and urban environments to portray a particular, explicitly positive, image of the Netherlands. The choices made at this site, and others like it all over the world, are part of a complex process of representation in miniature, a selection of iconography and design intentionally assembled to create unconscious impressions in visiting tourists, particularly children, about the full‐sized communities they resemble. As such, their representative powers are partial, a carefully curated miniature snapshot of certain aspects of an entire nation designed to act as a cultural and educational ambassador. In this issue, Jack Davy explores how the process of miniaturization, as evidenced by a Lego figurine, can encapsulate and transmit complex and controversial themes in a child‐like, non‐threatening manner. These processes operate subtly and inexplicitly, shaping our understanding of the wider world around us through the affordances of the small.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 24, Number 2. April 2008

Front cover and back cover caption, volume 24 issue 2 Front cover Front cover: Front cover The front cover of this issue illustrates Peter Loizois' article on the work of filmmaker Robert Gardner. The Hamar woman in the photo bears marks of whipping, a subject which raised the first divisions between Gardner and anthropologists Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, as Gardner was inclined to see the practice as a facet of female subordination and male cruelty. The Streckers, after many years of research, took a different view, which can be grasped in Jean Lydall's article ‘Beating around the bush’ (see http://www.uni-mainz.de/organisationen/SORC/fileadmin/texte/lydall/Beating ) Gardner makes clear his feelings in this note, highlighted in his book The impulse to preserve: ‘Editing the Rivers of sand imagery made a huge impression on me. I kept being reminded that I especially disliked Hamar man and I don't think I would have felt differently had there been no Women's Movement. I don't see how anyone can escape feeling the same way once they see the film. It was a painful life for both sexes. So why not say so? I don't think anthropology is doing its job by being value free. I do think it should accept responsibility to look for larger truths.’ (Robert Gardner 2006, The impulse to preserve: Reflections of a filmmaker, New York: Other Press, p. 158) Back cover Back cover: UN DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The back cover illustrates Paul Oldham and Miriam Anne Frank's article in this issue on the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration sets the minimum international standards for the promotion and protection of indigenous peoples' rights. The display boards capture the historic moment on 13 September 2007, when UN member states overwhelmingly supported the adoption of the Declaration at the General Assembly's 61st session. Votes in favour of the Declaration are shown in green (143 + 1 not shown), abstentions in orange (11) and votes against in red (4). With the exception of Montenegro, whose vote in favour did not register on screen, absent or non-voting states are blank. Such overwhelming support within the General Assembly was by no means guaranteed — it was the outcome of lengthy and delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations. Expectations that the Declaration would be adopted in December 2006 were dashed when the African Group of countries blocked it, claiming that, despite 23 years of negotiations, more time was needed for consultation. In the ensuing period, Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, as co-sponsors of the Declaration, took the lead in negotiating an agreement with the African Group that they would support a Declaration with three main amendments, and would block other amendments or delays put forward by Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand. The co-sponsors then sought agreement to this amended Declaration from the Global Indigenous Peoples' Caucus, who engaged in their own worldwide consultation process with indigenous peoples' organizations. The outcome remained uncertain, however, until these giant screens in the UN General Assembly Hall finally flashed green, to spontaneous applause from the delegates and their supporters. Since anthropologists work with indigenous peoples worldwide, this historic vote raises the challenge of how they, individually and as a discipline, position themselves in relation to the new Declaration.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 1. February 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 1 Front cover POO WARS Mandisa Feni of Site C, Khayelitsha sits on a portable toilet on the steps the provincial legislature. She is one of the many poo protesters who, in June 2013, dragged containers of human waste from the shanty towns on the urban margins to the provincial legislature in Cape Town's city centre. By collecting this shit from the urban periphery and dumping it at the centre of provincial political power, the protesters powerfully enacted their refusal to accept the portable toilets that the authorities had provided for people living in these informal settlements. Rather than accepting what they regarded as second‐class ‘portaloos’ for second‐class citizens, they demanded modern, permanent, porcelain toilets, just like those in middle class homes in Cape Town. Similar to the case of the Great Stink of London of 1858, the politically powerful could not ignore the stench aroound Parliament. In his editorial in this issue, Steven Robins argues that a lack of in‐house, ‘modern’ toilets in shanty towns continues to plague its inhabitants, who have taken to imaginative protest in various ways. His study on the politics of shit in Cape Town represents a form of public anthropology on a largely private activity. This politics of human waste is not popular in the mainstream media and is considered to be irrational and unruly by the wider public. But, as developments in Cape Town show, when human waste becomes matter out of place, it can also become a potent substance when deployed in popular protest. Back cover FACE VALUES Villagers in Kanga, northern Mafia Island, Tanzania, watch a screening of part of the BBC/RAI series Face values (1978) in 1985. The film (at that time on a reel‐to‐reel system) was projected onto the white‐washed wall of the village dispensary. Prince Charles, shown here on screen, was Patron of the RAI at the time and had studied anthropology at Cambridge. He encouraged the making of this series and acted as the interviewer of the five anthropologists involved. It was argued by the RAI that the presence of royalty would ensure a large TV audience for the series in the UK, and indeed, this seemed to be the case judging by the BBC's audience figures. However, the series was much criticized both by the newsprint media critics and by anthropologists. In this issue, in the second part of her article, Pat Caplan considers why the making of ‘educational’ material for a mass audience about people and societies in other parts of the world is problematic and probably rather unlikely to achieve the aims set out by the Prince: ‘If more people could have the advantage of information and knowledge about other people's behaviour, customs, religion and so forth, then perhaps some of the prejudice against immigrants in UK could be slowly reduced’. It also considers how local people have viewed this film material and how and why their reactions have changed over time.     

‘A Young Tory’? The Early Parliamentary Career of Charles James Fox 1768–74

This article seeks to redress the neglect, even by his biographers, of Fox's early career, when he made over 250 speeches in the house of commons in six years. The period when young Fox supported government was an inappropriate prelude to his later fame as opponent of Prime Minister Pitt and champion of ‘liberal causes’. He was anything but a ‘man of the people’ in his authoritarian attitude and detestation of popular opinion, and yet there were signs that he would not be an administration man in the mould of his father, Henry Fox.     

Hunger in the land of plenty: The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Oil-rich Venezuela is being hit by the largest crisis in living memory. Now, more than 4.8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in search of food and safety. News about migration and humanitarian aid dominate. Yet, many Venezuelans stay and seek alternative strategies to cope with scarcity and insecurity. Ad hoc solutions mainly depend on alternative economies in the borderlands that do not always fit within frameworks of human rights and rule of law, but do provide relief and produce opportunities along with new inequalities that (un)willingly sustain the crisis. Amid collapsing state infrastructures, these transborder economies tie into the global trade of basic supplies, narcotics, drugs, natural resources and human trafficking that operate in the interface of the legal and the illegal. The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is as much about poverty and scarcity as it is about wealth and abundance benefiting only a very few. An ‘anthropology of abundance’ allows us to grasp these underlying socio-economic dynamics that turn crisis management into crisis maintenance.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 4. August 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 4 Front cover: OLYMPIC LEGACY: FOOD Over the last decades, the Olympic Games have increasingly claimed to deliver a social and economic ‘legacy’ to the host city. The 2012 Olympic Games in London have set out to deliver a legacy of better food for east London, an area perceived as ‘deprived’, with higher than average rates of obesity and significant ‘food deserts’ in its midst. Various Olympic organizations have considered the issue, resulting in the publication of a Food vision for the first time ever in Olympic history. However, with companies such as Coca‐Cola and McDonald's having been appointed official suppliers to the Games, and with an extremely limited time frame, will the Games be able to deliver on this promise? Allotments have been demolished and plans are afoot for Queen's Market, Upton Park, to be replaced by a supermarket. In response, Queen's Market traders and customers protest that demolition of their market goes against the Olympic spirit. Indeed, the Games could be used instead to help improve access to London's ethnically diverse markets far beyond the borough limits, as suggested in this postcard distributed by campaigners. As Freek Janssens argues in his guest editorial in this issue, the 2012 Games provide the opportunity to more critically assess how food serves the marginalized in our ethnically diverse inner cities. Also in this issue, Johan Fischer deals with halal, another topic that impacts athletes and spectators at the Games, with sporting events taking place during ramadan. Back cover: POVERTY AND GRASSROOTS COMMERCE Aisha, a door‐to‐door entrepreneur in CARE Bangladesh’ s Rural Sales Programme (RSP), is one of 3,000 previously ‘destitute’ women who now earns an income by selling branded consumer goods across rural villages under a partnership between CARE and global multinationals such as Danone, Bic, and Unilever. Similar female distribution systems are now popping up across the world. From Procter and Gamble's distribution of sanitary pads to ‘poor’ adolescent girls in Kenya and Malawi, to Unilever's Shakti ammas distributing soap village‐to‐village in rural India, companies aim to expand their bottom line by fostering entrepreneurial opportunities among the poor through so‐called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives. Such initiatives reflect the changing nature of international development where new development actors – celebrities, philanthrocapitalists, multinational corporations, social entrepreneurs etc. – spearhead efforts to reduce poverty, replacing the role long occupied by states and aid agencies. Today some of the world's largest corporations have become key players in global development by selling ‘socially beneficial’ products to the ‘poor’, and by drawing them into global commodity chains as entrepreneurs. These efforts are now widely endorsed as part of a pro‐market development agenda that looks to the perceived ‘efficiency’ of the private sector to do what billions of aid dollars have been unable to do. BoP distribution systems can offer ‘poor’ women like Aisha an opportunity to earn an income and contribute to the food security of their family. But these engagements pose risks as well as rewards, and raise pressing questions for anthropologists about how, under what terms, and with what effects, global capital is linking up with informal economies in the name of development.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 2. April 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 2 Front cover CHARLIE HEBDO SHOOTING On 11 January 2015, in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo's offices and in a kosher supermarket, 4 million people took to the streets in France, including an estimated 1.5 million in Paris, many of them carrying the sign ‘Je suis Charlie’. The heart of the march in the capital was the Place de la République, where demonstrators climbed on the monument erected to Marianne, the national symbol of the Republic. In this issue, Didier Fassin discusses this unprecedented mobilization in defence of the ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity – as inscribed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – and more recently, laïcité, the French version of secularism inherited from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. He shows that this unanimity was, however, soon disrupted, as some, particularly those from low‐income neighbourhoods, questioned the double standard in the implementation of these principles – a contestation that was harshly repressed within the education and justice systems. To account for such dissonance, the article analyzes the discrepancy between the principles of the Republic and their applications in France. Laïcité, long implemented in a flexible and pragmatic manner, only became more strictly enforced in relation to Islam. Liberty, notably free speech, has recently been subjected to various legal and practical limitations. Equality, which exists under the law, is seriously undermined by social disparities and racial discrimination. Fraternity, which translates into solidarity and welfare, is increasingly weakened by discourses which stigmatize minorities. These discrepancies affect with particular intensity, immigrants from North and sub‐Saharan Africa and their descendants, most of them Muslims – a legacy of France's colonial past. Although they might seem untimely in such moments of unity, these meditations call for a critical reflection on the contradictions of contemporary democracies. Back cover AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL MANIFESTO Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa, the dominant ruling chief of the Fijian island of Bau 1829–1832 and 1837–1852, prior to the commencement of British colonial rule in 1874. Drawing by Alfred Thomas Agate. This is one of the earliest depictions of the rare black‐lipped pearl‐shell breast plates, civa. On Ratu Tanoa's head is the turban‐like bark cloth (masi) head scarf, i‐vauvau. It is said to have concealed the scar from a wound inflicted by a brother who was a rival for the title of Vunivalu, the war king of Bau: the active ruler in a diarchy whose counterpart was the sacerdotal king, the Roko Tui Bau. With Adi Savusavu, one of his nine wives, Ratu Tanoa was the father of Ratu Seru Cakobau, who succeeded in unifying most of Fiji into a single kingdom. In his anthropological manifesto in this issue, Marshall Sahlins argues that our main theories of ‘economic determinism’ represent a self‐consciousness of modern capitalist societies masquerading as the science of others. In the great majority of societies known to anthropology and history, power consists in the direct control of people, from which comes the ability to accumulate wealth, rather than control of their means of livelihood, of capital wealth, from which comes the control of people. Indeed in many cases the notion of ‘production’ itself would be inappropriate insofar as the ancestors or the gods are the creative agents, the fundamental sources of human subsistence – which people thus receive rather than make simply by their own labour. It follows that the principal political beneficiaries of economic prosperity are shamans, priests, garden magicians, chiefs, divine kings, and the like by virtue of their mediation of the spiritual origins of people's livelihoods. All this is not mere ‘false consciousness’ but the way these societies are organized: their own constituted anthropology, from which we must develop ours.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 1. February 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 1 Front cover FASCISM ON THE RISE? This picture features activists of the Polish National Radical Camp (ONR) who are about to start a celebratory march commemorating the anniversary of the movement's establishment back in 1934. The march's point of departure was the premises of the Gdansk shipyard – a place that became well known in 1980s due to a series of anti-regime protests by ‘Solidarity’ movement activists. The slogan above the gate reads: ‘Thank you for good work!’ (employees would see this slogan when leaving the premises, after their shift). The choice of place was far from coincidental. Polish mass media were quick to describe the anniversary as an attack on the memory of the Solidarity movement which, they emphasized, was the antithesis of fascism and which fought for liberalism. They also claimed that the march was a ‘reminiscence’ of September 1939 when Nazi Germany took over the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk). It is clear that the event was meant as a provocation and the organizers did not shy away from admitting it. Yet in his commemorative speech, the ONR leader referred explicitly to the events of 1980, reminding the gathered crowd that Solidarity fought for better work conditions, dignity and basic rights, and linked those arguments to a depiction of work conditions in the (present-day) neo-liberal system. He also emphasized that Solidarity brought about a revolution and that such a revolution is needed again today. His speech exemplifies well, a growing tendency for far-right movements to draw explicitly on socialist ideas and return to the idea of ‘the third way’, observable in Poland and beyond. The event was attended by activists from abroad, among them Forza Nuova activists and Polish economic migrants living in the UK and Ireland. In this issue, Agnieszka Pasieka considers what it is like to study the ‘unlikeable’ other. Several other contributions also discuss how anthropology might position itself in relation to the trend towards extreme right-wing politics worldwide. Back cover FIRE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM, BRAZIL Oil painting, undated and without the artist's signature, which used to belong to the National Museum, Brazil, until the recent fire destroyed it. Depicted is a Bororo boy, baptized as Guido, who was adopted at approximately seven years of age by D. Maria do Carmo de Mello Rego, a lady of fine education, wife of the governor of Mato Grosso. Without children and of relatively advanced age, the couple treated Guido as if he were their own son. D. Maria do Carmo made great efforts to win his affection, teaching him to read and introducing him to the arts. For four years, from 1888 to 1892, Guido lived with her and her husband, first in Mato Grosso, then in the city of Rio de Janeiro until he died on a nearby farm due to natural causes, possibly pneumonia. Donated by D. Maria do Carmo before his death, this painting became part of one of the oldest National Museum collections composed of about 400 Indian artefacts she had gathered from Mato Grosso (the majority of these of Bororo origin), including an album with drawings and watercolours made by Guido and carefully arranged by her. Not only this painting, but the entire collection of ethnographic pieces and the album of drawings and watercolours were unfortunately destroyed by the fire. In this issue, Gemma Aellah and Jessica Turner interview João Pacheco de Oliveira, professor of anthropology and curator of ethnographic collections at the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.     

Leaving Vietnam: Nixon,Kissinger and Ford, 1969–1975, Part two: January 1972–January 1973

Although anticipated, the North Vietnamese ‘Easter offensive’ against South Vietnam in 1972 created problems for the United States. Having reached a rapprochement with Communist China, President Nixon and his foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed that the attack could have serious repercussions for their attempt to balance it with détente with the Soviet Union, not to mention the US's credibility as a Great Power. They also feared it would damage Nixon's prospects for re‐election in November 1972. Despite opposition from his Defense Secretary, Nixon renewed the bombing of North Vietnam which had been stopped by President Johnson in 1968. This helped to bring the North Vietnamese back to the conference table and after complex negotiations, a draft peace agreement was ready for initialling in October 1972. However, President Thieu of South Vietnam saw significant drawbacks in the agreement and refused to go along with it. The North Vietnamese chose to have one more attempt to win on the battlefield and President Nixon, who had scaled down the bombing when peace seemed closer and won a landslide victory in the presidential election, launched another eleven days of concentrated bombing raids on North Vietnam at the turn of the year. This led to the final agreement initialled on 23 January 1973, which President Thieu reluctantly acceded to. Thieu's reservations were justified, but Nixon realized that, despite his electoral victory, he could not count on the continued support of Congress and the American people for the war. Far from bringing ‘peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia’, the January agreement was a fig leaf to cover American withdrawal.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 5. October 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 5 Front cover This installation was part of the ‘Hurray Menstruation’ protest organized by gender activists during the Sabarimala pilgrimage of 2018–19. This protest was supported by the Kerala government as part of its ‘Renaissance’ campaign against the BJP’ s (Bharatiya Janata Party) provocative assertion of traditional Hindu values. The installation is a condensed symbol in Victor Turner's sense, with many layers of meaning. The major elements are a vulva, alongside an image of the Constitution of India, centrally mediated by a woman blowing a trumpet - an expression of freedom from repressive and oppressive moral values espoused by the dominant middle class. The installation draws attention to oppressive rules in Hindu religiosity and ritual practice that target women as polluting due to biological processes particular to them. By contrast, the installation attributes positive values to these ‘polluting’ processes instead. Back cover THE PARABLE OF THE FOOTBRIDGE A footbridge in the wetlands. Where will it lead? ‘The between’ is a powerful theme in ritual and mythical traditions the world over. However, different traditions will express ‘the between’ in different ways. As described by Paul Stoller in this issue, Sufi traditions hold the bridge as a major symbol for barzakh, a space that links two distinct domains - a place that is between things, a space that separates the known from the unknown, the comprehensible from the incomprehensible, a nebulous space that compels the imagination. The footbridge is the epitome of ‘the between’, of being neither here nor there, of being liminal. On the footbridge, you may not know your front from your back or your past from your present. In this neither space, uncertainty seeps into your being. Where will your steps take you? If you make it to the other side, will things be different? Will you be the same person? The existential crisis of ‘the between’ that one finds on the footbridge can bring disruption, turbulence and stress. Amid this risky and unstable state of ‘negative capability’, the mind is sometimes cleared of clutter as one enters a space of imagination, creativity, innovation and invention. Are contemporary anthropologists ready to risk disruption and invention so we can follow the sinuous path to the anthropological future? If we move forward, what will we find on the other side of the footbridge?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 1. February 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 1 Front cover ALTERNATIVE FACTS In response to discourses of alternative facts, denials of climate science and the undermining of science in the public sphere, on 22 April 2017, protestors marched for science in cities across the United States. In this image of the San Francisco march, a protestor holds a sign proclaiming ‘science is universal’. While some protestors' slogans assumed the objectivity of science and facts, others asserted the importance of diversity, equality and inclusion in science. Scholars of science and technology studies have long deconstructed claims of universality, but recently some have argued that the authority of science and facts must be reclaimed. Bruno Latour emphasizes that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive. Analyses of human rights and political violence disclose how narratives and propaganda shape not just individual attitudes but also the functioning of institutions. Contexts of gaslighting, repetition, distraction and undermining facts require different strategies for understanding how institutions and societies are perpetrating and perpetuating injustices. In this issue, Drexler's article develops a framework of multidimensional and intersectional justice for analyzing the layered, compounded, dynamic forms of power and inequality that contribute to particular injustices. Understanding justice as multidimensional and intersectional is part of a struggle from which new forms of knowledge and truth can emerge. Back cover ‘NEW SCHISM’ IN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY? A supplicatory prayer service (Moleben) to Saint Emperor Nikolay II in an Orthodox church in the Russian Federation. On the commemoration day of his death, believers line up to venerate large icons of the tsar installed in the church, as in many other churches of the ‘Russian world’. When kissing the holy icons and listening to the words of prayer, they participate in a theopolitical performance of belonging to a community of co-believers and compatriots, of people who share the same faith and the same nation, an enactment of the model ‘one state, one church’ prevalent in Eastern Orthodoxy. What happens, however, when state borders change, when new sovereign states emerge or become stronger? Is it possible for Orthodox Christians to practise their faith outside the national-territorial logic? Since the summer of 2018, Jeanne Kormina and Vlad Naumescu have been observing a rapidly developing cold war within Orthodox Christianity. This war between different claims for sovereignty and jurisdiction over ‘canonical territories’ has followed clear logics of religious nationalism and imperialism. In this conflict, the less privileged — ordinary believers and local religious communities — have suffered most. In this issue, Kormina and Naumescu analyze the recent ‘schism’ in Eastern Orthodoxy to show how religion and politics are strongly intertwined in disputes over territory and sovereignty. Drawing a parallel between the post-socialist revival of religion in Ukraine and the current mobilization on the ground, they show how the theopolitics of ‘communion’ and ‘canonical territory’ shape the fate of people, churches and states.     

Le statue di marte e venere nel tempio di marte ultore sul foro di augusto 1

This paper explores the question of whether any circumstances, events or activities can be identified that may have made Cicero feel that he and / or other people were experiencing a moment or period of happiness in their private or public lives. By reviewing meaningful excerpts from a variety of Ciceronian works, this contribution presents examples of possible conditions and instances of happiness in Cicero's life (as far as it is possible to discover the feelings of an individual exclusively on the basis of their writings to other people). While Cicero hardly ever mentions preconditions for his own ‘happiness’ or states explicitly that he is ‘happy’, it can be inferred that he took pleasure in a range of situations that are generally regarded as blessings for human beings, such as having a family or a comfortable home. His special intellectual capability and his political career presented Cicero with further possibilities of winning success and satisfaction. Yet Cicero's feelings of happiness in all respects seem to have a basic component oriented towards community. Because Cicero's personal life is so intertwined with his public life and he has also considered the issue philosophically, his emotional disposition in ‘normal’ and ‘extraordinary’ moments is of a particular quality: he was able to derive joy from beliefs such as that he had saved the Republic, beyond the ordinary pleasures of all human beings such as conversations with good friends.     

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave,pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.