In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates’s intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space]

I base this article on an event that transpired during a funeral ceremony in the village of Achinathang in Ladakh, India. This incident, which coincided with a period of interreligious conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist communities, led me to question the manner in which margins become sites for the definition and contestation of citizenship and power. Here, I analyze the construction of margins in multiple contexts: in negotiating boundaries between death and rebirth, in coping with and challenging the control exerted by town-based political reform movements over rural space, and finally, in locating the position of the ethnographer in histories and spaces of domination. [death rituals, social space, politics of location, Buddhism, South Asia]

In this article, I examine the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship. I argue that globalization takes form in the Cayman Islands through the channels carved out for it by local state interests and regulation that have defined citizenship as a terrain for competing entitlements between expatriate workers and enfranchised permanent residents. Caymanians struggling to retain local political control over their labor market only further its incorporation into the global economy while expatriates can find their exit from Cayman stymied by the localization of labor markets elsewhere. [citizenship, transnational, labor, offshore finance, tourism]

In this article, I examine the child sponsorship program of World Vision Zimbabwe--offering perspectives from nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees, sponsors, sponsored children, and rural communities being assisted. I demonstrate how transnational processes of giving and membership in a global Christian family contrast with Zimbabwean interpretations of humanitarian assistance and efforts to initiate a Zimbabwean child sponsorship program amidst growing local inequalities. In effect, new perceptions of economic disparity are produced by the very humanitarian efforts that strive to overcome them. I explore the intimate and personal relationships encouraged by sponsorship and the political economies within which they are situated, which include jealousies, desires, and altered senses of belonging. [Africa, NGOs, humanitarianism, transnationalism, development, Christian evangelism, Zimbabwe]

In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. In focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self-improvement. [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam]

Navajo people frequently attribute occurrences of arthritis and rheumatism to inappropriate contact with menstruating women or menstrual blood. During ethnographic interviews about rules governing contact with various types of blood, Navajo consultants often explained these norms with allusions to key portions of the Navajo oral histories. The connections made by Navajo consultants in these contexts suggest that, like many other diseases, afflictions such as arthritis and rheumatism are metaphorically linked to ancestral impropriety or immorality. That is, particular actions on the part of ancestors of the Nihookaa Dine’e (Earth Surface People) are referenced as the precedent for considering certain types of menstrual and game animal blood dangerous to the health and well-being of contemporary Navajo people. In exploring the means by which these types of blood have come to carry such significance in the Navajo world, I contribute to disciplinary concerns about more effective ways to study so-called menstrual taboos and demonstrate how language, bodily substances, bodily ills, human agency, and ancestral actions intertwine. [Native Americans, Navajo, body, illness, menstruation, sexuality, arthritis/rheumatism]

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rethinking households: an atomistic perspective on European living arrangements (Verdon)
David Jacobson