Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2001"

Kinship and Corruption in Contemporary Nigeria

Abstract: This article explores the social reproduction of 'corruption' in Nigeria, using ethnographic data collected in the Igbo-speaking southeast. The author argues that corruption must be understood in the context of everyday instances of patronage as they occur in networks of kin, community, and interpersonal association. Kinship relationships, and other social ties rooted in similar moral obligations and affective attachments, enable Igbos to navigate Nigeria's clientelistic political economy. They also serve to perpetuate an ethic of appropriate redistribution that fuels corruption. The article analyzes a deep-seated ambivalence that is created as the reciprocal obligations of kinship articulate with structures of power and inequality that characterize contemporary Nigeria. Rather than withering away as Nigeria modernizes, the instrumental importance of kinship and community of origin may be greater than ever.

Like a White Piece of Paper: Embodiment and the Moral Upbringing of Vietnamese Children

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which rural Vietnamese girls' and boys' moral 'socialization' is influenced by Vietnamese educational discourses, local ideas of the body, and embodiment. In Vietnam, children's learning of 'good morality' is related to the metaphor of 'children are like white pieces of paper', which indicates that children need moral inscription in order to be socialized appropriately. In spite of official rhetoric, which stresses that all children should be 'socialized' similarly, local ways of construing the blank slate metaphor mean that rural girls and boys are socialized in radically different ways.

Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy

Abstract: Critiques of visualism, i.e. an epistemological 'bias toward vision', have focussed on surveillance and overview. Taking a different perspective, this paper differentiates looking from seeing, the latter being linked to all the senses. Discussions of landscape appreciation in Western literature have reflected a similar restriction to the distant or privileged gaze. Theorists have rendered invisible the labourers' and inhabitants' view of landscape and the consumption of its products. Based on fieldwork and filming in Normandy,this article reinserts the biographical and bodily meaning of landscape for unnamed cultivators and food producers, in contrast to nonlabouring spectators. It also discusses how fieldwork has to confront prior images of the landscape, especially Impressionist paintings as icons which intertwine with local perspectives. Through participant observation, the anthropologist may shift from looking as spectator to seeing as participant.

Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar

Abstract: Particular scenarios of anger in two African societies are compared in order to discern some of the complex ways in which emotion is related to cultural context and social practice. The disappointment of Kgalagadi elders (dikgaba) in Botswana and the irascibility and violence of royal Sakalava spirits in Madagascar entail moral inspection with respect to the justifiability of anger and the locus of fault. Through case studies we emphasize the interpersonal and hierarchical dimensions of justifiable anger and suggest a comparison with Western 'guilt.' The circulation of anger between the generations is contrasted to a situation in which the capacity for imagining the indignation of others collapses into indignity.

Arguing with the KGB Archives. Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia

Abstract: This paper is a sequel to my earlier work on life histories in post-Soviet Latvia. The opening of the KGB archives in Riga created the possibility of comparing archival information with recorded personal narratives. The files and the highly charged emotional responses that they evoked raise questions about the uses of language as it moves along a continuum from rigid formalisation to free poetic constructions. Excessive formalisation and institutionalisation of language preclude dialogue and rather than pin down meaning end up by destroying it. Nevertheless, informants were keen to engage in retrospective dialogue with the files, contesting facts and meanings and in the process subverting the original enterprise and reasserting themselves as moral agents.

Hunting for Conservation in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Abstract: The animals of the Papua New Guinea highlands are relatively defenceless. People not only value their meat, hunters sharing catch with kin, but also formally transact several creatures in the all-important socio-political exchanges that characterise their social life. The local sedentary population is dense, yet it has not hunted species to extinction regardless of their value and vulnerability to predation. This paper seeks an answer in the context of socio-political exchange values that inform social status. It uses data from a survey of animal skull trophies displayed in a sample of houses in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands Province to investigate connections between hunting and social standing - exchange status, kin group affiliation and age - with a view to elucidating tacit conservation behaviour which agencies concerned to protect biodiversity might profitably consider given current participatory rhetoric.

An Ethnographic Theory of Democracy. Politics from the Viewpoint of Ilhéus's Black Movement (Bahia, Brazil)

Abstract: The central aim of this paper is to outline an 'ethnographic theory of democracy,' and so contribute to a deeper understanding of the concrete mechanisms through which so-called representative democracy effectively functions. After some general observations, the article therefore focuses on exploring a series of events surrounding the participation of a segment of the black movement of Ilheus (Bahia, northeast Brazil) in the municipal elections of 1992 and 1996. From this ethnographic base, the paper then seeks to develop an overview of the participation of electors in the self-named democratic processes of modern nation-states, exploring phenomena such as electoral promises and vote buying, as well as concepts such as reciprocity and subjectivity.

What makes (the) Antankarana, Antankarana? Reckoning group identity in northern Madagascar

Abstract: This paper discusses different ways of reckoning group identity in the Ankarana region of northern Madagascar. It focuses on two distinct but related models that people employ in construing the meaning of the term 'Antankarana' and identifying the boundaries of the collective it denotes. The first, inclusive, model suggests that any person who respects the moral and political orders of the region can be classified among Antankarana, while the second, exclusive, model implies an objectified collective determined ultimately by descent. In addition to promoting the need for further anthropological study of identity reckoning, this paper discusses how rites and institutions that ideally serve to include people within a traditional political order have been reshaped through colonial and into post-colonial times as mechanisms for creating exclusive boundaries.

Foucault in the bush. The social life of post-structuralist theory in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg

Abstract: This essay seeks to make critical theory an object of ethnographic con-textualization and inquiry through an exploration of the social life of post-structuralist theory in 1980s East Berlin. The 'Prenzlauer Berg Scene' of artists and writers utilized post-structuralism as a distinctive register for defining their social identity and as an analytical and interpretive paradigm for articulating their alienation from the state-crafted language of GDR public culture. The essay discusses how the subversive practice of post-structuralism in the Prenzlauer Berg came at the price of linguistic exclusion and political withdrawal from mainstream GDR society. In conclusion, it is argued that the Prenzlauer Berg case emblematizes the difficulty of politicizing expert theoretical registers since these registers' objective critical 'power' relies upon structures of epistemic inequity that cultivate distinctions between critical experts and naive practitioners.

Transforming Signs. Iconicity and Indexicality in Russian Healing and Magic

Abstract: In this article, the ethnography of magic and healing in contemporary Russia is analyzed using the basic concepts of Peircian semiotics. Indigenous terms of affliction used in magical diagnostics of misfortunes, as well as pantomimic gestures in hand healing are regarded as iconic and indexical signs. Their mode of signification is pragmatic presentation rather than textual representation, which underlies their capacity to effect transformations in consciousness. It is shown, however, that it is cultural conventions of their symbolic meanings that form these signs as icons and indexes.

'The Women Are Coming': The Transformation of Gender Relationships in a Gay Synagogue

Abstract: The social context of women's entrance into positions of spiritual and organizational leadership in a formerly male-dominated New York gay and lesbian synagogue is presented. The paper explores the intricacies of women's investment with authority in the public forum, and the reactions of men to the 'intrusion' into 'their' space - from resentment and protest to active acceptance. Circumstances that maintain the exclusion of women from hierarchies of organizational power, or promote their inclusion, are inquired into.

The Fatal Splitting. Symbolizing Anxiety in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: Based on written interviews with young people collected in 1997-1999 in Barnaul (Siberia), this article explores structural and rhetorical patterns employed in the young people's descriptions of the New Russian woman, usually associated with a small group of rich and successful people in Russia ('New Russians'). As the essay demonstrates, the image of the New Russian woman can be seen not only as a symbolic representation of new market-driven relations but also as a screen on which deep identification anxiety, triggered by the destabilized cultural environment in post-Soviet Russia, is projected. Using the framework of object relation theory, the article suggests that the type of symbolization used by the informants helps to cope with uncertainty about the past; at the same time it appears to offer a way to deal with the anxiety about one's possible future on the post-Soviet market.

Teaching Visual Anthropology. Notes from the Field

Abstract: When I joined the Granada Centre in 1991 I was concerned to explore the field of visual anthropology by means of an intellectually coherent approach that encompassed research, teaching and filmmaking practices. At the centre of this approach was an interest in the relationship between vision and knowledge in ethnographic enquiry. My recent book, 'The Ethnographer's Eye', was an attempt to establish a broader intellectual context for the examination of vision within anthropology. In this essay I use an ethnographer's eye to look at the set of teaching techniques through which this understanding was gained. The reflections I offer here arise from a desire to understand better the relationship between teaching practice and academic writing, visual anthropology and television documentary. A critical appraisal of the Granada Centre as a fieldwork site makes possible the re-imagining of anthropology as a visual project.

Reflecting Diversity: Variants of the Legendary Footraces of the Rarámuri in Northern Mexico

Abstract: The Raramuri (Tarahumara) in northern Mexico are renowned for their footraces. This paper focuses on the interrelationship between footraces, social identity and sociopolitical organization. The legendary footraces of the Raramuri are viewed as an arena of cultural meaning that is not fixed but, instead, open to negotiation and contest. Races in different settings, two rural communities and one urban community, disclose different ideologies of self-identification and principles of organization, showing that diverse Raramuri groups do not necessarily adhere to the ethnic ascription imposed on them by the state.

Rita Liljeström, Eva Lindskog, Nguyen Van Ang, & Vuong Xuan Tinh. 1998. Profit and Poverty in Rural Vietnam.

Abstract: Rita Liljestrom, Eva Lindskog, Nguyen Van Ang, & Vuong Xuan Tinh 1998 Profit and Poverty in Rural Vietnam

Untouchables in India's Civil/Uncivil Democracy. A Review Article

Abstract: Alors que l'Inde a place aux plus hautes responsabilites politiques des personnalites issues du groupe des intouchables, dans la vie quotidienne, la violence envers les intouchables est persistante, voire augmente. A travers la presentation et le commentaire de quatre ouvrages recents sur la question des intouchables en Inde (R. Deliege, 1999 ; S. Dube, 1998 ; O. Mendelsohn & M. Vicziany, 1998 ; V. Prashad, 2000), l'A. montre comment ces contributions permettent de mieux comprendre la situation paradoxale d'une violence multidimensionnelle qui caracterise l'ambivalence de la democratie indienne, contemporaine et d'un point de vue ethnohistorique.