Showing papers in "Cultural Anthropology in 1999"

Compromising Power:Development, Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

Abstract: accomplishment of rule owes as much to the understandings and practices worked out in the contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy as it does to the imposition of development schemes and related forms of disciplinary power.3 My study is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of Indonesia's official program for the resettlement of isolated people. Resettlement programs are familiar enough as objects of anthropological study and critique, and there are many important accounts of the damage done to indigenous folk by inept bureaucrats and bullying regimes. My focus is rather different, for I seek less to expose the all-too-predictable havoc wreaked by state power in the periphery than to highlight the significance of that periphery, and the activities that go on there, in the constitution of the self-proclaimed center. Just as others have shown that colonialism was critical to the self-fashioning of the West (Cooper and Stoler 1997), "development" is here explored as a modern state's attempt at self-fashioning and rule, considered always as fragile and contingent accomplishments.4

At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns

Abstract: Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest cities in Asia, a center of world trade, a place of many comings and goings. It is an international hub, whose social and cultural landscape is heterogeneous, hybrid, and transnational. Included in Hong Kong's population of 6.4 million are over 130,000 Filipino domestic workers, representing the territory's largest non-Chinese minority. In the 1970s there were but a few hundred Filipinas who worked as "domestic helpers" for expatriate employers in the colonial city.1 Their popularity quickly grew among the burgeoning middle-class Chinese population, which found it increasingly difficult to attract local Chinese women to do paid household work. By the 1990s well over 10 percent of Hong Kong's population employed domestic workers of some sort. Women of numerous other nationalities are included among the foreign domestic workers (among them Thai, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Indian, and Malaysian), but by far the largest group is women from the Philippines. The majority of Filipinas are between the ages of 20 and 40, most are Roman Catholic, and approximately a quarter are married. Contrary to many locals' expectations, Filipina domestic workers do not come from the poorest or least educated sector of the Philippine population. The vast majority have attained more than a high school education, and some belong to middle-class families. They come to Hong Kong on two-year contracts, holding temporary work permits that are administered by the Philippine Overseas Employment Association and the Hong Kong labor and immigration departments. By far the largest group of employers today are local Chinese, many of whom have recently joined the ranks of Hong Kong's

Bioprospecting the Public Domain

Abstract: "I expect that my potatoes will make you rich," asserted one of the farmers whom I had interviewed about nomenclature and preferences for the native potatoes of the Tulumayo Valley in Peru. The comment was not unanticipated, but it still baffled me. The obvious contrasts between us made objection inappropriate. I was not going to use the potatoes I had collected in the valley to breed a new potato variety that might make me rich or famous, but it was possible that others might do so. Plant collectors had previously combed the area for genetic resources, and my collections for research on knowledge systems might someday end up in a breeding program. Scientific curiosity and an abiding fascination about the complexities of Andean cultural ecology had brought me to the Tulumayo, but I also hoped that my research would enhance my career. At the same time, I believed that Andean farmers could benefit from agricultural research, including my work on folk taxonomy and cultural ecology. This same farmer had planted his mahuay (short-cycle) fields in the variety renacimiento (renaissance), bred from native varieties. The farmer expected that renacimiento would provide income that native types would not yield. The Peruvian breeder of the variety had not become wealthy from its public release, but he had attained international recognition. Finally, the conjecture that the farmer's potatoes might increase my wealth implied a personal transfer of resources. But whose resources were these? My bafflement about how to respond to the farmer's assertion that his potatoes might enrich me resulted from the numerous layers that it touched. One was our shared knowledge that the potatoes in his field were useful to many people. They were part of an evolutionary heritage that has given the world one of its great staple foods, benefiting farmers and consumers around the world, as well as seed companies and scientists. The value of these resources is greater now because of the declining supply of native varieties and the increased demand to use this germ plasm to breed new potato varieties. Despite the value of the potato's genetic resources in Peru, farmers who maintain them remain among the poorest in the nation. The loss of native crop varieties before the tidal wave of modern agricultural technology has led to conservation in gene banks. Many conservationists are also concerned about preserving the agricultural

Identity Dub: The Paradoxes of an Indian American Youth Subculture (New York Mix)

Abstract: The crowd thickens on the small dance floor at S.O.B.'s, a world music club and the venue of Bhangra Basement, the first regular bhangra night at a mainstream club in New York, hosted by the ubiquitous DJ Rekha. The insistent beat of the dhol, the percussion base of the traditional North Indian folk dance known as bhangra in Punjab, pounds out over the techno and reggae tracks reverberating amidst the tightly packed bodies. Shoulders shrug and arms flail in semblances of bhangra moves, here, far from the wheat fields of the Punjab, far from the Californian orchards where early Punjabi migrants first settled in the early 20th century. Tonight, most faces are various shades of South Asian, but there are a few African Americans and whites getting down on the dance floor, too, for this is one of the few bhangra club nights that draws a noticeably racially mixed crowd. One of the past Bhangra Basement events featured a booth with mehndi, lacy designs in henna, traced on palms by a young white woman riding the current fascination with Indian "body art." On this night, there is an appearance by a live dhol drummer "all the way from Lahore," his yellow turban and sequined kurta presumably authenticating the Indian elements of this musical fusion. The drummer has an astonished, if delighted, expression on his face, as if simultaneously bewildered and excited by his performance for a frenzied crowd of young South Asian professionals and party goers, women in hip huggers twisting their arms in movements learned partly from Hindi films and partly from other bhangra nights like this, perhaps in college or at the Indian remix music parties that began springing up six or seven years ago. A young turbaned Sikh man leaps onto the stage beside the sweating musician, spinning and bouncing with acrobatic, break-dance-like agility. Jumping back into the crowd, he is joined by another young Sikh man, and as the crowd parts in a rapt circle, the two men circle around each other in exuberantly coordinated precision. Then three young women who have various degrees of classical dance training come forth, challenging

Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions

Abstract: To speak of the relations among political power, history, and the anthropology of emotion is to speak of a gap that theory and methodology have been unable to bridge. Anthropologists working on emotions have continued to depend heavily on the use of the ethnographic present and on sweeping generalizations about their informants' communities which do not come to grips with variation, resistance, or change. This is a surprising anomaly in a discipline that has, by and large, moved beyond such methodological crutches and in a subfield that has, in other respects, been a pacesetter in bringing new perspectives to bear on the problem of human difference. This anomaly derives from a theoretical insufficiency of broad significance. If the old idea of the Western subject has been dismantled and discarded, its replacements-notions of discourse, discipline, practice, agency-represent so many fragments from which it is difficult to recover any defense of political liberty. Yet people continue to cling to the idea of liberty-and to its corollary, the belief that dissidence and resistance can produce beneficial change-often without being able to say why. In what follows, I offer a concept of "emotional liberty" that does not depend on the unity or rationality of the "subject." This concept, I try to show, makes possible an approach to emotions that is at once ethnographic, historical, and politically engaged.

Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan

Abstract: It is by now a commonplace that, in translocal contexts, modernities must increasingly be theorized in the plural as diverse global phenomena reflecting multiple local agendas. The traditional/modern binary that was once a central mobilizing trope of anthropology, in which modernity is viewed as a "robust and noxious weed whose spread chokes the delicate life" out of "authentic" local and traditional meanings (Pigg 1996:164), has been revealed as inadequate to explain ways that discourses of the modern may be deployed oppositionally, for example, by those who seek access to modernity's language of rights against an oppressive state. At the same time "local" modernities do not proliferate indiscriminately without reference to the originally modern West; they are intimately implicated in questions of Western universalism and its relation to Western nationalism. As Rey Chow writes, modernity must be understood "as a force of cultural expansionism whose foundations are not only emancipatory but also Eurocentric and patriarchal" (1992:101). In this article I will examine the personal accounts of a marginalized population of professionally ambitious Japanese women to show how they deploy discourses of the modern, or "narratives of internationalism," to construct an "emancipatory" turn to the foreign/West in opposition to gender-stratified corporate and family structures in Japan.1 It should be noted at the outset that such internationalized professional women constitute a small minority of Japanese women; as Ogasawara observes in her recent book, the majority of young women in Japan still hold marriage and full-time motherhood as their primary life goal (1998:62-63). For the small number of women who are enabled by their age, marital status, economic resources, and familial flexibility (among other factors) to explore the cosmopolitan possibilities of internationalization, however, this option can lead to opportunities to travel, study, and work abroad and to the discovery of a female niche in the international job market as translators, interpreters, consultants, bilingual secretaries, entrepreneurs, international aid workers, United Nations employees, and so on. Examples of internationalist narratives abound in a genre of Japanese women's writing about the West by authors such as Toshiko Marks (1992),

The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory

Abstract: On a cool summer afternoon, a shaman arrived at a dusty mud-brick Naxi village to cure a resident who had gone mad. During the ritual that followed, the shaman called on Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping to assist her in driving out demons while she instructed the madman to brace up, learn from Lei Feng, and work for the greater good of his country. The shaman chanted, "The madman is one of the wretched masses. Arise if you don't want to be enslaved! Let our flesh and blood build the next Great Wall." The shaman incorporated political slogans and phrases from the Chinese national anthem into her ritual incantations. She wore a shoulder bag affixed with a Red Guard armband and marched around the madman's courtyard as if she were going into battle. The shaman bowed to the gods and burned incense, but she also invoked the "gods" and the experiences of the Chinese revolution-all in an attempt to save the madman.

Technologies of Everyday Life: The Economy of Impotence in Reform China

Abstract: Ermo is a 1995 film directed by Zhou Xiaowen and distributed mainly in the domestic market in China. Named for its protagonist, a woman who sells her homemade products (noodles, baskets, and the like) in a street market near her village, the film depicts the new rural Chinese economy well. The story includes a brief capitalist/erotic liaison between Ermo and her neighbor, Blindman. He owns a truck and thus is able to introduce his pretty neighbor, the rural producer, to wider markets and salaried labor in a city further from home. In contrast to the mobile and energetic Blindman, Ermo's husband is incompetent and sexually impotent. A retired cadre, he hovers morosely on the sidelines, reminding viewers of the displaced, but not yet forgotten, economic and cultural regime of socialism.

The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract: Rio de Janeiro, many Brazilians and foreigners agree, is a monumental city. The capital of Brazil until 1960, Rio has both an illustrious history and natural splendor. Steep granite hills, some of them populated by the city's poor, share space with modern high-rise buildings. The crescent-shaped beaches of the wealthy South Zone continue to draw tourists from as far away as Europe and the United States, despite international reports of violent street crime. When I arrived there in the last weeks of 1990, I felt a tingling sense of achievement. Even poor migrants, whose reasons for leaving the impoverished countryside are anything but abstract, are drawn to Rio partly by its glamour. The allure of Rio de Janeiro may be an effect produced less by its startling topography and breathtaking vistas than by what tourist brochures are apt to call its "spirit." The magic of Rio is constructed, really, from a collectively imagined and ideologically managed enchantment. Accepted within everyday discourses throughout Brazil as something of a metonymic enactment of national culture and character, Rio is portrayed as exuberantly spontaneous, "racially mixed," egalitarian in its ethos (if not in its objective structures), free spirited and casual, and, during certain days of the year especially, just a little bit shameless. As is the case with all such national showcases, the magic of Rio is simultaneously produced within and directed toward both local and transnational contexts. Rio's claim to represent the most appealing and uniquely Brazilian aspects of national culture is based largely on the city's performance of the pre-Lenten festival of carnaval. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta captured the symbolic resonance and national significance of the festival when he wrote, "it was not Brazil that invented Caraval; on the contrary, it was Carnaval that invented Brazil" (1984:245). The carioca, or Rio, carnaval is based on samba, a musical genre and dance style of remarkable tenacity and hegemonic reach. This article focuses on the historical development of, and contemporary discourses about, Rio's samba-driven caraval and its relationship to national representation and racial politics. With "racial politics" I do not refer to more explicit

Latinizing Culture: Art, Museums, and the Politics of U.S. Multicultural Encompassment

Abstract: It is now common in El Barrio, the East Harlem community that has long served as an important Puerto Rican enclave in New York City, to hear people complaining about the "Latinization" of the area. During a recent visit, I was particularly curious about the pessimistic outlook of a Puerto Rican artist who referred to the area as "a fading epitaph of the past," suggesting that its days as a key reference for Puerto Ricans in the city were numbered. Indeed, El Barrio has undergone major transformations since Puerto Ricans began to stake a claim on the area in the 1930s and 1940s. More and more its residents are also Dominicans, Mexicans, and Central Americans, following citywide patterns feeding a nascent pan-Latino identity in the "new Nueva York" (Flores 1996). These demographic changes are evident everywhere in the area, from the type of commerce, with taquerias (taco shops) emerging alongside bodegas, to the area's cultural institutions, which have shifted their original Puerto Rican focus to encompass the changing population. Thus the still-unopened Julia de Burgos cultural center, originally conceived almost ten years ago by a group of Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio, is now known as the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center; and El Museo del Barrio (i.e., the neighborhood museum), born out of the struggles of Puerto Rican activists for greater representation in the late 1960s, now claims to also represent all Latino and Latin American cultures in the United States. These developments, however, have not been free of controversy. The transformation of El Museo del Barrio's mission is now very much at the center of debate among Puerto Rican artists and activists who, while important in founding the earliest cultural initiatives in El Barrio, are now feeling marginalized by the "Latinization" of what they had come to know as a Puerto Rican institution. For one, these changes are occurring in a neighborhood that, although undergoing diversification, once served as the birthplace of Puerto Rican activism

A‐Whaling We Will Go: Encounters of Knowledge and Memory at the Makah Cultural and Research Center

Abstract: On a summer morning in 1995, like nearly every other morning that year, I went to the Makah Cultural and Research Center to research the history of the reservation community in Neah Bay, Washington. This morning was set apart from the others, however. There on the table, awaiting the staff, sat a paper plate stacked with smoked whale blubber. The blubber-boiled and smoked by a Makah linguist on the museum staff-was a novelty. As endangered species, California and Pacific gray whales had been off limits to hunting for many years. Whale hunting was once a significant spiritual, social, and economic practice for the qwidica?a. tx, or Makah people,2 and they were adamant about securing the right to it in their 1855 treaty with the U.S. government.3 Although the Makah people still enjoy occasional meals of salmon, halibut, sea urchin, gooseneck barnacles, and many other sea creatures, gray whale has not been a part of their diet since they ceased whale hunting early in the 20th century. By the 1920s, the whale population, decimated by commercial hunting, could no longer support this tradition (Pascua 1991). The smoked blubber sitting on the staff table that summer morning had come from an "accidental whale."4 It was July, and the net of a Makah fisherman accidentally entangled a gray whale. Entanglement in Makah nets had reportedly occurred five times in the prior 15 years. Each time, the federal government either confiscated the whale or sought prosecution for killing an endangered species (Bock 1995; Tizon 1998). But this time the Makah were allowed to keep the whale. Ironically, only two months prior to the "accidental whale," the Makah Tribe had announced its intention to resume hunting the gray whale because this species had recently been removed from the Endangered Species List. This announcement generated considerable commotion internationally among anti-whaling activists. The

The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America

Abstract: "What is importantfor us ? " asked cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks in his influential 1918 essay, "On Creating a Usable Past": "What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we to elect to remember?" (1993:225, emphasis in original). Brooks was concerned with his country's literary history, but his desire to approach the past "from the point of view not of the successful fact but of the creative impulse" was shared by many Progressive-era intellectuals who sought to mobilize American memory as a resource for a more democratic future (Brooks 1993:225). To think of the American past as "usable," as opposed to a dry collection of facts or a completed tradition deserving mute reverence, was to take an essentially pragmatic approach to the study of history. "For the spiritual past has no objective reality," Brooks asserted; "it yields only what we are able to look for in it" (1993:220). The past would become "usable" when it allowed Americans to pry open spaces in the present for future innovation. Such aspirations marked the approach taken to the past by at least two generations of liberal and radical intellectual-activists. Charles and Mary Beard's magisterial Rise of American Civilization (1927) and the multiple editions of The Growth of the American Republic (1930) by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager offered a "usable" metanarrative for confident progressives and

Consuming Pity: The Production of Death among the Cashinahua

Abstract: Cecilia: What does one's soul do once it has arrived in the sky? Augusto: Living. They live over there always partying, doing chidin, uman chani, nixpu pima, bunavai, kachanava [rituals]; they say that they are always playing. Sueiro: They say that there is no more suffering there, no toothache, they do not eat any more. C: They do not eat? A: They say that they are always partying, doing sai sai iki [a ritual]. S: Everyone is festive. Here we work in the hot sun and eat and suffer a lot, but where they are is not like that. It's so good, they say they do not suffer any

“A Broke-Up Mirror”: Representing Bajan in Print

Abstract: Arawak Hill, Barbados, April 13, 1994. It is about ten at night. Mrs. Farley is dozing off on the couch. Mr. Niles (a retired plantation worker and preacher) and I are silently poring over today's issue of the Advocate. Suddenly, Mr. Niles exclaims and pounds the table. I look up, startled. Mr. Niles pushes his portion of the paper in my direction and, pointing at a court report, says, "How do you like that?" I quickly scan the text. It is about a robbery in Bridgetown. But Mr. Niles is not interested in the story. He impatiently taps his finger at the excerpt quoting the defendant and says, "They shouldn't be doing this; it be shaming the person, how he kyaan [cannot] speak proper English. And they give he name, too! Anyways, there is nobody that says * wunna' these days." He turns to Mrs. Farley, his neighbor, and asks, "What you think, Mrs. Farley?" She replies, "Well, Mr. Niles, maybe is just for to show how he uneducated and thing, you know." '

Recent Developments in French Anthropology of France and the Role of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique

Abstract: If, in the late seventies, a man from Mars had wanted to find out about the ways of life of our people simply by looking at anthropological writing, he would have concluded that we were a country of farmers, living in villages, in old rural houses, who spend their time telling each other folk-tales in the evenings and acrimoniously competing for land and other types of property through the use of matrimonial strategies. [1997:295, my translation]

Cultural Scripts of Language and Sexuality in Martinican Theater: The Improvisational Impasse

Abstract: One day, not too long after joining a theater workshop in Fort-de-France, Martinique, I walked into the rehearsal room to find the class seated in a circle with Suzette, the workshop facilitator, asking us to explain why we were doing theater. Two primary explanations emerged: The first emphasized theater as a "release," a place where one could express oneself and work with emotions not normally allowed in daily life. Huguette, a teacher at an elementary school, explained this most clearly: As a teacher she must always control herself as well as her pupils. She felt that as a result, her life was becoming too controlled: "J'ai besoin de m'echapper" [I need to escape]. A second theme focused on theater as a form of therapy. Alain, a young man who always appeared upbeat and smiling, claimed that he had problems communicating with people and hoped that theater would help him learn to express himself. Both themes communicated an expression of frustration with daily life, where, it was felt, restrictions were placed on acceptable behaviors and emotions. There was one exceptional response. One of the participants, known for her sense of humor, remarked that she joined the workshop to become famous and to eventually get as much attention as Catherine Deneuve. Our laughter was quickly doused by Suzette's sharp admonition to the participant to take her question seriously. The revised answer was identical to the primary themesescape from daily constraints and a form of therapy. Later, during a break, "Catherine" claimed to a group of us that she had been serious-"What's the problem with wanting that?" she asked.