An unstable mode of hospitality underpins an important ethnographic finding among the Nuosu of Southwest China: namely the notion that each person ‘hosts’ his or her own soul, which takes the form of a ‘soul‐spider’ residing on the outer surface of the human body. Famous for their slaveholding practices, which were disbanded by the Chinese in 1956‐7, the Nuosu nowadays take ‘captive guests’, to underscore lineage rankings within their spidery cosmology. Exploring the captive position of outsiders – including anthropologists – to the Nuosu home, the paper gives a case study of an ‘inhospitable’ dispute between a shaman and his employer at an ethnological institute. Showing why every host wishes to prevent the captive guest from ever reciprocating his or her hospitality, the paper introduces the Nuosu ‘spider‐slave complex’, which entails gathering the fullness of life through attachments to the lineage, captive guests, and the person's own soul‐spider. Résumé Les matériaux ethnographiques recueillis auprès des Nuosu du Sud‐ouest de la Chine font apparaître un mode d’hospitalité instable : l’idée que chaque personne « héberge » son âme, sous la forme d’une « araignée de l’âme » résidant sur la surface externe du corps humain. Connus pour leurs pratiques esclavagistes abolies par les Chinois en 1956‐57, les Nuosu prennent aujourd’hui des « invités captifs » pour souligner les positions des lignages dans leur cosmologie arachnide. En réfléchissant à la captivité des étrangers, y compris les anthropologues, dans la maison nuosu, l’article présente le cas d’une controverse « inhospitalière » entre un chaman et son employeur dans un institut d’ethnologie. En montrant pourquoi les hôtes veulent toujours empêcher leurs invités captifs de leur rendre leur hospitalité, l’auteure décrit le « complexe esclave‐araignée » des Nuosu, qui implique que la plénitude de la vie s’obtient par des rattachements à son lignage, aux invités captifs, et à sa propre araignée de l’âme.

Divination is often regarded as a practice undertaken to obtain a standardized, best possible result. This characterization is made at the cost of analysing how people obtain desired innovations through divinatory procedures. To show how divination actually forces people to adopt strategies that lead to innovation, this article classifies all forms of divination into 'representational' or 'conjectural' categories. Drawing on Mongolian ethnography, the article argues that in conjectural divinations repeated questioning links known impossibilities to prospective possibilities, producing the basis for innovations which initially appear to arise out of nothing. The article demonstrates how conjectural divinations initiate processes of innovation wherein repeated questioning leads to combinatory thought which imposes novel combinations on people, who perceive the need for innovation, access an innovation, and finally recursively posit that innovation's conceptual origins. Prologue

Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro’s sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as the comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject. They are also ‘forces’, ‘energies’ or ‘talents’ which are taught, acquired and refined over time. This article argues that virtuosity and fortune are bodily affects which Mongols hold to varying degrees. Through the Mongolian game called ‘The Stag’, the article shows how players refine their virtuosity affect while receiving sudden influxes of fortune. Virtuosi and novice game players exchange perspectives in the pedagogy of play, travelling along an ‘ontological spiral’ of knowledge which renders the winning moves transparent.

This article gives the sequel to a case study on magical innovation introduced earlier in the JRAI, and shows that Buryat Mongol shamans regularly deflect hostile forces by adopting spirit perspectives. Presenting new ethnography on Buryat vampiric imps and an episode of intra‐familial vampirism, the article argues that, in Buryat sociality, anyone – including omnipresent spirits – may cross the virtuous‐unvirtuous divide. In northeast Mongolia, Buryats consider that close ancestral spirits watch after their descendants, whereas distant ancestral spirits manage a spirit bureaucracy. Building on Viveiros de Castro's work on perspectivism, the article thus proposes that close spirit perspectives entail an ‘intimacy affect’ while distant spirit perspectives entail a ‘virtuosity affect’. Buryat shamans sometimes oscillate between these perspectives to access both spirit intimacy and virtuosity. The article culminates by demonstrating how a Buryat shaman used intimacy and virtuosity to expunge her mother's ex‐husband and his undead relatives from the patriline. Résumé Cet article s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’une étude de cas sur l’innovation magique présentée précédemment dans le JRAI. Il montre que les chamanes des Bouriates de Mongolie repoussent régulièrement les forces hostiles en adoptant le point de vue des esprits. L’article présente une nouvelle ethnographie des farfadets vampires des Bouriates et un épisode de vampirisme intra‐familial, et avance que dans la vie sociale des Bouriates, n’importe qui (y compris les esprits omniprésents) peut franchir la frontière entre vertu et absence de vertu. Les Bouriates du Nord‐est de la Mongolie croient que les esprits ancestraux qui leur sont proches veillent sur leurs descendants, tandis que les esprits ancestraux distants gèrent la bureaucratie des esprits. À partir des travaux de Viveiros de Castro sur le perspectivisme, l’auteure propose que les perspectives des esprits créent un « affect d’intimité », tandis que les esprits distants suscitent un « affect de virtuosité ». Les chamanes bouriates oscillent parfois entre ces deux perspectives pour accéder à la fois à l’intimité et à la virtuosité. Ceci est mis en évidence à travers un exemple qui constitue le clou de l’article : la manière dont une chamane bouriate a chassé de la patrilignée l’ex‐mari de sa mère et les parents « non morts » de celui‐ci.

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