2,173 research outputs found
Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies
No full textThis article is a reprint of McKinley, Robert. 1976. “Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies.” In Studies in Borneo societies: Social process and anthropological explanation , edited by G. N. Appell, 92–126. DeKalb, IL: The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. The appendix, containing reflections on a debate between J. van Baal and the author, was written for publication in HAU
“Mafiacraft” and mafia activity: A dynamic and changing interaction
No full textDeborah Puccio-Den has conducted ethnographic research in Palermo since the mid-1990s, focusing on efforts to criminalize the mafia, both on the part of the criminal justice system, and also by ordinary citizens, among them photographers, artists, writers, social scientists, journalists, and antimafia activists. She proposes the word “mafiacraft” to conceptualize this process, evoking anthropological analyses of efforts to criminalize witches. The analogy dramatizes how much violence has occurred in modern Sicily without either prosecutors or morally sensitive Sicilians being able to identify, much less agree upon, those responsible. Puccio-Den acknowledges that “historical and political conditions” influence turning points in the ability of both sets of actors to concretize responsibility (“responsibilize,” as she puts it). Because the author does not touch on these conditions, I have taken the liberty to elaborate on two that I consider crucial: Sicily’s postwar struggle for agrarian reform, and the island’s becoming a hub for heroin trafficking to the United States in the “long 1980s.
Benjamin and us: Christianity, its Jews, and history
No full texttraduction du texte n° 11, de (2005) "Le christianisme, ses juifs et l'histoire selon Walter Benjamin", conférence au Collège international de PhilosophieInternational audienceIn 2004, the author of this article published Le christianisme et ses juifs: 1800–2000, an essay that studied Christian anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing insight from the connections between two histories: the microhistory of a village mystery play (Oberammergau, Bavaria) and the broad history of Christian anti-Semitism. Jeanne Favret-Saada’s methodology resembles Benjamin’s in the “Theses on the philosophy of history.” The work’s reception led the author to question Benjamin’s historical and intellectual commitments: his relation to Judaism, Europe, Nazism, materialism, and the methods of history as a discipline
The arts of memory: Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author. Translated by Matthew Carey
No full textFor linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons—that form the opposite figure of writing—has deeply influenced Western tradition. In this article, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language—to use Giambattista Vico’s phrase—that would characterize the Native American arts of memory. In this perspective, techniques of memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artifacts
The resonance of captivity: Aliens and conquest
No full textThe trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls “resonance,” especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various ethnographic and mediated examples of American ambivalence about the legacy of empire and colonization. The author argues that a vernacular theory of power emerges in people’s sense of ongoing parallels between various narratives of containment in America. The writing mimetically performs, as well as interprets, this narrative resonance.
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