Social Anthropology

McDougall, Debra. 2016. Engaging with strangers. Love and violence in the rural Solomon Islands. New York: Berghahn. 308 pp. Hb.: $120.00/£75.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78533‐020‐9.

This article examines the considerable material work men and women in coastal Sierra Leone invest in the attempt to nurture the webs of relations which, they hope, will catch them when their catches fail. From the raw fish handed to a stranger on the wharf to the intimate sharing of cooked rice at home, huge volumes of food circulate through Tissana's gift economy each day, in patterns that map each person's evolving network of friendships and romances. These networks of relationships are sometimes referred to locally as ‘potato rope families’, referring to their fast‐growing, ‘rhizomorphous’ forms. As the article progresses, I explore the ‘darker’ side of this flexible mode of reckoning social belonging. Huge anxiety is generated by the knowledge that, in the absence of gifts to hold them together, many of these intimate relations would atrophy and collapse as rapidly as they were formed. In other cases, a gift of rice is not only the substance of survival and kinship, but also a potent expression of power.

This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns.

In France, the notion of ‘race’ – which echoes both (post‐)colonialist discourses and a long history of state‐regulated racism – is itself usually publicly inexpressible, despite its implicit presence that nonetheless saturates public debates. However, in some specific cases, such as transnational adoption, the verbalisation of racial preferences and desires is encouraged by social workers and family experts as a means to prevent racism. This article aims to analyse the kind of practical institutional framing that produces and supports such verbalisation, and to explore its consequences with respect to the definition of racial hierarchies. Hence, instead of considering the preference of skin colour as a pre‐established parental desire that informs the racial distribution of children, I suggest focusing on the French case to analyse the racialisation of familial desires produced and the apparatus that frames adoption. Thus, by concentrating on the governance of family intimacy, this article aims to question the social dynamics that construct race as a meaningful performative category requiring professional expertise and action, that allow its public expression and that even facilitate the verbalisation of racial preferences in an institutional context supposedly defined by colour‐blindness.

This article situates peace research in the messy ambiguities of everyday encounters between foreign peacebuilders and local populations in post‐conflict environments. It suggests that anthropology allows for moving the liberal/hybrid peace debate beyond its immediate boundaries – a focus on governance systems and the intervention itself – towards a more comprehensive examination of mundane experiences in shared places and their possible influence on peacebuilding processes. Specifically, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in post‐conflict and post‐intervention Solomon Islands and on anthropological research on the importance of food for identity formation, sociality and customary peacebuilding in Melanesia. By examining non‐elite Solomon Islanders’ perceptions of foreign interveners’ apparent rejection of Solomon Islands foods, the article shows how everyday ‘food‐based’ encounters between foreign peacebuilders and Solomon Islanders affect non‐elite Solomon Islanders’ confidence in long‐term peace and more broadly their value and status in the ‘modern’, global, liberal political economy.

Given the frequent failure of internationally established reconciliation tools, traditional conflict resolution mechanisms are increasingly integrated into transitional justice programmes in order to locally root peace. However, traditional justice mechanisms can be highly ambivalent; they can be, at the same time, inclusive and exclusionary, thus promoting peace or triggering new conflict. In Eastern Indonesia, where the author has conducted extensive field research, local actors took up these challenges and try to adapt local justice mechanisms so that they can cope with mass violence and the reintegration of conflict parties and society. Social engineering is promoted as one solution to the problem. This article looks at various conceptualisations and implications of social engineering – from a top‐down authoritarian to a bottom‐up participatory approach – and discusses how far this controversial concept and the deliberate adaption of local traditions to new challenges should be taken into account in future peace research and work as well as in anthropological debates.

The frequent failure of international peace missions and the ‘crisis of the liberal peace’ led to the promotion of a local or cultural turn in peace research and work that focuses on the role and meaning of culture, local actors and a mostly unspecified ‘local’ for peacebuilding processes. This pushes peace and conflict studies to engage with the subject area of anthropological research, which poses a challenge for disciplines such as political and legal sciences. In contrast to the critiques of the critique of the liberal peace, which seem to have led to a circular debate, this special section aims to take the debate to the next step. It does so through anthropologically informed methodological and conceptual advancements that the local turn is asking for and by providing a better understanding of how the local can become an important reference point in peace and conflict studies without essentialising it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the contributions to this special section highlight the importance of ethnographic research and anthropological framing in analysing the ambivalence of the local in peacebuilding and the contributions anthropology can make to the interdisciplinary field of conflict and peace studies.

How to cook herring, and other puzzles of modern, distracted life