Social Anthropology

What is happening to the anthropological monograph? (The onslaught of the journal article)

In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere in the British Isles, mainline church denominations support their own mission societies. A small study of their attitudes and objectives was conducted with society officials, and with leading supporters in different denominations. Working in solidarity with others in their congregation, supporters were often more interested in helping to relieve suffering than to learn about the cultures and politics of the ‘missionised’. The sociality and disinterestedness of such charitable activities is contrary to some common assumptions about Western individualistic giving, deserves anthropological analysis and is relatable to Maussian theories of ‘the gift’.

Migration has been a regular feature in Europe since before the Romans. However, an acceleration of this process in the 20th and 21st centuries has resulted in the breaking down of old affinities and alignments and the emergence of new formations that challenge traditional group definitions. Many Europeans experience strong senses of exclusion from the mainstream society to which they have migrated. Some have explored this challenge of liminality in writing. The essay focuses on auto/ethnographies that have been penned in a liminal context with particular reference to the concept of Europe. How do migrants translate their own memories and stories from one region of Europe into a new cultural setting? What is the composite picture of Europe that is created in these migrant writings and how significant is the experience of liminality?

The study deals with the prestige economy of a Transylvanian Roma ethnic subgroup known as the Gabors. It highlights how these Roma construct prestige items and symbols of ethnic identity by de‐ and re‐contextualisation, that is, by commodity fetishism and symbolic re‐creation of silver beakers and tankards purchased from non‐Roma antique dealers, auction houses, museums etc. Focusing on a transitional period of the ‘social history’ of these objects, it analyses how the Gabors attach to them a new cultural identity (elite register of consumption of material goods) and new social identities (symbols of ethnic and patrilineal identity). These processes of ‘symbolic alchemy’ of objects play a significant role in the construction and materialisation of ethnic identity among the Gabors.

The creation of a scientifically pure sweetness was a historical process comparable to the standardisation of cooking oil or salt. But the case of sugar is almost unique. Today, quite different processes, concerned more with marketing than with chemistry, serve to elaborate, multiply and reshuffle products. These have the common objective of enlarging the aggregate market. They play upon taste, class aspiration and otherwise, to diversify the market in terms of class, ethnicity, and other criteria of social assortment, by inflecting the products themselves. Here I argue that two different meanings of the term ‘purity’ are popular, and that both are used to broaden and to deepen consumption.