"First a thank you. I would never want to privilege any level of anthropological work, perhaps unlike Martin I favour applied anthropology just as much as intellectual anthropology. But I certainly DO savour the intellectual, that which refuses the…"

"Ok, well I will be off line from now on so this is my last response. Let me start therefore by thanking Keith very much indeed for facilitating this, which I hope has been a wide ranging, open and very engaged discussion, from which I have learnt a…"

"I appreciate that for many Trinidad is not well known terrain so I hope I can be forgiven to reference my three previous volumes, Modernity: an ethnographic approach, Capitalism: an ethnographic approach and (with D Slater) The Internet: an…"

"First for Huon the quick answer is NO. I have worked in Trinidad for over twenty years and published at least a thousand pages of ethnography and project after project shows that although divisions such as ethnicity are hugely important, perhaps…"

"Many meaty things to chew on over the last two days, and thanks for these. First let me turn to Keith and has frustration with `same old’ social/material and impatience for some proper economic and political analysis. But I know Keith enjoys…"

"Ok, random comments at yesterdays posts, My guess is that mostly we would agree to avoid real/false fetish debates, the point that emerges in the book is that just as I had argued in prior publications the Trinidadian concepts of truth and of…"

"Amiria - don;t fret this is not some fundamental betrayal, my primary interest will always be with material culture and I am essentially in support of Illana's call to work on the materiality of Facebook although the more linguistic side of…"

"ok i shouldnt have gone back to the computer. I really like Illana's question because it gives me a wonderful opportunity to temporarily repudiate my main academic posture. I think of myself as a material culture person, but of course the kula…"

"Gosh 23 hours is a long time in online discussion ! I agree with Francine that in a sense we are not looking for the unprecedented, rather for the significant, so what matters is not that FB is used for memorialisation but that it integrates that…"

"Two more brief comments - I don't myself think that we can work with a clear object called religion and defined by certain characteristics, like most semantics i prefer a looser `Wittgenstein' like sense of a constellation of related…"

"In studying Facebook we need to resist the idea that it is a `thing' with properties we are trying to discover and categorize. Mark Zukerberg intended it to be more like a utility e.g. like water or electricity, something ubiquitous in the…"

"Thanks to the two recent postings. It seems to me that we may be achieving some kind of consensus about how to deal with the the concept of community as anthropologists.We start with agreement that community is not a description of degrees of…"

"Hi, I think I concur with much of what you say here. Firstly this issues with social science has very little to do with anything we might call actual communities. Actually human sociality as studied by anthropology varies hugely from kinship groups…"

"I would start by saying thanks to Keith for the invitation, it is a pleasure to participate in online forums such as this medianth given the way they can facilitate informal discussion on a global scale. Also to say I am `here’ in the…"

"I apologise if i sign off for a while,given other commitments and other networks its impossible to keep up wit two many, but with regard to McCreery's comment, as far as I know anthropologists who work on consumption in Japan such as Daniels…"

"Gosh these discussions move quickly. Just two comments. I dont think we will get far in discussing whether consumption does or does not change social relations per se. The point is that social relations always were material in practice and changes…"