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How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement
EDUARDO KOHN
Under the rubric of an “anthropology of life,” I call for expanding the reach of ethnography beyond the boundaries of the human. Drawing on research among the Upper Amazonian Runa and focusing, for heuristic purposes, on a particular ethnological conundrum concerning how to interpret the dreams dogs have, I examine the relationships, both intimate and fraught, that the Runa have with other lifeforms. Analytical frameworks that fashion their tools from what is unique to humans (language, culture, society, and history) or, alternatively, what humans are commonly supposed to share with animals are inadequate to this task. By contrast, I turn to an embodied and emergentist understanding of semiosis—one that treats sign processes as inherent to life and not just restricted to humans—as well as to an appreciation for Amazonian preoccupations with inhabiting the points of view of nonhuman selves, to move anthropology beyond “the human,” both as analytic and as bounded object of study.
[anthropology of life, human–animal relations, nonhuman selves, Amazonia, semiotics, perspectivism, multinaturalism]

The gift in the animal: The ontology of hunting and human–animal sociality
PAUL NADASDY
Many hunting peoples conceive of hunting as a process of reciprocal exchange between hunters and other-than-human persons, and anthropologists have tended to view such accounts as purely symbolic or metaphorical. To the extent that our theories deny the validity of northern hunters’ conceptions of animals and the ontological assumptions on which they are based, however, we legitimize agents of the state when they dismiss the possibility that aboriginal knowledge and practices might serve as the factual basis for making wildlife management policy. In this article, I argue that our refusal to consider aboriginal accounts of hunting as perhaps literally as well as metaphorically valid has both contributed to the marginalization of aboriginal peoples and foreclosed important avenues of inquiry into hunting societies and the nature of human–animal relations. I focus on human–animal relations as a form of reciprocal exchange and argue that the development of a theoretical framework that can accommodate northern hunters’ ontological assumptions is warranted theoretically as well as politically.
[hunting, human–animal relations, reciprocity, traditional/indigenous knowledge, ontology, radical participation, Subarctic, Yukon]

Intimate immensity: Phenomenology of place and space in an Australian yoga community
ASHA PERSSON
This article is a dialogue between Edward Casey’s theory of place and an ethnographic case study of Satyananda Yoga practice in Australia. At issue is Casey’s claim that embodied being-in-the-world is irrevocably dependent on a sense of place for its own existential coherence and, conversely, that placeless space inspires terror. This claim is partly rendered problematic by the ethnographic material, which details how Satyananda yogis enact a range of meaningful spatial relations through embodied practices to aid the evolution of self. Their emphasis on a consciously mediated balance between “grounding” and “expansion,” or implacement and spaciousness, elucidates the diverse and productive dynamics of embodied configurations of space.
[yoga practice, embodiment, place, space, phenomenology]

The location of Islam: Inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim way
HEIKO HENKEL
In this article, I emphasize the endeavor of religious Muslims to weave Muslim practices and institutions into the heterogeneous lifeworlds of modern society. Pairing a practice–theoretical approach with a phenomenological one, this article shows that an important aspect of “inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim way” is the active perception of this heterogeneous lifeworld, which foregrounds certain of its elements as distinctive. Through these strategies of inhabitation and perception, I suggest, social heterogeneity can be at once recognized and transcended.
[Islam, Istanbul, Turkey, space, phenomenology, practice theory]

Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua
ROSARIO MONTOYA
Drawing on the concept of “scenario,” I examine the ideological construction of an agricultural cooperative in a “model” village in revolutionary Nicaragua (1979–90). I argue that the state’s modernist project of development placed the burden of cooperative members’ transformation into model revolutionaries on individual will rather than on national and global political–economic relations. This resulted in Tuleños’ inability to live up to Sandinista expectations and authorized the production of Sandinista and academic discourses that cast these producers as failed revolutionaries. These discourses helped constitute and naturalize the vanguardist relationship established by the state’s modernist project between the state and the cooperative sector.
[nation-state formation, revolution, modernism, socialism, cooperatives, model villages, mystification]

Discursive constructions of homelessness in a small city in the Canadian prairies: Notes on destructuration, individualization, and the production of (raced and gendered) unmarked categories
CATHERINE KINGFISHER
In this article, I explore the conversations, debates, and constructions that inform and precede actual policy formation regarding homelessness in a small Canadian prairie city. On the basis of analyses of videotapes of public hearings coupled with participant-observation and interviews with decision makers, my discussion focuses on two related phenomena: first, the interactional production, via indexicality and omission, of an unmarked categorization of the homeless person as “male Aboriginal addict”; and, second, the destructuring, individualizing influences of discourses of “diversity.” I conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of both phenomena, with particular emphasis on unintended consequences.
[policy, destructuration, individualization, homelessness, race, gender]

How diasporic religious communities remember: Learning to speak the “tongue of the oricha” in Cuban Santería
KRISTINA WIRTZ
In this article, I probe the relationship between historical consciousness and cultural transmission. In contrast to scholars’ focus on language loss in African-language ritual registers in the Americas, I examine how Cuban Santería’s ritual register, called “Lucumí,” is actively regimented through the ways in which Santería’s practitioners learn, use, and interpret it. I discuss two specific interpretive strategies that santeros use: The “etymological approach” is a focus on studying and recovering fixed “original” Yoruba meanings, whereas the “divining-meaning” approach is a more charismatic, contextual, and performance-based focus on revealing deep and hidden meanings in Lucumí texts.
[ritual language, historical consciousness, language loss, cultural change, interpretive strategies, situated learning, African diaspora]

Dealing with uncertainty: Shamans, marginal capitalism, and the remaking of history in postsocialist Mongolia
MANDUHAI BUYANDELGERIYN
In this article, I explore the proliferation of previously suppressed shamanic practices among ethnic Buryats in Mongolia after the collapse of socialism in 1990. Contrary to the Buryats’ expectation that shamanism would solve the uncertainties brought about by the market economy, it has created additional spiritual uncertainties. As skeptical Buryats repeatedly propitiate their angry origin spirits to alleviate the causes of their misfortunes, they reconstruct their history, which was suppressed by state socialism. The Buryats make their current calamities meaningful by placing them within the shifting history of their tragic past. The sense of uncertainty, fear, and disillusionment experienced by the Buryats also characterizes daily life in places other than Mongolia. This study reflects broader anthropological concerns about the emergence of new cultural spaces and practices in former socialist and preindustrial societies undergoing transitions to market economies.
[shamanism, market, state, postsocialism, uncertainty, Mongolia, Buryats, violence]

Filipina migrants in rural Japan and their professions of love
LIEBA FAIER
During fieldwork in rural Nagano, I regularly heard Filipina migrants assert that they loved their Japanese husbands. Most of these men had been customers the women met while working as “entertainers” at local Filipina hostess bars. Here I explore how, why, and to what ends these women emphasized their love for their husbands as they crafted lives and selves in both Japan and the Philippines. Taking a transnational perspective to feminist work on emotion, I explore how love is made meaningful through global processes and the roles it plays in migrants’ efforts to craft new gendered and sexualized subjectivities.
[migration, sentiment, gender and sexuality, labor, marriage, rural Japan, Philippines]

On moving children: The social implications of Andean child circulation
JESSACA B. LEINAWEAVER
In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such “child circulations” produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family-making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru’s globalized adoption system, which implicitly denaturalizes the parenting of poor, indigenous Peruvians.
[Peru, Andes, adoption, kinship, family, fosterage, childhood]

Extra embryos: The ethics of cryopreservation in Ecuador and elsewhere
ELIZABETH F. S. ROBERTS
Through ethnographic comparison with Ecuador, I localize North American and European ethical debates about embryos. In Ecuador, some in vitro fertilization (IVF) practitioners and patients do whatever they can to preserve the life of embryos through donation or cryopreservation. For this group, embryos are embroiled in debates about life, as they commonly are in North America. However, other Ecuadorians do not view embryos through debates about life. Instead, these IVF practitioners and patients let embryos die rather than freeze them, to regulate the legitimate bounds of kin relations. These contrasting models of life ethics and kin ethics illuminate ideologies of religion, kinship, and personhood in Ecuador. In addition, this comparison demonstrates that the location of embryos in a framework of kinship prevents their circulation and exchange, whereas the North American and European debates about the human life of embryos allow for their continued circulation in the globalized reproductive marketplace.
[biotechnology, life, ethics, kinship, personhood, comparison, Latin America, North America]