Social body and icon of the person: a symbolic analysis of shell money among the Wodani, western highlands of Irian Jaya
Stéphane Breton

The Wodani of Irian Jaya describe shell money as an immortal person, endowed with a human anatomy. In the context of matrimonial and homicide compensations, shell money pays for the different parts and organs of the person, thus symbolically transforming the bride or the victim into a composite body.Each part is ascribed to one of the parentsé procreative agency. The patrilineal organs are compensated for with the most valued shells. By fragmenting the person into hierarchized elements, the payment does not produce individual pieces but social components, distributed among patrilineal clan members in monetary form. In payments, shells are said to be eaten by their recipients, so that the clan depleted by the loss of a daughter or a son is symbolically reconstituted. The clan is represented by payments as a totality made out of personsé parts, as a pool of patrilineal organs. Deconstructing persons to form a social whole and recycling elements of this whole to produce the person, shell money is an instrument of social reproduction at the same time as it is the symbol of the perpetuity of the clan body.  [shell money, bridewealth, symbolic exchange, Irian Jaya, New Guinea]

The ethnography of transnational social activism: understanding the global as local practice
Hilary Cunningham

Through a study of two contemporary U.S. religio-political movements, I analyze globalization as a process in which social actors appropriate distinctive kinds of global imagery and rhetoric to create new forms of activism. I document and contrast the development of transnational identities among two groups of political activists and examine the  unique but shifting historical conditions underlying these differences. Rather than begin with "globalization" as structural given, I explore the "global" as itself a constructed context of political identity and practice.  I include a discussion of my own discovery that my anthropological terms of analysis were often shared by the second group of political activists under study, and I explore how and why this happened. [globalization, social movements, political economy and culture, global civil society]

Alternative modernities: statecraft and religious imagination in the Valley of the Dawn
James Holston

Many new religions promote the emblems and institutions of modern nation-states.  In this article, I consider an example from Brazil, analyzing the mimetic relations between its modernist capital, Brasília, and a millenarian and ecstatic religion called the Valley of the Dawn located on the city's outskirts. I focus on the project of salvation that each sponsors and on a religious ritual that stages a judicial event associated with the state.  Arguing against compensatory explanations, I suggest that both state and religion are performances, mutually critical, of the same paradigm of modernity.  [Brazil, modernity, millenarian religion, spirit possession, ritual, nation-state, bureaucracy, law]

Playing for control of distance: card games between Jews and Muslims on a Casablancan beach
André Levy

As part of their effort to cope with their future dissolution as a diasporic community (due to a constant demographic decrease), members of the diminished Jewish minority in Morocco try to contain their relations with Muslims within well-defined and controllable sociocultural enclaves.  In this article, I examine one such enclave--a private beach named "Tahiti"--where Jews and Muslims engage through card games. I argue that as non-serious and rigidly patterned behavior, card games offer a protective social frame allowing Jews and Muslims to interact freely.  Moreover the games provide Jews a legitimate opportunity to convey critical messages and to maintain an open dialogue with Muslims without feeling exposed to danger.  These very constrained and controlled enclaves, however, also provide Jews with an opportunity to construct and underline strangeness in a society that has hosted them for two millennia.  This strangeness in turn, fortifies the enclaveés boundaries. [enclave culture, diaspora, religious minority group, demographic decrease, Moroccan Jews, Jewish-Muslim relations, card games]

The crucible of cultural politics: reworking "development" in Zimbabweés eastern highlands
Donald S. Moore

In this article, I examine the cultural politics of development in a Zimbabwean resettlement scheme, situating state interventions in the deep histories of colonial efforts to discipline rural livelihoods. Popular memories of resistance to colonial conservation, shaped by transnational circuits and constitutive of Zimbabwean nationalism, animate the cultural idioms of entitlement and state power in the 1990s. The contingent  micro-politics of agrarian struggle counter a recent tendency toward discursive determinism in anthropological perspectives on development. [development, cultural politics, practice, nationalism, spatiality, governmentality, Southern Africa]

Producing persons and developing institutions in rural Ireland
A. Jamie Saris

IN MEMORY OF JOHN HAMILTON

In this article, I examine a Community Psychiatric Nurse's highly commodified descriptions of the activities and interests of two clients of a mental hospital in rural Ireland. These examples show an intimate relationship between a discourse of economics and a discourse of rationality that can also be discovered in sources connected to the history of Ireland's mental hospital system. Using these and other connections, I argue that the distinctive utilitarian rationality associated with modernity, as well as reactions to it, can be promulgated and maintained at a local level through means other than economic markets. At the same time, I explain how the mental hospital now has a place within a local moral world. These two insights provide a novel perspective on a venerable debate in social scientific work on Ireland (and, by implication, many other peripheral areas of the global economy), that is if, how, and in what respects, the place "modernized."  [asylums, Ireland, rationality, modernization, commodity logic]

Witchcraft, grief, and the ambivalence of emotions
Michele Stephen

In this article, I argue that Melanie Kleinés psychoanalytic theory of mourning can shed new light on an old anthropological topic: witchcraft and sorcery.  Beginning with sociocentric analyses of sorcery and witchcraft, and linking  these beliefs to the experiential context of grief and bereavement, I focus on two ethnographic case studies-Balinese witchcraft and Mekeo sorcery.  I use Kleinés theory of mourning to extend Freudés concept of the ambivalence of emotions in order to show how unresolved childhood fears and images of the destructive mother give rise to persecutory fears at the death of a loved person. From this perspective, several problems left hanging  by sociocentric and structuralist approaches to witchcraft and sorcery can be answered in  new ways. [ambivalence, grief,  Melanie Klein,  mourning, sorcery, witchcraft]
 

Reviews
 

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Peacock

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Healey

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McClaurin

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Hernandez-Castillo

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Islam in an era of Nation-States (Hefner and Horvatich, eds.)
Mahmoud

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China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (Madsen)
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Williams

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L'illlusion mythique (Siran)
Redfield

Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities, and the Gaelic Renaissance (Macdonald)
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Kratz

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Conklin

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Evans

Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders (Austin-Broos)
Glazier

Getting Married in Korea: of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (Kendall)
Werner

Setting Boundaries: The Anthropology of Spatial and Social Organization (Pellow, ed.)
Sutton

Putting Islam to Work: Education, Political, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Starrett)
Launay

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (Keane)
Arno

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Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo (Rosenthal)
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The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities (Alexander)
Amit-Talai

The Struggle for Water: politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (Espeland)
Johnston

The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society (Tuzin)
Gutmann

Beyond Boundaries: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Vol. 5 (Baxter and Krulfeld, eds.)
Cohen

Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Altman and Ginat)
Jacobson

The Cultures of Globalization (Jameson and Miyoshi, eds.)
Stade

Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Aretaxaga)
Vaughan

Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Drama in Northern Ireland (Buckley and Kenny)
Jenkins

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Rabinow)
Helmreich

In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Thomas)
Rodman

Making Doctors: An Institutional Apprenticeship (Sinclair)
Millard

Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis (Kertzer and Fricke, eds.)
Miller

Aging in the Past:  Demography, Society, and an Old Age (Kertzer and Laslett, eds.)
Halpern