I draw on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oceania to formulate the concept of ‘charisma work’, a type of labour in which the extraordinariness of individuals and their visions for the world are (re)produced and promoted to help legitimise rational-legal power. I focus on how two Pacific Island microstates, the Cook Islands and the Republic of Kiribati, work with Conservation International, an international environmental NGO, to build networks of charismatic people in support of the world’s largest marine protected areas. I argue that an aim of charisma work in this case is to attract support and resources to meet the objectives of Pacific Island microstates caught in a double bind of balancing the right to internal sovereignty and the demands of extra-national partners and interests. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, I propose that rational-legal systems utilise charismatic processes to support authoritative claims while, at the same time, obscuring the egalitarian origins of institutional legitimacy.
Anthropology Matters Journal and its mailing list are twenty years old. Established in 1999 out of the student-led seminar Ethnography at the Third Millennium held at SOAS, by 2002 the journal was available open access online. For our final issue as co-editors, we spoke with some of those involved in Anthropology Matters’ foundation about its beginnings, open access, and the changing expectations of when and where it is thought best for early career scholars to publish.
This article examines a Taiwanese ‘free’ school, which I name as Wholesome School, based on an ethnography of forty-six days participating and observing teachers’ and students’ lives on campus. Taiwan, a democratic country under the influence of the progressive education movement, provided fertile soil for education innovation. A group of educators detested the state’s factory schooling model, which upholds a single ideal of academic success and the Confucius value of filial piety and obedience, and founded Wholesome. These teachers reinvented the social game rules of schooling and endowed students with liberty, equality, and independence. In the boarding school, students lived idiosyncratically and negotiated with the others on their freedom and responsibility. Responsible for their own choices, Wholesome students learned to discover their selves, make autonomous decisions, and respect individuality as well as diversity. From this research, it is evident that while social structures have a significant power in structuring habitus and limiting choices, social actors are aware of the rules of the structures they are embedded in and the serious stakes involved in playing the games and are capable of creatively accepting, rejecting, and modifying such rules by means of their agency and reflexivity.
