This article is about the meaning of mandinga in Afro-Brazilian capoeira as it is practiced in the city of Salvador, Brazil. Capoeira is an art form that combines elements of ritual, play, and fight. My main argument focuses on the mandinga as an indigenous form of power that shapes social relations, bodily interaction, magic acts, and the definition of a person. The concept of mandinga offers an understanding of the deceptive logic of capoeira and contributes to the development of an ethnographic theory of power. The emphasis here is on the importance of mandinga as a strategy for fighting and as a principle for social interaction with strong ontological implications. It is considered a cosmological force that affects the foundations of subjective reality and the perception of the world.
The Art of Losing One's Own Culture Isn't Hard to Master, It's Obviation
Roy Wagner, Gregory Bateson, and the Art of Science Writ Large
Elizabeth Stassinos
Like Gregory Bateson, Roy Wagner leaves no heirs. This is not the curse of Souw, but the curse of original thinking. Like Bateson though, Wagner has bequeathed to a future anthropology a certain style of thinking about Others, an elegant way of dislocating the Western self from its routines, its kinships, its ego, its diaspora. In this paper, and as a student of Wagner’s at Virginia in the 1980s and 1990s, I hope to trace some of Wagner’s work through Bateson’s and to compare some of the habits of mind of these two ethnographers and theorists and relate these back to The Invention of Culture. If I seem to forget that text in places or re-start it in others, it is because I have tried to stay close to that topic that led both in such opposite (one could say complementary schizmogenic) directions, one to biological sciences, the other to science fiction. I section off observations on their ethnographic theory by using poetry to express shifts in topics for, at their best, Wagner and Bateson are poets of that extreme human condition so sought after by ethnographers, culture shock.
Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Minimal Ontology
Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
Theodoros Kyriakides
functionalism, on the other. Belief and Disbelief in Favret-Saada’s Work and Elsewhere At first impression, Favret-Saada’s (1980) Deadly Words is preoccupied with an ethnographic theory of pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on the
Introduction
Hierarchy, Value, and the Value of Hierarchy
Naomi Haynes and Jason Hickel
Ethnographic Theory 3 , no. 2 : 219 – 243 . Haynes , Naomi . 2012 . “ Pentecostalism and the Morality of Money: Prosperity, Inequality, and Religious Sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt .” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 , no. 1
Introduction
(De)materializing Kinship—Holding Together Mutuality and Difference
Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Caroline E. Schuster
14 May 2015 ). Bennett , Jane . 2010 . Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things . Durham, NC : Duke University Press . Brightman , Robert . 2013 . “ Hierarchy and Conflict in Mutual Being .” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 , no
The Anthropology of Ontology Meets the Writing Culture Debate
Is Reconciliation Possible?
Rane Willerslev
California Press . Falzon , Mark-Anthony , ed. 2009 . Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research . Burlington : Ashgate . Hastrup , Kirsten . 1993 . “ The Native Voice—and the Anthropological Vision .” Social
The Ontological Turn
Taking Different Worlds Seriously
Andrew Pickering
Predication .” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 ( 1 ): 271 – 280 . Durkheim , Emile . 1995 . The Elementary Forms of Religious Life . Trans. Karen E. Fields . New York : Free Press . Eliade , Mircea . 1964 . Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
The Possibilities of Failure
Personhood and Cognitive Disability in Urban Uganda
Tyler Zoanni
: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity . New York : New York University Press . Bialecki , Jon and Girish Daswani . 2015 . ‘ Introduction: What Is an Individual? The View from Christianity ’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 61–79
En las márgenes de los Estados
Participación política y formaciones ciudadanas en América Latina
Catherine Alès and Claudia Puerta Silva
. ( 2013 ). Anti-crisis . Durham : Duke University Press . Vincent , J. (Ed.). ( 2002 ). The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique . Oxford : Blackwell Publishers . NOTAS 1 Sobre el concepto de “crisis” y su empleo
Introduction
Ethnographic engagements with global elites
Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair
. Lisette Josephides , 32 – 55 . London : Bloomsbury . Kalb , Don . 2015 . “ Introduction: Class and the new holism ”. In Carrier and Kalb 2015 : 1 – 27 . Kapadia , Anush . 2015 . “ Encyclopedia Plutonica ”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
