Purity and Power: Anthropology From Colonialism to the Global Hierarchy of Value

These four books focalize the links between sociocultural anthropology and the national or cultural identities of its theoreticians and empirical practitioners. Historically caught between the forces of nationalism and colonialism, the subdiscipline has largely transcended its now rejected past, of which significant traces nonetheless remain embedded in its conceptual inheritance. Ranging from vernacular as well as English-language Indian writings to the compromised achievements of German scholars and to the sharp divergences within and among the dominant traditions, the material of these books indexes the emergence of a self-conscious marginality that has engendered a distinctive and productive idiom of sociocultural critique.     

The Politics of Emergency

Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian interventions, but more attention to the cultural aspects of how emergencies operate and to the positive and negative effects they might have on political and social life is needed.     

KOSELLECK ON MODERNITY,HISTORIK, AND LAYERS OF TIME

In the scholarly reception of his work, Reinhart Koselleck's notion of modernity and his theory of multiple times have been cast as essentially at odds with each other. This article argues that although these positions are valid, Koselleck's writings can also accommodate an interpretation according to which the theory of multiple temporalities, or “layers of time,” provides theoretical ground for the modern understanding of time and history. Elaborating on this insight, the article shows the linkages sustaining the unity between Koselleck's formal theory of multiple times and his interpretation of modernity. To that end, I outline the main premises of the temporalization thesis that lies at the heart of Koselleck's theory of modernity, scrutinize his notion of Historik within which the framework “layers of time” belongs, and explore Niklas Olsen's and Helge Jordheim's interpretive accounts on how to conceive of the relationship between the two strands in Koselleck's thought. Ultimately, I argue that “layers of time” entails the formal conditions for historical acceleration, which is crucial for explaining the emergence of a specifically modern temporality wherein experience and expectation increasingly grow apart.     

Lebensaltertheorien in der Anthropologie der Romantik

Theories of stages of life within the anthropology of romanticism. – The essay discusses the importance and prominence of theories about different stages of life in the anthropological and medical discourse of romanticism. This discourse has clearly a stabilising and restaurative function, favouring the age of moderate manhood. The political and social regulative implications of these theories demand a restaurative roll‐back. The essay is based on a concept of sociology of knowledge formation.     

Part and Whole Numbers: an ‘Enumerative’ Reinterpretation of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits and its Subjects.

ABSTRACT From the starting point that concepts of number can contain within them a representation of a society's overall cosmology, reinforcing and strengthening its reality in logical terms through practice (a process I call enumeration), this paper charts the meeting of two systems of enumeration. As such systems are constantly changing, we concentrate on a particular point in time and space: the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (CAETS) in 1898. Here a nineteenth century anthropology obsessed with reinforcing its position as science through the mathematicalisation of its methods met a Melanesian enumerative system bound to materiality and pattern. The conflict between intentionally abstractive and intensely material enumerative systems generated perplexing results which throw their underlying cosmologies into greater relief.     

Field anthropology: application to burial contexts in prehistoric Southeast Asia

The context of burials in archaeological sites, that is whether the body was inhumed, wrapped, or in a coffin, is an aspect of mortuary ritual that has been missing from English-language publications on the subject. This is despite the development and use in France over at least the last two decades of methods of determining the context under the rubric ‘l'Anthropologie de Terrain’, or Field Anthropology. This paper briefly reviews the methods and applies them to prehistoric burial samples from two sites in Southeast Asia. This shows that burials at the Bronze Age site of Ban Lum Khao were either in coffins or wrapped. The practice of coffin burial appears to have been abandoned later, as all burials at the nearby Iron Age site of Noen U-Loke were wrapped.     

科学发展观的人学思想研究综述

党的十六届三中全会以来,尤其是有关科学发展观和人学理论的几个全国性学术研讨会召开之后,科学发展观的以人为本思想得到较为深入、全面、系统的研究。在此过程中,学术界对其形成的哲学基础、内容、特点和意义,尤其是对以人为本的本质内涵和价值理念等诸方面不乏深刻见解,但也有不少需要继续深入研究之处。     

Assessing the Effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone Geography and Anthropology

Abstract: Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under‐acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step.