General

ous labyrinths of culture, and must resort to volte-faces and oxymorons—' structuring structures', ' intentionless invention'—in order to account for agency and process in human life. As Jackson sums up (p. 22), by 'dismissing the subject', by refusing to give existential power the same value as political power, (post-)structuralism 'would deprive us of the very site where life is lived, meanings are made, will is exercised, reflection takes place, consciousness finds expression, determinations take effect, and habits are formed or broken.' The case studies which follow Jackson's introduction variously illustrate an anthropological attention to local experience, its cultural elaboration and its human preconditions. Lila Abu Lughod recounts the story which Kamla, a young Egyptian Bedouin, writes of how women's lives are changing, so as to question the possibility of an abstract moral code such as 'honour and shame'. Robert Desjarlais writes of the ' pulsional intensities' of life in a shelter for the homeless and mentally ill in Boston, forming a tactile, episodic and finite world in common. Rene Devisch discloses the bodily ways in which Yaka culture is created and engaged in; dance, for instance, constitutes a way of world-making which is practical, gendered and sensual. Alfred Gell reflects on a cut finger among the Umeda, so as to draw out the role played by taboo in defining the self and articulating it with a social world. Christine Helliwell describes the seamless form of sociality which gives onto the mutual constitution of person, household and community in a Dayak longhouse. Michael Herzfeld explores women's ritual laments at Cretan funerals; the performances express an embodied female understanding of the communal past, and represent public resistance against a destiny of subordination within male-dominated institutions and discourses. Shawn Lindsay shares his experiences of learning to drum in order to argue that complex musical performances are generated through bodily praxis. Jadran Mimica explains how death is assimilated into everyday sociality among the Iqwaye, such that there is no 'death' as such, only a myriad of contingent ways of' dying', of' becoming dead' and 'being after death' in others' behaviour. Keith Ridler tells us of the place of shared practical activity in the friendships he formed during field-work in Italy, and Jim Wafer reveals how he ' stood his ground' by returning home from field-work with a Black Brazilian homosexual lover 16 years his junior.