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American Ethnologist: Vol. 32, No. 1Table of Contents for AE, Vol. 32, No. 1
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Abstracts from AE Vol. 32, No. 1
AE Forum: Are Men Missing?
Provocation
Wedding bell blues: Marriage, missing men, and matrifocal follies
Evelyn Blackwood
In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the ‘‘Patriarchal Man,’’ to create and sustain concepts of ‘‘marriage’’ and ‘‘family.’’ By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the ‘‘missing man,’’ the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity.
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American Ethnologist Vol. 32, No. 1 -- Book Reviews
View all book reviews from American Ethnologist 32(1) (on AAAnet.org)
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Editor's Foreword - Virginia R. Dominguez
This issue’s AE Forum: Are Men Missing? is a lively discussion of contemporary anthropological approaches to family, marriage, household, and the role of men in myriad social contexts. As I read it, it focuses on what Evelyn Blackwood believes to be the continuing intellectual complicity of much anthropological thinking and writing in the privileging of men at the expense not just of women but also of other models and frames of understanding social and economic forms of organization. This proposition is discussed, debated, and defended with useful intensity here. The possibility that it may even be true in some, or possibly most, of the scholarship on heterosexuality and heteronormativity, in queer theory, or in feminist rethinkings of kinship and marriage is enough to arouse the passion and ire of a number of our commentators and to lead to a detailed articulation of the theoretical or conceptual state of early 21st-century anglophone anthropology.
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"Doing Anthropology in Sound" -- Feld and Brenneis - Special Web Supplement
"Doing Anthropology in Sound"
Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis Special web supplement to: American Ethnologist 31:4 - November 2004 Links to Sound Recordings, Web Resources, and Writings Discussed in the Article |
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