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The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology—applied consultancy and historicist self‐reflexivity—are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as ‘the surrender to the market’. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self‐obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of ‘late capitalism’ and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual ‘silence’.

Th e idea of writing a personal statement regarding my approach to ritual and to present a selfportrait of my own movement into this fi eld is diffi cult, to say the least. Th is is particularly so as the idea has too much of an overriding fi nality to it-an epitaph, aft er which there is no more. Th ere is the implication that somehow over the 40 or so years that I have been working in the anthropological fi eld of ritual and religion that I have been building a distinct coherent approach. It is tempting to say so, but it would be wrong. I would say that my orientation has taken many diff erent paths. I have always, like most anthropologists, been directed by the problemat-hand, given the empirical realities in which I found myself and the issue in the subject of anthropology that appeared to me to be particularly problematic at the time. Th is has sometimes resulted in a critical look at prevailing orientations and has led me in unexpected directions. Th e ethnographic materials with which I have been recently working, primarily in North Malabar of the Indian state of Kerala, is setting me off on new routes of analytical possibility, at least new for me. Th is is also the case with my (see Kapferer 2013a, 2013b, 2014) current interest in fi lm and its relevance for the anthropological study of myth and ritual. Such changes in direction are far from unusual in the ethnographically driven circumstance of anthropology in which ethnography is the ground for analytical and theoretical construction (and not the other way around as in other social sciences where theory governs research, see Kapferer 2007).Here I should make clear that my interest in ritual and religious practices is not in these forms of action as such. Th at is, I would not like to be categorized as an anthropologist of ritual and religion, a specialist in a subspecialism. I am interested in them because they raise critical questions about sociocultural processes and, therefore, for anthropological understanding as a whole. I have no theory of ritual (or religion) and I am interested in what may be regarded as ritual because it is a practice that appears to be largely defi ned (and this is highly problematic) by its symbolic density and intensity. Rituals are generative events par excellence and it is this that is at the foundation of my interest in ritual/religious dynamics and processes. Here my early fi eld experience has some relevance.My concentration on ritual practice and religious ideologies was largely developed during my fi eldwork among Sinhalese Buddhist villagers in the southwest of Sri Lanka mainly in the 1970s and 1980s. I had come to Sri Lanka from research conducted in rural and urban centres of Zambia, where I completed over three years of fi eldwork connected to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Th is was the main research station for Max Gluckman's "Manchester School" of social anthropology and the eventual interest that I was to take in ritual (not my major concern while Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4 (2013): 3-40 ©...

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