Social Anthropology

A recent experience of ‘returning’ photographs to acquaintances in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, leads to questions about the recognition of character. People acknowledge characteristic ways of acting or behaving, but it is not at all clear that these are simply attached to individual persons. To what entity might such characteristics be attached, and what are the ethical repercussions? There seems something of a parallel between the way English‐speakers bundle together the elements of someone's character and how they might compose a portrait; indeed to the various senses of ‘character’ as specification of qualities, intrinsic nature or customary habit, one might add the work it does in ‘painting a portrait’, as the metaphor goes. A completely unlooked‐for response on the part of Hagen friends to my proposal to seek out people in order to give what in some cases I had thought of as portraits, namely photographs of themselves and close kin, forced me to think afresh about what it means to have pictures of persons. This in turn might throw some light on character as analytic.

On the character of character

An immodest proposal

For Southern Californian members of the Vineyard network of charismatic churches, character is a gift of God, traits bequested on them that are equal in dignity and importance to the classical divine gifts such as tongues, prophecy, healing or casting out demons. The chief difference is that these more classical gifts are not about gaining or valuing character traits, but about submission to God, and therefore are as much moments of character's erasure as they are of elaboration. And both forms of character, as perduring divine gift or as an ascetically earned moral character shaped through submission, help believers understand character in a third sense: as their being participants, and therefore personages, in the wider Gospel narrative of cosmic salvation.

Ever since the ‘refugee crisis’ hit European shores, policymakers, journalists and politicians have sought out knowledge on ‘unwanted’ migration and ‘what to do about it’. As influential people knock on academic doors – at times seeking out anthropologists, such as this author – how should we engage, and under what conditions? The seemingly endless rounds of panel debates, conferences and other policy‐focused outreach pull academics towards ‘high‐level’ engagements, while short‐term or politically driven ‘emergency’ funding pushes us towards narrowly defined research objectives. Meanwhile, the ‘impact’ agenda – most developed in the UK, yet increasingly encroaching on other academic ecosystems – is shifting institutional incentives towards specific forms of scholarly activity. This article builds an ‘auto‐ethnographic’ account of my own experiences of crossing the borders of anthropology at a time of perceived migratory crisis and increasing impact calls. Delineating the pitfalls and risks of ‘capture’ by policy agendas, the article argues for active navigation of the borderlands between academia and its various publics. For anthropologists to wrest some control, I suggest, we must be willing to take risks and get our hands dirty; strategically deploy our ethnographic sensibilities to the full; and stand ready to apply our analytical skills to powerful systems – including, not least, to the impact agenda itself.

This introductory essay seeks to reintroduce character to anthropological inquiry. Although it has long been out of favour due to its historical associations with accounts that attempt to describe national or ethnic character, we argue that a return of the under‐theorised concept may be in order. The essay invites socio‐cultural anthropologists to describe the diverse contexts in which character is recognised or enacted, out‐there‐in‐the‐world, and to become far more reflective about the ways in which characterization is deployed in our ethnographic writing. At the same time, it asks how the concept might be fruitfully operationalized at a meta‐language level to reorient current fields of anthropological study, without necessarily resorting to any collective or individual essentialisms. To illustrate the utility of re‐interrogating the concept, the question is addressed to two specific fields in which one might expect a concept such as character to already feature strongly: the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Christianity. What does an ethnographic attention to the ways in which character gets attributed reveal? How differently might these and other fields look if anthropologists embraced the concept of character or rejected it more knowingly? Finally, the essay asks what kinds of recombination of insights an anthropology and character approach might enable.

Based on fieldwork in the Danish protestant movement Tidehverv, this article explores what it means to try to live one's life according to a neo‐orthodox Lutheran and explicitly Kierkegaard‐inspired theology, whose overarching existential, social and political ideal is always to be true to oneself. Departing from the seemingly paradoxical notion that the essence of living a genuinely Christian life is ‘to become what you are’, as a Tidehverv priest put it, I seek to pin down the distinct concept of character, and wider concepts of personhood and temporality, upon which this ‘fundamentalist existentialist’ theology and ethics rest. This will involve discussing in some detail a number of core Kierkegaardian concepts such as ‘the moment’ (), the ‘decision’ () and ‘the leap’ (), and making a preliminary attempt to contextualise Tidehverv's existentialist project within the wider political, religious and cultural history of the modern Danish nation state. In doing so, the article offers an exploration of the relationships between Lutheran concepts of character and political expression, and between the concept of Christian individual character and Danish national character.

In this paper I suggest that an analysis of movement can offer a fresh perspective through which to look at human–nonhuman relationships in Amazonia and beyond. Focusing on some examples from my ethnographic work among the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon, I explore how movement constitutes an important means through which similarity with nonhumans is constituted in everyday practice. Movement, as a common quality that human and nonhumans share, enables the Runa to consider themselves as ‘alike’ nonhuman others. In particular, I will show how self‐movement, understood as the awareness of one's own movement, is a central way in which Runa women align themselves to a spirit entity known as a the Grandmother of Clay.

Ong, Aihwa. 2016. Fungible life: experiment in the Asian City of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 312 pp. Pb.: US$25.95. ISBN: 9780822362647.