Social Anthropology

Familial persons in dark times

Bialecki, Jon. 2017. A diagram for fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 236 pp. Pb.: £27.00. ISBN: 978‐0‐520‐29421‐9.

Wolf, Sonja. 2017. Mano Dura: the politics of gang control in El Salvador. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 320 pp. Pb.: US$20.07. ISBN: 9781477311660.

In anthropology and beyond, discussions of character have more often focused on this as a quality of human subjects rather than of the material world. How is character figured as a quality of historic buildings, monuments and places? I situate this question through an ethnographic focus on conservation professionals in Scotland, tracing the practices through which ‘character’ is recognised, understood and conserved. My account explores the practices and dispositions through which practitioners attune themselves to this quality, and highlights the role character plays in resolving a central dilemma for conservation: how things can remain as they are, even while changing. This ethnographic focus questions some of the materially essentialist analytic frameworks that have prevailed in literatures on both conservation and character, while highlighting forms of practice that are elided more than illuminated by countervailing deconstructive approaches to these topics: actions, ideas and commitments that stem from heritage professionals’ own sense of character as ‘in‐built’.

‘Character’ was a key term in the early development of Anthropology as a discipline – Kant gives over the entire last section of his to refining the idea of character as a ‘way of thinking’. Perhaps inevitably, however, its ideological career since then – as the mark of a kind, or type of person – has been highly ambivalent. In the Caribbean, though, the idiosyncratic biographical gaze has loomed large. This article explores the status of character in an urban Caribbean everyday, where the demonstration of character through ‘talkover’ has profound social effects. Where does character come from? And what is its futurity in a social setting where no one can lay claim to autochthony, yet where ‘gifts’ are foundational to the ‘respect’ someone can command? Character belongs partly to the past as ‘a priority’, partly to the future as utopian protention.

Biondi, Karina. 2016. Sharing this walk: an ethnography of prison life and the PCC in Brazil. John F. Collins (ed., trans.). Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 222 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐4696‐2340‐5.

In order to ask what work the elusive concept of ‘character’ might do for anthropology, this article first asks what work the concept does for Euro‐American epistemology more broadly. It examines two invocations of ‘character’ in relation to animals at a scientific research site in South Africa. The first is the commonplace use of the term to denote the way the research subjects have been made into ‘characters’ on the TV show . The second is the technical term ‘biological character’ – the basic unit of contemporary evolutionary biology, and the main object of study at the site. These two characters are more than mere homonyms – they hark back to related concerns about purposive action, they populate conflicting moral narratives, and they operate on the threshold between self‐conscious fiction and essential truth. Building on this case, I argue that the distinctive value of the concept of character for anthropology resides in its ambivalence – the way it can point both to a contrived mask (a character in an account) and to the very essence of the entity in question (its true character). Such ambivalence maps a particular social form, which echoes across the anthropology of institutions, of ethics and of knowledge.