This article argues for a theoretical extension in anthropology from the post-Cartesian depiction of body and mind as one (rather than as separable) to the idea that this composite body-mind can be regarded as enmeshed in social trails created by the movement of objects. Movements of persons therefore occur with or in relation to the objects to which people attach themselves. Such everyday movements need to be contrasted with those dramatically resulting from forcible human displacement, in which refugees, for instance, take what items they can both for immediate practical use but also in order either to re-establish or re-define personal and collective origins. The article concludes by suggesting that, as mementoes of sentiment and cultural knowledge and yet also as bases of future re-settlement, the ‘transitional objects’ carried by peoples in crisis inscribe their personhood in flight but offer the possibility of their own de-objectification and re-personalization afterwards.

Ritual Syncretism as Cultural BorrowingLeach in his study of the Kachin interpreted disputes over claims to administer ritual or to recite myths as a means whereby politically opposed factions sought to assert their independence or their dominance (Leach, 1954, p. 278). He also showed that in this competition the Kachin made use of ritual and other cultural elements which they had adopted from the Shans and were using for political ends.

Over the centuries among many peoples, wind, air, breath, and notions of soul and life‐force have been regarded as intertwined semantically and in their effects on the world. Humans and intangible and invisible non‐human agents are often said to share these elements. Life as breath and wind as spirit, and both as evidence of consciousness, intention or soul, allow persons to abridge what they otherwise view as the separate domains of solid and non‐solid phenomena. They may understand them as transformable one into the other: human becoming spirit and spirit taking on human characteristics and form. The further association of this complex with smell reinforces the cyclical idea of human and non‐human transformation, by presenting it as what we ethnocentrically call a material and spiritual cycle, because smell itself has molecular origin and effect and yet, as regards vision and touch, can be elusive like spirit. The particular case described is of Bantu‐speaking inhabitants of the East African coast, and shows how Muslims and non‐Muslims have common metaphysical assumptions concerning this semantic cluster despite differences of religious belief.

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