Social Anthropology

A multi‐species perspective identifies and offers ethnographic insight into a variety of everyday, practical experiences and the roles they may play in shaping human–horse relationships. Analysis of narrative data from 60 open‐ended interviews with a wide variety of riders in Norway and the Midwestern USA identifies three central themes of co‐being. These are expressed, felt and voiced as embodied moments of mutuality, engagements of two agentive individuals and as a kind of anthropo‐zoo‐genetic practice, where species domesticate each other through being together. Co‐being as intra‐acting describes how horse and human meet and change as a result of their meeting. © 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

, by Benson, Peter

Dominant approaches to fear in the social sciences and humanities tend to consider fear as a negative and disempowering emotion. Such analyses conceptualise fear as an indistinct mass phenomenon, a characteristic of an abstraction, such as ‘risk society’ or ‘culture of fear’ or ‘dictatorial power’. By contrast, this paper examines the structure of the experience and management of fear by individual subjects, and relates this to questions of morality and self‐reflection. Using the cases of omens and horror movies, it is shown how fear is evoked and ‘managed’ within assemblages, which might include other people, frightening objects, ghosts, animals, diseases, technologies, or monsters. One is conscious of one's own fear and hence fear itself can become another ‘thing’, a property, which somehow must be dealt with. The theoretical proposition here is that fear need not be conceptualised as all‐embracing. An emotion such as fear is ‘mine’ / ‘ours’ and contained within an identity; and yet, being a relation, it puts into question the connection between this passing element of what we think of as ‘self’ with the world outside. Such an approach opens the possibility of examining the management of fear, its coming and going over time, the evaluations that are made of it (as noble, despicable, justified, irrational, etc.), and the entitlements it provides in society. In particular, it raises the question of attitudes towards other humans as objects of fear, and the circumstances in which they are repudiated or, to the contrary, embraced.

Norway has in recent years been rated as one of the most democratic societies in the world. But how open and democratic are Norway's mediated public spheres when it comes to minority individuals? This article is based on in‐depth interviews with a number of individuals of Muslim background in Norway who in recent years have been active in debates in the mediated public spheres. I argue that the existence of a hierarchy of preference among Norwegian liberal media editors includes and privileges the voices of individuals of Muslim background engaged in critiques of Islam, while it often excludes Muslims who are not prepared to engage in such critique.

A long‐term occupation

Police and the figures of the stranger