Faith and its fulfillment: Agency, exchange, and the Fijian aesthetics of completion
Hirokazu Miyazaki

In this article, I develop a theory of what I call the abeyance of agency, drawing upon a comparison between Fijian Christian church and gift-giving rituals. I argue that from religious practitioners’ viewpoint, religious faith concerns not so much the intentions of an anthropomorphic God as the limits that are temporarily placed on ritual participants’ agency. Such abeyance and subsequent recovery of their agency enables them to experience the intimations of an ultimate response. [agency, form, temporality, gift exchange, Christianity, Fiji]

Skins of desire: Poetry and identity in Koriak women’s gift exchange
Petra Rethmann

Koriak women in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East offer gifts of handworked reindeer fur and leather to entice men to become their sweethearts. Examining two love stories involving reindeer herding Koriak women and men, I explore the meaning of the gift as an embodied metaphor that arouses desire and creates seductive subjectivities. Focusing on sewer’s creativity, I situate my analysis within a wider discussion on aesthetics and gift exchange to explore the poetic dimensions of the gift. In a final outlook, I ask about the significance of fur production and exchange for Koriak identity formation. [gift exchange, aesthetics, poetry, indigeneity, Koriak, Russia]

Primus inter pares: Storytelling and male peer groups in an Indo-Guyanese rumshop
Jack Sidnell

Language is centrally implicated in the semiotic organization of socio-political realities and in the maintenance of both social equality and social differentiation. Conversations in a rural Indo-Guyanese village, during which men collectively reconstruct past events, allow for differential participation in the activity of storytelling. In the sequential organization of interaction, and the actions embedded therein, the participants display to one another a preoccupation with age, rights to knowledge, and social differentiation based on these criteria. [storytelling, social organization, knowledge, age, Guyana]

Mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian intifada
Iris Jean-Klein

Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, I highlight connections between domestic processes and the nascent state. Empowered by the progressive-nationalist movement, ordinary young men and women challenged the moral authority of the domestic patriarch. The new moral subjects were not, however, producing “themselves” individually and reflexively. In the face of paradoxical conditions of self-making precipitated by the organized political struggle, young men with their mothers and sisters became moral persons through a collaborative and reciprocal exercise of self. [statecraft, kinship, political organization, gender, personhood, Middle East]

“The largest population culture movement in the Western world”: Intellectuals and Gaúcho Traditionalism in Brazil
Ruben George Oliven

In this article, I examine the Gaúcho Traditionalist Movement, which, with an active participation of two million people, claims to be the largest population cultural movement of the Western World. Based on the cult of the Gaúcho in a specific cattle ranching area of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil’s southernmost state), the Gaúcho Traditionalist Movement was created by nonacademic intellectuals, generally from the urban middle class. The movement eventually spread to more than two thousand “Centers for Gaúcho Traditions” in all areas of the state, other parts of Brazil, and abroad. I analyze how and why Traditionalism made this three-stage distancing from its original point of reference, becoming a translocal and even transnational phenomenon. I discuss the role of intellectuals’ nostalgia for rural life in creating this form of population culture. I show that traditionalist intellectuals have operated as intermediaries between knowledge produced in academia and population culture movements, actively creating a popular culture that is frequently but mistakenly seen as being the product of the masses. [tradition, popular culture, national and regional identity, transnational movements, intellectuals, Brazil, Gaúcho]

Deadly power: A funeral to counter sorcery in South India
Isabelle Nabokov

In this article, I argue that the regenerative potential of Tamil sorcery and countersorcery in South India inevitably depends on destruction; I demonstrate what ritual specialists’ and sufferers’ perspectives can reveal about relations of power, death, and regeneration. I take issue with Bruce Kapferer’s recent proposition that sorcery is a creative practice through which human beings made and remake their lives. [sorcery, countersorcery, ritual healing, funeral symbolism, South India, Tamil people]