Jefferey M. Sellers,Anders Lidström and Yooil Bae: Multilevel Democracy: How Local Institutions and Civil Society Shape the Modern State

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

C. Lange,S. Nakagawa,J. Onyx,and C. Schwabenland (eds.), Women’s Emancipation and Civil Society Organisations: Challenging or Maintaining the Status Quo?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

“Am I My Brother's Keeper?” (Genesis IV:9): Violence and the Making of Society

The question behind this essay is whether an account of the making of social life—and it is as such that I read Genesis—also posits a thesis about the making of violence.     

Jureković, P., Labarre,F. (eds.): From Peace Making to Self Sustainable Peace: International Presence in South East Europe at a Crossroads?

RJB Review of Journals and Books

Jureković, P., Labarre, F. (eds.): From Peace Making to Self Sustainable Peace: International Presence in South East Europe at a Crossroads?     

The heritage machine: the neoliberal order and the individualisation of identity in Maragatería (Spain)

Since the inception of modernity, minority and majority identities have been constructed in a twofold process involving the parallel generation of representations of difference and the obliteration of alterity, that is, of other modes of existence. The exacerbation of the modern period in the supermodern era has furthered this process, adapting it to the new forms of neoliberal and post-political governmentality. This is paralleled by a shift from real to symbolic and metacultural forms of interaction that serve to negotiate identity and hegemony in the social sphere. Heritage has become a fundamental trope for the negotiation of identity, access to resources and power, as its production is not anymore bounded to the State but is rather ‘dispersed’ in society. This article explores the way cultural heritage has become a ‘machine’ for the production of dominant and individualised identities interacting in a deregulated market environment in Maragatería (Spain).     

‘Loyal resistance’: N.P. van Wyk Louw (1906–1970) and the intellectual

The article analyses the seminal role played by the poet N.P. van Wyk Louw in defining the intellectual in Afrikaans public discourse. It shows that Van Wyk Louw’s defence of key concepts such as ‘liberal nationalism’ and ‘the open discussion’ in the 1950s was a movement away from his earlier views on Afrikaner nationalism, in which he focused on non‐rational forces. In the contested terrain of debates on Afrikaner nationalism Van Wyk Louw emphasised the need for the intellectual to ground his interventions in the tradition of European political thought, which demanded a respect for justice and an attempt at reconciling nationalism with liberalism. The article finally comments on the relevance of Van Wyk Louw’s contribution to current debates on public intellectual life in South Africa.     

The mirror effect: seeing and being seen in the cult of María Lionza (Venezuela)

In the cult of María Lionza (Venezuela), the look or gaze constitutes a fundamental aspect of the ritual process, since it is one of the privileged ways through which the relations between spirits, mediums and participants are established. The use of the camera as a research method helps to gain a better understanding of this issue, since the action of holding a camera – and looking through it – may provoke comments and reactions among believers, resulting in a process by which a set of assumptions about the meaning of seeing and being seen that usually remain implicit become explicit. Most of the time, these newly explicit assumptions appear as visual prohibitions or as a consequence of a mistake made by the researcher. What I defend in this paper is that ‘visual mistakes’ and prohibitions are very valuable in anthropological research and should be taken into account. The text concludes with two general reflections: one about the connection between cinema and the sacred, and the other about the intimate relationship between what we usually call ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in visual anthropology.