In this issue...

Futures We Envision
Experiencing Maleness
Print Production and Media Flows
Pragmatism, Moralism, and Traditionalism
Anthropological Pasts

Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

AE FORUM: FUTURES WE ENVISION
Provocation
Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
JANE I. GUYER
A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals’ views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames.
[time, macroeconomics, evangelism, events, future]

Commentaries
Co-futures
VINCENT CRAPANZANO

Commentary on Jane Guyer
JONATHAN FRIEDMAN

Arbitrating faith and reason
HIROKAZU MIYAZAKI

Causality, ethics, and the near future
JOEL ROBBINS

Marginal utilities, time, and zombies: Comment on Jane Guyer’s “Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time”
ROBERT THORNTON

It’s about time: A commentary on Guyer
RICHARD WILK

Future knowledge
CAITLIN ZALOOM

Rejoinder
Further: A rejoinder
JANE I. GUYER

EXPERIENCING MALENESS

Life as art, and seeing the promise of big bodies
FLETCHER LINDER
In this article, I illustrate how bodybuilding, a popular U.S. cultural practice concerned with aesthetics and self-development, productively engages with social and cultural struggles facing late-modern subjects, including how humans might connect with the world, each other, and ourselves. Ethnographic details are based on discourse analysis of bodybuilding media, interviews with amateur and professional bodybuilders, and participant-observation in bodybuilding contests and gym training throughout the United States. My arguments and shifting narrative presentations draw on work on critique and postcritique in and beyond academic anthropology and suggest how seeing bodybuilding in a potentially positive light requires perceptual–ethical habits not currently fostered in the discipline.
[bodybuilding, United States, aesthetics, critique]

All-male sonic gatherings, Islamic reform, and masculinity in northern Pakistan
MAGNUS MARSDEN
In this article, I explore the complex opportunities afforded by high-intensity performative events for the instantiation of diverse forms of sociality and masculinity in the mountainous Chitral region of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. I focus ethnographically on two types of all-male musical gatherings that are regularly attended by Chitrali Muslims: the istók and the mahfil. The “permissibility” of these types of entertainment, according to Islamic authoritative teachings, is a source of considerable debate in the region: Many Chitrali “men of piety,” who are mostly trained in Pakistani madrassas and are often affiliated with so-called Islamist political parties, deliver mosque addresses during which they pronounce such gatherings “impermissible” within Islam. Analysis of the role played by these all-male sonic gatherings in the instantiation of locally contested forms of masculinity furnishes unique insights into the much-debated issue of how Muslims handle and respond to pressures to Islamize. More broadly, I aim to contribute to wider anthropological debates concerning the constitution and significance to everyday life of local theories of aesthetics, emotion, and ethical action.
[Pakistan, Islam, emotion, performance, masculinity, music]

The birth of nanke (men’s medicine) in China: The making of the subject of desire
EVERETT YUEHONG ZHANG
Why have hospital visits by impotence patients increased and visits by yijing (spermatorrhea) patients decreased in China since the 1980s? A change in moral symptomatology explains these diverging trends: Yijing, as a symptom under Maoist socialism, reflected a moral code of hostility toward individual desire, whereas impotence, as a symptom in post-Mao China, reflects the justification of individual desire. This contrast reveals a shift in the basis of subject making from enforcing collective unity to promoting individual desire. The recent emergence in China of nanke (men’s medicine), which treats impotence and other complaints, signals a new moral code that produces desire-centered subjectivity.
[post-Mao China, desire, impotence, sexuality, Chinese medicine, subjectification, self-castration]

PRINT PRODUCTION AND MEDIA FLOWS

Ways of reading as religious power in print globalization
THOMAS G. KIRSCH
In this article, I address issues of power with regard to religious print media distributed worldwide. I show that mission societies seek to ensure a homogenous interpretation of their publications by making them “obligatory passage points” for socioreligious advancement and standardizing literacy practices. Once successfully established, networks created through religious print media evolve as a twofold process in which the construction of power by media distributors and their audiences’ seeking of empowerment form an integrated whole. In this trajectory, literacy practices bridge local and global realms by enabling extensive religious networking based on the shared use of print media.
[globality, state, public, media, attention, climate, Peru]

SARS, a shipwreck, a NATO attack, and September 11, 2001: Global information flows and Chinese responses to tragic news events
VANESSA L. FONG
In this article, I examine how Chinese citizens in China and abroad used discourses of Chinese backwardness to make sense of tragic news events while simultaneously trying to avoid becoming identified with that backwardness. I focus on various interpretations of NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999; the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the sinking of a Chinese ferry in 1999; and the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic to explore how Chinese citizens negotiated between their own ambivalent loyalties and the contradictory official, unofficial, local, national, and international narratives in which these events were embedded. These negotiations suggest that global information flows are creating a transnational panopticon that increasingly enables neoliberal governmentality to operate on transnational levels.
[China, globalization, media, citizenship, nationalism, identity, death]

PRAGMATISM, MORALISM, AND TRADITIONALISM

Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the “edge” of Hopi sovereignty
JUSTIN B. RICHLAND
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic “talk about courtroom talk,” whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity—in which claims to cultural distinctiveness are either libratory or reifying, autochthonous or other determined—suggesting that a sharper picture of cultural politics takes these antinomies together as the ironic dialectics constituting the emergent “edge” of indigenous governance today.
[cultural difference, metapragmatics, indigeneity, Hopi law]

Toward vernacular democracy: Moral society and post-postcolonial transformation in rural Orissa, India
AKIO TANABE
In this article, I consider intercaste negotiations in defining ethically desirable sociopolitical relationships in contemporary Orissa, India. Democratization following local self-government reforms led to the inclusion of hitherto marginalized voices in local political dialogue. Particularly notable is subalterns’ employment of egalitarian sacrificial ethics to reinterpret the ontology of caste as founded on participation and cooperation of equal parts rather than on the colonially traditionalized hegemonic values of hierarchy and domination. This may be seen as an attempt to establish a vernacular democracy that mediates embodied sociopolitical morality and the idea and institution of equal participation.
[democracy, morality, subalterns, postcoloniality, the vernacular, civil society, political society]

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PASTS

Review essay: Reassessing anthropology’s maverick: The archaeological fieldwork of Frank Hamilton Cushing
NANCY J. PAREZO
Anthropology has had many charismatic figures in its past whose work has bordered on genius and who have presaged contemporary anthropological theories, issues, the choice of research topics, methodologies, or ethical concerns. Although often marginalized in the history of anthropology, a few of these key individuals have captured our imagination and recent attention because long-lost diaries, field notes, and reports have come to light, often after years of diligent searching by dedicated scholars. This review article assesses the contributions of three recent books on one of American anthropology’s most fascinating and enigmatic individuals: Frank Hamilton Cushing. These works focus on Cushing’s groundbreaking regional research in the American Southeast (Florida) and the Southwest (Arizona) and tell us much about the foundational values of our discipline.
[history of archaeology, Cushing, methodology, ethics, values]

“From sweet potatoes to God Almighty”: Roy Rappaport on being a hedgehog
BRIAN A. HOEY AND TOM FRICKE
Recognized as a principal figure in ecological anthropology, Roy Rappaport is best known for his study Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). His work in the anthropology of religion has received less attention. Least acknowledged is Rappaport’s role in defining an “engaged” anthropology. Drawn from interviews Tom Fricke conducted with Rappaport in the year before his death in October 1997, this article gives insight into these three facets of his professional life. Beginning with an account of Rappaport’s fieldwork with the Tsembaga Maring, the discussion takes up his core themes, ideas that evolved out of his early field experience and with which he was engaged as he worked to finish his final book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999).
[Roy Rappaport, interview, biography, Maring fieldwork, ecological anthropology, anthropology of religion, engaged anthropology]

BOOK REVIEWS
The following book reviews are available on AnthroSource:

Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Abu-Lughod)
Debra Spitulnik

Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Allman, ed.)
Leslie W. Rabine

Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (Borneman, ed.)
Joan Vincent

Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas (Conner with Sparks)
Jennifer Rycenga

Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Englund)
James Ellison

We Know Who We Are: Metis Identity in a Montana Community (Foster)
William Willard

The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (Hodgson)
Fiona Bowie

Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Lakoff)
Sjaak van der Geest

Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Lowe)
Sarah Hitchner

The Best of All Possible Islands: Seville’s Universal Exposition, the New Spain, and the New Europe (Maddox)
Susan M. Di Giacomo

Voices from the Global Margin: Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes (Mitchell)
Douglas Hertzler

Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium (Rakita, Buikstra, Beck, and Williams, eds.)
Katina T. Lillios

Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Smith)
David T. Courtwright

Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Zaloom)
James G. Carrier