Social Anthropology

In this article I argue that among the southern Betsileo slave descendants are essentialised by free descendants. After explaining how this striking case of psychological essentialism manifests in the local context, I provide experimental evidence for it and discuss the results of three cognitive tasks that I ran in the field. I then suggest that slaves were not essentialised in the pre‐colonial era and contend that the essentialist construal only became entrenched in the aftermath of the 1896 abolition of slavery, which paradoxically triggered the historical process of essentialisation.

In Tuva (Southern Siberia), people expect that each class of beings contains singular individuals that distinguish themselves by atypical bodily and behavioural features and capacities. Among humans, such beings are shamans, but Tuvans also identify shamans among animals and trees. Even in the landscape, some atypical places are strong personalities. I call ‘transsingularity’ the supposed relationship that connects all these singular beings across their different classes. This treatment of atypical beings, which is widespread among Northern Asian traditions, is based on a ‘singularity detection device’, an inferential schema that links individuality and categorial norm in a specific way. This cognitive device sheds light on representations about metamorphosis as well as on interactional strategies between clients and shamans. The singularity detection device, as opposed to categorial thinking, appears to be at the foundation of Northern Asian shamanism. Finally I suggest that it may also play a role in animist cosmologies in other regions of the world.

In the village of Yapatera, Peru, there exists a folk theory of race which posits that humans cannot be divided into mutually exclusive racial groups and that personhood is both physiologically and socially ‘mixed’. By engaging with the psychological literature on racial essentialism (i.e. the tendency to view humans in terms of discrete categories, as if they were natural kinds), this article digs deeper into the local folk theory of race. Experimental tasks were designed to test the inductive potential of race and revealed that villagers are far more likely to use other social categories (class, religion, kinship and place of origins) than race to base their inferences. The article discusses the use of experimental tasks as a vehicle for a different sort of conversation between ethnographer and informants.