Crossing borders: Globalization as myth and charter in American transnational consumer marketing
Kalman Applbaum

In this article, I explore the strategic practices and cultural theories of marketing managers in three U.S.-based transnational corporations (TNCs) as they seek to meaningfully direct their products across national borders. While cultural anthropologists have lately focused on local adaptation and appropriation of TNCs’ products to local meanings, the reverse process by which TNCs co-opt local meanings to a universalizing evolutionary paradigm – in what they have come to regard as a consumption-led new global order – has not been examined. Globalization is explored as a key cultural concept driving marketing managers’ practices – the myth and charter behind large TNC border crossings. (consumer marketing, globalization, transnational corporations, United States)

Black like this: Race, generation, and rock in the post-civil rights era
Maureen Mahon

In this article, I demonstrate that the intersection of race, class, generation, and education had a decisive impact on African American rock musicians who came of age during the post-civil rights era from the late 1060s to the present. By analyzing life stories, I connect rock musicians’ experiences with school desegregation to the position they occupy between black and white mainstreams and discuss how they critique discourses of black authenticity through the identities and practices they have produced as members of the Black Rock Coalition. I also consider the effects of racism and racializing discourses on this group of African Americans. (African American identity, music, black middle class, race and class, generation, life stories, United States)

The white edge of the margin: Textuality and authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia
Danilyn Rutherford

In Biak, Irian Jaya, in the far east of Indonesia, foreign slogans, narratives, and books are considered a crucial source of authority. In this article, I examine how amber beba (big foreigners), the Biak term for respected leaders, harness the potency attributed to distant lands by presenting their words as traslations of an alien text. I explore the implications of this strategy for pursuing authority by examining the worldview expressed in big foreigners’ translation of the Bible and other imported works. The case of Biak calls into question scholarly treatments that have taken literacy and Christian conversion as setting the stage for the emergence of postcolonial forms of hegemony. In valorizing the textual aspects of outsider’s words, Biaks reproduce a boundary between local and national structures of meaning, keeping foreign orders at a distance even as they tap them for authority and power. (leadership, literacy, translation, Christianity, intercultural relations, postcolonial societies, modernity)

Enslaving history: Narratives on local whiteness in a black Atlantic port
Jacqueline Nassy Brown

In this article, I analyze the jointly racial and spatial politics of representing slavery in contemporary Liverpool, England. I show how central space and place are to black Liverpudlians’ theories of racial processes and therefore to their antiracist activism. While I highlight the agency of subalterns in constituting the white identity of the city and its population, I also point to some of the limitiations of their antiracist practice and that of their white supporters. Toward that goal, I draw lessons from the antebellum slave narrative because its authors also understood and reappropriated slavery’s geopolitics, navigating similarly racialized terrain. (whiteness, space, place, locality, transnationalism, slavery, Britain)

Transformations in trade and the constitution of gender and rank in northeast India
Romy Borooah

I examine transformations in long-distance trade in a highland community in northeast India over a period of 35 years. I link changes in demand for trade goods to shifts in the political subjectivities of the Wancho as they are incorporated into the Indian state and to the consumer choices made by chiefs and commoners, women and men as they utilize opportunities to alter patterns of labor inhering in the local conceptions of gender and social rank. (consumption, trade, gender, labor allocation, hill tribe, northeast India)

Custom, courts, and class formation: Constructing the hegemonic process through the petty sessions of a southeastern Irish parish, 1828-1884
Marilyn Silverman

This exploration of hegemony, law, and politics attempts to expand recent anthropological approaches to hegemony and the law both topically and temporally. Specifically, I try to insert notions of coercion, class formation, agency, and political process into what have largely been cultural approaches to hegemony; I do so by exploring the workings of a local court through time. This court, in the context of a colonial state, brought together numerous agents (landlords, laborers, farmers, and retailers) who had conflicting and also sometimes converging economic and political intersts and understandings. Through their interaction, the court became a theater, forum, and arena while over time, it proved simultaneously to be both a civilizing device and a way of reproducing local class experience. (hegemony, historical anthropology, political-legal anthropology, class formation, courts, Ireland, colonialism)

Crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: Democracy, development, and political action
K. Sivaramakrishnan

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated all over the world as the 1990s became the decade for restructuring states and celebrating civil society. Examing one such major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropology of modernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local state-making in the forests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key tensions between development and democratization through an ethnography of policial action. (bureaucracy, democracy, development, ethnicity, forest conservation, identity politics, science and technology, the state, India)

Permeable homes: Domestic service, household space, and the vulnerability of class boundaries in urban India
Sara Dickey

Servants’ movements into and out of middle- and upper-class homes in the South Indian city of Madurai create a mixing of outside and inside spaces. Employers feel that this mixing threatens the security of their homes and class standing. Yet, because the presence of servants is a necessary marker of class, employers attempt to contain the threat by buttressing the symbolic boundaries of the household, controlling domestic workers’ movements through space, and manipulating workers’ closeness to and distance from employers. These employers’ accounts and actions reveal central concepts of and anxieties about class in contemporary urban India. (class, space, domestic service, women, domesticity)