Bruce Kapferer

A celebration of demons : exorcism and the aesthetics of healing in Sri Lanka

The Sinhalese exorcism rituals are perhaps the most complex and the most magnificent in performance still extant. For this second edition, the author has written a new preface and introduction in which he argues that the techniques of healing in Sri Lanka and the aesthetics of this healing cannot be reduced to Western psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic terms, and develops new and original approaches to ritual and the aesthetic in general.

Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning

Symbolic meaning and representational and reflexive perspectives remain dominant orientations in the analysis of ritual. While these must be crucial, this essay argues that a focus on the perceptual dynamics of rite, especially as these are located in ritual aesthetics, may expand an understanding of the force of rite. The discussion develops critically upon Victor Turner’s seminal work, suggesting ways in which ritual analyses may be redirected. The related concepts of dynamics and virtuality (distinguished from the cyber-technological kind) are developed, indicating that these may be critical for understanding how rites change or transform the situations to which they are directed. Ritual as a dynamic in virtuality that has no essential or necessary relation to the ordinary realities that surround it may, because of this fact, be greatly empowered as a force that can pragmatically intervene in ordinary realities.

The Distancing of Emotion in Ritual [and Comments and Reply]

There is an ambivalence toward ritual in social science. On the one hand, it is seen as immensely valuable to the individual and to society. On the other hand, there is an underlying feeling that ritual is impotent. This paper presents a theory of the distancing of emotion which integrates the positive and negative orientations toward ritual. The theory links ritual to the process of catharsis of repressed emotion, which subsumes the positive orientation. The theory also suggests that when ritual is either over- or underdistanced, it will be seen either as meaningless, in the case of overdistancing, or tension-producing, in the case of underdistancing, which subsumes the negative orientation toward ritual. The relationship between this theory and Freud and Breuers theory of repression and catharsis is described. Finally, some evidence from ethnology is reviewed which relates sense of well-being, distancing, and catharsis in funeral rites and in curing rituals.

The Anthropology of Europe: identity and boundaries in conflict

This is one of the first anthropological studies of Europe post-1989. Fourteen authors examine the social, cultural and political implications of European integration with particular emphasis on changing European identities, concepts of citizenship and levels of participation. Their aim is to set an agenda for future research based on European identity as a new object of study. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with major theoretical issues that have characterized the anthropological study of Europe and includes a discussion of the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a cultural area. The second section develops these themes further using different theoretical perspectives to explain complex issues such as nationalism, ethnic identities, and sectarian conflicts. Nine case studies cover a wide range of contemporary topics including Irish nationalism, identity and conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and gender, support and child care provision in Spain. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature on European integration and should be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, communications and European studies.This is one of the first anthropological studies of Europe post-1989. Fourteen authors examine the social, cultural and political implications of European integration with particular emphasis on changing European identities, concepts of citizenship and levels of participation. Their aim is to set an agenda for future research based on European identity as a new object of study. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with major theoretical issues that have characterized the anthropological study of Europe and includes a discussion of the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a cultural area. The second section develops these themes further using different theoretical perspectives to explain complex issues such as nationalism, ethnic identities, and sectarian conflicts. Nine case studies cover a wide range of contemporary topics including Irish nationalism, identity and conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and gender, support and child care provision in Spain. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature on European integration and should be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, communications and European studies.

Nationalist ideology and a comparative anthropology

The subjectivity of the anthropologist is grounded in the historical and ideological worlds in which he is positioned. The author finds the basis of his comparison of Australian and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalisms in the Australian cultural context, which leads him to a particular construction of the Sinhalese “otherness”. The Australian egalitarian nationalism and the Sinhalese Buddhist hierarchical nationalism are traced as ideologies through a range of practises, showing differing relationships between nation and state. Both nationalisms, the author argues, are to be understood as equally “modern” .

New formations of power, the oligarchic-corporate state, and anthropological ideological discourse

The article presents a broad claim that the political environment of the nation-state is complicated by the emergence to dominance of state and state-like oligarchic-corporate state formations. These are considered as a relatively new kind of political departure that constitutes a reconfiguration of the relation of controlling interests to social realities. The argument develops the suggestion that some recent anthropological orientations to the state are relatively unreflective as to their own ideological positioning.

Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Levi-Strauss’s analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison’s history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

The Australian society of the state: egalitarian ideologies and new directions in exclusionary practice

This article considers the broad historical and ideological processes that participate in forming the continuities and discontinuities of Australian egalitarian nationalism. We draw attention to its formation and re-formation in the debates surrounding the so-called Hanson phenomenon. Hansonism refracts the crisis of what we regard as the Australian society of the state in the circumstances of the development of neoliberal policies and the more recent neoconservative turn of the current Howard government. Our argument is directed to exploring the contradictions and tensions in Australian egalitarian thought and practice and its thoroughgoing creative reengagement in contemporary postcolonial and postmodern Australia.

How anthropologists think: configurations of the exotic

Anthropology has often been criticized for its exoticism and orientalism. They are the paradoxes of a discipline focused on the comparative study of difference and diversity and are at the centre of the discussion here in the larger context of the importance of anthropology in the humanities and social sciences. The emphasis is on the role of the exotic as vital to anthropologys study of difference and to its overall coherence and significance for the understanding of humanity as a whole.

Introduction: Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State, and Global Transgression

The very institution of the state is widely conceived of as inseparable from war. If it constitutes peace within the borders or order of its sovereignty, this very peace may be the condition for its potential for war with those other states and social formations outside it. Indeed, in different state systems their very inter nal order depended on predation beyond their borders. The one was the func tion of the other. Since ancient times it has been observed that the distribution