In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arena of speech play, verbal art and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911-81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience. [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture]

I address the emotional debate over David Stoll’s claims that parts of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum’s testimonial are untrue. Rather than arguing for or against either "side," I negotiate the double entendre of "Indian giver" and the assumptions that structure the arguments that make up the debate. I track how such assumptions of identity involve a detour through gendered, ethnic, and transnational difference. Transactions such as gifting, joking, and stereotyping are ecstatic and pleasurable, and vacillate with threatening to suggest that the vacillation itself, the exchange, is essential to identification and that the empiricist promise of being "nonduped" is an error. [identity, violence, globalization, consciousness, Mayan organizing, gender, U.S. anthropology]

In the 1990s, the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli triggered a furor over the millions of tax dollars the Moscow city government paid him for his monumental art installations around the Russian capital. Critics have assailed such gross expenditure in a period of economic privation, questioned the propriety of Tsereteli’s ties to power, and ridiculed his often cartoon-like aesthetics. In the embattled new Russian state, this infantilization of public space through government-sponsored art reprises a familiar discourse of timeless innocence in the service of state power. [Russia, Moscow, monuments, state power, time, art]

Through an analysis of recent developments in Australian soccer, I extend Homi Bhabha’s work on the nation as a problem of narration in two principal ways. I demonstrate that sport, like literature, is a fertile site for narrating the nation. I also illustrate the value of moving beyond the exclusive study of national narratives to the study of ethnic and transnational narratives as well in order to understand more fully the role of narrative in the construction of identities in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, I argue that the ambivalence and the power of the nation as narrative is what enables people involved in Australian soccer to use different narratives of the Australian nation--narratives of ethnic nationalism, multiculturalism, and cultural hybridity--to serve their own political and economic interests. [nationalism, multi-culturalism, ethnicity, Australia, soccer]

law and the pragmatics of inclusion: governing domestic violence in Trinidad and Tobago
Mindie Lazarus-Black

In this article, I demonstrate some of the complexities of the "pragmatics of inclusion" that ensue when subordinated people first struggle to gain access to hegemonic institutions and then challenge those institutions to maintain their inclusion. In presenting these findings, I reconsider the meaning of agency for persons seeking legal redress from domestic abuse in Trinidad and reassess the power and limitations of domestic violence law as a symbol and instrument for social change. [domestic violence law, agency, legal processes, kinship and gender ideologies, Caribbean]

Following the nuclear test ban treaty, weapons scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories are developing virtual technologies to simulate nuclear testing. Their interpretations of these technologies are incommensurable with the interpretations of antinuclear activists and conservatives in part because knowledge based on simulations is hyperconstructible. Introducing the notion of "securityscape," I connect the debate on simulations in nuclear science to the emergent literature on global structures, which has tended to ignore inter-state military relations. [anthropology of science, globalization, nuclear weapons, physics, war, U.S. culture, and activism]