Showing papers in "Ethnos in 1997"

Sluts and superwomen : The politics of gender liminality in urban Tonga

Abstract: In urban Tonga, certain men identify themselves and are identified by others as taking on some attributes of womanhood on a regular basis. This process, however, yields a heterogeneous category of persons, who are variously positioned in the socio‐economic structure and moral order. At one extreme, some transgendered men are highly productive individuals in the market economy, while, at the other extreme, others are principally preoccupied by their sexual conquests amongst non‐transgendered men, which brands them as unproductive consumers because of the economics of casual sex relations. The stereotypes of mainstream society focus more readily on the second pattern than on the first. Stereotypical representations also align transgendered men with modernity and the West, and this association places the target of these stereotypes in a potentially vulnerable position, both symbolically and otherwise. This analysis explores the ethnographic diversity of transgendered identities within a single society, the c...

Christians without faith: Some aspects of the conversion of the Wari’ (Pakaa Nova)*

Abstract: In the 1970s, the Pakaa Nova, also known as the Wari’, an indigenous people of the State of Rondonia, Brazil, converted to the Christianity of the Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission of Brazil. They developed their own distinctive interpretation of Christian teachings, adapting them to their own cultural codes and to their cosmology. Wari’ adherence to Christianity cannot be understood as a simple process of adoption of new values and strange rituals by a group which had been disrupted and stunned by contact. The Wari’ found, in Christian practice, values from their own culture, related to an ideal of generalized consanguinity. The abandonment of funerary cannibalism and of festivals is analyzed from this perspective.

Trust, entrepreneurship and development in Surat city, India*

Abstract: Through an examination of business relationships in the textile industry of Surat, a city in western India, this article evaluates different theories about the importance of social trust in economic development. The case study of Surat raises questions about models that posit a necessary expansion of broad civic ties or legal‐bureaucratic structures at the expense of close personal ties as a basis for industrial development. Surat's business people rely most strongly upon relationships to particular kins‐people, caste‐mates, and co‐religionists rather than broader civic bonds, formal legal controls, or bureaucratic systems as foundations for business trust. Although the expansion of the city's textile industry has created a greater need among the local population for impersonal, universalizing types of social trust, this article argues that these forms, show little sign of replacing personalized trust as the primary basis for local economic activity.

Labrador metis ethnogenesis

Abstract: Recent claims to Aboriginal (native or indigenous) identity include new peoples who may not have had an historical consciousness as distinct peoples. This paper presents such a case from Canada, the recent ethnogenesis of the Labrador Metis. These Metis claim Inuit ancestry. Their claim is opposed by Labrador's two established Aboriginal associations and government. Yet Labrador Metis have incorporated under the Labrador Metis Association, filed a land claim with the Canadian government, and are pressing their case before the public. The paper discusses how the Metis are attempting to negotiate Aboriginality, some of the sociocultural consequences of Metis ethnic mobilization, and why Metis are claiming to be Aboriginal at this time.

‘You may not know it, but I'm black’: White women's self‐identification as black*

Abstract: This article shows ways in which five European American women intertwine and interweave the American discourses of race and ethnicity to talk about themselves as ‘black.’ This black identity both fits with their anti‐racist desires and makes strategic sense in the context of their everyday lives. Importantly, the women do not deny the European side of their heritage, rather they embrace a multi‐racial/ethnic identity. It is argued that the element of choice involved with American ethnic discourse, combined with a general shift toward the allowance of mixed identities, allows this identity construction to be understood as a sensible one. It is further argued that these women's constructions illustrate a type of identity configuration that has become a highly significant option in the United States.

Playing the dance, dancing the game: Race, sex and stereotype in anthropological fieldwork*

Abstract: This article explores the complexity and implications of sustained sexual relationships between ethnographers and people in the field with whom they work. It explores influences on the kinds of knowledges the ethnographers acquire and the kinds of ethnographies they produce, as well as insights into issues of race, gender, and social and economic differences. This specific discussion revolves around a relationship the author had with a fellow capoeira angola player in Salvador, northeastern Brazil. Representations of Otherness and its relationship to tourism, economic inequality and concepts of self as well as to gender norms, are argued as playing an active and politicized role in the insights gained through the participant/observation methods of anthropology.

The construction of Dominican state power and symbolisms of violence

Abstract: Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particular cosmology can become an idiom for expressing and justifying the necessity of using bodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. This article seeks to develop this key idea with the aid of historically and ethnographically specific material from the Dominican Republic. The author attempts to show that both hegemonic Dominican nationalist imagery and hegemonic Dominican masculinity imagery contain certain ‐ different ‐ ideas about conquest. These ideas have supplied idioms for the legitimation and exacerbation of state violence and terror. The article also argues that symbolic and social complexes familiar to anthropologists under the labels of ‘religion’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘gender’, can furnish idioms for the legitimation of the illegitimate. We should not primarily conceptualize and study forms of political violence as phenomena outside a daily and ritually constructed reality of a particular kind, bu...

The delicacy of ethnography: A review article

Abstract: Minou Fuglesang. 1994. Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 32. Stockholm: Stockholm University. 322 pp.

Unleashing Spirits and Unbounding Gender: Vocal Gods and Polyvalent Discourse in Watchi Possession

Abstract: The paper examines the role played by spirits possession in defining and rearranging social relationships among a group of Watchi-Ewe. Possession by spirits is instrumental in defining concepts of self at a societal level, and women who come to experience possession refer to this as a life-changing event which alters relationships between genders, between different categories of women, and also between humans and the cosmological realm. Although gender features prominently as an issue of theoretical interest in the experience of possession, Watchi exegetic explanations challenge some of the assumptions made in contemporary literature about possession, where this phenomenon is considered as an instrument for the constitution of an exclusively female identity.

It's been a good field trip

Abstract: Paul Bohannan apporte ici sa contribution a une reflexion sur l'histoire de l'anthropologie. Il reflechit sur la richesse de sa carriere d'anthropologue de terrain (depuis son travail chez les Tiv du Nigeria jusqu'a ses recherches sur le divorce aux Etats-Unis) et d'universitaire. Il note qu'il a vecu pres de la moitie de l'histoire de l'anthropologie culturelle, et qu'il a travaille pour la discipline depuis les annees 40. Il tire les lecons de cet engagement intensif et tente de degager des directions fructueuses pour l'anthropologie du futur