Thomas Widlok

Sharing: Allowing others to take what is valued

Sharing adds a paradox to the question of transfer and value: Why do people share what they value even though they cannot count on a return? This contribution breaks with the conventional assumption that practices of sharing are simple prestages of more complex reciprocal gift-exchange or commodity transactions. Instead I consider sharing to be a complex social phenomenon that makes rather specific requirements in regard to bodily copresence, relatedness, and interaction. Based on ethnographic field research I also suggest that forms of “demand sharing” should not be considered to be aberrations since they conform particularly well to the values enshrined in sharing.

Potentials and Limitations of Mobile Eye Tracking in Visitor Studies: Evidence From Field Research at Two Museum Exhibitions in Germany

The main goal of this article is to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of mobile eye tracking (MET) in visitor studies and other social science research. We provide empirical examples of MET research in the context of a comparative study of two exhibitions at two museums in Germany. The article underlines the potentials of MET in combination with other methods and in comparison with conventional forms of observation and interviewing. On the basis of our case material we provide recommendations for social scientists who consider integrating mobile eye-tracking in their field research.

Agency, time, and causality

Cognitive Scientists interested in causal cognition increasingly search for evidence from non-Western Educational Industrial Rich Democratic people but find only very few cross-cultural studies that specifically target causal cognition. This article suggests how information about causality can be retrieved from ethnographic monographs, specifically from ethnographies that discuss agency and concepts of time. Many apparent cultural differences with regard to causal cognition dissolve when cultural extensions of agency and personhood to non-humans are taken into account. At the same time considerable variability remains when we include notions of time, linearity and sequence. The article focuses on ethnographic case studies from Africa but provides a more general perspective on the role of ethnography in research on the diversity and universality of causal cognition.

The universal hunter

ABSTRACT Commercial hunters in southern Africa often claim that they have immediate and privileged access to the culture of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups because they share the same subsistence pursuit. In this contribution I challenge these claims on two accounts. First, I highlight that hunting was part and parcel of many different social groups in southern Africa and I outline some of the historical shifts that have occurred to ‘hunting’ as the historical context changes in which hunting is being practiced across time and space. I propose a notational system to identify differences (and similarities) in the hunting practice. Second, I underline that hunting is only appropriately described in terms of the social relations that it constitutes. I suggest to apply the notion of ‘community of practice’ in a way that facilitates the comparison of various forms of interaction between commercial and indigenous hunters in terms of the positioning of the agents involved.

Where Settlements and the Landscape Merge

The separation between ‘settlement’ and ‘landscape’ is deeply entrenched in European thought and also in the worldview of many agrarian societies. In anthropology this is reflected in the distinct development of an anthropology of landscape on the one hand and an anthropology of built forms. The comparative use of permeability maps is introduced in this chapter as a promising route towards cross-fertilisation between these two hitherto separate bodies of theory and data. Permeability, the ways in which space allows or prevents humans from passing through places, is particularly relevant for our understanding of the fuzzy zone where settlements and the landscape merge. More generally, permeability maps help us to explore a more dynamic view of the relationship between spatial and social relations because they allow us to consider what one may call the ‘social agency of space’. The case material presented in this chapter was collected in the course of field research with ≠ Akhoe Hai//om ‘San’ or ‘Bushmen’ and their neighbours in northern Namibia but an explicit comparative perspective is taken that leads beyond this region.

The Decision to Move: Being Mobile and Being Rational in Comparative Anthropological Perspective

The relationship between rationality and action in the domain of space is closely related to the prototypical human action in space, namely, walking. This contribution from social anthropology looks at the prime cognitive challenge in this context: human practical reasoning about movement, the decision to go or to stay. Based on ethnographic work with various groups of mobile hunters and gatherers in southern Africa and Australia, the chapter presents an investigation of rationality and action in terms of human mobility in space. It begins with a critical assessment of probabilistic rational choice models of mobility and decision-making and suggests that more promising approaches are informed by work on the pragmatics of dialogues and on abductive reasoning. Rationality in that view is no longer a purely mental phenomenon, for it is distributed across social practice and is partially contained in features of the environment that western philosophy has long dismissed as irrelevant for understanding human rationality.

Good or bad, my heritage: customary legal practices and the liberal constitution of post-colonial states

The post-colonial constitutions of Namibia (1990) and of South Africa (1996) in principle allow for ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ law within the framework set by constitutional law. Developments in recent years, in particular in the course of debates surrounding the reform of inheritance laws, highlight the problems of integrating customary law with the newly established liberal law of the state. Arguing from an anthropological perspective, this contribution shows that the case of inheritance law reform in southern Africa sheds more light on inherent contradictions in the dominant legal system. It points at a number of intrinsic problems in the process of creating legal rules in the face of social practice.