K Rio
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 13244 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | K Rio |
| NOMBRES | K |
| APELLIDO | Rio |
| FIRMA | RIO K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5055-4883 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 110 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Religion, Globalization, and Universalism
This chapter gives an introduction to the place of anthropology in the globalization of religious values. Anthropology is taken as a concrete expression of the global channels opened up through colonial activity, but also itself forming a lively space for the articulation of the many different strands of religious thought highlighted through its source materials. The chapter highlights the problems that anthropology has had with addressing religi…
Ritualer på TV
I denne artikkelen argumenterer jeg for at nyhetsmedier konstruerer en versjon av virkeligheten som er rituell og okkult. Jeg presenterer først noen refleksjoner over mediedekningen av noen hendelser de siste tiårene: forsvinningen av den britiske jenta Madeleine i Portugal i 2007, grusomhetene i Fritzls kjeller i Østerrike hvor han holdt sin datter og barnebarn fanget og fremstillingen av Julian Assange som voldtektsmann i 2010. Dekningen av dis…
Forum
In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay "The Mathematics of Man," which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologi…
Gater, torg og heterotopier i byen. En kommentar til de siste års hendelser i Paris
Utgangspunktet for dette essayet er hvordan offentlige steder på forskjellige måter tiltrekker seg ulike kollektive uttrykk. For å peke på den særskilte rollen som gaten og torget spiller i byens utvikling, diskuteres de siste års hendelser i Paris gjennom begreper om «urban thresholds» og «heterotopi». På den ene siden legges det vekt på bevisst tilrettelegging av byrom for borgernes kollektive utrykk, eksemplifisert gjennom Place de la Républiq…
Rivers and the Study of Kinship on Ambrym
Chapter 5 the Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person Formations of Fear and Anger in Vanuatu
Commons, Associations, and Possibilities of Egalitarian Life in Paris, France
In this article I ask, at what level does the egalitarian life of the French Republic manifest itself? In what social spaces do people get to enjoy its slogan, Liberté, égalité, fraternité ? I take these questions to be closely entangled with the concepts of public space and civil society, as well as that of the commons. How do Parisians use their urban commons? What kinds of restrictions and barriers exist to exclude people from this space? I de…
An Introduction to Egalitarian Thought and Dynamics
In this introduction we approach egalitarianism as an upsetting force that in various ways has shaped much of modern, especially Western, human history. We outline philosophical trajectories from the Enlightenment onward; consider the historical realization of an agency of ‘the people’ for the articulation of state, society, and politics; and highlight some issues that arise when the claims to freedom and equality clash against established instit…
Monster Anthropology
This edited volume gives us a timely update on the state of the art of monster studies, and its chapters provide us with a fascinating plethora of scary creatures. I strongly recommend this book fo
And Its Other Worlds
This article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contri…
The Transformation of Hierarchy Following Christian Conversion in Vanuatu
In this paper, I use pig-killings as an entry for understanding the transformation that has taken place with respect to hierarchy and egalitarianism in Vanuatu. In the early twentieth century accounts by John Layard there is a thorough description of the cosmological and spiritual meaning of pig-killings in the manly hierarchy of these islands. The entire society was consumed in a sacrificial cycle that each lasted for six years and involved the …
Anthropology and 1968
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter-insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were for…
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia
In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil
Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila
In accounts of “traditional Melanesia,” we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally “good” However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal belie…
Partage à la demande et clôtures
Cet article discute certains aspects de la vie urbaine dans la capitale du Vanuatu. Lors de mes dernières recherches de terrain (2010 et 2014), j’ai étudié l’économie des maisonnées et l’organisation sociale des quartiers informels existant autour de la ville de Port-Vila. Je présente ici un aspect particulier de ces quartiers et mets à l’épreuve le débat établi sur la réciprocité mélanésienne, soit le partage à la demande et le don. Dans le cas …
Demand-sharing and fences
This article addresses certain aspects of town life in the capital of Vanuatu. In my most recent fieldwork in 2010 and 2014 I have been investigating household economy and aspects of social organization in the settlements that rapidly spring up around the town of Port Vila. I will present one particular feature of these settlements as a test case for revisiting the long debate about Melanesian reciprocity, demand sharing and gift. Notably, in man…
Konsumentens dobbeltliv
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Melanesian egalitarianism
Using Dumont's analysis of value, this paper discusses the interplay between equality and hierarchy in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. From this vantage point Melanesian egalitarianism appears to be a dynamic and hybrid form that reproduces itself through tensions between different forms of potential inequality. The discussion is situated within a thoroughly globalized society, where money and Christianity have played a fundamental role for over a centur…
A Shared Intentional Space of Witch-Hunt and Sacrifice
In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is 'the other side of sacrifice' in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpo…
Missionaries, Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia
Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of C…
Policing the Holy Nation
In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘good governance’ and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becomin…
Securing Modernity
Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long histor…
Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law
This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a…
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
Discussions Around a Sand‐drawing
This article considers the social circumstances of making a marriage diagram, on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu. It offers a reconsideration of the rather famous case of the ‘six‐section marriage system’ as demonstrated by Cambridge anthropologist Bernard Deacon. It relates this idea of a system to the indigenous practice of making figurative drawings in the sand. The argument is that the marriage diagram drawn for Bernard Deacon was merely an i…
Totalization and detotalization
This article marks an effort to extend Louis Dumont's concept pair of hierarchy and individualism towards a more realistic understanding of social formations. Dumont's work is reviewed along with his critics, and through a survey of contemporary ethnography a move towards a concept of totalization is suggested. It is argued that a view of totalization and detotalization provides a vocabulary for a re-establishment of the social for the discipline…
Denying the gift
This article takes up the well-known `obligation of a return' suggested by Marcel Mauss. Through material from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, Central Melanesia, we get a view of how the ceremonial process, and the sacrifice of pigs especially, builds on a distinction between `giving' and `exchanging'. Supported by the phenomenological approach taken by Derrida on the gift as well as recent ethnographies parallel to the Ambrym case, the argument is that …
Subject and Object in a Vanuatu Social Ontology
In this article, the author addresses the social effects of material exhibitions in Melanesia. He suggests that people in Vanuatu perceive subjects and objects within a totalizing mode of production, in which the material object takes on the capacity of encompassing social relations. He introduces the Vanuatu case as countering some of the analytical problems with materiality, especially efforts to dismantle the subject/object distinction or to u…
Melanesian egalitarianism
Using Dumont's analysis of value, this paper discusses the interplay between equality and hierarchy in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. From this vantage point Melanesian egalitarianism appears to be a dynamic and hybrid form that reproduces itself through tensions between different forms of potential inequality. The discussion is situated within a thoroughly globalized society, where money and Christianity have played a fundamental role for over a centur…
A Shared Intentional Space of Witch-Hunt and Sacrifice
In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is 'the other side of sacrifice' in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpo…
And Its Other Worlds
This article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contri…
Anthropology and 1968
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter-insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were for…
Missionaries, Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia
Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of C…
Partage à la demande et clôtures
Cet article discute certains aspects de la vie urbaine dans la capitale du Vanuatu. Lors de mes dernières recherches de terrain (2010 et 2014), j’ai étudié l’économie des maisonnées et l’organisation sociale des quartiers informels existant autour de la ville de Port-Vila. Je présente ici un aspect particulier de ces quartiers et mets à l’épreuve le débat établi sur la réciprocité mélanésienne, soit le partage à la demande et le don. Dans le cas …
The Transformation of Hierarchy Following Christian Conversion in Vanuatu
In this paper, I use pig-killings as an entry for understanding the transformation that has taken place with respect to hierarchy and egalitarianism in Vanuatu. In the early twentieth century accounts by John Layard there is a thorough description of the cosmological and spiritual meaning of pig-killings in the manly hierarchy of these islands. The entire society was consumed in a sacrificial cycle that each lasted for six years and involved the …
Demand-sharing and fences
This article addresses certain aspects of town life in the capital of Vanuatu. In my most recent fieldwork in 2010 and 2014 I have been investigating household economy and aspects of social organization in the settlements that rapidly spring up around the town of Port Vila. I will present one particular feature of these settlements as a test case for revisiting the long debate about Melanesian reciprocity, demand sharing and gift. Notably, in man…
The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person
This essay revolves around a recent intensification of homicidal sorcery on Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, central Melanesia. During my periods of fieldwork on the island, spanning from 1995 to 2000, the situation in my region changed dramatically. Even though Ambrym social life has always been imbued with sorcery, the circumstances around the turn of the millennium represented a complete loss of control and an existential crisis
Nye koster
Redaksjonelt
Discussions Around a Sand‐drawing
This article considers the social circumstances of making a marriage diagram, on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu. It offers a reconsideration of the rather famous case of the ‘six‐section marriage system’ as demonstrated by Cambridge anthropologist Bernard Deacon. It relates this idea of a system to the indigenous practice of making figurative drawings in the sand. The argument is that the marriage diagram drawn for Bernard Deacon was merely an i…
Redaksjonelt
Exposer la vie après la mort
Dans le nord du Vanuatu, les cérémonies mortuaires constituent le complexe d’échanges matériels le plus étendu. Elles durent en principe une centaine de jours et impliquent des dons continus de nourriture, d’argent et de nattes. L’argument de cet essai est que cette mobilisation de ressources matérielles – dans laquelle chaque prestation prend concrètement une forme matérielle – produit des effets qui concernent directement à la fois le chemin du…
The Power of Perspective
Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the analysis of Melanesian societies
Denying the gift
This article takes up the well-known `obligation of a return' suggested by Marcel Mauss. Through material from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, Central Melanesia, we get a view of how the ceremonial process, and the sacrifice of pigs especially, builds on a distinction between `giving' and `exchanging'. Supported by the phenomenological approach taken by Derrida on the gift as well as recent ethnographies parallel to the Ambrym case, the argument is that …
Totalization and detotalization
This article marks an effort to extend Louis Dumont's concept pair of hierarchy and individualism towards a more realistic understanding of social formations. Dumont's work is reviewed along with his critics, and through a survey of contemporary ethnography a move towards a concept of totalization is suggested. It is argued that a view of totalization and detotalization provides a vocabulary for a re-establishment of the social for the discipline…
Subject and Object in a Vanuatu Social Ontology
In this article, the author addresses the social effects of material exhibitions in Melanesia. He suggests that people in Vanuatu perceive subjects and objects within a totalizing mode of production, in which the material object takes on the capacity of encompassing social relations. He introduces the Vanuatu case as countering some of the analytical problems with materiality, especially efforts to dismantle the subject/object distinction or to u…
Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law
This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a…
Policing the Holy Nation
In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘good governance’ and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becomin…
Securing Modernity
Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long histor…
Missionaries, Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia
Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of C…
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Melanesian egalitarianism
Using Dumont's analysis of value, this paper discusses the interplay between equality and hierarchy in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. From this vantage point Melanesian egalitarianism appears to be a dynamic and hybrid form that reproduces itself through tensions between different forms of potential inequality. The discussion is situated within a thoroughly globalized society, where money and Christianity have played a fundamental role for over a centur…
A Shared Intentional Space of Witch-Hunt and Sacrifice
In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is 'the other side of sacrifice' in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpo…
Konsumentens dobbeltliv
Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia
In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil
Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila
In accounts of “traditional Melanesia,” we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally “good” However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal belie…
Partage à la demande et clôtures
Cet article discute certains aspects de la vie urbaine dans la capitale du Vanuatu. Lors de mes dernières recherches de terrain (2010 et 2014), j’ai étudié l’économie des maisonnées et l’organisation sociale des quartiers informels existant autour de la ville de Port-Vila. Je présente ici un aspect particulier de ces quartiers et mets à l’épreuve le débat établi sur la réciprocité mélanésienne, soit le partage à la demande et le don. Dans le cas …
Demand-sharing and fences
This article addresses certain aspects of town life in the capital of Vanuatu. In my most recent fieldwork in 2010 and 2014 I have been investigating household economy and aspects of social organization in the settlements that rapidly spring up around the town of Port Vila. I will present one particular feature of these settlements as a test case for revisiting the long debate about Melanesian reciprocity, demand sharing and gift. Notably, in man…
Anthropology and 1968
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter-insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were for…
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
And Its Other Worlds
This article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contri…
Sociology (21 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 obras) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (13 obras) · History (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Anthropology (10 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras)