If anthropology aims at ‘understanding “others” ’, then obviously anthropologists must be interested in the meaning of what those ‘others’ say. But to understand what speakers of a language other than our own say, we need to know what exactly the words and grammatical categories of that other language mean. This article argues that translating indigenous categories into academic English does not allow us to capture indigenous perspectives and leads to what Geertz calls ‘scripting other people's souls’. Focusing on cognitive and cultural categories from Australian Aboriginal languages usually linked with English labels such as ‘kinship obligations’ and ‘odd-numbered generations’, the article shows how the ways of thinking encoded in these languages can be explicated from the insider's point of view, in simple words and simple sentences directly cross-translatable into the indigenous languages themselves.

This article examines the relationship between Christian worship and the production of religious identity among Auhelawa speakers of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea. Auhelawa people live in a society in which a locally developed form of Christianity has emerged from a long engagement with missionaries. In the colonial era, missionaries spoke in terms of light and darkness to mediate their contradictory aims of both authentic personal conversion and total social change. Today Auhelawa believe that their society has been changed, and that this change entails a new way of thinking as well as acting, though like the missionaries they also struggle to express the relationship between the two. Viewing themselves as already converted, Auhelawa today use an ideology of ‘one mind’—unity in purpose which is subjectively felt and outwardly expressed—to resolve how their collective worship relates to individual belief. This framing of ritual, embedded in church prayer and music, however, is always incomplete. I argue this not only points to an important step in the process of formation of congregations, but also suggests why Christianity globally is both unitary yet also so strikingly diverse.

Sleeping leaves those asleep ‘blind’ and hence oblivious to potential or real danger. Such dangers are heightened further and more feared at night, the main time for sleep. In this article, I link ideas about sleep and nighttime social practices with questions about vision. My aim is to tease out some of the meanings implied in cross-culturally distinct solutions to the protection of sleepers at night. I proceed by contrasting ethnographic data from the remote Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu, Northern Territory, with select elements of the cultural history of Euro-American sleep. Through ethnographic vignettes, I illuminate how people at Yuendumu commonly arrange themselves in yunta, or rows of sleepers, at night, and how some sleepers awake regularly during the night to ensure the others’ safety. I contrast this with Euro-American ways of providing a sense of safety to the sleeper through practices of domestic fortification. My comparison revolves around the notion of sight, which in the Euro-American West is clearly linked to ideas of knowledge, and at Yuendumu, as I demonstrate, imbued with a sense of care. I conclude by relating the gained insights to participant observation as anthropological method.

The Latin American literature on Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) welfare programs has typically involved the quantitative evaluation of social and economic impact, with fewer studies addressing the qualitative and gendered impacts of CCTs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in poor squatter settlement communities in Uruguay, this article explores the everyday social realities of poor single mothers who have been disconnected from their kinship networks and must rely on CCT payments for survival. I locate these women's experiences within the third-way neoliberal discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and ‘self-help’ espoused by the state, and the various structural conditions, including crime, violence and unequal gender relations, that impact negatively on women's abilities to comply with their social and civic duties. I argue that rather than producing responsible and empowered subjects, Uruguay's recent CCT welfare program has paradoxically limited some women's participation in civic and public life and reproduced their dependent relations with men.

For several generations, intermarriage has been common between indigenous Rotinese Christians and migrant Muslims and their descendants in the Indonesian village of Oelua on Roti Island. Muslims have engaged with the customary institutions upheld by indigenous Rotinese Christians—namely, those associated with marriage proposals and bridewealth. They have also engaged in reciprocal inter-household exchanges to raise the cash to pay for weddings and bridewealth, as well as for other life cycle events such as funeral feasts and gatherings in the post-funeral mourning period. This article argues that intermarriage and inter-household monetary exchanges are important, among other factors, in promoting low conflict relations between the two groups, primarily because of the regular opportunities generated to interact in both public and private spheres. Marriage preferences in Oelua are changing, however, with young Muslim men preferring to marry women who subscribe to the same religion and similar customs. Muslim attitudes are also changing with respect to their involvement in inter-household reciprocal exchanges, with many wanting to engage in different ways, or not at all. The article discusses what these changing attitudes and practices may mean for maintaining congenial inter-group relations between Christians and Muslims in the future.

This paper explores the cultural significance of ephemeral public greetings on the highways of Australia's Northern Territory. Despite the exceptional speed at which vehicles pass one another and the fact that such salutations are mostly between travellers who have no acquaintance with one another, few drivers fail to acknowledge the co-presence of others on the highway. The main concern of this account is to detail how this greeting system works, including the diverse meanings which can be attached to participation in it. In conclusion, it is suggested that this is a form of phatic communication which, as Malinowski (1923) said, eschews engagement with weighty economic and political issues, but contributes significantly to a sense of community between those involved.