Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2002"

'India Shopping': Indian Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging

Abstract: How do representations of 'India' shape the lives of members of a diasporic community, the identities they forge, and the politics they negotiate? This paper examines how grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay Area enable the construction of India and Indian culture, and argues that (1) Indian grocery storesin the diaspora form a crucial node in the transnational circulation of texts, images, and commodities between India and the diaspora; (2) the objects sold in these stores create varying regimes of value in different contexts; (3) gender (as it intersects with class and race) offers an important lens to examine the kinds of social practices facilitated by these stores. Throughout, the author wishes to foreground the on-going and contested construction of a transnational set of images, discourses, and institutions that engender what different people mean by 'India.'

American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a 'Normal' Life in Postsocialist Hungary

Abstract: Throughout the post-Soviet bloc, people regularly describe as 'normal' high-quality commodities and living environment so therwise considered extraordinary in their local context. In Hungary, this discourse of the normal indicates that middle-class aspirants, claiming 'European' status, now evaluate their own standards of living by comparison to imagined western ones. Looking to the socialist period, I argue that the construction of a socialist modern consumer led to the equation of western standards of living with self-value and dignity. Western material worlds were perceived to be conducive to a form of family life and personhood impossible under the 'abnormal' conditions of state-socialism. As this new standard comes to dictate middle-class fashioning, it becomes instrumental in the ongoing social, economic and material transformation of the country.

The Taste of Nationalism: Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow

Abstract: In this article I consider how Muscovites cultivate and express nationalist sentiments through their food choices. During the last ten years of the post-socialist transition, Russian consumers have encountered an expanding and increasingly transnational commodity market. Locally produced elements of Russian cuisine both compete with and imitate foreign food products. In response to perceptions that foreign cultures are displacing or subsuming local cultural forms, Russian officials have launched a 'Buy Russian' campaign. Domestic food producers, store clerks, and customers collaborate to classify foods and other products as either 'Ours'(Nash) or 'Not Ours' (Ne nash) and describe local goods as superior to foreign goods in terms of taste, quality, and healthfulness. In their own narratives about consumption choices, Muscovites echo these nationalist themes by explicitly linking their personal food experiences with broader political issues. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on foodpractices in Moscow(199...

Chocolate and Cognac: Gifts and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: This paper examines the culture of gift-giving in contemporary urban Russia, illuminating in the process broader post-socialist deliberations about social identity and personal worth. Drawing upon ethnographic research in St. Petersburg (1998-99), I consider how marketization influences, informs, and overlaps with logics of gift-giving and with the social networking practices so central to Soviet-era consumer strategies. In contrast to most previous analyses of such phenomena, this article attends closely to the items of exchange themselves, asking why certain goods are chosen as gifts in particular contexts (such as the chocolate and cognac typically given as tokens of gratitude to doctors, teachers, and others whom one wishes to thank for services well provided). Social theorists have commented on the 'misrecognition' inherent in such gift-giving, in that transactors tend to view these presents not as pragmatic investments but simply - as Russian teachers put it - 'signs of attention' Yet here I push fu...

Consumers Exiting Socialism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Daily Life in Post-Communist Europe

Abstract: Introduisant ce dossier sur la consommation dans l'Europe postsocialiste (ex-URSS et pays de l'Est), les AA. situent d'abord brievement ces nouvelles ethnographies par rapport aux contributions recentes sur l'anthropologie de la culture materielle et de la consommation. Ils en delimitent ensuite les grandes orientations thematiques et mettent en evidence la specificite historique des pratiques consumeristes postsocialistes. Selon les AA., la consommation postsocialiste est revelatrice des processus et modes de fonctionnement internes d'un ensemble de relations et d'institutions en transformation. L'interface du socialisme d'Etat et du capitalisme global genere des changements structurels du point de vue des droits, des obligations, de l'autorite et des libertes. Cependant, cette sortie du socialisme s'effectue dans l'action quotidienne des acteurs, particulierement dans leurs comportements de consommateurs, encore marques par les pratiques et les histoires de l'ancien regime. Ces ethnographies revelent ainsi les formes culturelles qui ont contribuees au changement rapide dans ces pays.

Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation

Abstract: Although less well known than the Tibetan search for high lamas, cases of reincarnation reported from other parts of the world frequently involve very young children. What does this imply for our understanding of childhood? Reincarnated children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of childhood which posits a new being who slowly finds his or her way in the world. This paper raises questions about the challenges posed by reincarnation to dominant conceptions of childhood in the West, surveying subjects such as the separation of children into age grades and of 'life' into stages, the relatively recent historical trend of recasting childhood into a nostalgic mold, the investment of a life trajectory with an historicity, and the equating of children with savages, as peoples who antecede the 'adult' civilizations of the West.

On 'Modern' Christians, Consumption, and the Value of National Identity in Post-Soviet Lithuania

Abstract: Following the demise of the Soviet Union, Lithuania has opened up to global systems not only as a competitive consumer market but also as a new sphere of influence for various neo-Protestant charismatic churches. As signifiers of 'modernity,' transnational commodities and religious faiths are especially appealing to younger generations of Lithuanians who use them to redefine the meanings of their selfhood at the present moment of the disorienting 'transition to the West'. Focusing on differential drinking practices at Evangelist weddings, this paper examines the ways in which 'modern' goods, suchas Coca-Cola, become implicated in reconfigurations of Lithuanian national identity and 'tradition' as its significant support. I argue that transnational imports devalue this identity, undermine practices and dispositions perceived as 'traditional,' and create unprecedented intergenerational disjunctures. Simultaneously, imported goods and religions serve as means for constructing 'modern' selves and their concom...

Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death

Abstract: This article examines funerals in a Herero community in Botswana as a discourse on the fundamental sentiments that orient people to one another and that connect them through effecting mutuality. I argue that the Herero community, in the face of ongoing dispersal, is more concerned with sustaining sociality than with reconstituting particular forms or relationships. At deaths, Herero highlight basic social orientations through sentimental assertions of love, and desire, in the context of evidence of hostility and jealousy. Because these assertions are made, and sentiments motivated and acted, they also provide the medium through which changes in social forms take place.

Among the Foreign Correspondents: Reflections on Anthropological Styles and Audiences

Abstract: The interface between anthropology and journalism is drawing increasing attention. Newsmedia foreign correspondents, in particular, are engaged in a pursuit parallel to that of classical anthropology, reporting from one part of the world to another. Yet they work under very different organizational circumstances and relate differently to time and space. Drawing on examples from the work of 'Africa correspondents', the paper discusses the possibilities of personal initative in reporting. It also notes the role of the newsmedia in shaping public engagements with the world, and comments on the part of anthropological writing in influencing public culture.

Subjects and Capital: A Fragment of a Documentary Ethnography

Abstract: This paper considers the workings of various kinds of 'capital' in the early lives of one cohort, the Class of '58 of a U.S. High School. Bourdieu's valuable concept of capital as both material and cultural/symbolic is augmented with the idea of 'psychological' capital, a concept meant to begin to fill a gap in Bourdieu's framework concerning the complexity of desires, intentions, and 'personalities' in acting subjects. The paper also tackles some problems of ethnographic and ethnohistorical representation, suggesting the value of an analogy with several sub-genres of documentary films.

Creating Coalitions and Causing Conflicts: Confronting Race and Gender through Partnered Ethnography

Abstract: Responding to cultural anthropology's shift from the major paradigm of culture-as-meaning to one that includes the politics as well as the poetics of culture, this article urges experimentation with field methods. To that end, it recounts one such experiment, an attempt at partnered ethnography. Envisioned as a palliative to the dilemmas faced while conducting research in a Black millenarian community, I attempted a partnership with a fellow anthropologist whose race and gender positionings identify and place him differently from my own. Aiming to transcend the partiality of knowledge that necessarily derives from the standpoint of a lone researcher, as well as to find a way out of the researcher-researched imbalance of power, it was our hope that this coalition would produce multi-layered, multiply-positioned ethnography and do justice to the host community. The case illustrates, however, that this utopian vision of complementary research can, and did, spawn the very same problems of identity and authori...

Henry and I: An Ethnographic Account of Men's Fiction Reading

Abstract: Men's fiction reading is explored through a study of the members of a literary society (the Henry Williamson Society) in the United Kingdom. The activity of solitary reading is linked to these readers' conceptions of self and masculinity. In particular, their accounts of the passions or rapture of reading are understood through a theory of possession. Members of the literary society regard the event of fiction reading as crucial to their life development, allowing them to experience a self that is not their own while at the same time gaining self-recognition. The essay contributes to the ethnography of reading.

Clean and Green: Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Models in a Philippine Community

Abstract: This article demonstrates how the study of indigenous knowledge can be enhanced by paying attention to the forms in which this knowledge is organized and the way it is embedded in a wider cultural matrix. The empirical setting is a community of small-scale farmers on the Philippine island of Bohol, where much agricultural knowledge is organized in a cultural model built around a concept of cleanliness. The main part of the article is concerned with analyzing this symbolic model of cleanliness. I examine how it is applied within agriculture as well as in other domains; its esthetic, moral and practical dimensions; and how it can be said to embody a particular vision of the nature-culture opposition. In conclusion, I suggest that the cultural models approach may also facilitate the analysis of how indigenous knowledge changes over time.

Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

Abstract: This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler's recent writings on kinship. In this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping to lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. Butler examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed the incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler's critique of kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to a vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the state. I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, whether or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. Anthropology's ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and recognition that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.

Biotechnology and the critique of globalisation

Abstract: This paper argues that human ambivalence toward global forces and biopower is grounded in age-old anxieties about the strange, the new, and the other, and that these anxieties reflect the extent to which people feel that they are in control of the forces impinging on their local moral worlds. Tolerance of risk is thus a function of ontological security, and will be experienced very differently in the North and the South.

Three-Dimensional Puzzles: Southern African and Upper Palaeolithic Rock Art

Abstract: The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series 'Key Informants on the History of Anthropology' contributes to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In the following invited contribution, David Lewis-Williams reflects on the major reinterpretation of southern African rock art and Upper Palaeolithic art that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. An earlier interpretation of the rock art as representing hunters' impressions of their prey was replaced by sophisticated interpretations of the cosmology of the first inhabitants of South Africa. Lewis-Williams's work was crucial in bringing about this shift. David Lewis-Williams is Professor Emeritus of Archaeology and founder of the Rock Art Research Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, which promotes studies of the more than 15,000 sites within the country.

Boundaries of memory and anthropology

Abstract: The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series 'Key Informants on the History of Anthropology' contributes to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In the following invited contribution Sandra Wallman uses her experience of fieldwork in the Italian Alps in the 1970s to reflect on the essential fuzziness of our categorial boundaries--between then and now, us and them, participant and observer, etc. Professor Sandra Wallman has also done fieldwork in Lesotho, London, Turin, Uganda and Zambia. She has worked in the universities of Amsterdam, Bristol, LSE, Stockholm and Toronto. From 1993 to 1997 she was chair of the (GB) Association of Social Anthropologists. Widely published on a range of contemporary issues, her books include Take out Hunger (1969), Eight London Households (1984), Kampala Women Getting By (1996), and the edited volumes Perceptions of Development (1977), Ethnicity at Work (1979),...

The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology

Abstract: T he field of anthropology has gone through a period of profound (self-)criticism for the last two, even three, decades. The criticisms have left virtually no stone unturned: theories and methods, fieldwork and writing, the politics of particular kinds of projects and of the anthropological enterprise as a whole. In response to those critiques, and in response as well to a radically changing world, anthropology has virtually reinvented itself as a field over that period of time. There has been an enormous reconceptualization of the objects of study, as well as the forms and modes of carrying out anthropological research. Indeed, the reconfiguration of anthropological objects, subjects, methods, and languages has gone much further than perhaps anyone has noticed. The anthropology contained in most of today’s journals would be almost unrecognizable to Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski. The new foci of anthropological inquiry, the new topics and entities and groups and formations under consideration, the new research designs that delocalize ethnography and that conjoin ethnographic research with all sorts of other methods, have by now been almost normalized. The four papers that follow are meant to illustrate some of the many changes in anthropological theory and practice under way. My own paper tackles the question of class in the would-be classless United States, and I use my high school graduating class as the ethnographic population. Akhil Gupta examines notions of reincarnation, and considers the ways in which taking these The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology