Cultural Heritage protection
A response to Mike Rowland and
Beverley Butler (AT 23 [1]).
As an anthropologist living and practicing
in Africa, I identify a flaw in Rowland and
Butler’s otherwise admirable analysis of her-
itage in conflict situations. First, the authors
seem to imply that the nation-states created
as a result of the relatively recent colonial
experience are largely coterminous with the
autochthonous cultural groups as owners of the
inheritance they discuss. Second, the authors
seem to assume also that under contemporary
plural-society structure the constituent cultural
groups negotiate their preferences on equal
terms. I believe that neither assumption holds.
Within many African countries the views of
the strong are imposed on the marginalized
and the weak without any recourse to national
supervisory bodies that might redress the
wrongs. It is on these grounds that the impor-
tance of intervention by appropriate suprana-
tional bodies such as UNESCO, whatever their
faults, cannot be overemphasized.
Plural-society democracy is nascent and
illiteracy too rampant to allow for the type
of recommendations the authors have made.
Because the smaller, weaker groups are dis-
empowered in the new extraneous knowledge
systems in which the discourse occurs they
are unable to negotiate and secure their own
positions in it. They are routinely imposed
upon by a seeming conspiracy of officialdom,
imported religion and big business working in
favour of interests that are extraneous to these
local ones. The present order using UNESCO
and similar bodies at regional or global levels
is the nearest the world can come to offering
realistic assistance to the culturally weak and
vulnerable. Anything less will surely exacer-
bate an already bad situation. It will amount
to conspiring, or at least siding, with the self-
serving mighty against the hapless weak. l
P.-J. Ezeh
University of Nigeria
pitjazi@yahoo.com
comment 
Darwinian evolution
– broad enough for
culture?
Comment on Ingold and Mesoudi,
Whiten and Laland (AT 23[2]) and
Reynolds (AT 23[5])
In his critique of the recent article by Mesoudi,
Whiten and Laland (2006), Tim Ingold
observes that we need to ‘respond to the chal-
lenge of “evolutionary biology” in terms
more robust and forthright than we have used
up to now’ (2007: 17). Nonetheless, despite
26 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 24 No 2, April 2008
the forthrightness of his admonition, Ingold
mainly ends up suggesting that we need a
‘wider concept of evolution’ that allows us to
‘understand the self-organizing and transfor-
mational dynamics of fields of relationships
among both human and non-human being’
(ibid.). Yet evolutionary biology already
involves what Ingold advocates. Self-organiza-
tion and transformation are not terms antithet-
ical to a Darwinian evolutionary perspective.
What is missing, we argue, is substantive
identification of the reasons why the umbrella
of Darwinian evolution is not broad enough to
include cultural evolution.
The difficulty social and cultural anthro-
pologists have had with developing a unifying
theory about cultural systems, their relation-
ship to human behaviour, and how they change
through time stems from the complexity of
modelling self-modifying systems, not from
failure to embed the enterprise in a Darwinian
evolutionary framework as argued by Mesoudi
et al. Self-modification is precisely where
using classical mathematical modelling for
social human social systems falters, since we
need ‘models of how complex, information-
processing, self-reflective, self-restructuring
systems operate, develop and change’ (Read
1990: 55, emphasis added). It is the self-
reflexive, self-restructuring aspects of human
societies that make the Darwinian umbrella
inadequate.
Though culture, a key characteristic of
human societies, has biological origins driven
by Darwinian evolution, once in place it has
had consequences transcending those origins,
just as life forms arising through physical and
chemical processes had consequences tran-
scending their physical and chemical origins.
With the origin of life, fundamentally new
physical forms arose that had within them
the means for generating new forms that can
be variants on the parent form. The new life
forms could engage in endogenously initiated,
rather than exogenously driven, reproduction
and thereby set off a chain reaction of events
that we refer to as biological evolution. The
same is true, we argue, of the development
of organisms having a cultural/conceptual
basis for societal organization that arises
endogenously from within the mind/brain of
the societal members rather than exogenously
from their behavioural interaction (Read
2007, Read et al. [forthcoming]). As Vernon
Reynolds comments, ‘[a]nimals are different
from humans in that, whereas animal social
structures arise out of the behaviour and rela-
tionships of individuals (Hinde 1976), human
social structures arise from the mental con-
structs of participant members of the society’
(Reynolds 2007: 24).
The distinction we are drawing starts with
a Darwinian system defined by properties
at a higher ontological level (e.g. phenome
versus genome) and subject to selection acting
on variation occurring at a lower ontological
level. This leads to ‘population thinking’,
according to which Darwinian theory describes
how the action of variation and selection
mechanisms, both operating on distinct ‘short’
characteristic time scales, lead to changes in
frequency distribution of attributes in a popu-
lation over longer time periods. Such a system
contrasts with an organization in the form of a
culturally framed social system that, because
an organization can be self-monitoring and
self-modifying, is capable of endogenously
induced change. An organization need not be
embedded in a population of organizations, nor
is it reducible to a population of components
with attributes that suffice to characterize the
organization. An organization is not simply the
aggregation of components; hence the proc-
esses we are concerned with do not involve
variation and selection among components
or properties, but are rather the processes
of recruitment, differentiation, specializa-
tion and coordination among the parts of the
organization/social system. Change arises from
assessment of how well existing structure(s)
and processes of the organization deliver the
organization’s self-attributed functionality,
and takes the form of change in structure and
processes rather than change in attributes
of components at a lower ontological level.
Change, in this non-Darwinian scenario, also
arises when the organization generates new
attributions of functionality for itself, such as
the change from a hunter-gatherer band form
of organization to a tribal form of organization
(Lane et al. [forthcoming]).
As both Reynolds and Ingold note, turf is
not the issue. Nor, as Reynolds observes, is
it a matter of ‘a separate realm of discourse
for human society, human ideas and human
actions, setting them apart from the rest of
the biological world’ (Reynolds 2007: 24), if
only because the capacity for human society,
human ideas and human actions arose through
a Darwinian process of biological evolution.
But the processes giving rise to new forms
may also give rise to new processes that are
not variants of themselves; otherwise biology
would be reducible to chemistry and physics.
Though the ‘theory’ of the unilineal evolu-
tion of societies has rightly been critiqued as
overly simplistic, inconsistent with empirical
patterns of change, and failing to identify an
adequate process whereby the supposed evolu-
tionary pattern could arise, there is validity in
its focus on organizational self-­transformation
as the primary modality through which evolu-
tion has taken place in human societies. For
example, social organization in so-called
kinship-based societies derives from a con-
structed, conceptual system expressed through
the logic of a kinship terminology that also
determines possible trajectories for expansion
of its scope (Read 2001). What constitutes the
generating concepts of a kinship terminology
is mathematically demonstrable (Read 1984),
thereby making it possible to identify, in a pre-
cise manner, the sense in which it is a concep-
tual construction (but not the tetradic structure
hypothesized by Allen [2004]). It follows that
kinship structures do not arise simply through
emergence from behaviour, as would have to
be the case if the origin of kinship structures
was to be included within the Darwinian
framework of evolution viewed as a popula-
tion process acting on the characteristics of
individuals.
 There needs to be dialogue as Ingold and
Reynolds suggest, but dialogue that first recog-
nizes the shift in the modality through which
evolution takes place. l
Dwight Read
University of California Los Angeles
dread@anthro.ucla.edu
David Lane
University of Reggio-Emilia
lane@unimo.it
Allen, N. J. 2004. Tetradic theory: An approach to kinship.
In Parkin, R. and Stone, L. (eds) Kinship and family: An
anthropological reader, pp. 221-235. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lane, D. et al. (forthcoming). From population to
organization thinking. In Lane, D. et al. (eds) Complexity
perspectives on innovation and social change. Berlin:
Springer Verlag.
Ingold, T. 2007. The trouble with evolutionary biology.
Anthropology Today 23(2): 13-17.
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A. and Laland, K.N. 2006. Towards
a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 29: 329-383.
— 2007. Science, evolution and cultural anthropology.
Anthropology Today 23(2): 18.
Read, D., Lane, D. and van der Leeuw, S. (forthcoming).
The innovation innovation. In Lane, D. et al. (eds)
Complexity perspectives on innovation and social
change. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Read, D.W. 1984. An algebraic account of the American
kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 417-440.
— 1990. The utility of mathematical constructs in building
archaeological theory. In Voorrips, A. (ed.) Mathematics
and information science in archaeology, pp. 29-60.
Bonn: Helos.
— 2001. What is kinship? In Feinberg, R. and Ottenheimer,
M. The cultural analysis of kinship: The legacy of David
M. Schneider and its implications for cultural relativism,
pp. 78-117. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
— 2007. ‘Cultural evolution: A radical change in what
constitutes evolution’. Paper presented at the European
Conference on Complex Systems, Dresden, 1-5 October.
Reynolds, V. 2007. Evolutionary biology and human culture.
Anthropology Today 23(5): 23-24.
conferences 
Travelling spirits:
Migrants, markets and
moralities
Humboldt University, Berlin, 16-18
September 2007
Religious belonging today is increasingly
practised on the move, or in religious networks
that cross the borders of different nation-states.
Anthropologists working on religion are thus
challenged by new questions. When religions
travel, what are the pathways and routes of
religious agents? How are power relations
negotiated in transnational religious networks,
between travelling religious experts and their
followers, and within religious communities?
Another issue is the question of place-making:
where do migrants gather, meet, and find
places for worship? How do people in reli-
gious networks simultaneously engage with
more than one locality? And how do economic
and religious activities overlap? These and
other issues central to research on religions
in migration were debated in the workshop
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 24 No 2, April 2008 27
‘Travelling spirits: Migrants, markets and
moralities’, in Berlin in September 2007.
Keynote speaker Michael Lambek presented
a range of ethnographic examples from
Mayotte, Madagascar and Switzerland, and
reminded the audience that the movement
essential to spirits is not across space but
rather from the ethereal into the material
world. Furthermore, the spirits’ journeys do
not necessarily relate to contemporary jour-
neys of their mediums but rather to their own
travels in past lives, for instance when they
need to find information on certain events
or therapies. Lambek’s statement that the
‘essence’ of spirits lies in their materialization,
their repeated coming into presence, formed
a leitmotif of the conference and invited the
participants not to focus narrowly on physical
mobilities but to include the spirits’ capaci-
ties to negotiate between concealment and
revealation.
The first session addressed ‘commodifica-
tion and economic success’ in relation to the
merging of economic and religious activities
in transnational networks, which can provide
alternative moral meanings for financial obli-
gations, but also transfer neoliberal business
ideas into the religious realm. Rijk van Dijk
argued that the success of urban Ghanaian
Pentecostalists needs to be understood in
relation to the spirit of entrepreneurialism,
which reflects moralities of the market and
can foster individual competition as well as
feelings of insecurity. Other papers exam-
ined a rapidly growing spirit industry, for
instance in Vietnam, where consumer tastes
shape religious products and master mediums
have to apply the economic laws of supply
and demand in order to compete for custom
among different consumer groups by effec-
tively marketing the goods of salvation.
Clearly, economic issues related either to the
commercialization of religious practice or to
the definition of power relations within cult
communities have gained significance in
transnational networks and can also underlie
modes of religious inclusion and exclusion.
The session on ‘place-making’ started with
John Eade, who elaborated on the history of
sacred spatialization in world cities such as
London, where new groups of migrants con-
tribute to the re-ordering of urban belonging.
But the continuing spread of new temples and
mosques, and the integration of new styles of
music and dance can indicate the recent arrival
of more immigrants and serve as a marker of
a group’s distinctiveness. Throughout the con-
ference symbolic geographies of the sacred,
and ritual space production and appropria-
tion, which are contested in the social spheres
linking home countries and diasporas, were
central to discussion of the transnational
politics of belonging. This also involves the
increasing mobility of religious specialists,
some of whom don’t need to move physically,
but employ technologies of audio/video and
tele-evangelism to spread their religious mes-
sages and find new adherents.
Karen Fjelstad opened the session on
‘mobility of spirits and religious agents’, and
introduced the audience to the world of leng
dong spirits and their mediums, who ‘com-
mute’ between Vietnam and the USA. This
part of the conference followed the trajectories
of different types of spirits who, just like their
devotees, experience changes in behaviour,
attitudes and lifestyle as a result of migra-
tion. While on the one hand individual spirits
can adapt to the changing life conditions in
migration and change their characteristics,
for instance with regard to gender norms and
roles, on the other hand cult communities
can contribute to creating a home far from
home and maintaining former social behav-
iours. Nevertheless, the frequent splitting of
religious groups also hints at power struggles
and ongoing unresolved debates on religious
purity versus expansion. Marleen de Witte’s
focus on Pentecostalism’s audiovisual culture,
which uses audio and visual media to cross
religious as well as national boundaries, was
taken up by Simon Coleman in his concluding
remarks. He presented the technologies of
sacralization of a contemporary Protestant
movement in Sweden, where not only verbal
narratives but also a religious imaginary
materialized in maps, photographs, videos
and websites contributes to the creation of
an embodied relation between territory, sub-
jectivity and charismatic agency. The nexus
between religious imagination, bodily prac-
tices and visual representations became partic-
ularly clear in this last part of the conference.
Varied though the different papers were, a
number of overarching themes emerged: the
significance of mobile ethics that contribute to
the continuing global debate on purity versus
cosmopolitanism, the spirits’ ambivalence
regarding constructions of otherness, and the
revitalized role of religious imaginings in
the context of control and fixation. While the
diversity of the papers, in terms of region as
well as the type of religion, helped avoid rep-
etition, one of the main difficulties of compar-
ison lay in the different notions of spirits and
other religious imaginations: the question of
whether spirits in a Charismatic, Pentecostal
or Creole context can be compared at all
remains open to further discussion. l
Heike Drotbohm
Freiburg University, Germany
heike.drotbohm@ethno.uni-freiburg.de
The programme and list of participants can be found at
www2.hu-berlin.de/ethno/pdf/Conference_Travelling_
Spirits.pdf.