Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Andrew Brandel ◽  
Swayam Bagaria
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
The Dead ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Published Account

Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma, Trobriander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary experience of social life.

Gift-exchange as a Means of ‘Handling Diversity’

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 565-583
Author(s):  
Wim De Winter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Perceptions And Attitudes ◽  
Intercultural Interactions ◽  
Constitutive Element

Historical intercultural interactions between Europeans and Japanese during the seventeenth century were characterised by a diversity of perceptions and attitudes within a dynamic yet stable continuum of relationships, in which people reached a certain degree of understanding in a daily context. This relational stability was fundamentally created through evolving cycles of gift-behaviour, which occurred on distinct social levels. Surpassing mere tribute, this proved to be a constitutive element of daily social life. Research based on early seventeenth century European travellers’ accounts, letters and journals, compared with a famous case from the end of that century, emphasises that this behaviour changed in some ways and persisted in others. Originally developing in a considerably spontaneous and dynamic manner, this tendency became more institutionalised and ritualised in later times, when a fixed protocol for dealing with diversity was established. This phenomenon can be analysed through anthropological theory, and should be compared to different historical contexts in a diachronic sense, in order to fully understand both the theoretical implications and particularities of this context. This includes a methodologically critical perspective as well as a reflection on how historians handle diversity.

scholarly journals The Social Life of the Dead and the Leisured Life of the Living Online

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Kohn ◽  
Michael Arnold ◽  
Martin Gibbs ◽  
James Meese ◽  
Bjorn Nansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Dead

scholarly journals The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 127-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Meyer ◽  
Kate Woodthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Social ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Dead

This is an exploratory paper that aims to stimulate a dialogue between those interested in two particular spaces in society: the museum and the cemetery. Using empirical evidence from two research projects, the paper considers similarities and differences between the two sites, which are further explored through theoretical ideas about the social life of things and the agency of absence. Examining the materiality of these spaces, the paper addresses the role of objects in these two spaces and their respective associations with death, either through the dead themselves or the representation of those who have once lived. In particular, it explores the ‘presence of absence’ through three key points: its spatiality, its materiality, and its agency. Museums and cemeteries are, in this sense, directly comparable, as both spaces are shaped by and built upon the practice of making the absent present. Called ‘heterotopic’ by Foucault (1986) in that they are layered with multiple meanings, this paper will also argue for an understanding of museums and cemeteries as being able to transcend absence. Underpinning this is the belief that there remains much scope for future connections to be made between these two sites, theoretically, politically and practically.

The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory.

Social Forces ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 397
Author(s):  
John Gulick ◽  
Robert F. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Anthropological Theory

The Phusis of Neoptolemus in Sophocles' Philoctetes

1988 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Whitlock Blundel
Keyword(s):  
Dramatic Action ◽  
The Dead ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Father And Son

In the opening lines of Philoctetes, Odysseus addresses his companion Neoptolemus as his famous father's son (3f.). This is the first indication of an important theme: phusis, in the sense of inherited human qualities or capacities. Although Achilles has died before the dramatic action begins, he hovers in the background of the play, and no one challenges his claim to the highest admiration. Neoptolemus is closely associated with his father, and is repeatedly addressed or referred to as his father's son. In one particularly striking passage of his deception speech he describes to Philoctetes his own reception at Troy, where the welcoming army swore that they saw the dead Achilles alive once more (356–8). These lines conjure up a vivid physical likeness between father and son, but it remains to be seen how deep the resemblance really lies. Neoptolemus has the potential, in virtue of his inherited phusis, to be as admirable as Achilles.3 But two questions remain to be answered in the course of the play: Will he prove to be his father's son in character as well as birth? If so, how will this excellence be manifested?

scholarly journals Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staffan Appelgren ◽  
Anna Bohlin
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
Global North ◽  
Commercial Value ◽  
Flea Markets

From having been associated with poverty and low status, the commerce with second-hand goods in retro shops, flea markets, vintage boutiques and trade via Internet is expanding in Sweden as in many countries in the Global North. This article argues that a significant aspect of the recent interest in second-hand and reuse concerns the meaning fulness of circulation in social life. Using classic anthropological theory on how the circulation of material culture generates sociality, it focuses on how second-hand things are transformed by their circulation. Rather than merely having cultural biographies, second-hand things are reconfigured through their shifts between different social contexts in a process that here is understood as a form of growing. Similar to that of an organism, this growth is continuous, irreversible and dependent on forces both internal and external to it. What emerges is a category of things that combine elements of both commodities and gifts, as these have been theorized within anthropology. While first cycle commodities are purified of their sociality, the hybrid second-hand thing derives its ontological status as well as social and commercial value precisely from retaining ‘gift qualities’, produced by its circulation.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Economic Deprivation ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Dead

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus. This book explores what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political ruptures, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. It focuses on how various postsocialist and postwar materialities and fabrics of social life are understood and infused with Islam, and vice versa. It does so in three ways. First, it challenges the reductive analyses of Islam and Muslim lives in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina as being solely matter of ethnonational struggles and politics. Instead, the introduction develops the interlocked conceptual frames of “everyday historical work” and “vital exchange” to ethnographically elucidate how living a Muslim life in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina is ordered and inscribed by deep relations of obligation and care with the living, the dead, and the divine over a long period of time that spans generations. Finally, it provides an overview of the author's fieldwork as well as of the chapters that follow.

Hume’s Universalism: The Science of Man and the Anthropological Point of View

2018 ◽  
pp. 208-225
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Life Function

Though it is not his sole motivation, central to Hume’s overall philosophy is his intention to undermine the credibility of superstitious, super-natural accounts of what makes humans and their social life function. The argument of this paper is that attempts to downplay Hume’s universalism and, in virtue of his recognition of diversity, to identify him as subscribing to some form of historicism or relativism, are mistaken or at best fail to apprehend the centrality of his assault on unscientific accounts of human nature.

An Irish heretic bishop: Robert Clayton of Clogher

1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
A. R. Winnett
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Great Change ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead

In 1735 a great change took place in Cork society. Hitherto, wrote John Boyle, fifth earl of Cork and Orrery, ‘we trembled at a bumper and loath’d the Glorious Memory. We were as silent and melancholy as captives and we were strangers to mirth’. But now, he went on, ‘we sing catches, read Pastor Fido and talk love.’ The change was due to the death of Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross, and the advent of his successor, Robert Clayton. Browne, according to Harris, was ‘an austere, retired and mortified man’, but Clayton was a man of the world and given to social life. Browne had written treatises against drinking in memory of the dead (his inclusion of the toast to the memory of king William in his condemnation led to his being regarded by some as a Jacobite) and against the drinking of healths: the former was a blasphemous profanation of the Lord’s Supper, and the latter a pagan custom and a cause of intemperance. Under the more relaxed rule of Clayton glasses could be raised unaccompanied by troubled consciences.

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