This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education.
Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which
they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph ‘s intervention,
takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic exploration. The…[Read more]

In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for
and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Ma¯ ori are a cultural group or a racial
group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political…[Read more]

This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful
analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions
that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively
constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways
that texts circulate, and how this…[Read more]

In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially
in response to M¯aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered
regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being
a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making
and…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s systems theory to an…[Read more]

It is not a stretch of imagination to link seclusion of girls at puberty with the Palaeolithic cave art. The widely accepted view about cave art suggests that the cave artists had been shamans. This shamanic origin can imply that the religion emerged in the times when the cave artists were active. It has already been posited in the relevant…[Read more]

This essay develops interrelations and mutual implications foremost among Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, and David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. It proposes that the evolution of contempla…[Read more]

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective…[Read more]

Bans on coal mining have been implemented in two tribal majority states in India’s north-east frontier; Nagaland and Meghalaya. In Nagaland the state government imposed the ban in an attempt to capture control of coal extraction and trade, while in Meghalaya India’s National Green Commission imposed the ban over concern for the environment and…[Read more]

Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail is an ethnographic study of migrants from India’s north-east border region living and working in Delhi, the nation’s capital. Northeast India borders China, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Despite burgeoning interest in the region, little attention is given to the thousands of migrants…[Read more]

Borderland Cities in New India explores contemporary urban life in two cities in India’s Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change. Social and economic transformation from India’s embrace of neoliberalism and globalisation, often referred to as ‘new’ India, has become a popular subject for academic analysis in the last decade. This is epit…[Read more]

Edition of cuneiform tablet excavated at Büklükale on the western Kızılırmak in 2010.

An examination of Judean Pillar Figurines in relation to cultural discourse and identity construction in the late Iron-Age Levant