bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
the culture of carving and the carving of culture: content and context in artisan status among the Ashanti
Authors: SILVER HARRY R.
Published: November 2004

Materialist and symbolic explanations of cultural institutions are weighed in an effort to determine which best explains the unusual status of master wood‐carvers in Ashanti. Technical skills and unique privileges mark the carver's position within the social order in a manner resembling the Western concept of professionalism. From an economic standpoint, these mechanisms limit competition and allow carvers to exploit existing markets with maximum efficiency. Yet such explanations fail to elucidate why certain peculiar features of this status assume the particular forms they do. The answer lies in “thick” description and analysis of the status's larger socioideational context—specifically in the analogous structural and symbolic qualities which carvers share with Ashanti noblewomen in their relationship with important chiefs. [symbolism, ideology, social organization, economics, ritual, art]
Healing and the cultural order: the case of the Barolong boo Ratshidi of southern Africa
Authors: COMAROFF JEAN
Published: November 2004

Healing reveals clearly both the dialectical relationship between the cultural order and subjective experience and the role of this dialectic in wider processes of continuity and change. This examination of one southern Africa therapeutic system is set in the context of a more general debate between formalist and phenomenological interpretations of ritual and cosmology. It examines the relationship between shared symbolic categories and the indigenous perceptions of order and disorder, suggesting that affliction here is a structurally configured dislocation of the self and its social and cosmic context. Healing thus entails the manipulation of multivocal symbolic media, seeking to reintegrate the physical, conceptual, and social universe of sufferers and community. In rapidly changing societies, healing reveals how existing symbolic categories subsume chaotic experience and also how perceptions of an expanding sociocultural domain may transform these categories themselves, [healing, change, Africa, cosmology, self and society. Western allopathic medicine]
he‐said‐she‐said: formal cultural procedures for the construction of a gossip dispute activity
Authors: GOODWIN MARJORIE HARNESS
Published: November 2004

Formal cultural procedures utilized by urban black female children to construct a type of gossip dispute they call “he‐said‐she‐said” are analyzed. The procedures employed to construct opening accusations produce utterances with a characteristic syntactic structure as well as a field of activity constituted through particular types of events, actions, and identities for the participants and rules for sequencing these phenomena through time. These procedures thus generate not only linguistic structures but also social configurations and cultural events, [conversation analysis, social organization, ethnography of communication, legal anthropology, Black English Vernacular]
Routinization of behavior in a charismatic leader
Authors: ANDELSON JONATHAN G.
Published: November 2004

Processual studies in anthropology can benefit from a consideration of Max Weber's theory of charisma. Two charismatic leaders in the sectarian and formerly communal Amana Society of Iowa have always been regarded by members as possessing different degrees of charisma. A statistical analysis of the inspired revelations of the two leaders reveals that the testimonies of one were highly patterned. The patterning is indicative of the “routinization of charisma” process described by Weber and is accounted for by the historical particulars of the case. Loss of creativity is identified as one factor in the routinization process. [processual analysis, change, communitarian societies, charismatic leadership]
a historical reconsideration of female dominance among the Chambrl of Papua New Guinea
Authors: GEWERTZ DEBORAH
Published: November 2004

My focus is the sociohistorical referents of a transformation that occurred in intersexual relations between the time the late Margaret Mead studied the Chambri (Tchambuli) in 1933 and my own field research there. The Tchambuli people of Papua New Guinea are famous in the literature of women's studies because Mead describes them as having significant and dominant roles within their villages. During my fieldwork with the Chambri, I decided to eschew the ontological concept of role and adopt a more systemic approach. Instead of labeling Chambri women as dominant, or submissive, I seek an underlying pattern of relationships that persists through time in a range of social situations.
land tenure, ecological zone, and agricultural regime in the Central Andes
Authors: GUILLET DAVID
Published: November 2004

Using a sample of community studies, the interrelationships between land tenure, agricultural regime, and ecological zone in the Central Andes are explored. Communal control is found to be associated with grazing and sectorial fallowing, while private control is found to be associated with permanent irrigation, specialized horticulture, and long‐term fallowing. These patterns are shown to be produced by population pressure and market relations interacting with the vertical ecology of the Central Andean area. The importance of these findings to the debate over the “Tragedy of the Commons” and the degradation of mountain environment is discussed. [land tenure, “Tragedy of the Commons,” Central Andes, mountain agriculture, vertical ecology]
to be Quechua: the symbolism of coca chewing in highland Peru
Authors: ALLEN CATHERINE J.
Published: November 2004

Coca chewing plays a crucial role in maintaining basic cultural principles in the minds of individuals living in a Quechua‐speaking community in southern Peru (Province of Paucartambo, Department of Cuzco). This paper explores the ceremonial uses of the coca leaf, focusing particularly on the etiquette for hallpay (coca chewing) during the daily routine. The hallpay ceremony involves reciprocal sharing of coca leaves among two or more individuals, accompanied by prescribed phrases of invitation and thanks, and by invocation to three classes of spiritual beings. The rules for performing the ceremony express the fundamental Quechua concept of ayllu, which is community rooted in a sense of common origin in, and orientation toward, certain sacred places. Ceremonial uses of coca involve standardized forms of behavior, the observance of which orients the actors spatially, socially, and religiously, and in so doing integrates them into a larger cultural framework. (ayllu, coca leaf, symbolic interaction, Quechua culture, ritual)
toward a convergence of cognitive and symbolic anthropology
Authors: COLBY BENJAMIN N. , FERNANDEZ JAMES W. , KRONENFELD DAVID B.
Published: November 2004

This review describes the conditions that have established the subfields of cognitive anthropology and symbolic anthropology as major clusterings of anthropologists. It discusses the influences in anthropology as well as in related areas of cognitive science, linguistics, and literary criticism that can bring the two subfields closer together. It also looks at future directions of study and suggests some of the characteristics that might be included in a single, unifying theory.[cognitive anthropology, symbolic anthropology, history of anthropology, method, theory, review of field, social anthropology]
leper, hyena, and blacksmith in Kujamaat Diola thought
Authors: SAPIR J. DAVID
Published: November 2004

Taken together, the disposal of a dead leper and the funeral for a hyena shot while hunting provide a way into a set of categories developed in Kujamaat Diola thought. I begin with the funerals and proceed first to supply ethnographic background to Kujamaat ideas about lepers and hyenas; I then go on to consider the symbolics of each in relation to the other and to related categories. The symbolic analysis takes into account three interdependent processes: variable marking, associative linkages, and analogic systematics. [leprosy; hyenas; blacksmithing; marking; natural symbols; symbolic anthropology]
meaning and morality: a semiotic approach to evil eye accusations in a Greek village
Authors: HERZFELD MICHAEL
Published: November 2004

Anthropological approaches to the evil eye have suffered from the analytical inadequacy of the evil eye construct itself. Utilizing material from a Greek (Rhodian) village, this article seeks a wider frame of reference in which evil eye accusations are treated as expressions of a moral‐value system and in which that system is shown to articulate concepts of fate and character with the criteria for inclusion in the village society. The primary focus is thus semiotic; it is an attempt to show how villagers interpret personal habits and characteristics, including the possession of an allegedly dangerous eye, as signs of the individual's failure to satisfy those membership criteria adequately. On the basis of this ethnographic evidence, it is suggested that the concept of boundary transgression may prove to be a more useful tool of cross‐cultural analysis than the generalized stereotype of “the evil eye.” [evil eye, witchcraft, moral systems, social boundaries, semiotics, Greece]
figurative language In a universalist perspective
Authors: BROWN CECIL H. , WITKOWSKI STANLEY R.
Published: November 2004

This paper assembles cross‐language evidence documenting several high frequency, figurative labels for body parts: e.g., “child of the eye,” for pupil of the eye; “mother of the hand,” for thumb; “mouse of the arm,” for biceps. These figurative expressions occur in languages at frequencies that greatly exceed chance. In addition, their distribution is discontinuous across genetic and geographic language boundaries, indicating frequent independent invention. Repeated invention of similar figurative expressions is due to universal naming tendencies. These tendencies relate to underlying marking principles, intralanguage lexical constraints, physical world/perceptual givens, and language context and use considerations. [anatomical terminology, cognitive anthropology, folk classification, language universals, marking principles, metaphor]
the serpent's children: semiotics of cultural genesis in Arawak and Trobriand myth
Authors: DRUMMOND LEE
Published: November 2004

While functionalist accounts of myth have generally yielded to structural analyses since the appearance some 25 years ago of Lévi‐Strauss's essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” the relationship between myth and that analytical entity called “culture” is still unclear. The difficulty can be traced to an unfinished anthropological dialogue about what culture is or what cultures are, and how it/they can best be described. My central thesis is that anthropologists have tended to regard their subject matter—culture—as a received object of study and that they have been mistaken in this tendency. The article proposes to regard “a culture” as generated meaning, a motivated affirmation of a system of differences. Establishing the semiotic form of two Arawak and Trobriand origin myths helps to show how anthropological theories are themselves composed. A textual criticism of one theory of myth—Malinowski's—is combined with an analysis of two bona fide “primitive” myths. The comparison indicates that the myths provide better theory about the dynamics of cultural identity than does the theory of myth, [cultural theory, semiotics, myth, Malinowski]
Nambiquara leadership
Authors: PRICE DAVID
Published: November 2004

A study of Nambiquara leadership carried out to overcome preconceptions left by earlier ethnography shows an egalitarian system grounded in a social structure that emphasizes the ties between siblings. There is a slight tendency for authoritarian leaders to emerge in situations of constant danger. Extra wives are not so much a reward for leadership as an added responsibility. Men do not lead in return for compensation, but to ensure the well‐being of their kin. [egalitarian society, leadership, polygyny, lowland South America, ethnographic restudy]
“man the fisher”: salmon fishing and the expression of community in a rural Irish settlement
Authors: TAYLOR LAWRENCE
Published: November 2004

This paper analyzes the significance of the summer salmon fishery of Teelin, a small coastal settlement in county Donegal, Ireland. Although not of great economic importance to most Teelin families, the salmon pursuit is the subject of considerable cultural attention, providing a source of communal and personal identity. An explanation for the disproportionate cultural strength of the fishery is sought in its contribution to the maintenance of the local community as a bounded social entity in a region where historical disincorporations have made the existence and nature of such communities problematic. The ways in which the interactional and experiential aspects of this fishery contribute to Teelin's “local culture” are examined as a sample case of the relation between any such socially definitive activity and the structure of a local system of social relations or ideology. [community, European ethnography, maritime anthropology, Ireland, ideology]
processes of dispute management among urban black children
Authors: GOODWIN MARJORIE HARNESS
Published: November 2004

This paper investigates the forms and functions of alternative dispute procedures as well as distinctive operating cultures that account for them among urban black working‐class children. It is found that children strategically manage the social organization of a dispute through the selection of particular argument formats. In conducting argumentative exchanges, children display a range of communicative competencies and collaborate in performing highly orderly negotiations of power. [conversation analysis, child language, social organization, legal anthropology, Black English Vernacular]
growth and davalopmant of folk zoological lift‐forms in tha Mayan languaga family
Authors: BROWN CECIL M. , WITKOWSKI STANLEY R.
Published: November 2004

This paper examines the growth of folk zoological life‐form categories (e.g., “fish,” “bird,” “snake”) in the Mayan language family of Mesoamerica. Lexical reconstruction indicates the addition of zoological lite‐forms over time. Proto‐Mayan, spoken 4000 years ago, possessed only one life‐form, “snake,” while all contemporary Mayan languages have at least three terms—“snake,” “bird,” and “fish.” The findings of this study support a zoological life‐form encoding sequence proposed on the basis of synchronic language evidence (Brown 1979a). Positive correlation of the encoding sequence with societal complexity implies (1) that the sequence is basically additive or cumulative in nature, and (2) that earlier language states generally had fewer animal life‐forms than later states. Both of these implications are supported by the present investigation. This paper also treats systematic ways in which Mayan languages have acquired folk zoological life‐forms, continuing the investigation of principles of biological nomenclatural development begun by Berlin (1972). [cognitive anthropology, ethnozoology, folk classification, language change, language universals, Mayan languages]
a Mangarrayi representational system: environment and cultural symbolization in northern Australia
Authors: MERLAN FRANCESCA
Published: November 2004

It is common enough for aborigines in many parts of Australia to regard environmental features as visible signs of world‐forming activities of totemic creator figures. The relationships between individuals, social groups, and the creator figures are cast in complex ideologies that express the ties between men and locality. In the Northern Territory along the Roper River, an aboriginal group, the Mangarrayi, also use vast numbers of environmental objects, mainly trees, to represent directly individuals linked to creator figures who made the localities where the objects stand. Thus, all three components of totem/man/land relations, which are so central a part of aboriginal culture, exist or are represented in the landscape. This paper explains how the environment is utilized to represent this system of relations in a way and to an extent that has not been previously reported in the Australianist literature, illustrating the cultural constitution of the “natural” environment. [Australia, totemism, environment, semiotics]
les îles Marquises: ethnography from another beachhead
Authors: BRADY IVAN
Published: November 2004

Book reviewed in this article:

Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880. GREG DENING

Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization. T. WALTER HERBERT, JR
Reviews
Authors: VATUK SYLVIA
Published: November 2004

Book reviewed in this article:

Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System. MORTON KLASS

The Peasant and the Ray; Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India. ERIC STOKES
from pigs to pearlshells: the transformation of a New Guinea Highlands exchange economy
Authors: FEIL DARYL K.
Published: November 2004

Studies of exchange in Melanesia have usually emphasized the functional value of transactions for maintaining social relations. The material side of transactions — what items are exchanged, how they are produced, and what relations arise from their production — have held secondary interest for anthropologists. This paper analyzes two neighboring, interconnected exchange systems in the New Guinea Highlands: the Melpa moka, a system primarily of pearlshell exchange, and the Enga tee, in which pigs are the most valued exchange items. The entailments of exchanging pearlshells and pigs, the sociopolitical implications of each, and the historical circumstances affecting both systems are examined. [Enga, Melpa, New Guinea Highlands, ceremonial exchange, economic anthropology, rank and stratification]
the division of labor and processes of social change in Mount Hagen
Authors: STRATHERN ANDREW
Published: November 2004

In Mount Hagen, in the western highlands province of Papua New Guinea, alterations in the use of gardens, coupled with the maintenance of certain ideas about work, the division of labor, and rights over crops, have resulted in conflict between wives and husbands. The chief new crop is coffee, which is sold for cash; and while women do much of the work to produce the coffee, control of the money derived therefrom is still claimed by men, who channel it into their own ceremonial exchanges. Further, since coffee trees take up land previously used for subsistence crops, people are nowadays constrained to spend cash partly on foodstuffs for themselves and their pig herds. Cash cropping has brought with it many problems, and conflict is played out in ideological as well as material terms. [Papua New Guinea, Mount Hagen, social change, cash cropping, male‐female relations]
Mosbys and broomsedge: the semantics of class in an Appalachian kinship system
Authors: BATTEAU ALLEN
Published: November 2004

The kinship forms of a community in the Appalachian Mountains of the southeastern United States are examined, with a focus on a kinship unit called the set by the mountain people. This unit, which is a collection of descendants of a common ancestor living in close proximity, is analyzed in terms of its composition, constitution, and use in network formation. It is demonstrated that the set is not simply a kinship group and that its existence is not simply an adaptation to poverty. Rather, it is a codification of the distinctions of kinship, personal identity, and class understood by the mountain people. The nexus of these class relationships lies in usufructuary rights of kin to land, which has been translated into an idiom of identification with named localities. [kinship, class, Appalachia, land]
the evil eye as synthetic image and its meanings on the Island of Pantelleria, Italy
Authors: GALT ANTHONY H.
Published: November 2004

Garrison and Arensberg's overgeneralized assertion that the evil eye is a reflection of patron‐client systems in circum‐Mediterranean societies, and Herzfeld's particularistic argument that the evil eye is not a useful unit for local cultural analysis, are found to be inadequate. Needham's synthetic image concept is offered as a fresh view of evil eye; it mediates the cross‐cultural and historical existence of the belief, on the one hand, and fills the need for careful analysis in given locales, on the other. The evil eye synthetic image as it is constituted on the Island of Pantelleria, Italy, is explored as an example of such a perspective of a persistent symbolic complex. [Italy, evil eye, symbolism, envy, synthetic image, magic]
the rules and the game: the practice of marriage among the Komachi
Authors: BRADBURD DANIEL
Published: November 2004

Studies of marriage in the Middle East have traditionally been focused on the whys and wherefores of patri‐parallel cousin marriage. Recent studies have argued that marriages are more directed by practical concerns than by categorical preferences. The relationship of rules to practice has therefore become problematical. Building on a detailed analysis of marriages contracted among Komachi nomads, this paper clarifies the relationship of rule to practice within Komachi society. [Middle East, kinship, marriage, rule and practice]
structuralism routinized, structuralism fractured
Authors: BOON JAMES A.
Published: November 2004

Structural Sociology. INO ROSSI, ed.

The Logic of Culture: Advances in Structural Theory and Methods. INO ROSSI, ed.
the named and the nameless: gender and person in Chinese society
Authors: WATSON RUBIE S.
Published: November 2004

Personal naming provides an insight into the construction of gender and person in Chinese society. The process of naming marks important social transitions for Chinese men; the more names a man has the more socialized and also, in a sense, the more individuated he becomes. By contrast, married women in rural China are essentially nameless. If personhood is a process of social growth, judged against the standard of men, the evidence presented here suggests that Chinese women do not, indeed cannot, attain full personhood.
in search: the purported biological basis of parenthood
Authors: MODELL JUDITH
Published: November 2004

A discussion of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), a group advocating change in American adoption policies, demonstrates the importance of a nature/culture construct in individual experiences of parenthood. Through a vivid rhetoric, the group redefines the significance of relinquishing a child to adoption; searching for a child “reverses” the surrender of a child. Reassessing “biological” and “social” claims, CUB affirms the importance of “nature” in parent‐child bonds. The article contributes to the literature on American kinship and on life‐crisis rituals, adding an indication of the links between individual interpretations and changes in public policy.
authenticity and ambivalence in the text: a colonial Maya case
Authors: HANKS WILLIAM F.
Published: November 2004

The Spanish conquest of Yucatan created a new discourse in which Maya and Spanish systems of representation were encompassed, interacted, and then produced hybrid cultural forms. The Maya nobility played an important role early on in this process, through their participation in both Spanish and indigenous sectors of colonial society. This paper explores the ambivalence of the nobility by analyzing their letters, addressed to the Spanish Crown, in Maya language. The hybrid character of these texts is demonstrated in the forms of royal address, the representation of the Franciscans and the secular clergy, and the network of intertextual relations linking the letters to a broader contemporary discourse.
sex and sin, witchcraft and the devil in late‐colonial Mexico
Authors: BEHAR RUTH
Published: November 2004

Analysis of Mexican Inquisition cases can shed light on various aspects of religion and belief that have gone largely unexplored in the ethnohistory of Mexico: the course that Christianization took during the 18th century, the role that women played in it, and how it affected the racially mixed areas that were growing in importance as the colonial era drew to a close. Men and women in these areas were intensely involved with beliefs linking witchcraft, sex, sin, and the devil, and constantly juggled these beliefs with contradictory beliefs fostered by the Catholic Church. The Inquisition, which played such a large role in creating these crises of conscience, paradoxically came to abandon its pursuit of “superstition” by the late 18th century, as inquisitors came to see these men and women as members of a lower class, not worthy of being held to account.
religion, class, and context: continuities and discontinuities in Brazilian Umbanda
Authors: BROWN DIANA DE G. , BICK MARIO
Published: November 2004

Earlier research on Afro‐Brazilian religions, influenced by static and simplistic models of syncretism and acculturation, underestimated their fluid and politically sensitive nature. Recent ethnographic and historical approaches to these religions show a complex interplay among elements of Catholicism, African, and other religious practices that responds to changing political and social conditions. This processual complexity is illustrated in the history of Umbanda, which has relied on various sources for the construction of its ideology and ritual within contexts variously charged by the expression of class interests, racial identities, and political positions.
convicted by the holy spirit: the rhetoric of fundamental Baptist conversion
Authors: HARDING SUSAN F.
Published: November 2004

Born‐again Christian belief follows conversion, an inner transformation that quickens the supernatural imagination. Among fundamental Baptists, rhetoric, not ritual, is the primary vehicle of conversion. Witnesses “speak the gospel,” the ramifying discourse and narrative of Christ. Listeners “come under conviction” as they appropriate the gospel in their inner speech. At “the moment of salvation,” listeners become public speakers of the gospel. They “believe” in the sense of embracing a narrative tradition that rewords their experience in terms of a personal, triune Cod who intervenes in daily life and in history.
bad blood, spoiled milk: bodily fluids as moral barometers in rural Haiti
Authors: FARMER PAUL
Published: November 2004

Move san, an illness widespread among rural Haitian women, might be described as a somatically experienced disorder caused by emotional distress. When it occurs in pregnant women or nursing mothers, move san causes breastmilk to “spoil,” in which case an herbal treatment is likely to be sought. Case material is presented that suggests that bad blood and spoiled milk serve as moral barometers that submit “private” problems (abuse of women, especially pregnant or nursing ones) to public scrutiny. Although more than one analytic model is considered here, it is argued that move san is best understood as a disorder of experience in which the stories told by sufferers, and by their consociates, play a key role in the shaping of that experience. By attending closely to the way in which illness (and other misfortune) is worked into the narrative renderings of broader experience, anthropologists may be better able to avoid the Cartesian dualism that still marks much medical anthropology. [Haiti, illness narrative, bodily fluids, Cartesian dualism, interpretive anthropology]
the dream of spiritual initiation and the organization of self representations among Pakistani sufis
Authors: EWING KATHERINE P.
Published: November 2004

Pakistani dreams of initiation into a sufi order illustrate how a dream may have the power to transform the dreamer by becoming the basis for a new, semiotically constituted self representation. The semiotic power of the dream can be understood only by considering several aspects of the dreaming process: how the manifest dream content simultaneously replicates a cultural template and expresses the dreamer's idiosyncratic concerns and conflicts, how the interpretation of the dream facilitates the establishment of a new self representation and associated social relationships which may resolve the dreamer's conflicts, and finally how the significance of the dream is ultimately determined by the dreamer's ability to realize the expectations of the new self representation in his subsequent life. [dreams, self‐concepts, psychological anthropology, semiotics, sufism, Pakistan]
dead goats and broken betrothals: liability and equity in Dou Donggo law
Authors: JUST PETER
Published: November 2004

This article looks at intentionality, causation and mitigation in calculations of legal liability among the Dou Donggo (Eastern Sumbawa, Indonesia). A specific case is used to explore a legal principle that makes a person liable for delicts that “might have” been committed, whether or not the accused has actually caused any damage. It is argued that this principle creates a “stricter‐than‐strict” liability without sacrificing equity. A comparative perspective is also considered. [dispute settlement, law, liability, equity, Indonesia]
Poetics and politics in the Ecuadorean Andes: women's narratives of death and devil possession
Authors: CRAIN MARY M.
Published: November 2004

In their recent review of anthropological writing, Marcus and Fischer (1986:84–86) have noted that anthropological analyses of political economy tend to neglect issues of cultural meaning. These authors argue that interpretive anthropology has often elided historical processes and has not always situated its analyses with respect to the broader perspectives of political economy. This article attempts to bridge these concerns by examining narratives recounted by female peasants of highland Ecuador that attribute several recent deaths of male wage laborers to devil possession. Refracted against an expanding global economy, the analysis focuses on the ways in which peasant cosmology and gender and class ideologies are inscribed in these devil narratives and produce meanings that resist the commodification of labor. Through such stories the unofficial voices of peasant women disrupt attempts by commercial farmers to redefine the meaning of work under the new relations of production on local estates.
a public sphere in Amazonia? the depersonalized collaborative construction of discourse in Xavante
Authors: GRAHAM LAURA
Published: November 2004

What are the discourse presuppositions of the Habermasian public sphere? The present article explores this question by comparing the Western philosophy of language with the political discourse practices of the Xavante Indians of central Brazil. Specifically, it focuses on the relationships among discourse, the individual, and the collectivity. Discursive practices in Xavante men's council meetings pragmatically represent discourse as an emergent intersubjective production. Elaborate co‐performances that incorporate both participant commentary and the discourse of previous meetings oppose the principle of negativity to that of notability. Speech performances effectively detach individuals from the content of their speech, counteracting Xavante factionalism and promoting social cohesiveness as well as egalitarian relations among senior males. Simultaneously, speech practices recreate and reinforce age‐ and gender‐based relations of dominance. [discourse, co‐performance, factional politics, principles of negativity and notability, philosophy of language, Brazilian Indians]
cultural interpretations and intracultural variability in Navajo beliefs about breastfeeding
Authors: WRIGHT ANNE L. , BAUER MARK , CLARK CLARINA , MORGAN FRANK , BEGISHE KENNETH
Published: November 2004

Societies differ in their interpretations of the body and its fluids in ways that seem to reflect the organization of society, the natural world, and other culturally meaningful symbols. However, portrayals of these interpretations, often both static and concealing, mask internal diversity, change over time, and methodologic forces for consistency. This article reports on beliefs about breastfeeding gleaned from ethnographic interviews with 35 Navajo men and women, and from survey interviews with 250 postpartum Navajo women. Working with Navajo consultants, the authors developed a “cultural text,” a coherent portrayal that synthesized respondents' beliefs. The text stressed certain beliefs: that breastfeeding is proper behavior, that it is a means of passing on the mother's attributes, and that it is a means of showing children they are loved. However, only a minority of the ethnographic interviews elicited these beliefs, and only about half the Navajo women surveyed agreed with them as statements. These findings suggest that meanings attached to the body are dynamic, changing over time as aspects of the cultural context arealtered; diverse, reflecting individual experiences and exposure to varied beliefs; and contingent, being influenced by data collection and interpretation techniques. [Navajo, breastfeeding, methodology, beliefs]
juthaa in Trinidad: food, pollution, and hierarchy in a Caribbean diaspora community
Authors: KHAN AISHA
Published: November 2004

Focusing on the Hindi term juthaa—food and drink that have become “polluted” by being partially consumed—this article explores pollution ideology and its implications for social relations and the construction of identity among Hindu and Muslim East Indians in Trinidad. It suggests that in this overseas community the salience of the concept of juthaa, though caste derived, is indicative of an egalitarian morality at work in concert with hierarchical principles. This, in turn, has implications for the way we understand cultural reproduction and change, ritual, and stratification among diaspora populations. [pollution ideology, social stratification, South Asian diaspora, transnational identities, Trinidad]
market magic: getting rich and getting personal in medicine after Mao
Authors: FARQUHAR JUDITH
Published: November 2004

Focusing on private medical practices in a north China county town I explore a shift toward the personal in the world of small business and popular healing. In contrast to the mass representation techniques of the currently threatened Maoist state—explored in this article through the figure of Lei Feng, the model soldier—private entrepreneur doctors now seek to embody medicine and health, attracting patients by cultivating personal auras and practicing medicine with touches of magic. China's new culture of “getting rich” invites an ethnography of the individual, the personal, and the embodied, not as a natural foundation of culture but as a particular cultural response to the demise of the pervasive collectivism of the Maoist state. [rural entrepreneurs, magic, state discourses, postsocialism, medical practice]
Carefully on the Margins: Christian Palestinians in Haifa between Nation and State
Authors: Sa'ar Amalia
Published: November 2004

Christian Palestinians in Israel are a religious minority within a national minority. Among the Palestinians of Haifa, however, they are a majority and an elite. By examining practices of children's socialization, I follow the ongoing process of boundary maintenance among Christian Palestinians in the city of Haifa as they navigate among their potentially conflictual affiliations with the Israeli state, the Palestinian nation, and the Christian religious community. Christian Palestinians vacillate between Christian ethnocentrism on the one hand and Palestinian national identification on the other. I argue that these seemingly contradictory attitudes and practices are responses to and a utilization of the broader political economy of Israeli Palestinians, which has itself been dynamic and even contradictory. Furthermore, I argue that we can use the perspective of such a group on the margins to highlight some of the conflictual aspects of the broader nation‐state system. [Palestinians in Israel, Christian Palestinians, marginality, nation‐state, oppositional behavior, resistance]
De‐Constructed Ethnographies
Authors: Varenne Hervé
Published: November 2004

Dan Rose. Patterns of American Culture: Ethnography and Estrangement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. 123 pp. $19.95 (cloth).

John D. Dorst. The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. xii. 220 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Statistics, Attributes, and the Dynamics of Burin Typology
Authors: Sackett James R.
Published: November 2004

Exploring the dynamics of typological patterning in stone tools requires analytic approaches for quantitatively manipulating attributes. Building upon the work of A. Spaulding, the present author, and many others, this paper outlines one such approach based upon contingency table analysis, which is designed to meet the needs of the practicing lithic typologist while calling for little statistical expertise. Its use is illustrated by an examination of the dynamics of morphological patterning among dihedral and truncation burins. The results obtained serve as a basis for examining some of the key issues involved in pursuing lithic typology and understanding its behavioral background.
Archeologist‐Ethnographer‐Informant Relations: The Dynamics of Ethnoarcheology in the Field
Authors: Brumbach Hetty Jo , Jarvenpa Robert
Published: November 2004

An ethnoarcheological investigation in the Canadian subarctic is used to evaluate the role of native informant‐field assistants (Chipewyan, Cree, Metis) in the research process. While many informants provide insightful reflections on the recent historical past, “on‐site” informant‐assistants offer the most meaningful contributions. The latter help locate archeological residues, accompany researchers to sites during survey and/of excavation, identify artifacts and, most significantly, present their own distinctive conceptions of what the material world represents. These differing conceptions are simultaneously vexing and revealing, giving rise to new dilemmas and questions. Is archeology (or ethnoarcheology) a positivist or interpretive social science? If it is a positivist enterprise, how do we identify this as separate from our personal interpretations of the past? Whose truth or perception of the truth do we embrace? These issues are explored as ethnoarcheologists and their informants struggle for a common understanding of artifacts, features, sites and expressions of ethnicity.
Political Lords and Political Ideology in Southeastern Chiefdoms: Comments and Observations
Authors: Helms Mary W.
Published: November 2004

This collection of papers highlights contexts in which ideology seems to have played a leading role in the political life of Southeastern societies. In this essay it is assumed that these polities operated within a general cosmological perspective based on belief in the consubstantiality of life. It is also assumed that association with qualities of distant time and space conveyed political legitimation to high elites. Building on these assumptions the significance of chiefly contacts with both horizontal (geographical) and vertical (celestial) external domains is examined and discussed.
The District of Columbia Fire Fighters' Project: A Case Study in Occupational Folklife
Authors: Burson‐Tolpin Anne
Published: November 2004

Robert McCarl. 1985 The District of Columbia Fire Fighters' Project:. Case Study in Occupational Folklife. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, Suithsonian Folklife Studies Number 4.
Class Warfare in the United States, Part 2
Authors: Durrenberger Paul
Published: November 2004

The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret. Michael Zweig. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Building More Effective Unions. Paul Clark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Coca and Tropical Colonization in Bolivia: The Adaptiveness of a Cash Crop
Authors: Well Jim
Published: November 2004

Evaluation of the adaptlveness of coca as a cash crop Involves several Interrelated factors. In addition to the physiological and social aspects of coca consumption, coca production Is affected by conditions for Its cultivation In a changing physical environment, by developments In the market economy, and by International political pressures to restrict the Illicit distribution of cocaine. Fieldwork data from one pioneer settlement of Quechuaspeaklng homesteaders show that coca remains the main cash crop in the tropical Chapare colonization zone in eastern Bolivia. But the future of this crop is largely beyond the control of the Andean peasants who have traditionally raised and used it.
Functions of Propertylike Information in Stateless Societies
Authors: Precourt Walter E.
Published: November 2004

In this article the function of propertylike information in stateless societies is analyzed. The first section of the article examines recent studies that conceptualize propertylike information and considers the relationship between propertylike information and educational and political processes. Examples of information possession and transmission in contemporary state societies are then presented to further elicidate the conceptualization. These introductory materials provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of propertylike information in stateless societies that follows in the second section of the paper.
The South Italian Family Revisited
Authors: Moss Leonard W.
Published: November 2004

Piecing together evidence from the historian, the archivist, the political scientist, and the ethnographer, Dr. Moss, in the C.S.A.S. Distinguished Lecture, describes the changing southern Italian family. In this brief essay he describes the traditional family as one adapted to a medieval feudal society that must now face the task of adjusting to an urban and industrialized society. The question of the survival of the unit is left unaswered but the reader is left with a real understanding of the dynamics of family life in South Italy; both yesterday and today.
Birthday Parties: A Study of Developmental Change in American Culture
Authors: Klein Janice
Published: November 2004

The complex interrelationships among ritual, life course transitions, and altered states of consciousness (ASCs) are examined on a theoretical level. ASCs are an important and relatively new concept in anthropological studies of transition and change. Hypersuggestibility, a characteristic of ASCs, is the key element of this analysis.

Birthday parties are analyzed as a life course ritual. Their efficacy in facilitating transition is evaluated in light of the issue of the potential of a series of less intense rituals versus the potential of one major ritual for effecting change. Stress is a crucial element of this problem. A symbolic analysis of those elements of birthday parties relevant to the main thesis supports the conclusion that birthday parties are a significant life course ritual in American culture.
A Conceptual Basis for Cultural Psychology
Authors: WIERZBICKA ANNA
Published: November 2004

It simply will not do to reject the theoertical centrality of meaning for psychology on the grounds that it is “vague.” Its vagueness was in the eye of yesterday's formalistics logician. We are beyond that now. [Bruner 1990: 65]
THE SOCIAL FORMATION OF CHILDBIRTH
Authors: Browner Carole
Published: November 2004

A Review of Recent Research: The First Birth: A Family Turning Point. Doris R. Entwisle and Susan G. Doering.

A Review of Recent Research: Anthropology of Human Birth. Margarita Artschwager Kay, ed.

A Review of Recent Research: Ethnography of Fertility and Birth. Carol P. MacCormack, ed.

A Review of Recent Research: Childbirth: Alternatives to Medical Control. Shelly Romalis, ed.
REVIEWS
Authors: Brown Paul F.
Published: November 2004

Book reviewed in this article:

Other Ways of Growing Old: Anthropological Perspectives. Pamela T. Amoss and Steven Harrell, eds.
The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology
Authors: Scheper‐Hughes Nancy , Lock Margaret M.
Published: November 2004

Conceptions of the body are central not only to substantive work in medical anthropology, but also to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire discipline of anthropology, where Western assumptions about the mind and body, the individual and society, affect both theoretical viewpoints and research paradigms. These same conceptions also influence ways in which health care is planned and delivered in Western societies. In this article we advocate the deconstruction of received concepts about the body and begin this process by examining three perspectives from which the body may be viewed: (1) as a phenomenally experienced individual body‐self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society, and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and political control. After discussing ways in which anthropologists, other social scientists, and people from various cultures have conceptualized the body, we propose the study of emotions as an area of inquiry that holds promise for providing a new approach to the subject.
The Growth of Medical Authority: Technology and Morals in Turn‐of‐the‐Century Obstetrics
Authors: Leavitt Judith Walzer
Published: November 2004

Before 1880 birthing women and their female attendants dominated decisions concerning labor and delivery. Between about 1880 and 1920, however, the medical profession gained control of obstetrical care, and birth increasingly took place within hospitals. Using the specific example of the debate about performing craniotomies (the surgical mutilation of the fetal head to permit vaginal extraction) on live fetuses, the paper analyzes how technological innovations, changing medical theory, moral and ethical considerations, and professional interests interacted to make physicians more powerful arbiters in America's birthing rooms. Decisions surrounding cases of cephalopelvic disproportion, when major surgical interventions became essential, reveal most starkly the issue of control. Physicians learned to use such situations to increase the importance of what they felt was the uniquely scientific basis of their own contribution. The establishment of physicians' authority over emergency home‐based deliveries in this turn‐of‐the‐century period was a necessary prerequisite to their ultimate assumption of hospital‐based authority.
Divisions of Labor: Obstetrician, Woman, and Society in Williams Obstetrics, 1903–1985
Authors: Hahn Robert A.
Published: November 2004

During the 20th century the developed world has witnessed a fundamental revolution in the conduct of birth. Its place has moved almost entirely from domestic to medical settings, while obstetrical professionals have increasingly assumed control of its events. Powerful artifacts and procedures employed in the conduct of birth have proliferated concurrently and appear to exert a command of their own. This obstetrical revolution has occurred in a cultural environment of profoundly charged and rapidly changing values and practices regarding sexuality and reproduction, health and health care, identity, and autonomy. In this paper I focus on relations between obstetricians and childbearing women, as presented in the first 17 editions of Williams Obstetrics, the central reference text of this medical specialty. From the first edition in 1903 to the most recent in 1985, Williams has both reflected and guided the development of belief and practice in obstetrics. Early editions hold childbirth to be an essentially pathological event; childbearing women are its patients and require extensive medical monitoring and intervention. Though recent editions stress the social and psychological context of childbirth, this viewpoint has not yet fully informed the practices and attitudes that characterize the text.