Abstracts -- AE 31(1)
Contemporary Art Worlds and Their
Productive (In)stabilities
Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange The 2003
Presidential Address to the American Ethnological Society
Fred Myers
In the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk
Marika asked the Australian government to investigate the
unauthorized use of Yolngu clan designs on a variety of
commodity forms, inaugurating a process of recognizing Indigenous
ownership of "copyright" in such designs. This
treatment of design-and of culture-as a form of property
involves understandings and practices of materiality and
subjectivity that differ from those informing indigenous,
Aboriginal relationships to cultural production and circulation.
In this article I explore the significance for material
culture theory of recent work on and events in the development
of notions of cultural property. One of my main concerns
is the relevance of local understandings of objectification,
or objectness, and human action-as embedded in object-ideologies.
I discuss the limited capacity of legal discourses of cultural
property to capture and reflect the concerns of Indigenous
Australians about their own relation to culture, to creativity,
and to expression.
Art-writing in the modern Maya art world of Chichén
Itzá: Transcultural ethnography and experimental
fieldwork
Quetzil E. Castañeda
IIn this article I examine the modern Maya
art world of Chichén Itzá, Mexico. My ethnographic
focus is the political history and technical and aesthetic
development of the Piste Maya art "tradition"
that emerged within the transcultural contexts of the anthropological
fascination with and touristic consumption of the Maya.
I also describe the experimental ethnography project that
was developed to study the transcultural dynamics of the
Chichén art world.
Outside of social movements: Dilemmas of indigenous
handicrafts vendors in Guatemala
Walter Little
In Antigua, Guatemala, Maya handicrafts vendors work in
a tourism marketplace that brings together multiple ethnolinguistic
groups and international visitors. In this article I discuss
the interrelationship between occupation and social movements
to examine the essentialized identities propagated by the
Maya Movement and Ladino racism. I argue that making a living
helps shape the interrelated processes of economic and political
mobilization. I use work and local political contexts, in
particular, to illustrate why vendors do not embrace established
social movements.
Performativity
The culture-conscious Brazilian Indian: Representing and
reworking Indianness in Kayabi political discourse
Suzanne Oakdale
In this article, I examine a Brazilian indigenous
people's self-conscious use of the ideas of "culture"
and "Indian ethnicity." Whereas analysts usually
discuss indigenous use of these concepts in the context
of high-profile national or transnational intercultural
events, I look at how retrospective accounts of participation
in such events are woven into local political discourse.
I focus on how two Amazonian leaders represent their participation
in past events of cultural display as a means of mounting
very different arguments about their eligibility for positions
of authority in their community. I argue that local frames
of reference, for example, those relating to the culturally
appropriate conduct of politics, must be considered in assessing
the significance and meaning of cultural performances, even
when the staging of indigenous culture is performed principally
for a nonlocal audience.
Text and performance in an African Church: The Book,
"live and direct"
Matthew Engelke
In this article I examine textual authority
and religious language in an African Christian church. Known
as the Masowe weChishanu, members of this church refer to
themselves as "the Christians who don't read the Bible."
I focus on how religious language in Masowe ritual highlights
the performative nature of religious authority. In particular,
I show how prophets in the church denigrate the role of
religious text by working to create a "live and direct"
connection to God through their sermons. Drawing on the
ethnography of reading and ritual, and contributing to the
newly emerging interest in an anthropology of Christianity,
I show how Masowe recast the authority of the text as a
political and religious object by making it unnecessary.
The Bible becomes significant in its absence, challenging
an understanding of scriptural religion as objectified in
texts.
"Praise the Lord": Popular cinema and pentecostalite
style in Ghana's new public sphere
Birgit Meyer
In this article I examine the elective affinity
between Pentecostalism and the vibrant video-film industry
that has flourished in the wake of Ghana's adoption of a
democratic constitution. I argue that, as a result of the
liberalization and commercialization of the media, a new
public sphere has emerged that can no longer be fully controlled
by the state but that is increasingly indebted to Pentecostalism.
Pentecostalism and video-films come together and articulate
alternative, Christian imaginations of modernity. Seeking
to grasp the blurring of boundaries between religion and
entertainment, I examine the pentecostalite cultural style
on which these alternative visions thrive. My main concern
is to investigate the specific mode through which Pentecostal
expressive forms go public, thereby transforming the public
sphere.
Expanding "Henry": Fiction reading and
its artifacts in a British literary society
Adam Reed
Members of the Henry Williamson Society talk
of what fiction reading does for them. Their experience
of literature is connected to their appreciation of the
author Henry Williamson as a central and mythic figure.
How "Henry" is composed determines the kind of
actors readers can be and also explains the capacities assigned
to the Williamson artifacts-books and land-that they identify.
In this article, I explore a theory of reading as relationship
and examine the role of literature as an instrument of social
agency. I focus on the relationships that society members
draw out around solitary acts of reading and literary society
activities, including the way they assign causation within
a matrix of relations. As well as examining their culture
of owning, reading, and displaying books, I investigate
society members' appreciation of geographical location.
The article aims to contribute to the development of anthropological
theories of literature.
Intimacy, Reproduction,
and Violence (review essays)
Big ideas: Feminist ethnographies of reproduction
Janelle S. Taylor
Review of:
Motherhood Lost: A Feminist
Account of Pregnancy Loss in America. Linda L. Layne.
New York: Routledge, 2003.
Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer
Culture. Linda L. Layne, ed. New York: New York University
Press, 1999.
Pragmatic Women and Body Politics. Margaret Lock and
Patricia A. Kaufert, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Baby's First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal
Subjects. Lisa M. Mitchell. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2001.
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis
in America. Rayna Rapp. New York: Routledge, 1999.
.
This review essay considers five recent books-three single-authored
ethnographies and two edited volumes-that present feminist
ethnographic analyses of reproduction. I highlight the volumes'
common themes and approaches and offer critical reflections
on the current state of the anthropology of reproduction
as exemplified in these works. I argue that feminist anthropologists
pursuing ethnographic studies of reproduction have amply
demonstrated what anthropologists in general have long sought
to demonstrate: that to study ordinary people in their everyday
lives is, indeed, to address "the big ideas."
In the process, these feminist anthropologists have also
offered to our discipline an ambitious new vision of what
a better world might look like and of how ethnographic research
might help bring that world about.
Domestic violence and difference
Madelaine Adelman
Review of:
Black Eyes All of the Time: Intimate
Violence, Aboriginal Women, and the Justice System.
Anne McGillivray and Brenda Comaskey. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999.
Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography.
Neil Websdale. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998.
Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian
Immigrants in the United States. Margaret Abraham.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Colonizing Hawal'i: The Cultural Power of Law. Sally
Engle Merry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
The four monographs reviewed here signal both a critical
shift and the value of diversity in domestic violence studies.
The authors of the works consider the meaning and policing
of, as well as resistance to, domestic violence within specific
historical and cultural contexts, of rurality, of immigration,
and of the cultural and political economy of colonialism.
These ethnographic and historical works document women's
experiences of battering and how the state distinguishes
between acceptable and unacceptable levels of violence within
marriage.
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