P Pels
Biographic Data
| ID | 12437 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Pels |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Pels |
| SIGNATURE | PELS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6504-6649 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 585 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
“Black” Magic? Rethinking Early Modern Dutch Ethnographies of “Fetish”
This essay uses a comparison of two Dutch-language sources on the concept of “fetish”—by Pieter de Marees (published 1602) and Willem Bosman (published 1704)—to suggest that, before we ask what they tell us about seventeenth-century West Africa, they show a significant historical change in how Europeans assessed their relations with people on the continent. The material engravings that introduce the books indicate that the invisible ontologies be…
Unpacking Missionary Collections
Christian missionary collections have contributed much to the development of the exhibitionary complex, but have received significantly less notice than imperial states using violence to acquire collections, and subsequent demands for restitution. This introductory essay argues that researching missionary collecting and exhibiting requires a broad approach to the materiality of collections, to recognize the multilayered biographies of artifacts, …
Spirits in the Museum
The question how to deal with artifacts in museums that have a religious provenance has been debated extensively with regard to Christianity and so-called “world religions”—also in this journal. Le
Middle‐Class Versus Working‐Class White Mothers’ Approaches to Diversity in the Netherlands
There is a large body of literature on how white middle‐class parents select schools for their children in gentrifying urban contexts. In this study, we aimed to explore the experiences of such parents after enrolling their children in ethnically mixed schools but also how these experiences varied in gentrifying urban contexts and smaller cities. We interviewed mothers without a migration background living in a large city (Amsterdam) or a medium‐…
The Spirit of Matter
The Uncomfortable SubjectSituating Cultural Relativism and Conservative Movements in Indonesia
sense of rejection toward other groups, whether based on ethnicity, religion, or any other identity markers, has always been a delicate matter for an anthropologist. Departing from the premise of cultural relativism, anthropologists are trained to empathize with their research subjects. However, similar empathy could not easily be exercised to research subjects whose conservative views contradict cultural relativism. The dilemma might explain why…
‘Not an Airy European Fantasy’ or How (De)Colonization Embeds the Anthropological Imagination
This chapter looks with suspicion at the modernist portrayal of the imagination as a unique human capacity to imagine and change social institutions. Instead of opposing mind and matter, or invoking a centuries-old utopian tradition (and the suffering it brought), I explore anthropology’s ‘imaginations’ in a critical ‘decolonizing’ register: firstly, the ways in which ‘imagination’ could criticize core concepts of modernity (the nation-state and …
Classification revisited
Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline's history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity…
“Where There Aren’t No Ten Commandments”
The El Dorado scandal not only displays how anthropologists commonly draw the boundaries between ethics and scientific expertise but also uncovers, through its discursive excesses, the common and rather ethnocentric assumptions on which these boundaries are based. One of the more interesting features of the initial reaction to the Turner/Sponsel memo was the American Anthropological Association’s profession of weakness with regard to censuring co…
An Expository Study of Witchcraft among the Basoga of Uganda
Guidelines for anthropological research
As anthropologists we are increasingly confronted with attempts - be it by employers, the media, or policy makers - to regulate our work in ways that are both epistemologically and ethically counterproductive and threaten our scientific integrity. This document is written out of concern about the problems that occur when protocols for data management, integrity, and ethics, developed for sciences that employ a positivistic, hypothesis-testing and…
Guidelines for data management and scientific integrity in ethnography
New protocols for scientific integrity and data management issued by universities, journals, and transnational social science funding agencies are often modelled on medical or psychological research, and do not take account of the specific characteristics of the processes of ethnographic research. These guidelines provide ethnographers with some of the most basic principles of doing such research. They show that the primary response of ethnograph…
Anthropology as Science Fiction, or How Print Capitalism Enchanted Victorian Science
Ethnography, Intersubjective
Intersubjective interaction has always provided the epistemological foundation for ethnographic knowledge. However, this has developed across three historical phases. First, before professional academic anthropology, intersubjective interaction in the “field” was subjected to the hierarchies of natural history collecting centered on the metropoles. Second, around 1910, it became a sine qua non of “intensive fieldwork” as a hallmark of academic an…
Data management in anthropology
Recent demands for accountability in ‘data management’ by funding agencies, universities, international journals and other academic institutions have worried many anthropologists and ethnographers. While their demands for transparency and integrity in opening up data for scrutiny seem to enhance scientific integrity, such principles do not always consider the way the social relationships of research are properly maintained. As a springboard, the …
Enchanted reason
Science fiction is a privileged site to study the magic of capitalism. On the one hand, an anthropology of science fiction asks questions about how to characterize science fiction socially and culturally. It should resolve these questions by acknowledging that its first recognizable manifestation occurs when the fictionalization of science, fed by the confusion science produces about life and morality, is brought together with the drive to commer…
The Raw and the Overcooked
The Raw and the OvercookedSome Comments on Stephan Palmié’s Cooking of History Peter Pels KEYWORDS Stephan Palmié, Peter Pels, The Cooking of History, Afro-Cuban religion, Africa, Cuba, Yoruba, Santéria What does Stephan Palmié’s new book offer to someone who is neither an expert on nor particularly interested in Afro-Cuban religion? The introduction on call number BL2532.S3 (under which books on Afro-Cuban religion are shelved in the Chicago Uni…
The Impact of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) on Parenting by Mothers Within an Ethnically Diverse Population in the Netherlands
Intimate partner violence (IPV) profoundly affects multiple life domains for the people involved. We report on the experiences of Dutch mothers of various ethnic backgrounds regarding their parenting during and after IPV, their perceptions of the influence of IPV on their parenting, as well as their need for and experiences with support services. We conducted qualitative interviews with 100 mothers in the Netherlands who had experienced IPV. Most…
Modern Times
Anthropologists have long neglected the future as an object of study, and recent contributions to the topic rarely address it systematically. This essay argues that this is the result of the unfinished project of postcolonial reflexivity about the anthropological subject. Anthropologists are, like most other social scientists, addicted to primitive temporal classifications of modernity and especially its tendency toward epochal thinking. To comba…
Using “Magic” to Think from the Material
Introduction As the provocative discussions about religious life at Çatalhöyük (Hodder 2006, 2010) have demonstrated, speaking of transcendent forms of sociality in human prehistory is a tricky business. In an earlier volume, Carolyn Nakamura began to address “when” and“where” one can speak of “magic” and whether “magic” could be viewed as something distinct from “religion” in the Neolithic material culture of Çatalhöyük, while Peter Pels elabora…
After objectivity
Intersubjectivity in anthropology has rarely been studied against the broader background of the place of intersubjective exchanges in the long-term history of anthropology. This article attempts to do so by setting the history of anthropology against the history of objectivity since the enlightenment as outlined by lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's seminal Objectivity (2007). On that basis, it concludes that the currently popular romantic ideal…
Magical Things
This article focuses on the concepts of magical things followed by fetishes, commodities, and then the modern world of computers. When do things become magical is a vital question which this article tries to answer. This article discusses the magical elements associated with various objects that we come across in our daily lives. It also focuses on the problematic aspect associated with magic and fetish. The understanding reached by the impossibi…
Amazing Stories
Global 'experts' and 'African' minds
Whereas many historians of British anthropology worried themselves about the complicity of anthropologists with colonial rule, and have tried to demonstrate a fundamental contradiction and gap between academic anthropologists and colonial administrators, a study of the professionalization of anthropology in Tanganyika Territory between 1930 and 1960 can show that the ethnographic tradition of Tanganyika indirect rule slowly attuned itself to clas…
Temporalities of “religion” at Çatalhöyük
This essay starts from the assumption that the careful distinction of different temporalities indicated by the material evidence from the Çatalhöyük site may advance the study of whatever kind of specially marked “religious” or “transcendent” experiences occupied the life of its inhabitants. In writing it, however, I found that I needed a certain theoretical and methodological framing to make sense of my arguments about how “temporalities of reli…
The Anthropology of Colonialism
This article explores the evolving field of colonial studies, emphasizing its interdisciplinary nature, blurring the lines between anthropology, history, and literary studies. It examines how this field necessitates a reflexive approach within anthropology, prompting scholars to confront the discipline's historical entanglement with colonial practices. The article argues that colonial studies has progressively shifted towards understanding coloni…
Professions of Duplexity
This paper attempts to contextualize the renewed vigor with which ethical codes have been discussed in anthropology in the 1990s. It outlines, with four historical sketches set in chronological order, different ways in which morals have been conceptualized and institutionalized in anthropology. It argues that the history of professional anthropology has been marked by a tension between an Occidental discourse on ethical duplicity and a more speci…
Modern Times
Anthropologists have long neglected the future as an object of study, and recent contributions to the topic rarely address it systematically. This essay argues that this is the result of the unfinished project of postcolonial reflexivity about the anthropological subject. Anthropologists are, like most other social scientists, addicted to primitive temporal classifications of modernity and especially its tendency toward epochal thinking. To comba…
Introduction
1994). Introduction: Five theses on ethnography as colonial practice. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 1-34
The pidginization of Luguru politics
The analysis of the tensions of empire that characterize indirect rule is usually hampered by the failure to study critically its discourse of representation and the indigenous resistance and accommodation to it. In this article I make that attempt by describing the administrative ethnography of the Uluguru Mountains in Eastern Tanganyika as a pidgin constructed in a specific contact situation (the baraza, or council meeting) by speakers from bot…
The Magic of Africa
This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heartland of magic and while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analy- sis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is pa…
After objectivity
Intersubjectivity in anthropology has rarely been studied against the broader background of the place of intersubjective exchanges in the long-term history of anthropology. This article attempts to do so by setting the history of anthropology against the history of objectivity since the enlightenment as outlined by lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's seminal Objectivity (2007). On that basis, it concludes that the currently popular romantic ideal…
The modern fear of matter
Materiality is a quality of relationship rather than a thing in itself (Ding an sich). These relations vary. An inquiry into late Victorian attitudes towards materialism shows that modern science inherited a certain fear of matter from Protestantism, which identifies a number of these relationships as being at least latently religious. It allows us to specify how culturally and historically particular our understanding of matter, materiality and …
A Politics of Presence
Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania
This article restudies assumptions about the nature of nationalism in Africa on the basis of the brief moment when African nationalism emerged in the mountain area of Uluguru, in eastern Tanzania. It suggests that our understanding of the emergence of the concept of nationality was far too narrowly focused on the idea of the state and of the unity of the public existing within that state. By exploring a multiplicity of coexisting colonial and ind…
The construction of ethnographic occasions in late colonial Uluguru1
1994). The construction of ethnographic occasions in late colonial Uluguru. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 321-351
Guidelines for anthropological research
As anthropologists we are increasingly confronted with attempts - be it by employers, the media, or policy makers - to regulate our work in ways that are both epistemologically and ethically counterproductive and threaten our scientific integrity. This document is written out of concern about the problems that occur when protocols for data management, integrity, and ethics, developed for sciences that employ a positivistic, hypothesis-testing and…
Guidelines for data management and scientific integrity in ethnography
New protocols for scientific integrity and data management issued by universities, journals, and transnational social science funding agencies are often modelled on medical or psychological research, and do not take account of the specific characteristics of the processes of ethnographic research. These guidelines provide ethnographers with some of the most basic principles of doing such research. They show that the primary response of ethnograph…
Socialization practices of Moroccan families after migration
This article compares the pre-migration and post-migration socialization practices of Moroccan families in The Netherlands. Our main theoretical interest is in continuity and change in the reconstruction of socialization practices in new contexts and how the nature of this reconstruction can be understood. The article addresses social organization in general, the social organization of the family, values and goals related to upbringing and practi…
Global 'experts' and 'African' minds
Whereas many historians of British anthropology worried themselves about the complicity of anthropologists with colonial rule, and have tried to demonstrate a fundamental contradiction and gap between academic anthropologists and colonial administrators, a study of the professionalization of anthropology in Tanganyika Territory between 1930 and 1960 can show that the ethnographic tradition of Tanganyika indirect rule slowly attuned itself to clas…
Africa Christo
The Impact of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) on Parenting by Mothers Within an Ethnically Diverse Population in the Netherlands
Intimate partner violence (IPV) profoundly affects multiple life domains for the people involved. We report on the experiences of Dutch mothers of various ethnic backgrounds regarding their parenting during and after IPV, their perceptions of the influence of IPV on their parenting, as well as their need for and experiences with support services. We conducted qualitative interviews with 100 mothers in the Netherlands who had experienced IPV. Most…
Perspectives on Tierney'sDarkness in El Dorado
Classification revisited
Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline's history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity…
Enchanted reason
Science fiction is a privileged site to study the magic of capitalism. On the one hand, an anthropology of science fiction asks questions about how to characterize science fiction socially and culturally. It should resolve these questions by acknowledging that its first recognizable manifestation occurs when the fictionalization of science, fed by the confusion science produces about life and morality, is brought together with the drive to commer…
Educational policies on migrants and minorities in the Netherlands
In common with other European countries, the Dutch government has pursued an active educational policy on migrants and minorities focusing on integration. This article presents the results of a study into the objectives and results of this policy between 1970 and 2002. Were the desired objectives achieved or were the outcomes of the educational policy the opposite of what was intended? To what extent did the integration policy in the Netherlands …
Middle‐Class Versus Working‐Class White Mothers’ Approaches to Diversity in the Netherlands
There is a large body of literature on how white middle‐class parents select schools for their children in gentrifying urban contexts. In this study, we aimed to explore the experiences of such parents after enrolling their children in ethnically mixed schools but also how these experiences varied in gentrifying urban contexts and smaller cities. We interviewed mothers without a migration background living in a large city (Amsterdam) or a medium‐…
Implicit Understandings
Visions of Anthropology
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Critique and Reflexivity in Anthropology
Africa Christo
All Good Men'. The Development of Lubwa Mission, Chinsali, Zambia, 1905-1967
The construction of ethnographic occasions in late colonial Uluguru1
1994). The construction of ethnographic occasions in late colonial Uluguru. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 321-351
Introduction
1994). Introduction: Five theses on ethnography as colonial practice. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 1-34
Implicit Understandings
Kizungu Rhythms
Kizungu Rhythms
L'A. tente de montrer que le christianisme a ete importe dans la societe Luguru en copiant les modeles ngoma, c'est a dire les rythmes de la vie tels qu'ils sont vecus par la societe Luguru. Le ngoma est a la foi un rythme et une initiation. Ce potentiel d'initiation permet de combiner la reproduction de la balance des pouvoirs entre les generations et l'incorporation de formes nouvelles de travail et de possession de la terre. Cette creativite a…
The pidginization of Luguru politics
The analysis of the tensions of empire that characterize indirect rule is usually hampered by the failure to study critically its discourse of representation and the indigenous resistance and accommodation to it. In this article I make that attempt by describing the administrative ethnography of the Uluguru Mountains in Eastern Tanganyika as a pidgin constructed in a specific contact situation (the baraza, or council meeting) by speakers from bot…
Visions of Anthropology
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Anthropology of Colonialism
This article explores the evolving field of colonial studies, emphasizing its interdisciplinary nature, blurring the lines between anthropology, history, and literary studies. It examines how this field necessitates a reflexive approach within anthropology, prompting scholars to confront the discipline's historical entanglement with colonial practices. The article argues that colonial studies has progressively shifted towards understanding coloni…
The Magic of Africa
This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heartland of magic and while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analy- sis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is pa…
Professions of Duplexity
This paper attempts to contextualize the renewed vigor with which ethical codes have been discussed in anthropology in the 1990s. It outlines, with four historical sketches set in chronological order, different ways in which morals have been conceptualized and institutionalized in anthropology. It argues that the history of professional anthropology has been marked by a tension between an Occidental discourse on ethical duplicity and a more speci…
East African Expressions of Christianity (review)
Spear, Thomas, and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds. 1999. East African Expressions of Christianity. East African Studies series. Oxford: James Currey; Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota; Nairobi: EAEP; Athens: Ohio University Press. 340 + xii pp. $44.95 (cloth) $22.95 (paper)
A Politics of Presence
Imaginer les élections
L'enlisement des expériences de démocratisation engagées récemment en Afrique a conduit nombre d'observateurs à s'interroger sur la compatibilité des procédures électorales avec les « traditions » locales de délibération. Or, on constate que les administrateurs coloniaux du Tanganyika se posaient des questions similaires sur l'introduction du vote secret. Quelle signification pouvait être accordée à cette nouvelle technologie politique ? Contre t…
Perspectives on Tierney'sDarkness in El Dorado
East African Expressions of Christianity (review)
Spear, Thomas, and Isaria N. Kimambo. eds. 1999. East African Expressions Of Christianity. East African Studies Series, Oxford: James Currey. Athens, Ohio: University Press. xii + 340 pp
Creolisation in Secret the Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania
This article restudies assumptions about the nature of nationalism in Africa on the basis of the brief moment when African nationalism emerged in the mountain area of Uluguru, in eastern Tanzania. It suggests that our understanding of the emergence of the concept of nationality was far too narrowly focused on the idea of the state and of the unity of the public existing within that state. By exploring a multiplicity of coexisting colonial and ind…
On Reflections on Darkness in El Dorado
The trickster’s dilemma
As several chapters in this volume attest, auditing and accounting have become the operational signs of the global spread of neoliberal values. On the one hand, they accompany high hopes about a transformation of transnational relationships in the direction of good governance and an increasing transparency of the organization of state and civil society; on the other, they generate the fear that this transformation of liberal morality cloaks a nov…
Educational policies on migrants and minorities in the Netherlands
In common with other European countries, the Dutch government has pursued an active educational policy on migrants and minorities focusing on integration. This article presents the results of a study into the objectives and results of this policy between 1970 and 2002. Were the desired objectives achieved or were the outcomes of the educational policy the opposite of what was intended? To what extent did the integration policy in the Netherlands …
Special section
Socialization practices of Moroccan families after migration
This article compares the pre-migration and post-migration socialization practices of Moroccan families in The Netherlands. Our main theoretical interest is in continuity and change in the reconstruction of socialization practices in new contexts and how the nature of this reconstruction can be understood. The article addresses social organization in general, the social organization of the family, values and goals related to upbringing and practi…
What has anthropology learned from the anthropology of colonialism
The emergence of the anthropology of colonialism in the 1990s has stimulated and enhanced critical reflection on the cultural and historical embedding of the discipline of anthropology, offering what is in effect a historiography of the discipline's present. How has this historical consciousness changed the contours of the discipline? Has it allowed anthropologists to critically distance their discipline from its intimate involvement with the wor…
Sociology (40 works) · Anthropology (25 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (23 works) · History (22 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (21 works) · Art (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Ethnography (12 works)