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****************************************************** * http://www.anthropologymatters.com * * A postgraduate project comprising online journal, * * online discussions, teaching and research resources * * and international contacts directory. * ****************************************************** *** Sincere apologies for cross-posting*** ---------------------------------------------------------- SPECIAL ISSUE Cosmologies of Fortune: Luck, Vitality and Uncontrolled Relatedness Edited by Giovanni da Col and Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge) http://berghahn.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/socan/2012/00000056/00000001 This special issue and its following companion issue (Social Analysis 56, no. 2) are concerned with the ways in which fortune, luck, and chance are conceived in a range of different societies. This first special issue, attempts to trace the semantic field encompassed by terms glossed as ‘fortune’, ‘luck’, and ‘chance’ and their role in constituting distinct economic cosmologies, along with conceptions of vitality, kinship, and relatedness, by answering the following questions. How can we account for different ontologies of luck, fortune, and chance? To what extent are they commensurable? How are fortune and luck related to the presence or absence of indigenous idioms of randomness or chance? Are there societies without luck and societies that display great anxieties about the control of the flows of fortune? How do fortune and luck relate to indigenous conceptions of risk and danger? How is the power of fortune inherited and transmitted, harnessed and contained, lost or deployed? How is fortune employed as a kinship idiom for negotiating identities or conceptions of prosperity and reproductive vitality? How are fortune and luck made visible in distinctive materialities and generated through the circulation of things? Hopefully, these contributions will help to reinstate ethnography as a prime method for understanding how human beings think about luck and harness fortune in order to tame contingency or to catalyze the serendipities of their quotidian lives. Preface Introduction: Natural Philosophies of Fortune — Luck, Vitality, and Uncontrolled Relatedness Giovanni da Col (Cambridge) The Sword, the Sponge, and the Paradox of Performativity: Some Observations on Fate, Luck, Financial Chicanery, and the Limits of Human Knowledge David Graeber (Goldsmiths College, London) Is There Fortune in Greater Amazonia? Peter Gow (St Andrews) and Margherita Margiotti (Bristol) Vital Energy: The Current of Relations Stephen Gudeman (Minnesota) The Elementary Economies of Dechenwa Life: Fortune, Vitality, and the Mountain in Sino-Tibetan Borderlands Giovanni da Col (Cambridge) The Three Duties of Good Fortune: ‘Luck’ as a Relational Process among Hunting Peoples of the Siberian Forest in Pre-Soviet Times Roberte N. Hamayon (EPHE Paris) The Dangers of Excess: Accumulating and Dispersing Fortune in Mongolia Rebecca Empson Knowledge, Morality, and Causality in a ‘Luckless’ Society: The Case of the Chewong in the Malaysian Rain Forest Signe Howell (Oslo) Beneficial Bonds: Luck and the Lived Experience of Relatedness in Contemporary Japan Inge Daniels (Oxford) Afterword: The Lottery of Babylon, or, the Logic of Happenstance in Melanesia and Beyond Roy Wagner (Virginia) ************************************************************* * Anthropology-Matters Mailing List * * To join this list or to look at the archived previous * * messages visit: * * http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML * * If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all * * those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: * * [log in to unmask] * * * * Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new * * CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com * * an international directory of anthropology researchers * ***************************************************************