Ethnology最新文献

{"title":"Many Ways of Becoming a Woman: The Case of Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian \"Girls\"","authors":"Amalia Sa'ar","doi":"10.2307/3773852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773852","url":null,"abstract":"Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women are normatively expected to remain virgins and social juniors, yet in practice their handling of their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, produces a range of social personas. While some indeed remain submissive and suppressed, others undergo sexual maturation. Detailed ethnographic attention to their lifestyles, and particularly to their sexuality, disproves any stereotypic impressions held of this group of Arab women. As liminal persons, unmarried women serve not only as delineators of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Contextualizing the phenomenon historically, the analysis considers how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. (Sexuality, virginity, gender, liminality) Linguistically referred to as \"girls\" (banat), unmarried Palestinian women in Israel have a strong likelihood of being barred from adult femininity, as well as being generally marginalized. Local explanations of the use of \"girls\" as a form of reference to unmarried women emphasize their assumed virginal state. The term banat also means \"daughters,\" which highlights the second aspect of their classification. As those who \"remain daughters\" (byithallin banat), their primary role remains the one they have in their family of orientation, which has no adult position for them. They therefore allegedly remain fixed in an ongoing child-like status. The linguistic gesture of infantilizing and desexualizing unmarried women represents a normative expectation that the passage to womanhood should occur in a specific, institutionalized form. Against this narrow expectation, this ethnography of unmarried women (1) discloses a wide diversity of personal types, ranging from extremely submissive or \"girlish\" to outgoing and charismatic individuals who can hardly be described as girls. This essay focuses on the sexuality of these women, and uses their liminality as a prism to understand notions of womanhood in Israeli-Palestinian culture generally. Formal and practical forms of local knowledge are not consistent with the local conviction that unless females marry, they cannot mature in a socially accepted way. Despite the stigma associated with the term banat, many unmarried females overcome the pitfalls set by the norm of marriage and do attain womanhood. These persons successfully resist their restriction to become sexually mature, social adults. In so doing, many of them manage not to lose moral standing. Against heavy odds, some even manage to increase their respectability. At the same time, they remain liminal personas, habituating an interstitial space between normative age and gender categories. The ways in which unmarried females handle their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, range from extreme suppression to self-rejoicing sexual awakening. As liminal personas, unmarried women serve not only as delineations of norm","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"43 1","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773852","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68993787","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}

{"title":"Social and Emotional Contexts of Weaning among Bofi Farmers and Foragers","authors":"Hillary N. Fouts","doi":"10.2307/3773856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773856","url":null,"abstract":"Weaning is a topic of much theoretical interest in anthropology, psychology, and public health. Several specific images about weaning are ubiquitous throughout the scholarly literature, but these are inadequate for describing the full spectrum of social and emotional factors involved in weaning. The images are evaluated in the context of comparative data collected among the Bofi farmers and foragers. While most studies of weaning have focused on health issues, this analysis identifies social and emotional factors related to caregiving practices, children's responses to weaning, and social transitions that accompany weaning. The Bofi farmers and foragers provide an interesting comparison of weaning because, although they live in the same natural ecology and speak the same language, they have distinct patterns of child-rearing and weaning. The comparison of Bofi weaning practices leads to a discussion of weaning patterns among other farmers and foragers and weaning patterns predicted by region and subsistence. (Tropical farmers and foragers, Central Africa, parent-child relations, weaning) ********** Weaning has been of much interest to anthropologists and psychologists for some time and is a prominent feature in many theories of human development. For example, weaning is characterized by attachment theorists (Ainsworth 1967) as a period in which the mother-child relationship is likely to be under stress; parent-offspring conflict theorists depict weaning as a nexus of parent-offspring conflict (Trivers 1974); and in the grandmother hypothesis, weanling children are shown to be especially vulnerable and in need of allomothering by grandmothers (Hawkes, O'Connell, and Blurton-Jones 1997). Despite the theoretical interest in weaning, few systematic studies of the behavior of weanling children have been conducted. Instead, most of our knowledge about weaning is derived from anecdotes in ethnographies, studies of maternal decision-making, and studies documenting the nutritional transition of weaning. Cultural and emotional contexts of weaning, however, have rarely been the focus of research. Studies of children are currently gaining more interest and attention in anthropology. Hirshfeld (2002) urged anthropologists to study childhood because children are integral members of every culture. By documenting only the ideas and behaviors of adults, he points out, anthropologists are missing a substantial portion of cultures. In most non-Western, small-scale cultures (such as the Bofi foragers and farmers), weaning typically occurs in toddlerhood rather than in infancy, and is therefore a central theme of early childhood. This article describes a cross-cultural study of weaning, documenting the practices, beliefs, caregiving transitions, and child behaviors associated with weaning among two small-scale societies, the Bofi farmers and foragers of Central Africa. My colleagues and I (Fouts, Hewlett, and Lamb 2001) described a preliminary study of the social and","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"9 1","pages":"65-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773856","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68994486","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}

{"title":"Adolescent ambiguities and the negotiation of belonging in the Andes","authors":"Krista E. Van Vleet","doi":"10.2307/3773834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773834","url":null,"abstract":"Although typically marginal to conceptions of citizenship, children also negotiate their belonging to the nation. This article explores the ways adolescent girls in a rural region of Bolivia use clothing to identify themselves with various collectivities: nation, region, and family. Their consumption and displays of fashion are shaped by national and local discourses of gender, race, and the civilized. Navigating multiple identifications simultaneously, their everyday and ritual practices disrupt assumed oppositions between \"Indian\" and \"Bolivian.\" (Youth, gender, race, identity, Bolivia) Hegemonic notions of modern citizens and national identities are typically built on unmarked categories of masculinity, \"whiteness,\" urban residence, and adulthood, yet women, nonwhites, and children also are citizens, both in the formal sense of having the \"right to carry a specific passport\" (Yuval-Davis 1997) and in a practical sense of actively negotiating their belonging to national collectivities. Although often relegated to the margins of political arenas, the ways in which women and ethnic minorities are materially and symbolically crucial to the construction and maintenance of borders between places and categorical distinctions between kinds of people have in recent years been explored by scholars from a variety of disciplinary and regional perspectives (Albro 2000; Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1999; Collins 1998; de Grazia 1996; de la Cadena 2000; Layoun 2001; Luykx 1999; McClintock 1995; Nugent 1998; Parker, Sommer, and Yeager 1992; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Stephenson 1999; Stoler 1995; Weismantel 2001; Yuval-Davis 1997). Much of this work, drawing on a Foucaultian framework (Foucault 1972, 1978), demonstrates the ways in which colonial and national states engage and depend on establishing not only new political and economic organizations but also social actors able to function within them. From this perspective Stephens (1995a:6) asks, \"In what respects are children--as foci of gender-specific roles in the family, as objects of regulation and development in the school, and as symbols of the future and of what is at stake in contests over cultural identity--pivotal in the structuring of modernity?\" In the highland region of Pocoata (Province of Chayanta, Department of Potosi), Bolivia, children and young adults come into contact with urban hegemonic notions of national identity and become integrated into national arenas through education in rural public schools (Luykx 1999; Stephenson 1999), migration to urban areas for work (Gill 1994), consumption of commodities (Colloredo-Mansfield 1999; Parker, Sommer, and Yeager 1992), mass media, and mandatory military service (Gill 1997). But if people's subjective views are partially shaped through state and civil institutions, they are also inextricably intertwined with personal experiences and local conceptions of childhood and youth, and gender and family (Stephens 1995a: 16; Stoler 1995). Moreover, chi","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"349-364"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773834","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68993707","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}

{"title":"When is a divorce a divorce? Determining intention in Zanzibar's Islamic courts","authors":"Erin E. Stiles","doi":"10.2307/3773829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773829","url":null,"abstract":"Establishing intention in legal acts is a crucial element of judicial reasoning in Zanzibar's Islamic courts. This article explores how Islamic judges determine the validity of divorce-related actions through assessing the intention of the actors involved. Examining two recent cases from a court in rural Zanzibar demonstrates how a judge determines the intention behind actions. The judge considers the range of possible meanings of divorce-related actions in the cultural context of Zanzibar. (Zanzibar, Islam, intention, divorce, judges) Establishing the presence or absence of intention in legal acts is a crucial element of judicial reasoning in Zanzibar's Islamic courts. This article examines the way in which Islamic judges, kadhis, determine the validity of divorce-related actions through assessing the intention of the actors involved. Intention, or nia in Kiswahili (from the Arabic niyya), is an important Islamic theological concept with great legal relevance. Also, it is a significant part of the discourse surrounding divorce among lay people in Zanzibar. In marital disputes, the kadhi understands and applies the principle of intention in light of changing cultural norms of gender roles in marriage and with respect to views of individual agency in marital practice and divorce. Examining two recent cases from a court in rural Zanzibar will demonstrate exactly how a judge determines the intention behind actions by considering the range of possible meanings of divorce-related actions in the cultural context of Zanzibar. In assessing the relationship between outward actions and intangible inner states, the judge considers the possible scenarios in which a divorce-related legal action can occur. He determines the most likely meaning of the action through considering the evidence presented in court by litigants and witnesses in light of such scenarios. The cases examined here are examples of disputed divorce, those in which husband and wife disagree whether a valid divorce has taken place outside of the court. A detailed look at the proceedings of two similar cases shows the ways in which the kadhi determines the validity of out-of-court divorce actions through assessing the intentions of the actors involved. The cases show that establishing validity is not simply a matter of determining whether the divorce has been issued, but hinges on whether the proper intention was there when the divorce action was performed. If the meaning of the action relies on the intention, how, in such circumstances, can the intention of the actor be established? Messick (2001:178) has written, \"Given the assumed gap between forms of expression and intention, legal analyses amount to attempts to erect bridges from the accessible to the inaccessible. The interpretive work of evaluating spoken and written expression ... represents such a bridging effort.\" This article demonstrates one jurist's practice of bridging through his recognition of the multiple interpretations of ac","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"273-288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773829","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68994015","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}

{"title":"Domesticating the Immigrant Other: Japanese Media Images of Nikkeijin Return Migrants","authors":"Takeyuki Tsuda","doi":"10.2307/3773830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773830","url":null,"abstract":"The return migration of Latin American nikkeijin to Japan is unprecedented in the country's history. Never has Japan been faced with so many returning Japanese who are so culturally different. Their presence profoundly challenges the country's long-held beliefs about Japanese ethnicity, race, and culture. Although the media are reputed to be the principal agents of social change, their coverage of these nikkeijin immigrants does more to reinforce than challenge traditional Japanese ethnic and cultural assumptions. (Migration, ethnicity, media, Japan) In the early 1990s, a popular weekly Japanese television program called Naruhodo za Warudo (Let's Go! The World) introduced Japanese audiences to the different customs, foods, and peoples of foreign societies. However, in one particular show the exotic person introduced was not an African or Melanesian, but a Latin American nikkeijin (Japanese descendant born and raised outside Japan). A Japanese Peruvian who had been crowned the Miss Nikkei beauty pageant queen was paraded onstage in a traditional Japanese kimono. Although she looked completely Japanese, the audience was greatly amused when she stumbled over the simplest Japanese lines she had been fed and eventually resorted to Spanish. This is an example of how the Japanese media exoticize the nikkeijin as ethnic curiosities who do not fit the Japanese notion that those of Japanese descent should be culturally Japanese as well. The Latin American nikkeijin have become much more than ethnic anomalies in Japan. With a population of well over 300,000, they have become the second largest group of foreigners in Japan after the Korean Japanese, and their numbers continue to grow steadily despite the country's prolonged economic recession. The largest group of nikkeijin immigrants are the Japanese Brazilians, who began migrating to Japan in the late 1980s in response to a severe Brazilian economic crisis and a crippling shortage of unskilled labor in Japan (Tsuda 1999a). Although they are relatively well educated and middle class in Brazil, they earn five to ten times their Brazilian salaries as factory workers in Japan. Almost all of them initially went to Japan with intentions to work for a few years and then return to Brazil with their savings, so they have been called dekasegi (temporary migrant workers). However, many remained, brought their families to Japan, and became long-term settlers (Roth 1999:150-54; Tsuda 1999b; Yamanaka 2000). Most of the Japanese Brazilian return migrants are second and third generation (nisei and sansei and no longer culturally Japanese. Therefore, despite their Japanese descent, they are treated as foreigners in Japan because of the narrow definition of what constitutes being Japanese, and have become the country's newest ethnic minority. The Brazilian nikkeijin have attracted a disproportionate amount of Japanese media attention, which has thrust them prominently into public awareness (Tsuda 2003:xiii-xv). As a result,","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"289-305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773830","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68994057","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}

{"title":"The mixed economy of the South Indian Kurumbas","authors":"C. Tharakan","doi":"10.2307/3773832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773832","url":null,"abstract":"This article reports on the Kurumbas, forager-horticulturists of Attappady, India. The concern here is with the relationship between the subsistence economy and social organization in an attempt to explain the persistence of both immediate- and delayed-return systems. The explanation I propose lies in the nature of adaptation to the physical environment and Kurumba relations with tribal and peasant neighbors that affect their subsistence pattern and put them in a state of partial transformation; i.e., suspended between, while participating in, different economic and social arenas. (Social organization, hunter-gatherers, Kurumbas, Attappady) That present-day foragers are hardly representative of a paleolithic way of life is well known. For several hundreds of years they have been heavily dependent upon both part-time cultivation or herding and trade with food-producing populations (Lee and De Vore 1968; Myers 1988; Lee 1992; Bird-David 1988, 1992; Headland and Reid 1989; Headland 1991; Guddemi 1992). In brief, hunter-gatherers cannot be understood as independent from and unaffected by other sectors of a wider network (Denbow 1984). Although the Kurumbas of Attappady, India, are described as engaged in hunting and gathering, these modern foragers(1) combine and flexibly shift between hunting and gathering, swidden cultivation, small-scale herding, trade, and occasional wage labor. There are different mixes of these components in any hunting-gathering society, depending on historical factors and such conditions as available resources, ecological parameters, technology, relations with neighbors, type of trade networks, etc. Important features that characterize relations of production among foragers include collective ownership of the means of production, an emphasis on the importance of co-operation, egalitarian patterns of sharing, flexibility in the local group membership, and little emphasis on accumulation. Some of these features are shared by horticultural people who are at the egalitarian end of the spectrum, but what differentiates egalitarian farmers from foragers is the latter's loose structure and the greater informality of their arrangements. Similarly, certain formal and structured aspects of horticultural societies are present in some hunter-gatherer societies. Although a certain mode of subsistence procurement is characteristic of foragers, other aspects of their culture vary. Failure to recognize this masks the flexible nature of these societies. Woodburn (1982) suggests that there are two kinds of food-gathering societies based on their economy and social organization: an immediate-return system and a delayed-return system, the first based on the immediate use of food resources and the second based on the yield of labor over time. An immediate-return economy is flexible and relies on multiple alternative strategies. A delayed- return system is found among more sedentary foragers whose economic cycle includes massive harvests and stora","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"323-334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773832","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68994134","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}

{"title":"Imagining modernity in rural Fiji","authors":"Karen J. Brison","doi":"10.2307/3773833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773833","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding ethnic identity in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific requires looking at the ways that individuals draw on ideologies to make sense of the particular circumstances of their lives. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized premodern tradition, individual Fijians are more concerned with defining their identity vis-a-vis other villagers. When people justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community, they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity is experienced individually as contradictions between competing ideologies and local experience through idiosyncratic life circumstances. \"Modern\" and \"traditional\" are not opposites but creatively redefined as having much in common. (Fiji, modernity, postcolonialism, ethnic identity, Pacific) Much literature has examined the ways tradition in the Pacific is invented or imagined to define present identity and achieve contemporary goals (e.g. Keesing 1989; Lawson 1996; Linnekin 1990). This article follows Englund and Leach (2000), Riles (2001), and Robbins (2001) in suggesting that the ways Pacific people imagine modernity is just as crucial as the ways they invent tradition for constructing their sense of self. Modernity, in the form of increased flows of capital, commodities, ideologies, and images, is a state of the world; but, following Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001), modernity, like the concept of tradition, is also a local construct, imagined in a variety of ways to make sense of particular life circumstances. Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001) both argue that Third World peoples use constructs of modernity to define identities for themselves within local culture. Ferguson (1999) says that his Zambia informants in the 1980s sounded as if they had read 1950s sociology texts on modernization theory when they stressed the need for strong nuclear families, independent individuals, and the need to work hard and try new things in order to bring about economic development. While social scientists and Third World governments have largely rejected modernization theory, it lives on in the minds of those who grew up under the policies it shaped. Ferguson (1999) suggests that Zambians slip in and out of modernity as a distinctive \"style\" in order to position themselves in Zambian society; for instance, espousing nuclear families and avoiding the demands of rural relatives. Riles (2001) similarly argues that urban Fijian workers in NGOs define their identity within the Fijian community through an international \"aesthetic\" of modernity that constructs problems and approaches in terms of international concepts like the need for networks and for \"grids\" generating goals and plans for action. Both scholars suggest that modernity is constructed in imagination to create local identities (cf. Englund 2002). The life stories of several rural Fijians show that constructs of modernity are just as crucial to imagi","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"08 1","pages":"335-348"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773833","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68993698","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}

{"title":"Untangling conversion: Religious change and identity among the forest tobelo of Indonesia","authors":"C. Duncan","doi":"10.2307/3773831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773831","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 1980s, after decades of refusal, the Forest Tobelo foragers of northeastern Halmahera, Indonesia, converted to Christianity. The version of Christianity they accepted was not the one offered (or imposed) by coastal Tobelo- speaking communities with whom they share kinship and affinal ties, but was brought to the region by the American-based New Tribes Mission. This essay examines the factors and motivations behind this change, and offers an explanation that takes into account local histories, larger political and economic changes, such as deforestation and land encroachment, and the rarely examined topic of missionary methodologies. The Forest Tobelo decision to convert is best understood as an attempt to maintain their distinct identity from coastal communities with whom they have a long history of poor relations; the methods used by the New Tribes Mission made conversion an attractive option at that time. (Christianity, missionaries, Halmahera, conversion motivations) In March 1999, a Forest Tobelo man began preaching the Bible to the largest remaining group of unconverted Forest Tobelo living in the interior of central Halmahera. As the island erupted into communal violence later that year, he continued to teach despite requests from coastal communities that he stop. By October of that year a large number of the Forest Tobelo he was working with accepted the Christianity he was professing. At the same time, other Forest Tobelo missionaries were preaching to groups living in three other river valleys and were planning to go elsewhere on the island to proselytize. The seeds of this indigenous missionary movement were planted in 1982, when the New Tribes Mission arrived at Tanjung Lili in northeastern Halmahera and began laying the groundwork for their evangelism. This evangelistic activity eventually led the majority of the Forest Tobelo from the Lili, Waisango, and Afu Rivers to convert to Christianity in the late 1980s. Some of these converts now work as missionaries throughout central Halmahera. This article examines how and why a large number of Forest Tobelo decided to adopt Christianity after decades of refusal, and why they chose the New Tribes Mission version as opposed to that offered (or imposed) by the coastal Tobelo, with whom they share a language, kinship, and affinal ties. The explanation requires connecting the larger processes of social change that affected the Forest Tobelo with the moral and epistemological choices made at the individual level in decisions to accept or reject Christianity. Some models of conversion attribute such change to modernization or state incorporation, while others turn to Weberian notions of disenchantment and rationalization; i.e., an estrangement with an old way of life and the incorporation into a new social order led to the adoption of Christianity (Weber 1956; Horton 1975). However, as critics have noted, such explanations fail to take into account politics, economics, or hierarchies ","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"18 1","pages":"307-322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773831","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68994071","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}

{"title":"Negotiating Culture: Conflict and Consensus in U.S. Garage-Sale Bargaining","authors":"Gretchen M. Herrmann","doi":"10.2307/3773802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773802","url":null,"abstract":"Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the underdocumented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States. (Bargaining, United States, garage sales) ********** This article addresses bargaining in the U.S. garage sale, one of the few places in America where shoppers and sellers haggle for low- to moderately priced goods. Although it is not representative of mainstream economic practices, garage-sale bargaining does shed light on American values surrounding economic exchange and on the American ambivalence toward the practice of bargaining itself. The blatant vying for material advantage in bargaining reveals a set of values that, although always present in commercial transactions, are usually muted by the convention of fixed prices and an aura of pleasantness attendant to store purchases. The garage sale provides a site in which to explore the tensions in U.S. exchange between the socially affirming and egalitarian on the one hand, and the individual maximizing and unequal on the other, and to come to appreciate how the relative balance in the exchange shifts. Bargaining practice both reflects the veneer of friendliness of daily commercial transactions and at times lays bare the struggle for advantage that often underlies exchange. This examination of small-scale bargaining, sometimes over nickels and dimes, complicates the essentialized depiction of the West as a thoroughly rationalized economic system (Carrier 1992), affording a more nuanced picture of American exchange, and provides a unique ethnographic statement about this practice. The focus here is on the cultural aspects of garage-sale bargaining, although factors such as gender and class can also be important in bargaining practice (Herrmann, In press). This essay demonstrates that particular American patterns of garage-sale bargaining exist, if unevenly accepted, and are practiced with considerable inter- and intracultural variation. Roughly stated, there is a circumscribed range of culturally tolerated bargaining behavior and those who transgress these boundaries may be viewed as aggressive, self-serving, and even greedy. This essay also contributes to the growing body of literature on cultural economics (e.g., Gudem","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"237-252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773802","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68993448","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}

{"title":"Gestational Surrogacy: Nature and Culture in Kinship","authors":"H. Levine","doi":"10.2307/3773799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3773799","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropological writing about the new reproductive technologies has focused on how they undermine presumed links between nature and culture in kinship. Surrogate motherhood in particular is said to show that \"natural facts\" serve as symbolic resources to facilitate choice, a key value of Western culture. This work has generated important insights into contemporary discourse about the social and cultural implications of reproductive technology. However, treating nature as a cultural domain exacerbates the tendency to divorce kinship from biology. An analysis of the stated motives of women who become gestational surrogates is presented here to support an argument that a focus on emotion, and its manipulation, can help anthropologists to better integrate human nature and culture in the study of kinship. (Surrogacy, kinship, nature, culture) ********** Peletz (1995) dates the end of \"essentialist thinking\" in the study of kinship to Needham's (1971) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. That volume effectively decentered the field well before postmodernism, that indefatigable enemy of essence, reared its head in anthropology. The old view, held since Morgan, that kinship is something specific built from a combination of discrete elements (terminologies and rules of descent, marriage, and residence) gave way to an emphasis on context, where kinship is seen to be embedded in specific constellations of gender, power, difference, contradiction, paradox, and ambivalence. Contemporary analyses of gay families and surrogate motherhood in Western culture bring these points home, as they demonstrate how destabilized the building blocks of kinship in our own societies have become. Peletz (1995:366) approves dismantling the \"building blocks\" approach and kinship's anticipation of the postmodern critique, but criticizes an associated development, that anthropology has \"turned its back\" on biology. He sees this as especially unfortunate because new developments in reproductive technology make \"'nature' and biology more relevant to our analytic thinking about kinship than they have been since Morgan.\" Surrogate motherhood provides particularly good opportunities for a reappraisal of the relationships between the \"natural\" and sociocultural aspects of reproduction and kinship. The opportunity to revisit some unresolved issues arises because the split between gestational and genetic motherhood has opened a range of new reproductive options. Conception and pregnancy can be separated and turned into commercial transactions and professionally managed procedures. A woman can give birth to her own grandchild, for example, by carrying a pregnancy from her daughter's egg. Embryos can be frozen and a child brought into the world long after its genetic parents are dead. The existence of such choices makes once apparently secure connections between biology, folk biology, conception ideology, and kinship categories less stable than they were. Does culture bend to accommodate these ","PeriodicalId":81209,"journal":{"name":"Ethnology","volume":"42 1","pages":"173-185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3773799","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68993393","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}