The Ritualisation of Abortion in Contemporary Vietnam Tine Gammeltoft	129-143

Induced abortion was introduced in Northern Vietnam in the 1960s as part of socialist efforts to develop and modernise Vietnamese society. With approximately two million pregnancy terminations per year, Vietnam now has the highest abortion rate in the world. This article explores how unmarried urban youths seek to cope with the experience of abortion and the suffering it entails. It is argued that while some forms of suffering are officially recognised, glorified and heroised in Vietnam, the suffering that a premarital abortion involves is surrounded by shame, stigma and denial. The ‘ethos of suffering’ that dominates Vietnamese public culture makes it difficult for youths to find resolution for the emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas that abortion experiences give rise to. In this situation, many young people turn to ritual practice, seeking help and compassion from spiritual beings and powers. Young people’s reactions to abortion indicate the presence in their daily lives of spiritual orientations deriving mainly from Buddhist traditions. The paper proposes that in order to understand how reproductive events are experienced in local worlds in and beyond Vietnam, more analytical attention needs to be paid to cosmological aspects of human procreation.

United and Divided: Christianity, Tradition and Identity in Two South Coast Papua New Guinea Villages Michael Goddard and Deborah Van Heekeren	144-159

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Motu and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari’s conception of itself as a ‘traditional’ Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting ‘tradition’ as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity.

Beyond Anthropology, Towards Actuality Annette Hamilton	160-170

Anthropology in Australia is at a critical juncture. This paper discusses the way in which the discipline has been challenged at the institutional level, in part due to pressures arising from economic rationalisation within universities. Anthropology, however, must take some responsibility for its condition. Psychology has established itself as the primary ‘human’ discipline to provide qualifications appropriate for professional employment. At a more scholarly level, anthropology’s traditional zones of concern have been taken over by others, including history and cultural studies. Can we, and should we, demystify anthropology and its practices? Can we reposition anthropology with a broader vision of the human experience, and what will happen if we cannot?

From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual Healing Michael Humphrey	171-187

The victim has been put at the centre of states’ post-atrocity strategies to reform governance, rehabilitate state authority and promote reconciliation. This paper explores the role of the victim in the truth commissions and trials aimed at reconciliation and justice and their experiences of the outcomes. The successor state’s focus on recovering victims after mass atrocity ritually inverts the former regime’s project of producing them. In both truth commissions and trials the state seeks to manipulate the ‘spectacle’ of the victim’s pain and suffering to publicly project the power of the state for different ends. Whereas the repressive state seeks to deepen the effects of violence as a strategy of rule, the successor state seeks to reverse the social and political effects of violence. These strategies of transitional justice have sought to reverse the effects of exclusion, to reverse the direction of state power from producing victims towards redeeming victims, from injuring to healing.
Because of the problems of mass criminality and widespread impunity, truth commissions have become widely adopted in preference to trials as a bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder. They set about producing a ‘democratising truth’ through a process of public inquiry located outside the state in the people. On the whole, the process, the public testimony and the witnessing has been better received than the product, the reports and the reparations. By contrast, trials seek to produce a societal consensus based on the recovery of the law. But in both cases the victim is redeemed through the individualising discourse of law or the polarising logic of trials which establishes the guilty and innocent. The truth of atrocity is found in affirming gross human rights abuses in victims, in transacted violence rather than the deeper structures of violence. Thus, victimhood is built on a universalising human rights discourse which overly individualises the origins of atrocity.

Spouses and Siblings in Sa Stories Margaret Jolly	188-208

Earlier functionalist and structuralist approaches treat myths as texts rather than as stories told by people speaking in specific and variable contexts. An analysis of variations in the telling of two Sa stories from South Pentecost, Vanuatu, suggests that myths are not so much collective charters or manifestations of a deep unconscious structure of the mind but are stories which might be more biographically and historically situated.

Legitimising Belief: Identity Politics, Utility, Strategies of Concealment, and Rationalisation in Australian Aboriginal Religion Erich Kolig	209-228

This article explores the ways in which anthropologists have formulated ‘place’. In recent years place and its companion The ‘women's business’ on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret ‘in a sealed envelope’. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition.

Netsex, or cybersex as it is sometimes known, is shown to be both a way of manifesting and dealing with some of the problems facing people in some online groups. The ethnographic data comes from the mailing list ‘Cybermind’, where netsex seems to have been an important, but relatively hidden, part of list activity. Some effects of the structure of mailing lists and communication programs are described. A description of netsex is given and analysed, various list-based discussions about the subject are described, and it is shown how netsex operated amongst some group members. It is argued that netsex is one of a number of ways which are used to frame and explore the occurrence of diverging meanings and vague boundaries, the paradoxical conventions of authenticity (depending on such things as strong emotion, body feelings, typing errors and gender), and the oscillating and uncertain relationship between online and offline life.

Obituary to Dr. Jonathan Robert Telfer, 1953-2002 Adrian Peace	111-112

Book Review Essays

Book Reviews

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