Learning about power: Development and marginality in an adult literacy center for farm workers in Zimbabwe
Blair Rutherford and Rinse Nyamuda

In this article, we critically examine the rise and fall of an adult literacy center that we helped establish for farm workers during the course of fieldwork on a commercial farm in Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe. We raise questions about the emerging conventional wisdom in the anthropology of development and poscoloniality more broadly that characterizes development primarily as a mechanism to impose Western agendas and control targeted peoples. Our tale of the “Night School” suggests that anthropologists and social scientists need to pay attention to the power relations of development and the varied hierarchies and arrangements “in the margins” of development that cross-cut wider interventions and relations of rule. (development, discourse, power, Zimbabwe, postcolonialism, gender, race, ethnography)

Three weddings and a performance: Marriage, households, and development in the highlands of central Sulawesi, Indonesia
Albert Schrauwers

To pamona couples are generally married in three ceremonies: traditional, church, and civil. Here, I treat each ceremony as a performative genre that consitutes the household differently. Both church and state actors see themselves as modernist reformers of tradition, which they view as a hindrance to development. I argue, however, that the traditional household form is the product of the modernizing efforts of church and state and hence points to a process of the development of underdevelopment. The wedding has become a key site of cultural contestation in which the constitution of the household is the outcome affecting livelihoods and the distribution of resources. The flows of performative elements from one genre of wedding ceremony to another are thus attempts to assert and resist hegemony. (wedding ceremony, development, household, gender inequality, performance)

The marital project: Beyond the exchange of men in Minangkabau marriage
Jennifer Krier

Previous discussions of Minangkabau marriage focus on how the “exchange of men” poses an exception to Lévi-Strauss’s theory that marriage can be universally described as the exchange of women, whom he views as the most supreme of social and natural valuables in all societies (1969:65). In keeping with these discussions, I show that in some cases of Minangkabau marriage it appears that men are exchanged as bearers of social value. I also move beyond the focus on marriage as the transaction and subjugation of value. Instead, I describe marriage as a process of social production in which husbands and wives engage in strategic projects to secure social value over time – in the form of claims to rank. Viewing marriage as a project of ongoing process of production leads to a reappraisal of both Minangkabau gender relations and anthropological notions about the nature and role of exchange. Minangkabau husbands are not objects of value but empowered agents who, along with their wives, struggle to create and manage rank differentiation within their wives lineages. Rather than enhancing lineage cohesion, as Lévi-Strauss’s exchange theory would suggest, the exchange of men and the production of value in Minangkabau marriage lead to lineage fragmentation. (marriage, exchange, matriliny, gender, Minangkabau)

Blacks, black Indians, Afromexicans: The dynamics of race, nation, and identity in a Mexican moreno community (Guerrero)
Laura A. Lewis

In this article, I explore identity formation in Mexico from the perspective of residents of San Nicolás Tolentino, a village located on the Costa Chica, a historically black region of the southern Pacific coast of Guerrero. Outsiders characterize San Nicolás’s residents as black, but in Mexico, national ideologies, anthropologies, and histories have traditionally worked to exclude or ignore blackness. Instead, the Spanish and Indian mestizo has been constituted as the quintessential Mexican, even as the Mexican past is tied to a romanticized and ideologically powerful Indian foundation. Ethnographic evidence suggests that San Nicolás’s “black” residents in fact see themselves as morenos, a term that signifies their common descent with Indians, whom they consider to be central to Mexicanness. As morenos interweave their identities, experiences, and descent with Indians, they also anchor themselves through Indians to the nation. These identity issues are complicated by the recent introduction to the coast of Africanness in the context of new national and scholarly projects reformulating the components of a new Mexican multicultural identity. In part, local morenos see Africanness as an outside imposition that conflicts with their sense of themselves as Mexican while it reinforces their political and economic marginality. (Mexico, Guerror, blackness, race, identity, ethnicity, nationalism)

Derision, exorcism, and the ritual production of power
David Holmberg

In this article, I address theoretical constructions of ritually produced symbolic power in Tamang communities of Nepal. I relate dance-skits deriding dominant classes and violent excorcisms to the social production of this power. This symbolic power is an elementary form of power produced in the activity of ritual itself. The ritual analyzed could be characterized as defiant, and thus I address larger questions of ritual and resistance. (ritual, power, resistance, Tamang, Nepal, South Asia)