Anthropological Theory

In this essay, I argue that the concept of masculinity that was first developed in Bateson's Naven, his 1936 monograph about ritual and society among the Iatmul, a New Guinea people, was an originary moment for the constructivist position that has come to hold sway, not only over masculinity studies in Melanesia in specific, but over masculinity studies in general. My thesis, however, advances a more definite claim: Bateson's prescient view of gender did not come to theoretical maturity in masculinity studies, either areally, or more broadly defined, for another 50 years, when it was given new articulation by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988). In order to make the connection I see between these two books, I first reread Bateson's argument in Naven with regard to its view of Iatmul masculinity. I then turn to Marilyn Strathern's conception of gender in Melanesia, again with an emphasis on masculinity. After discussing my claim that the one gave rise to important dimensions of the other, I conclude by briefly defending that assertion against a methodological challenge, that of Whig interpretation, which is inevitably raised against this kind of intellectual history.

This article marks an effort to extend Louis Dumont's concept pair of hierarchy and individualism towards a more realistic understanding of social formations. Dumont's work is reviewed along with his critics, and through a survey of contemporary ethnography a move towards a concept of totalization is suggested. It is argued that a view of totalization and detotalization provides a vocabulary for a re-establishment of the social for the discipline of anthropology.

Past literature tends towards dichotomous representations of computer hackers as either unhealthy young men engaged in bold tournaments of sinister hacking or visionaries whose utopian technological lifestyle has the potential to disrupt the pathologies of capitalism and modernity more generally. In contrast, this article examines the heterogeneous nature of hacker sociality in order to more adequately portray the complex topography of hacker morality and liberalism. We distinguish between and compare three different, though overlapping, moral expressions of hacking in order to theorize liberalism not as it is traditionally framed — as a coherent body of philosophical, economic, and legal thought or a set of normative precepts and doctrines — but as a cultural sensibility that, in practice, is under constant negotiation and reformulation and replete with points of contention. In doing so, we seek to contribute not only to the ethnographic literature on hacking, but to wider theoretical issues regarding the relationship of culture, morality, liberalism and technology in the contemporary world.

The economic imperatives of neoliberalism combined with the technologies of New Public Management have wrought profound changes in the organization of the workplace in many contemporary capitalist societies. Calculative practices including `performance indicators' and `benchmarking' are increasingly being used to measure and reform public sector organizations and improve the productivity and conduct of individuals across a range of professions. These processes have resulted in the development of an increasingly pervasive `audit culture', one that derives its legitimacy from its claims to enhance transparency and accountability. Drawing on examples from the UK, particularly the post-1990s' reform of universities, this article sets out to analyse the origins and spread of that audit culture and to theorize its implications for the construction of academic subjectivities. The questions I ask are: How are these technologies of audit refashioning the working environment and what effects do they have on behaviour (and subjectivity) of academics? What does the analysis of the rise of managerialism tell us about wider historical processes of power and change in our society? And why are academics seemingly so complicit in, and unable to challenge, these audit processes?

In The Perception of the Environment (2000), Ingold has argued that differences in cultural knowledge are more a matter of variation in embodied skills than in discursive knowledge. These skills develop through the practitioners' engagement with their environment and in situated social relationships. In order to `discover' for themselves what is taken for granted for experienced practitioners, they have to `fine-tune' their perception through observation and imitation. But how do observations and imitations of others' movements actually transfer into shifts in one's own perception? In her book Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (2002), Milton argued that emotion acts as a learning mechanism to filter attention. I propose that when one observes and imitates in a process of learning, one enters into an empathic relationship with a skilled practitioner. Through synchronization of intentions and movements, emotions spread over and change the practitioners' perception accordingly.