Ethnos

The Sukuma Sensorium Before discussing the sensory shifts that are pivotal in Sukuma healing, an introduction to the human sensorium may be in order. As a Western ethnographer, I am inevitably influenced by Euro-American conceptions in which ...

Laughing and humour are of great importance to most people in their everyday life and these phenomena have attracted attention from many social thinkers. It has been noted that laughter often is provoked by something that is considered to be absurd and paradoxical. This essay focuses specifically on the meaning of laughter among Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon. The

... Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 1984. Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia. ... And it is this performance of masculine success that is important, not the actual 'breadwinning' potential of the actor. If as Butler (1988)5. Butler, Judith. 1988. ...

ABSTRACT By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by examining an ethnographic memoir called The Secret of Csíksomlyó by Árpád Daczó, a widely known contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic intellectual. Daczó blends autobiography and ethnography to argue that the Hungarian Virgin Mary is a Christianized pagan moon goddess. Halfway through, Daczó switches genres to propositional theology and defends himself to the magisterium, the Church's institutional guarantor of orthodoxy. I situate Daczó's effort to anticipate his critics in the history of Catholic-Protestant theological polemics, which helped make propositional theology into the Catholic Church's privileged language for investigating heresy. By placing Daczó's use of propositional theology against the backdrop of contemporary Catholic theologians’ debates about the magisterium's authority, I challenge anthropological assumptions about the social significance of propositional belief.

Rapid economic, political, social, and technological changes have left many people in the world feeling anxious and longing for the known, the predictable, and the safe. At the same time, globalisation has opened up a realm of alternative subjectivities for many in the global South: other imagined presents and futures (Appadurai 1990, 1996; Trouillot 2001; Liechty 2002; Besnier 2011). This process of imagining other life possibilities begets new desires, both bodily and material. In this novel world of alternatives to life-as-it-is-lived-here, Tsing’s (1993) concept of ‘out-of-the-way’ takes on a new, relative quality. It disrupts previous fixed core/periphery models of globalisation, in which flows radiate from urban centres to remote peripheries, by changing the perspective to that of individuals. Individual definitions of outof-the-way shift, as people originate in various locations and move around in search of the possible. This flexibility – the transcending of place and a fixed perspective – is the concept’s theoretical potential, and the reason why the contributors to this special issue expand Tsing’s original definition and apply it to understanding the production and management of intimacy, the body, and sexual relations. In diverse ways, anthropologists have explored and theorised margins (Das & Poole 2004), borders (Donnan & Wilson 1999; Mignolo 2000; Kearney 2004; Green 2006), and edges (Besnier 2007) of countries, places, and the global. Each variation of this concept – margins, borders, and edges – contributes a distinctive perspective for recognising and analysing local–global intersections within everyday lived experience. For our purposes, however, Tsing’s (1993) conceptualisation (cf. Piot 1999) of the out-of-the-way speaks most provocatively to the intimate spaces of social life and the unexplored folds, fringes, and morally troubling cavities of gendered bodies. The people with whom we work – in Nepal,

The off-label use of the drug misoprostol has effectively turned homebirths in ‘resource-poor’ nations into unmarked and un-enunciated zones of experimentation. Misoprostol has become the public health solution in response to medico-humanitarian discourses that construct homebirths as responsible for high maternal mortality. In the absence of proper safety tests, advocating its routine administration against postpartum haemorrhage in homes around Pakistan functions to erase the distinction between service delivery projects and experimentation. Drawing on ethnographic research in Balochistan, I argue that promoting misoprostol in contexts of structural inequality, particularly where excessive artificial labour induction prevails, constitutes the enactment of a kind of ‘medical relativism’. This medical relativism entails an experimental practice that burdens poor women with undue risk as misoprostol becomes a substitute for required structural and economic transformation of Pakistan's healthcare system. Overall, the paper concludes, the contemporary faith in pharmaceuticals perpetuates a colonial governmentality of bodies, medicines, and healthcare.

The recent explosion of theft in sculpture from Angkor era temples in Cambodia raises questions about the circumstances that make such destructive acts possible at these historically sacred Khmer sites. This paper looks at the commodification of and traffic in temple sculpture in relation to a particular way of classifying and evaluating the temples. It considers different systems of classification