Asmat social worlds are permeated with multiple forms of dependency. In this paper, I ask how different modalities of dependency inter‐relate within the space and time of Asmat life, and how this is being reshaped by Asmat's increasing incorporation within broader structural orders during a period of national decentralisation. First, I describe how relations of dependency shape everyday life, through a discussion of the time and space of quotidian food distribution and concomitant claim‐making. Then, I outline how forms of inter‐clan interdependency innovate on the above pattern during ritual feasting, which generates remarkable social co‐presence through ritualised interdependent work. Finally, I explore how feasting interdependence, and its organisation in space and time, is being warped by ‘The Allocation of Village Funds’ (‘Alokasi Dana Desa’), a decentralised government grant. I do so via a case study of a ritual feast house construction project, in which Asmat villagers attempted to reckon with new forms of dependency typified, in indigenous discourse, by the distinction between ‘sago’ and ‘rice’ as local versus introduced staple foods associated with contrasting regimes of action. At stake here, in the collision between indigenous and newly emergent modes of dependency, is the viability of socially valuable modes of ritual life, which, in an age of decentralisation, are becoming shaped by and reliant on new types of forces outside of the community's own labour and control.
This special issue re-envisages the anthropology of ethics from the point of view of "the negative". The negative is a gloss for actions, practices and social formations that our interlocutors view as bad, troubling, threatening, immoral or unethical, and the varied local categories and discourses through which they are evaluated. Anthropology has often overlooked immorality in its study of ethics (Yan 2011(Yan , 2014Csordas 2013; Fassin 2015; Olsen and Csordas 2019), privileging "the good" and people's practices of self-cultivation (e.g. Robbins 2013; Laidlaw 2014). 1 This elision reflects an underlying tendency within some strands of Anglophone anthropological thinking towards 1. We use the terms "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably throughout the Introduction. Some authors use "ethics" to signal a departure from Durkheimian conceptions of morality which emphasise unconscious, collective moral codes (e.g.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.