Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Darkness In Anthropology, Peter Van Arsdale

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An essay covering Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon by Patrick Tierney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 417 pp. and related documents.

Introduction: The New Arab Family, Nicholas S. Hopkins

Faculty Book Chapters

This volume represents revised versions of a collection of papers presented at Cairo Papers Ninth Annual Symposium on ''The New Arab Family,'' held in May 2000. Marriage, divorce, and related topics were center stage, particularly in the demographic papers. Another focus was to combine two very different approaches to the study of the family -- on the one hand demographic, and on the other broadly sociological or anthropological, or as some would say, psychodynamic, that is to say focusing on dyadic or multi-member networks of relationships within the family. Some of these papers in turn focused on ''agency,'' the ways …

Universal Human Rights And Cultural Diversity, Hilde Hey

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of Human Rights: New Perspectives, New Realities, edited by Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. 259pp.

The debate as to whether human rights should be considered universal or culturally relative has come a long way. In 1947, when the Commission on Human Rights considered proposals for formulating a declaration on basic human rights, the American Anthropological Association submitted a statement expressing concern about the universality of the proposed declaration. The association’s main argument was that ideas about rights and wrongs and good and evil that exist in one society are incompatible with the ideas …

Home As A Place Of Exhibition And Performance: Mayan Household Transformations In Guatemala, Walter E. Little

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the town of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala, has been incorporated into transnational movements of people, commodities, and ideas through tourism, development, and religious evangelism. The Kaqchikel Mayas living there have long looked outward from their community as they embraced, ignored, or criticized these global flows. Contemporary Kaqchikel Mayas have incorporated these global flows into the organization and maintenance of their households, while giving them a local interpretation. Some families have made their homes a place to enact their culture through exhibitions and performances for tourists. Such performances are indicative of the strategies …

Transcending Cultural Definitions: A Sense Of Peace, Susan Sanae Sakayori

MA TESOL Collection

Who am I? What am I? This paper is an attempt to tell a personal story of my struggle to answer these questions about my racial and cultural identity. As a Japanese American who has lived the first half of my life in the U.S. and the latter half in Japan, I found it increasingly difficult to find my place in either culture. I was faced with issues of ethnicity, cultural background and personal values that I didn’t realize were so important in understanding who I was. I have traveled down a road of discovery where I was given a …

Global Competition And Community: The Struggle For Social Justice, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

The above two quotations embody disparate worldviews with regard to the neoliberal project that has enveloped much of Latin America in the past decade. Globalization intensifies the region's integration into the world economy through neoliberal reforms such as market opening, privatizations, and rationalization of production. These reforms are transforming rural societies, raising important questions concerning policies that selectively favor new strategies for capital investment and production oriented toward market expansion, as they marginalize surplus workers and "inefficient" forms of production. This paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the contradictions brought about by globalization and local people's struggles to …

Table Of Contents, Journal Staff

Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice

No abstract provided.

Division Within The Boundaries, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the Part-European settlement of Kasavu, Fiji, land is divided in each generation into parallel plots of ever-decreasing width but identical form. Kinship as division, I argue, is knowledge which is not representative of social relations and which therefore does not effectuate 'change'. This is contrasted to an additive logic of of kinship relations among urban Part-Europeans, a logic in which information is potentially infinite and thus always incomplete, and in which knowledge attaches to persons and changes through techniques of collective discovery.

The Deculturation Of The Brunei Dusun, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Culture, Ideology, And Community: The Dynamics Of Accommodation And Resistance To Restructuring Of The Mexican Sugar Sector, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Neoliberalism has provoked profound and diverse consequences for rural Mexico, escalating the agricultural crisis for producers and workers in various sectors. Against this context, recent improvements in the sugar sector raise interesting questions about its relative economic success under the neoliberal paradigm. This article contrasts two cane zones--one that experienced economic recovery and another affected by abandonment of the sugar mill--to argue that in the interstices of modernizing neoliberalism, cane growers and mill workers who were subjected to politics of exclusion struggle to ensure the survival of their culture, community, and economic livelihood.

Community Organization And Development Among The Zabbalin Of Muqattam, Elena Volpi

Faculty Book Chapters

Two studies of the informal garbage collectors' community at the base of the Muqattam Hills in Cairo explore and comment on the impact of an institution-building program on leadership and participation and the impact of development programs on the women of the settlement.

Cattle, Co-Wives, Children, And Calabashes: Material Context For Symbol Use Among The Il Chamus Of West-Central Kenya, Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper examines systemic contexts for symbol use among the Maa-speaking Il Chamus in the Lake Baringo region of west-central Kenya. The systemic context for symbols and material culture consists of the environmental constraints and behavioral responses that characterize pastoralist life in East Africa. The author's interest in this problem developed in response to Ian Hodder’s work among the Il Chamus, Pokot, and Tugen in the Baringo District. Unlike Hodder, however, the author argues that symbols and their use in East Africa can be more productively explained from a materialist perspective. Specifically, it is proposed that symbols affixed to certain …

Higher-Order Categories In Brunei Dusun Ethnobotany: The Folk-Classification Of Rainforest Plants, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Restructuring The Mexican Sugar Industry: Campesinos, The State, And Private Capital, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Under the new agrarian policies and economic rules of Article 27, implemented in January 1992, the customary patters of political patronage and loyalty in the countryside no longer operate as before. Campesions now are challenged to think and act like entrepreneurs who assume investment risks in order to successfully participate in competitive markets. But most possess neither the economic resources nor worldviews to be the “campesino entrepreneurs” sought by the government or by the leaders of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) and the Confederación Nacional de Productores Rurales (CNPR), the two campesino confederations affiliated to the ruling PRI. This contradiction …

Defining Religion: Death And Anxiety In An Afro-Brazilian Cult, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This dissertation clarifies the anthropological concept of religion by crafting the most useful scientific definition. The first chapter illustrates the confusion surrounding this term, and argues that the comparative method of anthropology requires that this imprecision be removed. Reviewing the four types of definitions of religion extant in the literature -- Content, Behavioral/Performative, Mental, and Functional -- Chapter 1 concludes that the best definition will be a generative functional definition. The second chapter supports this conclusion by finding that an independent discipline, American constitutional law, has arrived at the same understanding.

Chapter 3 details the nature of definitions and the …

Poisons And Antidotes Among The Taman Of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

Among the Taman of kabupaten Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, certain oils are used to cast and counteract spells. Antidotes are said to be made from the same substance as poisons, and thus a given antidote implies ownership of the poison, and this is one reason people are furtive in using, exchanging, and discussing this aspect of folk-medicine. Magical oils are generally obtained outside Taman society, and are used most often to cure illnesses presumed to have been contracted outside the society. These oils contain essences, and so can be reproduced by adding oil. However, specific knowledge is needed to use …

Etdebali: Un Viaje Al Corazón Del Pueblo Ngóbe, Phil D. Young, Milton R.A. Machuca-Gálvez, Jorge Sarsaneda

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Etdebali: Un viaje al corazón del pueblo ngóbe fue publicado en 1993 en Panamá (ACUN, Serie “Nuestro modo de ser” / Colección “Mundo Ngóbe.”). Se imprimió un pequeño tiraje y en la actualidad el libro impreso está agotado. Esta es una copia facsímil del original en formato Adobe Acrobat (PDF).

El libro incluye la presentación, seguida de tres artículos del antropólogo estadounidense Phil D. Young (*1936-+2013); los artículos fueron originalmente publicados en inglés, traducidos al español:

(1) Presentación. Jorge Sarsaneda del Cid. Páginas 5-6.

(2) Young, P. (1970) “Notes on the ethnohistorical evidence for structural continuity in Guaymí society”, Ethnohistory …

Representing African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Of all the currents of change that have swept the humanities during the last half-century, the most far-reaching revolve around language. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism, among other language-based disciplines, have developed what is often presented as a largely unprecedented self-consciousness about representation. The message to scholars in nonlanguage-based disciplines is clear: to be taken seriously, one can no longer view language as a transparent window to an objective reality but must confront the foundational political and ideological baggage of the medium itself, as well as its constant slippage in the hands of the producer.

Economic And Social Change In A Village In Giza, Judy H. Brink

Faculty Book Chapters

[abstract not provided]

The Empire Strikes Out? A Look At The Nationalities Crisis In The Soviet Union, Catherine E. Breen

Honors Theses

My thesis rests on the notion that, because of the increase of freedoms in the Soviet Union today, many republics are demanding that their autonomy be restored and that this nationality crisis, an unforeseen and unwanted byproduct of recent reforms, has grown into such a disaster that it is now actually impairing the whole reform movement in the Soviet Union as civil unrest and strife are beginning to threaten the stability of this huge empire.

Ethnic identity is not something that can be hidden, changed, forced, or converted, nor will national and cultural roots simply disappear over time. Thus, the …

Something Old, Something New : Marriage Customs Among The Druze In The Shouf Mountains Of Lebanon, Nancy Scarlette Beaini

Dissertations and Theses

The focus of this research was to obtain, specifically, data on the marriage customs of the Druze in the Shouf Mountains of southeastern Lebanon. Ten Druze informants were selected and classified according to sex, age, marital status and religious status (sheik/sheika). A detailed questionnaire was designed to use during the interviews with these informants. However, after two interviews, it became apparent that a variable questionnaire was necessary to take advantage of the new, richly-detailed, cultural information that emerged with each informant. New questions were developed, in the field, to reflect and gather this new ethnographic data on Druze marriage customs.

Miriam Kahn's Review Of Lenore Manderson's Shared Wealth And Symbol: Food, Culture, And Society In Oceania And Southeast Asia, Miriam Kahn

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Music In The Funeral Traditions Of The Akpafu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"Nna lo senu kuwe, fie oresire somoloo?" ("Who laid a mat for him, so that he slept so deeply?") With this rhetorical question, the Akpafu of Southeastern Ghana initiate a period of public mourning occasioned by the death of one of their number.1 The philosophic significance of death in Akpafu culture is twofold. First, it marks the completion of the earthly cycle of existence, birth-circumcision-puberty-marriage-death. Second, it opens the door to a higher, spiritual realm in which the deceased, as an ancestor, takes his place alongside the lesser gods and the Supreme Being in the higher reaches of the hierarchy …

Patricia Polansky's Review Of Elena Viktorovna Govor's Bibliografiia Avstralii, 1710-1983 (A Bibliography Of Australia, 1710-1983), Patricia Polansky

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

The Taman Negara Batek: A People In Transition, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Batek Negritos from the vicinity of Taman Negara National Park in West Malaysia are a hunting and gathering people presently experiencing rapid encroachment by the modern world. Under the authority of the Malaysian government, they are being encouraged to settle and to emulate Malay subsistence farming communities. Unfortunately, this strategy has had a number of adverse effects on the Batek.

Key Elements In The Evolving Political Culture Of The Federated States Of Micronesia, Daniel T. Hughes, Stanley K. Laughlin Jr.

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

El Pueblo Guaymí Y Su Futuro, Milton R.A. Machuca-Gálvez, Daniel Holness Carrasco Sr.

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Esta publicación contiene las ponencias y documentos que se presentaron en el FORO SOBRE EL PUEBLO GUAYMÍ SU FUTURO, celebrado en la ciudad de Panamá del 23 al 27 de marzo de 1981. El material está dividido en cinco secciones: una introducción seguida de 1. La historia de los guaymíes; 2. Situación actual del pueblo guaymí; 3 Las luchas guaymíes; 4. Los grandes proyectos de desarrollo: ¿bendición o maldición?; y, 5. "Se hace el camino al andar": pasos en la lucha. Las secciones “guardan una estrecha relación temática con un eje central que aparece a lo largo de la publicación: …

Nepal Studies Association Bulletin, No. 21, Nepal Studies Association, Donald A. Messerschmidt

Nepal Studies Association Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Nepal Studies Association Bulletin, Nos. 19-20, Nepal Studies Association, Donald A. Messerschmidt

Nepal Studies Association Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Nepal Studies Association Bulletin, No. 18, Nepal Studies Association, Donald A. Messerschmidt

Nepal Studies Association Newsletter

No abstract provided.