ABSTRACT
This chapter describes with ethnographies of repetition, the other will amount to a discussion of anthropology as repetition. Blanes points out that ‘as in other scientific endeavours, anthropology has also traditionally grounded itself upon the study of repetitions and recurrences, in order to qualify them as “empirical facts”’. But Blanes is not the only contributor to the present collection who is addressing this meta-aspect of the anthropology of repetition. The specific institution(s) and group(s) of persons who can be ethnographically identified to possess the authority to determine ‘when a repetition ceases to be a repetition’ in a given context are also likely to belong to its wider political, economic or cultural elite. As Bandak and Coleman point out, the ‘process of re-examining repetition may expose both implicit and explicit dimensions of the history of anthropological theory’.
