Social Anthropology

The invention of gender in stand‐up comedy

Transgression and digression

The concept of isolation has dogged anthropological studies of rural Ireland. This paper re‐conceptualises isolation through ethnographic work undertaken on the minibuses run by Rural Transport projects in five counties of Ireland. Instead of seeing isolation as an embedded characteristic of Irish landscapes, histories or of the ageing body, the paper describes dynamic, shifting expectations of belonging and community. On the Rural Transport buses, characteristic moments of witnessing ‘figures in the landscape’ during predictable and routinised journeys produce strikingly new negotiations of alterity and sameness among the passengers. The paper argues for the significance of these moments in developing a socialised, inscribed landscape and new senses of generative agency.

This essay aims to rethink the epistemological study of violence among the Yanomami's Venezuelan and Brazilian world. In doing so, I reopen some of the discussions between Marshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon/National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the context of the much longer debate about ‘innate aggressiveness’ (as virtue or vice) as it came to be revived in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and the protests against the Vietnam War.

This article looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. Building on fieldwork with disenfranchised urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe, it clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to precarious situations and life conditions. The article argues that the struggle to identify threats leads to a nervous sociality in which figures and social forces are examined for hidden intentions and negative potentials. Such circumstances engender an apprehensive bearing, as an affective state, posture and approach, through which social life is sought, investigated and controlled. It augments perceptivity and leads to a scanning and probing of social life that feeds into a social version of the hermeneutics of suspicion and generates a range of pre‐emptive practices.

Littlewood, Roland and Rebecca Lynch (eds.) 2016. Cosmos, gods and madmen: frameworks in the anthropologies of medicine. New York: Berghahn Books. 220pp. Hb.: US$120.00/£85.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78533‐177‐0.

Hart, Keith (ed.) 2017. Money in a human economy. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books. 314 pp. Hb.: US$120.00. ISBN: 9781785335594.

A celebration of Roy Wagner and ‘The reciprocity of perspectives’

This special section proposes that an ethnographic and conceptual emphasis on tactics can contribute to anthropological understandings of thinking, acting and being in the world. Although they can be perceived as intrinsic tenets of human sociality and subjectivity, tactical thinking and doing are becoming important parts of socio‐political landscapes around the world. Approaching the notion of tactics ethnographically demands highlighting how and why tactical sociality and subjectivity emerge in everyday life. Granting ethnographic attention to tactical practices of people can aid in showcasing how such practices do not merely strive to fulfil a certain outcome, but rather attempt to reinforce awareness of one's, often uncertain, structural position in a social, political or legal apparatus. In addition, a conceptual emphasis on tactics can provide a useful analytic lens in rethinking notions of relationality, agency, structure and method as these are contained in already existing anthropological concepts, such as habitus, access, alliance, subjectivity and uncertainty. By ethnographically and conceptually exploring tactical sociality and subjectivity as they become implicated in everyday contexts and situations, the articles in this section aim to provide a contemporary anthropological perspective of tactics.