bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Village daughter, village goddess: residence, gender, and politics in a Himalayan pilgrimage
Authors: SAX WILLIAM S.
Published: November 2004

In the Garhwal Himalayas, as elsewhere in South Asia, persons and the places where they reside are thought to have strong mutual effects upo—indeed, to be parts of—each other. What happens, then, after a new bride is obliged to move to her husband's place after marriage? Men and women have different perspectives on this question. Men (and the classical moral treatises of Hinduism) tend to assert complete transformation of the bride, and the standard wedding rite seeks to effect such a transformation. Women, on the other hand, tend to believe that the bride changes only gradually and that her ties to her natal village are never completely severed.

Outmarried village daughters are required to participate in numerous rituals in their natal villages; prominent among such rituals are the periodic pilgrimages of the regional goddess, Nandädevi. The requirement that outmarried daughters participate confirms the female perspective, but the pilgrimages themselves ultimately reaffirm virilocality. In this way, both the male and the female perspective are validated without contravening the world view in which both are grounded, and political relations of male domination and female subordination are reproduced through ritual. [ritual, politics, residence, gender, pilgrimage, South Asia]
Reading and the righting of writing ethnographies
Authors: BIRTH KEVIN K.
Published: November 2004

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. JAMES CLIFFORD and GEORGE E. MARCUS

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. GEORGE E. MARCUS and MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER.
the erasure of women's writing in sociocultural anthropology
Authors: LUTZ CATHERINE
Published: November 2004

Writing, citation, and other canon‐setting patterns in the recent (1977–86) literature of sociocultural anthropology reveal the impact of gender relations. In this article, citation is treated as a social practice which, among other things, legitimizes the voice of the cited author. While women produce a substantial proportion of the work available for citation, the proportion of women authors cited is lower than would be expected on that basis, and it varies with the citing author's gender. Annual meetings programs also show a tendency for women to be extremely active, but the frequent focus on gender and feminism is not reflected in overviews of the field. Conclusions are drawn about the relative marginalization of women's work and about the relationship between the warranting of women's academic work and the public or private context of its evaluation.
Politics and grammar: agency in Samoan political discourse
Authors: DURANT ALESSANDRO
Published: November 2004

This article proposes that we integrate ethnographic with grammatical analysis in order to study the constitution of “agency” in legal and political discourse. Much of the political and juridical process of conflict management in a Samoan fono involves the definition of certain “facts” and the assignment of certain semantic roles to key participants. Morpho‐syntactic elements of Samoan grammar hence become powerful tools in the political arena, where social actors compete by either constituting or resisting definitions of agency.
Sweet colors, fragrant songs: sensory models of the Andes and the Amazon
Authors: CLASSEN CONSTANCE
Published: November 2004

The indigenous peoples of South America culturally code sensory perceptions in varied and complex ways. This article outlines and compares the sensory models of indigenous cultures from two contrasting South American regions: the central Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands. While the various peoples of the Andes appear to share the same basic sensory model, those of the Amazon manifest significant differences in the symbolic values they accord the different senses. One common factor among the Amazonians, which also distinguishes them from the Andeans, is the importance given to the senses dependent on proximity, particularly smell. Such differences can be attributed to a variety of causes and are seen to have a variety of cultural effects. In conclusion, the anthropological implications of examining indigenous theories and modes of perception are explored.
“illegal aliens” and “opportunity”: myth‐making in congressional testimony
Authors: CHOCK PHYLLIS PEASE
Published: November 2004

Congressional hearings are scenes for actions more diverse than either a judicial or an information‐gathering model would suggest. Hearings are settings in which ideologies are put to work in talk, both as practical activity and as ritual performance. In testimony in 1975 in a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee's hearings on immigration reform, speakers drew rhetorically upon particular American mythic themes to affirm an egalitarian ideology in a context of institutional and cultural uncertainty. Myths of opportunity were used to reify “illegal aliens” in order to deny difference, inequality, and history. The rhetorical displacement of myth by the use of irony opened the debate to new terms but failed to dislodge the myth‐making process.
the political topography of Spanish and English: the view from a New York Puerto Rican neighborhood
Authors: URCIUOLI BONNIE
Published: November 2004

This article suggests that people build their sense of language around relationships as much as they build relationships around language. For inner‐city New York Puerto Ricans, using English with one another and with black neighbors is a different experience from using English with middle‐class whites. Bilinguals also construct ways to “share” Spanish with black neighbors whether or not those neighbors actually speak Spanish; men and women have different strategies for doing this. The linguistic ease with which Puerto Ricans and blacks form relations stands in sharp contrast to the linguistic risks that attend Puerto Rican relations with middle‐class whites.
Delegated voice: ritual speech, risk, and the making of marriage alliances in Anakalang
Authors: KEANE WEBB
Published: November 2004

Many societies stress communicative practice in their models of the social world. In Anakalang, Sumba, the process of marriage negotiation helps constitute and display the value of social identities and relations. In this “scene of negotiation,” ritual speech performance formalizes discrete speech participant roles and separates voice from agency. The scene implicitly portrays interaction as risky, with a potential for failure to which the very forms of interaction may themselves contribute.
Book Reviews
Authors: CROWLEY TERRY
Published: November 2004

Book reviewed in this article:

Pidgins and Creoles. Volume I: Theory and Structure. JOHN A. HOLM.

Pidgins and Creoles. Volume II: Reference Survey. JOHN HOLM.
pigs, party secretaries, and private lives in Hungary
Authors: LAMPLAND MARTHA
Published: November 2004

Studies of the agricultural second economy in Hungary have focused on the role of recent state policies. It will be argued here that the specific character of socialist planning and practice cannot be understood without exploring changes in the form of social value over the last hundred years. This process, the commodification of social life, is also analyzed as the basis of anthropological theories of meaning. An alternative view of social process and nonreferential meaning is offered. [meaning, commodification, work, agriculture, socialism, Hungary]
the transformation of the Norwegian notion of everyday life
Authors: GULLESTAD MARIANNE
Published: November 2004

This article argues that the current prominence of the notion of “everyday life” is tied to a particular stage in the development of modern secularized society and that, therefore, the notion should not be applied cross‐culturally or historically without careful qualification. This argument relies on an examination of the transformation of the notion of everyday life in Norway, based on long‐term fieldwork among working‐class families as well as on analyses of social planning and social science documents. During the 1980s, “everyday life” (hverdagslivet) became a central notion in Norwegian society. Once part of a temporal polarity between the everyday and the festival, it has now become part of a somewhat different polarity, that between everyday life and the sociopolitical system. The fact that the notion's old connotations (drudgery and plainness) coexist to some extent with its new ones (closeness, wholeness, and integration) makes everyday life a rich and potent political symbol. The potency of a political symbol thus rests on what in this article is termed the “span of ambiguity” ofits associated meanings. [political symbolism, history, local community, everyday life, home, Scandinavia]
Constructing the sterile city: pronatalism and social sciences in interwar Italy
Authors: HORN DAVID G.
Published: November 2004

This article explores the construction of the Italian city and the urban population as objects of social scientific knowledge and technical intervention. In the context of a pronatalist campaign launched by the fascist regime in the 1920s and 1930s, the city was identified as a locus of sterility, and urban populations were made the targets of new forms of government aimed at transforming reproductive practices. The links between knowledge and power revealed by this “problematization” of the city are, I suggest, of some importance for genealogies of the social sciences, including urban anthropology. [cities, urbanism, social science, reproduction, Italy, fascism]
a day at the Tibetan opera: actualized performance and spectacular discourse
Authors: CALKOWSKI MARCIA S.
Published: November 2004

Recent studies of performance genres suggest that many rituals generate proposi‐tional force by manipulating ritual frames and so drawing the audience to reflect upon various levels of performance reality. This article focuses on the fusion of such levels during the performance of a Tibetan opera before an audience of refugee Tibetans living in India, a spectacle wherein the mimetic performance of a mock exorcism became an actual exorcism. The article analyzes this transformation from the combined perspective of theatrical semiosis and speech act theory. [Tibet, performance theory, opera, ritual, theater]
Anthropology and the development encounter: the making and marketing of development anthropology
Authors: ESCOBAR ARTURO
Published: November 2004

Since the end of World War II, relations between industrialized nations and Third World countries have been greatly determined and mediated by the discourses and practices of “development.” Although anthropologists in general have not prob‐lematized the existence of such discourses and practices, a growing number of them have joined the applied field as “culture experts” in development activities. This article traces the rise and growth of “development anthropology” since the mid‐1970s. Because of their adherence to mainstream models in both anthropology and development, the article argues, development anthropologists reinforce ethnocentric and dominating models of development. Moreover, these practitioners disturbingly recycle, in the name of cultural sensitivity and local knowledge, conventional views of modernization, social change, and the Third World. Some thoughts for redefining the role of anthropology in development are offered. [development anthropology, applied anthropology, history of anthropology, development studies, critical theory]
Women and things: Pokot motherhood as political destiny
Authors: BIANCO BARBARA A.
Published: November 2004

Among the cattle‐keeping Pokot of northwestern Kenya, women use cowhide belts to support and to undermine the clans for which they bear children. By analyzing the design, symbolic associations, and uses of these commonplace but extraordinarily powerful items of adornment, this article shows how one East African patrilineal society deals with the problematic nature of maternal nurture. More generally, it suggests that by attending to the wide variety of things that women make and wear, we may achieve a better understanding of the political ramifications of motherhood. [gender, adornment, the body, patrilineal descent, East Africa]
Measuring the Maya disconnection: violence and development in Guatemala
Authors: EARLE DUNCAN
Published: November 2004

God and Production in a Guatemalan Town. SHELDON ANNIS.

Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala. BEATRIZ MANZ.
the body in the gift: memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange
Authors: BATTAGLIA DEBBORA
Published: November 2004

In casting gift exchange as an inscriptive performance of embodied gender relations, the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea reveal an indigenous valuation of forgetting as a willed transformation of memory and resist the opposition between inscribed and enacted cultural traditions that is so pervasive in the anthropological literature on social memory. Sabarl mortuary exchanges that feature “corpses” of gendered wealth serve here as a case in point. [exchange theory, gender performances, embodiment, memory and forgetting, Melanesia, mortuary rituals]
Assessing the consequences
Authors: WHITE RICHARD
Published: November 2004

Columbian Consequences. Volume 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. DAVID HURST THOMAS, ed.
the sannyasi and the Indian wrestler: the anatomy of a relationship
Authors: ALTER JOSEPH S.
Published: November 2004

Indian wrestling (pahalwani) is a disciplined way of life that demands rigorous physical and moral training. In this regard it is analogous to the Hindu life path of world renunciation (sannyas). Here I show how Indian wrestlers use the model of sannyas to help define their way of life. Wrestlers recognize the centrality of the physico‐moral body as a defining idiom of identity. Their interpretation of body discipline thus sheds light on general theoretical issues relating to identity formation and concepts of the person in Hindu South Asia. [India, wrestling, sannyas, asceticism, identity, body discipline]
male transvestism and cultural change in Samoa
Authors: MAGEO JEANNETTE MARIE
Published: November 2004

In Samoa today the transvestite plays a role once played by pre‐Christian girls in nighttime exchanges of entertainment. Ambiguous and liminal in “her” relation to gender categories, the Samoan transvestite acts out a jest about these categories. This jest dramatically illustrates the importance of a sensitivity to local humor and to ironic modes of self‐representation in ethnographic perspectives on sex roles, social structure, and personhood. The form of humor “she” practices also sheds light on the place of the erotic in Samoa from the missionization period to the present, a subject that has long preoccupied the anthropological imagination. [cultural change, Samoa, transvestism, humor, gender]
Changing representations of place, community, and character in the Spanish Sierra del Caurel
Authors: BAUER RAINER LUTZ
Published: November 2004

The peasants of the mountain interior of Spanish Galicia often represent themselves to powerful “outsiders” as a culturally marginal, degraded, or disadvan‐taged group. Their negative self‐portraits tend to reflect and inspire higher‐ranking Spaniards' appraisals of them as “uncivilized” people living in “primitive” environments. This article examines the interests, motives, and strategies that condition this dialogue between subordinate and superordinate groups as it develops in a particular community. The discussion focuses on three successive historical periods that evidence changes in villagers' interactions with state authorities, in their specific representations of themselves to outsiders, and in their perceptions of their place in Spanish society. [peasant‐state relations, representations of community, resistance and identity, Spanish Galicia, western Europe]
the construction of national identity in Brittany and Quebec
Authors: BADONE ELLEN
Published: November 2004

Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. RICHARD HANDLER. New Directions in Anthropological Writing: History, Poetics, Cultural Criticism. GEORGE E. MARCUS and JAMES CLIFFORD, eds.

“We Are Not French!” Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany. MARYON MCDONALD.
a guide to the perplexed ethnographer in an age of sound bites
Authors: FERNANDEZ JAMES W.
Published: November 2004

Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology. ROGER SANJEK, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. xviii + 429 pp., figures, photographs, notes, references, index.
Property relations, production relations, and inequality: anthropology, political economy, and the Blackfeet
Authors: NUGENT DAVID
Published: November 2004

Political‐economic concepts that privilege production over other dimensions of social life are inappropriate to the study of non‐Western societies. Concepts suitable for non‐Western societies must be based on the institutional specificity of those societies, just as production‐based concepts (forces and relations of production) derive their analytical value from the institutional structure of industrial capitalism. In this article, “property relations” is advanced as such a concept and is used to explain the emergence of inequality from egalitarian social relations among the Blackfeet Indians on the northern plains of North America. [political economy, property relations, historical anthropology, legal anthropology, inequality, gender relations]
the selling of San Juan: the performance of history in an Afro‐Venezuelan community
Authors: GUSS DAVID M.
Published: November 2004

By viewing the Afro‐Venezuelan Festival of San Juan in the historical context of a 45‐year period, we can see the manner in which this celebration has articulated the changing social and political realities of those who have performed it. From the growth of nationalism and the consolidation of the Venezuelan state during the first years of democracy in the late 1940s, to the developmental fever generated by the oil boom of the 1970s, to the emergence of a new African consciousness in the present, the festival, like all cultural performances, has mirrored transformations within the community itself. Most recently, the celebration of San Juan has served to reconsolidate the community in a time of tremendous social turmoil and has also permitted those participating in it to speak about a subject few Venezuelans have ever wished to address—that of race. [festivals, cultural performance, resistance, Afro‐American history, Latin America, Venezuela]
gender, power, and legal pluralism: Rajasthan, India
Authors: MOORE ERIN P.
Published: November 2004

Villagers in rural northeastern Rajasthan, India, most frequently take their disputes to either the local village councils or the state courts. But the councils and courts are manipulated by powerful men; women and low‐status men cannot find their justice in these forums. Stretching the boundaries of the law to include the work of a Muslim spiritual teacher and healer, or maulavi, can help us understand the victims of the central legal systems. Both men and women may seek remedies to social and physical problems by visiting a maulavi, and for women, a trip to the healer may become a form of resistance to male ideological hegemony. Attention to spirit possession, stress‐related illnesses, and traditional healers lends us new insight into cultural conceptions of justice, resistance, and the role of gender in legal pluralism. [legal pluralism, healers, India, Islam, women and resistance]
power and transcendence in the Ma Tsu pilgrimages of Taiwan
Authors: SANGREN P. STEVEN
Published: November 2004

By prescribing travel outside pilgrims' native communities, the Ma Tsu pilgrimages of Taiwan define the sources of socially productive power as transcendent to both the individual and the community. In this article, pilgrimage ritual and rhetoric are shown to constitute a multifaceted set of mutually authenticating representations of the self‐productive power of various institutions and culturally constructed selves. The most encompassing horizons of social and cultural production in pilgrimage exceed overt or conscious representation in pilgrimage itself, a fact crucial to the article's attempt to link the spatially hierarchical social organization of pilgrimages to ideological qualities inherent in pilgrimages' representations of transcendent power. From an objective or “totalizing” analytical perspective, pilgrimages are logically transcendent or encompassing levels of social production, but they entail representations of transcendence that misrecognize the sociogenic nature of this transcendence. [pilgrimage, alienation, ideology, social production]
when Bushmen are known as Basarwa: gender, ethnicity, and differentiation in rural Botswana
Authors: MOTZAFI‐HALLER PNINA
Published: November 2004

Recent scholarship on the Bushmen (San) and other hunter‐gatherers calls for an understanding of the way specific historical circumstances give rise to a variety of modes of livelihood and strategies of survival of groups. However, little attention has been paid to the analysis of cultural and political dimensions of this process. This article is concerned with a group of “Basarwa” (a Setswana equivalent to “Bushmen”) who have been permanent residents in a Tswana village in eastern Botswana since the turn of the century, and with the historical process that maintained those Basarwa in a position of marginality vis‐à‐vis their Tswana neighbors. I argue that to fully understand the continued marginality of the Basarwa in changing historical circumstances, one has to analyze the dynamic relations between the cultural definition of Sarwa identity and its material and social grounding in household reproduction. [Bushmen, hunter‐gatherers, ethnic formation, gender, rural differentiation, Botswana]
our garden is the sea: contingency and improvisation in Mandar women's work
Authors: VOLKMAN TOBY ALICE
Published: November 2004

In the late 1980s, women in fishing communities on the southwest coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, began to leave the looms on which they had woven fine silk sarongs. The alternative work they sought was fish‐trading, on a scale that gave them considerably more mobility (and income) than women had enjoyed in the past. This article explores these changes in terms of discourses and practices of gender, emphasizing complementarity and competing state visions of domesticated women and national development. It argues that cultural flexibility, including willingness to abandon older ideals linking womanhood and weaving, enabled some women to improvise at a moment of rapid technological and commercial change.[gender, work, fishing communities, weaving, Indonesia]
Yearnings: televisual love and melodramatic politics in contemporary China
Authors: ROFEL LISA B.
Published: November 2004

To trace the complex “passion for meaning” (Barthes) that animated the consumption and interpretation of Yearnings, a television melodrama that aired in China just a year and a half after the Tiananmen demonstrations, requires moving beyond a dichotomy between “the political” and “the popular.” This article argues that Yearnings became a nationwide controversy because it allegorizes post‐Tiananmen dilemmas of national identity in relation to socialism and in relation to the diverse class and gender positionings of the characters as well as the viewers. Textualist and reader‐response analyses of popular culture need to be broadened by an ethnographic approach that asks sociodiscursive questions about the operations of popular culture as a site for the constitution of national subjects, one that offers complicated possibilities for oppositional practices. [China, national identity, popular culture, gender and class, politics of representations, the state]
de‐Orientalizing the Chinese family firm
Authors: GREENHALGH SUSAN
Published: November 2004

Since the 1960s, East Asia's «four little dragons» have become the fastest growing areas of the world economy. Inspired by a newfound pride in the traditions of Chinese culture, Chinese scholars and China specialists have traced the roots of the region's economic dynamism to its «traditional ConAjcian culture,» one of familism, collectivism, and mutual benefit. Focusing in this article on one embodiment of Confucian culture, the Chinese family firm, I question the substantive interpretations and emancipatory implications of this new discourse. Historical study of 25 Taiwanese enterprises suggests that the reality is one of conspicuous gender disparities in the distribution of work and reward. The division of labor in these firms was not a natural reflection of tradition but a political construction of the family/firm head, who was pressed to build his firm out of family resources by several features of the national and global political economies. I argue that the Confucian thesis is a form of Orientalist economics that arose in the context of, and in turn supported, a very conservative politics. By simultaneously valorizing Chinese «collectivism» and obfuscating the gender, ethnic, and other inequalities on which it is based, this discourse not only reproduced Orientalist constructions of Chinese culture, but it also discouraged the discovery of subjugated knowledges and lent support to a new, flexible form of capitalist accumulation that is based on exploitation of gender and other social inequalities. [Orientalism, power/knowledge, gender inequality, family business, political economy, flexible accumulation, China/Taiwan]
culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia
Authors: JACKSON JEAN E.
Published: November 2004

In this article I use Edward Sapir's (1924) famous phrase as a theme to explore how Tukanoans of Colombia's Northwest Amazon are learning to change their notions of their own history and culture to achieve a better fit with received wisdom about Indianness. Situated in a highly politicized context, this process involves local and national Indian rights organizations and sympathetic international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I also briefly address the issue of ethnographic authority—the confrontation between anthropological and native visions of indigenous culture and history. [Northwest Amazon, indigenous mobilizing, identity politics, construction of culture, ethnic nationalism]
policing boundaries: race, class, and gender in Cartagena, Colombia
Authors: STREICKER JOEL
Published: November 2004

Analysis of everyday discourse among the poor of Cartagena, Colombia, reveals the mutual construction of race, class, and gender identities. Discourse on class and gender encodes racially discriminatory concepts, identifying blackness with acts that contradict normative class and gender identities. This article shows how the interlocking meanings of race, class, and gender enforce the status quo of men's, nonblacks', and elders' authority within the popular class. [race, class, gender, symbolic analysis of difference and inequality, Afro‐Spanish America]
agriculture and the domestication of industry in rural Bulgaria
Authors: CREED GERALD W.
Published: November 2004

The capitalist model underlying most analyses of agro‐industrial interaction leads to an assumption of industrial determinism whereby the requirements of industry set the parameters for agricultural adaptations. Examining the interaction under east European socialism challenges this premise. In Bulgaria the complete integration of the local socialist economy worked together with a continuing cultural equation between village and agriculture to “domesticate” industry: that is, the system forced industry to accommodate the needs and requirements of agriculture. This interpretation sheds light on the difficulties faced by postsocialist economies and also challenges our assumption of industrial primacy under capitalism, where subsistence agriculture and part‐time farming continue to be significant forces in the political economy. [agriculture, Bulgaria, economic development, peasant worker, rural industry, socialism]
constructing local identities in a revolutionary nation: the cultural politics of the artisan class in Nicaragua, 1979‐90
Authors: FIELD LES W.
Published: November 2004

During the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979‐90), the Sandinista government was simultaneously committed to a politics of class consciousness and a nation‐building project informed by an indigenista ideology. Western Nicaraguan artisan communities, a heterogeneous social group with variable and distinctive cultural practices, responded to the Sandinista Revolution by creating a union that represented artisans' interests in terms of class rather than ethnicity, which has historically been a marker of subordinate status. Through an analysis of a particular history in which class identity became salient, in this article I stress not only the fluidity of local identities, but also underscore ways in which anthropology may be complicit in nation‐building projects that maintain the subaltern position of peoples among whom anthropologists work.
consumption, prostitution, and reproduction: the poetics of sweetness in bori
Authors: MASQUELIER ADELINE
Published: November 2004

In this article I explore the semantics of sweetness among the Hausaphone Mawri of Niger. I show how the various configurations of sweetness meaningfully unify the contexts of prostitution, spirit possession, and obstetrics for some Mawri struggling to make sense of changing social realities. These interrelated experiences of production and reproduction in turn provide an idiom for expressing concretely the temptations of consumer culture and the dangers of uncontrolled consumption in contemporary Niger.
Hindu culture for an Indian nation: gender, politics, and elite identity in urban south India
Authors: HANCOCK MARY
Published: November 2004

In this article I describe a south Indian social movement, headed by a Hindu preceptor. This movement relied on elite women members and on feminine religious idioms to solicit upper‐caste consent to Hindu nationalism; with that ideology, it naturalized caste inequalities and attempted to broker alliances between urban elites and the poor. The movement represented upper‐caste contestation for hegemonic power, but failed because of indeterminacies attached to its “education of consent” and anti‐Brahman political sentiment.
“I can't tell you all my troubles”: conflict, resistance, and metacommunication in Bangladeshi illness interactions
Authors: WILCE JAMES M.
Published: November 2004

Transcripts of interactions between patients, kin, and healers open up the lives of fourrogi (“sick ones” or “patients”) in Matlab, Bangladesh. I compare the pattern of domination and resistance in those interactions with Western biomedical encounters. Patients in Matlab express dissatisfaction with the power relations of family or medicine through low‐level means that do not enter discursive consciousness. By indirectly calling attention to the suppression of their voices, patients' metacomplaints—a species of metacommunication evident in two of the interactions—entail an incipient cultural criticism.
reviews
Authors: GROCE NORA ELLEN
Published: November 2004

Book reviewed in this article:

Blind People: The Private and Public Life of Sightless Israelis. SHLOMO DESHEN.

The Caregiving Dilemma: Work in an American Nursing Home. NANCY FONER.

Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions. HAIM HAZAN.
meaning and feeling in the anthropology of emotions
Authors: LEAVITT JOHN
Published: November 2004

Emotion terms are used in everyday discourse to indicate experiences that involve both meaning and feeling, both mind and body. Most attempts to theorize emotions, however, tend to reduce them to one side or the other of these dichotomies; anthropology is divided between views of the emotions as primarily biological and as primarily sociocultural in nature. In this article I consider these approaches and propose three ways around the meaning/feeling dichotomy: through a rereading of the intellectual past of the modern West; through analytic methods that seek to reconstruct affective resonances; and through a realization that feeling‐tones, as well as meanings, are conveyed in the writing and reading of ethnography. In this article I draw on comparative material from the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon in northern India. [emotion, meaning, feeling, anthropological theory, South Asia, Himalaya]
the limits of “state functionalism” and the reconstruction of funerary ritual in contemporary northern Vietnam
Authors: MALARNEY SHAUN KINGSLEY
Published: November 2004

In this article I examine the history and consequences of the Vietnamese Communist Party's attempt to reform funerary rituals in the post‐1954 period. By examining the mixed results of the campaign, I argue that “state functionalism,” a phenomenon defined as the use of ritual by state officials to advance official objectives and ideology, cannot succeed in controlling all meanings and values mobilized in ritual. Official ideology, however, does not remain divorced from the values and ideals participants bring to reformed ritual practices. Instead, it enters into a transformative dialogue with its historical antecedents, producing a set of rituals, and ideas about ritual, different from what the cadres intended and what they replaced. [funerary ritual, Vietnam, ritual change, culture and ideology, socialist ritual]
contested meanings: tantra and the poetics of Mithila art
Authors: BROWN CAROLYN HENNING
Published: November 2004

The art of the women of Mithila, known as Mithila or Madhubani art, has attracted a good deal of international interest as a folk art medium and a good deal of disagreement concerning interpretation. In this article I question those interpretations that view the art as tantric because they have been elicited from conversations among a few Brahman men with Western scholars predisposed to find tantric meanings. Using women's commentaries, contextual ritual analysis, and trope theory, I develop an analysis in which I see the art as reflexive—an iconic tradition of women's understanding of selfhood in patriarchal society. [art, India, Mithila art, women, tantra, ritual, trope theory]
the pidginization of Luguru politics: administrative ethnography and the paradoxes of indirect rule
Authors: PELS PETER
Published: November 2004

The analysis of the tensions of empire that characterize indirect rule is usually hampered by the failure to study critically its discourse of representation and the indigenous resistance and accommodation to it. In this article I make that attempt by describing the administrative ethnography of the Uluguru Mountains in Eastern Tanganyika as a pidgin constructed in a specific contact situation (the baraza, or council meeting) by speakers from both the Luguru substrate or subaltern political discourse and the British superstrate language of political and ethnographic representation. [colonial discourse, political anthropology, indirect rule, invention of tradition, African history]
“how we built the road”: the politics of memory in rural Galicia
Authors: ROSEMAN SHARON R.
Published: November 2004

In considering the symbolic constitution of history at a local level, ethnographers are confronted with the way in which memories are constructed around political contests not only for resources but also for interpretations of events. In this article I examine the use of history as a form of “making do” through an analysis of a historical narrative of localism about the 1964 construction of a highway connecting a settlement to the national infrastructure, as told by a group of Spanish Galician villagers. In their accounts, narrators contested the official understanding of economic development projects as delivered to local communities from the “outside.” Although their labor was appropriated in order to complete the road project in 1964, in 1990 they were contesting the meaning of that appropriation. [politics of memory, oral history, “making do,” fascism, Spanish Galicia, western Europe]
Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective
Authors: Downey Greg
Published: November 2004

Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Mary‐Jo Delvecchio Good. Paul E. Brodwin. Byron J. Good. and Arthur Kleinman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. vlii. 214 pp., notes, references, contributors, Index.
The Witch Hunt, or, the Triumph of of Morality
Authors: Skaria Ajay
Published: November 2004

The Witch Hunt, or, the Triumph of Morality. F. G. Bailey. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. ix. 221 pp., photographs, Index.
Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered
Authors: Abelmann Nancy
Published: November 2004

Towards. Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Nina Glick Schiller. Linda Basch. and Cristina Blanc‐szanton. eds. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992. xv. 259 pp., contributors, references.
The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and its Legacy
Authors: Yalman Nur
Published: November 2004

The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and its Legacy. Robert Parkin. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. xi. 226 pp., notes, bibliography, Indexes.
Antropologia delle origini cristiane
Authors: Di Bella Maria Pia
Published: November 2004

Antropologia delle origini cristiane. Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce. Roma‐Barl: Editori Laterza, 1995. xvi. 243 pp., notes, bibliography, Indexes.
Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary
Authors: Chen Nancy N.
Published: November 2004

Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary. Ron Burnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xii. 355 pp., notes, bibliography, index.
Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture
Authors: Volland Anita
Published: November 2004

Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture. William Washabaugh. Oxford: Berg, 1996. xx. 209 pp., figures, notes, bibliography, Index.
Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup'ik Eskimo Oral Tradition
Authors: Riches David
Published: November 2004

Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup'ik Eskimo Oral Tradition. Ann Feinup‐Riordan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. xxiv. 389 pp., Index, bibliography, figures.
Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Culturalist Analysis
Authors: Carsten Janet
Published: November 2004

Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Culturalist Analysis. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney. eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. + 310 pp., contributors, notes, references, Index.
The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification In Angang
Authors: Wang Lihua
Published: November 2004

The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification In Angang. Charles Stafford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xv. 213 pp., notes, bibliography, glossary, index.
Sex and Violence in Brazil: Carnaval, Capoeira, and the Problem of Everyday Life
Authors: Lewis J. Lowell
Published: November 2004

I argue that the concept of everyday life should be understood by theorists primarily as a residual category, defined in opposition to marked frames of social interaction. Accordingly, I explore the Brazilian everyday through two kinds of special events: the martial game of capoeira and the well‐known carnaval. Ethnographers of Brazil tacitly acknowledge the elusiveness of the everyday by focusing on certain themes within it. I consider two popular themes: sex and violence. I conclude by asserting, in opposition to materialist positions, that there is an important sense in which mere fantasies (as some people might say) like carnival are more real than everyday life. [Brazil, sex, violence, everyday, carnival, capoeira]
Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea
Authors: Healey Christopher
Published: November 2004

Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea. Polly Wiessner and Akii Tumu. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xvii. 494 pp., maps, tables, appendixes, notes, references, index.
Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African‐Nicaraguan Community
Authors: McClaurin Irma
Published: November 2004

Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African‐Nicaraguan Community. Edmund T. Gordon. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xiv. 330 pp., map, photographs, notes, acronyms, references, index.
Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales
Authors: Brinner Benjamin
Published: November 2004

Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales. Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. xxi. 349 pp., illustrations, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.
Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture
Authors: Gordon Deborah
Published: November 2004

Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture. Frida Kerner Furman. New York: Routledge Press, 1997. + 218 pp., photographs, notes, works cited, index.
Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt
Authors: Launay Robert
Published: November 2004

Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Gregory Starrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvi. 308 pp., index, bibliography, notes.
The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society
Authors: Gutmann Matthew C.
Published: November 2004

The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in. New Guinea Society. Donald Tuzin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiii. 256 pp., figures, notes, references, index.
Serious Fun: Minority Cultural Dynamics and National Integration in Thailand
Authors: Jonsson Hjorleifur
Published: November 2004

In this article, I explore local social and cultural dynamics in the context of the national integration of ethnic minorities. My case concerns a Mien population in Thailand and describes various engagements of local and national spaces that center on issues of fun. Sports competitions and culture shows resonate with other projects that reinforce the centrality of villages in contemporary social life. For the Mien, these dynamics index a shift from the household to the village as the subject of action. Fun and games are not digressions from politics but are central to the serious play of everyday life, [national integration, ethnic minorities, fun, ethnography, village, Mien (Yao), Thailand]
Theorizing the Americanist Tradition
Authors: Miller Bruce G.
Published: November 2004

Theorizing the Americanist Tradition. Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell. eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 397 pp., figures.
Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.‐Latin American Relations
Authors: Clark Kim
Published: November 2004

Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.‐Latin American Relations. Gilbert M. Joseph. Catherine C. Legrand. and Ricardo D. Salvatore. eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xv. 575 pp., figures, contributors, index.
An Ethnography of Four Non‐Governmental Development Organizations
Authors: Campbell John R.
Published: November 2004

An Ethnography of Four Non‐Governmental Development Organizations. Diana Joyce Fox. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. vi. 331 pp., appendixes, bibliography, index.
Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America
Authors: Sacks Maurie
Published: November 2004

Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America. Jack Glazier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 245 pp., appendix, notes, index.
Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence, and Ritual in Gisu Society
Authors: Curley Richard
Published: November 2004

Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence, and Ritual in Gisu Society. Suzette Heald. New York: Routledge, 1999. ix. 192 pp., notes, references, indexes.
Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist
Authors: Lyons Harriet
Published: November 2004

Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist. Fran Markowitz and Michael Ashkenazi. eds. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 248 pp., references, index.
Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market
Authors: Litzinger Ralph A.
Published: November 2004

Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Dorothy J. Solinger Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ix. 444 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index.
Times Enmeshed: Gender, Space, and History among the Duna of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Jacka Jerry
Published: November 2004

Times Enmeshed: Gender, Space, and History among the Duna of Papua New Guinea. Gabriele Stürzenhofecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 242 pp., tables, photographs, appendix, bibliography, notes, index.
Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns
Authors: Grimshaw Anna
Published: November 2004

Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns. Paula Kane Robinson Arai. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ix. 233 pp., photographs, tables, appendixes, bibliography, endnotes, index.
Reciprocity and Realpolitik: Image, Career, and Factional Genealogies in Provincial Bolivia
Authors: Albro Robert
Published: November 2004

In this article, I analyze the persuasiveness of ritual libations in provincial Bolivia as populist spectacles. During an era of extensive national reform, these libations are prototypical definitional performances within a changing regional political arena. I argue for an approach to the contextualization of factional politics that resituates both performance based theories of rhetoric and ethnographic treatments of life histories in a more comprehensively synthetic public interpretive frame. I treat libations as part of a local political process attuned to the perceived truthfulness of personal indexical references in performative frames. The plausibility of sponsors' self‐images turns on the potentially conflictual shadings of their public careers, shades often unintentionally generated by such spectacles, [political ritual, popular identity, life histories, indexicals, Bolivia]
Is the "World Game" an "Ethnic Game" or an "Aussie Game"? Narrating the Nation in Australian Soccer
Authors: Danforth Loring M.
Published: November 2004

Through an analysis of recent developments in Australian soccer, I extend Homi Bhabha's work on the nation as a problem of narration in two principal ways. I demonstrate that sport, like literature, is a fertile site for narrating the nation. I also illustrate the value of moving beyond the exclusive study of national narratives to the study of ethnic and transnational narratives as well in order to understand more fully the role of narrative in the construction of identities in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, I argue that the ambivalence and the power of the nation as narrative is what enables people involved in Australian soccer to use different narratives of the Australian nation—narratives of ethnic nationalism, multiculturalism, and cultural hybridity—to serve their own political and economic interests, [nationalism, multiculturalism, ethnicity, Australia, soccer]
The Fate of "Culture": Geertz and Beyond; Culture: The Anthropologist's Account
Authors: Stade Ronald
Published: November 2004

The Fate of "Culture": Geertz and Beyond. Sherry B. Ortner. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. vii +169 pp., index.

Culture: The Anthropologist's Account. Adam Kuper. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1999. x+ 299 pp., notes, index.
Race and Ethnicity in East Africa
Authors: Abbink J.
Published: November 2004

Race and Ethnicity in East Africa. Peter G. Forster. Michael Hitchcock, and Francis Lyimo. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 2000. vi. 181 pp., notes, references, glossary, index.
The Manasir of Northern Sudan: Land and People, a River in Society and Resource Scarcity
Authors: Jedrej M. C.
Published: November 2004

Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. John Burdick. New York: Routledge, 1998. vii. 246 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Sacrifice as terror; the Rwandan genocide of 1994
Authors: Besteman Catherine
Published: November 2004

Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Christopher C. Taylor. Oxford: Berg, 1999. vii +197 pp., bibliography, index,