Social Anthropology

Anthropologie sociale

ISSN: 0964-0282 (print) • ISSN: 1469-8676 (online) • 4 issues per year

Volume 18 Issue 2

The dynamism of plurals

An essay on equivocal compatibility1

João De Pina‐Cabral

In ethnographic accounts equivocation is often read as error. To the contrary, in this paper I give an example of a situation of equivocal compatibility from fieldwork among Eurasians in Macao (southern China) during the early 1990s. In the course of intersubjective interaction, a creative process occurs of successive transformation of the pertinent angles of identification and differentiation. The use of the first person plural is a constant mode of producing and altering identification and differentiation in such a way that what is singular and what is plural is constantly being re‐assessed. This dynamism of plurals both elicits response from the persons involved in the interaction and marks the world that surrounds them. The aim of the paper is to explore how belief relates with identity in a dynamic way that is mutually constitutive.

Esquisse d'une archéologie et généalogie des savoirs anthropologiques

Laurent Berger

Chaos, mimesis and dehumanisation in Iraq

American counterinsurgency in the global War on Terror

Antonius C. G. M. Robben

This article examines how the military dimension of the global clash between the cellular system of nonstate networks and the vertebrate system of nation‐states, as formulated by Arjun Appadurai, was played out in counterinsurgency operations between US troops and Iraqi insurgents during the Iraq War between 2004 and 2006. It demonstrates how American forces embraced the insurgency's networked tactics when massive assault operations failed. Informed by social mimesis and Manichaeism, counterinsurgency units enhanced the chaos of local battle spaces, dehumanised combatants hiding among the people, and thereby increased civilian deaths at checkpoints, during raids and in detention centres.

Silver‐haired society

What are the implications?

ROGER GOODMAN

Response to Roger Goodman

HAIM HAZAN

Response to Haim Hazan

ROGER GOODMAN

Response to Roger Goodman

HAIM HAZAN

The ‘postulate of abundance’. market and religion in La Paz, Bolivia

Nico Tassi

In Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, urbanised indigenous highlanders () have produced one of the most successful experiments of indigenous entrepreneurship in the region. Rejecting locally dominant bourgeois values, for example modesty and thriftiness, run a thriving transnational economy of conspicuous consumption placing moral emphasis on spending in excess, and rapidly materialising profit into abundant display – whether through dress, through exhibition of goods or through religious parades. Despite their economic affluence, remain a rather discriminated group from the rest of the urban population for their supposed failure to submit to laws of economic rationality. This article is an attempt to redress the misunderstanding between and elites and to understand the functioning of ’ postulate of abundance both in religious and economic practices. I argue that ‘abundance’ is a salient economic and cosmological value associated with the reproduction of goods and cosmological relations. I suggest that ’ postulate of abundance may provide an insight into a form of market economy in which excess, rather than scarcity, operates as the motivating force for exchange.

, identification and sacrifice in the Gujarat pogrom

Parvis Ghassem‐Fachandi

Central Gujarat is often called the ‘laboratory of Hindutva’. This paper examines how complicity during the Gujarat pogrom in 2002 was tied to an imagery of sacrifice invoked through a language of ritual and diet. By means of the spectacle of uncanny terrorism, the deployment of sacrificial language, rumours of abduction of young women, and circulation of images of excess, a Hindu victim was mimetically constructed through Muslim victimisation. , initially deployed as an ethical critique of the violence of sacrifice, was transformed into an element of violent identification contributing to widespread complicity among residents of the city of Ahmedabad.