Social Anthropology

A paradigmatic shift in drug addiction treatment took place in a therapeutic community in northern Italy over the last 30 years, moving from a ritual model to a person‐centred one. While both models can be interpreted as devices for re‐shaping subjects who, through drug addiction, are experiencing a deep biographical crisis and are in need of reaching their deepest emotional level, the underlying ‘emotional ontologies’ – i.e. the role, place and sense of emotions – are quite different. This local change can be put into relation with wider anthropological changes affecting Western societies over recent decades.

The Holocaust, a significant moral principle for contemporary Germany, is embedded in a politically and emotionally charged discourse of remembering and forgetting. German politicians and young German adults often perceive the Holocaust as a threat associated with guilt, and call it , killer‐phrase, or , bludgeon. This paper analyses how the Holocaust is endowed with agency, and how demands to control its powers are aligned with this. Some young German adults used this narrative practice to position themselves in the German memory discourse, while others criticised it. This paper argues that agency attribution contributes to the mechanisms of forgetting by reducing the complexities of social and historical entanglements.

This article ethnographically outlines how one woman politician in a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina used favours to help ‘get things done’, becoming perceived as a ‘goddess’ who ‘spent herself’ for the sake of others. The article suggests that such people managed to gather power through the paradox of keeping‐while‐giving (Weiner, . . . Berkeley: California UP). People able to grant numerous favours in multiple public and private arenas kept aside the position of the person able to manage ambiguity, which was part of the new ad hoc, flexible forms of governance, exercised by both the international and the local actors in the country.

The notion of ‘global art’ acknowledges that there are major changes in the art worlds‐network, and refers to new concepts of contemporary art and art worlds. The anthropology of art, however, has participated in a limited way in these art theoretical debates, although it could fruitfully contribute to them. This article discusses one major issue of global art using three ethnographic examples from Francophone West Africa: how to analyse the local specificity of contemporary art?