Foregrounding the Muslim periphery (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This guest editorial considers the implications of Akbar Ahmed's latest book –The Thistle and the Drone: How America's war on terror became a global war on tribal Islam, which was the centrepiece of several panel discussions in London.     

Armed peace: Militarization of Rio de Janeiro's favelas for the World Cup (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Rio de Janeiro city's policy of Pacifying Police Units (UPP) for strategically located favelas is part of the state's reconfiguration of the city, involving military occupations, evictions and gentrification in the lead‐up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Yet since the author arrived in Rio to carry out doctoral research on young people's experiences with the UPP, the flaws in the project have become increasingly exposed as the policy appears to be experiencing a crisis. This paper describes this current crisis in the global context of mega‐events and the elitization of urban space.     

Grammar and Interpretation at Sallust Cat . 57.4

The meaning of the utpote qui sentence at Sal. Cat. 57. 4 is discussed with an assessment of its relevance for the situation before Catiline's final battle.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

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.     

Citations out of place (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Mary Douglas wrote that she derived the phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ from Lord Chesterfield, but the authorship of something close to this phrase was more likely Lord Palmerston's, and it arose in the context of policy concerns over urban sewage and rural fertilizer. The phrase was picked up immediately, made more abstract, and applied in a variety of contexts that drew together moral judgements with considerations of hygiene. Hence the phrase had a complex authorship and usage that had already prepared it for the uses to which Douglas would put it, and its history shows how the aphoristic formulation of a widely held notion can provoke thought by, in twenty‐first century terms, going viral.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

Breastfeeding as custom not culture: Cutting meaning down to size (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Seeing breastfeeding as culturally constructed highlights its overall meaning only to hide the activity's inner dynamic and structural separateness. To study breastfeeding in its own terms, our paper flips culture as meaning on its head, asking how the whole (culture) fits the part (breastfeeding). Addressing that question to cultural, regional and cross‐cultural bodies of evidence, we find that what's viable bioculturally is nowhere near as malleable as what's imagined culturally. In understanding these arrangements, history and function need as much consideration as anthropologists currently give meaning.     

Inappropriate object: Warsaw and the Stalin‐era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk disaster (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article is about the shifting relationship between the city of Warsaw and the Palace of Culture and Science – a gigantic Stalinist skyscraper which dominates the city centre – in the aftermath of the 10 April 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 others (mostly very senior military and political figures) in the woods outside Smolensk in western Russia. The crash's victims had been on their way to a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of a massacre in the Katyń forest, near Smolensk, during which thousands of Polish army officers were shot on the orders of Stalin. Despite its status as Warsaw's most obvious material relic of Russia's historical domination over Poland, the Palace of Culture has in the last two decades been gradually reappropriated into the city's own landscape and everyday life. In fact, since the fall of communism, the Palace has eclipsed the city's traditional emblems and monuments to become regarded as the most identifiable marker, or ‘symbol’, of the contemporary city. Further, the Palace has consolidated the tangible and powerful impact it exerts on the city's architecture and urban layout, on its political, bureaucratic, ‘cultural’, commercial and educational life, and on the bodies and minds of its citizens. The very word ‘palace’ is normally understood in Warsaw to refer to the Palace of Culture. For a time after Smolensk, however, the word acquired a new association with the Presidential Palace, where crowds gathered to lay flowers, light candles and stand vigil. The markedly muted presence in Warsaw of the Palace of Culture during the mourning period after Smolensk demonstrated that the happy interaction between post‐socialist Warsaw and the rehabilitated Palace does not extend into every domain. The topography of mourning in Warsaw in the days after 10 April seemed to highlight the abject dimension of the Palace's uncanny presence in the city. This article explores why, how and for how long the Palace withdrew and was withdrawn from the life of the Warsaw after Smolensk.     

IS THE MACROSCOPIC CLASSIFICATION OF FLINT USEFUL? A PETROARCHAEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF FLINT RAW MATERIALS FROM THE IBERIAN NEOLITHIC MINE OF CASA MONTERO*

Casa Montero is a mining complex located outside Madrid (Spain), dated from the Early Neolithic (c. 5400–5000 cal bc ). An area of some 4 ha has been investigated and some 4000 shafts recorded, of which 324 have been excavated. The characterization of its raw flint materials and the establishment of its diagnostic features are indispensable in the reconstruction of the distribution of the mine's products beyond the immediate site. This work reports the geological study of the mine's Miocene flint layers and their petrological characterization. Archaeological samples from the mine's shafts were classified according to macroscopic features and petrological characteristics.     

China and world anthropology: A conversation on the legacy of Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Fei Xiaotong (Fei Hsiao‐Tung, 1910–2005) obtained his PhD under Bronislaw Malinowski's supervision at the London School of Economics in 1938. Of the 20 volumes of his completed works, two books are well‐known in the West: Peasant life in China, published in English in 1939, and Xiangtu zhingguo (1947), translated as From the soil by Gary Hamilton and Zheng Wang in 1992. As one of China's finest sociologists and anthropologists, Fei was instrumental in laying a solid foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China, and his work helped to influence China's social and economic development. This is a translated, abridged and revised version of a conversation originally conducted in English, but published in Chinese to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong. Wu Zitong, the editor of China Reading Weekly, puts a series of questions to Gary Hamilton and Xiangqun Chang.     

Painting Andean Liminalities at the Church of Andahuaylillas,Cuzco, Peru

The church of Andahuaylillas located near Cuzco, Peru, is frequently hailed for its lush interior decorations and seventeenth-century mural paintings. One mural image in particular has captured the sustained attention of scholars for decades: the entrance wall mural entitled Camino del cielo e infierno depicting a complex allegory of good and bad faith. This article explores the mural's connections to a Flemish print and a Spanish auto sacramental (a one-act play associated with Corpus Christi), demonstrating the hitherto unexamined relationships between mural painting, print culture, and religious theatre in the Andes. It also considers the inclusion of local indigenous and Inca references in the mural that were simultaneously subsumed within discourses of idolatry while at the same time granting visibility and legitimacy to indigenous Andeans. This article brings to light the plurality of meanings invested in Heaven and Hell as both destination and journey among Spanish ecclesiastics and their indigenous constituents.     

St Columba and the convention at Druimm Cete: peace and politics at seventh‐century Iona

Attendance at the ‘convention of kings’ at Druimm Cete in north‐east Ireland is one of the most famous episodes in the career of St Columba or Colum Cille, who died in 597. Discussion of the significance of this shadowy summit, largely informed by unreliable late evidence, has hitherto focused upon what (may have) transpired there between kings based in Ireland and Scotland. The result has been the neglect of the hagiographical dimension of the presentation of Druimm Cete in our principal source, Adomnán's Vita Sancti Columbae, composed c.700. Analysis of this material shows that Adomnán's information about the convention came from his principal source, composed some sixty years earlier. It reveals moreover that Druimm Cete assumed prominence within the Columban dossier in the 640s for what it represented, rather than because of what actually happened there. Once the hagiographical agenda of Vita Sancti Columbae and its principal source is restored to its rightful place in evaluating the text, it emerges that several of its best‐known stories – including the story of Columba's ordination of a Scottish king – are much more problematic as witnesses to sixth‐century history than is conventionally supposed. As scholars begin to lose their grip upon the historical Columba, however, they grow better able to grasp seventh‐century political history in north‐east Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.     

Cartoon epic heroes in indigenous Siberian revival: The meaning of ethnicity in Putin's Russia (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

This article outlines a motivation for the Russian Federation's incursion into the Crimea, which concerns the Putin administration's relationship with Russia's citizens, rather than the outside world. I use a case study from Siberia – the Sakha people's revival of their national epic, the Olongkho – to explore the possibility that Putin's behaviour during the Ukrainian crisis serves to legitimate his authority within Russia, by appealing to conceptions of ethnicity that have their roots in Soviet‐era social engineering. Rather than deducing the Putin administration's motives from the events and relationships they immediately concern, I explore motivations emerging from the configuration of values, perceptions, and conventions that shapes and reproduces social difference in Russia. The Sakha Olongkho revival shows how the perceptions of ethnicity fostered during the Soviet era have become powerful indexes of morality and authority. Individual Sakha citizens now demonstrate their identities and values through adopting a stance towards a reified conception of Sakha ethnicity expressed in their choices of recreation, fashion and consumption. Sakha ethnicity has become integrated into the process whereby hierarchical social groupings emerge within Sakha society according to their avowal of specific tastes and norms. The relatively small size of the Sakha population – which is nevertheless the dominant ethnic group in their republic, Sakha (Yakutia) – enables us to see trends affecting the rest of Russia in microcosm. Thus, I suggest that former Soviet ethnicity has become so closely woven into Russia's morality that Putin's invasions of foreign states, in the name of the ethnic Russian community, bolster his claim to be a moral person and a legitimate and authoritative national leader.     

The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock's Politics of History

One of the great intellectual productions of the postwar period, J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was also an intervention in the American polity of the 1970s. The book's content, its rhetorical style, its methodology, and even its physical printed form were all designed to effectuate a political gesture. The crises of 1968 to 1973 invalidated the optimistic liberalism of Pocock's academic circle. The history of political language offered a refuge and a programmatic foundation for Pocock's pragmatic conservatism. The Machiavellian Moment was designed to reinforce the weight of tradition in contemporary political debate.     

The Chinese Hukou System at 50

A noted American authority on urbanization in China presents a retrospective analysis of China's hukou (household registration) system on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of its promulgation, reviewing the history of that system from a broad socio-political perspective. More specifically, the paper focuses on revealing trends in the development of the system over time and identifying many of its important ramifications for modern Chinese society, as well as on the impact of hukou on the country's industrialization, urbanization, and social and spatial stratification. The author argues that the hukou system now presents a major obstacle to China's quest to become a modern, first-world nation and global leader. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O180, O530, P200, R120. 2 figures, 3 tables, 111 references.     

A Nabataean and Roman shrine with civic and military gods at Humayma,Jordan

The lifecycle of a Nabataean and Roman community shrine at Humayma, Jordan reflects the evolving values of the town's inhabitants from the first to the third century CE. This paper reviews the evidence for the shrine's appearance and significance over this period, as well as the nature of the cult practised there. Beginning its existence as a Nabataean shrine, whose design incorporated the rising sun and the town's primary peak, the building was damaged when the Romans converted Nabataea into Provincia Arabia. The Roman garrison initially dismantled the shrine to build their fort, but a few decades later the shrine was restored with a centrally placed Nabataean betyl and legionary altar symbolising harmony between the garrison and the town. The garrison's god, Jupiter‐Ammon‐Serapis, and possibly Isis, were now worshipped alongside the town's Nabataean deity. This shrine stressing military‐civilian harmony was later deliberately damaged, most likely during Zenobia's revolt.     

Britannia rules the waves? (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

An international arbitration tribunal recently found the United Kingdom to have breached its obligations under international law in declaring a Marine Protected Area in the Chagos Islands (British Indian Ocean Territory). The ruling has potential implications for the indigenous people of the islands, the Chagossians, who continue to wage a political campaign for the restoration of their right of abode in Chagos. In this comment, I update readers on the tribunal's ruling and other related current events.     

Property,rights ans community in a South African land‐claim case (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country's land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area.