Reconsidering Witchcraft: Postcolonial Africa and Analytic (Un)Certainties

African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly flexible and deeply attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch provide commentaries on the meaning and merit of modernity as experienced in different historical and cultural settings. By exploring one particular type of witchcraft —that involving rain—amongst the lhanzu of Tanzania, this article suggests instead that some forms of witchcraft may be more pertinent to understanding local notions of "tradition" than "modernity." It is argued that the process of identifying rain witches provides lhanzu men and women with a way to circumscribe, contemplate, and, ultimately, reassert the veracity and significance of a conceptual category they call "tradition." The article concludes by critiquing the homogenizing effects of terms like the African witch and African witchcraft, compelling us to think in terms of pluralities rather than singulars. [Keywords: witchcraft, modernity, tradition, rainmaking, anthropological theory]     

Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. Hildi Hendrickson. ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 268 pp.     

Native American Postcolonial Psychology

Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 227 pp.     

Laws of the Postcolonial

Laws of the Postcolonial. Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick. eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 309 pp.     

Postcolonial Suicide Among Inuit in Arctic Canada

Indigenous youth suicide incidence is high globally, and mostly involves young males. However, the Inuit of Arctic Canada have a suicide rate that is among the highest in the world (and ten times that for the rest of Canada). The author suggests that suicide increase has emerged because of changes stemming in part from the Canadian government era in the Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s. The effects of government intervention dramatically affected kin relations, roles, and responsibilities, and affinal/romantic relationships. Suicide is embedded in these relationships. The author also discusses the polarization between psychiatric and indigenous/community methods of healing, demonstrating that government-based intervention approaches to mental health are not working well, and traditional cultural healing practices often take place outside of the mainstream clinics in these communities. The main questions of the paper are: Who should control suicide prevention? What is the best knowledge base for suicide prevention?     

Multiple Black Identities

Book reviewed in this article:
Black Mosaic: Community, Race, and Ethnicity among Black Immigrants in Washington, DC . Portia James, curator.     

Post-Sandinista Ethnic Identities in Western Nicaragua

The meanings of the ethnic labels Indian and mestizo in Latin America are often treated as stable, bounded, and clearly marked by anthropologists, nationalists, and indigenous intellectuals alike. In Nicaragua, the post-Sandinista emergence of a discourse of indigenous identity in the western region, where successive state elites have considered that identity erased, underscores the dynamic mutability of both indigenous and mestizo ethnicities. This reconsideration derives from dialogue between anthropological analysis and an indigenous intellectual involved in organizing in the western region.     

Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India

Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Akhil Gupta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. 410 pp.     

Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World.

Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in. Polycentric World. Anouar Majid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 225 pp.     

Estranged Bodies and Vietnamese Identities

In this paper I will explore both the regulation of migrant bodies as well as the lived experience of migrant embodiment in order to develop an analysis of the body as a vortex of meaning in the displacement process. By examining the way in which the bodies of Vietnamese migrants are simultaneously object and agent, I will indicate how the relations between migrants and the wider society are felt and sensed through the bodily experiences of Vietnamese people. The dynamic between how Vietnamese bodies are represented and how they are experienced reveals the body to be a predominant marker of difference from both within and without, the mediator between experience and signification. I will indicate how the dominant media construction of Vietnamese bodies as defiled has sustained forms of exclusion and distancing which have influenced the way that Vietnamese bodies are lived. I thus explore the means through which the body has particular salience when attempting to understand the nature of migrant identities in Australia.     

National Development Generates National Identities

The purpose of the article is to test the relationship between national identities and modernisation. We test the hypotheses that not all forms of identity are equally compatible with modernisation as measured by Human Development Index. The less developed societies are characterised by strong ascribed national identities based on birth, territory and religion, but also by strong voluntarist identities based on civic features selected and/or achieved by an individual. While the former decreases with further modernisation, the latter may either decrease or remain at high levels and coexist with instrumental supranational identifications, typical for the most developed countries. The results, which are also confirmed by multilevel regression models, thus demonstrate that increasing modernisation in terms of development contributes to the shifts from classical, especially ascribed, identities towards instrumental identifications. These findings are particularly relevant in the turbulent times increasingly dominated by the hardly predictable effects of the recent mass migrations.     

Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka

Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka. Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and Chandra R. de Silva. eds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 212 pp.     

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. Mary Bucholtz. A. C. Liang. and Laurel Sutton. eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 431 pp.     

Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico

Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico. Arlene M. Davila. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. 302 pp.     

Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay.

Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Thomas Blom Hansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 280 pp.     

History,Houses and Regional Identities

The Indonesian government authorises particular modes of representations of the diverse cultural traditions of the archipelago which are subservient to the display of a national culture in the pursuit of national unity. The ‘Taman Mini Indonesia Indah’ theme park in Jakarta manifests the authorised version of difference, as do regional museums. In the province of South Sulawesi, under the guiding influence of local scholars, the provincial government has developed its own theme park which, in the manner of the Jakarta park, uses house forms as emblems of the cultural diversity found in the province. This paper investigates the historical sensibilities displayed in the park, those of the planners and those of the people who live in and use the park. The planners have tried to avoid the use of ersatz forms, with a stress on cultural ‘authenticity’ in the creation of the displays. They have made the park a showcase for an expression of a regional sensibility about the historical genesis of the place of the province in the modern world, giving their own traditions a centrality which is lacking in expressions of culture authorised by the national government.     

Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles

Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles . Saurabh Dube. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 259 pp.     

Fleeting Identities: Perishable Material Culture in Archaeological Research

Fleeting Identities: Perishable Material Culture in Archaeological Research. Penelope Ballard Drooker. ed. Carbondale, 1L: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 2001.410 pp.     

Optimal Decoding of Cellular Identities in a Genetic Network

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