Article

Anthropological Theory
11(2) 197–221
Catching the local ! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Michael Lambek DOI: 10.1177/1463499611407397
ant.sagepub.com
University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract
This paper attempts to conceptualize the local neither in exclusive relation to the global
nor as a specifically spatial phenomenon but in terms of ethical life, as a conjunction of
activities and their consequences. In this sense the local is singular rather than merely a
specific site on a homogeneous grid and as much temporal as spatial. The argument is
developed with respect to changing meanings of the local in my own ethnographic
practice as well as the changes in my main field site in Mayotte, Western Indian
Ocean. The depiction of activities draws from and develops the conceptual scheme
of Hannah Arendt.

Keywords
activity, Hannah Arendt, ethics, local/global, Madagascar, Mayotte, temporality

Each human activity points to its proper location in the world. (Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition, 1998: 73)

The local stops at many stations; it is the slow train. It does not race above ground
but moves along it. As it crosses the terrain it slows our gaze and concentrates our
attention. It allows us to see what is in-between.
I attempt to recuperate the local as a tempo or perspective that both recognizes
significant features of the human world and helps to bring them into some kind of
focus. Specifically, the paper responds to a set of provocations raised by Veena Das
and Deborah Poole (2007) in their call to consider how the concept of the local
figures in one’s own work and to speak to what they see as ‘an emergent trend
towards rethinking ‘‘the local’’ not as a site of spatial unity – or as a something that
is opposed to the global or translocal – but rather as a structure of feeling, affect,
temporality and relatedness in which the dyad global-local becomes non-sensical as
a nested or spatialized opposition’. Among the attractive features of this proposal
is the invitation to speak about the local untwinned from and irrespective of the
global and, indeed, in a modality that is not exclusively spatial. I take the local as
an anthropological abstraction, in the first instance, but also draw on its

Corresponding author:
Michael Lambek, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada
Email: lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca
198 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

conceptualization and enactment among Malagasy speakers on the island of

Mayotte, Western Indian Ocean, thereby to bring the view outside the window
back into the train.
The local signifies a vast set of questions. For anthropologists these include:
What is the local an instance of ? Is it a mode of seeing or being, a kind of place, a
form of interpellation? Does ‘the local’ signal a set of commensurable units, equiv-
alent ‘localities’ elsewhere; or is it the sign of something unique and incommensu-
rable? Does it enable us to evade the question of (bounded) units like ‘cultures’?
Does a grasp of the analytic potential of the local in this sense offer a means to
transcend dichotomous modes of thought; is it somehow the signifier of a new form
of exemplary monism?
For ordinary people the problems entailed by the local include: what are the
centres and limits of our lived worlds; how can we keep them from dissipating or
dissolving into larger, more encompassing or more rapidly changing worlds; what
are the spaces for sustained ethical practice, meaningful work, effective political
action? With what degree of arbitrariness or unpredictability can we be expected to
live? When the climate of history (or the earth) rises such that ‘all that is solid melts
into air’, where and how do we regain the degrees of certainty, durability, and
trust – of the coolness necessary to sustain human life?
A first step for anthropology is of course simply to address the ways in which
ordinary people address the questions confronting them. To begin, but only to
begin, to answer my first set of questions, then, the local is an instance of people
addressing together the problems of their human and historical condition. The
anthropological object is the manifestation of life in the face of specific conditions,
people making history in circumstances not of their own choosing. Our units of
investigation are to be distinguished according to many criteria: how people
distinguish themselves, what events they have suffered, what forms of discipline
they are subjected to, what forms of action they have taken. We find people every-
where at the conjunction of structure and event, at the crossroads of philosophy
and history. This is where we are located as well.
The local can be seen both in itself and for itself. It can be understood, analyt-
ically, as produced through the imposition of a neutral spatial grid or a specific set
of categories and their consequent objectification. It can be understood, herme-
neutically, as an organic phenomenon, ‘how those whom power-holders consider
to be marginal are central to themselves’ (Bloch 1998: xiv). As Dipesh Chakrabarty
puts it:

Analytic social science fundamentally attempts to ‘demystify’ ideology in order to

produce a critique that looks toward a more just social order. . . . Hermeneutic tradi-
tion, on the other hand, produces a loving grasp of detail in search of an understand-
ing of the diversity of human life-worlds. It produces what may be called ‘affective
histories.’ The first tradition tends to evacuate the local by assimilating it to some
abstract universal; it does not affect my proposition in the least if this is done in an
empirical idiom. The hermeneutic tradition, on the other hand, finds thought
Lambek 199

intimately tied to places and to particular forms of life. It is innately critical of the
nihilism of that which is purely analytic. (2000: 18)

I agree with Chakrabarty’s subsequent remark that one should not be ‘dog-
matic’ about the distinction (2000: 264, n.58) and that one should ‘bring them
into some kind of conversation with each other’ (2000: 18). This conversation is
and has been a significant part of the tradition of enquiry that anthropology is.
However, as Chakrabarty also argues, an articulation of incommensurable ideas
or practices produces not equivalence out of difference but rather difference out
of incommensurability (2000: 17 and 263, n.57).1 The trick then is somehow not
to lead the conversation to resolution, whether by one side convincing the other
of its exclusive correctness or by reaching a compromise, but to keep both alive
at once. In so doing, the local would be perhaps simultaneously the focus of
our attention and superficial to it. Perhaps we could agree that the local always
exists in some kind of tension between internal and external forces and
definitions.
I share with Das and Poole a sense of unease about a simple opposition
or partition between global and local. One could argue this is a category mistake,
as though things pertained exclusively to one or the other, instead of both at
once, in different ways. Diffusionism, of which globalism is in some ways the
latest and most muscular version, had at its heart the category mistake of opposing
self and other. To acknowledge for a moment Linton’s famous attempt to use
diffusionism to offset American cultural complacency (1936), consider whether
a particular institution – morning coffee, or cooking spaghetti with tomato sauce
– is something intrinsic to our culinary tradition or foreign and imported?
Is it ‘theirs’, or ‘ours’? The invention of noodles in China or the domestica-
tion of tomatoes in the New World notwithstanding, there is still something to
be said for the genius of Italian cuisine, and the originality of Italian cuisine not-
withstanding, there is still something to be said for acknowledging the sources and
movements of its products. These are not mutually exclusive, commensurable
options.2
A more appropriate opposition to the local than the global might be the every-
where and nowhere of objectivist Enlightenment thought, the ideal of escaping the
particular, the specific, the immediate, or the immanent. That is, the opposite of
the local may be the abstract or transcendental universal.
In this respect the local describes the human condition, down here on earth. It
exists at many levels of inclusion and scale. Hence one could describe the global as
simply the most encompassing end of a series of levels of the local, the local at the
level of planet earth. The ‘local’, in a second, and perhaps more usual sense, would
describe the least encompassing end of the series.
From this perspective, the category mistake of opposing global and local would
be not only one of pretending the commensurability of what are incommensurable
perspectives but the reverse one of treating the ends of a common scalar measure as
200 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

though they were discrete entities, mistaking the measure or level of recursion for
the phenomena.
One could also contrast the local with mass society. Hannah Arendt draws the
image of the cultural world, constructed by humans, as a table. ‘To live together
in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have
it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world,
like every in between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (1998: 52).
Arendt contrasts such a public realm with mass society in which it is as though the
table around which we are seated were to disappear, so that people ‘were no longer
separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible’
(1998: 53). To reinhabit the local would be to rebuild the table, to restore the tangible
means of relationship.
The image of the table suggests a kind of centripetal containment. Things fall
apart, the centre cannot hold. So did Chinua Achebe, after Yeats, already in 1958,
epitomize the effects of the initial arrival of British missionaries and the imposition
of colonial force on Igbo communities. There is perhaps no better way to describe
the demise of, or threat to, the local. Of course, not all localities can be defined
concentrically, as having or being centres when viewed from an external perspec-
tive, but perhaps they can from an internal one. The centre is the indexical origo
and the local is defined with reference to it – to my body or person, our kinship
network, home, community, political arena, or world, or as I would prefer to
phrase it, to our labour, our practice, our mutual acts.
The local is thus in one sense fundamentally deictic and concentric, a perspective
whose circumference expands and contracts, with respect to the attention, engage-
ment, or projects of inhabitants. Nuer segmentary organization is one form this
movement can take. It is when we try to define or impose the local from an external
perspective, from above, as it were, that we have trouble with boundaries and their
reifications and transgressions. In other words, the indexicality of the local means
both that it is not fixed in space or time and that it can be invoked and inhabited at
many levels of inclusion. Phrased another way, the local is relative – to persons,
activities, conversations, and horizons.
The corollary to this view is that, contrary to a position from globalization
that sees the local, from the outside, as a place continuously impinged upon by
and encapsulated within external forces and structures (or a place to be
observed, measured, developed, etc.), the problem or danger from the perspec-
tive of the local is more one of excessive dispersion and anomie. If the local is
vulnerable in the way we most often think about it, that is, to being penetrated
or encompassed by external forces so that, in effect, it is subsumed or sub-
merged, the more salient threat is one of dissolution, thinning, disintegrating, or
simple loss of interest. That is to say, the problem is experienced as one of
maintaining a centre more than of defending boundaries. If the local is always
constituted through a balance between activity (production) and reception, from
the internal perspective, the local one, it is the failure of concentration – in all
its senses – that is the main risk.
Lambek 201

Sidetracking along my intellectual biography

As far as I can recall when I first set out in 1975 to do fieldwork I did so without the
benefit of a concept of the local, and certainly without the global. There was no
local until we had invented the vocabulary and we did so when the older vocab-
ulary was no longer adequate to changing historical circumstances and intellectual
conversation. Yet vocabulary does not simply denote objects that are pregiven.
When ‘local’ shifts from an unobtrusive adjective to a noun, from a descriptor to a
reified abstraction (‘the local’), it becomes a kind and kinds, as we know from
Hacking (1999), after Foucault, have consequences for the very things to which
they are meant to refer, such that before the word there was not quite that object in
the world. Thus in looking for their objects in historical periods before the words
were coined we may be guilty of anachronism, or chronocentrism.
One could argue that the invisibility of the local was because it was taken for
granted. It had not yet become problematic for me, and perhaps not yet for the
discipline at large – though the discipline caught on faster than I did. In some ways
I have never left the local in this older, prediscursive sense, though perhaps it has
left me.
Two sets of oppositions were relevant when I first went to the field that today
strike me as precursors, but not equivalents, to the local and its other. One I have
already half alluded to, namely the debate between diffusionism and evolutionism.
Although diffusionism was already long defeated as an anthropological theory, it
was highly relevant in the context of Madagascar, where the inhabitants speak a
language whose closest relatives are spoken by people thousands of miles away in
Indonesia. French colonial scholarship liked to emphasize the Indonesian origin of
the population of the Malagasy highlands in contrast with the statistically more
phenotypically African inhabitants of the coasts, thereby offering a racialized
account of Malagasy history that both drew on and reinforced the social hierar-
chies and biases dominant in Madagascar at the time. The diffusionists argued as
though the Merina had brought the state or ‘civilization’ with them across the
Indian Ocean to Madagascar, contained in a basket in their outrigger canoes, or
more likely, in their heads. The evolutionists, of whom, reinforced by some training
in archaeology, I was one, wanted to understand how and why social stratification
and state formation developed dynamically within Madagascar itself. This was in
essence a materialist theory in opposition to the idealism of the diffusionists.
The materialist/idealist valence soon switched to work the other way; with world
systems theory and Wolf’s conceptualization of history, models that emphasized
globalization were more likely to be staunchly materialist whereas those that
emphasized the local tended to be more idealist, or at least interpretive.3 This is
not the place to pursue the question of the relationship of social evolutionary to
historical approaches in anthropology but it is worth remembering the lesson of
evolutionism that whatever the movement of capital, goods, people, imperial
armies, or ideas, one has to understand their impact in relation to the dynamics
of specific social formations in a given setting.
202 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

In the event, political circumstances (local and global) prevented me from begin-
ning what would have likely been a doomed attempt at applying a regional rather
than local model (after Political Systems of Highland Burma) to northern
Madagascar and sent me instead to the small island of Mayotte where another
prevalent theoretical opposition – between the particular and the universal – came
to figure much more strongly in my work. Having recently read Geertz, I was
inspired to make Mayotte ‘another country heard from’. Carrying out what was
essentially a Malinowskian village study, I was guided or comforted by Geertz’s
aphorism that ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbor-
hoods. . .); they study in villages’ (1973: 22).
This was the heyday of the confrontation or articulation of hermeneutic anthro-
pology with structuralism. My undergraduate years were haunted by Lévi-Strauss,
not Geertz; I say ‘haunted’ because everyone spoke about him in hushed tones of
awe but no one ever fully explained him, at least not sufficiently to me. In turning
my doctoral thesis into a book, I took my supervisor Aram Yengoyan’s advice to
read Ricoeur (1971) and was much taken with his dialogue with structuralism. It
was an argument of Human Spirits (Lambek 1981) that the particular form spirit
possession took in Mayotte spoke to questions of the human condition writ large.
I wrote in the introduction:

The core of anthropological theory lies in the dialectic between human cultural unity
and diversity. There has been a tendency in recent symbolic analyses to emphasize
the latter at the expense of the former. The thrust of the present study is to bring the
two together. After an excursion through the particularities of an exotic culture, of a
genre, texts, and style foreign to our own, we discover a ‘deep semantic’ that is, I
think, more familiar to us. The world that possession points to, or ‘opens up,’ is not
so different from the world we know. Were this correct and generalizable, it would
support Lévi-Strauss’s vision and his general methods but place the universal at a
lower level of abstraction. Yet neither would it deny the insight of Geertz, who
argues that what is universal to humankind is our radical investment in the partic-
ular. The depth interpretation of a foreign text (culture) is only reached through the
mediation of a structural (cultural) analysis. A common view is revealed, to invert
the metaphor, only from the very tops of different mountains. (Lambek 1981: 12)4

It is a truism by now to link an interest in the particular to a model of

cultures as bounded autonomous units. The model has been sufficiently chal-
lenged but there is debate about whether that is because of the disappearance or
transformation of phenomena to which it did once appropriately apply, that is,
whether the existence of relatively bounded cultures is primarily a historical
question. Lévi-Strauss phrased the historical argument better and earlier than
most:

The gradual fusion of groups previously separated by geographic distance as well as

by linguistic and cultural barriers has marked the end of a world: the world of human
Lambek 203

beings who, for hundreds of thousands of years, lived in small and durably separated
groups each evolving differently on both a biological and a cultural level. The
upheavals unleashed by an expanding industrial civilization, and the rising speed
of transportation and communication, have knocked down these barriers. At the
same time, we have lost the possibilities offered by these barriers for developing and
testing new genetic combinations and cultural experiences. Now we cannot close our
eyes to the fact that, despite its urgent practical necessity and the high moral goals it
has set itself, the struggle against all forms of discrimination is part of the same
movement that is carrying humanity toward a global civilization – a civilization that
is the destroyer of those old particularisms, which had the honor of creating the
aesthetic and spiritual values that make life worthwhile and that we carefully safe-
guard in libraries and museums because we feel ever less capable of producing them
ourselves. (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 23)

The concept of the local has come for some to stand in for what Lévi-Strauss
refers to as ‘those old particularisms’, but it does so precisely because it does not
carry with it the idea of bounded, autonomous social groups and cultural worlds.
However, I do not think that we can easily say that local: global:: particular:
universal; it will take many volumes of some future Mythologiques to resolve
this. Among other things, the dominance of a global/local over a universal/partic-
ular framework is an index of a shift in the discipline of anthropology itself as
much as in its object. I characterize anthropology as dynamically situated between
history and philosophy and would say that in the last three decades the pull has
been much more strongly to the side of history. However, despite profound
historical and intellectual changes, study along the dimensions of particular/
universal remains possible and interesting.5
I have said that I worked without a concept of the local so I was rather
surprised to recall – indeed, I almost missed the fact – that the subtitle of my
second book, Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte, was Local Discourses of Islam,
Sorcery, and Spirit Possession (1993).6 In fact, I described knowledge and practice
in Mayotte as situated at a particular conjunction of three explicitly translocal
traditions (Islam, cosmology, and spirit possession).7 It was their singular con-
junction – there and then in Mayotte – that was local and that interested me.8 The
relation of the local to the regional was more salient than to the global (Islam had
not yet been defined as ‘global’), but behind this remained understanding the
particular in its relations to the universal, epitomized for me by general problems
of practice, knowledge, and incommensurability. However, as I saw the incom-
mensurability of traditions as a problem internal to Mayotte, my argument led me
to break down the distinction between the interpretive work that goes on within ‘a
culture’ from that which goes on between cultures, thereby undermining the objec-
tification of distinct cultures without abandoning the particular or the local. Life
in Mayotte, as I understood it, was constituted in the conversations and other
forms of practice generated through the articulation of diverse translocal
traditions.
204 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

Two models of the local: A matter of prepositions

It is a consequence of the sort of transformation described by Lévi-Strauss that the
local enters anthropology only when it is no longer self-evident.9 But it comes into
view in at least two ways.
Where distinct cultures were once the sign and register of the incommensurable,
the local becomes a register of the all too commensurable. That is, one of the ways
that ‘the local’ is applied is to affirm a model of homogeneous empty space. Here the
local implies a position – any position – on the neutral grid available to the surveyor,
land developer, state planner, etc. This grid of homogeneous space parallels
Benjamin and Chakrabarty’s elaborations of secular, homogeneous, and empty
time. The power of the grid is now nowhere better epitomized than in the availability
of GIS, Google Earth and other satellite images, and indeed in the whole configu-
ration of the internet.
Conversely, a strength of the concept of the local in anthropology is that it can
evade ideas of bounded unity, cohesion, autonomy, etc., while simultaneously
preserving an idea of particularity or singularity in the face of inscription in the
homogeneous grid or subsumption within larger political, legal, and technological
orders. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, ‘Anthropology is not homogeneous,
empty space but space filled by the presence of the here’ (1962: 263, as quoted in
Chakrabarty 2000: 265n, my transformation and emphasis).
To appreciate both the closeness and difference of these two invocations of the
local, consider the distinction that Chakrabarty adopts from Paul Veyne between
specificity and singularity (and that is reminiscent of Boas’s depiction of cosmog-
raphy and Kroeber’s struggle over various conceptions of history). Chakrabarty
quotes Veyne as follows:

History is interested in individualized events . . . but it is not interested in their indi-

viduality; it seeks to understand them – that is, to find among them a kind of gener-
ality or, more precisely, of specificity. It is the same with natural history; its curiosity
is inexhaustible, all the species matter to it and none is superfluous, but it does not
propose the enjoyment of their singularity in the manner of the bestiary of the Middle
Ages, in which one could read descriptions of noble, beautiful, strange or cruel ani-
mals. (Veyne Writing History: Essays on Epistemology 1984: 56, as cited by
Chakrabarty 2000: 82)10

Chakrabarty himself continues:

The very conception of the ‘specific’ as it obtains in the discipline of history, in other
words, belongs to the structure of a general that necessarily occludes our view of the
singular. Of course, nothing exists out there as a ‘singular-in-itself.’ Singularity is a
matter of viewing. It comes into being as that which resists our attempt to see
something as a particular instance of a general idea or category. Philosophically, it
is a limiting concept, since language itself mostly speaks of the general. Facing the
Lambek 205

singular might be a question of straining against language itself; it could, for exam-
ple, involve the consideration of the manner in which the world, after all, remains
opaque to the generalities inherent in language. Here, however, I am using a slightly
weaker version of the idea. By ‘singular’ I mean that which defies the generalizing
impulse of the sociological imagination. (2000: 82–3)11

Singularity here is not opposed to plurality; they are on the same side. Plurality
is a multiple of singularities.12 Nevertheless, singularity unfortunately counts for
very little in the social sciences, even anthropology, where teaching and learning are
organized around specificity, abstraction, illustration, etc. Publishers know this; it
is one reason for the precarious state of the ethnographic monograph.13
Turning the anthropological object from the particular to the local is, in one
sense, a shift in weight from the singular to the specific. But more than this, it can
index a shift from the specific as an instance of culture, with all its density, texture,
and incommensurability, or from the specific as an instance of society, with the
implications of autonomy and perhaps holism, to the specific as mere location on
the homogeneous grid.
When I was writing my dissertation one of my professors14 pointed out that it
was a very different matter for me to say what took place on Mayotte as opposed to
what took place in it. I see now that this matter of prepositions signifies the various
oppositions I have brought into play between the local/global and the particular/
universal, the hermeneutic and analytic, the singular and the specific.
In classical (insular) fieldwork the referents of the ‘on’ and the ‘in’ were expected
to coincide (I don’t know about fieldwork carried out on/within large land masses),
but nowadays they cannot. Malagasy speakers have a proverb that addresses the
situation. They say, tsy tany mandeha fo ulun’belu (It’s not land that moves, but
people).15 People in (or on) Mayotte told a rueful joke on themselves: when the
French first imposed their rule over Mayotte the inhabitants pierced a hole in a
rock at one end of the island (it is still visible), attached a rope, and attempted to
tow the island away, to escape quite literally out from under French rule. But of
course, ‘land doesn’t move, people do’. The inhabitants of Mayotte eventually
decided it was better to keep the French than to escape them and they voted in
several referenda to stay part of France. They feel strongly that they have benefited
as a result (as indeed by many criteria, including health, education, and standard of
living measured in monetary terms, they certainly have). Yet such benefits were
never received without some disquiet – often expressed by means of the relationship
between the immobility of land and the movement of people. Some years after
I heard the tale about towing away the island, bush spirits invaded the homes of
villagers, crying out at their own expropriation when roads were built and gasoline
fumes began to pervade the countryside. And then my friend Nuriaty saw in a
dream how the Muslim saint decamped from his tomb outside our village and took
a motor boat (vedette) for parts elsewhere, where presumably he could rest in
tranquility and dignity, away from the transgressions of Sunday picnickers on
the beach (Lambek 2002a).
206 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

As the bush was cleared to general human satisfaction, the spirits scattered. Not
long after, people did too. Many inhabitants themselves moved temporarily to La
Réunion or metropolitan France and in the meanwhile the village filled with ‘infor-
mal’ immigrants from the neighbouring Comoros in search of a livelihood. Is the
local to be found with the unmoving land or the moving people? Or is it to be found,
to borrow Anna Tsing’s felicitous word (2004), in the friction between them?
Whatever the case, it is becoming increasingly problematic to differentiate between
accounting for what is found simply ‘on’ Mayotte and what is ‘in’ or ‘of’ it.
By one coinage, then, the local applies to any and every kind of place, its only
distinctive feature being one of scale. It describes the sort of places one could, with
some exaggeration, describe as being without a soul, places where, as Gertrude
Stein put it, there is no there there. Its rise in usage is an index of the rise of such
kinds of places, a shift from heterogeneity toward homogeneity, plenitude to
emptiness, potency to neutrality, multidimensionality to flatness. One could say,
perhaps, that in saluting the departure of the spirits the inhabitants of Mayotte
were acknowledging the passing of their own singularity.
And yet, they were using singular means to do so. By another view, then, the one
I am advocating here, recognition of the local is precisely to catch the there there.
The way to do so is by turning from a consideration of abstract space or stationary
objects to one of realized moral action, from a focus on the stillness of land, to the
liveliness of human activity, from space to the acts of inhabiting place (cf. Basso
1996). This is, I think, the larger point of the proverb It’s not land that moves, but
people; the essential tension between place and people, immobility and movement,
can only be realized in acts and practices of habitation. Indeed, people from
Mayotte residing in Réunion (1700 km away) told me that Réunion had now
‘become’ Mayotte (Etu Larunyon izeo fa Maore´).
Singularity is to be found in acts. That this is my act, carried out here, in this
place, now – is a singular event. And all acts – habitual, ritual, or heroic – have
moral entailments, impelling acknowledgement, response, witness, and recognition
(Lambek 2010). Another way to catch the local, then, is to focus on acts and the
circular ripples of their consequences.

How do we inhabit the local?

In thinking about the local as constituted by means of acts and consequences rather
than specific spaces or individualized places, that is, by acts of habitation, I have
been inspired by Stanley Cavell’s arguments, in Must We Mean What We Say?
(1976) and elsewhere, concerning the intractable entailments of speaking and
acting, specifically the problem of acknowledgement – the obligation to acknowledge
my words and acts as mine, whatever I meant them to say or do, but conversely the
obligation to acknowledge the meaning beyond or to one side of your effective
utterances or acts. I have learned, in part from Veena Das (2007), to understand
the local as the reach of mutual acknowledgement along with the risks of infidelity
(or infelicity). However, I see such acknowledgement taking place not only in the
Lambek 207

give and take of everyday life but also in the more formal contexts constituted by
ritual. I follow here the argument of Rappaport (1999) that ritual performance entails
embodied commitment to the liturgical order of which it is a part and hence, along the
lines originally put forward by Austin (1962) with respect to the illocutionary, that
such performance entails commitment to the moral effects that it accomplishes as well
as the means by which it does so. Insofar as ritual is a social act, so do participants,
including witnesses, acknowledge each other as moral persons, bound to a common
order and to common criteria for evaluating each other’s acts. To give a simple illus-
tration, to have served as a witness to a baptism or wedding (say, by eating at the feast)
is to acknowledge the transformation in the moral condition of the main subjects and
to share the commitment to sustain and uphold what has transpired (whatever the
subsequent failures to do so). In participating in the felicitous performance of a ritual
we acknowledge that we mean what we say and do (an act which thereby provisionally
answers Cavell’s original question) and we acknowledge the acts and utterances,
ultimately the moral personhood, of the other performers as well.
The performance of ritual thus binds participants into singular communities of
shared ethical criteria and specific commitments. Whatever one’s private ‘belief’,
active participation entails accepting the criteria internal to the liturgical order.
Participants in a common liturgical order can recognize each other across wide
spaces, re-forming and re-inhabiting the local wherever they meet. It is on this basis
that Muslims (at least Muslim men) have travelled and done business so easily
across the Indian Ocean world (cf. Kresse and Simpson 2007; Loimeier and
Seesemann 2006; Parkin and Headley 2000; but also Weber 1946 on Protestant
denominations in the US). The Muslim local blossoms at every mosque, sustained
and supplemented by means of the performative discipline indexed by dress and
comportment.
Thinking about the local as the scene and product of acts invites attention to
Arendt’s discussion of activity in The Human Condition. As she put it, ‘each human
activity points to its proper location in world’ (1998: 73). Following Aristotle, she
distinguishes activity as contemplation, work, and, action, and adding, after Marx,
labour. Arendt prefigures a good deal of feminist thought in distinguishing labour
from work. Labour refers to the activity of reproduction, including not only the
explicit ‘labour’ of giving birth, but of raising children, providing subsistence, and,
showing her German roots, the monotonous regularity of cleaning. Each kind of
activity, its specificity always historically constituted, exceeds its origo in its own
way, according to its measure and scope. In Arendt’s scheme, labour is continuous
and rhythmical, embodied, and highly localized – hidden, as the Greeks liked it, in
the household; moreover, ‘it is . . . the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing
behind’ (p. 87). By contrast, work entails the creation or production of discrete
objects (‘works’), which then go on, as Appadurai, Kopytoff and others have
latterly shown, to have lives and movement of their own. Work is punctuated
and irreversible; the activity is localized but its products can travel widely.
Action, for Arendt, is epitomized as politics and is distinguished by its consequen-
tiality and the fact that the outcome is both irreversible and unpredictable; the
208 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

trajectory of genuine action, which for Arendt, as for the Greeks, means heroic
action, is in principle without limits.
Part of the excitement of reading The Human Condition today is thus the way
Arendt distinguishes the temporality (or chronotope) characteristic of each kind of
activity. Insofar as the local is constituted by means of activity so it is intrinsically
temporal. The lessons here are both that it is an error to abstract the spatial from
the temporal and that temporality is not all of a kind, that human life is constituted
through a multiplicity of temporalities, possibly incommensurable among them-
selves. The local is the site at which these multiple activities and temporalities
(continuities, ruptures, rhythms, beginnings and endings, irreversible acts and
reiterated practices) are lived simultaneously.
In anthropology, ‘local’ used to be a bound morpheme, preceded by patri-, matri-,
etc., and even various baroque combinations, such as the patri-uxorilocal that
I favoured to describe post-marital residence in Mayotte. Although often phrased
as rules rather than practices, the point of these concepts was to show that social
collectivities and localities are not isomorphic, that persons move in patterned ways
across the landscape and shift locality. The scope of these localities was never spe-
cified; thus one could hardly distinguish, for example, whether uxorilocal meant a
man moving in with the girl next door or a woman living miles away. But several
points were – and are – critical: that residence is rarely stable throughout the life
cycle, that people do move, that movement helps constitute locality, that movement
and hence localities are gendered and age-sedimented in particular ways, that locality
is often figured with respect to kinship and marriage (and hence effected by means of
ritual), and that when that happens, and history is not getting in the way, movement
within and between localities is repetitive, or cyclical, albeit original for each person.
Thus we might think of localities as sediments of original yet iterated acts, social
equivalents of the Middle Eastern tells in which habitation is built upon previous
habitation. I like to return to Freud’s remarks about the mind in Civilization and Its
Discontents, with which I concluded The Weight of the Past (2002b: 174):

Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly
long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come
into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue
to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of
the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their
old height on the Palatine and the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its
battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so
on. But more than this, in the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once
more stand – without the Palazzo having to be removed – the Temple of Jupiter
Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw
it, but also in its earliest one, when it showed Etruscan forms. (1985: 257–8)

Localities are like this: places inhabited, rebuilt, and reinhabited. Humanly
inhabited spaces have a temporal dimension of sedimented labour, work, acts,
Lambek 209

and their consequences. We must be attuned to the temporality and depth of the
local. At the same time, the local is not only always already deposited but must be
continuously realized.
In her emphasis on politics and singular, discrete acts, perhaps Arendt unduly
neglects Aristotle’s conception of continuous practice, and more specifically,
practical reason or judgement (phronesis). Phronesis is the domain of the ethical;
conceived as prudence, it is perhaps the central or meta-virtue and serves as a
model for how virtuous practice proceeds. Where virtue is understood as cultivated
disposition and where ethics is understood as practical, they apply to the realm of
work no less than action, and much more intimately to the realm of labour than
Arendt supposed. Arendt is proto-feminist rather than feminist insofar as she does
not grant labour the full value of ethical practice. Additionally, in centring her
argument about work on the (male) craftsman or artist and his products, she
underplays the role of performance as a kind of work, and especially of ritual
performance.16 Arendt drew on etymology very productively in distinguishing
labour from work in several European languages, but she ignored the fact that
many societies also identify liturgical and life cycle rituals as work.17 Moreover,
ritual performances are central both to the cyclical round Arendt identifies as
labour and to the public domain and the irreversibility of action that she identifies
as politics. Finally, in her attention to specifically heroic acts, Arendt neglects the
significance of ordinary acts and utterances and so her model needs to be supple-
mented by Austin and Cavell.
From an Aristotelian conception of practice as open-ended judgement it is easy
to slip into an objectification of discrete practices, as does Alasdair MacIntyre in
After Virtue (1984). Yet MacIntyre takes the ethical dimension of practice
seriously. He distinguishes the goals or goods internal and external to a given
practice, e.g. playing music for the enjoyment or the exercise of the capacities it
provides as opposed (though they needn’t be specifically opposed) to playing in
order to win a prize or support a family. Instead of emphasizing the finished
product, like the sculpture, the point would be the pleasure and challenge entailed
in sculpting it. In the case of goods internal to a practice, means and end are
conjoined. Only with respect to external goods are ends scarce, practice agonistic,
and tournaments of value possible. It is anthropology’s near blindness to internal
goods and obsession with external ones (Weber and Turner, perhaps, aside; see also
James 2003) that inadvertently exports the very ideologies of capitalist competition
and consumption it sets out to critique and is partly responsible for the pervasive
cynicism of the discipline. One way to think about the local then is with respect to
the goods internal to a set of practices, such that activity and context are conjoined
rather than the one being external to the other. To re/inhabit the local would be to
respect the value of internal goods rather than to give oneself over exclusively to
external forms of valuation (and a utilitarian relation of means to ends).18
To speak about inhabiting or re-inhabiting as a universal concern is not, of
course, to assert that either along the public or along the subjective register will
it be articulated or experienced in the same manner everywhere. This returns us to
210 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

the particular. Not only do contexts, constraints, and obstacles differ, but so do
persons, practices, idioms, goods, and histories, what it means to inhabit, and what
kinds of acts are necessary for habitation or rehabitation. A familiar example of
surprisingly continuous habitation of or through a local practice or set of related
practices is the kula. A striking illustration of rehabitation after severe disruption is
provided by Wendy James (2007). Having traced Uduk, among whom she con-
ducted fieldwork several decades earlier, through the Sudanese war and extensive
displacement, she rediscovered people in refugee camps. Although they had all
converted to charismatic Christianity, she observed them practising much older
forms of music and dance that she herself had never seen but of which there exist
earlier records. Such collective music-making forms a kind of existential origo and
a manifestation of reinhabiting or reconstituting the local; ‘making’ here is simul-
taneously doing and being. Uduk displaced to the US avidly watch videos of the
dance sent them from the refugee camps.19 Musical and dance performances epit-
omize practice in MacIntyre’s sense: done for their own sake, for the skills they
entail and exact, the pleasure and absorption they bring. These are goods internal
to practice, properties of action rather than products or objects. A comparable
description would be to say that they epitomize the exercise of the human capacities
rather than the maximization of utilities (Macpherson 1973; cf. Lambek 2008).
For the remainder of the paper I turn specifically to villages of Malagasy speakers
in Mayotte, the research site I know best. This is not the only kind of ‘local’ and a
discussion of my other field sites would lead in somewhat different directions.

Mayotte: The local as activity

The villages that I reached by a steep path through dense forest in 1975 now suffer
a steady stream of vehicular traffic on the paved road. They have changed in many
ways, sliding from the singular to the specific in the manner in which they are seen
and administered. Yet activity still shapes the local and activity, from the perspec-
tive of the actors, is always in some respect singular.
I begin with some brief words about the sphere Arendt called labour. In the early
1970s people went regularly to and from fields, often several kilometers away, where
they sometimes stayed for the season. They went on foot, up and down hill, or by
canoe. Preparing rice fields, planting, weeding, harvesting, drying, and husking by
mortar and pestle have since all been replaced by the purchase of imported white
rice. Water collected in wells or ran in bamboo pipes from springs to a communal
basin where women fetched it in buckets; today houses have taps or standpipes with
potable running water. People cooked with firewood, successively supplemented or
replaced by charcoal, liquid fuel, and now electricity. Women have lighter domestic
chores but they also have less help as their daughters are at school; many of the
younger women themselves hold wage jobs. An active farming and fishing village has
been transformed into a residential community for workers and unemployed. As the
village contracts from the fields and gardens, and somewhat from the lagoon, toward
the ever more intensely built-up central space, people drive out daily to town or fly to
Lambek 211

more distant parts. All these changes in labour and in what Arendt called the
tangible reconfigure the local (and could of course be discussed at much greater length).
While gender roles are not rigid and some domestic labour is shared between the
sexes, women do the bulk of it and their labour entails not only caring for children
but keeping men satisfied. Such labour is variously and sometimes simultaneously
emotional, sexual, and ethical. In all of this the local can be seen to comprehend the
house, the courtyard, and the neighbourhood, exchanges between domestic part-
ners and among women. The local is found in the well-trod pathways between
houses and the histories of movements and exchanges, resentments and reconcili-
ations, between them. In the early mornings and every day those women and men
stroll individually across to the compounds of their elders to enquire their well-
being, greeting everyone met along the way. This mix of kinship and neighbourli-
ness, acknowledgement, informal courtesy, and mutual concern, is one axis of the
local. It weakens with absence of those commuting to work or living abroad but
one of the outstanding features remains the rich and playful quality of conversa-
tion. There is much laughter.
Arendt distinguishes the repetitiveness of labour from the creativity of work.
‘Without taking things out of nature’s hands and consuming them, and without
defending himself against the natural processes of growth and decay, the animal
laborans could never survive. But without being at home in the midst of things
whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very
permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human’
(1998: 135). People in Mayotte once made, and now largely purchase, a number
of material items, but the objects of much work in Mayotte and what is made
durable are less material things than liturgical orders, social relations, and moral
persons. Central to kinship is not only the daily round of care but the deliberate
production of persons, most fundamentally through circumcising sons, marrying
off daughters as virgins (Lambek 1983), and holding ceremonies to pray for
deceased parents (Lambek 2011). Social reproduction is also saliently materialized
in the construction of houses, once for daughters and now also for oneself. These
are still partly built by hand but always include wage labour and purchased
materials.20 There has been inflation in the size and solidity of houses; construction
is constant and houses are expanding into what were open-air living spaces between
them even though older people prefer to work and relax outside.
Making the social has been the responsibility of the entire community. If fathers
have the job of building houses for daughters, everyone shares in the building and
upkeep of mosques and in the production of collective Muslim ceremonies, includ-
ing reciprocal feasts with other villages and periodic performances of Sufi music
(Lambek 2000, 2006). Everyone partakes in the social production of persons, that
is, in one another’s circumcisions, virgin weddings, and mortuary services, and
through the 1970s there were elaborate and formal rules as to how this was
done. The ceremonial exchange system (shungu) produced goods internal to its prac-
tice, including the elaboration of full and equal citizenship for all participants
(Lambek 1990a).
212 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

The world of the village I encountered in 1975 was constituted largely through
ritual: life-cycle rituals that placed people in the community, collective rituals inter-
nal to and inclusive of the community, exchanges of ceremony that related the
communities to one another, and the daily, weekly, and annual Muslim observances
that related everyone to God and, indirectly, to the umma. There were also ceremo-
nies of spirit possession in which participation was, as it were, by election or infec-
tion, by the decisions of spirits to inhabit certain persons and to periodically rise up
and speak and act through their bodies. With the exception of daily prayer and the
more private encounters with healers, all these events were known as asa, a word that
means ‘work’ or ‘works’ (miasa, ‘to work’). They were ‘work’ in the sense of publicly
performing, producing, transforming, offering hospitality, and acknowledging, and
‘work’ in the sense of requiring a good deal of effort – planning, accumulating
firewood and foodstuffs, cooking, organizing labour and distribution, praying,
and so on. Work (asa) implies a seriousness and consequentiality distinguished
from service (odd jobs, employment, note the French term). Asa overlaps with
Aristotelian poiesis such that the felicitous performance of each ritual could be
considered the performance of a work, as in a work of art, a formulation most
obvious with respect to the beautiful performances of Sufi music and dance or the
singing of a maulida. But asa here also fits the Aristotelian category of acts or
actions, things done, or accomplished. Asa produce moral persons, relations,
states, and conditions (e.g. spiritual protection) through specific acts. At the end
of an asa people who have put it on say to one another in relief and self-congratula-
tion, nefa tsara, it ended well, meaning, in Austinian terms, a felicitous performance,
carried off without hitch or flaw.
Carrying out an asa has a temporal structure of feeling approximating that of
drama of which Turner speaks (1974) – anticipation and anxiety, followed by the
pleasure and concentration of performance, and then the relief and satisfaction of
accomplishment.21 This extends among whatever the size or scale of the group con-
ceived as responsible for the particular performance, the tompin ny asa, masters or
owners of the work/ceremony, whether they be a couple marrying off their daughter
(secondarily including a range of bilateral kin), a mosque congregation inviting the
neighbouring one to perform a maulida and be feasted in return, or the whole com-
munity holding its own blessings (shijabu) or protective prayers or inviting other
communities across Mayotte for performances of Sufi dances. In actual fact, the
composition and articulation of the various participants as tompin – responsible
producers – or as subjects, performers, guests, recipients, and witnesses is complex,
a part of local knowledge that is by no means self-evident but that constitutes, one
could say, the social structure. The distinctions, overlaps, and reciprocations among
the various actors are overtly expressed in the accumulation and redistribution of
food; whether, for example, meat from a slaughtered cow is distributed raw or
cooked and to which combination of individuals, households, age groups, guests,
etc. Such acts serve cumulatively to reproduce the local as centre to itself.22
Certainly, then, one measure, or rather, exemplification, of how the community
changes or what happens to the mode of inhabiting the local, concerns the
Lambek 213

performance of such asa – by and for whom, and to what effect. The bottom line:
whether it is still possible to carry out asa felicitously.
I’ve suggested that in any locality the articulation of the vehicles and activities of
labour, work, action and contemplation provide a unique configuration. At the
same time, we must not ignore the contingency of events and ask, as Sahlins does
(1985), how they are integrated into structure, or ask, as theorists of social suffering
do, how they effect disruption and damage. As a consequence of various events,
including the termination of rice production and the rapid growth of commodifi-
cation, villagers closed the formal system of ritual exchange (shungu), yet they did
so in such a deliberate, orderly manner that it wound down gradually, payment by
payment, according to its own principles (Lambek 1990a). The shungu system was,
in a sense, an objectification of both labour and work and it produced a certain
form of temporality that entailed the completion of the person (social redemption).
It is in the time and key of action that the system was closed down. People did not
simply lose interest and disengage but rather acknowledged the act of termination
as theirs. This act now becomes a part of the history of the community. However,
the demise of the formal system has not meant a decline in the performance of life-
cycle rituals (asa), but rather a change in their criteria or felicity conditions and
especially a shift in participation and acknowledgement from the collective towards
the kin group.
One of the striking things about asa is the collective autonomy with which they
are performed and that they serve to express. But such autonomy has been recently
increasingly encroached upon and encompassed by the state. In 1976 the local
political movement, led and energized largely by women, that fought to have the
island remain under French control achieved victory (Lambek 1995) and since that
time, at the repeated urgings of the majority of its citizens, Mayotte has become
ever more firmly embedded in the French state, as a collectivite´ de´partementale, and
soon a de´partement. France has invested heavily in infrastructure and especially in
education. Citizens of Mayotte increasingly enjoy the benefits of French citizenship
(including the euro), but also must live increasingly under the same bureaucratic
restrictions and subject to the same forms of discipline and governmentality.
Reforms and regulations have been introduced in stages, yet often come as a rude
surprise. They include the registration of births and marriages, housing standards,
zoning, property registration, forms of taxation, and so on, but also a variety of
benefits, including old age, unemployment, and child support. One of the effects of
state bureaucracy has been a vast increase in geographical mobility; once a French
passport has been acquired – no longer difficult for someone who can establish birth
in Mayotte – the world is open. When people discovered that state benefits were
higher for residents of metropolitan France and La Réunion they began to move
temporarily in large numbers to those distant places. Women often led the migra-
tion. On Réunion they saved money and reinvested it in housing in Mayotte and
perhaps also went on the haj.
In Mayotte, not only have most rituals shifted to weekends to accommodate the
rhythms of wage labour, but they have become increasingly concentrated in the dry
214 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

months of the austral winter that happily coincide with the vacances characteristic
of French education and employment and that therefore see a large influx of
migrants returning home for the holidays and participating in the rituals of
fellow villagers or engaging the latter to help them produce their own rituals.
The village has become a place to return periodically in order to have one’s sons
circumcised, daughters married, and deceased parents prayed for, or to attend
similar rituals (asa) held by others. After such events people often leave again.
But return also serves as the final goal and most migrants are engaged in construct-
ing new houses in the village.
In 1975 a relatively wealthy man who had married into the village was expelled
from the community because he had chained his canoe to a tree. There was no
objection to private property but canoes had to be available at a moment’s notice
to notify people elsewhere at the event of a death. When someone died everyone
would stop whatever they were doing and go to the house of the deceased to
recite dua, help prepare the body, or be sent as messenger. When I described
coming from a city of 2 million inhabitants the inevitable response was that
I must spend all my time attending funerals. That ethic of acknowledgement has
considerably weakened. Funerals are still public affairs but many life cycle rituals
are now by invitation, thereby considerably undermining what had been the
genuinely collective project of the social reproduction of community members
and also adding a dimension of differentiation in the size and expense of affairs
whose equivalence and reciprocity had once been carefully controlled.
The local has thus considerably expanded to incorporate all the comings and
goings and the satellite settlements to be found in Réunion or Marseille, but it
has also thinned out with respect to social density. It is no longer the case that
everyone in the community is implicated in the social production of everyone
else. People no longer intrinsically and explicitly acknowledge each other’s moral
personhood, transformation, and interconnection; conversely, they must now
tacitly acknowledge social differentiation. The moral shift is heightened by the
influx of generally young, poor, and illegal migrants from neighbouring islands,
often claiming or seeking kin ties in the village and serving as cheap labour,
builders and occupants of the very houses under construction while the owners
are away in Réunion living in rented housing and working or more likely col-
lecting benefits. This lends to everything a quality of unease and unreality. It is
offset in part by the integrity of Islam, which comprehends the entire community
and which, despite internal debates and especially tension between what I have
called certain knowledge and contestable authority (Lambek 1990b), continues to
implicate people in one another’s reproduction. Thus all the kinship ceremonies I
have mentioned require the participation of knowledgeable Muslim men drawn
as much on the basis of reputation and age as specific kin ties or citizenship.
These men must be well fed if the prayers they utter are to be effective. Their acts
and satisfaction acknowledge the moral personhood of those on whose behalf
they recite and they too are acknowledged. The collective good is internal to the
practice.
Lambek 215

For Arendt, action affords the highest form of human activity and is epitomized
in what she calls natality. ‘The life span of man running toward death would
inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the
faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent
in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not
born in order to die but in order to begin’ (1998: 246). If action is characterized by
beginning, irreversibility, and unpredictability of outcome, such novelty and
freedom carry their own ethical entailments. ‘The possible redemption from the
predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done though
one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing – is the faculty of
forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the
future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises’ (Arendt 1998: 237).
Rappaport (1999) has demonstrated the enormous significance of promising or
commitment in ritual and for social order; promising, broadly conceived, is a
central feature of what I have been calling participation in and acknowledgement
of one another’s social reproduction that characterizes the local as a singular
world. Ritual provides criteria by which we know that promises are made and in
reference to which we can judge whether they are kept. Divested of its Christian
trappings, forgiveness is harder to pin down or formalize, but it too is a salient part
of the temporal experience of life in the community, especially in the face of
another factor I have not had space to discuss, namely the prevalence of sorcery
and other forms of harmful or irresponsible behaviour that can be understood as
betrayal or the failure of acknowledgement. In the face of rapid social change and
social differentiation, people must forgive themselves and each other their relative
success and failure. Such forgiveness must take place especially between people of
adjacent age cohorts, between siblings, and between wives and husbands.
Forgiveness is more difficult when the criteria of wrongdoing are in question.23

Conclusion
Rather than opposing the local to the global and thereby rendering the local as
empty homogeneous space, I have tried to understand it of and for itself but at the
same time without reifying it as a bounded place or community. I have argued that
the local can be understood as a place of ethical life; or conversely, that sustained
ethical life be seen as sign and substance of what could be called the local. I take the
local to be constituted by the activities of its inhabitants, operating within specific
traditions in some conjunction with one another. Following Aristotle and Arendt,
such activities include labour, work, and action, each with its distinctive temporal-
ities and, no doubt, distinctive extensions in space. Departing from Arendt, I link
ethics both to labour, as the everyday form of care for others, and to the work of
ritual as a form of action that accomplishes the sort of mutual acknowledgement
that must be central to inhabiting the local. I rejoin Arendt in arguing for the
saliency of promising (commitment, acknowledgement of others) and forgiveness
in constituting the worlds that people share.
216 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

Activities and concerns can be considered ‘local’ precisely insofar as they are
understood as internal rather than external to the practices that engage people,
even when such practices entail the ostensibly global, such as the connoisseurship
of hip hop music in Tanzanian barbershops (Weiss 2009) and the like. Conversely,
internal goals engage widely travelled migrants, bringing them ‘home’ in order to
engage in what is most important or meaningful to them, whether sapeurs in the
Congo (Friedman 1990), the holders of life cycle rituals in Mayotte, or Canadians
of southern Sudanese background returning there to select a wife and pay bride-
wealth (Fanjoy n.d.), or else in reconstituting ‘home’ and its practices in new
settings.
I am not proposing a radically new way of constituting the local but an alter-
native perspective on it. When the local is understood in the first instance through
activity, and especially through the sedimentation of acts and their consequences,
its spatial dimensions become fluid, dynamic, and multiple – and thereby hardly
defining or confining. This is not to say that space or place is irrelevant. In the end
it is the dynamism of activity juxtaposed to the potency and attraction of place that
animates the local in Mayotte, the tension between centripetal and centrifugal
forces. (‘It’s not land that moves, but people.’) Such animation is always simulta-
neously temporal. And it is the balance or spaces between promise and resignation,
acknowledgement and lapse, and forgiveness and resentment that characterize
the structure of feeling. This is simultaneously singular, specific, and, no doubt,
universal.

Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared for the conference ‘Reinhabiting the Local’, held in Baltimore, 15–16
May 2007 and organized by Veena Das and Deborah Poole. I am grateful to the organizers
for the initial provocation, and to conference participants as well as AT referees for their
constructive feedback. My work has been supported by successive grants from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs
program. The Wenner Gren Foundation supported the Baltimore conference.

Notes
1. He cites Meaghan Morris on Naoki Sakai’s conception of translation.
2. The situation that provoked Linton to puncture American insularity has long been reversed
in the academy. Today, the risk of provincialism lies in overlooking the local, not the global.
Perhaps it is only close attention to the local that enables true cosmopolitanism.
3. With respect to the emergence of pre-colonial states in Madagascar, the significance of
trade, and especially the trade in people, both internal to the island and externally
through Muslim ports of trade and later directly with Europeans, has proved of great
significance for understanding the emergence and reproduction of inequality (Campbell
2009, Lambek 2001, Vérin 1986, Wright 2007, among others).
4. Internal references deleted. An irony is that I was led in the direction of interpreting with
reference to the human condition precisely because I did not fully understand the local
context, or rather, the regional and historical context. Villagers in Mayotte were also
relatively ignorant of how the trumba spirits were rooted in the Sakalava polity, still
Lambek 217

active within the postcolonial state of Madagascar just across the Mozambique
Channel. That is to say, rather in the manner of MacIntyre’s picture of the modern
condition (1984), that the villagers operated with a piece of tradition broken off from its
own history. I fully confronted this only many years later upon fieldwork in
Madagascar. Yet I stand by my interpretation in HS. That the interpretation moved
to the level of the universal because I was ignorant of the tradition does not necessarily
invalidate it. Perhaps – and I emphasize the uncertainty – it helped me to see things more
clearly. Conversely, expanding my grasp from the local to the regional and, effectively,
back in time, not only made me less naı̈ve about the local but it interfered with my grasp
of the universal.
5. Indeed, the pendulum may be turning as universalist theories through the avenues of
cognitivism and biological evolutionism are regaining influence.
6. In fact, the title of each of my ethnographic works refers to a locality – or is it a culture?
7. Islam is a widely travelled tradition and cosmology has both preceded and travelled
along with Islam in the Western Indian Ocean region. I did not include the European as
a fourth tradition because its articulation with the others was unclear at the time of my
fieldwork and because its inclusion invited a different kind of analysis in what was
already a much too long book.
8. Later (2000) I wrote about localizing practices, specifically the way in which Islam was
incorporated into life-cycle rituals and scenarios of reciprocity at the same time as per-
sons and relations were thereby constituted as Muslim.
9. It could be said that the local only comes into sight from the extra-local, as it were.
10. Veyne’s depiction of history should be compared with Hayden White’s comparison of
alternative modes of historical argument (1973), drawing in turn on Pepper’s root meta-
phors (1942). For ethnographic exemplification see Lambek (2002b: Ch. 3).
11. Chakrabarty’s larger point is that the specific is always constituted in relation to the
terms of European theory. He argues that an appeal to singularities is not a claim
of impermeable wholes but rather an ‘appeal to models of cross-cultural and cross-
categorical translations that do not take a universal middle term for granted’
(2000: 83). Such translation, he says, is direct, on a ‘barter’ rather than generalized
commodity exchange model; in other words, it obviates the need for passage through
a ‘modern’ social science vocabulary of reified abstractions.
12. For Arendt, plurality is a central feature of the human condition. ‘Plurality is the
condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way
that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live’ (Arendt,
1998: 8).
13. Readers want to know that they are reading something of specific content, that they can
categorize and fit into a pigeonhole, say a sub-discipline or region. On the other hand,
singularity of form (e.g. Sebald 1996) is celebrated in the arts.
14. It might have been Vern Carroll.
15. Among Sakalava on (or in) Madagascar itself, one of the implications of the proverb is
that land is all the more potent for its stillness, as are things like shrines, trees, and,
especially, ancestral bones that are planted in it. There is thus a fundamental articulation
between the potent and stable and the dynamic (Lambek 2002b, cf. Feeley-Harnik
1991).
16. It is telling that the prototypic work of art for Arendt is a (presumably marble) sculpture
rather than, say, a musical composition. It is a durable object, more tangible and lasting
than her metaphorical table. However, Arendt does also recognize arts that do not
218 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

produce durable material objects. Thus, in critiquing Adam Smith’s denigration of occu-
pations based on performance as manual labour, she responds, ‘It was precisely these
occupations – healing, flute-playing, play-acting – which furnished ancient thinking with
examples for the highest and greatest activities of man’ (1998: 207).
17. ‘Liturgy’ itself stems from the Greek leitourgia, public service, itself incorporating ergon,
work or service (Rappaport 1999: 47). We speak in English of a religious service.
18. One reviewer of the paper describes this as ‘doing something for the hell of it, because it
is fulfilling, because it is what Marx referred to as ‘‘species being’’ (gattungswesen)’ and
suggests that such a perspective has been realized in the literature on embodiment.
19. A contrary case, among many others, in which a refugee population has not found a way
to happily resolve the problem of reinhabiting the local was the situation of northern
Muslims in Sri Lanka compellingly described by Thiranagama (2007). Whether we
examine the trajectories of migrants or attend to the experiences of those who have
lived through disruptive and violent events within a single or constant place or forced
to become refugees, we see the same thing, the necessity and desire for what Das (2007)
has termed ‘the descent into the ordinary’. For migrants this can take one of several
forms, recreating the local in a new place, founding or finding a new local, or returning to
an old one. Whether and in what senses these places, newly constituted or returned to,
can be local, whether one can reinhabit the local, whether one can go home again, whether
it is home that has changed or we have, and whether and how to re-stitch (to borrow
another Das metaphor) the relationship between ourselves and our new homes, or
between former, current, and future homes, are lively existential problems. It is not
that there is no more ‘local’, but it is to ponder in what sense it is the same ‘local’, the
local we inhabited before the flood, before the exodus, before adding to it a second local.
20. Where houses were once relatively standard in size, materials, and furnishings, they are
now the site of rapid inflation and competition.
21. I shared this cycle of feeling when I helped my ‘siblings’ produce commemorative
prayers (mandeving) for our deceased parents in 2005.
22. The practical work to maintain the centre was also at the heart of my ethnography of
Mahajanga (2002b). But there the egalitarian asa of kinship and community character-
istic of Mayotte was displaced in importance by fanompoa, the hierarchical work of
caring for the royal ancestors, remnants of the Sakalava polity. A select number of
people worked very hard to do so.
23. See Lambek (2002a, 2004, 2011). Clearly, Mayotte has not been subject to the sort of
history where people have carried out acts that are literally unforgivable. Moreover, it is
a place where ritual has bridged differences rather than enlarging them (cf. Das 2007).

References
Achebe C (1958) Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.
Arendt H (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Austin JL (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Basso K (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Benjamin W (1962) Theses on the philosophy of history. In: Benjamin W (ed.) Illuminations.
New York: Schocken, 253–264.
Bloch M (1998) Foreword to The Time of the Gypsies by Michael Stewart. Boulder:
Westview.
Lambek 219

Campbell G (2009) An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and
Fall of an Island Empire, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell S (1976) Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Das V (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Das V and Poole D (2007) Reinhabiting the Local: A conference on the affective, sensory,
and political meanings of the local in recent anthropological theory. 15–16 May,
Baltimore, MD. Circulated conference statement.
Fanjoy M (n.d.) Shifting Conceptions of Self and Belonging: Identity and Transnationalism
among Sudanese Refugees in Canada. Provisional title, doctoral thesis in progress,
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto.
Feeley-Harnik G (1991) A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Freud S (1985) Civilization and Its Discontents, The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 12. London:
Penguin, 251–340.
Friedman J (1990) The political economy of elegance. Culture and History 7: 101–125.
Geertz C (1973) Thick description. In: Geertz C (ed.) The Interpretation of Cultures.
New York: Basic Books.
Hacking I (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
James W (2003) The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
James W (2007) War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kresse K and Simpson E (eds) (2007) Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism
in the Western Indian Ocean. London: Hurst.
Lambek M (1981) Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lambek M (1983) Virgin marriage and the autonomy of women in Mayotte. Signs 9(2):
264–281.
Lambek M (1990a) Exchange, time, and person in Mayotte: The structure and destructuring
of a cultural system. American Anthropologist 92(3): 647–661.
Lambek M (1990b) Certain knowledge, contestable authority: Power and practice on the
Islamic periphery. American Ethnologist 17(1): 23–40.
Lambek M (1993) Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery,
and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lambek M (1995) Choking on the Qur’an and other consuming parables from the Western
Indian Ocean front. In: James W (ed.) The Pursuit of Certainty. London: Routledge,
252–275.
Lambek M (2000) Localizing Islamic performances in Mayotte. In: Parkin D and Headley S
(eds) Inside and Outside the Mosque: The Anthropology of Muslim Prayer Across the
Indian Ocean. Oxford: Curzon, 63–97.
Lambek M (2001) The value of coins in a Sakalava Polity: Money, death, and historicity in
Mahajanga, Madagascar. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4): 735–762.
220 Anthropological Theory 11(2)

Lambek M (2002a) Nuriaty, the saint and the sultan: Virtuous subject and subjective vir-
tuoso of the post-modern colony. In: Werbner R (ed.) Post-Colonial Subjectivities.
London: Zed Books, 25–43.
Lambek M (2002b) The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lambek M (2004) The saint, the sea monster, and an invitation to a Dıˆner-Dansant.
Anthropologica 46(1): 57–68.
Lambek M (2006) The playful side of Islam and its possible fate in Mayotte. In: Loimeier R and
Seesemann R (eds) Dini na Dunia: The Global Worlds of the Swahili. Hamburg: Lit Verlag.
Lambek M (2008) Measuring – or practising well-being? In: Corsı́n A (ed.) Culture and Well-
being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics London: Pluto,
115–133.
Lambek M (2010) Toward an ethics of the act. In: Lambek M (ed.) Ordinary Ethics:
Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, 39–63.
Lambek M (2011) Kinship as gift and theft: Acts of succession in Mayotte and Ancient
Israel. American Ethnologist 38(1): 1–15.
Lévi-Strauss C (1985) Race and culture. In: Lévi-Strauss C The View from Afar, Neugroschel
J and Ross P (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Linton R (1936) One hundred per cent American. In: Linton R (ed.) The Study of Man: An
Introduction. New York: Appleton-Century.
Loimeier R and Seesemann R (eds) (2006) Dini na Dunia: The Global Worlds of the Swahili.
Hamburg: Lit Verlag.
MacIntyre A (1984) After Virtue, 2nd edn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Macpherson CB (1973) Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon.
Parkin D and Headley S (eds) (2000) Inside and Outside the Mosque: The Anthropology of
Muslim Prayer Across the Indian Ocean. Oxford: Curzon.
Pepper S (1942) World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rappaport R (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ricoeur P (1971) The model of the text. Social Research 38: 529–562.
Sahlins MD (1985) Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sebald WG (1996) The Emigrants. London: Harvill Press.
Thiranagama S (2007) Moving on? Generating homes in the future of displaced Northern
Muslims in Sri Lanka. In: Carsten J (ed.) Ghosts of Memory. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
126–149.
Tsing A (2004) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Turner VW (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Vérin P (1986) The History of Civilization in Northern Madagascar. Rotterdam: Balkema.
Weber M (1946) The Protestant sects and the spirit of capitalism. In: Gerth HH and Mills
CW (eds) From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press, 302–322.
Weiss B (2009) Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
White H (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wright HT (2007) Early State Formation in Central Madagascar. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Museum of Anthropology.
Lambek 221

Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and holds a Canada Research Chair

at the University of Toronto. He has carried out research in the Western Indian
Ocean since 1975 and is the author of three monographs and editor of a number of
volumes, including Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action
(Fordham University Press, 2010). An earlier essay appeared in Anthropological
Theory 8(2).