EthnologyPub Date : 2004-09-22DOI: 10.2307/3774029
A. Ploeg
{"title":"Wealth items in the Western Highlands of West Papua","authors":"A. Ploeg","doi":"10.2307/3774029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774029","url":null,"abstract":"This article compares the distinctive uses of wealth items among Grand Valley Dani, Western Dani, and Me, the largest ethnic groups in West Papua. The time period covered is primarily from first contact with Europeans to the early 1970s. (Wealth items, inalienability, ancestor cult, exchange) ********** The Western Highlands of West Papua extend from the Grand Valley of the Baliem to the western tip of the Central Highlands (see map). The area coincides with the \"Western Sphere\" of the Highlands as identified by Hyndman and Morren (1990). They define a sphere as \"a potentially expansive, segmentary, reticulated mosaic of local groups that, notwithstanding observable ethnolinguistic diversity, share a common tradition and are strongly influenced by one or more core populations at the historic-geographic centre of their region\" (Hyndman and Morren 1990:10). Hyndman and Morren (1990:13) distinguish three such spheres in the Central Highlands: Eastern, Central, and Western. The Eastern Sphere centers on \"a chain of eight valleys from Arona-Aiyura to Tari-Koroba\"; the Central on \"the Sepik Source Basin and the Sibil valley\"; and the Western centers \"on the Baliem valley and the Paniai Lakes.\" [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A number of ethnic groups, well represented in ethnographic studies, reside in the Western Highlands of West Papua. Best known are the Grand Valley Dani, the Western Dani, and the Me. The Grand Valley is located in the lower reaches of the Baliem River where it flows southeast through a wide valley with a relatively flat floor before it leaves the Highlands via the Baliem Gorge (see map). The habitat of the Grand Valley Dani is formed by the floor, the slopes of the valley, and its tributary valleys. The habitat of the Western Dani centers on the valleys of the North Baliem, the Boko, north of the Grand Valley, the Toli, the Yamo, and the Ila rivers. They occupy the entire middle section of the Western Highlands north and west of the Grand Valley. In the recent past they pushed further west. As a result, the valleys of the Ila, the upper Kema, the Nogolo, and the Dora have an ethnically mixed population of Western Dani, Damal, Moni, and some smaller groups. The habitat of the Me runs from the middle reaches of the Kema to the westernmost tip of the Highlands. Most Me live around the Paniai, Tigi, and Tage lakes, and in the valley of the Edege River and its tributaries. The Grand Valley Dani, the Western Dani, and the Me are by far the largest Highlands groups, and are the focus of this article. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC RECORD The establishment of colonial rule in the West Papua Highlands started in the late 1930s in the Paniai Lakes area. The extension of colonial control was interrupted by World War II. Missionaries and administrative officers settled in the Dani areas in the 1950s, in 1954 in the Grand Valley, and in 1956 among the Western Dani (Hayward 1980:124), and missionaries of various denominations have remained active. In 1963, the Indone","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"5 1","pages":"291-313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-09-22DOI: 10.2307/3774031
Melissa Schrift
{"title":"THE ANGOLA PRISON RODEO: INMATE COWBOYS AND INSTITUTIONAL TOURISM","authors":"Melissa Schrift","doi":"10.2307/3774031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774031","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Angola prison rodeo as a form of tourist performance and ritual. It argues that the rodeo capitalizes on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system. The essay introduces the notion of institutional tourism in relation to the polities of representation. (Tourism, performance, prison, spectacle, representation) ********** Every Sunday in October, thousands of people glut the back roads leading to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to be spectators at the Angola Prison Rodeo. Hailed as \"The Wildest Show in the South,\" the rodeo features untrained inmates competing in events borrowed from professional rodeo and made unique to Angola Prison. The rodeo thrives as a tourist attraction, not by virtue of its location but because it promises unparalleled spectacle. Spectators travel many miles to attend the Angola rodeo and access one of society's most censored private realms. Indeed, the prison is a space that defines itself by its ability to conceal. As a place that both hides offenders from the public eye and restricts inmates from accessing the public, the penitentiary denotes layered meanings of concealment. The United States' collective imagination of prison life implicates associations with the private--hidden contraband, clandestine sexual relations, dark and sinister thoughts. Though few could actually describe an isolation cell, most people can conjure some version of \"the hole'--a deep and dark place that stores the worst of humanity. Prisons are the antipublic, institutional replicas of hell itself. It is thus, perhaps, surprising that when the prison is made public, people line up to see. The spectacle of the Angola Rodeo is yet another example of contemporary popular culture's fascination with criminality, evident by the overwhelming success of television crime shows, entrepreneurial efforts to commodify prison life (Wright 2000), and the expanding industry of penal tourism (Adams 2001; Strange and Kempa 2003). Despite a robust anthropological literature on the local and global dynamics of tourism, penal tourism has received little ethnographic attention. This essay aims to encourage considerations of penal tourism through discussion of the Angola prison rodeo. Drawing from scholarship that understands tourism as ritualized interaction and performance, this article suggests that the Angola rodeo, like many tourist sites, capitalizes on the promise of cultural difference rendered through the display of inmate cowboys participating in a rodeo on prison grounds. It argues that the rodeo serves as a forum for the display of animalistic inmate others who are effectively subdued by a progressive penal system that simultaneously ensures captivity, control, and rehabilitation. The Angola rodeo is treated in this discussion as an officially sponsored tourist ritual that plays on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"331-344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-09-22DOI: 10.2307/3774032
Jeffrey C. Kaufmann
{"title":"Prickly pear cactus and pastoralism in southwest Madagascar","authors":"Jeffrey C. Kaufmann","doi":"10.2307/3774032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774032","url":null,"abstract":"Madagascar's Mahafale cattle raisers have adopted several species of the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) into their subsistence patterns. Their use of Opuntia has had the economic effects of both sedentary and transhumant intensification. It lengthens the stay of pastoralists at their villages and structures the timing of their seasonal migration to distant pastures. (Cactus-plant cattle fodder, pastoralism, sedentarization, Mahafale, Madagascar) This article explains how several thousand Mahafale pastoralists in southwestern Madagascar have incorporated prickly pear (Opuntia) into their pastoral economy, which depends on assisting their cattle through the dry season, when grass and water are scarce. Rather than relying on nomadism in the pursuit of water and pasture for their livestock, the pastoralists have turned to cactus to keep stock alive. So pivotal is Opuntia in the cattle diet that they categorize it as sakafon-drano (water-food). This plant-human relationship, therefore, is central to an understanding of Mahafale economic life. Prickly pear, a cactus of the genus Opuntia, recognized by its characteristic thorned, flattened segments, has thrived in places far from its original New World homelands. In the Mediterranean region, people have cooked with fresh, broad, flat, segmented Opuntia stems (called nopalitos in Spanish) and its ripe, fleshy pears (L'Allemand 1958:113). In Sicily, varieties of the tree-shaped Opuntia ficus-indica, which can grow to a height of twenty feet or more and forms a woody trunk at the base, have been valued for their fruit as well their hedging, foraging, and wind-breaking (Barbera, Inglese, and Pimienta-Barrios 1995:18). Cactus pears have been a principal fruit crop of North African nomads, who also boiled down the fruit juice, which is rich in vitamins, as a molasses substitute (Meyer and McLaughlin 1981:108). Outside of rice-growing areas in India, farmers have maintained large hedges of thorny O. dillenii (Donkin 1977:44). O. hernandezii has been grown in Senegal for hedging, opposing the expansion of sand, and for its fruit (Chevalier 1947:453). Agriculturalists in North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya) have lined their cropped land, roads, and camel trails with cactus fencing (Monjauze and Le Houerou 1965). Sheep and cattle ranchers in Australia have colonized dry lands by feeding prickly pear to their stock (Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board 1925; Dodd 1940). Pastoralists have used cacti as cattle fodder in Sicily, Tunisia, South Africa, and Madagascar (Monjauze and Le Houerou 1965:104). THE CACTUS REGION IN MADAGASCAR Prickly pear has affected the Mahafale pastoralist way of life, particularly in terms of mobility, diet, and gender relations. Women harvest cactus, collecting tuna, the prickly pear fruit, for their families to eat. They also sell the surplus as a cash crop. Male herders work cactus as a vegetable crop for cattle. They singe truncated cactus nopales, the fleshy leaf pads, over a fir","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"345-361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.2307/3774034
J. Shannon
{"title":"The aesthetics of spiritual practice and the creation of moral and musical subjectivities in Aleppo, Syria","authors":"J. Shannon","doi":"10.2307/3774034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774034","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes the performance of dhikr (the invocation of God through prayer, song, and movement) in Aleppo, Syria, as an embodied practice mediated by specific repertoires of aesthetic and kinesthetic practices. In dhikr, aesthetic stimuli produce an experience of temporal transformation that participants narrate as \"ecstasy.\" Performing dhikr also conditions a musical self, which in turn allows for the habituation of spiritual states. This suggests the importance of investigating the interface of embodied practices, temporality, and the aesthetics of spiritual practice. (Aesthetics, temporality, music, Islam, Syria) ********** Although much has been written on Islamic art (Grabar 1973, 2003; Naef 2003), most studies have focused on the aesthetics of the word and image, the sound and texture of sacred texts and prayers, and the graphical depiction of divinity in, for example, the arabesque (Nelson 1985; Behrens-Abouseif 1999). However, less attention has been paid to the relationships of Islamic art to specific forms of Muslim piety, specifically the sensory techniques of Muslim worship that condition and enable spiritual states. According to the great twelfth-century Muslim scholar al-Ghazzali (1901-02, 1991), the spiritual life of the devout Muslim is formed not only through prayer but also through aesthetic practices. Among these are the art of sama' (audition), which denotes acts of listening and bodily practices associated with the achievement of ecstatic states. Following recent anthropological literature that strives to understand Muslim spirituality as mediated by bodily practices (Mahmood 2001; Hirschkind 2001), this essay examines the interplay of aesthetic and spiritual practices in Aleppo, Syria. It focuses on the dhikr, or ritual invocation and remembrance of God through prayer, incantation of sacred texts, song, and bodily motions that form a dance--practices generally associated with Sufism. Many participants in Aleppo understand dhikr to be an orthodox Sunni practice, and not something associated primarily with Sufism (Shannon, In press; Pinto 2002). Through the practice of dhikr, Muslims in Aleppo fulfill a Qur'anic obligation to invoke God and at the same time they may seek to attain physical and emotional states that promote spiritual transformation. Two musical processes, melodic modulation (tarqiyya) and rhythmic acceleration (kartah), structure the dhikr and, in conjunction with specific kinesthetic, visual, olfactory, and tactile cues, affect the sensate body to inculcate experiences of transformation and condition a spiritual and musical self. They do this by promoting transformations in participants' experience of temporality in the course of performing dhikr. In the context of debates within Muslim communities concerning the permissibility of music in Islam, this analysis reveals that musical practices are at the heart of this form of Muslim spirituality. RITUAL PRACTICE, THE BODY, AND MEMORY Scholars have address","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"381-391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.2307/3774030
J. Traphagan
{"title":"Interpretations of elder suicide, stress, and dependency among rural Japanese","authors":"J. Traphagan","doi":"10.2307/3774030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774030","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores ideas expressed by older, rural Japanese to explain suicide among their age peers. It also looks at how older Japanese conceptualize residing with children and grandchildren in terms of dependency and stress. While the multigeneration household often is represented by both young and old in Japan as an ideal living situation for the elderly, many elders also see coresidence as a significant source of stress due to conflicting values held between generations. For many rural elderly, the stress associated with coresidence is viewed as being sufficiently severe to lead some of them to end their lives. Based on conversations held with elders in rural Japan, these themes are contextualized in terms of Japanese concepts of suicide. (Japan, suicide, aging, dependency, stress) ********** In the summer of 1998, Satoh Keiko, a woman in her mid-thirties, succinctly expressed a common theme used by people in rural northern Japan to interpret the motivations of elders who kill themselves: \"Elderly who are living alone do not commit suicide all that often, but those who are living with children and grandchildren often commit suicide.\" The idea that living with one's children and grandchildren is likely to influence an elder to commit suicide seems at odds with widely held assumptions about the centrality of filial piety in shaping intergenerational relationships in Japan, as well as stereotyped images of later life in Japan in which older people are represented as being happiest living in multigenerational households (e.g., Palmore and Maeda 1985). Using data from Taiwan, Wolf (1972, 1975) argues that suicide can be a form of sanction against young family members, as people, particularly natal kin, raise questions about what drove the deceased to end his or her life. The actual or assumed threat of suicide can be a strategy elders use to manipulate their children (Ikels 2004b:7; Wolf 1972:159-60). This insight may apply to the high rate of elder suicide in rural Japan, for self-aggression in Japan can be interpreted as a \"sign of resentment against a source of frustration\" in interpersonal conflicts (Lebra 1984:48). Self-destruction, then, is one possible way for someone in Japan to cope with conflict, particularly where direct confrontation is not valued in interpersonal relationships. For Satoh-san, the multigeneration household does not necessarily insulate an elder from loneliness and isolation. In fact, as will become evident from the data presented here, the multigeneration household in Japan may well represent a context in which suicidal feelings are intensified as a result of stressful relationships with kin. Elder suicide in Japan is interpreted in part in terms of perceptions about multiple and conflicting cultural frames existing within a confined social space. For many Japanese, younger and older generations are perceived as having completely different core values, which leads to considerable stress between those generations (T","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"315-329"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-06-22DOI: 10.2307/3774062
John B. Gatewood, C. Cameron
{"title":"Battlefield pilgrims at Gettysburg National Military Park","authors":"John B. Gatewood, C. Cameron","doi":"10.2307/3774062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774062","url":null,"abstract":"Historic battlefields provoke a broad range of responses from visitors. This article reports on the reasons people give for visiting Gettysburg National Military Park and the perceptions and images they have of the park. The meanings that Gettysburg has for people are varied and in some cases highly affective. The research provides empirical support for the suggestion of other studies that sometimes battlefield visitors begin as tourists, but then are transformed into pilgrims. (Battlefield tourism, pilgrimage, historic sites) ********** Despite world history being riddled with events of war, few battlefields have been marked for remembrance, perhaps because the sites recall destruction, death, and sometimes feelings of disgrace, anger, or despair. Many battlefields, if stripped of casualties and the detritus of war, are physically unremarkable and need to be transformed from neutral terrains into culturally meaningful landscapes (Gold and Gold 2003; Kapralski 2001). The transformation is done by the placement of physical artifacts such as monuments, statues, and gelded war machines, as well as the use of verbal text: brochures, guidebooks, signs, plaques, and tour guides. All these shape and define the visitors' experience on ground that otherwise may seem unprepossessing. The growing literature on battlefield tourism documents some of the history of restoration efforts in Europe, North America, and Australia (e.g., Diller and Scofidio 1994; Gold and Gold 2003; Linenthal 1991; Lloyd 1998; Ramsay 2001; Weeks 2003). There is general agreement that battlefield restoration, a Subset of commemoration activities, began in the nineteenth century in association with the creation of national histories and patriotic fervor in young states such as America or the renewed states of Europe (Gillis 1994). Anderson's (1991) work has helped to show how the veneration of military death is linked to modern nationalistic impulses. In the nineteenth century, battlefields and military cemeteries came to be seen as holy places, sanctified by the death of soldiers. These deaths were framed as sacrifices for the highly abstract notion of a nation or what Anderson (1991) describes as an \"imagined community.\" In the United States, where there was a dearth of religious shrines, battlefields, military cemeteries, and monuments came to be regarded as sacred places. Linenthal (1991:4) argues that in the nineteenth century, a common religious-style rhetoric he calls the \"patriotic canon\" permeated the text of remembrance at American military sites with the oft-repeated themes of \"war as holy crusade, bringing new life to the nation and warrior as culture hero and savior.\" To the extent that battlefields are regarded as holy sites, visitors might think of themselves as pilgrims. This notion is apparent in Walter's (1993:72) study of a World War II battlefield in which he describes what he and others experienced, where \"for a few moments [visitors] cease to be tourists and have ","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"193-216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774062","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-06-22DOI: 10.2307/3774066
James S. Bielo
{"title":"Walking in the spirit of blood: Moral identity among born-again christians","authors":"James S. Bielo","doi":"10.2307/3774066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774066","url":null,"abstract":"The proliferation of small groups within American Protestantism, in particular those devoted to Bible study, raises questions about the collective construction of meaning in congregational life. Using discourse as an analytical tool, this article explores the meaning of moral identity as constructed in three Protestant groups in the southern United States. Discursive participants relied on three strategies for building a concept of the moral self: positioning the heart at the center of moral identity; describing what it means to be born again; and describing three moral \"others.\" (Discourse, moral identity, born-again Christianity) ********** Recent ethnographic work among mainline Protestants has noted the centrality of Bible study to congregational life, individual spirituality, and religious communication (Wuthnow 1994a, 1994b; Davie 1995; Roberts n.d.). Similarly, anthropologists working with text-based religions have been called to shift attention from the internal properties of those texts to the active processes through which their meaning is engaged, interpreted, and applied by adherents; what Bowen (1992:495) calls the \"social life of scriptures.\" This article bridges these two lines of research by examining how, within three Protestant groups, Bible-study discourse is concentrated on answering the central question of what it means to be moral. The question of moral identity is placed in relation to these groups' dominant sense of religious belonging as born-again Christians, and considered for how it is achieved, communicated, and reaffirmed through the discursive action of members. While some anthropological attention has been directed toward the cultural grammar of the born-again movement (Stromberg 1993; Harding 2000), this article takes a discourse-centered approach to the construction of moral identity, viewing language as a form of social practice rather than a system of rhetoric. It is necessary here to define \"discourse,\" a favored term in anthropology (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990:7). Three understandings of discourse are employed by anthropologists: first, as a single stretch of talk or written text, in either dialogic or monologue form (Sherzer 1987); second, as a collection of interpersonal and/or written texts occurring across a defined time and space, and usually concerning a particular topic (Stewart 1996); third, as a historically deep field of texts, symbols, and practices typically analyzed to discern institutional relations of power (Foucault 1980). This essay employs the second of these approaches. Accordingly, the discourse-centered approach is not the same as that proposed by Urban (1991), but instead uses Bahktin's (1934) premise that all speech is situated within a larger discursive setting. Discourse is open ended, and therefore must be approached across time and space to allow its ongoing meanings to be revealed. It therefore is necessary to investigate discursive activity across numerous Bible studies. Utterances ","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"271-289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-06-22DOI: 10.2307/3774064
Satsuki Kawano
{"title":"Scattering ashes of the family dead: Memorial activity among the bereaved in contemporary Japan","authors":"Satsuki Kawano","doi":"10.2307/3774064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774064","url":null,"abstract":"Challenging the normative practice of interment, scattering ashes emerged as a new ritual in Japan during the 1990s. Both sensational and controversial, the practice has met with cries of protest and enthusiastic support. As an expression of their respect and affection, people in Japan are expected to venerate the family dead at a family altar and a family grave. Because maintaining the grave evokes the cherished notion of filial piety, some regard scattering ashes as a threat to memorial tradition. But the bereaved who scatter their kin's ashes continue to memorialize their kin by selectively altering certain aspects of memorial activity. They create personally significant ways to honor their loved ones. Scattering ashes, characterized by innovation and flexibility, has increased the range of memorial practices in Japan. (Japan, memorials, ritual change, ancestor worship) ********** Although scattering cremated ashes, or cremains, had been long considered illegal in postwar Japan, the number of people supporting the practice has increased since the establishment of a citizens' movement in 1991, the Grave-Free Promotion Society (GFPS). (2) In postwar Japan, the stem family (ie) a Buddhist-style altar (butsudan), and had a social contract with a Buddhist temple to venerate ancestors at a family grave. The GFPS has been promoting people's right to choose scattering ashes and thus has challenged mortuary convention. People's reactions to scattering have been mixed. Because establishing and maintaining a family grave easily conjures up a positive moral idea of filial piety, opponents view scattering as a denial of reverence for the ancestors. In particular, some Buddhist priests, funeral specialists, and gravestone-providers implicitly or explicitly depict scattering as an antifilial act showing little respect for ancestors. A 53-year-old priest of the Shingon Buddhist Sect, for example, attacked scattering: \"Just throwing the ashes like unwanted objects is disrespectful\" (Japan Times 2004). (3) As scattering is sometimes considered the denial of ceremonies for the family dead, this priest urges the Japanese to \"preserve our unique culture for ceremonies and graves.\" Is scattering an antifilial denial of duty and respect for ancestors and custom? By drawing from traditional memorial acts as well as crafting their own, ash-scatterers create a personalized memorial activity. Rather than devaluing the deceased, ash-scatterers express their sense of fulfillment in having helped the deceased achieve a desired return to nature. Thus a 66-year-old woman declared, \"My deceased husband must be resting peacefully at sea embraced by Mother Nature--to which he wanted to return.\" At issue with ash-scatterers is not the dismissal of memorial activity for the family dead, but rather their choice of meaningful methods. For most postwar Japanese, death and ancestor rites have often been conducted as Buddhist rituals. Thirty years ago, Smith (1974:113) had already obs","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"233-248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774064","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-06-22DOI: 10.2307/3774065
N. Bubandt
{"title":"Genesis in Buli: Christianity, blood, and vernacular modernity on an Indonesian Island","authors":"N. Bubandt","doi":"10.2307/3774065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774065","url":null,"abstract":"Christianity and local ontology in the North Malukan village of Buli intersect in surprising ways that upset conventional ideas about tradition and modernity. The poetics and cultural politics of blood, as these emerge in an idiosyncratic telling of Genesis, attest to a paradoxical modernity. In this ambivalent modern imaginary, traditional ontology frequently structures pretensions to being modern, while modern sensibilities form the basis of ostensibly traditional assertions. Attending to the discursive and ontological aspects of blood in Buli therefore provides a way of analyzing the entangled imaginaries of modernity and tradition in a marginalized Indonesian community, and by extension a way of bringing the debates about invented traditions and alternative modernities into constructive conversation. (Symbolism and politics of blood, alternative modernities, objectified tradition)","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"249-270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774065","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EthnologyPub Date : 2004-06-22DOI: 10.2307/3774063
Juan Carlos Skewes, Debbie Guerra
{"title":"The Defense of Maiquillahue Bay: Knowledge, Faith, and Identity in an Environmental Conflict","authors":"Juan Carlos Skewes, Debbie Guerra","doi":"10.2307/3774063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3774063","url":null,"abstract":"After two years of active resistance, in 1998, the people of Mehuin in southern Chile succeeded in stopping the construction of a pipeline that would have spewed industrial waste from the largest pulp mill under construction in South America into Maiquillahue Bay. This article analyzes the power of the Defense Committee of Mehuin's discourse in mobilizing the people. The outcome of this conflict illustrates the committee's ability to connect the pipeline's threat with local transcendental meanings, while scientifically explaining the pipeline's ecological impact. Thus, residents could make sense of the danger in the context of their culture, be motivated to defend the bay, and also have their understanding of nature transformed. The case suggests that local communities may engage in a symbiotic and scientifically informed relation to nature and become wardens of their environment. (Environmental conflict, Chile, scientific and religious knowledge, political ecology) ********** The projected construction of a pipeline for the discharge of industrial waste was a turning point for the people of Mehuin, in Chile. In an unprecedented case starting in 1996 and extending for two years, the local community challenged and defeated COPEC, the largest Chilean holding company. Contrary to national and regional expectations, a handful of rural villagers proved capable of better safeguarding nature than the national environmental laws. Their success preserved their environment and their economy. The successful defense of Maiquillahue Bay demonstrates how local residents were able to create a discourse that allowed no dissent among them and made any negotiation with the corporation impossible. Based on documents from the days of the conflict and on interviews and group discussions, this article analyzes the discourse of the Defense Committee of Mehuin, a committee created to stop the construction of the pipeline. The victory is a tribute to the people's ability to apply a transcendental meaning shared by different groups that populate the area to mobilize against the ominous threat. The pipeline came to be known as fatidic, ducto fatidico, the fatal (or fated) pipeline, a term that became an icon unifying the community in its struggle. The Defense Committee's discourse incorporated the various views in Mehuin, including those of fishermen, small business people, indigenous and other residents, and Catholic and Pentecostal believers. In so doing, the committee integrated local practical knowledge, religious views, and scientific concepts. As rural and indigenous inhabitants of the countryside, the residents were regarded as naive and easy to manipulate. They were, instead, capable of describing the unique maritime and fluvial aquatic populations of the Lingue River and Maiquillahue Bay. In describing the effect of industrial residues, they alluded to the role winds and tides have in disseminating pollutants. They also understood the chemical composition of chlor","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"217-231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3774063","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68997650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}