The new genomics has begun to play an increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. By facilitating the transcription of older notions that heritable substances determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, this molecular–biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic “resolution” of the question of Thomas Jefferson's paternity of his slave Sally Hemings's children and from the emergence of commercial personal genomic history services targeting African American consumers, I seek to expose the epistemological and methodological problems inherent in biotechnologically driven “ancestry projects” (however oppositional and empowering they may be in certain cases). I also aim to show how the divinatory logic of applications of genomic technologies of knowledge production to the validation of modes of social identification replicates racial essentialisms such as U.S. ideologies of hypodescent in a manner oddly reminiscent of the “invisible essences” that, according to classic ethnographic descriptions, underlie systems of witchcraft detection.

In the past two decades, analogies drawn from supposedly Caribbean processes of creolization have begun to command increasing interest in anthropology. Examining historical as well as contemporary social uses of this terminology in its region of origin, as well as linguistic, sociocultural, and archaeological extrapolations from such usages, this review argues that although, as an analytical metaphor, "creolization" may appear to remedy certain deficits in long-standing anthropological agendas, the current unreflexive use of it is neither defensible on empirical grounds nor theoretically well advised. Yet while this review argues against further uncritical extensions of such metaphorics, it analyzes their current proliferation as a social phenomenon worthy of anthropological analysis in its own right.

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As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a “marked distinction… between real and personal law, between things and persons.” Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century western modernism, Mauss was at pains to point out that it was “only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal” (ibid.: 74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent elaboration. Commenting on Mauss' insights, James Carrier (1995: 30), thus, speaks of, “an increasing de-socialization of objects, their growing cultural separation from people and their social relationships” and the development of conceptions of “alienability and impersonality of objects and people in commodity relations” as characteristic of this moment. But Carrier is not entirely happy with the uses made of such insights by students of westerns societies. His intent, rather, is to qualify Mauss' famous distinction between forms of enacting object-relations as social relations shaped by sharply contrasting modes of gift or commodity exchange. Carrier, thus, expends much energy on expounding the extent to which “blocked exchanges” (Walzer 1983) “singularized goods” (Kopytoff 1986), conceptions of “market-inalienability” (Radin 1987) and “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) are not random pre-capitalist survivals fortuitously lingering on within western cultures, but constitutive of forms of sociality indispensable to them. Of course, Carrier is largely concerned with dispelling the economistic fictions of forms of “occidentalist” discourse that systematically project a normative language of market functions and failures onto social practices which regularly produce, rather than merely accidentally throw up, what economists call “externalities” inhibiting optimal market allocations. Nevertheless, it is striking that both Mauss and most of his critics (Carrier being merely an example) take a principal, ontological distinction between people and things for granted. As a result, we are treated to sets of contrasting representations of how cultures (capitalist or other) construe such fundamental realities into different configurations of subjects and objects, so that the mystifications of one social formation or cultural order illuminate those of the other—to ultimately prove a Cartesian point.

Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs through different forms of hustling people with money, including offering sexual favours to tourists, as well as to an increased focus on own interests instead of on courteous sharing among Cubans, and increased racial cleavages. He finds that the introduction of the dollar in Cuba, as well as tourism's growth, garnered income, but also stimulated inequalities in access to dollars and to dollar-prized commodities, and had morally problematic effects, because working formally for the state with wages in pesos generally paid less than informal work to obtain dollars. He describes how this increased instrumental thinking and made hustling widespread, and also stimulated shams and secular intentionality within the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, e.g. fake possessions to obtain dollar offerings to deities from foreigners at ceremonies. In addition, he refers to the ending of the circulation of the US dollar as currency in Cuba as decreed by the Cuban government in November 2004, making the dollar's role in practice historical.