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La représentation ethnographique dans l’ordre postcolonial : symbolisation de la société, du corps, et de l’autre

Ellen Badone

Consuming Passions: Child Abuse, Fetishism, and "The New World Order"

Jean Comaroff
While our current world — post-colonial, late-capitalist, translocal — might seem uniquely plagued by eroding frontiers and virtual realities, it is still peopled by beings who try to build shelters on what they take as relatively firm cultural ground. This paper explores one African instance of how people live at the juncture of global currents, how they deal with the "beat" of heteroglossia. I focus on the changing figure of the "post-colonial" witch — the witch who trades in commodities and travels by taxi — and I explore his/her characteristic obsessions. How do such figures bespeak late twentieth-century conditions? Why are they increasingly preoccupied with the bodies of the young? Does this bear any relation to what underlies the rising terror, in many Western contexts, of the physical vulnerability of children?

Commentaire/Commentary: Monstrous Desires and Moral Disquiet: Reflections on Jean Comaroff’s "Consuming Passions: Child Abuse, Fetishism, and ’The New World Order’"

Michael Lambek

Culture, Technology and the New Death: Deadly Disputes in Japan and North America

Margaret Lock
"Brain death" was institutionalized 25 years ago primarily to make organs "harvested" from brain dead bodies on an artificial ventilator available for transplant. Doubts exist as to whether the donors used in the first heart transplants conducted in South Africa in 1967, and in Japan in 1968, were dead. Reaction to these two experiments was remarkably different. In Japan the surgeon was arrested for murder, a national debate about brain death continues today, and transplants from brain dead bodies have only been made permissible since June 1997. This debate contrasts with that in North America, where transplant technology is routinized and an organ "shortage" is recognized. In Japan the argument is politicized, focuses on death, and draws on cultural knowledge about Self and Other; Japan and the West; harmony and individualism; tradition and modernity / postmodernity. North American discussion focuses on saving lives; making death meaningful; remaking death yet again; and assumes technology to be culturally and politically autonomous. These respective debates are discussed using textual analysis and the results of interviews with philosophers, physicians, and nurses in both cultural settings. An effort is made to suggest why the Japanese debate is central in constituting contemporary cultural identity, whereas the North American debate is of little public interest. The significance for anthropology of the hybrid status of brain dead bodies and organ recipients together with the national and global circulation and commodification of bodies and body parts associated with this technology is considered.

Commentaire / Commentary

Nelson Graburn

Un défi majeur : penser la description ethnographique

François Laplantine
Ethnographic description (literally, writing culture), without which anthropology is not possible, is an activity which blurs the boundaries between the linguistic and the visual. One could almost say, as Marcel Duchamp has said of painting, that it is an activity of the retina. Attentive to detail, and to the details of the detail, ethnographic description starts from the experience of witnessing and attempts to elaborate a system of knowledge (anthropology) which returns incessantly to that which has been witnessed. However, ethnographic description does not consist solely in witnessing, but in enabling witnessing; that is to say, writing about what one has seen which now no longer exists. As writing about difference, ethnography is postponed writing that cannot accommodate a lack of linguistic differentiation, but rather calls for the full use of the syntactical and lexical resources of the language. It is concerned with enabling witnessing through words, which cannot be interchangeable, particularly when one’s goal is to report in the most meticulous and differentiated manner possible, the specificity of the unedited situations with which one has been confronted. The explanatory rationality that develops in the process of substituting the invisible (concept) for the visible (sensations) and the general for the particular is today the object of an increasing scepticism. It is not impossible that ethnographic description, which focusses on witnessing and seeks a particularizing style of writing, might attract renewed interest. However, this activity, which this paper will show cannot be considered subaltern (a kind of point of departure for knowledge), has paradoxically never been considered as such by anthropologists who nonetheless hold it to be the principal category of our discipline. The difficulty stems from the fact that not only does ethnographic description fail to dissociate the study of culture (ethnos) from the question of writing (graphê), but also derives its distinctiveness precisely from their relationship. Proceeding to transform the gaze into language, ethnographic description implies that if we wish to understand it, we should ask ourselves about the relationships between the visible and the speakable, or to be more exact, the readable. Ethnography is social reality transformed into language, and inscribed in a network of intertextuality: anthropology, which maintains a necessary relationship with what has previously been said and written. Given these conditions, what are the relationships between social reality and textual reality? How can one construct not only society as text but also the society of the text?

Commentaire/Commentary : écrire l’exclusion et l’invisibilité, comment, pour qui ? : Notes autour de la conférence de François Laplantine

Francine Saillant

Les errances du Renard pâle dans le haut pays dogon

Gilles Bibeau
This paper will demonstrate the ways in which new ethnographic research carried out by Dutch and joint Italian and Malian research teams in the Upper Dogon region has led to doubts about the trustworthiness of the classic Works by Griaule and his team. The paper will be concerned with understanding what can explain the divergences between the ethnographic Works of Griaule, Leiris, Dieterlen and Calame-Griaule on the one hand, and those of Walter van Beek, Piero Coopo and L. Pisani on the other hand. I will also raise the question of why native voices, particularly those of novelists, tend to construct the ethnography of the Dogon at a considerable distance from both the older and more recent ethnological literature. I will examine the fictional Works of Yambo Ouologuem and Hampaté Ba with a view to answering the question of whether these works actually provide a better evocation of Dogon society than do the ethnographers.

Commentary/Commentaire: After the Fox: Griaule, Griots, and Griottes

William Rodman

Concluding Comments

Thimothy D. Epp, Jasmin Habib, Nancy Lewis and Karen Saylors

Loaves and Fishes: Sustaining Anthropology at McGill

Bruce G. Trigger
The McGill anthropology department provides an example of a small and poorly funded department striving to achieve excellence by concentrating its limited resources on a few highly specific objectives. Initially the goal of the department was to study the impact of economic development on indigenous peoples. While this focus shaped early recruitment of teaching staff and the graduate program, other considerations, especially the needs of the undergraduate program, required a broader coverage of anthropology. In recent decades the shift from a behaviourist to a cognitive orientation in anthropology has encouraged increasing emphasis on cultural anthropology at the graduate level as social change and development have come to be viewed increasingly from a perceptual point of view. The dialectic between the needs of the graduate and the undergraduate programs has promoted a combination of focus and flexibility that in retrospect has served the department well.

La dimension cognitive du rapport aux médecines parallèles

Gérard Baril
The research in this article supports the postulate that the confrontation actors have with practical choice favours the observation of attitudes and their associated representations. Thus, the practical choice Québecers have with regard to diverse therapentic options delimits the field of observation. Likewise, the cleavage between "scientific medicine" and "alternative medecine" is used to analyze present day behaviour, attitudes and representation, in other words, a cognitive journey through which one has a glimpse into knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge.

La prostitution féminine à Montréal, 1945-1970, par Danielle LACASSE, Montréal : Boréal, 1994, 236 pages (broché)

Bernard Arcand

Prehistories of the Future : The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, par Elazar BARKAN et Ronald BUSH, éditeurs, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1995, 449 pages, 18,95$ US (broché), 55,00$ US (relié)

Bertrand F. Gérard

Visions of Sound. Musical Instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America, par Beverley DIAMOND, M. Sam CRONK et Franziska von ROSEN , Waterloo : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994, 222 pages, 19,95$ US (broché), 47,50$ US (relié)

Hervé Rivière

The Broken Hoe. Cultural Reconfiguration in Biase Southeast Nigeria, par David Uru IYAM, Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 1995, 238 pages, 18,95$ (broché), 55,00$ (relié)

Jean-Claude Muller

Looks and Frictions. Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, par Paul WILLEMEN, Bloomington et Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, et London : British Film Institute, 1994, 263 pages (broché)

Michel Larouche

Sexy Dressing Etc., Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity, par Duncan KENNEDY, Cambridge et London : Harvard University Press, 1993, 258 pages, 24,95$ US (relié)

Bernard Arcand

Music among the Zu’/’wa-si and Related Peoples of Namibia, Botswana and Angola, par Nicholas M. England, 1995, New York & London : Garland Publishing, Harvard Dissertations in Folklore and Oral Tradition, 417 pages (relié)

Emmanuelle Olivier

Localisme, fêtes et identités. Une traversée ethno-festive de la Mauricie (Québec), par Bernard CHÉRUBINI, Paris : Éditions de L’Harmattan, 1994, 336 pages, 180 FF (broché)

Jocelyne Mathieu

Yassin, vallée heureuse de l’Himalaya. Étude sur les Bourouchos du Yasin (Pakistan septentrional), par Étienne TIFFOU, Paris : Peeters, SELAF 351, Coll. Asie et Monde Insulindien 23, 1995, 201 pages (broché)

Denis Matringe

Open the Social Sciences : Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Immanuel WALLERSTEIN et al., Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1996, 105 pages, 10,95$ US (broché), 37,30$ US (relié)

Gérard Baril

Peuls nomades. Études descriptives des Wodaabe du Sahel Nigérien, par Marguerite DUPIRE, Paris : Karthala, 1996, 336 pages (broché)

Suzanne Champagne

La parole inuit. Langue, culture et société dans l’Arctique nord-américain, par Louis-Jacques DORAIS, Paris : Peeters, SELAF 354, 1996, 331 pages (broché)

Nicole Tersis

Peuples des Grands Nords. Traditions et transitions, par Anne-Victoire CHARRIN, Jean-Michel LACROIX et Michèle THERRIEN, directeurs, Paris : Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, 1995, 351 pages, 130 FF (broché)

Paul Charest

Women Wielding The Hoe. Lessons from Rural Africa for Feminist Theory and Development Practice, par Deborah Fahy BRYCESON (ed.), Oxford/Washington, D.C. : Berg Publishers, 1995: 282 pages

Judith M. Abwunza

The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition, by Harjot OBEROI, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 494 pages

Karim-Aly Kassam

The world’s writing Systems. Edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xlv + 920 pp. 222 $ CAN

Kevin Tuite

Maurice BLOCH, La violence du religieux, Paris : Éditions Odile Jacob, 1997, 232 pages, 135 FF

Jean-Claude Muller

Couverture / Cover

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