Showing papers in "Ethnos in 2007"
TL;DR: The authors argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as they show with data from Papua New Guinea.
Abstract: Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. In light of this, a key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. I argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea.
200 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored commodity exchange as a morally inflected practice, one that mediates competing tensions of greed and generosity, the sacred and profane, and affection and estrangement through the fairtrade flower.
Abstract: This paper explores commodity exchange as a morally inflected practice, one that mediates competing tensions of greed and generosity, the sacred and profane, and affection and estrangement through the fairtrade flower. Using the UK–Kenya fairtrade flower commodity chain to examine the cultural economy of fairtrade, I suggest that like the charity business and the international development industry, fairtrade complicates the distinction between the sacred and secular and the gift and commodity as Northern consumers and NGOs weave webs of obligation through the medium of the market. Further, I argue that while fairtrade is predicated on values of partnership and interdependence, it also operates within commodity chains that advance liberal ethics as a mode of ‘governmentality’ over African producers, translating consumers' sympathy-based humanism into new technologies of regulation and surveillance.
70 citations
TL;DR: This article took books in retrospect and gave one the opportunity to do something perhaps rather more significant than simply reviewing books and comment on their merits as the books are published. But taking books in hindsight gives one the chance to do a rather more signific
Abstract: Normally, academics simply review books and comment on their merits as the books are published But taking books in retrospect gives one the opportunity to do something perhaps rather more signific
64 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the production of material and symbolic value as expressed through the ongoing commoditization and potential transformation of the type of salami made in Bergamo, a town and province in Northern Italy.
Abstract: Recently, in Italy and other European countries, certain foods have become markers of cultural continuity and economic possibility as various actors negotiate the value of these products. Using the concepts of recontextualization and tournaments of value, this article considers the production of material and symbolic value as it is expressed through the ongoing commoditization and potential transformation of the type of salami made in Bergamo, a town and province in Northern Italy. It focuses on various regimes of value to clarify competing visions of how production, consumption, and modernization are connected, and illuminates not only the process of how a local delicacy gets elevated to the status of gourmet product, but also how authenticity and prestige, which often seem to go hand in hand, become paired.
52 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors look at the context of materialised memories - the consumption and framing of photographs - and propose that these modes of framing mirror the relationships within and surrounding the household, and locate them in short-hand time frames characteristic of the social exchanges appropriate to those relationships.
Abstract: This paper looks at the context of materialised memories - the consumption and framing of photographs. Ethnographic work in British homes unearthed diverse ways of consuming and displaying photos. We propose that these modes of framing mirror the relationships within and surrounding the household, and locate them in short-hand time frames characteristic of the social exchanges appropriate to those relationships. Through framing, people flog their collective good intentions to conduct relationships appropriately over time, without capitulating either to the risk of over-imposing nor of neglect. As a counterpart to Gell's and Strathern's analyses of art and social efficacy, our work illustrates the capacity within British family culture to materialise intention around on efficacious social object,constructing intention as a quality of persons not objects while retaining the agent-like Properties of photographs.
44 citations
TL;DR: The amulpullun biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to complete the person as discussed by the authors, which challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person.
Abstract: The amulpullun biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to ‘complete’ the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be ‘completed,’ and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeur's concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceased's person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than ...
43 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s, and argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communal identity as by individual experience.
Abstract: Developing recent ethnographic work on the subjective experiences of those involved in traumatic events, this paper examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are only now beginning to surface, and the paper considers the transition from the private experience of suffering to its public telling. It focuses on how people find a voice for their telling and what happens as a result of breaking the silence. Of special interest is the language and style in which the narratives enter the public domain, and the silences that remain. The paper argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communalidentity as byindividualexperience, and thereby complements the trauma literature that tends to emphasise the latter.
43 citations
TL;DR: This paper used the case study of one Evangelical Sunday school teacher and his life as a "Christian businessman" to argue that conceptions of personal financial success among born-again Christians are structured by the prevailing model of Born-Again personhood.
Abstract: In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday school teacher – Rick Betcher – and his life as a ‘Christian businessman.’ Anthropologists and other scholars have shown great interest in how matters of money figure in the culture of Protestantism. Using Rick's self-designed Sunday school class, The Mind of Christ, I argue that conceptions of personal financial success among born-again Christians are structured by the prevailing model of born-again personhood – the New Mind.
38 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo, and found that for many of them, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as intrinsic to Bidiuh-ness and other aspects of life.
Abstract: This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the ‘fluid’ and ‘shifting’ nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as intrinsic to Bidayuh-ness and other aspects of life. Moreover, this sense of flxity has been mapped onto their conceptions of the (Malay-dominated) Malaysian ethnic system, in which they are inescapably entangled. The article investigates some of the consequent tensions arising from Bidayuh (dis)engagements with Malaysia's ethnic ‘flxity’, while tracing certain trends and changes in this relationship.
38 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Cusqueno citizens invoke the same representations, with competing claims of authenticity and authority, as they construct their own versions of Incanist identification in populist movements against the state and its enforcement of the global neoliberal order, as well as in their attempts to survive in the tourist economy.
Abstract: The Peruvian state's neoliberal policies include its mission to modernize Peru through international tourism and foreign investment, and tourism promoters and politicians increasingly invoke Andean mysticism and Inca patrimony (or incanismo) as a marketing strategy. This paper argues that Cusqueno citizens invoke the same representations, with competing claims of authenticity and authority, as they construct their own versions of Incanist identification in populist movements against the state and its enforcement of the global neoliberal order, as well as in their attempts to survive in the tourist economy. In Peru, criticism of the tourist industry is often grounded in incanismo and seems to take aim at the neoliberal order. However, closer analysis reveals a more complicated set of relationships between resistance and liberalism. Friction emerges not because cultural identity is being commodified or inequalities persist, but because local desires for access to the market are frustrated by state ...
36 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the political and cultural effects of the Islamic opposition's call to boycott US goods in Malaysia in the wake of 9/11 and show how this issue evokes a wide range of contestations and paradoxes in the everyday lives of suburban Malay Muslim middle-class families.
Abstract: Much current anti-consumerist and anti-globalisation discourse identifies boycotting as an immensely powerful force. Religious and secular activists alike pro- mote consumer boycotts as a type of practised resistance that promises to break US economic, military and cultural hegemony. Obviously, consumers' support is essential for the success of such boycotts, and I argue that insufficient anthropological atten- tion has been paid to the micro-social logics of modern forms of boycotting. This article examines the political and cultural effects of the Islamic opposition's call to boycott US goods in Malaysia in the wake of 9/11. I shall show how this issue evokes a wide range of contestations and paradoxes in the everyday lives of suburban Malay Muslim middle-class families. Most of all, the boycott confronts divergent Malay middle-class groups with the problem of how to translate intentionality into practice.
TL;DR: The authors examines notions of hierarchy and leadership among Asheninka people in Peruvian Amazonia and argues that individuals believe that peaceful social reproduction is best achieved by acting independently and respecting the autonomy of others but that aggregation and differentiation remain an option in circumstances where individual action would be ineffectual.
Abstract: This article examines notions of hierarchy and leadership among Asheninka people in Peruvian Amazonia. It considers the apparent disjunction between individuals' preference for a peaceful and autonomous everyday existence and the Asheninka's renowned ability to form large-scale cooperative groups under powerful leaders. Responding to recent anthropological writings that recognise the variability of political forms both across and within Amazonian societies, the article focuses on the social and political preoccupations that can be seen to underlie both social forms among the Asheninka. It argues that individuals believe that peaceful social reproduction is best achieved by acting independently and respecting the autonomy of others but that aggregation and differentiation remain an option in circumstances where individual action would be ineffectual. The article also examines how the Asheninka use outsiders as effective organisers that also symbolise the problems of coercive power.
TL;DR: In this article, a Sasak woman's efforts to rebuild her house and to achieve compatibility with its inhabitants were described. But more than comfort is at issue in the elective affinity between houses and bodies: our very identity is at stake.
Abstract: The concept of ‘compatibility’ has a particular saliencein many Indonesian societies. This article examines ‘compatibility’ with reference to person–house relationships on the island of Lombok. Examining a case where the house and its inhabitants had become incompatible, the article follows one Sasak woman's efforts to rebuild her house and to achieve compatibility. Stressing the unpredictable and recalcitrant quality of material things, the article shows how the materiality of the house imparts dynamism into the relation between a house and its inhabitants. The article suggests that the house is not only a pivot of reflexivity but a vehicle of action. But more than comfort is at issue in the elective affinity between houses and bodies: our very identity is at stake. edward s. casey, 1993
TL;DR: The authors examines state-citizen interactions in the Pelourinho Historical Center of Salvador, Brazil and argues that attention to sound provides a number of ways of updating longstanding anthropological concerns with structure and agency.
Abstract: This article examines state–citizen interactions in the Pelourinho Historical Center of Salvador, Brazil. It argues that attention to sound in the Pelourinho provides a number of ways of updating longstanding anthropological concerns with structure and agency. On the basis of attention to sound it addresses social action around play, the ability to position oneself in flows of signs, and the adroit manipulation of different classes of sign. This article is thus a phenomenologicallyinfluenced criticism of an anthropology of meaning based on the arbitrary sign and accompanying form/content and subject/object distinctions. Yet it emphasizes also that a naive celebration of ontology and the materiality of sign vehicles ignores the extent to which both communication and agency may turn on people's ability to move pragmatically between non-referential language and more fully symbolic communicative events.
TL;DR: This article explored the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families, through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts, one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996-97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004-05.
Abstract: Focusing on the idea of dwelling in the field, this paper explores the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families. Through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts – one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996 –97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004–05 – I interrogate what it means to inhabit the field. In the world of multi-sited ethnography all research sites are not created equal; both in terms of the kinds of data one can collect and the types of observations one can make. How ethnographers are situated in a web of affliations affects their experience in the field, what they observe, and their research practice. I propose renewed attention to how anthropologists live in the field, including how relationships are interpreted in the field by ethnographers and their informants.
TL;DR: A twist of fate took me unexpectedly, and in short order, from the red dust of the Western Desert of Australia to blacksands of volcanic ash in a chain of tropical islands in the southwest Pacific.
Abstract: A twist of fate took me unexpectedly, and in short order, from the red dust of the Western Desert of Australia to blacksands of volcanic ash in a chain of tropical islands in the southwest Pacific....
Journal Article•
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Anthropologists are Talking as mentioned in this paper is a series of informal academic conversations, corridor talk, and debates with colleagues at seminars and conferences, which aim to emulate these kinds of informal conversations in the conviction that they often turn out to be formative for the ideas that later become the basis of our publications.
Abstract: This is the second feature of ‘Anthropologists Are Talking’. 1 The aim of the series is to provide an alternative to the standard, single-author article that academic journals generally publish in order to give space to a more dialogic kind of reflection. When they do not write, anthropologists arguably spend much of their professional time (though perhaps not as much as they might like) engaged in informal academic conversations, corridor talk, and debates with colleagues at seminars and conferences. ‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ seeks to emulate these kinds of informal conversations in the conviction that they often turn out to be formative for the ideas that later become the basis of our publications. The series is intended to explore these informal kinds of inspiration and knowledge production that otherwise rarely make it into academic journals. The series does so by bringing together a group of anthropologists and inviting them to talk candidly and spontaneously about a contemporary issue of common concern to them. This conversation took place in May 2006 at Hindsgavl in Denmark in connection with the conference ‘Reinventing the Whole in a Global World’ organised by the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography. The conversation was recorded, moderated and edited by Nils Bubandt. The topic ‘Anthropology After Globalisation’ was chosen to spotlight the ambivalent changes that the relationship between the global and the anthropological is currently undergoing. On the one hand, the topic invites the participants to take stock of the concept of ‘globalisation’ and evaluate the state-of–the-art of anthropological analyses of the global situation. What are, to put it differently, the strengths and weaknesses, the platitudes and profundities of current anthropological thinking about the global? On the other hand, the topic attempts to focus attention on the global forces that are reshaping anthropology as a subject and an institution in fundamental ways at the very same time that the discipline is trying to get a methodological, analytical, and theoretical handle on these forces. The topic invites
TL;DR: In this paper, a specific connection between the living and the dead is explored based on fieldwork among the Sa'dan Toraja of Indonesia, which implies an indigenous phenomenology of death-as-being-in-the-world.
Abstract: Based on fieldwork among the Sa'dan Toraja of Indonesia, this article explores a specific connection between the living and the dead. Perceived as a sensual relationship embedded in a particular sensory modality, this connection implies an indigenous phenomenology of ‘death-as-being-in-the-world’. Focusing on this ‘being’ and utilizing Paul Valery's evocative description of the ‘glance of death’ to introduce and formulate my argument, I explore the lives of the dead and examine the power of their senses. More than that, rather than re-presentation and epistemology, I argue for an understanding of death which places the emphasis on indigenous ontology and foregrounds the affective way in which Toraja live their lives and their deaths.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on food in newly independent, increasingly authoritarian Uzbekistan where the focus is on national cuisine in part because of deprivation, rather than abundance, and food indexes both rituals of the nation as national cuisine yet links with myriad and variable performances as it is grown, cooked and eaten.
Abstract: Nations reverberate with the conundrums of unity and difference. Studies of food provide an effective way to understand this paradox as food indexes both rituals of the nation as national cuisine yet links with myriad and variable performances as it is grown, cooked and eaten. National foods enhance ethnic nationality in newly independent, increasingly authoritarian Uzbekistan where the focus is on national cuisine in part because of deprivation, rather than abundance. National cuisine is vulnerable to differences within a nation, because in the shared and embodied practices surrounding food, people make emotion-based evaluations of the nation-state. Uzbek governmental policies result in poverty, limited food production, little global food, and repression of pure Islamic practices, regions, and minority ethnic groups.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the methodological implications of Clifford's approach through the description and analysis of thirty-six hours spent in the company of a Yakkha family and friends in the Nepalese Tarai, serendipitously encountered while the author was "en route".
Abstract: This article addresses the debates surrounding Clifford's paper ‘Traveling Cultures’ and its argument that greater attention should be paid to ‘routes’ as well as ‘roots’ in anthropological research. It is based on research into the socio-cultural effects and outcomes of migration amongst the Yakkha, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group originating in the middle hills of East Nepal. It considers the methodological implications of Clifford's approach through the description and analysis of thirty-six hours spent in the company of a Yakkha family and friends in the Nepalese Tarai, serendipitously encountered while the author was ‘en route’. The conclusion drawn is that Clifford's ‘strong’ form of ‘fieldwork as travel practice’ is more difficult to justify than his ‘softer’ suggestion that ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ be studied together.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a fifteen-year engagement in a fieldwork project in remote Third World locations, where anthropologists often move on to a new field and cease publishing on their former site without formally indicating the completion of their research goals.
Abstract: Ethnographic texts preserve the historicity and losses of both the people observed and their observer. However, anthropologists rarely inform their readers about the circumstances of their departure from a fieldwork project. Without formally indicating the completion of their research goals, they usually move on to a new field and cease publishing on their former site. This procedure seemed natural enough when anthropologists conducted their studies in remote Third World locations. The constraints of distance, time, and budget made that abrupt separation seemingly inevitable and self-explanatory. But when anthropologists choose fieldwork sites that are close to home or easy to revisit, or conduct long-term research, their relationships with their subjects change radically, both during fieldwork and during the stages of writing and publishing the ethnographic text. Consequently, their eventual exit from the field involves a different process. Based on the experience of a fifteenyear engagement in ...