Showing papers in "American Ethnologist in 1990"

the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women

Abstract: Resistance has become in recent years a popular focus for work in the human sciences. Despite the theoretical sophistication of many anthropological and historical studies of everyday resistance, there remains a tendency to romanticize it. I argue instead that resistance should be used as a diagnostic of power, and I show what the forms of Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin women's resistance can reveal about the historically changing relations of power in which they are enmeshed as they become increasingly incorporated into the Egyptian state and economy. [resistance, power, Bedouins, women, the state, Egypt]

Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood

Abstract: Narrative, self, and face-to-face interaction all intersect in everyday storytelling practices in which children and caregivers make claims to personal experiences. This article examines such practices as a site for the social construction of self in early childhood. Drawing upon excerpts of narrative talk from a variety of cultural traditions in the United States, we describe the self-relevant meanings and processes entailed in three particular narrative practices. [narrative, self, childhood socialization, language socialization, ethnopsychology]

State versus Islam: Malay families, women's bodies, and the body politic in Malaysia

Abstract: This article examines the social effects of the secular state and Islamic resurgence as they negotiate different models of Malay women, kinship, and identity. Widely viewed as a politically radical force, Islamic revivalism is here interpreted as a middle-class ideology mediating changes in gender and domestic relations linked to official policies. Neither simply “resisting” nor “passive,” upwardly mobile women have come to identify with revivalist ideals of motherhood, male authority, and the imagined body politic. [state/body politic, Islamic revivalism, gender and the family, social agency, class and social change, Malaysia/Islamic societies]

Goodly beasts, beastly goods: cattle and commodities in a South African context

Abstract: Among the 19th-century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of production and exchange, embodied an order of meanings and relations, and had the capacity to reproduce a total social world. They were, in sum, prime media for the creation and representation of value in a material economy of persons and a social economy of things. But they also had particular historical salience. As the Tswana were colonized, the encounter between periphery and center, local and global economies, was played out—materially and ideologically—in the contest between beasts and money, a contest which has given rise, also, to such token currencies as “cattle without legs.” The double character of cattle—as icons of a “traditional” order and as weapons in the struggle to assert control over modern life—has significant implications for our understanding of commodities in noncapitalist, non-European contexts, [cattle, commodities, money, colonialism, South Africa]

Visions and revisions: Toraja culture and the tourist gaze

Abstract: Ethnic tourism, a consummate form of “collection,” presupposes processes of ob-jectification that extend to “culture” itself. Such processes are not simply imposed by the demands of the international tourism industry; actors include indigenous peoples who are both “tourist objects” and reflective critics, whose cultural visions (and revisions) are shaped in part by a distinctive “tourist gaze” and in part by a dialogue with the state. These processes are explored in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where indigenous media (houses, effigies, and ceremonies) are being recomposed, using a range of new media, as obyek turis. [tourism, representation, public culture, art, ritual, Indonesia]

Certain knowledge, contestable authority: power and practice on the Islamic periphery

Abstract: The relationships among texts, readers, and moral community are explored in order to understand the dissonance and interplay of personal and textual authority in local Islamic practice (Sunni, Shaf'i branch) among Malagasy-speaking villagers of Mayotte (Comoro Islands, East Africa). A political economy of knowledge approach is linked to an analysis of recitation as a ritual activity in which illocution-ary force exceeds referential meaning. The discussion has relevance for the understanding of the relationship between religious knowledge, power, and action in Islamic societies as well as of the interface between the oral and the written more generally. [Islam, religious texts and ritual utterances, knowledge, power, Malagasy, Comoros]

Sweet colors, fragrant songs: sensory models of the Andes and the Amazon

Abstract: 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.

“like a veil to cover them”: women and the Pentecostal movement in La Paz

Abstract: This article explores the connections between class, gender, and evangelical Christian ideology in the formation of new social relationships, as well as in the masking of inequalities and the implicit affirmation of traditional relations of domination between men and women. It argues that women address gender- and class-based problems by using religious ideology to recast the meaning of past events. Through their ties to other believers, they also promote values and practices that challenge aspects of the dominant society, even though they do not question the hierarchical aspects of Pentecostal ideology.

the erasure of women's writing in sociocultural anthropology

Abstract: 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.

“Everywhere we go, We are in danger”: Ti Manno and the emergence of a Haitian transnational identity

Abstract: During the second week of May 1985, the news spread rapidly among Haitians in New York that Ti Manno, a popular Haitian musician, had died. The rumors were put to rest when Ti Manno, sobbing, telephoned a Haitian radio program to say he was alive but sick; he asked for people's prayers. A number of prominent Haitian personalities responded by forming a movement of support for Ti Manno called Operasyon Men Kontre (Operation Clasped Hands), which had as its immediate goal raising money to pay Ti Manno's hospital bills. Ti Manno had not requested the money and did not need it. From collection boxes placed at Haitian businesses and centers around New York City and from contributions sent by individuals in Haiti, $10,000 was collected over the course of a month. To raise even more money, a concert was held that brought together some of the best-known Haitian musicians in New York. But the day after the concert, word spread that Ti Manno had died, and this time the rumor was true. The story made banner headlines in the Haitian newspapers in New York, which also announced the arrangements for public viewing of the body and the plans for the funeral and burial. It was rumored that Ti Manno had requested on his deathbed that his body be prevented from falling into the hands of the Duvalier government. To respect his wishes, his body would be buried in New York until the overthrow of Duvalier. Ti Manno's remains would then be returned to Haiti for permanent inhumation. At the public viewing of Ti Manno's body, police barricades had to be set up to control the crowds, as more than 5000 people filed past his casket, many weeping openly. On the day of the funeral, mourners filled the church hours before the funeral service was to begin. More than 1000 people attended the ceremony, while several hundred more waited outside. The following week, the death of Ti Manno was the hottest topic of conversation among Haitians in New York. Haitian newspapers published Ti Manno's life story and the eulogy presented by his brother, a Catholic priest who had traveled from Haiti to officiate at his funeral. The newspapers printed messages of condolence sent by a broad spectrum of the Haitian population in the United States, ranging from leaders and prominent businessmen to ordinary citizens. The extensive press coverage in the weeks after Ti Manno's death ignored the newest round of rumors, the whispered stories that Ti Manno had died of AIDS. Through his music, Ti Manno, The lyrics of Ti Manno, a popular Haitian singer, and the short-lived Ti Manno movement are examined in order to elucidate the factors that shape the multiple and overlapping identities of Haitian immigrants. It is argued that, as black immigrants, Haitians tend to be "transnationals" who form identities that allow them to accommodate to and resist realities of race and class in both Haiti and the United States. [transnationalism, ethnic identity, race, immigration, Haiti, nationalism, class] III I III I I IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII II II~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Movement and space: Andamanese cartography

Abstract: The anthropological study of space usually presents the cultural construct of space as a prefabricated stagelike structure. The cultural construct of space of the Ongee hunters and gatherers of Little Andaman is not stagelike but is a “map” of movements created by the plotting of various experiential coordinates that demarcate activity-specific places. Ongees share space both with spirits who hunt and with animals who are hunted. Conjunctions in the paths of movement of humans, spirits, and animals set up the culture's dynamics of movement, dynamics expressed in patterns of individual movement, myths, body painting, language, and the maps of space that the Ongees drew for this ethnographer.

the hajj: sacred and secular

Abstract: A comparison of the pilgrimage to Mecca made by Turkish villagers with that made to their natal villages by Turkish immigrants in Europe argues for blurring the boundaries between the categories “sacred” and “secular” as well as those between pilgrim and migrant. It suggests that the hijra (emigration of Muhammed) and the hajj (his pilgrimage home) provide a symbolic model, unavailable for non-Muslims, that implicitly structures and makes comprehensible the ritualistic and obligatory character of the immigrants' journey home. [Islam, symbolism, pilgrimage, Turkish peasants and immigrants]

Customs and Christian conversion among Akha highlanders of Burma and Thailand

Abstract: This article considers why Akha highlanders of Burma and Thailand were reluctant to convert to Christianity in the past, why they have been converting in growing numbers in recent years, and, finally, why they convert at all. It argues that a key to answering these three questions is the nature of the traditional Akha cultural equivalent of the Western category “religion,” especially its equation with ethnic identity. Since Akha Christianity does not fit any of the various social science models of religions in contact situations such as coexistence or syncretism, an alternative model, namely, replacement, is proposed. [Christian missions, conversion, cultural change, ethnic identity, Southeast Asia]

from saints to shibboleths: image, structure, and identity in Maya religious syncretism

Abstract: Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimalten-ango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical—and thus ethnic—boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other local images of community, in particular ancestors and “earth lords,” shows syncretism to be an essential property of local identity, not simply a quaint or arbitrary survival of the Maya past. Contrasts with antecedent saint cults in 16th-century Spain demonstrate the “Mayan-ness” of this syncretism; comparison with saint cults in other Maya communities relates syncretism more closely to local contexts of community morality than to enduring “deep structures” of some primordial Maya culture or to a “false consciousness” born of persistent colonialist oppression. [Maya religion, religious syncretism, saint cults, Guatemala, ethnic identity]

the dream of spiritual initiation and the organization of self representations among Pakistani sufis

Abstract: A Pakistani man, after dreaming that two sufis come to him and feed him, may find his life transformed as a result of his dream The power of dreams to change a person's life has been observed by anthropologists and psychologists (for example, Hallowell 1966; Singer and Pope 1978; Wallace 1952, 1956), but the process of transformation is not well understood This article will show how a semiotic model of the self, which sees a person as an ever-changing array of self representations constituted through dialogue,1 can explain this transformative power of a dream in terms of the dream's content and its relationship to the dreamer's subsequent experiences Too much dream research has focused on content at the wrong level, at least for present purposes Freudian psychoanalysts have downplayed the significance of manifest dream content in their search for the disguised wishes and conflicts that constitute the "latent content" of a dream (Freud 1965[1900]:345-347) But, while a dream clearly weaves together elements from the dreamer's past, expressing his disguised impulses and conflicts, as Freud demonstrated, it must also be a projection into a culturally articulated future (see Basso 1987:99) if it is to be transformative This article will show that this projection can be identified in the manifest content of the dream, which simultaneously replicates a cultural "template" and expresses the dreamer's idiosyncratic concerns in a cultural idiom that may be socially communicated These concerns can be understood as a desire to establish a self-image that is congruent with the dreamer's current circumstances and that facilitates his resolution of persistent personal conflicts However, the significance of the content of a dream ultimately depends on subsequent events, on how the future actually unfolds A sufi initiation dream, for example, may have a powerful impact on the dreamer's system of self representations, so that as a result of the dream the dreamer comes to regard himself as the disciple of some sufi teacher But the social salience of a particular self representation will depend upon subsequent events and may shift over time as external conditions change If the dreamer does not succeed in resolving conflicts by adopting the new self representation, the relevance of both the self representation and the dream may 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]

Between shame and sanctification: patriarchy and its transformation in Sicilian Pentecostalism

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which Sicilian Pentecostals enact a gender system in response to a perceived crisis in the prevailing gender order, an order I interpret, following Kenelm Burridge, as a system of “redemption,” conferring a culturally specific form of “integrity.” Pentecostalism, then, is a gender-system-in-the-making, a new calculus of human worth, that combines new structures with aspects of the failing hegemonic system. The result is a more complex, ambiguous patriarchy, one that may be less viable than the hegemonic system, enabling believing women to transcend some of the gender constraints of the prevailing system.

Concepts of parenthood: the Warnock Report, the Gillick debate, and modern myths

Abstract: This article examines the notion of the family in the United Kingdom as a “contested domain” during a period of public reformulation of kinship ideas. In public discourse, threats to the family from two sources were perceived: new technologies of reproduction had led to the possibility of reproduction without sex; contraception prescription practices had evoked for some an image of disorderly sex without reproduction. Moving beyond simple contrasts such as commerce versus kinship, this essay examines the complex play of images in the public and media debate about English kinship. It shows that the conflicting positions examined inhabit a single ideological terrain, one in which the naturalness of the family is presupposed. Maternal nurture and bonding provide the key bio-moral metaphor in these positions. The article contributes to recent explorations of the “discourse among discourses” in advanced capitalist societies.

Motherhood and power: the production of a women's culture of politics in a Mexican community.

Abstract: This article examines women's conversations and speeches in political groups as demonstrating how they understand the fit between their role as mothers and their emerging role in the political arena in a Mexican community. In the late 1970s Buena Vistan women organized their own political groups. Images of the mother as redeemer channeled their demands for political authority in a time of political and economic crisis. This article argues that by drawing on traditional constructions of gender relationships, women's organizations produced an alternative definition of legitimate politics and established their own place in the public political arena. [Mexico, gender, politics, social movements, ideology]

who gets ahead? cognitive responses to heteroglossia in American political culture

Abstract: Theories of social practice too often ignore the mediating role of cognitive schemas. This is especially the case in studies of blue-collar workers, whose discourse, taken out of context, seems so inconsistent as to suggest the absence of organized beliefs. This article analyzes the discourse of some Rhode Island workingmen and proposes that they internalize conflicting social ideologies in one of three ways. These three forms of cognitive organization, obscured by superficially similar discourse, mediate behavior differently and respond differently under pressure to change. This model challenges traditional theories of belief. [ideology, cognitive schemas, discourse analysis, working-class consciousness, American political culture]

meaning, agency and colonial history: Navosavakadua and the Tuka movement in Fiji

Abstract: make their history? Does this make their terms of agency already a reflection of colonial culture? Reconsidering an aspect of Fijian history previously studied as "cargo cult," this study examines issues of meaning and agency, novelty and cultural continuity. In the late 1870s Christian missionaries had been in Fiji for almost 50 years. The islands had been ceded to Great Britain in 1874. Then, in the hinterlands of Viti Levu, Fiji's largest island, an oracle priest called Navosavakadua mobilized in opposition to enemies old and new. He foretold a world overturned, in which Fijian chiefs would serve the Fijian people and foreigners would be driven out. He foretold the return of ancestor gods and ancestors; he made miracles and granted immortality (tuka) to his followers. Revealing the return of two Fijian gods, the Twins, to the sacred Nakauvadra mountain range, he identified them as the true Jehovah and Jesus. Colonial authorities found his Tuka movement heathen and criminal; Navosavakadua and his followers were the subject of extensive colonial surveillance and were ultimately deported. Their present-day descendants, now returned to their ancestral lands, have little to say about Tuka but much to say about their ancestor. They assert that Navosavakadua served Jehovah and worshipped him before the missionaries came to Fiji. From the 1870s to the present, Navosavakadua has remained a potent legendary figure, renowned among his direct descendants in the north of Viti Levu island, his name known by Fijians throughout the Fiji group. He has remained potent in the concerns of the colonial and postcolonial state1 and in the Western scholarly imagination. Navosavakadua has been called a prophet, and Tuka has been read as a paradigmatic example of the "cargo cult" (Worsley 1968) or "millenarian movement" (Burridge 1969). Rather than proposing a new general theory of cults, however, I seek to dissolve the analytic construct How are we to understand the agency of "others" in colonial encounters? Analyses of indigenous history making and of colonial hegemony can be harmonized: in colonial societies multiple cultural articulations are formed, contested, and routinized. This essay reconsiders Navosavakadua, a 19th-century Fijian oracle priest, and his Tuka movement, once considered a paradigmatic "cargo cult." Navosavakadua's project contested a developing colonial orthodoxy; both were articulations of Fijian ritual-politics, colonial authority, and the Christian god. Colonizers try to routinize articulations that privilege them, but "others" also make history with their own powers to articulate. [history, colonialism, agency, ritual-politics,

the emergence of the waged life course on the United States‐Mexico border

Abstract: Histories of families repatriated from the United States to Mexico in the 1930s reveal conflicts between older and younger generations over residence, consumption, and work. These conflicts were caused by the emergence of a life course based on the principle that an individual is responsible to the market for selling labor, a life course which could no longer be reconciled with the traditional obligations of generational succession. This model of life courses may be useful in studying the differences between cyclical and permanent working classes. [U.S.-Mexico border, wage labor, working classes, life courses, material culture]

Politics and grammar: agency in Samoan political discourse

Abstract: 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.

Blood of the Leviathan: Western contact and warfare in Amazonia

Abstract: This article argues that reported wars among Native peoples of Amazonia are not representative of pre-Columbian warfare. The well-known cases that are the bases for our conceptions of Amazonian warfare, as well as dozens of less prominent instances of war, can be attributed largely to circumstances created by the European intrusion. The broader implication is that anthropological theory and teaching about war are distorted by an unexamined premise that reported cases of war among nonstate or tribal peoples are self-generated phenomena. [warfare, Amazonia, Western contact, anthropology and history, the Columbian encounter]

Images of denigration: structuring inequality between foragers and farmers in the Ituri forest, Zaire

Abstract: Research on forager/farmer interactions has focused largely on relations of material exchange, thereby excluding symbolic and social structural aspects of those interactions. Lese representations of Lese (farmer)/Efe (hunter-gatherer) cultural differences shape the symbolic incorporation of Efe trading partners into Lese village life. Since the Lese frequently characterize the Efe as female, gender appears to be a principal idiom through which the Lese represent those differences. Gender is a metaphor for relationships of inequality between village insiders and outsiders. The metaphor creates an analogic equivalence between Lese men's wives and the Efe, as village outsiders, and refers to their structural similarities in relation to the Lese villages. [forager/farmer interactions, Africa, Efe Pygmies, Lese, inequality, gender]

reciprocity, redistribution, and the transaction of value in the Mesoamerican fiesta

Abstract: The fiesta system has long been seen as a focus of collective life in native Mesoamerican communities and has been identified as an important device for the circulation of material goods among community members. However, ethnographic reports have tended to focus on only one kind of exchange in the fiesta: the distributions of wealth that sponsors make to participants. Drawing on recent ethnographic work in the Mixteca Alta, this article shows that the fiesta is actually a nexus of three different kinds of exchange, involving the reciprocal exchange of wealth by pairs of fiesta participants and the pooling of wealth at a center, in addition to the distributions made by sponsors to participants. The article goes on to argue that fiesta participants actively use these exchanges to create complex social meanings in each fiesta celebrated.

Nurture and force‐feeding: mortuary feasting and the construction of collective individuals in a New Ireland society

Abstract: This article concerns the performative efficacy of mortuary feasting in constructing matrilineages as transcendent collective individuals. Melanesian mortuary symbolism commonly assimilates death and decay to forms of consumption epitomized by eating. In Tanga, giving food dialectically relates the guests and hosts of mortuary feasts as “eaters” and “noneaters,” or as consumers and agents impervious to consumption. Exchanges of cooked pigs and shell disks objectify this relative evaluation. I analyze the sequence of Tangan mortuary feasts as a process whereby agents detach attributes of “partible” persons and ideally complement each other in the project of creating matrilineal continuity. [mortuary symbolism and ritual, feasting, exchange, matriliny, Melanesia]

the Rock Creek rodeo: excess and constraint in men's lives

Abstract: In a society whose members believe that it is based on choices made by individuals, choices that involve sacrifices of individuality, men who lead conventional lives are likely to ponder whether they have given up too much. This American dilemma is, I argue, confronted and temporarily resolved for certain of the men of Rock Creek, Montana, during the local Fourth of July rodeo. Through this event men are able to relive and transcend their pasts in such a way as to conclude that they, as responsible citizens, have indeed appropriately controlled but not significantly relinquished their autonomy as men. In conclusion I suggest that the oscillations in rodeo (and other rituals) between the liminal and the normal have, by virtue of their very structure, their movement in and out of society, a special salience and efficacy in the American context for the enactment of such existential issues concerning the relationship of the individual to society.

the woman who didn't become a shaman

Abstract: When a Taiwanese village woman began to display shamanistic behavior, her neighbors had to decide whether she was being called by a god to speak for him, possessed by a ghost, exploited by her husband, or crazy. Although she had many of the attributes of a successful tang-ki, or shaman, she was finally labeled crazy because of her marginal status in the community and in the male ideology. [China, Taiwan, gender, shamans, self]

Reading and the righting of writing ethnographies

Abstract: 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.