Mana on the move: Why empirical anchorage trumps theoretical drift

Abstract

At a time when the channels for academic publication seem to multiply at a staggering rate and the writer-to-readership ratio approaches 1, our fellows’ gaze becomes an ever scarcer commodity. Attentionseeking behaviour has hardly been decorous in academia, and this time-honoured detached intellectualism has limited the genres for underlining novelties. But new realities require new measures. And the hullabaloo surrounding the presentation of a manifesto for an ‘anthropology of ontology’ at the 2013 American Anthropological Association meetings had the makings of a successful public relations campaign, gobsmacking into silence those who had regarded the various theoretical takes that are subsumed under this label as mere analytical frameworks rather than The Next Big Thing. [...]