Showing papers in "Ethnos in 1989"
TL;DR: The authors argue that there is a need for anthropology to reshape Us assumptions, particularly in response to recent resexive and deconstructionist critiques, and present a revised set of assumptions with regard to cultural meanings, sharing, positioning and function.
Abstract: Field materials from North Bali are presented to question conventional anthropological conceptions of culture and common practices in its analysis. The author argues that there is a need for anthropology to reshape Us assumptions, particularly in response to recent resexive and deconstructionist critiques. A revised set of assumptions is presented with regard to cultural meanings, sharing, positioning and function; and its fruitfulness in the analysis of cultural reproduction in Bali is explored.
181 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, two prominent perspectives toward culture in the world system are inspected, and another view is suggested which gives greater emphasis to the relationship between transnational cultural flows and continued cultural creativity at the periphery.
Abstract: The twentieth century has come to witness the growth of a global ecumene of culture, an organization of diversity structured by center‐periphery relationships. In this article two prominent perspectives toward culture in the world system are inspected, and another view is suggested which gives greater emphasis to the relationship between transnational cultural flows and continued cultural creativity at the periphery.
83 citations
TL;DR: The subjectivity of the anthropologist is grounded in the historical and ideological worlds in which he is positioned The author finds the basis of his comparison of Australian and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalisms in the Australian cultural context as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The subjectivity of the anthropologist is grounded in the historical and ideological worlds in which he is positioned The author finds the basis of his comparison of Australian and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalisms in the Australian cultural context, which leads him to a particular construction of the Sinhalese “otherness” The Australian egalitarian nationalism and the Sinhalese Buddhist hierarchical nationalism are traced as ideologies through a range of practises, showing differing relationships between nation and state Both nationalisms, the author argues, are to be understood as equally “modern”
58 citations
TL;DR: The cultural construction of gendered bodies: Biology and metaphors of production and destruction as discussed by the authors was a seminal work in the field of gender and gender relations in the early 1990s, focusing on women's bodies.
Abstract: (1989). The cultural construction of gendered bodies: Biology and metaphors of production and destruction. Ethnos: Vol. 54, No. 3-4, pp. 143-160.
20 citations
TL;DR: This article decoded a sixteenth century folktale which records the Sinhalese reaction to the arrival of the first Portuguese and found that the Portuguese and the Christian sacrament of communion were represented as dangerous, disordering forces.
Abstract: This essay decodes a sixteenth century folktale which records the Sinhalese reaction to the arrival of the first Portuguese. Where the historiography kas interpreted this tale as benign wonderment in the face of exotica, a piecemeal deconstruction of the allegorical clues in the ‘story is utilised to reveal how the Sinhalese linked ike Portuguese with demons and with Vasavarti Mārayā, the arch enemy of the Buddha. In this fashion the Portuguese and the Christian sacrament of communion were represented as dangerous, disordering forces. The piecemeal reinterpretation of this short text, however, must be overlaid by a holistic perspective and the realisation that its rendering in oral form enabled its purveyors to lace the story with a satirical flavour: so that the Portuguese and Catholicism are, like demons, rendered both disordering and comic, dangerous and inferior—thus ultimately controllable. In contending in this manner that the folktale is an act of nationalist opposition, the article is designed as ...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that the Makuna society in the Colombian Vaupes is an intermediate form between two contrasting but related types of social organization, represented by the Carib societies of the Guiana region and the Tukano groups of the Northwest Amazon.
Abstract: it is argued that the Makuna society in the Colombian Vaupes is an intermediate form between two contrasting but related types of social organization, represented by the Carib societies of the Guiana region and the Tukano groups of the Northwest Amazon. The paper suggests that current changes in Makuna society may, in part, be understood in terms of the underlying structure of exchange, encoded in the asymmetric alliance system common to all these Amerindian societies of northern lowland South America.
8 citations
TL;DR: The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by G. A. Collier, R. I. Jones and R. W. Wirth as discussed by the authors, was published by Cambridge University Press.
Abstract: The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by G. D. Jones and R. R. Kautz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ix + 254 pp. The Inca and Aztec States 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, edited by G. A. Collier, R. I. Rosaldo and J. D. Wirth. New York: Academic Press, 1982. xx + 475 pp. Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Frank Salomon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xviii + 274 pp. The Origins and Development of the Andean State, edited by J. Haas, S. Pozorski and T. Pozorski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. vi+ 188 pp. Peruvian Prehistory; An Overview of pre‐lnca and Inca Society, edited by R. W. Keatinge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xvii + 364 pp.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the special biases, social ambiguities and methodological problems characterizing ethnographic research among fieldworkers with cultural orientations vaguely or partially congruent with their hosts, and addresses broad issues regarding detachment and objectivity, limits upon shared experience and meaning, and interpretive dilemmas facing the ethnographic enterprise.
Abstract: This article examines the special biases, social ambiguities and methodological problems characterizing ethnographic research among fieldworkers with cultural orientations vaguely or partially congruent with their hosts. Information for this discussion derives from a recent field study of agrarian adaptations in northeastern Finland conducted by an anthropologist of third‐generation immigrant Finnish‐American background. This context is used to address broad issues regarding detachment and objectivity, limits upon shared experience and meaning, and interpretive dilemmas facing the ethnographic enterprise generally.
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Ryden's 1961 observation that a certain Formative (pre-Tiahuanaco) pottery was decorated was neglected until 1984-87 investigations in the Cochabamba Valley yielded one ceramic type with pattern burnishing, with various attributes permitting more precise temporal placements.
Abstract: Stig Ryden's 1961 observation that a certain Formative (pre‐Tiahuanaco) pottery was decorated was neglected until our 1984–87 investigations. Our excavations in the Cochabamba Valley yielded one ceramic type with pattern burnishing—Ryden's decoration—dated to between 800 B. C. and A. D. 200, with various attributes permitting more precise temporal placements. The pottery, probably produced in the northern part of the Cochabamba Valley, was found as distant as the Mizque Valley 120 km southward, and therefore is useful for interrelating the diverse regional and local Cochabamba Formative ceramic traditions, and perhaps tying them to central Andean ceramic sequences which include the same decorative technique.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine succession practices on eastern Finnish farms through an analysis of the use of wills and other documents of transfer, and show that the situation to be more complex than this, and there is even a fictional element in some documents.
Abstract: The paper examines succession practices on eastern Finnish farms through an analysis of the use of wills and other documents of transfer. Wills are relatively rarely used, and the most important documents are contracts inter vivos between parents and children and between siblings. Such documents, with their detailed and precise conditions and provisions, may appear to mark the invasion of the family by the form and spirit of legal rationality and economic individualism. A deeper investigation of the contexts of their use, however, shows the situation to be more complex than this, and there is even a fictional element in some documents. Rural Finnish families organise succession to their farms within the framework of the law and state bureaucracy, but they do not play a merely passive role in their relations with such institutions.