Love, Sorrow, and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence

Love, Sorrow, and Rage: Destitute Women in. Manhattan Residence . Alisse Waterston. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. xi + 235 pp.     

"Strong Women" and "Pretty Girls": Self-Provisioning, Gender, and Class Identity in Rural Galicia (Spain)

In this article I examine expressions of class and gender identity in a worker-peasant community in rural Galicia (Spain). While men who have worked for decades in migrant destinations define their own class positionality partly through reference to the unpaid, subsistence work that is performed mainly by women who remain in the community, these same women adeptly "code switch" between "strong woman" and '"pretty girl" demeanors through their work activities, dress, and use of domestic spaces. Using the example of ethnographic data from this one part of rural Europe, 1 argue for the broader importance of anthropologists considering how laboring bodies become gendered; the intersections between gender and class identities; and connections among mixed livelihood strategies, the continuity of self-provisioning activities, and resistance to fully commoditized consumption. [Key words: class and gender identity, Galicia, Spain, unpaid provisioning work, consumption]     

Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality

Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Sue-Ellen Jacobs. Wesley Thomas. and Sabine Lang, eds. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997.332 pp.     

Women and Bullfighting: Gender, Sex and the Consumption of Tradition.

Women and Bullfighting: Gender, Sex and the Consumption of Tradition. Sarah Pink. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 1997. 234 pp.     

For Love,Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry

Public debates about international matchmaking highlight the victimization of impoverished women by western men or the self-interested instrumentalism of women who marry for visas. Meanwhile, agencies and many of their clients portray this as a linking of well-intentioned lonely hearts who just want normal family lives. A meaningful anthropological account must incorporate and move beyond both types of narratives, acknowledging that deeply felt sentiment and ‘strategic’ plans to improve one's life overlap in all kinds of social exchange, romantic or otherwise. How the relationship between self-interest and affect is understood depends upon historically specific and gendered experiences of political economy. Participants’ framings of their own and their prospective spouses’ ‘sincerity’ and ‘seriousness’ are diagnostic of structural pressures each group has experienced, which they seek to address through international marriage.     

For Love,Labour, and Lifestyle: European Men Moving to Northeast Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article debates the specific case of the migration of European men to Northeast Brazil and its relation to the creation of intimacy bonds with local women that have been made possible by previous tourist visits. The analysis has the principal objective of understanding the dense framework of social conditions and circumstances that cause the transatlantic mobility of men, and gives particular emphasis to the emotional and marital factors that fuel this type of movement, trying to show that they also migrate for intimacy reasons, and not only for economic reasons as studies based on a neoclassical approach have often seemed to indicate. While central, in these examples of international mobility, the intention to marry is not as determining a factor as the concept of ‘marriage migrations’ would suggest. Poetic motivations related to passion coexist dynamically with a much wider set of (micro)political economy and existential drives, related not only to employment and investment but also to recreation and the minutiae of everyday life. For this reason, it is important to avoid any unicausal schema based on exclusive or dichotomous conceptual frameworks that foreground migration for marital, lifestyle and/or employment motives. The migrations in question tend to be motivated, simultaneously, by the desire for matrimony and to secure assets, and even by what we might call ‘civilisational’ issues. The material that sustains both this and other perspectives presented in the article is the result of a multisited ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in various spaces within Euro-Brazilian configurations of intimacy.     

Rituals of Gender Identity: Markers of Siberian Khanty Ethnicity, Status, and Belief

Siberian Khanty (Ostiak) menstrual taboos and related rituals of birth, naming, and marriage are analyzed, in order to explore cross-cultural theories of menstrual restriction, gender stratification, and female conservatism. Emphasis is placed on Mary Douglas's idea that conflicting norms of male dominance and female independence can encourage pollution beliefs. The importance of ancestresses, female shamans, and postmenopausal women in Khanty ritual indicates that there is no male monopoly on concepts of culture, power, the sacred and the "public." Khanty ideas about women, changing with Russian influence, are discussed in terms of slowly shifting definitions of "self and ethnicity. Data result from 13 months in the Soviet Union, including a summer ethnographic expedition to the Northern Ob River . [symbolic anthropology, pollution beliefs, gender stratification, ethnicity, Siberian Khanty (Ostiak)]     

Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger

Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Adeline Masquelier. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 352 pp.     

Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England

Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England. Nicole Rodriguez Toulis. New York: New York University Press, 1997.304 pp.     

Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America

Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America. Irma McClaurin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.218 pp.     

Development,Labour Relations and Gender in Papua New Guinea.

This paper examines the relationship between ‘subsistence’ production, simple commodity production and wage labour and the different effects this relationship has on males and females. The peri-urban village of Siar, located a few kilometres north of Madang town in Papua New Guinea, is used as a case study. It is argued that the village as a social group is dependent on wage labour for its reproduction and hence is proletarianized. As part of the proletarianization process, married women in the village have become doubly subordinated: to capital and to men.     

Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields

Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields. Miriam Goheen. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 252 pp.     

Drinking Money and Pulling Women: Mobile Phone Talk,Gender, and Agency in Vanuatu

This paper examines aspects of gendered discourse around mobile phones in Vanuatu, focusing especially on the talk of high-ranking men from the northern Raga-speaking region of Pentecost Island. Rather than being restricted to the technologies or their direct capacities alone, it is argued that the local reception of new technologies such as mobile phones should be contextualised in terms of broader dialogues of change, and should also take into account the visual and discursive expressions of culture that accompanies them, including in the form of marketing. Examination of the ‘impact’ of such new technologies should also include taking account of broader local meanings and messages that become associated with them. As the ethnography presented here suggests, while mobile phones themselves certainly provide a useful tool for furthering positive social change, such as in the empowerment of women, the meanings and narratives that surround them may by marked contrast entail more negative entrenchments of unequal relations of power.