Showing papers in "American Ethnologist in 2001"
TL;DR: Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality by Aihwa Ong as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in the field of transnationality. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.
Abstract: Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.
1,517 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline, and explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood.
Abstract: In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. In focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self-improvement. [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam]
244 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the variable relationships assigned to rule-governed behavior within different conceptions of the self under particular regimes of truth, power, and authority, and link their analysis of ritual to issues of embodiment, emotions, and individual autonomy.
Abstract: In the anthropology of ritual, one productive area of debate has focused on how the formal and conventional character of ritualized behavior is linked to, or distinct from, informal, routine, and pragmatic activity. In this article, I engage and extend this debate by analyzing various understandings of the Muslim act of prayer (salat) among a women's piety movement in contemporary Cairo, Egypt. Rather than assume a priori that conventional gestures and behaviors necessarily accomplish the same goals, I inquire into the variable relationships assigned to rule-governed behavior within different conceptions of the self under particular regimes of truth, power, and authority. In the second half of the article, I link my analysis of ritual to issues of embodiment, emotions, and individual autonomy, examining parallel conceptions of salat that coexist in some tension in contemporary Egypt, [ritual, embodiment, emotions, discipline, subject formation, Islam]
191 citations
TL;DR: This article analyzed how the Maasai of Kenya are presented in three different tourist performances (postcolonial, postindependence, and postmodern) and found that each site tells a different story, an alternate version of history, with its own perspective on the role of ethnicity and heritage within the nation state and in the world community.
Abstract: In this article, I analyze how the Maasai of Kenya are presented in three different tourist performances—postcolonial, postindependence, and postmodern. Each site tells a different story, an alternate version of history, with its own perspective on the role of ethnicity and heritage within the nation-state and in the world community. Using a method of controlled comparison, I expand the theoretical dialogue in tourism debates by departing from the monolithic discourse that has characterized so much of tourism scholarship, [ethnic tourism, Maasai, globalization, performance, authenticity, ethnography, media images]
176 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the child sponsorship program of World Vision Zimbabwe-offering perspectives from nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees, sponsors, sponsored children, and rural communities being assisted.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the child sponsorship program of World Vision Zimbabwe-offering perspectives from nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees, sponsors, sponsored children, and rural communities being assisted. I demonstrate how transnational processes of giving and membership in a global Christian family contrast with Zimbabwean interpretations of humanitarian assistance and efforts to initiate a Zimbabwean child sponsorship program amidst growing local inequalities. In effect, new perceptions of economic disparity are produced by the very humanitarian efforts that strive to overcome them. I explore the intimate and personal relationships encouraged by sponsorship and the political economies within which they are situated, which include jealousies, desires, and altered senses of belonging. [Africa, NGOs, humanitarianism, transnationalism, development, Christian evangelism, Zimbabwe] This is a study of the paradoxical effects of Christian humanitarian programs of child sponsorship. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in child sponsorship seek to transcend economic disparity via personal relationships between individuals in "developed" nations and the children they sponsor in "less-developed" nations. These organizations speak to the potential of eradicating poverty, improving lives spiritually and economically, and uniting sponsors and sponsored children in an international community. The paradox lies in that, as much as these efforts inspire a liberatory potential, they also accentuate localized experiences of poverty and transform relationships of belonging for sponsors, the children they sponsor, and employees of the NGOs. The results of such efforts are indeed ambiguous. The liberatory potential to link people and transcend inequality on a global scale occurs in local political economies that reinforce the very disparities that sponsorship aims to overcome. This is not to say that humanitarian aid is a hopeless task, but that it is a multidimensional process that must be understood in such a spirit. In this article, I investigate the dual consequences of child sponsorship through an analysis of one religious NGO, World Vision in Zimbabwe. I frame my analysis with the narrative experiences of two men in their twenties-a Zimbabwean who was formerly a child sponsored by World Vision and a Canadian sponsor who visited the child he sponsored in rural Zimbabwe. The cases educe how evangelical narratives of child sponsorship simultaneously transcend difference and exacerbate it-producing unintended consequences for both sponsors and their children. Culled from a larger project focusing on Christian NGOs and the relationships between religious ideas and economic development in Zimbabwe, my focus on World Vision arises from research I conducted in World Vision's offices (in California 1994-95, in Washington, D.C.
110 citations
TL;DR: McLachlan et al. as mentioned in this paper described the Inside Japan's JET Program and discussed the importance of diversity in the JET program and its role in the success of the program.
Abstract: Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program. David L. McConnell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ix. 328 pp., tables, notes, bibliography, index.
102 citations
TL;DR: The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation Greg Grandin Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2000 vxiii + 236 pp, appendixes, notes, references, index as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Blood of Guatemala—A History of Race and Nation Greg Grandin Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2000 vxiii + 236 pp, appendixes, notes, references, index
99 citations
TL;DR: Popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions, are continually being refashioned and re-appropriated for devotional, commercial, and political purposes in New Orleans.
Abstract: Popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions, are continually being refashioned and re-appropriated for devotional, commercial, and political purposes in New Orleans. Belying nostalgic representations of the jazz funeral as a “dying tradition,” neighborhood-based parades produced by working-class African Americans continue to provide a space for the articulation of local subjectivities, particularly for those most affected by the violence of contemporary urban life, [blackness, memory, New Orleans, urban space, performance, violence, heritage]
95 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined the informal privatization of space and power occurring within China's "floating population" under late socialism, focusing on a prominent unofficial migrant community in Beijing, and analyzed the ways migrant leaders build up their power through the control of housing and market spaces and by mobilizing traditional social networks.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the informal privatization of space and power occurring within China's "floating population" under late socialism. Focusing on a prominent unofficial migrant community in Beijing, I analyze the ways migrant leaders build up their power through the control of housing and market spaces and by mobilizing traditional social networks. By revealing the complexity and uncertainties within the culturally specific reconfiguration of power and social relations in post-Mao China, I challenge the metanarrative of postsocialist transformations as a teleological move toward liberal capitalism and democracy, and I articulate the dialectical relationship between space and power, [space, power, migration, social network, state-society dynamic, socialism and postsocialism, China]
95 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a seemingly fantastic series of events in Nigeria in a context that renders them meaningful and acknowledges their intimate connection to everyday issues of wealth, power, and inequality is discussed, focusing on popular stories of the occult circulating in the wake of a widely publicized case of ritual killing.
Abstract: In this article, I situate a seemingly fantastic series of events in Nigeria in a context that renders them meaningful and acknowledges their intimate connection to everyday issues of wealth, power, and inequality. Focusing on popular stories of the occult circulating in the wake of a widely publicized case of ritual killing, I argue that these stories depict popular discontent over inequality, but also Nigerians' ambivalence about and critical awareness of their own role in maintaining patron-clientism. [Nigeria, patronage, inequality, witchcraft]
74 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how rural Mozambicans in the Mueda plateau region experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO, the anti-colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state.
Abstract: In this article I examine how rural Mozambicans in the Mueda plateau region experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO, the anti-colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state. In interpreting and engaging with the dramatic transformations brought on by FRELIMO socialism, Muedans often drew on the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMO attempts to banish sorcery-related beliefs and practices. While Muedans sometimes resisted the modernization agenda and sometimes embraced it, they could not make systematic instrumental use of sorcery discourse to pursue strategic ends. Rather, sorcery served them more broadly as a social diagnostics of power relations —one that preserved ways of understanding power that are saturated with ambivalence, [power, postcolonial Africa, sorcery, surveillance, guerrilla war, villagization, modernization]
TL;DR: Taylor as discussed by the authors described the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 as a "sacrifice as terror" and described it as an "act of war against the human race." (http://www.bergs.org.uk/books/sacrifice-as-terror).
Abstract: Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Christopher C. Taylor. Oxford: Berg, 1999. vii +197 pp., bibliography, index,
TL;DR: The authors 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 to serve their own political and economic interests.
Abstract: 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]
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ix. 339 pp., notes, refrumors erences, index,
Abstract: Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Jay Ruby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ix. 339 pp., notes, refrumors erences, index,
TL;DR: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean as discussed by the authors, by Carla Freeman et al., 2000.
Abstract: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean. Carla Freeman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ix + 334 pp., tables, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index.
TL;DR: In the 1990s, the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli triggered a furor over the millions of tax dollars the Moscow city government paid him for his monumental art installations around the Russian capital as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the 1990s, the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli triggered a furor over the millions of tax dollars the Moscow city government paid him for his monumental art installations around the Russian capital. Critics have assailed such gross expenditure in a period of economic privation, questioned the propriety of Tsereteli's ties to power, and ridiculed his often cartoon-like aesthetics. In the embattled new Russian state, this infantilization of public space through government-sponsored art reprises a familiar discourse of timeless innocence in the service of state power. [Russia, Moscow, monuments, state power, time, art]
TL;DR: The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society as discussed by the authors, ed. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Abstract: The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari. eds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 323 pp., index.
TL;DR: The authors explored the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona, focusing on the placename compiled by Britton Goode (1911-81), a Western Apache linguist and historian.
Abstract: In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911–81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture]
TL;DR: In this paper, the meaning of agency for persons seeking legal redress from domestic abuse in Trinidad and reassess the power and limitations of domestic violence law as a symbol and instrument for social change.
Abstract: In this article, I demonstrate some of the complexities of the "pragmatics of inclusion" that ensue when subordinated people first struggle to gain access to hegemonic institutions and then challenge those institutions to maintain their inclusion. In presenting these findings, I reconsider the meaning of agency for persons seeking legal redress from domestic abuse in Trinidad and reassess the power and limitations of domestic violence law as a symbol and instrument for social change, [domestic violence law, agency, legal processes, kinship and gender ideologies, Caribbean]
TL;DR: The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City as discussed by the authors, by Roger Sanjek. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 465 pp., figures, photographs, notes, references, index.
Abstract: The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New YorkCity. Roger Sanjek. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. ix. 465 pp., figures, photographs, notes, references, index.
TL;DR: Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life.
Abstract: In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848–59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space]
TL;DR: The authors examines the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship.
Abstract: The A. examines the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship. He argues that globalization takes form in the Cayman Islands through the channels carved out for it by local state interests and regulation that have defined citizenship as a terrain for competing entitlements between expatriate workers and enfranchised permanent residents. Caymanians struggling to retain local political control over their labor market only further its incorporation into the global economy while expatriates can find their exit from Cayman stymied by the localization of labor markets elsewhere.
TL;DR: The Mourning for Diana: A Book as discussed by the authors, ed. Tony Walters. Oxford: Berg, 1999. vii. 286 pp., illustrations, photographs, index, and text.
Abstract: The Mourning for Diana. Tony Walters. ed. Oxford: Berg, 1999. vii. 286 pp., illustrations, photographs, index.
TL;DR: In the northern Japanese memorial practice of "bride-doll marriage/", which emerged during World War II, the soul of a dead child is married to a spirit spouse embodied in a consecrated figurine as discussed by the authors, stimulating limited exchange relationships between the living and dead by building on old and new modes of gifting and circulation, including the prestation of Bodhisattva statues, affinity, transmigration, and the abstraction of social relations made possible by modern commodity forms.
Abstract: In the northern Japanese memorial practice of “bride-doll marriage/” which emerged during World War II, the soul of a dead child is married to a spirit spouse embodied in a consecrated figurine. These marriages stimulate limited exchange relationships between the living and dead by building on old and new modes of gifting and circulation, including the prestation of Bodhisattva statues, affinity, transmigration, and the abstraction of social relations made possible by modern commodity forms. Motivated by a strong sense of unfulfilled obligation toward the deceased, these restricted acts of exchange culminate in the cessation of exchange transactions between the living and specific dead persons. In this respect, spirit marriage is profoundly unlike conventional marriage among the living, which leads to ramifying exchange relations between a growing number of persons over time. [Japan, memorialization, mortuary ritual, commodities, Buddhism]
TL;DR: Hanks as mentioned in this paper presents a collection of essays on language, usage, and context in the context of language, Utterance, and Context, with a focus on language usage.
Abstract: Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context. William F. Hanks. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 325 pp., tables, figures, index.
TL;DR: In this paper, the appropriation of the notion of codependence in Japan, as alcoholism increasingly becomes a subject of social concern, is explored, where women who define themselves as codependent must forge a distinction (blurred by dominant cultural ideology) between socially valued interdependence and "unhealthy" or systematically exploitative forms of asymmetrical ties.
Abstract: In this article, I explore the appropriation of the notion of "codependence" in Japan, as alcoholism increasingly becomes a subject of social concern. Codependence is pathologized in the 1980's American popular psychology, which regards accommodation to social relationships as a compromise of the self Yet, in Japan, the notion resonates with postwar national ideologies of the normal—that is, of Japanese society as held together through family-like intimacy and highly cultivated sensitivities to social demands. Japanese women who define themselves as codependent must forge a distinction (blurred by dominant cultural ideology) between socially valued interdependence and "unhealthy" or systematically exploitative forms of asymmetrical ties. Forging this distinction allows women to reject exploitative demands of society while continuing to function within familial and neighborhood communities. To the extent that women can forge distinctions between "dependence" and "codependence," they may be better able to resist state and social demands that come at their expense, [gender, national identity, hegemonic cultural processes, transnationalism, selfhood, addiction, Japan]
TL;DR: In this paper, the double entendre of "Indian giver" and the assumptions that structure the arguments that make up the debate are discussed, and the authors track how such assumptions of identity involve a detour through gendered, ethnic, and transnational difference.
Abstract: I address the emotional debate over David Stoll's claims that parts of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Turn's testimonial are untrue. Rather than arguing for or against either "side", I negotiate the double entendre of "Indian giver" and the assumptions that structure the arguments that make up the debate. I track how such assumptions of identity involve a detour through gendered, ethnic, and transnational difference. Transactions such as gifting, joking, and stereotyping are ecstatic and pleasurable, and vacillate with threatening to suggest that the vacillation itself, the exchange, is essential to identification and that the empiricist promise of being "nonduped" is an error. [identity, violence, globalization, consciousness, Mayan organizing, gender, U.S. anthropology]
TL;DR: This paper introduced the notion of securityscape, connecting the debate on simulations in nuclear science to the emergent literature on global structures, which has tended to ignore inter-state military relations.
Abstract: Following the nuclear test ban treaty, weapons scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories are developing virtual technologies to simulate nuclear testing. Their interpretations of these technologies are incommensurable with the interpretations of anti nuclear activists and conservatives in part because knowledge based on simulations is hyperconstructible. Introducing the notion of "securityscape," I connect the debate on simulations in nuclear science to the emergent literature on global structures, which has tended to ignore inter-state military relations, [anthropology of science, globalization, nuclear weapons, physics, war, U.S. culture, and activism]
TL;DR: Weil et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss ethnicity and migration in global perspective, focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on women's empowerment. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press.
Abstract: Roots and Routes: Ethnicity and Migration in Global Perspective. Shalva Weil. ed. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1999. 248 pp.
TL;DR: Gilman and Shain this paper discuss the role of jewries at the frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict Sander L Gilman and Milton Shain eds Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000
Abstract: Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict Sander L Gilman and Milton Shain eds Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999401 pp, tables, index