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Showing papers in "Ethnos in 1999"


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: The last several years have witnessed the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the former East Germany that has entailed the recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the museumification of everyday life as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The last several years have witnessed the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the former East Germany that has entailed the recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life. This paper interrogates a distinction between ‘mere’ nostalgia and socially sanctioned commemorative practices by tracing the social lives of East German things, including their paths, diversions, and recuperations, in the context of eastern Germany's transition to a late industrial society. I seek to elucidate not only the social, political, and economic conditions that have produced the recent explosion of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East) in the former GDR, but an interplay between hegemonic and oppositional memories as well. In flaming resistance to western German hegemony in terms of product choices and mass merchandising, I argue, practices and products of ‘Ostalgie’ both contest and affirm the new order.

192 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the wild peccary hunt is used as the basis for an ethnographic essay on an indigenous notion of point of view applied to the field of relations between humans and animals in the cosmology of a Tupi people, the Juruna.
Abstract: This article takes the wild peccary hunt as the basis for an ethnographic essay on an indigenous notion of point of view,’ applied to the field of relations between humans and animals in the cosmology of a Tupi people, the Juruna. In addition to revealing the particular complexity of these relations, the concept of point of view reveals how the notion of double is irreducible to that of soul, how ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’ are perspectival effects, and finally how the hunt is included in a multiple bilinear spatio‐temporal structure, evoking the labyrinths’ that the Juruna paint an their skin.

86 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Susanne Lundin1
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss biotechnology and cultural transformation by considering xenotransplantation, and their focus is on patients who have received animal cells, and on their attempts to make it possible to handle both medical interventions and society's ideas about these technologies.
Abstract: Today's technology is able to intervene in biological processes in a highly concrete way. Technology thus shapes and reshapes our world in a very special way, not just biologically but also culturally. This raises questions relevant to the cultural sciences. In this article I discuss biotechnology and cultural transformation by considering xenotransplantation. The focus is on patients who have received animal cells, and on their attempts to make it possible to handle both medical interventions and society's ideas about these technologies. This requires a shift from discourse analysis to a more action‐oriented analysis: to capture how people live the discourse. In this context, I view people's bodies as meeting places for different figures of thought and practices. My initial assumption is that this requires a demystification of the body, that is, interpretations proceeding from diversity and flexibility rather than fixed categories.

51 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that the processual and practical character of traditional marriages, combined with weak social institutions, provides those who wish the basis on which to legitimise such informal sexual relationships.
Abstract: In Botswana there is a large, and increasing, number of women who do not marry but have one or several lovers simultaneously and have gifts from these menas an importantpart of their income. It is argued that the processual and practical character of traditional marriages, combined with weak social institutions, provides those who wish the basis on which to legitimise such informal sexual relationships. Such practices represent a new sexual morality, whose conditions are further explained by treating the term ‘prostitution’ in a comparative perspective. Tensions arise from the new constellation of sexual mores, generating fundamental social changes — most notably substantial economic transfers from men to women, loss of male power, and changing gendered identities. Lastly, the practices described are discussed in relation to the AIDS epidemic.

28 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: The case of the Mohawks of Kahnawake, outside Montreal, is presented as an illustrative counterpoint to the political philosophy of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Inasmuch as Aboriginal peoples today are, in one manner or another, encapsulated within sovereign states not of their own making, the politics of Aboriginal identity throws out special challenges. This article addresses some of them: the separate, even contradictory, cognitions of ‘place’ between Aboriginal and, say, Immigrant; the present inappropriateness and insufficiency of Western liberal rights philosophy, along with multiculturalism, respecting aboriginality; the distorting (often enigmatically so) and divisive colonial legacies as Aboriginals themselves engage in the politics of their identity. The case of the Mohawks of Kahnawake, outside Montreal, is presented as an illustrative counterpoint to the political philosophy of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor.

21 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: The big house is a potent symbol of rural Minangkabau life, embodying the centrality of women to the continuity and reproduction of the matrilineage as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The big house is a potent symbol of rural Minangkabau life, embodying the centrality of Minangkabau women to the continuity and reproduction of the matrilineage. But big houses are not simply sites of social reproduction. Mothers and daughters negotiate and contest the ties of kinship embodied in the big house. Where big houses represented mother's power to control their daughters, national discourses of domesticity have reoriented daughters’ desires toward a house of their own. Daughters assert the importance of their own nuclear households as a way to resist their mother's control. Yet daughters have not become the housewives and mothers of national fantasy. They are reworking matrilineal ideology to gain the right to control their own small houses, ultimately reconstituting big houses in new forms.

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: This paper examined how gendered space in the Pohnpeian feasthouse relates to gendered discourse and discourse about gender in Micronesia and found that women orators at feasts discursively subvert characterizations of women's status as contingent on men.
Abstract: Both space and language are resourcesin the production of social hierarchies. In Pohnpei, Micronesia, the social categorization of space in the feasthouse creates a map of the social order that includes a subordinate identity for women, that of a wife whose status depends on her husband's. However, women orators at feasts discursively subvert characterizations of women's status as contingent on men. The orators invoke a more complex range of gendered subject positions than are expressed spatially, including women's multiple identities as mother, sister, and wife. This article examines how gendered space in the Pohnpeian feasthouse relates to gendered discourse and discourse about gender. The tension between the spatial representation of women's status and the discursive one indicates that the production of social stratification is a dynamic and interactive process in Pohnpei, entailing contradiction as well as confirmation within and across semiotic modalities.

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In 1997, it was reported that a sheep had been successfully "cloned" at the Roslin Institute in Scotland as mentioned in this paper, which attracted a great deal of attention and the idea of "cloning" appeared to generate both anxiety and anticipation in equal measure.
Abstract: In 1997, it was reported that a sheep had been successfully ‘cloned'at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. The sheep, named Dolly, attracted a great deal of attention and the idea of ‘cloning’ appeared to generate, in much of the western world at least, both anxiety and anticipation in equal measure. Discussion generated in the media immediately turned to the advantages and disadvantages of cloning people. I focus here on some of the responses to Dolly in the United States and in Britain. Drawing on fieldwork, pre‐Dolly, in the north of England, largue that the image of ‘the clone’ acts as a conceptual brake, as a marker of limits, to possibilities presented through new reproductive and genetic technologies. ‘Cloning’ provides an ethnographic window through which specific cultural understandings of kinship can be discerned.

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors look at the commodification of and traffic in temple sculpture in relation to a particular way of classifying and evaluating the temples and consider different systems of classification and theories of value that converged on the temples at different moments in history, and the politics behind the ascendance of particular value systems.
Abstract: The recent explosion of theft in sculpture from Angkor era temples in Cambodia raises questions about the circumstances that make such destructive acts possible at these historically sacred Khmer sites. This paper looks at the commodification of and traffic in temple sculpture in relation to a particular way of classifying and evaluating the temples. It considers different systems of classification and theories of value that have converged on the temples at different moments in history, and the politics behind the ascendance of particular value systems. It uses Arjun Appadurai's concept of a ‘regime of value’ to illuminate the intersection of many different value systems at the temples today, and to shed light on the contradictory mix of conservation and exploitation, scholarship and commerce, preservation and development, which co‐exist at these now‐international heritage sites.

13 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: The authors discuss the expectations of Westerners and their interest in an ‘authentic’ Vietnamese painting and its contrast to Vietnamese visions of their city in decay, and illustrate how opposite notions of "authenticity" and history define the cultural production of taste and alter perceptions about art and the Orient.
Abstract: When Hanoi's favorite painter Bui Xuan Phai died in 1988, he became a legend in Vietnamese art circles. He was known as much for his paintings of ‘Old’ Hanoi streets ‐ earning him the nickname of Pho'Phai or ‘street’ Phai‐ as for his frequent visits to the underground cafes where banned writers spent their evenings drinking and philosophizing. As the Vietnamese economy improved in the early 1990s, a clientele for his paintings began to develop among Westerners visiting Hanoi. Gradually, it became increasingly clear that most of the paintings on the market attributed to Phai were in fact forgeries. This article will discuss the expectations of Westerners and their interest in an ‘authentic’ Vietnamese painting and its contrast to Vietnamese visions of their city in decay. The article illustrates how opposite notions of ‘authenticity’ and history define the cultural production of taste and alter perceptions about art and the ‘Orient.’

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia is presented, and the predicaments are both intimate and global in dimension.
Abstract: Recent statements on globalization, the social life of objects, and the open‐endedness of self‐definition offer fresh angles of approach in the ethnographic apprehension of contemporary art worlds. They are brought together here in an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia. Modernist ideas about art, authenticity, and painterly subjectivity not only inform the expert systems that oversee the ‘artness of art’ but also give rise to troubling anxieties and desires associated with ‘originals’ and fakes.’ The efforts of Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous to prevent forgeries of his work from reaching the market throw special light on the difficulties experienced in containing the illusions and confusions of art value. The predicaments are both intimate and global in dimension.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the transformation and representation of particular regional textile genres, as well as the equation by Indonesian developers of idealist aesthetics and marketing success through national guidance are explored, with examples of textiles from Jambi, Sumatra and highland Central Sulawesi.
Abstract: Indonesian regional textiles that formerly circulated locally for practical and ritual purposes were identified by New Order government authorities for wider marketing to serve the purposes of economic and national development. This article, based primarily on data from a 1996 Indonesian government‐sponsored textile symposium, explores the transformation and representation of particular regional textile genres, as well as the equation by Indonesian developers of idealist aesthetics and marketing success through national guidance. With examples of textiles from Jambi, Sumatra and highland Central Sulawesi, I argue that some Indonesian developers and fashion designers formulated a hierarchical code of aesthetics that was based on commercial markets and homogenizing nationalist goals. In certain respects, this code of aesthetics runs contrary to the financial and symbolic interests of local textile producers and foreign specialists who are offended by what they consider the denigration and pirating ...

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the various ways that the work of Aragon, French, Berdahl, George and Taylor, included in this volume, individually and collectively suggest elaborations and modifications of Appadurai's important work, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, from which they have all taken inspiration.
Abstract: This paper considers the various ways that the work of Aragon, French, Berdahl, George, and Taylor, included in this volume, individually and collectively suggest elaborations and modifications of Appadurai's important work, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ‘from which they have all taken inspiration. They present instances of complex paradoxical relations between value, singularity, and commodity status; indicate the emergence of a new kind of self‐reflexive commodity cum social critique (the neofetish); and provoke this reader, at least, to consider the violence of conspicuous destruction as a component of the value of authenticity.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: The authors examines entrepreneurs active in the production and marketing of garlic in the Venezuelan Andes who take advantage of local sharecropping practices and the codes and concepts of the traditional economy to build efficient rural businesses.
Abstract: The point of departure of this paper is that markets as much model as mirror cultures, that trade introduces goods and competencies that can be used to transform social relationships. Kearney (1996) has suggested that Bourdieu's (1986) work on forms of capital and Baudrillard's concept (1981) of ‘sign value’ are useful tools in studying rural development and differentiation. This paper examines entrepreneurs active in the production and marketing of garlic in the Venezuelan Andes who take advantage of local sharecropping practices and the codes and concepts of the traditional economy to build efficient rural businesses. In so doing, they use both symbolic and economic capital to appropriate economic wealth. Successful entrepreneurs acquire material goods, behavior, and an economic rationality characteristic of the market economy, which they manipulate to transform social values.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore names and naming practices in Haya communities of Northwest Tanzania and argue that this act of recollection embedded in such names can best be understood as an effort to displace past reputations, and overcome the disparaging views of one's consociates.
Abstract: This article explores names and naming practices in Haya communities of Northwest Tanzania. Certain Haya names evoke past experiences and circumstances that surround the birth of a child, as well as the social reputation of the child's parents, I argue that this act of recollection embedded in such names can best be understood as an effort to displace past reputations, and overcome the disparaging views of one's consociates. From this perspective, Haya names can be understood as modes of remembering designed to both recall and undermine past memories; as well as forms of social agency through which people actively attempt to engage in and transform their social conditions.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: In this paper, the practices and experiences of an American diviner are studied, revealing the spontaneous, visual nature of her practice and highlighting the role of the senses and emotions in divination.
Abstract: Divination has been a well‐studied subject in the field of anthropology. Yet diviners within Western societies have been curiously ignored. Van Dijk's and Pels’ (1996) concept of the ‘politics of perception’ is discussed as a means of under‐standing why this is the case. Redressing this gap, I study the practices and experiences of an American psychic. This ethnographic material helps to move us beyond the patient‐client dialogue to address the internal processes of the diviners themselves. The reflexive exegesis of Elizabeth, an American diviner, reveals the spontaneous, visual nature of her practice and also highlights the role of the senses and emotions in divination. Other examples of sensory experience, such as in cases of blindness, show that those senses deemed lower down’ in the hierarchy of perception can be accurate modes of gaining knowledge of the world.


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1999-Ethnos
TL;DR: A. Appadurai et al. as discussed by the authors propose a mise en perspective generale de l'anthropologie contemporaine de la culture materielle and of l'art.
Abstract: A partir d'un commentaire sur les contributions a ce numero thematique, l'A. propose une mise en perspective generale de l'anthropologie contemporaine de la culture materielle et de l'art. En reference au cadre conceptuel de la circulation et de la vie sociale des objets (A. Appadurai), il s'interroge sur les problemes de classification inherents au traitement de la culture materielle. Il suggere notamment de partir de la culture materielle comme categorie la plus englobante, afin de permettre une etude rapprochee des phenomenes sociaux et culturels lie a l'art. La marchandisation de la production culturelle liee a la culture materielle et au marche de l'art necessite une revision des cadres d'interpretation, et une prise en compte des productions identitaires, nationales et locales, dans le contexte des phenomenes transnationaux et de la globalisation. La construction des memoires locales s'inscrit dans les enjeux de la circulation marchande des objets, dans la manipulation des regimes de valeur, et dans l'assignation de significations nouvelles qui reinserent ces objets dans les cultures locales.