In 1996, an elite group of Ngaju Dayak religious activists invited National Geographic Television to film their rites of secondary treatment of the dead in the village of Petak Putih, Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. In this article, I explore activists’ efforts to engage the National Geographic Society and their attempts to exert a high degree of control over the manner in which local traditions were portrayed to the filmmakers. I focus in particular on how representations of specific local practices figure in the recasting of a contemporary Dayak face, and on questions concerning religious authenticity and authority. I argue that the activists’ interest in making a film, and their decisions during its shooting were part of their larger organizational strategies, with potentially far-reaching political and economic consequences. [Indonesia, Dayaks, religion, identity, tourism, filmmaking]

In this article, I analyze the persuasiveness of ritual libations in provincial Bolivia as populist spectacles. During an era of extensive national reform, these libations are prototypical definitional performances within a changing regional political arena. I argue for an approach to the contextualization of factional politics that resituates both performance based theories of rhetoric and ethnographic treatments of life histories in a more comprehensively synthetic public interpretive frame. I treat libations as part of a local political process attuned to the perceived truthfulness of personal indexical references in performative frames. The plausibility of sponsors’ self-images turns on the potentially conflictual shadings of their public careers, shades often unintentionally generated by such spectacles. [political ritual, popular identity, life histories, indexicals, Bolivia]

In this article, I explore the appropriation of the notion of "codependence" in Japan, as alcoholism increasingly becomes a subject of social concern. Codependence is pathologized in the 1980’s American popular psychology, which regards accommodation to social relationships as a compromise of the self. Yet, in Japan, the notion resonates with postwar national ideologies of the normal--that is, of Japanese society as held together through family-like intimacy and highly cultivated sensitivities to social demands. Japanese women who define themselves as codependent must forge a distinction (blurred by dominant cultural ideology) between socially valued interdependence and "unhealthy" or systematically exploitative forms of asymmetrical ties. Forging this distinction allows women to reject exploitative demands of society while continuing to function within familial and neighborhood communities. To the extent that women can forge distinctions between "dependence" and "codependence," they may be better able to resist state and social demands that come at their expense. [gender, national identity, hegemonic cultural processes, transnationalism, selfhood, addiction, Japan]

In this article I examine how rural Mozambicans in the Mueda plateau region experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO, the anti-colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state. In interpreting and engaging with the dramatic transformations brought on by FRELIMO socialism, Muedans often drew on the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMO attempts to banish sorcery-related beliefs and practices. While Muedans sometimes resisted the modernization agenda and sometimes embraced it, they could not make systematic instrumental use of sorcery discourse to pursue strategic ends. Rather, sorcery served them more broadly as a social diagnostics of power relations--one that preserved ways of understanding power that are saturated with ambivalence. [power, postcolonial Africa, sorcery, surveillance, guerrilla war, villagization, modernization]

In this article, I explore local social and cultural dynamics in the context of the national integration of ethnic minorities. My case concerns a Mien population in Thailand and describes various engagements of local and national spaces that center on issues of fun. Sports competitions and culture shows resonate with other projects that reinforce the centrality of villages in contemporary social life. For the Mien, these dynamics index a shift from the household to the village as the subject of action. Fun and games are not digressions from politics but are central to the serious play of everyday life. [national integration, ethnic minorities, fun, ethnography, village, Mien (Yao), Thailand]

In this article, I examine the informal privatization of space and power occurring within China’s "floating population" under late socialism. Focusing on a prominent unofficial migrant community in Beijing, I analyze the ways migrant leaders build up their power through the control of housing and market spaces and by mobilizing traditional social networks. By revealing the complexity and uncertainties within the culturally specific reconfiguration of power and social relations in post-Mao China, I challenge the metanarrative of postsocialist transformations as a teleological move toward liberal capitalism and democracy, and I articulate the dialectical relationship between space and power. [space, power, migration, social network, state-society dynamic, socialism and postsocialism, China]