Anthropology

This article describes an unusual system of ceremonial exchange found among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte (Comoro Archipelago) and demonstrates the manner in which the person as citizen, the experience of aging, and ultimately society itself were constituted through it. The forces leading to the demise of the system and the manner in which the disarticulation of exchange obligations is being managed are described. The article portrays the holistic social world and experience created through partic$ation in the exchange system, providing an implicit contrast with the morejiagmented world that follows its dismantling.

Spirit possession manifested in a state of trance is common throughout Africa and Afro-America. Despite local variation, there is a striking degree of similarity among the jnun of North Africa, the deities of Dahomey and Brazil, the Hausa bori, Ethiopian and Sudanese zar, and Malagasy trunba, t o give but a few of the better known examples. The similarity of these spirits and their manifestations suggest t o at least one Africanist that "the dance of possession belongs to the deepest strata of contemporary African civilizations. It is a phenomenon of extraordinary vigor . . ." (Balandier 1966:46).

1 :00 a.m. A spirit possession ceremony is in full swing. Tumbu's eldest daughter Nuriaty, in trance and possessed by a patros spirit, breaks away from the knot of dancers to join her father standing in the shadows on the edge of the spectators. The spirit beckons Nuriaty's younger sister Mariam and me to join them and then proceeds to tell the three of us that it wants two new cloths, one from Nuriaty's husband and one from her younger siblings. One cloth must be identical to Tumbu's; his is old and tattered now. The spirit addresses Tumbu by his first name, a demeaning form his daughter would never use. The spirit insists that when the cloth is ready the spirit must be called up again in Nuriaty, not in Tumbu, to receive it. "Bring me the cloth by Saturday!" the spirit calls as it dances off [edited excerpt from field notes. October 13, 19851.

phy. Only the essay by Richard lenkins discusses explicitly methodological problems in relation to the anthropological study of violence in Northern Ireland, lenkins questions the usefulness of ethnographic data to research cultures of violence and argues in favor of taking seriously other sources of documentary evidence such as newspapers. This suggestion would not seem unreasonable to anthropologists studying violence and the state who have voiced similar concerns about the limitations of conventional ethnography.

Much of the earliest anthropological concern with medical and health-related issues was closely linked to the study of comparative religion and ritual. As medical anthropology has matured into a semi-autonomous subdiscipline, the problem of explicating the relation between medical and sacred realities has receded into the background. This is in part for the apparent reason that the field addresses an increasingly broad range of topics that are not immediately relevant to the anthropology of religion. Yet it also seems to be due in part to a felt but unspoken need to establish an identity for medical anthropology as a clinically relevant, applied, and 'scientific' subdiscipline in sharp distinction from the theoretical, interpretive, and 'humanistic' fields of comparative religion and symbolic anthropology. The implicit assumption in much work is that folk and religious healing, or phenomena of ecstatic trance and spirit possession, can be acknowledged as religious in an emic sense, but must, in an etic analysis, be discussed in medical or psychiatric terms. In this methodological disposition the relevant questions have been whether religious experience is pathological or therapeutic, and whether religious healing can be understood as an equivalent form of psychotherapy.

Professor Janzen's review of m y book Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte ( C R S A zo(4)) contains a central contradiction. On the one hand, he points to the similarities between possession in Mayotte and elsewhere in Africa, in order to argue against the analysis of each case in its own terms; on the other hand, he complains that my data are not similar enough to his, leading him to assume that the discrepancy is due to my theoretical bias. Perhaps the problem has more to do with his theoretical preconceptions than with mine.

This article addresses the general problem of beginning in human thought and action. It argues for complementing the emphasis on transition in the analysis of ritual with attention to beginning and for supplementing the relative passivity of liminality with the resoluteness of initiating action, while also attending to both the transitive and intransitive aspects of beginning itself. Drawing from representations of the foundation of a Sakalava monarchy in Madagascar, the article presents sacrifice as an exemplary form of beginning. Describing sacrifice in this manner obviates the need for any theory of sacrifice while offering new insights on the gift, ethical personhood, and the temporality of tradition.

Book reviewsj rai_1661 905..951 Archaeology, art, and artefacts Arnold, Dean E. Social change and the evolution of ceramic production and distribution in a Maya community. xxx, 351 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2008. £54.50 (cloth) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951

In this paper I pursue arguments concerning the relation between economic and ethical value. I consider the relationship of activities to objects and (following Aristotle and Arendt) distinguish between the activities of action (doing) and production (making). Marx founded his theory of value on labor and the way it is congealed and occluded in commodities and most anthropology, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, has followed suit in the attention to objects (or objectifications). What are the consequences of adding the value of acts (especially performative acts) to the value of labor and what are the "objects" into which acts congeal? What would be a ritual theory of value?

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Much of the earliest anthropological concern with medical and health-related issues was closely linked to the study of comparative religion and ritual. As medical anthropology has matured into a semi-autonomous subdiscipline, the problem of explicating the relation between medical and sacred realities has receded into the background. This is in part for the apparent reason that the field addresses an increasingly broad range of topics that are not immediately relevant to the anthropology of religion. Yet it also seems to be due in part to a felt but unspoken need to establish an identity for medical anthropology as a clinically relevant, applied, and 'scientific' subdiscipline in sharp distinction from the theoretical, interpretive, and 'humanistic' fields of comparative religion and symbolic anthropology. The implicit assumption in much work is that folk and religious healing, or phenomena of ecstatic trance and spirit possession, can be acknowledged as religious in an emic sense, but must, in an etic analysis, be discussed in medical or psychiatric terms. In this methodological disposition the relevant questions have been whether religious experience is pathological or therapeutic, and whether religious healing can be understood as an equivalent form of psychotherapy.