I argue that theories of kinship and their critique have been dominated by emic perspectives on Euro-American (European, for short) relatedness which has confused kinship for the whole of European relatedness. I review a string of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century European social theories, demonstrating that they are all about European relatedness: a dynamic spectrum integrated through the notion of growing up. As such European relatedness is an integral part of the social structure and the state.
Win Neisen is a local, indigenously developed church, that is the contemporary manifestation of the well-known Paliau Movement which started in Manus, Papua New Guinea, in 1946. One of its central doctrines is that reality is divided into two spheres, the physical and the spiritual. Win Neisen followers adhere to a millennial vision, that involves the final dissolution of the opposition between the two spheres. In this paper I present recent material on Win Neisen beliefs and practices in order to characterize its particular form of millennialism. I conclude that this is very different from the millennialism of the early Paliau Movement and argue that a perspective on different regimes of historicity is useful for explaining this difference. Finally, I suggest a possible connection between Win Neisen's emphasis on the material-immaterial opposition and its specific regime of historicity relating to the challenges of the present time.
What does it mean to be "near" for families with autistic teenagers and young adults in Denmark? We explore this question, drawing upon critical phenomenology and the anthropologies of autism and kinship. More specifically, we investigate how families experience and respond to living with autism in family lives where commonsense notions of closeness and intimacy are not always possible. Following longitudinal fieldwork with eight families, we present examples of entanglements between human and non-human animals as they emerge in disorienting situations, experiences of uncertainty, surprise, and wonder. Through a method and analysis of perplexity, we argue that dwelling on perplexing moments of interspecies relationality not only holds a potential to reveal unconventional and productive modes of relating, but also offers a critical lens on normative frameworks of family life in Denmark.
Anthropological studies of Pentecostal and evangelical faith practices and experiences frequently reveal that followers struggle with a challenge related to the presence of "the religious," in both its material and immaterial manifestations. This challenge often prompts an academic dilemma in attempting to ascribe meaningful existence to things that are simultaneously absent and present. To move beyond this dilemma, I will focus on a tension within a group of travelers attending the annual prayer convocation of the All Pacific Arise movement, based in Solomon Islands, held in Israel. The tension arose from individuals wanting to visit a biblical site, which the group leaders considered a distraction from experiencing God's presence during the journey. However, this distraction was seen not as a need to abstain from material objects that could mediate contact with God, but rather as a sign that God, though omnipresent, fluctuates in intensity. Their understanding that divinity varies over time and space invited me to consider Graham Harman's Object Oriented Ontology as explained in Immaterialism, which asserts that all things, both material and immaterial, inherently remain beyond our grasp. I suggest that this approach helps us interpret objects, including "God" and "religious movement" as transcendent and, at times, withdrawn.
This essay explores ritual artifacts from ontological, material, and processual perspectives by applying an "operational sequence" (cha & icirc;ne op & eacute;ratoire) approach and tracing their "conceptual affordances." Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin people and their artifacts in the conflictual landscapes of the Negev/Naqab, this study challenges previous works that have conceptualized sacrificial blood rituals as symbolic ways to commune with the divine. It draws on the ontological and material turns in anthropology and related disciplines to show how handprints made with animal blood on ancestral saints' graves, despite their prominent visibility, do not represent communion but embody it. Inspired by scholarship on the anthropology of blood, I explore how its material properties afford a process of becoming-with the sacrificial animal and the saint. I also discuss how the handprints can be channeled more broadly for (onto-)political purposes and territorial claims.
This article examines how the invisible spiritual world takes material form in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the archipelago since 2010, I argue that Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, whose influence has expanded significantly in Vanuatu and elsewhere in recent decades, reinforces perceptions of immanent invisible worlds. It does so by introducing a semiotic ideology that defines new and compelling ways of understanding this invisible world, particularly in contexts of anxiety and longing. Focusing specifically on a local Christian charismatic revival movement between 2014 and 2025-a period during which thousands of sorcery remedies were collected and two accused sorcerers were tragically lynched-I argue that more attention is needed to understand how ideas about invisible material forces shape people's lives. I also show how locally rooted Pentecostal-charismatic movements are perceived as particularly effective in articulating and addressing such forces.
Difficulties in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge within Amazonian societies impact collective identity, sociopolitical cohesion, and ritual praxis. While idealized models of this transmission exist, these have come under strain, engendering concerns regarding the potential loss of knowledge. Nevertheless, as the Murui-Muinai (Uitoto) case demonstrates, the transmission of ritual knowledge, articulated with conceptions of bodily substances and ritual products, has found alternative pathways in contexts of social crisis. These innovations, which include women and affinal kin breaking with male primogeniture, offer valuable comparative perspectives for other Amazonian societies facing similar challenges of social change and the disarticulation of traditional kinship structures.
Instead of reproducing an assumed opposition between immaterial and material religious elements to lived religious worlds, this special section approaches the issue of im/materiality through ethnographic and historical material collected on Pacific religious movements. We argue that religious movements exemplify the emergent character of religion, revealing how it is fluidly and continuously constructed. Religious movements are creative becomings, in which the im/materiality of religion is negotiated anew when members work toward the realization of their religious projects. Studying religious movements, we therefore suggest, allows us to see the conceptualization of, and the relationship between, materiality and immateriality in the making and offers a privileged perspective on the forces running through and composing emergent religious worlds. In our introduction, we summarize and contextualize our contributors' innovative theoretical and analytical approaches in relation to questions of materiality and immateriality in the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally.
I analyze the power of things to direct the actions and shape the belief of members of a Catholic charismatic movement in Papua New Guinea. Things not only feature centrally in the movement's ambitions, but play a vital role in its practices. Taking a relational ontology perspective, I argue that the material and immaterial dimensions of religion are not distinct fields of experience, knowledge, and practice but are co-constitutively intertwined in relational actions between humans, spirits, and things. Emanating from the premise that human and nonhumans assemble in historically and sensuously idiosyncratic ways, I study the ways that bodies, rosaries, and mobile phones have become part of Catholic charismatic practice and ethno-theology in a context significantly shaped by missionization and colonialization. I show that the Catholic charismatic encounter has opened up a space for the renegotiation of power relationships via relational actions between humans, spirits, and things.
It is argued that in the case of the Meb & ecirc;ng & ocirc;kre (Kayap & oacute;) of Central Brazil, with implications for other Northern J & ecirc; speaking peoples, those authors who equated kinship with the sharing of bodily substance diverted attention away from what corresponds more appropriately to soul-stuff, contained in names and prerogatives transmitted from the ancestors. The names of the mythological ancestors are perpetuated among the living in exogamous matrilineal Houses. The repetition of names in each generation produces genealogical amnesia, the unintended consequence of which is to maintain mythical time equidistant from the living. This interpretation approximates the Meb & ecirc;ng & ocirc;kre to the matrilineal Bororo and the patrilineal Tukano-speaking peoples of Northwest Amazonia, suggesting that the supposed irrelevance of any notion of descent has proved to be premature. Amazonian First Peoples were long taken to be disinterested in their forebears, but recent research has nuanced this claim, putting the ancestors back into the picture.
In the upland indigenous villages of Northwestern Andean Argentina, the ethnography of ritual offerings to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) highlights how specific substances, such as food, coca leaves, alcohol, and cigarettes, perform as material life forces, relating humans, animals, and more-than-human beings into a living environment. These relations are not necessarily harmonious and symmetrical, as they include both commensality and mutual consumption. This article focuses on an ethnographic theory of substance, connecting local praxis, Andean anthropological literature, and anthropological reflections on animism as "animacy." It calls for a possible understanding of substances as relational performing, that is, relational actions in a middle-voice mode. Underscoring the role of food offerings, the article then links kinship-relatedness to a wider environmental relationality. Finally, by underlining the multiple interconnected aspects of the vital force associated with breathing, it contributes to the discussion on "animism revisited" in the Andes.
