Anthropological Sense Research Articles

Derive dell'ibrido. Uno schema ontologico e archetipico

L'ontologia estetica di René Magritte descrive il mondo come processo ibrido di traduzione e traslazione di una somiglianza universale. Ibridazione come dimensione ultima ed elementare dei rapporti materiali e mentali tra gli esseri: uno strato del mondo che riaffiora da profonditŕ remote, come quella ‘logica dell'ambiguo, dell'equivoco, della polaritŕ' che il mito conosceva bene, e che ci appare oggi stranamente affine alle dinamiche del moderno, in un senso estetico e antropologico che mette in gioco le radici del concetto di cultura. Su questo sfondo ontologico va proiettata la centralitŕ contemporanea, ma anche l'universalitŕ della categoria di ibridazione per l'architettura. Qui si traccia lo schema di questa tesi: dal modello epistemico della deriva, legittimazione epistemica di un'estetica dell'ibridazione, ai suoi riflessi architettonici, raffigurati in conclusione con esempi di ‘derive archetipiche'.

Symphysio-Fundal Height Nomogram In Ultrasound Dated Pregnancies

Objective: Fundal height measurements in centimeters have always been an objective method of evaluating fetal growth in pregnancy. The accepted Mcdonald's rule refers primarily to Caucasians regrettably. Since fundal height may actually vary in an anthropological sense it was considered necessary to apply Mcdonald's rule to African subjects to see whether there is any significant difference. The aim of this study is to construct symphysio-fundal height nomogram for normal pregnant Nigerian women. Material & Methods: In a cross sectional mode, four hundred and five pregnant Nigerian women were studied to examine how their fundal height values compared with those in the literature. A regression equation was derived for the 10th and 90th centiles. Values outside the range of 10 – 90th centiles are to be used for the prediction of small-for-dates and large-for-dates babies respectively. The prediction formulae for the various centiles derived from regression analysis and their usefulness in clinical anthropological practice using fundal height measurement are highlighted. Results: The study demonstrated a significant difference in fundal height values of Nigerian women especially in late pregnancy compared with other published values in the literature. A positive linear correlation between symphysio-fundal height and fetal gestational age was found in Nigerians with a correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.9962 (p<0.001). The relationship is best described by the second order polynomial regression equation y = – 0.0024x2 + 1.1255x – 1.8334 where y is the symphysio-fundal height in centimeters while x is the gestational age in weeks. Conclusion: Symphysio-fundal height chart is a valuable tool for assessing fetal growth in the antenatal clinic in as much as it is cautiously constructed for a given population and the same method of measurement is strictly adhered to by different observers in the same organization. Key Words: Fundal Height; Predictive formulae; Nigerian women DOI: 10.3126/ajms.v1i2.3138Asian Journal of Medical Sciences 1 (2010) 64-67

Law and morality in the light of acceptance and constraint

Every rule adopted by a community, characterized by the traits: significance, the manner of adopting the rules of morals, the nature of moral responsibility, the form of pressure of morals, is the rule of 'public' morals. It is obvious that 'public' morals are not rooted only in autonomous principles of the moral agent, but also in the fact of the existence of adopted rules in a community. At the same time, we distinguish 'public morals', truly adopted by a commonly given group from 'critical morals' used in the criticism of the existing social institutions. Legislators, however, have to decide on some of the questions of 'public morals', which happens when some practice threatens to affect some valuable social institute. Then they are forced to hold to a consensus of moral standpoint adopted by the community as a unity. The definition of the moral standpoint, provided in that manner, shows that that term is now used in an anthropological sense. An ordinary man, whose views we must enforce by means of law, is not expected to judge about anything, and his attitude can mainly be a matter of conviction. If a sensible man believes that some common practice is immoral regardless of whether this belief is correct or not, since for him it is honest and impartial, that no one of the correctly oriented members of the society thinks otherwise, then that practice is immoral for the legislator too. Conclusions made in this way are partly false, because they depend on the use of the term moral standpoint in its anthropological sense. Although it is true that the majority thinks that certain behaviour is 'awful vice', and cannot tolerate it, there remains a possibility that this common opinion is made up of prejudices, rationalizations and personal aversions. Consequently, 'public' morals are always a mixture of customs and conventions, reasoning, experiences and prejudices. It can be said that an ordinary man cannot provide any reason for his point of view but will supply only a reason that reflects a common moral standpoint which he himself is unable to endorse honestly and consistently. A conscientious legislator, to whom is said that there is a consent about an issue in the moral sense, ought to check the credibility of the consensus.

Learning Lessons from Teaching American Culture in Global Flux

This theme issues focuses on the teaching of in the global arena by educators both within and outside the United States. is to be understood in the broadest sense possible here. It can be defined tentatively as the repertoire of learned values, beliefs, attitudes, aesthetic preferences, rules, and customs shared by a particular collectivity of people. The numerous modern usages of the term divide roughly into two large domains that come both into play in the following pages. In one, stands for the arts alone, with time-bound divisions such as those between high, mid-brow, and popular art, and associated differences in taste and appreciation. In the other domain- in the anthropological sense - it stands for the religious/secular, political, and social beliefs and practices, or more generally a way of life, that bind a people. Material culture refers to as embodied in a wide variety of artifacts and other material things. Needless to say, a substantial part of globalizing consists of such material objects. Students of today's cultural globalization emphasize deterritorialization as one of the major driving forces (Appadurai). They acknowledge that it is not a new process, of course; local cultures have long been influenced - and even shaped- by outside forces, and, historically, have become disembedded, that is, detached from their local anchorings under capitalism. But the current phase of accelerated globalization differs from the past because of the dramatically increased transnational movement of ideas, goods, services, images, and people. A main feature of this phase is enhanced time-space compression - the speeding up of global processes, so that the world feels smaller and distances shorter, and events in one place have immediate impact on people and places a very long distance away (Harvey 201-323). At least three, if not all, authors of the following articles view the workings of in a global context, either implicitly or explicitly, in terms of transculturization. This approach rejects what it considers essentialist thinking about culture, in this case the notion that there is such a thing as American culture or some other national that has a relatively stable identity. Instead, the emphasis is put on the contested character, variety, permeability, and fluidity of culture. Cultures are always seen as hybridized and hybridizing, multi- and intercultural, working through debates, controversies, and negotiations. One deals with complex and often contested cultural flows from different locations and in different discourses. This entails a focus on cultural encounters, contact zones, or zones of interaction in which difference and inequality in terms of power are examined. This perspective stresses that is not monolithic and that America has never transmitted a single coherent message. Also what was once perceived as may have changed over time. Similarly, the receiving is diverse and in constant motion. The idea of an authentic (or other national) is untenable, because it has always been diffuse, in flux, without clear boundaries, and constantly remade through influences such as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, and, in recent time, also increasingly through transnational media and all kinds of globalizing networks. In his book Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004) the historian Michael Denning sees the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 as the symbolic moment when the current era of globalization can be said properly to begin, with the corporate states of the Cold War being superseded by the beginnings of a transnational crossfertilization as peoples, capital, and commodities began to flow more freely across frontiers. Denning stipulates that area studies (such as Studies) in the traditional sense fitted well with the period between 1945 and 1989 when the world was conventionally divided into discrete, partitioned spaces: the capitalist First World, communist Second World, and the decolonizing Third World. …

Sustentação de problemas de escrita em textos de alunos de graduação e da formação escolar básica

In the academic environment, since the mid 1980s, studies and debates point to the existence of a crisis in the teaching of Portuguese (both in the writing and reading skills). Such claim has also been discussed in the media (newspapers, magazines, newscasts, websites, etc). In order to analyze the so-called crisis in writing, we will undertake a comparison between the writing of students from first year of the first cycle — elementary school — (essays written in class in 2008) and from college students (internship reports for the Language Degree from a public University, presented in 2008 and 2009). The objective of this comparison is to ascertain, in the mentioned texts, how two important factors of textuality are constituted: cohesion and textual coherence. This article aims at a reflection supported by the following initial hypothesis: there is a possible culture, in the anthropological sense of the term, which tolerates the spread of precarious texts in different environments, among which are the most formal — such as the University — where, supposedly, no one would admit a written text that does not fulfill the formal rules of the Portuguese language.

Mobile phones and the inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness

The aim of this article is to put mobile phones and uses of other new media into the broader context of cross-cultural comparison. The article focuses on two countries (Sweden and the USA) and on leisure and sociability. A problem with studies narrowly focusing on mobile phones is that the mobile’s uses cannot easily be separated from uses of other information and communication technologies (ICTs), as when ICTs compete for time spent or when key functions such as maintaining relationships are distributed across devices. Therefore the concept of multimodal connectedness is introduced to examine the whole range of ICTs. Once we can see how various technologies for maintaining relationships complement each other, we often find that convergences outweigh divergences between cultures. The implications for cross-cultural comparison are that we can distinguish between culture in an anthropological sense (that is, as a unique way of life) as against mediated culture, where there are increasingly common patterns of multimodally communicative relationships across cultures, even if differences also persist.

Ten thousand journal articles later: ethnography of "The literature" in science

El artículo explora las dificultades que, para la historia de la ciencia y la tecnología del siglo XX, supone la lectura de un gran número de artículos científicos. Se argumenta que hay tensión entre dos estrategias distintas: la lectura en detalle de los artículos clave y el análisis de citaciones y otros métodos automáticos de rastrear la literatura. El desafío que supone alternar estos dos métodos y la necesidad de mantener una aproximación interpretativa cuando nos enfrentamos a una extensa literatura (miles o decenas de miles de artículos) pueden ser abordados aproximándonos a la literatura científica como si de un informante se tratara, en el sentido antropológico. Caracterizamos a la literatura científica como capaz de describir el cambio en los conceptos y en las prácticas científicas y técnicas. El artículo explora esta estrategia y propone centrarse en asuntos tales como los materiales y métodos (y las prácticas que conllevan), así como en los problemas a los que éstos contribuyen o intentan solucionar. The article explores the difficulties, for the history of science and technology of the twentieth century, is reading a large number of scientific articles. It is argued that there is tension between two different strategies: detailed reading of key articles and citation analysis and other automated methods to track the literature. The challenge of alternate these two methods and the need to maintain an interpretive approach when faced with an extensive literature (thousands or tens of thousands of items) can be addressed approaching the scientific literature as if it were an informant in the anthropological sense. We characterize the literature as able to describe the change in the concepts and practices in science and technology. The article explores the strategy and intends to focus on issues such as materials and methods (and practices involved), as well as the problems they help or try to solve.

Chapitre 7. Les sens du don ; l'essence du don

Our study endeavors to show, in the form of an empirical study, that the inadequate number of donations of human body parts in France can be explained by a fear of loss, in both an ontological and anthropological sense: to give is to renounce, to lose, to deprive oneself. This line of argument seeks, on one hand, to highlight how the common understanding of donation implicitly fuels this behaviour, and, on the other hand, to propose a relationship of oneself to oneself followed by oneself to others through various representations of the possession of one's body. Thus, a social practice with a medical purpose (collecting blood, removing an organ) reads as, firstly, a very old metaphysical question, namely my relationship with my body, secondly, a legal ethics question, that of the commitment of men to one another, established an maintained not only by will and rational deliberation but also by the components of each person's body.

THE “MEDITERRANEANS” OF SOUTHERN SIBERIA AND KAZAKHSTAN, INDO-EUROPEAN MIGRATIONS, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE SCYTHIANS: A MULTIVARIATE CRANIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

The article presents some results of a multivariate analysis of 245 male Eurasian cranial series dating to various periods from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age. These results contradict the commonly held view that certain comparatively gracile (narrow-faced) Bronze Age populations of Southern Siberia and Kazakhstan were “Mediterranean” in the anthropological sense, i.e. Southern Caucasoid. Craniometry provides no support for the theory that those people migrated to Southern Siberia or Kazakhstan from Southwestern Central Asia, the Near East, or Trans-Caucasia. Populations described as “Mediterranean” (the Okunev people of Tuva, the Yelunino, the Samus, and some Afanasiev and Andronov groups) display craniometric resemblance with the Bronze Age people of Southern Russian and Ukrainian steppes, as well as with certain Late Neolithic and Bronze Age groups of Central and Western Europe. These affi nities are apparently caused by migrations of Indo-Europeans (specifi cally Indo-Iranians) from their European homeland eastward, as far as Eastern Central Asia. The return from Eastern Central Asia to Europe of the descendents of one of these groups during the Early Iron Age was probably the principal cause for the emergence of the Scythians on the historical arena.

Ethics policy as audit in Canadian clinical settings: exiling the ethnographic method

In the 1990s, institutional research ethics boards (REBs) impacted the relationship between researchers and their participants by formalizing the ethics requirements to conduct research involving human subjects. While exceptions are made in some ethics policies for research that crosses international borders — for example, where obtaining written consent is not culturally acceptable — there are no such exceptions for research that crosses interdisciplinary domains. Consequently, when conducting anthropological fieldwork in a Canadian clinical setting, the requirements of the standardized ethics policy proves to mesh poorly with the ethnographic and general anthropological approach to research, distorting the process and meaning of obtaining informant consent in the anthropological sense. This article documents one neophyte ethnographer's complicated journey into the land of the REB, raising some important questions about the audit-type nature of the ethics review process and the potential exile of ethnography that may result.

The Culture Cult Revisited

What is the gravest threat to “open” democratic societies today? In Karl Popper’s view it was tribalism. By contrasting closed autarkic Sparta and free-trading Athens, and looking at the social systems of Fascism and Communism (on the one hand) and Western democracy (on the other), he argued that the “enemies” of the open society were forms of belief and social organization humanity had yet to transcend. These were embodied in solidaristic ideals hostile to rationality, individualism, and pluralism. The Culture Cult (Westview 2001) argued that in the last 50 years this tendency has expressed itself in a widespread romantic enthusiasm for the primitive (defined as “romantic primitivism”) and an admiration for ethnic culture at the expense of civilized values. The older sense of “culture” as understood by Matthew Arnold was exclusive, prescriptive, and hierarchical. The anthropological sense of the word used today is inclusive, descriptive, and horizontal. The article looks at the role of Herder and Isaiah Berlin in providing a rationale for this state of affairs.

CHILDREN & NEW MEDIA

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Usage of “ubiquity” in this paper foregrounds the social aspects of the term, elaborating on the more technical meaning developed by Weiser (1993 Weiser M. 1993. Ubiquitous computing. Retrieved August 28, 2006, from http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiCompHotTopics.html [Google Scholar]). 2. Note the qualification in each work: topical in the case of Wartella and Reeves (suggesting perhaps that methods were not influenced by popular concerns), and temporal in the case of Livingstone (suggesting perhaps that with time, some more theoretical work is in place). Essentially, both reviews found it necessary to limit the extent of public influence over academic work. 3. Carey explained that “we [Americans] understand that other people have culture in the anthropological sense as we regularly record it—often mischievously and patronizingly. But when we turn critical attention to American culture the concept dissolves into a residual category useful only when psychological and sociological data are exhausted” (1989 Carey, J. W. 1989. Communication as culture: Essays on media and society, Boston: Unwin Hyman. [Google Scholar], p. 19). This observation sheds light on the dual construction of childhood as a separate culture on the one hand and as adults' immature mirror image—indeed as their own future—on the other. Perhaps this latter interpretation of childhood leads adults to ask questions about the transmission of information to their kids rather than about the construction of identities that informs the creation of meanings out of texts and objects. 4. For an exploratory inquiry, see Ribak (2006 Ribak, R. 2006. “Cultural reflections on the mobile phone in parent–teen relationships.”. In Cultural attitudes towards technology and communication 2006, Edited by: Sudweeks, F, Hrachovec, H and Ess, C. 595–605. Murdoch, , Australia: Murdoch University Press. [Google Scholar]).

Before cultures: the ethnographic imagination in American literature, 1865-1920

The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910 - more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America. In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings to life not only the regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketch-books of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; popular magazines such as Century Illustrated Monthly, which published Cushing's articles alongside Henry James's; the debate between Joel Chandler Harris, author/collector of the Uncle Remus folktales, and John Wesley Powell, perhaps the most important American anthropologist of the time; and Du Bois's polemics against the culture concept as it was being developed in the early twentieth century. Written with clarity and grace, Before Cultures will be of value to students of American literature, history, and anthropology alike.

Kryminologia kulturowa? Antropologia kultury jako przyczynek do rozważań nad problematyką zabójstwa w krajach anglosaskich

The paper covers the issue of cultural and ethnological perspective in contemporary criminology. The author presents various theories that are currently developing worldwide, addressing the problem of the role of culture (in the anthropological sense of the word) and its influence on the aetiology of criminal behaviour, social reaction to crime, and creation of role-modelling in different societies. The presentation is focussed mostly on the cultural and criminological comparison of three countries the United States of America, Great Britain and Canada – and their homicide data. These countries, although seemingly similar in many ways when traditionally analysed in criminology, differ significantly in terms of murder – not only statistically, but also at a deeper and more complex historical level. The author describes these differences, arguing that the cultural approach to criminological issues is crucial in explaining violence. The last part of the paper focuses on case-study examples from all the three countries under discussion; this serves as an illustration to the author’s postulate of incorporating the ethnological studies and research into the system of criminology.

Europe Versus Asia: Truth Versus Virtue

Science and technology are products of human ingenuity, and as such they are cultural phenomena: products of human culture. Values also belong to culture, but to a different kind of culture. The word ‘culture’ is used in two meanings, but in discussions people often do not realize this. There is culture in the narrow sense, let us call it ‘culture one’, which stands for civilization and its products; and there is culture in the wider, anthropological sense, ‘culture two’, which means patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that differ from one group of people to another. Values belong to culture two, not to culture one. My research has been on values, that is culture two, and I will compare values in Europe and in Asia.Several studies have been devoted to differences in values among similar people from different countries. I compared people working for the same multinational organization in the same jobs, but in more than fifty different countries. My Hong Kong colleague Michael Bond compared psychology students in ten different countries. We both found that the differences in the values of our respondents reflected four basic dimensions of national culture: Power Distance, or the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally: from relatively equal to extremely unequal. Individualism, or the degree to which people in a country learn to act as individuals rather than as members of cohesive groups: from collectivist to individualist. Masculinity, or the degree to which values like assertiveness, performance, success and competition, which in most cultures are traditionally considered the domain of men, prevail over values like the quality of life, maintaining warm personal relationships, service, care for the weak, and solidarity, which in most cultures are considered to be more the domain of women: from tender to tough. Uncertainty Avoidance, or the degree to which people in a country feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations: the extent to which they believe in one single Truth with a big T and reject those who do not think, look and act like themselves; from relatively flexible to extremely rigid.

Rites de passage et récits de conversion : le témoignage de quelques anglaises au milieu du XVIIe siècle

The breakdown of age-old rites of passage resulting from the collapse of the Church of England in the middle of the seventeenth century, led to the displacement and interiorization of ritual practices. The conversion narratives written by women from Congregationalist and Baptist churches show how rituals marking the stages of human life were spiritualised and transposed to inner life. When used as admission narratives, these testimonies became true rites of passage in the anthropological sense of the term, even overshadowing the traditional rite of baptism. The writing of conversion was used to ritualise and to commemorate this radical change, leaving traces or relics of conversion.

The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality

The Art of Hearing God:Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality T. M. Luhrmann (bio) In an essay surveying the use of the term "spirituality," Sandra Schneiders writes that most scholars of religion these days use the term in an "anthropological sense," by which she means that "there is a growing consensus that Christian spirituality is a subset of a broader category that is neither confined to nor defined by Christianity nor even by religion."1 I write here as an anthropologist (my primary fields are psychiatry and religion), conscious that as I enter a conversation with scholars of Christian spirituality, there are thickets of learning which separate us and which neither of us can entirely see. I come to the table with an intellectual style and method out of the social sciences; scholars of spirituality bring centuries of engagement in debates I do not know. Yet I would like to hold the conversation, because I believe that I am puzzling over one of those features of spirituality not confined to Christianity nor even to religion, and I think that this feature may shed light on the way that many American Christians experience God—and I would like to hear how scholars of spirituality respond to what I have to say. The puzzle begins with the shifts in the way certain psychiatric disorders are recognized over time. A humanistic skeptic might say: "But of course, definitions of psychiatric disorder always are changing, such vague categories inevitably shift their forms with the changing discourse of their times." In fact, that skeptical view is already well-entrenched in this case. The disorders which concern me are the ones called dissociative disorders, and what I find puzzling is that they disappear in America in the early decades of the twentieth century and reappear in that century's last few decades. There are already articulate (and often humanist) critics who suggest that the disorders are imagined by highly suggestible individuals whose complaints reveal more about their society than about their bodies.2 For them, the appearance and disappearance of the disorders is a cultural epiphenomenon which accompanies real social issues about the changing role of women in society. They write about the way that social metaphors and narratives become embodied in an individual's experience of illness. Much of what they say has the ring of truth. [End Page 133] The clinicians on the other side believe that dissociative disorders have the stark reality of cancer.3 They read what the critics have to say, and they have become more cautious about the specific claims that their patients make. But whereas many of the critics (and perhaps much of their intellectual readership) tend to dismiss the disorders entirely, these clinicians see the misery of their patients face-to-face, and they think that there is a real clinical phenomenon, that something is wrong with these bodies. Like the critics, the clinicians think about shifting social narratives—but for them, the issue becomes why certain symptoms were ignored or misinterpreted at certain times. They think that the gap in diagnosis arose because mid-century clinicians were blinded by the arrogance of psychoanalysts who interpreted incest as fantasy and by the new and capacious diagnosis of schizophrenia, introduced by Eugen Bleuler in 1908.4 They tend to think that the psychiatric symptoms generated out of childhood sexual abuse have always been the same. In this essay I would like to offer another explanation, one that has not occurred (to my knowledge) to either side locked in the debate. I suggest that there is a psychological capacity called absorption, that this capacity is involved in psychiatric dissociative disorder but also in much spiritual experience, that it can be trained and elaborated, and that the cultural interest in the phenomena associated with the fruits of this capacity rises and falls over time. Social narratives, then, are central to my story, but they are central because they dictate when people become more or less interested in training this bodily capacity. The Diagnoses Let me begin with a richer description of these controversial diagnoses. In the last thirty to forty years, mental health professionals have identified patients with an array...

Art

13 Retro Keywords ... And W hy They’reWorth a Second Look Art In what follows I would like to examine the changing meanings and usages of the term “art” (as well as the concept “art”) since Raymond Williams encapsulated its historical etymologies and political contexts in Keywords. Such a re-examination necessitates, I think, a consideration of Williams’s method in the 1970s, and what his materialism means or how it functions today. His conclusions regarding the status of art must be placed in a his­ torical context vis-à-vis twentieth-century Critical Theory and Marxism, for Williams’ s ideas inform or reproduce or anticipate the “art world” con­ ceptualism of such theorists as Arthur C. Danto and Pierre Bourdieu. Williams’s technique in Keywords was to trace a material history of words’meanings in usage. Or, rather, he was interested in words that con­ tained in their history a conflict that was symptomatic of larger struggles. His most important methodological statement in Keywords may be where he links the semantic and the social: the issues could not all be understood simply by analysis of the words. On the contrary, most of the social and intel­ lectual issues, including both gradual developments and the ESC 30.4 (December 2004): 5-65 Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. He currently works at Emily Carr Institute. Recent publications include “On Dre,” in Open Letter 12:5 (Spring 2005), an essay on contemporary Vancouver art in Flash Art (Nov.-Dec. 2004), and “Jameson, Haraldsson, and Architecture,” in TheJameson Critical Reader, ed. Sean Homer & Doug Kellner (Palgrave, 2004). His novel, Smoke Show, will appear in the fall of 2005 from Arsenal Pulp Press. He was in the hallway of the University of Victoria English department when he learned of Williams’ death in early 1988. most explicit controversies and conflicts, persisted within and beyond the linguistic analysis. Yet many of these issues, I found, could not really be thought through, and some of them, I believe, cannot even be focused unless we are conscious of the words as elements of the problems. (16) Here we see Williams veering between the Scylla and Charybdis of twen­ tieth-century Marxism: economism vs. idealism. At one extreme, we have the economism of Stalin, and at the other, cultural studies.1The idealism in Williams is that which stretches from semiotics to cultural studies: by which I mean stressing the necessity of the letter, of the word. But Williams is hardly some Brit naïf. His semiotics comes via Volosinov/Bakhtin,1 2and thus he locates his idealism in a class situation: “I was given the impres­ sion ... that these [differing uses of culture] arose mainly from the fact of an incomplete education” (16). Williams’ s bourgeois interlocutor assumed people using the word “culture” in an anthropological sense were merely scholarship boys. Williams’s sense of class struggle is also to be found in the anecdote which opens Keywords’introduction, the origin if you will of the text: his return to Cambridge after military service (in a tank! like Billy Bragg!) during World War 11.Williams’ s narratives are relevant because they place in a historical situation his methodology: looking at the meaning of keywords as a symptom of class struggle. This technique resolves momentarily the great Saussurean binary of synchrony and diachrony. For, while Williams never makes the historicist error of arguing that we know the etymology of the word “art”when we use it now, we are nonetheless using a word that arrives sedimented in those moments of dissension. As well, Williams is quite Bakhtinian in that he avoids Saussure’ s idealism by situating words in the moment of the utter­ ance: i.e., the class structure that obtains in academic speech genres or habi1 Therefore, “most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, are effectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity” (42): this is Stalinist, or economist, in the sense that Williams mistakes an economic transaction (the purchasing of art) for a determining condition. Some art is sold: but the differences between that...

Ashurbanipal's headhunt: An anthropological perspective

The severed head is a topic that has always attracted popular attention. In Christian art, for example, it was an image of martyrdom and fearless resistance against suppression. In contrast, popular accounts of headhunting have been used to convey an image of the primitive for Western audiences since the nineteenth century (e.g. Panel 1992). In anthropology headhunting has long been discussed in terms of materialist and evolutionary models. Only recently attempts have been made to place the phenomenon of headhunting in a wider historical and regional context (Hoskins 1987; idem 1996b; George 1991). The headhunter has become a professional recruiter in the search for executives to fill high-level positions. However, most scholars would not look to urban societies when researching the topic of the practice of headhunting, namely the taking of a head. We still habitually perceive it as an expression of violence and primitive warfare that occurs in stateless societies. In opposition to that view, this article will focus on an urban society in which a headhunt was, in at least one case, carried out in a strict anthropological sense: that is the headhunt of Ashurbanipal, described in the annals as the overthrow of the Elamite king Te-Umman and portrayed on the reliefs at Nineveh.

Cultural diversity, group formation and alienation as constraints on employee interaction in a wholesale company

Although a relatively new concept in anthropology, the notion of cultural alienation appears to be a useful instrument to explain aspects of workplace interaction and behaviour. This article deals with alienation as a function of cultural diversity in a wholesale company in Gauteng, South Africa. It was identified as an important issue impacting upon employees' interaction with others and was manifest in group establishment, various affective experiences, and distancing between people. Sources of the alienation include both organisational culture and culture in the conventional anthropological sense, but it appears that in the company concerned, the former outweighs ‘conventional’ culture as an alienating factor.