The Exclusive Brethren ‘Doctrine of Separation’: An Anthropology of Theology

Why do the Exclusive Brethren attend church ten times a week? Why do they shun excommunicated members, including immediate family? Why do they refuse to eat with outsiders? Why will they employ outsiders in their businesses, but never be employed by them? Why do they reject modern media as “pipelines of filth”? Why do they refuse to vote, while simultaneously campaigning for Conservative Party candidates? Why do they only live in detached houses, and build churches entirely without windows? How, in other words, do the Exclusive Brethren try to live good lives? And what can we learn anthropologically from these models of ‘the good’, and from the objections they provoke? Drawing inspiration from Keane’s (2014) suggestion that ‘we shouldn’t decide in advance what ethics will look like’, this paper seeks to critically contribute to new scholarship within the anthropology of morality and detachment by constructing, in a very literal sense, an anthropology of theology via an analysis of the Exclusive Brethren ‘doctrine of separation’.

Parading through the Peace Process:Anthropology, Governance and Crisis in Northern Ireland

Because the authors both did work on the North Ireland parades, they became integrally involved as fieldworking anthropologists in the monitoring of these events, and in the creation of policy for their management. They detail how they worked with individuals and groups at every level, from protestors on the street up to the Secretary of State for the region. Later funded to examine legal and policing approaches to protests in other countries, especially South Africa, they show how they used this comparative knowledge to urge the implementation of measures which appear to have led to a diminution of violence in the parades. Finally, they assess their own contribution to the peace process in terms of contingency, timing, luck, flexibility, and industry.

The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing

To what extent do bestselling travel books, such as those by Paul
Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as
much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and
press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre,
identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing
are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in
which ‘everybody travels’. Despite the forces of globalisation, common
stereotypes about ‘foreignness’ continue to shape the experience of
modern travel. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is
concerned with the way contemporary travelogues engage with, and try
to resolve, familiar struggles in global politics such as the protection of
human rights, the promotion of democracy, the management of
equality within multiculturalism and the reduction of inequality. This is
a thoroughly interdisciplinary book that draws from international
relations, literary theory, political theory, geography, anthropology and
history.

The fall of kinship - towards an epidemiological explanation

Kinship used to be described as what anthropologists do. Today, many might well say that it is what anthropologists do not do. One possible explanation is that the notion of kinship fell off anthropology's radar due to the criticisms raised by Needham and Schneider among others, which supposedly demonstrated that kinship is not a sound theoretical concept. Drawing inspiration from epidemiological approaches to cultural phenomena, this article aims to enrich this explanation. Kinship became an unattractive theoretical concept in the subculture of anthropology not simply because of problems with kinship theory per se, but also on account of fundamental changes in the very conception of anthropological knowledge and the impact of these changes on the personal identity of anthropologists.