The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations (the idea of multiple...

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Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept

The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. They discuss a wide range of goods - from oriental carpets to human relics - to reveal both that the underlying logic of everyday economic life is not so far removed from that which explains the circulation of exotica, and that the distinction between contemporary economics and simpler, more distant ones is less obvious than has been thought. As the editor argues in his introduction, beneath the seeming infinitude of human wants, and the apparent multiplicity of material forms, there in fact lie complex, but specific, social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade, and desire. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.

The Social Life of Things

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idiosyncratically, speak (Wolf 1980).

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Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is bartered for illusory or transitory power, with the way in which production in capitalist economies causes workers to become alienated from the commodities they produce. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends Taussig's ideas about the devil-pact metaphor.

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Combining shrewd applications of current cultural theory with compelling autobiography and elegant prose, Jose E. Limon works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism. A native of South Texas, he renders a historical and ethnographic account of its rich Mexican-American folk culture. This folk culture, he shows whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting and accommodating the dominant culture of Texas. Critiquing the work of his precursors John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes Limon deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil. Limon's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif, signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity. "

Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas

American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture

The Meanings of Macho: Being. Man in Mexico City. Matthew C. Gutmann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 330 pp.

The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City

MARXIST SOCIAL THEORY is enjoying an unparalleled influence in the contemporary intellectual life of the West, and its presence in the United States is no exception (Aronowitz 1981:ix). Well developed Marxist perspectives are increasingly evident in the social sciences, historiography, and literary criticism; so it is, perhaps, something of a surprise to discover the relative absence of a parallel discussion in folkloristics. The reasons for this absence and the possibilities for such a Marxist discourse particularly among English-speaking folklorists remain largely unexplored, although Fox has taken an initial step (1980). The present remarks are intended as another but more substantial initiative toward a continuing discussion. A full analysis of Marxist thought and folklore would require a discussion of several key topics: the status of folklore in the writings of Marx and Engels, the development of a Soviet folkloristics, the fate of Marxism in Western folkloristics, and conversely, the place of folklore in the development of Marxism outside the Soviet bloc and among Soviet dissidents. Previous discussions of these subjects have varied in quality and have lent an almost exclusive emphasis to Soviet practice or its rejection in the West (Dorson 1972; Fox 1980; Oinas 1973; Oinas and Soudakoff 1975; Sokolov 1950; Williams 1975; Zemljanova 1963). In a larger study in progress I discuss all of these areas and elaborate my theoretical views on the subject. In this instance, however, I wish to explore the most ignored of these topics-the place of folklore in the development of non-Soviet Marxism, specifically among selected and representative nonfolklorists whom I will generally refer to as Western Marxists. While folklorists have had little to say about Marxism and folklore, this Western Marxist tradition has demonstrated a high degree of interest in this relationship. Their commentary merits discussion both as an important chapter in a developing history of folkloristics (Ben-Amos 1973) and as a necessary background for future theorizing in this area. My chief contention is that the treatment of folklore by Western Marxists has a limited character. They intuitively view folklore as collective behaviors whose fundamental character is in some way inherently opposed to the dominant social order of state capitalism, an unclear formulation at best. Further,

José E. Limón

Papers

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas

American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture

The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City

Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Reintroduction