JASO-Online Volume I, Number 2

JASO-online n e w s e r i e s N.S. Vol. I, no. 2 Winter 2009 CONTENTS The awkward social science? Anthropology on schools, elections and revolution in Nepal David N. Gellner 115-140 The never-ending debate about The moral basis of a backward society: Banfield and ‘amoral familism’ Emanuele Ferragina 141–160 Ideas and ironies of food scarcities and consumption in the moral economy of Tuta, Cuba Marisa L. Wilson 161–178 Still ‘taming the turbulent frontier’? The state in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan Maira Hayat 179–206 Black no more: towards a new theoretical framework for studies of social space connected with the ‘informal economy’ Małgorzata Irek 207–225 Report on centenary conference, ‘“What’s the matter” in anthropology?’ OUAS 226–227 BOOK REVIEWS 228–249 Journal of the Antrhopological Society of Oxford JASO-online Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford • In association with School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (University of Oxford) and Oxford University Anthropology Society New Series, Volume I, no. 2 (2009) JASO-online Editors: Robert Parkin, Stephen Robertson Web Editor: David Zeitlyn ISSN: 2040-1876 © Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK. All rights reserved in accordance with online instructions. Download current issues and back numbers for free from: http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/publications/journal-of-the-anthropological- society-of-oxford/ ii JASO-online N.S. Vol.I, no. 2 ISSN: 2040-1876 Winter 2009 CONTENTS David N. Gellner, ‘The awkward social science? Anthropology on schools, elections, and revolution in Nepal’ (Inaugural Lecture, 15 May 2009) 115-140 Emanuele Ferragina, ‘The never-ending debate about The moral basis of a backward society: Banfield and “amoral familism”’ 141-160 Marisa L. Wilson, ‘Ideas and ironies of food scarcities and consumption in the moral economy of Tuta, Cuba’ 161-178 Maira Hayat, ‘Still “taming the turbulent frontier”? The state in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan’ 179-206 Małgorzata Irek, ‘Black no more: towards a new theoretical framework for studies of social space connected with the “informal economy”’ 207-225 Oxford University Anthropology Society: report on centenary conference, ‘“What’s the matter” in anthropology?’ 226-227 Book reviews 228-249 Alan Barnard, Anthropology and the Bushman (Gordon Ingram) Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly immigrants: rights, activism, and transnational South Asian politics in the United States (Maira Hayat) Annette Aurélie Desmarais, La Vía Campesina: globalization and the power of peasants (Marisa Wilson) Roy Ellen (ed.), Modern crises and traditional strategies: local ecological knowledge in island Southeast Asia (Peter Rudiak-Gould) Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (eds.), Creativity and cultural improvisation (Kate Fayers-Kerr) Martin Jones, Feast: why humans share food (Matt Grove) Peter Luetchford, Fair trade and a global commodity: coffee in Costa Rica (Kathleen Sexsmith) Daniel Miller, Stuff (Andrew Bowsher) Eva Reichel, Notions of life in death and dying: the dead in tribal Middle India (Iliyana Angelova) Andrea S. Wiley and John S. Allen, Medical anthropology: a biocultural approach (Kate Fayers-Kerr) iii JASO-online N.S. Vol.I, no. 2 ISSN: 2040-1876 Winter 2009 Notes on contributors to this issue: Iliyana Angelova is a research student in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthro- pology, University of Oxford. Andrew Bowsher is a research student in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthro- pology, University of Oxford. Kate Fayers-Kerr is a research student in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthro- pology, University of Oxford. Emanuele Ferragina is a research student in the Department of Social Policy, Univer- sity of Oxford, and a lecturer in Social Sciences and Humanities at the École supérieure de commerce de Paris. David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College. Matt Grove is a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Cognitive and Evolution- ary Anthropology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Golding Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Maira Hayat recently received her MSc in Social Anthropology from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Gordon Ingram is a Departmental Lecturer within the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. Małgorzata Irek is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences and Law, Oxford Brookes University. Peter Rudiak-Gould is a research student in the Institute of Social and Cultural An- thropology, University of Oxford. Kathleen Sexsmith received her MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford's Department of International Development in 2008. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Development Sociology at Cornell University. Marisa L. Wilson recently received her DPhil in Social Anthropology from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. She is currently a lecturer in Human Geography at the Department of Food Production, the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. iv JASO-online N.S. Vol.I, no. 2 ISSN: 2040-1876 Winter 2009 THE AWKWARD SOCIAL SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGY ON SCHOOLS, ELECTIONS, AND REVOLUTION IN NEPAL1 David N. Gellner Vice-Chancellor, Warden, Colleagues, Friends: As an anthropologist of religion and ritual I am conscious of a duty to follow custom, and it is the custom on occasions like these to begin by invoking the ancestors. Of Oxford ancestors, the two who tower over the field are A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans- Pritchard. A French reviewer of my first monograph was kind enough to see in it the influence of Evans-Pritchard.2 Evans-Pritchard, as many of you will be aware, gave an inaugural lecture in which he praised and endorsed the explicitly comparative and positivistic view of anthropology of his predecessor, Radcliffe-Brown. Later, he changed his mind and decided that anthropology should be seen as a kind of cultural translation and that therefore anthropology belongs properly with the humanities. In his Marett Memorial Lecture of 1950, he famously declared that ‘social anthropology is a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art’; consequently ‘it studies societies as moral systems and not as natural systems…[it] seeks patterns and not scientific laws…[and] interprets rather than explains.’3 For anthropologists at the time, this must have come as a shocking and iconoclastic retreat from the conventional position enthusiastically advocated by Radcliffe-Brown. One thinks of the post-war decades, and particularly the time when Evans-Pritchard was making these pronouncements, as a golden age of social anthropology—funding 1 Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, held in the Examination Schools on 15 May 2009. I have preserved the main text as it was spoken. References and passages omitted in order to keep to the allotted hour of the lecture are given in the footnotes. To view the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the lecture, see Appendix. 2 Gellner (1992). I referred to Evans-Pritchard explicitly just three times, though one of these was a prominent invocation, alongside Weber and Durkheim. 3 ‘Social Anthropology Past and Present’; see Evans-Pritchard 1962: 26. Gellner, The awkward social science? pressures were few, research opportunities plentiful, classic ethnographies just waiting to be composed, and post-colonial guilt a distant cloud on the horizon. So it is chastening to read Evans-Pritchard writing in the Oxford Magazine in 1951 that ‘the members of the Institute are so overburdened with teaching, supervision and administration that they are unable to get on with their own research or even essential reading’ (Evans-Pritchard 1951). One’s first reaction is to exclaim that the pressures of 1951 surely cannot have been equal to those of today, but perhaps it was ever thus. Evans-Pritchard’s successor, the pioneering anthropologist of Chinese society, Maurice Freedman, rejected the choice between his two great predecessors. He wrote that the dilemma between anthropology as art and anthropology as science was, in his words, ‘largely an illusion’ (1979: 26), because all that anthropologists were doing when they claimed to be scientific was affirming ‘an idea of rigour and objectivity in method and a faith in the ultimate orderliness of what they have chosen to study’ (ibid.). However, Freedman was writing before the rise of postmodernism, with its rejection of ‘orderliness’ in method, in the object of study, and in the way it is represented. Freedman’s successor, Rodney Needham, famously deconstructed kinship and declared that it did not exist, and he took the same position on many other concepts that common sense would have us accept as human universals. Needham’s own inaugural lecture was none the less an affirmation of faith in the possibility of comparative work. The abstractness of his list of what can be compared might have astonished Radcliffe-Brown, including as it did ‘symbolic forms’, logical relations such as symmetry and asymmetry, modes of classification, and so on (Needham 1978: 17-21). But he affirmed unequivo- cally that there is a universal psychology and—with David Humean phrasing that was no doubt deliberate—likewise affirmed the existence of a universal ‘mode of reason proper and common to all men; and [he added] this crucial finding is an achievement, neces- sarily, of comparative ethnography and the discipline of social anthropology.’ A nice connection to my own subject matter is made by the fact that Needham, having served with the Gurkhas, could (as I cannot) sing Nepali songs, when suitably lubricated and in congenial surroundings such as the Turf Tavern or King’s Arms. It is said that he broke down in tears during his inaugural lecture when asking his audience to remember and honour the sacrifices of the Gurkha troops with whom he fought in Burma, one of whom (though he did not mention it at the time) had saved his life at the battle of Kohima.

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