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Monetization and Social Life
Viviana A. Zelizer

In her article Viviane Zelizer reviews the state of the art of sociological and anthropological contributions to the study of money. She focuses on the related processes of monetization and commodification in relation to the social and cultural context. Three questions figure prominently in her article. Firstly, are there forms of social relations which are incompatible with monetary exchange? Secondly, does monetization inevitably transform the quality of social life? Thirdly, what are the causes and consequences of different types of monetary transfers? In relation to these questions she advocates a cross­-disciplinary approach to the interactions between market transactions and other aspects of social and cultural life. . (back)

 


A Palace for a Penny
Private Property and Ritual Transactions in Post-Socialist Poland
Longina Jakubowska

The interactions between market transactions and other aspects of social and cultural life is taken up by Longina lakubowska in her analysis of the relationship between property and money in post-socialist Poland . In spite of the country’s gradual transformation to the capitalist economic model, many transactions are governed by non­-monetary principles. Through a detailed description of the case of a former manorial estate in southeastern Poland , she highlights the complexities of property transfers between a peasant village community and the estate’s pre-war gentry owners. She argues that monetary transactions are complicated by the historical hierarchies of prestige and embedded in present-day social relations and perceptions of moral order that predate communism. (back)


Coins for Blood and Blood for Coins
From Sacrifice to Ritual Murder in the South African Lowveld, 1930-2000
Isak Niehaus

Taking as a point of departure the escalation of rumours of ritual murder and blood sucking in the latter years of Apartheid and the new South Africa, Isak Niehaus shows how residents of Bushbuckridge draw on important contrast between an earlier period of subsistence agriculture – in which objects such as coins and animals were sacrificed to the ancestors or to mine snakes to ensure life, health and rain – and a contemporary period of wage labour – in which coin diggers, witches and ritual murderers illicitly exchanged blood for money. As told in the present, these stories protest about the subordination of life to money and express a nostalgic longing for a time when exchanges of coins for blood were guided by a striving for collective well-being.
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The Price of a Bed
Migrants and Money in Cape Town
Erik Bähre

Erik Bähre investigates the widespread phenomenon of informal financial self-help groups. Through a case study of one particular group organized by Xhosa migrant women in Cape Town, he shows how the members use money to build social relationships and solidarity in a threatening social environment marked by economic malaise, crime and HIV. The sense of protection and solidarity gained by participation in such a group, however, appears to be not all-embracing. Although the members stress the feelings of support and solidarity, it is equally c1ear that the dangers and horrors of South African society can only be kept at bay temporarily. Bähre shows that the financial support and flows of money create anxiety, indebtedness, conflict, and envy between people who depend on each other. He argues that we can only understand the relationships between group members and other relations of (financial) dependency by taking loc al discourses about witchcraft into account. (back)


Goed en slecht geld
Gesprekken in een Ghanees dorp
Sjaak van der Geest

Linking up with longstanding debates in anthropology, Sjaak van der Geest addresses the question of the moral nature of money. On the basis of detailed ethnographic data, he investigates local perceptions of money in Kwahu-Tafo ( Ghana ). He shows that money is not considered intrinsically good or bad, but that its valuation depends on how it is gained and spent. While there are misgivings about its illicit accumulation – for instance by forms of sacrifice similar to those described by Niehaus – and selfish a-social use, money as such is appreciated as the main guaranty for a happy life. (back)


The Double-Sidedness of Money
Arjo Klamer and Harry van Dalen

In the last contribution the economists Arjo Klamer and Harry van Dalen explain the double-sidedness of money. In agreement with Zelizer, the authors propose an interdisciplinary approach of the study of money. They argue that economists generally focus on the function of money as a standardized means of exchange and measurement, enabling efficient transactions of goods and services. This, however, is just one side of the coin, the side with the numbers on it. The other side, however, is equally important. There we find the symbols that express the relation between money and the state. This side alludes to social, political and cultural values like credibility, trust, political unity and national identity. They illustrate their argument with some reflections on the introduction of the euro. They argue that the ‘exchange’ side has been taken care of but that as long as the other side is not based on a shared European identity, the euro might turn out to be a failure. (back)

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The Berserk Style in Post-Vietnam America
Kirby Farrell

Kirby Farrell discusses how in the decades following the debacle of US involvement in the Vietnam war, the occasional rampage of a returning soldier from Vietnam (popularly known as ‘going berserk’) could become a model for a whole set of different cultural ‘berserk styles’. In the ‘berserk style’, psychodynamics and historical conditions interact, so that behaviours we associate with trauma can be seen slipping into new forms and combinations in American life, unexpectedly assuming a host of surprising guises, from pseudo-Christian millennialism to vigilante-revenge fantasies and binge behaviours. And reciprocally, particular conflicts, fantasies, and tropes – trauma prominent among them can be observed producing symptoms. Although the berserk style did not originate in Vietnam , Farrell convincingly demonstrates that the Vietnam War had much to do with the proliferation of these styles in America at the turn of the millennium. (back)

 


To Hunt the Black Shaman
The Great Purge in East Siberia
Heonik Kwon

The Great Purge, Stalin’s violent war against the past in the late thirties and early forties, had tremendous consequences for the life and being of the native Orochon people of Sakhalin Island . The reindeer-owning Orochon were labelled Kulaks, their shamans were arrested and send to labour camps, healing rites could no longer be performed and sacred objects had to be buried or destroyed. In present-day discourses in Orochon society ­including the great many mythical tales told among the Orochon – references to this catastrophe are completely absent. And yet, Heonik Kwon shows us how the collective imagination is silently at work to assimilate the tragedies of the past into the Orochon worldview. Arguing that the presence of absence may be a significant social fact in itself, he traces echoes of the catastrophe in what is left untold in some of these mythical tales about shamans and hunters. ‘The incompleteness of each individual story can change to an attribute of mutual complementarity if the two stories are considered as constitutive parts of a work told separately rather than separate works.’ Through this procedure, the Purge is ‘domesticated’: transformed from an uncontrollable whirlwind of history to the proportions of a (tragic) episode of indigenous life. . (back)


Catastrofes en hemelse helpers
Notities en beelden
Jojada Verrips

In his photo-essay, Jojada Verrips addresses the question why monuments dedicated to the Great War – regardless which party in the conflict it involves – of ten display angels, more particularly the Archangel Michael. In an analysis of a number of these monuments he provides a tentative answer as to why these peaceful heavenly creatures have been used so often to ponder and commemorate catastrophic outbursts of infernal violence.
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The Disease of Immorality
Narrating Aids as ‘Sign ofthe Times’ in Middle-class Nairobi
Rachel Sprank

Rachel Spronk describes and interprets the AIDS epidemic as it is experienced and negotiated by adolescents in Nairobi , Kenya . She found these young people caught between a growing awareness of the apparent danger on the one hand and moral messages that portray AIDS as the disease of immorality on the other. Spronk shows how these adolescents – generally ill informed about AIDS and its relationship with sex – attempt to bring the epidemic into the sphere of their own understanding. From the great many narratives that circulate about the disease they gather what appeals to them. Thus, they make their own story about AIDS. Although the fear of the disease itself is discernible in this story, much of their anxiety focuses on the social implications of AIDS. According to these adolescents, AIDS has not come incidentally to Kenya . To the contrary, it is understood as a sign to make people aware of the social and cultural disorder in the post­colony, the so-called immorality that is the result of not adhering to cultural customs and values. For these youngsters, AIDS has become the symbol of a society gone astray. (back)


‘Breng Boldoot’
De schokbestendigheid van de Jakartaanse middenklasse in 1998
Lizzy van Leeuwen

‘Nothing happens’ was the Leitmotif of the glamorous Orde Baru in which the Indonesian middle classes had sought refuge after the tremendous violence and slaughter of the 1965 coup. This Orde Baru primarily found expression in spending, shopping and consuming. Lizzy van Leeuwen describes how this ideology provided Jakarta ‘s upper middle classes an interpretative framework when catastrophe hit again: this time in the guise of the economic collapse of the Indonesian economy in the late nineties, culminating in the Jakarta riots and looting of 1998. While her informants refused to engage in any explicit analysis of the drastic changes impinging upon their lives, commentaries of a silent, implicit nature were hard to miss. Through an analysis of utterances, fashions, trends and life-styles that sprung up in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Van Leeuwen reveals how the collective imagination was at work to transform the catastrophe in yet another consumer item, thus prolonging the credo that ‘nothing happens’. (back)

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Amália
Some Reflections on the Death of a Portuguese Star
Mattijs van de Port

In his contribution on the recently deceased singer of the Portuguese fado, Amalia Rodrigues, Mattijs van de Port analyses the many eulogies that appeared in the Portuguese media for the woman `who made Portuguese mothers cry’. Amalia had become a con­troversial figure during her life due to her close association with the Salazar dictatorship and the ambivalent appreciation of her art. In the days after her death, however, she was appropriated by many different sections of Portuguese society. Communists, elites, immigrants and gays all declared Amalia to be theirs and theirs only. The author shows how she embodies the absence that is at the core of every ideological edifice and could thus trigger the hope and desire of a fulfillment of what all these groups are lacking. (back)

 


Pir Sahib Altaf Hussein
Spot en parodie in een Pakistaanse persoonlijkheidscultus
Oskar Verkaaik

Oskar Verkaaik discusses the relation between mocking and devotion in an article about Pir Sahib Altaf Hussein, the political and spiritual leader of the Muhajir popular movement in Pakistan. Defying the saying that `who ever mocks has lost his belief’, Verkaaik shows that humor is an essential part in the cult around Pir Sahib, producing a form of cultural intimacy between the leader and his followers. Laughing about the venerated leader, understanding the parodies of his political performances, strengthens group cohesion. (back)


A Kingly Cult
Thailand’s Guiding Lights in a Dark Era
Irene Stengs

In her contribution Irene Stengs compares the simultaneous veneration for two Thai Kings and investigates how the two cults interrelate. There is a large overlap in the needs and emotions that underlie the veneration for both Kings, and hence she speaks of a `kingly cult’. The cult has emerged in an era that the Thai perceive as `a dark age’. Political incompetence, scandalous behavior of monks and the Asian economic crisis have made many Thai to put their hope on the Kings. In the case of the historical King Chulalongkorn people worship his spirit, allowing to approach the King by anyone at anytime. In the case of King Bhumibol, the present monarch, the living person is worshipped as his powers are meritious for the country as a whole. Interestingly, in the collective imagination the two Kings become increasingly more alike. In the cult their blessing powers merge to help both individuals and the nation. (back)


Diana
Death of a Media-Styled Secular Saint
Joke Hermes, with Merel Noordhuizen

The death of Diana, princess of Wales, in September 1997, was mourned on an unprecedented scale. She became a symbol of warmth and humanity, that British society, apparently, lacked. Joke Hermes asks what it was about Diana that she was, for a short while, a modern day saint. Why and how did the media become so involved in what can only be called a hype? Both the construction of the image of Diana and the media logic underpinning her mourning are analysed in this article. (back)


The Dictator’s Two Bodies
Hidden Powers of State in the Dominican Imagination
Lauren Derby

Lauren Derby presents a detailed analysis of the magical aura that surrounded Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist in the first half of this century. The syncretic religious culture of the republic provides the background against which it is demonstrated how members of different segments of society, all in their own way, believed in and contributed to Trujillo’s almost unlimited supernatural and secular powers. (back)


‘Post-Communist Personality Cults’
The Limits of Humour and Play
Justin 1’Anson-Sparks and Maruska Svasek

Justin 1’Anson-Sparks and Maruska Svasek show us how the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia also meant a surprising recurrence of memories on Stalin’s personality cult, a `comeback’ that largely took place in the form of a satirical board game. In their vivid description and analysis of the game the authors focus on the importance of humour when reflecting upon the past. Their essay demonstrates the interplay between the breaking of taboos and present-day politics in post-Communist Czech society. (back)


Virtual Idols, Our Future Love
Alan Sondheim

In the last contribution of this issue, Alan Sondheim takes the reader into the weird world of computer animated figures and introduces us to Kyoko Date, a Japanese virtual idol, created in 1996. The author reveals something of the worldwide emotional and erotic traffic that virtual idols provoke. He not only invites us to reconsider the relationship between object of devotion and devotee, but also to acknowledge the importance of virtual dimensions of human idols. (back)

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L’enfant terrible
Anthropology and its Aversion to Children
Lawrence Hirschfeld

Lawrence Hirschfeld opens the issue with an examination of what he calls `the aversion of anthropology to children’. He states that this aversion goes hand in hand with anthropology’s neglect of psychological explanations of cultural learning. If we are interested in the emergence of cultural forms, Hirschfeld argues, anthropologists better take notice of the ideas of children and of psychology as a discipline. (back)

 


Why Children Should be Central to Anthropological Research
Christina Toren

Christina Toren makes a similar argument. She states explicitly, that we should not study children only because they have been neglected. According to Toren studying children is the only way in which anthropologists can learn how adults come to say what to say and to do what to do. She proposes a revision of Piaget’s theory, `because it is literally the only theory of the constitution of ideas over time in which structure and process’ are two sides of the same coin, in stead of separate domains.
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‘It Hurts’
Children’s Cultural Learning About Everyday Illness
Pia Christensen

Pia Christensen studied Danish school children’s ideas about illness. Noticing that young children may mask an illness by adapting their behaviour and bodily posture, she explores the complex interpretative processes involved in children’s definitions of bodily experiences as either `normal’ and acceptable or as `worrisome’ and constituting signs of illness. This focus on children’s perspectives and practices in different age-sets reveals that very young children understand illness primarily as a distinct social event. Only when they start translating between their own subjective experience of self and body and the dominant cultural models of the body do they come to share the adults’ understanding of bodily discomfort and illness. (back)


The Magical Power of Words
About Children, Their Conflicts and Their Bodies
Suzanne Kuik

Suzanne Kuik’s contribution shows us the merits of treating children’s culture as a separate world with its own codes. She takes us to Dutch urban ten and eleven year olds, for whom mutual relations are the most important topic to talk about. In different kinds of fights behavioural norms are explored. By pointing out that the children’s culture bears resemblance to some features described for oral cultures, Kuik makes clear why words are so powerful for children. (back)


Kinderen, polygynie en fosterage: ervaringen uit Oost-Kameroen Catrien Notermans

In Catrien Notermans’ contribution we learn about the impact of polygyny on children in Cameroon. Co-wives do not live together in peace and harmony, therefore many mothers put their children in fosterage to let them escape the tensions at home. The author analyses adults’ reflections about their own childhood in polygyneous households. Notwithstanding their negative evaluations of childhood experiences, Notermans’ informants do not reject the ideology of polygyny. (back)


Notions of ‘Risk’Applied to Urban Children in Nepal
Karen Valentin

Karen Valentin takes the reader to Kathmandu. She emphasises that the category of `children at risk’, as used by NGOs, bears the danger of overlooking the fact that street children themselves develop strategies to solve their problems. The children often are successful. Street children do not necessarily live on the streets for the rest of their lives to end in misery. Furthermore, the focus on the category of street children can result in a lack of attention for other children who do not fit the definition but do need help.
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The Buca Boys from Metro Juárez.
Leadership, Gender and Age in Mexico City’s Youthful Street Culture
Roy Gigengack

The last contributor, Roy Gigengack, also writes about street children. He lived among them in Mexico City. His argument resembles that of Karen Valentin, although he focuses more on the internal organisation of bunda’s and their mutual relations. Central in the `culture of the street’ are leadership, gender and age. In a vivid ethnographic description he shows that the children defy the easy categorisation of adults and use them, indeed, for their own purposes. (back)

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The Double Nature of Collecting
Materialism and Anti-Materialism
RusselI W Belk, University of Utah

RusselI W. Belk opens the issue with a discussion on ‘the double nature of collecting’, as collecting has both a materialistic and an anti-materialistic dimension. He argues that collecting involves many aspects that can be construed as highly materialistic. The collector is acquisitive, possessive, and likely to value the collected objects more than people. The goods collected are luxury objects that may be regarded as precious treasures and as monetary investments. And the collector may exhibit traits of envy, jealousy, and self-indulgence in pursuing collected items. While accepting that there is some truth to each of these charges, Belk argues that collecting may be seen as an anti-materialistic activity that creates a de-commoditised sphere that opposes the market processes of commodity culture. Moreover, he contends that this second interpretation of collecting represents a romantic ideal to which most collectors aspire. (back)

 


Nobody’s Objects
Early-19th Century Ethnographical Collections and the Formation of Imperialist Attitudes and Feelings
Susan Legêne, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

In a detailed analyses of the ‘biography’ of three different objects found in the repository of Dutch ethnographical collections – female slave dolls from Suriname, a life sized Japanese family made from papier-maché, and two mill stones and guns from North Africa – Susan Lejêne reconstructs the relationship of these objects to a specific past, as well as the specific encounter between native craftsmen and the Western collector that had been lost in the setting of the ethnographical museum. The article clearly shows how ethnographic collections transform specific objects to essential images. (back)


On Collecting as Play, Creativity and Aesthetic Practice
Bjarne Rogan, University of Oslo

According to Bjarne Rogan, the urge for collecting cannot be satisfactorily explained by the collectors’ own listings of their motives. Above and beyond the common explanations ­that range from a keen interest in art, history and cultural heritage to a nostalgic longing for relics and curios from consumer society – other mechanisms are at work. Drawing upon interviews with collectors, as well as on written sources and on fiction, Rogan’s article focuses on the ludic, creative and aesthetic aspects of collecting. From this perspective the collection appears to be an arena for composing new entities and new contexts, new worlds apart from the real one, and new works of art – whether the constituent elements are valuable paintings or industrial relics. (back)


Collectible Amulets
The Triple Fetishes of Modern Thai Men
lrene Stengs, University of Amsterdam

In Thai society collecting amulets is a common hobby of urban middle class men. Irene Stengs demonstrates how amulet collecting is closely interwoven with Thai male identity. In this society, where status and hierarchy are key determinants in social relationships, the amulet collection is one way for a man to express his status. Furthermore Thai amulets are very special objects as they are commodities, collector’s items and powerful objects at the same time, what makes them fetishes in three different ways. Widening Marx’s idea of the fetish character of commodities, the author argues that the value relations on the amulet collectors’ market reflect the power relationships among Thai men. (back)


Monsters in Vienna
The pathologisch-anatomisches Bundesmuseum
Mélanie van der Hoorn

In her contribution Mélanie van der Hoorn describes the genesis and the contents of the peculiar and horrific collection of deformed skeletons, foetuses, and casts in the Pathologisch-anatomisches Bundesmuseum in Vienna . The article not only discusses how collections manage to transform human beings into objects, but shows as well how society at large uses collections to produce false yet reassuring messages about the normal and the abnormal. (back)

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Outstanding Musicians & the Stranger Within.
Reflections on Serb Perceptions of Gypsy Music
Mattijs van de Port

Mattijs van de Port discusses the attribution of musical talent to society’s others, more particularly the gypsies in Serpia. The widespread belief that gypsy musicians deliver a more ‘soulful’ interpretation of Serbian folk music is linked with more generalnotions in Serbian society that present gypsies as ‘the stranger within’: that-what-one-is-in-spite-of-what-one-ought-to-be. The article shows how gypsy musicians dur-ing musical performances return what was projected onto them, thus allowing an expansion of the Serbian persona to a more complete notion of self. (back)

 


Nocturnal Ethnographies.
Following Cortazar in the Milongas of Buenos Aires
Marta E. Savigliano

Marta Savigliano takes us with her into the ‘milongas’ of Buenos Aires and makes the reader experience the tango through her description of the dance. The result is what she dubs a ‘nocturnal ethnography’: the stuttering and stumbling of the ethnographer’s dancing encounter with a strange world, created by the escape from everyday life and the dedication of the other. (back)


Wereldmuziek als antropologische goudmijn
Rob Boonzajer Flaes

Rob Boonzajer Flaes wonders what the anthropologist’s contribution to the study of world music could be. He suggests two main approaches. The first concerns thelevel of the world wide system and the processes of translation from global formsto forms adapted to local needs. The second focuses on music traditions separately, with popular culture, the professional musician’s practice and creolization as focal points. (back)


The Dancer’s Way of Knowing.
Merging Practice and Theory in the Doing and Writing of Ethnography Jill Flanders Crosby

Jill Flanders Crosby, a dancer whose background critically shaped and informed fieldwork experience and data analysis, discusses the unique ethnographic voice that can arise from the dancer’s way of knowing and the knowledge that resides in the moving body. She explores how a dancer’s ways of discovering and making meaning can influence what is apprehended during fieldwork and how it is analyzed, and its importance and validity for anthropological research. (back)


Rite en realiteit in Stravinski’s offerdans.
Le Sacre du Printemps en de grenzen van de verbeelding
Etty Mulder

The shock, dismay and outright fear that was aroused by the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps (and by subsequent generations of listeners) induced Etty Mulder to some reflections on the violent power of this masterpiece and -in what follows from her line of argument -the power of music and dance in general. In her discussion of the forlorn choreographers’ attempts to dance Stravinsky’s music, Mulder concludes that the Sacre du Printemps refuses to be represented in bodily postures and movement. This composition refuses to be imagined in other terms than itself and confirms a view on music as an autonomous source of meaning. (back)


Selena: Sexuality, Greater Mexico and the Song-and-Dance with Hegemony
José E. Limon

Selena was a young and extremely popular singer/performer of working-class, Mexican ancestry though born and raised in the United States. In some part her popularity and her quasi-folk saint status after her death may be explained by her sheer talent and success relative to a socially marginalized community both in Mexico and the United States as well as the tragic manner of her recent death by murder. But, Jose E. Limon argues that her popularity was also created by her culturally nuanced and carefully contained performative sexuality articulated through song but more importantly in the stage costuming of her body and her provocative dancing; a singing and dancing sexuality useful for a community with a tradition of sexual repression even as it also responds to the hegemony of the dominant Anglo society, although in a more fluid manner than the concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘counterhegemony’ have traditionally allowed. (back)


Highlife en juju. Muzikanten als motor van West-Afrika
Marleen de Witte

Marleen de Witte discusses the role of the West African popular music styles juju and highlife in processes of identity formation and the reproduction of social order.
She focuses on musicians as cultural brokers who select and combine various music elements. Highlife musicians mainly contributed to creating class identities and life styles, whereas juju musicians played an important role in the construction of an ethnic Yoruba identity. Contextualizing the musicians’ social positions, the author shows why juju musicians use traditional musical elements to a much larger extent than highlife musicians. (back)


Two-Stepping to Glory. Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility
Julie Malnig

Julie Malnig explores the phenomenon of the cultural and artistic ‘transmission process’ of social dance forms within and among different classes and cultural groups in the United States during the 1900s and 1910s. More specifically, she describes and analyzes the ‘ragtime era’, a period when the country was undergoing tremendous economic, social and cultural changes. The author shows that social dance is not only reflective of cultural practice and behavior, but productive of culture, as well. In particular, she demonstrates the power of dance and musicical forms to embody emerging values and cultural ideals. (back)


Performance and Psychosocial Experience in Kalapalo
Myths About Musical Ritual
Ellen B. Basso

Ellen Basso argues that language and/or symbol oriented approaches are insufficient to clarify Kalapalo ritual performances. Music and dance are the most fundamental aspects of these happenings and therefore sensory and corporeal experiences dominate these events. Even in Kalapalo songs there is no verbal communication since they often consist of unintelligable tone syllables. The author shows how the emphasis on pure musicality over verbal imagery enables the erformers to transcend the boundaries and classifications of language: during the performance the mythical world of ancestral powerful beings can be entered and knowledge can be obtained of ‘what we cannot know, what cannot happen to us’. (back)


Spiritual Music and Dance in Pakistan
Hiromi Lorraine Sakata

Music and dance in orthodox Islam are viewed with suspicion and precaution.
Hiromi Sakata, however, shows how these activities, through their use in spiritual knowledge and healing within the Sufi tradition, have developed into a vibrant, unifying force that succeeds in countering Pakistan’s official orthodox policies. (back)


Contra dancing, pro contradans.
Cultuurpolitiek en ideologie in Nederland, ca. 1918-1955
Rob van Ginkel

The introduction of modern dances like charleston and fox trot in the Netherlands gave rise to opposition from moralists, folklorists and cultural pessimists. As an alternative for these ‘dangerous foreign dances’ they proposed the (re)invention of folk dances. Their efforts were largely in vain, however. Modern dances did not need outspoken advocates to become part and parcel of popular culture. In his article, Rob van Ginkel describes and analyzes these cultural confrontations within the broader theme of the politicization of Dutch culture between 1918 and 1955. What is striking is that though several folklorists used their folk dance theories in the service of national socialist ideology, some postwar politicians were keen on using similar ideas in their political programs. They perceived folk dances as instrumental to national culture building. (back)

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20 (2)


Daydreaming Between Dusk and Dawn
 Orvar Löfgren & Billy Ehn

The play of light and dark from dusk to dawn produces rich ituations for daydreaming.
This paper explores such terrains of everyday fantasies, drawing on a larger, ongoing
study of daydreaming as a cultural practice. Taking the Scandinavian experience with its strong
seasonal variations in light as a starting point, different contexts of nightly daydreams are
explored, the twilight zone, the sleepless hours at night, the approaching dawn and its morning
routines. How are moods and daydreams linked in such situations, what kinds ofcultural raw
materials are used and how have the conditions changed over time? (back)

 


Life After Dark in Kwahu Tafo
Sjaak van der Geest

The author reflects on four nocturnal topics he observed during his research in
Kwahu-Tafo, a rural Ghanaian town: witchcraft, sex, human waste removal and sleeping. Yet
little of his fieldwork was in fact nocturnal. He also asked school students to write about their
views of life after dark in their town. From these reflections, the night in Kwahu-Tafo is revealed
as both the ‘enemy’ of the day – a realm for activities that were not allowed or possible during
the day – and as the day’s indispensable companion. The night solves the moral dilemmas of the
day. The night provides the coulisses of the day. (back)


Testing Nightscapes. African Pentecostal. Politics of the Nocturnal
Rijk van Dijk

Pentecostalism in Africa has developed a special relationship with the night as a
time for conducting specific religious activities. Of these, the night vigil is the best-known, with
its underlying notions concerning darkness, invisible powers, faith and community. Ghanaian
Pentecostals view the night as a kind of landscape where certain spaces and places become important
to test the strength of one’s personal faith and convictions because the time after dark produces
ambiguities of the good and the bad, or the superior and the inferior, of the spiritual powers
that manifest themselves. Participation in Pentecostal night-time activities signals a modernity of
Pentecostal beliefs and identities which, by confronting the powers of darkness, bring about a
strengthening of the faith that churches and leaders aim to establish in interaction with their following.
This contribution ventures to sensitize anthropology to the modernity of these forms of
Christianity and the way they are becoming active producers of social and spiritual environments
– defined here as Pentecostal nightscaping – as testing grounds for the efficacy of their faith. (back)


Bangalore @ Night. Indian IT Professionals and the Global Clock Ticking
Michiel Baas

This article deals with the question of what the night means to IT (information
technology) professionals working in the Indian IT industry in Bangalore. In particular, it argues
that the way IT work gets done (in India) demands a type of flexibility of an IT worker that‘forces’ him to rethink perceptions of working hours (in particular day and night shift). At the
same time the article introduces the accounts of people who do not work for the IT industry,
but have to deal with its impact on a daily basis. Their comments give us a deeper understanding
of the working of this industry and the impact it has made on the city of Bangalore. (back)

To balance
Franziska Jentsch


Nothing Shines as Bright as a Beirut Night
Nicolien Kegels

In times of peace, rich Lebanese youth use the glitzy, glamorous, yet rigidly
regulated nightlife of Beirut as the stage on which to imagine themselves ‘a class apart’ from
the chaotic everyday reality of a politically and economically unstable country. In times of war,
nightlife continues as usual, yet this time it allows the young-and-trendy to imagine themselves
to be as Lebanese as everybody else. Under the slogan ‘war or peace, we continue to live life as
normal’, members of the Beiruti party scene assert their Lebanese-ness by embedding their
clubbing in a national discourse of resistance and resilience. (back)

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21 (2)

Editorial



How to Make the State Listen

Indigenous Violence, State Fears and Everyday

Politics in Peru

 Michael Kent



 Moving to the ‘Dark Side’

Fear and Thrills in Cape Town, South Africa

Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard



 Itinerary of No Mercy

Roundtrip San Salvador – Los Angeles

Juan Carlos Narváez Gutiérrez



 Fear, Politics and Children:

Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian Preschool
Teachers

Talk About Political Violence

Deborah Golden



 Book Review

Lauren Derby: The Dictator’s Seduction.

Politics and the Popular Imagination
in the Era
of Trujillo

José Carlos G. Aguiar

In Conversation: Writing Culture

On Finding Original and Transformative

Ethnographic Voices


Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Performativity, Cultural Memory and

Reverse Anthropology

Barbara Tedlock

Rhyme and Reasons

The Epistemology of Ethnographic
Poetry

Kent Maynard

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