Niko Besnier

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Anthropology

Crisis, valor y esperanza son tres conceptos cuya intersección y mutua constitución permiten repensar la naturaleza de la vida económica, tomando distancia de los modelos abstractos alejados de las realidades cotidianas de las personas comunes –modelos cuyas deficiencias quedaron dramáticamente expuestas con la actual crisis económica mundial–. Est...

A new and important contribution to the re-emergent field of comparative anthropology, this book argues that comparative ethnographic methods are essential for more contextually sophisticated accounts of a number of pressing human concerns today. The book includes expert accounts from an international team of scholars, showing how these methods can...

In the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes’ bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer ava...

To write a successful article for a major anthropology journal, authors can employ a number of strategies. The first and most essential is to familiarize themselves with the journal's mission. For AE, authors must ground their arguments in current debates in the discipline, make a clear contribution to anthropological theory, support this contribut...

Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil's stadiums or China's parks, on Cuba's baseball diamonds or Fiji's rugby fields, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional energy, bet money, perform witchcraft, and ingest substances. Sport is a microcosm of what l...

Referenda can be sad affairs. This time last year, I was in Greece discussing with friends their referendum. It was a difficult visit with many painful conversations. Most were about what the EU meant, what might Grexit have meant, and the way material security was rapidly vanishing: having a decent salary, a job, money in the bank, valuables in ba...

The changing architecture of the professional rugby union has created a seeming contradiction in Fijian nationalism: the best Fijian rugby players are now representing other nations and yet remain national heroes regarded by many Fijians as the embodiment of masculine indigenous Fijian ideals. Fijian ideologies about rugby problematize Benedict And...

The circulation of mobile professional athletes, a phenomenon whose visibility increased exponentially in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, poses important questions for postcolonial approaches to the human condition. At first glance, the orientation of entire segments of the population in some countries in the global South to th...

Special Section Colloquium Meditation on Michael Carrithers' "Anthropology as irony and philosophy."

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host...

The migration of rugby players from Fiji and neighbouring Pacific Island nations poses fundamental questions about the way in which sport is embedded in historical, political, social and global dynamics, all of which give specific meanings to sports and those who play it. An approach that bestows a central role on comparison focuses equally on how...

Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinki...

Recipient of 2015 ICAS Book Prize Reading Committee Edited Volume Accolade (Social Sciences) Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender cate...

Since their invention in mid-nineteenth century Britain, modern sports have traveled: first, as they were exported to all regions of the world, often piggybacking on colonial projects; second, as sports are often brought to troubled economies and states in the context of development and reconciliation projects; and third, as athletes moved across n...

Globalization has added complexity to the notion of communicative competence. Although globalization has now become a central focus in sociolinguistics, speech communities continue to be treated as homogeneous entities in which language shifts affect everyone in similar fashion, and smaller speech communities as particularly vulnerable to language...

Communicative competence, a concept that emerged in the 1970s, is in need of rethinking. This rethinking operates in two directions: on the one hand, by taking into account the new forms of interaction and contexts associated with globalization; on the other hand, by locating communicative competence as emerging out of embodied, intersubjective, an...

Towards the end of the years following 2000 a veritable epidemic of hair salons occurred in Nuku'alofa, the small capital of the Tongan islands. This phenomenon reflects new ways of understanding the body by means of which Tongan women attempt to distance themselves from traditional life without however leaving it behind totally. Transgender men, w...

Over the past three decades, the important role that anthropological theory has bestowed on the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, gender, and sexuality has placed sports at the center of questions central to the discipline. New approaches to the body, based on practice theory, view the sporting b...

The mobility of rugby professionals from Tonga to Japan and points beyond poses new questions about the role of the body as a mediator between the subjective and the objective, which anthropologists and other social scientists have generally examined within the confines of specific societies. Increasingly, mobility across different regimes of valua...

The formation of social classes in Pacific Islands societies and in their diasporas continues to raise theoretical questions about the nature of social classes and their relationship to prior forms of social organization. In Tonga, middle classes both reproduce aspects of the older rank-based system with which they continue to coexist and innovate...

The concluding chapter brings together strands of the argument developed in this book. It discusses the micro–macro linkage between interaction and the larger social context, and the tension between emotion and politics. All aspects of social and political life on the atoll, from the public to the intimate, operate at the convergence of seemingly d...

Far from being displaced by modernity, the exchange of women's textile valuables of little practical value but enormous ritual significance is increasing in importance in Tonga and amongst Tongan migrants in the industrial West. The dwindling production of and increasing demand for these textile valuables have prompted entrepreneurs to open pawnsho...

While globalization has become a central lens through which social scientists have reframed old questions in the last couple of decades, students of language and gender in their sociocultural context have been slower to do so. Yet global processes are of concern to people' s daily lives in all contemporary societies, as they gender themselves and e...

At the second-hand marketplace in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, Tongans buy and sell objects that their diasporic relatives send them instead of remittances. While selling objects goes against the grain of a traditional moral order, the marketplace is immensely popular but dominated by local Others. It enables participants to articulate and pra...

In Tonga, transgender men and heterosexually-defined men form sexual and romantic relationships. However, these relationships are unthinkable to mainstream society because they are incommensurable with the three dyadic principles that define gender, particularly the covenant between sisters and brothers. Transgender persons seek different solutions...

The Miss Galaxy beauty pageant held annually in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, is, at first glance, a show of transgendered glamour, but it is equally a display of translocality. Through the performance of an exotic otherness (through costumes, names, dances, etc.), the socially marginalized contestants claim to define the local, in ways that ma...

Niko Besnier a publie en 2000 un ouvrage dans lequel il proposait une description grammaticale du tuvalu. L'A. examine ici le traitement des categories vides dans cet ouvrage en soulignant son interet pour la theorie linguistique

In urban Tonga, certain men identify themselves and are identified by others as taking on some attributes of womanhood on a regular basis. This process, however, yields a heterogeneous category of persons, who are variously positioned in the socio‐economic structure and moral order. At one extreme, some transgendered men are highly productive indiv...

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, even if only to seek inspiration beyond the confines of familiar intellectual paradigms, is an arduous endeavor. Yet the participants in the Almagro Workshop, whose revised contributions appear in this volume, took an important step towards significant cross-disciplinary exchanges. This important step is the apprec...

In the early days of psychological anthropology, the study of emotions was principally a cataloguing task: a typical endeavor consisted in identifying emotion terms in the language of the community that the anthropologist studied, and in attempting to arrive at a definition for each term. The resulting catalogue could then be compared with similar...

This paper is a critical examination of ‘involvement’ as an analytic category in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The discussion first identifies a variety of conceptual problems associated with the nature and locus of involvement. Then a number of ethnographic studies focusing on the relationship between language use, emotionally, society,...

Two ideological currents underlie political life on Nukulaelae Atoll (Polynesia): one that calls for a strong leadership structure and another that argues for egalitarianism. This paper focuses on the fate of one ambitious leader who fails to heed the community's egalitarian ideology and whose career is cut short by gossip alleging him to be a sorc...

Written discourse produced on Nukulaelae atoll of Western Polynesia falls principally in two categories: personal letters and religious sermons. Personal-letter writing is a highly affective communicative context, in which the vulnerable aspects of the person are highlighted. Sermons, in contrast, elaborate authoritarianism and directness. The dive...

MoermanMichael, Talking culture: Ethnography and conversation analysis (University of Pennsylvania Publications in Conduct and Communication). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. xiii + 212. - Volume 19 Issue 1 - Niko Besnier

This article examines the organization and function of information-withholding sequences, a conversational strategy used by participants in gossip interactions on Nukulaelae, a Polynesian atoll of the Central Pacific. A withholding sequence is a three-turn sequence whereby a piece of information is withheld in the first turn, an other-repair is ini...