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Contents of Volume 26, Number 2, February 1999

Articles

Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony
Jean Comaroff And John L. Comaroff

 Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from ìritual murder,î the sale of body parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generationómediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings ìthe globalî and ìthe localîótreated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realitiesóinto a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an ìawkwardî scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there. [postcoloniality, modernity, millennial capitalism, occult economy, witchcraft, South Africa]

 Debate
Reflections on the Comaroff lecture
Sally Falk Moore

Response to Moore
second thoughts
Jean Comaroff And John L. Comaroff

Negotiating parentage: the political economy of ìkinshipî in central Sulawesi, Indonesia
Albert Schrauwers

 Widespread fosterage and adoption has recently emerged around Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi within the wider constraints of peasantization, whereby kin are ideologically set off as a source of noncommodified labor for a newly constituted peasantry. The differentiation of this peasantry has been blunted and a kin-based ìmoral economyî created through the transfer of dependents (rather than resources) between households. This transfer of kin has been eased by a concept of parentage that stresses nurturance and sharing, not just filiation. Class tensions are muted by the insistence that the calculation of costs and benefits between kin is unseemly. Fosterage, however, opens up tensions as some ìparentsî exploit their newly acquired ìfreeî domestic labor. This article focuses on the terms foster children use to resist this exploitation, namely their refusal to acknowledge a parental tie. Drawing on historically constituted relations of subordination, these dependents draw on the now legally defunct vocabulary of master (kabosenya) and slave (watua) to describe their position. [parenthood, adoption, development, slavery]

Villages dammed, villages repossessed: a memorial movement in northwest China
Jun Jing

 In this article, I employ the concept of repossession to analyze the politics of memory in the rural county of Yongjing, northwest China. I focus on an innovative social movement that works toward community recovery from the devastating impacts of forced resettlement and farmland destruction. I suggest why this movement should be considered a social process by which memories of trauma were transformed into a political discourse that holds a powerful state bureaucracy accountable for a multiplicity of injuries inflicted in the name of economic development. The concept of repossession, strictly defined within the context of collective actions, refers to the attempts of displaced and disenfranchised peasants to regain a politically silenced voice of resentment, reestablish a material basis of village life, and reconstruct a ruined landscape of popular religion. [protest, memorial movement, repossession, mandatory resettlement, community recovery]

Alguito para ganar (a little something to earn): profits and losses in peasant economies
Enrique Mayer and Manuel Glave

 We explore various ways in which small-scale peasants in the highlands of Peru conceptualize the everyday concept of profit in the contemporary context of neoliberalism. Through a process of approximations, we use the results of a survey of potato fields in two comparable valleys in Peru to clarify the differences between a strict business accounting procedure to establish profits or losses and the procedure that peasants use to evaluate the profitability of cash crops. We suggest that peasants evaluate profits or losses of cash crops in terms of a simple cash-out and cash-in flow. We indicate that this kind of calculus carries an implicit subsidy that permits market participation but provides little or no long-run benefit under prevailing productivity conditions and price levels. We also look at how farmers evaluate the status of their subsistence crops by showing that they ignore important cash expenses that are necessary to produce them. Finally, we describe accounting procedures characteristic of Andean peasants to understand how they monitor resource flows in their household-based farms. Analysis of the data leads us to question the ìsubsistence firstî model of peasant economies and to posit an interdependent relationship between subsistence and commercial sectors in which money plays an important but perverse role as it cycles through the market and the household. [peasants, Andes, Peru, cash and subsistence crops, profitability, market integration, genetic erosion]

The burden of heritage: claiming a place for a West Indian culture
Karen Fog Olwig

 The cultural construction of the past is of increasing interest to anthropologists, as well as to the people they study. Many of the most forceful and visible expressions of the past are fueled by the so-called heritage movement, which is becoming a worldwide concern, born of an uneasy combination of national ideology, ethnic politics, and tourist industry interests. I explore the cultural politics of heritage in relation to the different ways in which the people of the Caribbean island of St. John, the U.S. Virgin Islands, have made a place for themselves in time and space. An exploration of the role of oral tradition in constructing different versions of the past shows that the islanders themselves feel considerable ambivalence toward the expectations of the promulgators of heritage, including anthropologists. I raise questions both about the construction of historical identity in the Caribbean and, more generally, about the witting or unwitting role of anthropologists in the creation of heritage. [African-Caribbean culture, cultural heritage, oral traditions, cultural identity, cultural construction of place, sense of pastness]

The predicament of dress: polyvalency and the ironies of cultural identity
Deborah Durham

 To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtinís notion of ìsparkleî to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democratic state. I use Herero womenís sense of the dress to question recent approaches to ìcultureî among scholars who look only at its differentiating function, since Herero women also see the dress as a means of building mutuality. [dress, identity, embodiment, agency, gender, southern Africa, culture

 Cultural polyphony and identity formation: negotiating tradition in Attica
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou

 Over the past century the Messogitic communities of Attica have been seen by the Athenian elite as degenerate and marginal groups because of two elements central to their culture: the Arvanitic language and retsina wine. These elements were perceived as undermining the eliteís project of constructing a homogenous Greek nation-state based on links to the ancient Greek language, a classical spirit, and a glorified vision of the folk. This dismissive discourse has influenced the ways Messogites have viewed themselves as well as the Athenians, and has given rise to a counterdiscourse. In this article, I attempt to follow the dialogue between the dominant Athenian discourse and the Messogitic counterdiscourse as these have been transformed over time. Arguing that traditions and identities are not only constantly invented in an ongoing negotiation process, I also seek to show how symbolic elements can be appropriated by different groups and invested with novel meanings and significance in what I call a double dialectic of tradition. However, I contend, this process does not necessarily improve the subordinatesí position, but may lead to their further marginalization. [double dialectic of tradition, identity, nationalism, local versus national, Arvanitic language, retsina wine, Greece, ethnicity]

Open spaces and dwelling places: being at home on hill farms in the Scottish borders
John Gray

 In this article, I highlight the spatial dimension of social life. I analyze the shepherding practice of ìgoing around the hill,î a practice central to sheep farming in the Scottish borderlands. I distinguish between, on the one hand, the more rationalized space of fields and the commoditized sheep raised in them, and, on the other hand, the wild but meaningful hills and the sheep living on them. Using Heideggerís concept of ìdwelling,î I describe how, through the practice of going around the hill, sheep farming people in the Scottish borders create an attachment to the land that defines the farm, the farming way of life, and the historically formulated borders region as places in which they ìfeel at home.î Together these places comprise the spatial dimensions of locality and identity for sheep farmers. [place, space, Scotland, borders, shepherding, identity]

Return to Sumatra: 1957, 1997
Edward M. Bruner

 In this article, I reflect on how ethnography has changed between my 1957 fieldwork in a Toba Batak village in Sumatra, Indonesia, and my return visit in 1997. I argue that current issues of transnationalism and globalization are as significant in what is seemingly the most traditional of anthropological sites, a mountain village in Southeast Asia, as in more modern worldly settings. I discuss culture and ethnography, and I explore different experiential meanings of the term village. [ethnography, culture, transnationalism, locality, Toba Batak, Indonesia, exchange, mortuary rites]
 
 

After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888?1951 (Stocking, Jr)
Elizabeth Colson

 Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia 1870?1990 (Karakasidou)
David Rheubottom

 Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High (Fordham)
Nicholas Baham

 The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market (Hertz)
Alan Smart

 Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below (Stephen)
Joann Martin

 Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiries into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (Nader, ed.)
Stacia E. Zabusky

 The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic (Urton)
Kendall A. King

 Reason and Passion: Representation of Gender in Malay Society (Peletz)
G. G. Weix

 Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives (Grillo and Stirrat, eds.)
Lisa B. Markowitz

 Re-Situating Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (Amit-Talai and Knowles, eds.)
Paul Ryer

 Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee (Rabinowitz)
Nadia Abu El-Haj

 Miroirs du Colonialisme, Terrain, no. 28, Carnets du Patronomie
Paul Stoller

 Keeping House in Lusaka (Hansen)
Lisa Cliggett

 Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (Ramet, ed.)
Adrianne Dana-Tabet

 The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America (Orlove, ed.)
Linda J. Seligmann

 Cross-Cultural Marriage: Identity and Choice (Breger and Hill, eds.)
Ilana Gershon

 Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies (Fienup-Riordan)
Nelson Graburn and Cari Borja

 Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peopleís Lives (Hoskins)
Carol Hendrickson

 The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Gutmann)
Richard Parker

 Godís Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Griffith)
Thomas Csordas

 Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (Davis-Floyd and Dumit, eds.)
Susan Markens

 The Anthropology of Pregnancy Loss: Comparative Studies in Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Neonatal Death (Cecil, ed.)
Elisha Renne

 Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Human Rights (Headland and Whiteman, eds.)
Elizabeth Brusco

 Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India (Hasan, ed.)
Saba Mahmood

 Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Armbrust)
Gregory Starrett

 A Different Kind of War Story (Nordstrom)
Alcinda Honwana

 Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (Hirsch)
Beverly Stoeltje

 Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Ries)
David Abramson

 When We Began, There Were Witchmen: An Oral History from Mount Kenya (Fadiman)
John G. Galaty

 Playing on the Mother-Ground: Cultural Routines for Childrenís Development (Lancy)
Jill E. Korbin

 Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations (Martíz)
Eugenia Georges

 Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Allison)
Misty L. Bastian

 In the Beginning: The Navajo Genesis (Levy)
Charlotte J. Frisbie

 Myths of Ethnicity and Nation: Immigration, Work, and Identity in the Belize Banana Industry (Moberg)
Melissa A. Johnson

 Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Di Leonardo)
Hervé Varenne

 Tourism and Culture: An Applied Perspective (Chambers, ed.); Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places (Abram, Waldren, Macleod, eds.)
Malcolm Crick

 Berlin in Focus: Cultural Transformations in Germany (Becker-Cantarino, ed.)
Hermine G. De Soto

 Two Towns in Germany: Commerce and the Urban Transformation (Haeuser)
Hermine G. De Soto

 School-Smart and Mother-Wise: Working-Class Womenís Identity and Schooling (Luttrell)
Amy Stambach

 Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology (Wilk)
Nicola Tannenbaum

 Re-Imaging Japanese Women (Imamura, ed.)
Susan J. Napier

 Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies (Ogasawara)
Susan J. Napier

 Transforming Societies, Transforming Anthropology (Moran, ed.)
Stephen Brush

 Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Hoodfar)
Elizabeth Faier

 The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives (Inhorn and Brown, eds.)
Andrea S. Wiley

 Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Robertson)
Teri Silvio

 The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Lamplan)
Marida Hollos

 Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology (Kuznar)
Michael C. Reed

 Own or Other Culture (Okely)
Todd Sanders

 Property in Economic Context (Hunt and Gilman, eds.)
Bonnie McCay

 Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands (Foster)
Karen Sykes

 Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (Hill and Hurtado)
Richard Reed
 
 

Cumulative Index, Volumes 22-25