David Berliner

• Professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles

A comment on Kierans, Ciara, and Kirsten Bell. 2017. “Cultivating ambivalence.” Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 23–44.

Aquí presento —con la autorización del autor— la traducción de un brevísimo texto que, a mi entender, supera en relevancia a cualquier cosa que haya leído en los últimos años [incluidos artículos en revistas ISI y demás síntomas de la cuantofrenia académica]. El original en inglés puede consultarse: https://www.academia.edu/34347273/How_to_get_rid_...

Academic Anxieties Because it shakes up the very foundation of our world, anthropology triggers anxiety. In this article, I explore some of these anxieties that the contemporary academic capitalism has contributed to amplify.

Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...

Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...

Why nostalgia?Nostalgia seems characteristic of our times. In the West, we find an all embracing nostalgic glorification of the way things were done in the past; it is omnipresent in as varied domains as nationalism, heritage policies, consumerism, tourist industry, popular culture and religious and ecological campaigns. This issue of Terrain exami...

Nostalgia has played a foundational role in the history of anthropology. Historically, our discipline lent its passion for exotic cultures vanishing against the modern world. I call this perspective ‘disciplinary exonostalgia’. In this article, I suggest the persistence of an intimate entwinement of contemporary anthropology with exonostalgia. I ar...

Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in...

By comparing the historic center of Luang Prabang in Laos with that of Fès in Morocco, we are seeking to elucidate, beyond their own particular specificities, the similarities between these two sites on the World Heritage list. As soon as UNESCO came into play, the landscape of these two heritage sites became increasingly complex. Not only tourism,...

Cultural transmission is a hot topic today. In this article, I show how it haunts the foundations of anthropology and continues to animate many contemporary debates. I suggest, for scholars interested in Intangible Cultural Heritage, new directions to better explore its workings.

Participant observation nowadays constitutes a fully legitimate research method as well as an existential attractor for many anthropologists. In this essay, I look at the desire for ethnographical participation and the pleasure and pain that can result from this experience. I describe the participatory inquiry as an existential and intellectual adv...

Participant observation nowadays constitutes a fully legitimate research method as well as an existential attractor for many anthropologists. In this essay, I look at the desire for ethnographical participation and the pleasure and pain that can result from this experience. I describe the participatory inquiry as an existential and intellectual adv...

This article explores the workings of nostalgia as a major driving force in heritage-making. Based on my fieldwork in Luang Prabang, an ancient royal town of northern Laos which became a UNESCO Listed World Heritage Site in 1995, I propose that it is necessary to disentangle the multiple nostalgic attachments which lie behind the often-mentioned la...

Luang Prabang is a town in Northern Laos that has been on the World Heritage List since 1995. Famous for its Buddhist monasteries and orange-robed monks, as well as for its colonial architecture, its international reputation has grown quickly. It has now become a key destination for tourists in Southeast Asia. Among the unexpected effects of UNESCO...

La transmission est une question très chère au cœur des anthropologues. Pourtant, rares sont les études qui prennent le transmettre comme point de départ, comme un objet d’étude « en lui-même et pour lui-même ». Dans cet article, je montre combien la transmission hante les fondements de notre discipline et comment elle continue d’animer la plupart...

Losing one’s cultureThe politics of Unesco at Luang Prabang (Lao pdr)Luang Prabang is an ancient Laotian royal city which figures on the list of World Heritage sites since 1995. Because of its saffron clad monks, because of its Buddhist temples and because of its supposed mystical religious aura, as well as because of the network of traditional and...

"Is there a French anthropology today?" The question might seem arrogant to many, but it was addressed to me in 2003 during an AAA (American Anthropological Association) meeting in Washington, DC when an American friend and colleague questioned me about contemporary French anthropology. Although a Francophone Belgian, and not French, I found myself...

Bloch on Bloch on ‘Religion’ Maurice Bloch Why Maurice Bloch’s Work on ‘Religion’ Is Nothing Special but Is Central Laurent Berger Maurice Bloch, or How to Think Persistence in Religion? David Berliner Is Ritual Really Like a Hat? Or, The Category Formerly Known as ‘Religion’ Fenella Cannell The Cognitive Turn and the Materiality of Social Life: On...

This paper is an attempt to explore local definitions of ethnic identities on the Basse Côte of Guinea-Conakry (West Africa). I look at how Bulongic people contextually delineate their group identity using essentialist perspectives and constructivist narratives, between migration and autochthony tropes. I delve into the complex relationships that t...

This special section of Men and Masculinities speaks of gender, methodology, and anthropology. It is designed to open an interdisciplinary debate about crucial issues in social sciences and gender studies. Building on anthropologists' experiences, it takes ethnography as an entry point. For some time, feminist-inspired literature on gender and the...

In Monchon, a now Islamicized Bulongic village, the “circumcision of 1954” was the last male initiation ceremony. Nevertheless, the Bulongic have inherited their religious past, with its initiations, invisible forces, sacred groves and secrets. Old men who took part in this ceremony claim to be the “last Bulongic”. The evolution of an initiatory so...

Among anthropologists of both sexes, there is an enduring cliché that female anthropologists have better access to women's worlds than their male counterparts. I work about female religiosity in a West African Muslim society, the Bulongic (Guinea-Conakry), and my presence as a man was never an issue with the Bulongic women. In fact, from the beginn...

Memory, persistence, and cultural transmission are hot topics in anthropology today. Contributing to an increasing anthropological interest in youth agency, in this article I invite readers to look at youth as a crucial site for understanding issues of religious memory and cultural transmission. In the past five decades, Bulongic people (Guinea–Con...

Anthropological Quarterly 78.1 (2005) 197-211 In recent years, studies of memory have blossomed in the humanities. (Klein 2000, Radstone 2000, Zelizer 1995) In anthropology in particular, a vast number of scholars are currently occupied with research about memory. (Candau 1998, Climo and Cattell 2002, Olick and Robbins 1998) The list of contributio...

The Feminization of Custom. Possessed Women and Religious Transmission among the Bulongic (Guinea-Conakry). — The Bulongic used to be “irreducible fetishists”. The year 1955, when a Muslim scholar going by the name of Asekou Bokare passed through, put a definitive end to these ritual practices, which informants call “customs”. Despite the absence o...

Les Bulongic ont jadis été d'" irréductibles fétichistes ". L'année 1955, avec le passage d'un expert musulman, connu sous le nom d'Asékou Bokaré, mettra un terme définitif à ces pratiques rituelles, que mes interlocuteurs désignent par le terme " coutume ". Pourtant, en l'absence d'initiation, de masques et de forêts sacrées, se jouent, aujourd'hu...

Au cours d’une mission exploratoire a Franceville et Okondja, en pays ambede, une epidemie de fievre hemorragique a virus Ebola s’est declaree dans le departement de la Cuvette Ouest (nord-ouest du Congo-Brazzaville), a la frontiere gabonaise. Pour rappel, la fievre d’Ebola est une maladie contagieuse et grave dont le taux de letalite est tres elev...