Front and back cover caption: NANO-PURITY AND CLEANLINESS
This advertisement by a Swedish company specializing in technologically advanced workwear, including cleanroom clothing, illustrates Mikael Johansson’s article on the anthropology of nanotechnology in this issue (pp. 3-6). Juxtaposing modern scientific ideas about purity and cleanliness with the religious, the advertisement suggests that although nuns and nano-scientists wear similar clothing, their concerns are very different: while nuns may aspire to moral purity in their renunciatory vocation, to modern science they and their clothing are as polluting to the laboratory environment as all other animate beings. Mother Sabrina exchanges her nun’s habit for scientifically engineered clothing and thus reduces particle emissions into the environment. Clothing as a symbol of moral purity is contrasted with that produced for the practical purpose of reducing environmental pollution in the workplace.
The heart of nanotechnology research is the cleanroom where experimentation takes place. In the minute context of the nanometer scale, a single microscopic dust particle is gigantic, posing enormous risks to experiments. By far the most contaminating presence in a cleanroom are humans, who drop about 10,000 skin particles per minute, each 3,000-5,000 nanometres across. Humans must cover their bodies in protective clothing, not to protect themselves from experiments, but to protect experiments from their own dirt. In such an environment human behaviour needs to be strictly controlled, including regulating food and drink intake and body movement. According to one cleanroom manual, people who tend to be nervous, bad-tempered or resistant to authority should not work in a cleanroom as they are more likely to contaminate the area. Cleanrooms are specially engineered to withstand vibration generated by outside sources such as cars and inside sources such as machines. Visible light with a bandwidth of 400-800 nm needs to be strictly controlled with light filters as this can ruin experiments.
The heavily regulated nano-lab is clearly distinct from the cloister, but they are not without similarities and interesting inversions. Both deal with worlds invisible to the naked eye and are in one way or another deeply concerned with purity and regulating human behaviour. If the mysteries of the universe and ontological truths used to be the province of theologians and priests, natural scientists today see their vocation as revealing and acting as custodians of fundamental truth.

Keith Hart 1
British social anthropology’s nationalist project

Mikael Johansson 3
‘Plenty of room at the bottom’: Towards an anthropology of nanoscience

Kwok Shing Chan 7
Hillside burials: Indigenous rights in the New Territories of Hong Kong

Jonathan Benthall 10
The greening of Islam?

Sean Kingston 13
Anthropology and the British Museum: A conversation with John Mack

Obituary
Suzette Heald 18
The legacy of Isaac Schapera (1905-2003)

Comment
Steven Hooper 20
Cannibals talk
Dirk H.R. Spennemann 20
Bones of contention
Marshall Sahlins 21
Artificially maintained controversies (Part 2)

Conferences
Roy Willis 24
ASA 2003: Communitas enters the academy
Catherine Nash 24
ASA 2003: Anthropologists on drugs, and other products of science
Nancy Lindisfarne 25
Challenging the experts
Marija Djolai 26
Anthropology and change in higher education

Letters 27
Pat Caplan on Uniting UK anthropology
Raymond Corbey on van Gennep

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October 2003 – vol 19 – no 5

Front and back cover caption: The minutes of the first meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA), held in Oxford on 23 July 1946.
In this issue (pp. 8-13), David Mills delves into the discipline’s archives to recount the history of the relationship between the ASA and Royal Anthropological Institute, and provocatively asks what the future holds for anthropology’s professional associations.
As UK universities increasingly mutate into commercially-driven ‘multiversities’, and students are encouraged to think like consumers, are scholarly associations still relevant and will they continue to play an important role? Should they become mass market-oriented public relations agencies, dedicated to disciplinary profile-raising, or should their priority be to steward the profession and its scholarly specialisms within a fast-changing academy? How many associations does a ‘small’ discipline really need, and can they represent an increasingly diverse international constituency of students, academics and practitioners effectively?
The work of such associations has often depended on a spirit of disciplinary public service by scholars, but there is a pressure to professionalise membership services, administration and fund-raising. The author argues that learned societies need to redefine and reassert their role as senior university managers prove increasingly willing – in the name of institution-building – to abrogate academic agendas.
In a world where more and more research is driven by private grants and donations with limited outcomes, scholarly societies are more than ever called upon to uphold the ideals of independent and value-free scholarship. In recent years, several major scandals have put pressure on learned societies to develop clearer standards concerning consultancy and ethics.
Also in this issue, Adrian Peace (pp. 1-2) describes unfavourable media publicity for the discipline in Australia following the Hindmarsh affair . This is a difficult issue, given the nature of the discipline, the diverse activities in which anthropologists engage and the functioning of national political agendas and the media.
However, should the discipline be brought into disrepute, consequences can be serious. Are scholarly societies as presently structured in Britain adequately equipped to engage the entire profession in debating these and other issues? Are they sufficiently responsive to issues of concern to their membership? What changes, if any, do we need to equip the profession to face what looks like an uncertain future?
In 2001 RAI Director Hilary Callan initiated a comprehensive strategic review of RAI activities, services, structure and resources in consultation with Council. Recommendations are to be published soon in the form of a Strategic Plan for consolidation and development over the coming years.

Adrian Peace 1
Hindmarsh Island and the politics of anthropology

Anthony Good 3
Anthropologists as experts: Asylum appeals in British courts

David Mills 8
Professionalizing or popularizing anthropology? A brief history of anthropology’s scholarly associations in the UK

Alberto Corsín Jiménez 14
Working out personhood: Notes on ‘labour’ and its anthropology
comment

COMMENTS

Gananath Obeyesekere, W. Arens 18
Cannibalism reconsidered: Responses to Marshall Sahlins (AT 19,3)

Fiona Magowan 19
The aesthetics of breeding: A response to Rebecca Cassidy (AT 19,3)

Andrew K.T. Yip 19
Reflections on Islam and homosexuality: A response to Wim Lunsing (AT19,2)

Natalia Shunmugan 20
Human remains: A response to Josie Appleton (AT19,3)

EXHIBITIONS
George Lau 21
Imperial strategies: Consuming Aztecs and unveiling Machu Picchu

CONFERENCES
Simon Coleman 24
Of margins and marbles: On the margins of religion

LETTERS
Peter Rivière 24
Whatever happened to Van Gennep?

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August 2003 – vol 19 – no 4

Front cover caption [illustrating Tom Rice's article on pp 4-9]: This drawing, of which a detail is reproduced on the front cover, is illustrator Miriam Navarro's response to the article 'Soundselves' by Tom Rice. The article explores the ways in which hospital patients are affected by the sounds which surround them. Far from being simply irritating by-products of the activities taking place within the hospital, sounds carry important meanings for those patients who are compelled to listen, and whose daily lives are therefore filled with noise. The exploration of soundscapes provides an interesting challenge for anthropologists, given the highly visual nature of the discipline’s conceptual and theoretical imagination. Yet an anthropology of the senses, which understands the sense of hearing to be an important mediator of culturally inscribed values, is well-placed to explore the deep sense of auditory experience. The article therefore plays on a potentially productive tension between a visualizing discipline and a listening ethnographic subject. Navarro's illustration highlights the disorientation and isolation which auditory experience holds for some within the hospital environment. The soundscape often generates disturbing or even frightening thoughts and experiences.

Back cover caption: Civil rights, art and anthropology. Bars and String-Pieced Columns quilt made by Jessie T. Pettway of Gees Bend, Alabama, in the 1950s. Together with Annie Mae Young’s Work-Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion of Strips (1976), this quilt features centrally in the exhibition The Quilts of Gees Bend, Alabama, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (November 2002-March 2003) and now touring the United States until 2005. The women of Gees Bend, descendants of former slaves who worked for generations on the Pettway and the Gees Brothers’ cotton plantations, made quilts to remember the dead, to ward off the cold, to entertain children, and to generate a small cash income.
The civil rights movement reached Gees Bend in the mid-1960s, when Martin Luther King preached at the local Baptist church. The Bend opened its doors to an influx of young ‘freedom workers’, and Gees Bend ladies began to quilt for justice through a peoples’ co-operative called the Freedom Quilting Bee. When King was assassinated Gees Benders provided the mule that pulled his coffin to its resting place. Eugene Witherspoon presented King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, with a king-sized ‘Double Star’ quilt as a gift from the Freedom Quilting Bee.
In this issue Nancy Scheper-Hughes recalls her years as a civil rights worker in Gees Bend, her enchantment with these quilts and her failed attempts to market them for $30 each in Boston and New England, only to see them become priceless works of art some 30 years later.
Jessie T. Pettway is amazed that her old quilt, made in the traditional way from her family’s discarded clothes, ripped carefully by hand and then re-sewn into a pattern that ‘volunteered’ itself, appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. A ‘Southern white gentleman’ named William Arnett approached Ms Pettway (and dozens of her neighbours) in 1998 and purchased most of the remaining quilts in Gees Bend. Jessie, aware that some journalists feel that she was duped and exploited, responds: ‘I was just going along thinking that these quilts wasn’t nothing… I was surprised [they] paid us as much as they did for my old quilts… I have got respect now for my work… To be paid so much for them and to see them be in museums and in magazines and newspapers makes me feel real good… The museum and the books [museum catalogues] have upgraded us. We are all so proud… We were celebrated! I told my own story about my own self… These quilts, they brought us from a mighty long way. And I hope we have a longer way to go…’.

Jacqueline Urla 1
Euskara: The ‘terror’ of a European minority language

Tom Rice 4
Soundselves: An acoustemology of sound and self in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

Raymond Corbey 10
Destroying the graven image: Religious iconoclasm on the Christian frontier

Nancy Scheper-Hughes 15
Anatomy of a quilt: The Gees’ Bend Freedom Quilting Bee

NARRATIVE
Gerald Mars 22
The CIA and the KGB: Paranoia is a two-way mirror

COMMENT
David Z. Scheffel 24
Natives as dialogic partners: A response to Takami Kuwuyama (AT 19,1)

Paul-F. Tremlett 24
The problem of belief: A response to Matthew Engelke (AT 18,6)

CONFERENCES
Nazalie Iqbal 24
Pakistan Workshop 2003

Jonathan Skinner 25
Essential anthropology?

OBITUARY 26
Jean La Fontaine
I. Schapera (1905-2003) and R. Firth (1901-2002): The end of a generation
Colin Creighton and Michael Hitchcock
Peter Glover Forster (1944-2003)

EXHIBITIONS 27
Gustaaf Houtman and Sean Kingston
The museum of the mind: Art and memory in world cultures

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June 2003 – vol 19 – no 3

Front cover caption [illustrating Steven Hooper's article on pp 6-8]: Detail from ‘View of Owyhee, one of the Sandwich Islands in the South Seas, With the Death of Captain Cook’, aquatint, hand finished in colour, by Francis Jukes after John Cleveley, July 1788. (National Maritime Museum, PAH 7776; reproduced with permission). John Cleveley’s depiction is reputedly based on an original drawing by his brother James, who was present at the scene of Cook’s death, though whether he saw precisely what happened is uncertain. This version bears similarities with that of John Webber, official artist on the Third Voyage, who was not present at Cook’s death and did not depict it until c. 1781-83 (see Joppien & Smith 1988 for discussion). No reliable pictorial representation of Cook’s death exists, only history paintings based on accounts and hearsay of what was no doubt a chaotic and traumatic event.

Back cover caption: Violence and war. How do human beings perpetrate, cope with and interpret violence? This is a major issue for humanity, and therefore for anthropology. In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY we present a number of approaches to the implications of violence in a wide range of contexts, past and present. This photo shows NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson visiting a multi-ethnic school in Sarajevo together with Lt. Gen. William E. Ward, Commander of the Stabilization Force in Bosnia, on 10 April 2003. The photo illustrates the editorial by Gregory Feldman (pp. 1-2), who argues that NATO constitutes a fitting object for anthropological analysis as it continues to enlarge into Eastern Europe in tandem with the European Union.
Murray Wax and Hugh Gusterson make the ethical case for and against anthropologists cooperating with national security agencies in their home states. Danny Hoffman proposes a ‘frontline anthropology’, an anthropology of combat zones which could challenge the inadequacies of ‘embedded’ journalism. Marshall Sahlins considers how anthropologists sometimes prefer to reinterpret and sanitize violent past practices, such as cannibalism, in favour of present sensibilities, overlooking the facts of ethnographic history. Steven Hooper examines how and why weapons that might have been involved in killing Captain Cook have become 'relics' fetching high prices at auction. Rebecca Cassidy looks at Arab dimensions to the pedigree of British thoroughbred racehorses, formidable war instruments of the past originally appropriated from the Middle East. These noble animals retain their combative qualities in sporting competition, while at the same time sustaining local elitist political values of purity through inbreeding. The review by Carlos Londoño provides a counterpoint, noting how the many varieties of Powwow ritual practised today are marked by hybridity and openness.
David Mills charts the fluctuating fate of anthropology in British universities, through a statistical history. Like multi-ethnic schools, anthropology has its role to play in helping to push societies away from war into more creative and less destructive forms of engagement. We hope this issue highlights the continued relevance of anthropology to a new generation of students.

Gregory Feldman 1
Breaking our silence on NATO

Marshall Sahlins 3
Artificially maintained controversies: Global warming and Fijian cannibalism

Steven Hooper 6
Making a killing?: Of sticks and stones and James Cook's ‘bones’

Danny Hoffman 9
Frontline anthropology: Research in a time of war

Rebecca Cassidy 13
Turf wars: Arab dimensions to British racehorse breeding

David Mills 19
Quantifying the discipline: Some anthropology statistics from the UK

COMMENT
Defending the nation? Ethics and anthropology after 9/11
Murray Wax 23
Wartime dilemmas of an ethical anthropology
Hugh Gusterson 25
Anthropology and the military – 1968, 2003 and beyond?

CONFERENCES
Carlos David Londoño Sulkin 27
Powwow diversified: Performance and nationhood in Native North America
Josie Appleton 28
UK to restitute human remains?

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April 2003 – vol 19 – no 2

Front cover caption: The front cover illustrates the article by Graeme Were and Susanne Küchler (see pp. 3-6) on cloth and clothing in the Pacific. This photograph of a white woman wearing a barkcloth poncho appeared in Beatrice Grimshaw's In the strange South Seas (London: Hutchinson, 1907). Prior to conversion to Christianity, ponchos were made in Tahiti but not in the western Pacific; they were introduced to Samoa and then Niue by Tahitian teachers who led the efforts of the London Missionary Society, so that converts could mark themselves through this adoption of upper-body clothing. The form of the Tahitian garment was preserved, but the freehand painting of botanical motifs was distinctively Niuean. When this photograph was taken, barkcloth making had been abandoned on Niue for at least a decade (Photo supplied by Nicholas Thomas).

Back cover caption: Colonialism and ethnography. Belkadi ben Namou, Arab interpreter (deira) and guide to the Hilton-Simpson party visiting Algeria, c. 1914. Decorated by the French authorities, he was assigned to official visitors by the colonial government.
This photo illustrates Pierre Bourdieu’s Foreword to Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Paris/The Hague: Mouton, 1963), here translated under the title of ‘Colonialism and ethnography’ (pp. 13-18), and introduced by Derek Robbins on pp. 11-12 of this issue.
Following his studies and a short period teaching, Bourdieu was conscripted to serve in the French army in Algeria in 1956. Deeply uneasy about the Algerian War of Independence, by the end of 1958 he had written Sociologie de l'Algérie, in which he sought to re-present the culture and social organization of indigenous Algerian tribes and encourage informed debate about the war in mainland France. He sought to transform a ‘clash of civilizations’ into an opportunity for inter-cultural dialogue. He then proceeded to carry out sociological research in Algeria with the assistance of research teams which mirrored the cultural diversity of the colonial society. He later described this as a ‘maieutic’ process – one of enabling the birth of a self-determined independent state.
As a citizen of a colonizing state, Bourdieu was acutely aware of manifestations of both real and conceptual domination. Although unavoidably a representative of colonial power, he did not believe this was automatically morally incriminating. He believed he could exercise moral responsibility by objectively representing the cultural encounters within which he was situated, enabling participating social agents to construct social solutions.
Today many anthropologists suggest that what is represented as a ‘clash of civilizations’ is globally in need of reconceptualization through the construction of a discourse of inter-cultural dialogue not subservient to military and political discourse. Bourdieu's text of 40 years ago still points to a way in which international understanding may develop by undertaking rigorously reflexive anthropological research rather than by analytically imposing the models of Western, positivist, sciences of society.

Jonathan Skinner 1
The British Dependent (Orphan) Territories

Susanne Küchler & Graeme Were 3
Clothing and innovation: A Pacific perspective

Björn Lindgren 6
The green bombers of Salisbury: Elections and political violence in Zimbabwe

Derek Robbins 11
The responsibility of the ethnographer: An introduction to Pierre Bourdieu on ‘Colonialism and ethnography’

Pierre bourdieu 13
Translation by Derek Robbins & Rachel Gomme
Colonialism and ethnography: Foreword to Pierre Bourdieu’s Travail et travailleurs en Algérie

NARRATIVE 19
Wim Lunsing
Islam versus homosexuality? Some reflections on the assassination of Pim Fortuyn

COMMENT 22
Ruth Finnegan on Anonymity and pseudonyms
Edith Turner on Anthropology, fieldwork and belief
Tim Ingold & Felicia Hughes-Freeland on Anthropology in the UK

FILM 24
Michal Buchowski on Romania, the Balkans and beyond

CONFERENCES 25
Sarah Worden
The cultured body: African fashion and body arts
Anna Streissler
Violence: Practices and ideologies
Sian Lazar
Teaching Rites of Passage

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February 2003 – vol 19 – no 1

Front cover caption: The front cover illustrates the article by Mikael Kurkiala (see pp. 6-7) on Fadime Sahindal, murdered by her father after she fell in love with a man not chosen for her by her relatives. In response to violent assaults by members of her family, she initiated court proceedings against her father and brother and turned to the media to make her predicament public. At a seminar in the Swedish Parliament in November 2001, just months before her death, Fadime said: 'One day I met Patrik, a Swedish boy, and we fell in love. All of a sudden I was transformed from a nice Kurdish girl into a loose whore. Today... I feel strong and stable, but it's been a long process to get to this point. I have been forced to forsake my background and to build a new identity. I have had to leave my family.' Thousands attended the memorial service for Fadime, including many public figures. When she was buried on 4 February 2002, her friends carried this portrait to her grave, sited opposite that of Patrik who had died before her. The drizzling rain repainted her image and turned it into an icon.

Back cover caption: Anonymity in anthropology. This is Akua Mansaa, an elder in the town of Kwahu-Tafo, Ghana, preparing the husks of corn cobs for wrapping kenkey, a local food. Akua Mansaa and Kwahu-Tafo are real names, recorded and published in Sjaak van der Geest’s research on this rural community. But often we use pseudonyms to conceal the identity of informants and ‘maintain their confidentiality’, as professional codes stipulate. Are we right to do this? Should anthropologists reveal or hide the names of the people they work with and places they work in? How ethnocentric are our assumptions and whose interests are we protecting? And how might this relate to the low public profile of anthropology? In this issue of Anthropology Today several articles touch on this matter.
Sjaak van der Geest writes about his early research in Ghana, in which he carefully protected his informants' identity and gave pseudonyms to everything and everybody, including himself. Returning after many years to study the lives of older people in the same place, he realized that concealing the identity of informants could lead to disappointment. They liked the idea that their full name and portrait would be published: they wanted to be remembered. They, and he himself, now regret use of pseudonyms. Takami Kuwayama also argues for greater openness and generosity with informants and local scholars, by positively identifying them as ‘dialogic partners’.
Mikael Kurkiala’s account of the case of Fadime Sahindal, however, reveals how nationwide mass media attention in Sweden could not protect this young woman against her family’s codes when she was murdered in an ‘honour killing’. Paul Sillitoe and Thomas Hylland Eriksen address the anonymity of anthropology in the public domain, and our struggle to communicate substantive findings in the media and to raise the profile of the discipline among potential students.
Confidentiality in anthropology is more complex than rules and codes suggest. The consequences of naming vary depending on context, but we must evidently weigh up the costs and benefits of anonymity, both for our informants and for ourselves and our discipline.
Photo: Sjaak van der Geest

Paul Sillitoe 1
Time to be professional?

Thomas Hylland Eriksen 3
The young rebel and the dusty professor: A tale of anthropologists and the media in Norway

Mikael Kurkiala 6
Interpreting honour killings: The story of Fadime Sahindal (1975-2002) in the Swedish press

Takami Kuwayama 8
'Natives' as dialogic partners: Some thoughts on native anthropology

Sjaak van der Geest 14
Confidentiality and pseudonyms: A fieldwork dilemma from Ghana

COMMENT 19
Kay Milton on Human-animal relations

OBITUARY 20
Michael Hitchcock on K.W. Nicklin

CONFERENCES 21
Mark Allen Peterson
Context and content in New Orleans: AAA 2002
Mette Louise Berg
A supermarket of anthropology: AAA 2002
Justin Kenrick
A forest of papers: CHAGS 9
Anouska Komlosy
International Workshop on Multiethnic Asia

LETTERS 24
P-J Ezeh on African anthropology
David Walsh on Firth and Polynesian languages
Murray L. Wax on Rosalie H. Wax
Michael Hitchcock on RAI patronage
Ragnar Johnson, Hilary Callan on UK anthropology statistics revisited

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