Suchergebnisse

Issues associated with the phrase "sustainable development" are clarified by careful analysis of the meaning of carrying capacity. In their impressions of carrying capacity's effects, two explanations for the death of a memorable culture (Easter Island) differed fundamentally. One explanation was captive to a premature notion of a carrying capacity ceiling no population growth could ever penetrate. For the other, population was seen as having grown until it did exceed the maximum sustainable load, thus having inflicted environmental damage that reduced carrying capacity. The former view had to imagine a geological catastrophe to account for the culture's death. In the latter view, it was a case of excessive success proving fatal. A proponent of the latter view regarded Easter Island as a "preview in microcosm" of what may be happening globally. As such, the Easter Island experience would have important implications for industrial societies. Comparison of the two autopsies has implications for the social sciences.

This essay is about torture and the culture of terror, which for most of us, including myself, are known only through the words of others. Thus my concern is with the mediation of the culture of terror through narration—and with the problems of writing effectively against terror.

The Return of the Dead

Just as anthropologists recognized, with Tylor in 1871, that the concepts of death and culture were closely related, they set aside the treatment of the dead in Western Europe so that they could ignore the raging debate on the soul and afterlife. This paper examines the situations in which the occidental dead "come back". This renewed recognition is fully effective only when Christian afterlife is taken under consideration, as with, for instance, the difficult birth of Purgatory. Historical and contemporary anthropology can then reflect upon the rich modalities of an exchange which, in recently studied rural societies of Southern Europe restores all its ordered complexity to the social use of the dead.