Showing papers in "American Ethnologist in 1995"

blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state

Abstract: In this article I attempt to do an ethnography of the state by examining the discourses of corruption in contemporary India. I focus on the practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy in a small north Indian town as well as on representations of the state in the mass media. Research on translocal institutions such as “the state” enables us to reflect on the limitations of participant-observation as a technique of fieldwork. The analysis leads me to question Eurocentric distinctions between state and civil society and offers a critique of the conceptualization of “the state” as a monolithic and unitary entity. [the state, public culture, fieldwork, discourse, corruption, India]

the substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi

Abstract: Malays on the island of Langkawi become complete persons, that is, kin, through living and consuming together in houses. Identity and substance are mutable and fluid. These perceptions suggest a processual view of kinship and personhood. They challenge anthropological definitions of kinship, which focus on procreation and which assume a universal division between the “biological” and the “social.” [Malay, kinship, personhood, feeding, social, biological]

culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia

Abstract: 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]

making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions

Abstract: The biological definition of family at the root of functionalist kinship theory has been rightly criticized by contemporary feminist and symbolic anthropologists, but in retreating into an antinatural position such critiques simply recapitulate the limitations of an opposition between nature and culture in which the former is prior and essential, the latter secondary and historical. From the perspective of Zumbagua, where people become parents by feeding and caring for children over extended periods of time, both schools of thought are not only inadequate to explain fully the material bases of local practice but are representative of a specific Western-bourgeois ideology that indigenous people actively oppose.

the cultural politics of blackness in Colombia

Abstract: Recent political mobilization by blacks in Colombia challenges notions about the “invisibility” of blackness there and the structural difficulties of political mobilization. It also raises issues about the analysis of cultural politics and the deconstruction of cultural “inventions” without thereby invalidating them as a locus of ethnic solidarity. [cultural invention, identity, black culture, politics, Colombia]

“the Vezo are not a kind of people”: identity, difference, and “ethnicity” among a fishing people of western Madagascar

Abstract: This paper presents a model of identity and difference alternative to ethnicity. It describes how the Vezo of western Madagascar construe their identity by transcending descent or descent-based features of the person. To be a Vezo is to have learnt Vezo-ness, and to perform it: identity is an activity rather than a state of being. Difference is construed by an analogous process of identification: others are different because they have acquired and perform another identity. Both identity and difference are not inherent in people, but are performative.

“thus are our bodies, thus was our custom”: mortuary cannibalism in an Amazonian society

Abstract: Etude de la logique culturelle du cannibalisme mortuaire pratique, jusque dans les annees 1960, par les Wari (Pakaa Nova) du Bresil occidental. Les pratiques wari ont ete inadequatement expliquees par les interpretations materialistes, psychogeniques et symboliques marquant les recentes theories sur le cannibalisme. L'A. insiste sur les comprehensions indigenes de la relation du cannibalisme et des experiences de deuil. Les concepts de la signification sociale du corps humain ont rendu sa destruction importante dans l'apaisement du chagrin et l'attenuation des memoires du mort. Dans un processus social de deuil en rapport avec la transformation de l'image du mort par les endeuilles, le cannibalisme est apparu comme un element cle qui affirmait les idees de la regeneration humaine-animale et la reciprocite exprimee dans le mythe, la cosmologie et l'eschatologie wari

policing boundaries: race, class, and gender in Cartagena, Colombia

Abstract: 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]

the spoken house: text, act, and object in eastern Indonesia

Abstract: Sumbanese descriptions of the “traditional house” as a microcosm and emblem of local identity are neither unproblematic expressions of a cultural totality nor simply objectifications imposed by ethnography or modernity. One way the house is able to serve as a discursive object reflects, in part, specifically Sumbanese models of action and beliefs about language as refracted in changing historical circumstances. In ritual, speakers seek to engage and elicit responses from powerful others, whereas current religious and political developments reframe ritual words as means of describing a cultural world. Both sets of practices draw on the authority of “entextualized” language but interpret it in different ways. Emerging representations of cultural meaning are shaped by long-standing speech genres and by recent social and cultural transformations, mediated by shifting language ideologies. [culture theory, representation, discourse, ritual speech, language ideology, house, Indonesia]

erotic anthropology: “ritualized homosexuality” in Melanesia and beyond

Abstract: Anthropologists studying homosexualities frequently make a distinction between sexual activities or practices on the one hand and sexual identities on the other. This chapter reviews anthropological uses of the construct of "ritualized homosexuality" in Melanesia and examines related theoretical problems in the cross-cultural study of sexualities, homosexualities, and erotics. It argues that identifying as "ritualized homosexuality" the semen practices through which boys are made into men in some Melanesian societies engages and relies on Western ideas about sexuality that obscure the indigenous meanings of these practices. The chapter also argues that age and gender hierarchies and a substance-based model for the constitution of social identities together comprise a more useful and accurate framework for understanding boys' initiatory practices in Melanesia. It demonstrates the need for a more self-critical and self-aware stance as well as a more refined theoretical apparatus for the larger project of theorizing sexualities cross-culturally.

The Hexis of Interpretation: Islam and the Body in the Egyptian Popular School

Abstract: This article examines how travelers, colonial officials, and educators have treated prayer and other body rituals in Egyptian popular schools. Once the object of colonial critiques of indigenous pedagogy, body ritual has now become the focus of a functionalist discourse that reads bodily postures and movements as natural manifestations of social, ideological, and cosmological structures. Starting from Bourdieu’s notion of hexis, the literal embodiment of ideology, the article examines how Egyptians—and anthropologists—extract meaning from ritual behavior.

dancing with corpses reconsidered: an interpretation of famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar)

Abstract: In September of 1990 I was talking with a woman named Irina about something an ancestor of hers had done some 60 years earlier. Like all the andriana or nobles of Betafo (a community to the north of the town of Arivonimamo, in Imerina, Madagascar) she was descended from a certain Andrianambololona, whose body, together with those of his wife and daughter and of three of his retainers, was buried in a large white tomb in the center of the village of Betafo, a five-minute walk across the rice fields from her house. This particular ancestor, she was telling me, has long had the custom of appearing to his descendants in dreams to announce when the occupants of the tomb felt cold and needed to have a famadihana performed: that is, to be taken out and wrapped in new silk shrouds. When this happened in 1931, his descendants quickly gathered and organized the ritual. But, in their hurry perhaps, they forgot to exhume the bodies of the three retainers buried at the foot of the tomb somewhat apart from the rest. "The afternoon after they'd finished," she said, "the town suddenly caught fire and burned to the ground. And the next morning he came once more to the person"-the individual who had originally had the dream-"and said, 'If you don't wrap us all, next time I'll kill you outright .. .' So they got the tombs ready again and rewrapped

the birth of the reservation: making the modern individual among the Lakota

Abstract: Indian wars, intertribal war parties, buffalo hunts, or sun dances. The United States government had embarked on a policy of civilizingthe Lakota and other western Indian peoples, and schools and even family gardens appeared on the reservation. Although the Lakota had formerly been recognized by the United States in treaties as a "nation," the government no longer made treaties with Indians, and the internal sovereignty of native polities had been den ied by extending federal jurisdiction over crimes in Indian country. Political sovereignty now resided with the local agent of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), whose material sources of power included the paramilitary Indian police force that he paid and commanded, and the rations he dispensed on which the Lakota had come to depend for subsistence with the destruction of the prereservation mode of production. But just how completely had the Lakota been politically subdued by 1885? In that year, the agents on the Great Sioux Reservation lined up their charges to take the annual census in order to establish the size of the populations for the purpose of issu ing rations. At the Rosebud Agency, the OIA office established on the Great Sioux Reservation to administer the Sicangu (or Brule) Lakota, the 1885 census takers recorded some remarkable English translations of Lakota names. Peppered throughout the census, in between names such as "Black Elk," "Walking Bull," and "Dull Knife," were names such as "Bad Cunt," "Dirty Prick," and "Shit Head" (Rosebud Agency 1885). What happened is not difficult to unravel: Lakota people were filing past the census enumerator, and then getting back in line-or lending their babies to people in line-to be enumerated a second time using fictitious and rather imaginative names. The intention was to This article traces the means by the which the Lakota people of Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota were internally pacified, that is, penetrated by the state apparatus in the form of the United States of Office of Indian Affairs during the period from 1880 to the mid-1930s. The focus is on how the state constructed new kinds of bureaucratically knowable and recordable individuals, with new kinds of self-interests that could be predicted and manipulated by the officials. These new Lakota individuals were made by means of four administrative processes that I call, after Foucault, modes of subjection: property ownership, determination of "competence," registration of Indian "blood" quanta, and recording of genealogy. [Native Americans, colonialism, internal pacification, Lakota, political economy, subjection]

Discourse, politics, and the development process: reflections on Escobar's 'anthropology and the development encounter'

Abstract: L'analyse de l'article d'A. Escobar « Anthropology and the development encounter : the making and marketing of development anthropology » met en avant quatre faiblesses : (1) la presentation concernant le role des anthropologues travaillant dans ou avec les agences de developpement est incomplete et impropre, (2) Escobar ne considere pas adequatement le contexte dans lequel le discours du developpement s'etablit ou le role que l'anthropologie joue dans la construction de ce discours, (3) il ne considere pas systematiquement la relation entre le discours et les relations de pouvoir en general et il limite sa discussion sur le developpement a la production du discours du developpement des agences de donneurs, (4) il ne considere pas les relations specifiques et les questions de pouvoir s'y impliquant et liant les anthropologues a ceux qu'ils etudient

metaphor and the metalanguage: “groups” in northeast Arnhem Land

Abstract: Ethnographic description often involves the substitution in an anthropological metalanguage of expressions embedding one set of metaphors for indigenous expressions that incorporate quite different tropes. In this article I examine metaphors implicit in the language of “clan” and related expressions, especially the corporate “body” or “person,” “boundaries,” “segments,” and the “levels” of taxonomic hierarchy. I then show why the use of such expressions has led to anomalies in descriptions of the construction of Yolngu “Murngin” patrifilial groups. These are constituted through tropes related to ancestors, the body and plants, and connections through ancestral journeys and creative acts. [metaphor, translation, lineage theory, Murngin, Yolngu, Australian Aborigines]

the decolonization of consciousness: local skeptics and the “will to be modern” in a West African village

Abstract: During a recent initiation ceremony, the men of Bassarel rewrote customary law. I discuss both the attitudes of the protagonists in the ceremony who likened it to a “Party Congress” and attitudes toward spirits as revealed in ritualized orations. I conclude that a tendency to objectify and manipulate custom, coupled with a pervasive skepticism about spiritual efficacy, reveals a typical West African ethos rather than reflects the ruptures of colonization and revolution. [postcolonial ethnography, belief, religious change, West Africa]

contested ritual, contested femininities: (re)forming self and society in a Nepali women's festival

Abstract: The Tij festival of contemporary Nepal represents a case in which a ritual has become a crucial space for the cultivation of feminine subjectivities. For Tij, Hindu women create novel songs that are performed before the entire community. Sometime in the past this portion of a larger ritual complex, previously analyzed as representing and reproducing an ideal Hindu femininity, became a space for protests and complaints about the patriarchal Brahmanical ideologies and practices that dominate women's lives. In the wake of the democracy movement, the festival has been turned to a new arena, to the world of governmental politics, and the songs have become more explicitly revolutionary in content. Here, we argue that these critical voices, developed through the collective processes of song composition and their enactment in the special atmosphere of the festival, have provided a basis for women's critical self-consciousness and for their social action in the new political climate. [gender, ritual-in-practice, cultural production and social movements, women's political culture, Nepal, South Asia]

women's rights are human rights: the merging of feminine and feminist interests among El Salvador's mothers of the disappeared (CO‐MADRES)

Abstract: Using a detailed ethnographic analysis of El Salvador's mother's of the disappeared (CO-MADRES), I suggest that to look at multiple facets of women's identities and the ways in which they both accommodate and resist dominant ideologies of gender hierarchy and national security best explains their political activity. I propose this approach as an alternative to dichotomies such as feminine versus feminist movements. Personal narratives and testimonies document how the CO-MADRES have incorporated issues of state repression, domestic inequality, and women's sexuality into a new discourse on human rights.

the sexual division of labor in Kofyar agriculture

Abstract: Previous models of the sexual division of labor in agriculture have suggested that men and women universally have distinctive work routines and differential access to agricultural labor. This article argues that these generalizations will not always hold true and illustrates this point with the particular example of intensive agriculture dependent on manual labor. An analysis of detailed labor data from the Nigerian Kofyar support this contention. [sexual division of labor, agriculture, agricultural intensification, control and access to labor, Nigeria]

white settler assertions of native status

Abstract: The anthropology of postcolonialism has tended to neglect or homogenize the varied expressions of cultural and national identity of British settler descendants. Against the backdrop of research with white settler descendants who farm large Crown pastoral lease properties in the South Island high country of New Zealand, this article examines evidence they presented before the Waitangi Tribunal about their attachment to land as a politicized expression of belonging, of one set of Pakeha voices. It analyzes how high country runholders speak about and symbolically construct belonging and suggests that the high country landscape is a central metaphor in the conceptual systems of its inhabitants, providing them with a way of thinking about their cultural distinctiveness within the arena of contestations in the meanings of cultural identities defined by the Waitangi Tribunal. [postcolonial settler identity, New Zealand high country, land claims, sheep station life, anthropology of place]

conversion by affiliation: the history of the Karo Batak Protestant Church

Abstract: Theories of conversion have often stressed either psychological or sociological factors, but viewing conversion as the public declaration of a new identity and incorporating the element of time afford a way to synthesize these approaches. Although conversions to Christianity in the Karo Protestant Church, legacy of a Dutch Reformed mission, were often prompted by political or pragmatic considerations and reinforced an ethnic identity in contrast to a Muslim majority, religious life for many Karo has been transformed over the long run.

equilibrium and extraction: dual organization in the Andes

Abstract: The division of society and space into halves or “moieties” has been an important feature of Andean culture for centuries. Contemporary moieties are often regarded as the result of either an impervious pre-Columbian conceptual model that has resisted Spanish influence or of marriage preferences. In this article I challenge these views, arguing that the ubiquity of moiety organization today can best be understood as the result of an indigenous imperial model of domination, the extractive uses of which continued into the Spanish Colonial and Republican periods. Based on a case study from the southern Peruvian Andes, I demonstrate that the continued use of moieties in Andean communities must also be understood in terms of the role that dualism plays in ritual action and other conceptual and social domains. I also explore the relationship between equilibrium and extractive ideologies, and between historical models and contemporary social process.

smugglers or samaritans in Tucson, Arizona: producing and contesting legal truth

Abstract: In 1985–86, 11 religious activists whose congregations had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees were tried in Tucson, Arizona, on alien-smuggling charges. Although 8 of the 11 were convicted and although the verdicts were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the social and legal significance of the trial, and of the sanctuary movement itself, has continued to be negotiated by sanctuary activists. Examining the events that led to this trial, the trial itself, and the trial's aftermath sheds light on how legal truth is produced and contested both within and outside of courtrooms. [power, resistance, truth, sanctuary, prosecution, law]

from tlahtocayotl to gobernadoryotl: a critical examination of indigenous rule in 18th-century central Mexico

Abstract: My central argument in this article is that the pueblo de indios of 18th-century central Mexican highlands should be seen as the continuation of pre-Hispanic indigenous landed estates. The pueblos were highly stratified entities and were ruled by a small elite of families, usually referred to as caciques. The local level elite either traced descent from the pre-Hispanic nobility or had taken the place of that nobility by acquiring parts of early post-conquest grants in which pre-Hispanic demesnes were recognized. Consequently, Spanish institutions might have changed the form but not the basic substance of indigenous forms of lordship.

power, resistance, and the cult of Muslim saints in a northern Egyptian town

Abstract: Practice theory is employed to analyze the cult of Muslim saints. Unlike much of the previous work by anthropologists on this topic, the present study has an urban, rather than rural and tribal, ethnographic locus. A major finding is that privileged as well as nonprivileged individuals use the cult for ideological discourse and dramaturgy. This has seminal implications for understanding the relation of power to resistance. An unobtrusive form of power that does not inspire resistance appears to match Bourdieu's concept of “symbolic power.” In contrast with the Weberian and Marxist zero-sum views of power, symbolic power appears to be a positive-sum phenomenon. [power, resistance, discourse, practice theory, Muslim saint cult, urban Egypt]