The front cover shows a cliff-jump into the sea at the Devil’s Frying-Pan, a cove near the southernmost tip of Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula, a favourite cliff-jumping spot in the area.

The back cover shows a 43 -meter high bungee jump from Kawarau Bridge, near Queenstown, New Zealand. Proclaimed as ‘the world’s first commercial bungy jump site’ this image was taken from one of the marketing brochures of an international commercial bungee jump company.

This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY focuses on hazardous sport. Risk is inherent to all life, and societies all over the world develop technologies, institutions and practices to mitigate risk at both collective and individual levels. Perhaps because collective management of risk is so pervasive in modern society, in the West we also tend to seek risk out to gain personal experience of handling it. In recent years, hazardous sports have become a growth industry, especially among the young. These sports provide an opportunity to handle and confront risk personally in natural and urban environments.

In this issue, Patrick Laviolette draws attention to the association between hazardous sports and subcultures, and how practitioners’ use of the environment can bring them into confrontation with the authorities.

Allen Abramson and Robert Fletcher focus on how the swift and small-scale ‘eco-play’ of rock-climbing is pitched against the much larger enterprise of dominating landscapes through mountain-climbing.

Tim Dant and Belinda Wheaton argue that what is exciting about windsurfing is not simply the type of embodied skill needed, which is so different from dinghy sailing or yachting, but how the sailor engages with a subculture oriented to creative physical self-actualization.

Carl Cater and Paul Cloke examine how a range of sports perceived as being hazardous is bundled into adventure tourism for popular consumption.

CONTENTS

Patrick Laviolette 1
Hazardous sport?
Allen Abramson & Robert Fletcher 3
Recreating the vertical: Rock-climbing as epic and deep eco-play
Tim Dant & Belinda Wheaton 8
Windsurfing: An extreme form of material and embodied interaction?
Carl Cater & Paul Cloke 13
Bodies in action: The performativity of adventure tourism
Chris Hann 17
Reconciling anthropologies: Reflections on an unremarked centenary

COMMENT
David Price 20
Anthropology as lamppost? A comment on the Counterinsurgency Field Manual
Roberto J. González 21
Phoenix reborn?: The rise of the ‘Human Terrain System’

LETTERS
Jacqueline Solway 22
San victory: In response to Stephen Corry AT 23,5:5

NARRATIVE
Els van Dongen 23
Anthropology on beds: The bed as the field of research

CONFERENCES
Carlos Y. Flores and Udi Mandel Butler 27
Beyond text?

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October – vol 23 – no 5

Front cover caption: The front cover illustrates Julie J. Taylor's article on the outcome of the San people's court case against the Botswana government. The photo shows Roy Sesana, leader of the San organization First People of the Kalahari and chief appellant in the case, with Gordon Bennett, the San group’s lawyer, at the start of the case in July 2004. In the course of the last century, the San or Bushmen of southern Africa became possibly the most studied indigenous group in the world. In addition to suffering land dispossession and violence during the colonial period, their image in the West has long been that of exotic and innocent ‘Other’, fuelled over time by the work of scientists, anthropologists and filmmakers among others. In recent years the San have become part of wider debates about indigeneity, poverty and development, often in relation to land rights. Many San have formed their own representative institutions and have also entered into relationships with national and international NGOs to campaign for their rights as an indigenous minority. From 2004, San claims to land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana drew unprecedented attention in the international media, due in part to the efforts of local NGOs and the British-based advocacy group Survival International. After protracted court proceedings and much controversy, the case finally came to an end in late 2006. At first sight the outcome appeared to offer victory to San applicants, but matters in the Central Kalahari are far from resolved, raising questions about the role of advocacy groups and the fate of marginalized San groups elsewhere.

Back cover caption: (IM)PERSONAL MONEY. Roboti of Giribwa Village, Trobriand Islands (above) is seen wearing the armshell Nanoula and the necklace Kasanai. Both have been circulating in the kula for at least a century and were already famous when Malinowski saw them. He was sure that these valuables were not money because they were not an impersonal medium of exchange, but Marcel Mauss, in a long footnote to The gift, wrote: ‘On this reasoning there has only been money when precious things have been really made into currency – namely have been inscribed and impersonalised, and detached from any relationship with any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state that mints them... One only defines in this way a second type of money – our own.’

This exchange was in some ways the high point of economic anthropology. The world of national currencies issued and controlled by states and banks must now come to terms with innumerable virtual instruments such as those seen flashing on the screens of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (below). But, as the current ‘sub-prime mortgage’ crisis shows, these anonymous money instruments are still closely linked to personal credit. The challenge facing anthropologists today is to renew the legacy of Mauss and Malinowski in ways that illuminate such matters of universal practical concern.

In this issue, Keith Hart argues that money, like society itself, is and always has been both personal and impersonal. A pragmatic anthropology should aim to show that the numbers on people’s financial statements constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time. The next step is to explain how these numbers might serve in building a viable personal economy. When we are able to take responsibility for our own economic actions, we will understand better the social forces impinging on our lives. Then it will become more obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes.

CONTENTS

Ulf Hannerz 1
The neo-liberal culture complex and universities: A case for urgent anthropology?
Julie J. Taylor 3
Celebrating San victory too soon? Reflections on the outcome of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve case
Magnus Fiskesjö 6
The trouble with world culture: Recent museum developments in Sweden
Keith Hart 12
Money is always personal and impersonal
David H. Price 17
Buying a piece of anthropology, Part Two: The CIA and our tortured past

COMMENT
Roberto J. González 23
Patai and Abu Ghraib
Vernon Reynolds 23
Evolutionary biology and human culture: A comment on Ingold (AT 23[2])
Martin A. Mills 24
Roaring mice: A comment on Ingold and Mesoudi, Whiten and Laland (AT 23[2])

OBITUARY
Richard Fardon 25
Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007)
Guillaume Iyenda 26
Speech of the Lele people at the funeral service for Professor Dame Mary Douglas
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August – vol 23 – no 4

Front cover caption: COMMEMORATING THE ‘POLISH POPE’. The cover of this issue illustrates Ewa Klekot’s article about how Pope John Paul II (Karol Jósef Wojtyla, 1920-2005) was popularly commemorated in Poland during the ‘Week of Vigil’, 1-8 April 2005. One of the longest-serving pontiffs of modern times, and the only non-Italian to have been elected since the Dutch Adrian VI in the 1520s, Pope John Paul II died on 2 April and was buried on 8 April in the grottoes under St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Tomb of the Popes. During this week unprecedented expressions of grief and mourning were displayed in Polish cities. Whole streets and squares were converted into temporary shrines, decorated with burning candles, flowers, papal portraits, letters to the departed Pope and both papal and Polish flags.

The front cover shows a mother and daughter paying homage by lighting and placing candles along John Paul II Avenue, one of the biggest streets in central west Warsaw. The back cover shows a spontaneous memorial in the form of a large cross in Pilsudski Square, Warsaw, where John Paul II had celebrated mass during his first visit to Poland in 1979, the year after he was elected Pope. The memorial incorporates lanterns, flower offerings and a commemoration board made by primary school children.

In constructing unofficial, vernacular and temporary commemorative sites from candles and flowers, Polish citizens re-enacted both the rituals of All Saints Day and the tradition of arranging flowers and candles in public places. The latter is, in the Polish context, more than an expression of grief provoked by deaths of important Polish personalities: it is also historically a way of expressing popularly shared feelings and values, and of asserting a degree of autonomy from the government of the day.

Until 1990, Pope John Paul II symbolized powerful nationalist-Catholic sentiments that had helped Polish citizens stand up to communism. However, the slogan ‘I didn’t mourn the pope’ which appeared on T-shirts made by a young Polish artists’ group suggests that this new alliance between religion and official politics is being contested.

Mourning rituals surrounding public figures frequently have a multivocal quality, and are barometers of change. As part of its ongoing engagement with public events, ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY invites debate on how collective memories are punctuated and shaped by historical moments such as these.

James G. Carrier 1
Ethical consumption
Ewa Klekot 3
Mourning John Paul II in the streets of Warsaw
Jonathan Marks 7
Anthropological taxonomy as subject and object: The consequences of descent from Darwin and Durkheim
P. Steven Sangren 13
Anthropology of anthropology? Further reflections on reflexivity
Christine A. kray 17
Women as border in the shadow of Cancún

OBITUARY
Jonathan Benthall 22
Brownlee J. Kirkpatrick, 1919-2007

COMMENT
Hugh Gusterson 23
Anthropologists and war: A response to David Kilcullen (AT 23[3])

CONFERENCES
Freek Janssens 24
21st-century anthropology: Global process and power
Raymond Corbey 24
From shell beads to syntax: The Cradle of language
David G. Anderson 26
The ethnohistory and archaeology of Northern Eurasia

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June – vol 23 – no 3

Front cover caption: PARTISAN ‘ANTHROPOLOGY’. The cover of this issue reproduces a Republican Party campaign poster from 1900, which claims that between 1896 and 1900 the American flag was being planted on foreign soil not ‘to acquire more territory’ but ‘for humanity’s sake’. The poster contrasts an image of economic decline at home and poverty in the Spanish colony of Cuba, alleged to be the Democratic legacy in 1896, with one of prosperity in the US and progress in its new dominion after four years of Republican rule.

The next US presidential elections will take place in November 2008, and campaigning for nomination is already under way. Partisan proclamations that territories are occupied for ‘humanity’s sake’ suggest good intentions, but anthropology researches and seeks to connect with humanity as a whole, not to serve one party or one nation over another. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ has divided the world, generating a renewed interest in partisan use of the social and behavioural sciences, including anthropology, in the hope that these might help succeed where force has failed. The 2007 annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists resolved that a research proposal by our principal research funding agency endangered lives and was in violation of our professional ethics. History will not judge us kindly if funding agencies proceed unilaterally, or if our professional associations fail to give clear guidance on the circumstances under which it is appropriate for professional anthropologists to be involved in such activities, if at all.

Everyone supports non-partisan use of academic research for ‘humanity’s sake’. However, since anthropologists cannot research without first gaining and then retaining the trust of the peoples they engage with in the course of fieldwork throughout the world, in open and willing long-lasting relationships, partisan deployment of our research in war constitutes a potentially life-threatening development for the peoples we befriend, for ourselves, our students, our profession and for our family and colleagues.

As part of an ongoing engagement with how our research, and that of other social and behavioural sciences, is being appropriated in war, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY features discussions on their use in two areas of warfare, with contributions on counterinsurgency, by Roberto González, David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, and unwitting input into interrogation techniques, by David Price.

CONTENTS

Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero 1
Memorializing traumatic death
Sylvia Grider 3
Public grief and the politics of memorial: Contesting the memory of ‘the shooters’ at Columbine High School
David H. Price 8
Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA
Roberto J. González 14
Towards mercenary anthropology? The new US Army counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 and the military-anthropology complex

COMMENT
David Kilcullen 20
Ethics, politics and non-state warfare: A response to González
Montgomery McFate 21
Building bridges or burning heretics?: A response to González
Stephen Ellis, Jeremy Keenan 21
The Sahara and the ‘war on terror’: A response to Jeremy Keenan (AT 22[6])
Laura A. McNamara 22
Culture, critique and credibility: A response to Houtman (AT 23[2])
Gerhard Anders 23
Follow the trial: Some notes on the ethnography of international criminal justice

CONFERENCE
Udi Mandel Butler, Carlos Y Flores 26
AAA2006: Critical intersections/dangerous issues

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April – vol 23 – no 2

Front cover caption: ‘The greatest predators on earth’, writes the anthropologist Alan Macfarlane in his advice to his granddaughter, Letters to Lucy: On how the world works (Profile Books), ‘munch their way through the animal kingdom. We are caught in a dilemma. For we are a meat-eating species, which gains much of its protein from consuming other animals. It is almost impossible to imagine that we will change, but we may, with sufficient will, find ways to minimise the pain we inflict on our fellow species.’ Our front cover photo is taken from a publicity poster produced by SARC, the Southern Animal Rights Coalition, which is organizing the Southampton Cruelty Free Festival on 12 May (see www.crueltyfreefestival.com). In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Jonathan Benthall asks why it is that, while anthropologists have studied most other social movements including environmentalism, little attention has been focused on the animal liberation and rights movement. The movement is underpinned by serious philosophical reflection and by its acknowledgment of Darwinism. This suggests that the shock caused by Darwin’s discoveries is still being worked through nearly a century and a half later. Benthall’s guest editorial outlines the ideological manifestations of the movement and also considers the implications of taking it seriously. Macfarlane’s view, meanwhile, is that ‘perhaps it will not be until some new and superior species emerges on earth, some computerised android, which breeds humans in tiny cages, force-feeds them, drains their bile, eats them, that we will seriously begin to crusade for the abolition of animal-on-animal cannibalism.’

CONTENTS

Jonathan Benthall 1
Animal liberation and rights
Anna-Karina Hermkens 4
The power of Mary in Papua New Guinea
Mark Maguire and A. Jamie Saris 9
Enshrining Vietnamese-Irish lives
Tim Ingold 13
The trouble with ‘evolutionary biology’

COMMENT
Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten and Kevin N. Laland 18
Science, evolution and cultural anthropology: A response to Ingold
Cornelius Holtorf 18
‘What does what I am doing mean to you?’: A response to the recent discussion on Tribe
Laura A. McNamara, Gustaaf Houtman 20
Culture, critique and credibility: Speaking truth to power during the long war

OBITUARY
Grazyna Kubica 22
Andrzej K. Paluch: 1944-2006
Jeremy MacClancy 22
Rodney Needham: 1923-2006

EXHIBITIONS
Andrew Moutu 24
Pasifika Styles: A polyphonic collage

CONFERENCES
Ewa Klekot 26
Observations of a post-East European member: EASA 2006
Gail Thakur 26
Becoming visible: All Roads Film Festival

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February – vol 23 – no 1

Front cover caption: A Dutch participant in the reality television series Groeten uit de rimboe, in which Dutch and Belgian families immerse themselves in the daily life of the world’s ‘most primitive tribes’. Some time afterwards, their hosts pay a return visit to experience life in Europe, screened on television in the sequel Groeten terug. The two series have been subject to heated debate in the Dutch media, having been both lauded as unpretentious entertainment and condemned as unethical ‘popular anthropology’.

The attention of Myrna Eindhoven, Laurens Bakker and Gerard Persoon was first drawn to the series when a family was sent to Mentawai, where all three have done fieldwork. While they themselves are critical of the unashamed focus on entertainment, they became intrigued by the reactions of other anthropologists to the series.

Here they connect this case from the Netherlands to the ongoing debate on ‘popular anthropology’ in ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, triggered by the UK series Tribe. Dutch anthropologists have mostly dismissed the series as ‘not anthropology’, criticizing it as exploitative and as ethnocentric. But do anthropologists have the authority to define ‘popular anthropology’? How do we come to terms with blatant commercialization of our fieldwork sites, and their conversion into exotic locations for popular entertainment?

Back cover caption: NATION-BUILDING IN EAST TIMOR. East Timor celebrates its Independence Day on 20 May each year. The day forms the backdrop for the largest annual encounter between the political centre and the periphery. In this photo, an elder (katuas) member of Fretilin, the largest political party, blends traditional and modern at the Independence Day celebrations in the capital, Dili, in 2005.

As an exemplar of the United Nations’ capacity for ‘nation-building’, the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste (or ‘East Timor’ as it is more popularly known) developed into something of a ‘poster boy’ for the United Nations from the day it became a sovereign nation on 20 May 2002. But in April 2006, some months after the last remaining UN staff had left, violence in the streets of the capital began to undermine social and political stability, resulting in the overthrow of prime minister Mari Alkatiri.

Under the more engaged leadership of his successor, José Ramos-Horta, the threat of unrest has abated to some extent. Nevertheless, the country faces an array of serious problems – political, social and economic. In his article in this issue, David Hicks draws on his anthropological fieldwork to highlight the widening gap between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’. Hicks argues that the former embodies the institutions and quasi-Western values professed by the national leaders in Dili, while the latter centres around the traditional, largely indigenous values of the country’s local communities, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the population.
Although already latent before the United Nations left, this widening divergence in values is eroding the political integrity of the first nation-state to become a member of the United Nations in the 21st century, and if it continues to grow, will call into question the ability of the United Nations to ‘manufacture’ nation-states.

Anthropology has an important role to play in highlighting and analysing the implications of grassroots discrepancies between local populations and political elites. More than this, it has a role to play in confronting the international community with the ethical and other consequences of its increasingly regular interventions in third countries.

CONTENTS

Mike Rowlands and Beverley Butler 1
Conflict and heritage care
Angela Procoli 3
Science in society: Networking knowledge among French geneticists and breeders
Myrna Eindhoven, Laurens Bakker and Gerard A. Persoon 8
Intruders in sacred territory: How Dutch anthropologists deal with popular mediation of their science
David Hicks 13
Community and nation-state in East Timor: A view from the periphery
Gustaaf Houtman 17
Islam in today's world: A conversation with Akbar Ahmed

NARRATIVE
Pat Caplan 20
'Never again': Genocide memorials in Rwanda

COMMENT
Christopher P. Toumey 23
Expeditions to na-no-tech
Mikael Johansson 25
2006 - European year of nano?
Jeremy Keenan 26
My country right or wrong
Susan Wright 28
Spying and fieldwork
Brian Morris 28
Wittgenstein revisited

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