Belonging to the nation: generational change,identity and the Chinese diaspora

This study reviews developments in the ethnic and national identity of the descendants of migrants, taking ethnic Chinese as a case study. Our core question is why, in spite of debates worldwide about identity, exclusion and rights, do minority communities continue to suffer discrimination and attacks? This question is asked in view of the growing incidence in recent years of ‘racial’ conflicts between majority and minority communities and among minorities, in both developed and developing countries. The study examines national identity from the perspective of migrants' descendants, whose national identity may be more rooted than is often thought. Concepts such as ‘new ethnicities’, ‘cultural fluidity’, and ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ identities feature in this examination. These concepts highlight identity changes across generations and the need to challenge and reinterpret the meaning of ‘nation’ and to review problems with policy initiatives designed to promote nation-building in multi-ethnic societies.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

Things to think with: words and objects as material symbols

This paper integrates archaeology, anthropology and functional brain imaging in an examination of the cognition of words and objects. Based on a review of recent brain imaging experiments, it is argued that in cognition and action, material symbols may be the link between internal representations and objects and words in the world. This principle is applied to the sapient paradox, the slow development of material innovation at the advent of the anatomically modern human. This translates the paradox into a long-term build-up of extended and distributed cognition supported by development in the complexity of material symbols.     

Compliance and the patient's perspective: Controlling symptoms in everyday life

Non-compliance with medical advice is poorly understood. Most of the existing literature considers the problem only from the doctor's point of view. We undertook a diachronic, qualitative study of the illness experiences of 19 women to try to understand non-compliance from the patient's perspective. Three-fourths of our study group had ceased to follow their doctor's recommendations by four months postdiagnosis. Their non-compliance could not be explained by the fact that the women held understandings of their illnessses which were incongruent with their physicians'; nor were they unable to understand the diagnosis they received A consideration of the roles that their diagnosis and treatments played in their daily lives proved more useful in explaining their failure to follow physicians' recommendations. Patients' use of treatments reflected their desire to control symptoms within the constraints of their daily routines.     

Fear and everyday life in rural Nepal

This paper analyses fear in a village in central Nepal during the ‘People’s War’. Spanning the years from 1999 to 2008, the paper illustrates how the different phases of the insurgency and individual circumstances resulted in people’s relationship with fear changing over time. By presenting a chronological analysis of fear, the authors draw attention to the interrelationship between fear, temporality and sociality and show that fear is always contextually situated, differently experienced through time and related to personal circumstances. Villagers had strongly developed coping strategies which they drew upon to support themselves and decrease their fear. Some people, however, suffered such a degree of structural violence that experiencing fear was seen as a privilege. Others denied their fear as part of their performance of manliness while others coped by ridiculing fear. Although a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust lingered, most people recovered from the impact of chronic fear. They fully returned to their field and forest work as well as their previous social activities following the peace agreement of 2006.     

Exemplars and the reproduction of everyday life: The Amherst affair

Frederick Errington is Aaaociate Professor of Anthropology, at Keene State College, New Hampshire. Deborah Gewertz is Professor of Anthropology, at Amherst College, Massachusetts.     

When "humanitarianism" becomes "development": the politics of international aid in Syria's Palestinian refugee camps

In recent years, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has attempted to go beyond its role as a provider of relief and basic services in Palestinian refugee camps and emphasize its role as a development agency. In this article, I focus on the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, an UNRWA-sponsored development project taking place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Ein el Tal and Neirab in northern Syria. I argue that UNRWA's role as a relief-centered humanitarian organization highlights the everyday suffering of Palestinian refugees, suffering that has become embedded in refugees’ political claims. I show that UNRWA's emphasis on “development” in the refugee camps is forcing Palestinian refugees in Ein el Tal and Neirab to reassess the political narrative through which they have understood their relationship with UNRWA.     

Photochemistry in everyday life: the effect of spontaneous emulsification on the photochemistry of trans-anethole.

The photochemical behaviour of spontaneously formed microemulsions obtained upon dilution of ethanolic solutions of trans-anethole (E-1-(4-methoxyphenyl)propene, t-A) with water is compared to that of homogeneous ethanolic t-A solutions. Significant differences in reactivity reflect the confined nature of the aggregated t-A which leads to reduced yields of isomerization and dimerization products. In contrast to homogeneous solutions, where a photostationary state enriched in the Z-isomer (c-A) is rapidly reached, the proportion of c-A formed upon irradiation of t-A microemulsions remains below 15%. In the presence of oxygen the formation of trans-anethole oxide is observed which, when formed in non-homogeneous environments, undergoes polymerization.     

Idioms of distress: Somatic responses to distress in everyday life

In-depth interviews were conducted among 50 subjects residing in the industrial town of Newcastle, Australia. Half of these subjects were from the general population and half were currently seeking counselling for personal/family problems. None of the subjects were receiving any medical care at the time of interview, though seven had done so during the episode of distress they were discussing. The study shows that while the subjects psychologized their problems, members of both groups tended to somatize at a rate proportional to the level of distress. Subjects were unaware of any relationship between the distress they were experiencing and their physical complaints. The results of this study support previous research which argues that those experiencing distress and those who tend to introspect are also those who are likely to amplify somatic symptoms. At the same time these results depart from findings in the United States which suggest that in the West, people learn to express social and personal distress in psychological terms,, thereby reducing the level of somatization. Though not representative of the population as a whole, the findings raised questions warranting further study.     

Reproductive strategies and Islamic discourse: Malian migrants negotiate everyday life in Paris, France

Approximately 37 thousand Malians currently reside in France as part of the West African diaspora. Primarily Muslim, both women and men confront challenges to their understandings of Islamic prohibitions and expectations, especially those addressing conjugal relations and reproduction. Biomedical policies generate marital conflicts and pose health dilemmas for women who face family and community pressures to reproduce but biomedical encouragement to limit childbearing. For many women, contraception represents a reprieve from repeated pregnancies and fatigue in spite of resistance from those who contest women's reproductive decisions as antithetical to Islam. French social workers play a particularly controversial role by introducing women to a discourse of women's rights that questions the authority of husbands and of religious doctrine. Women and men frame decisions and debate in diverse interpretations of Islam as they seek to manage the contradictions of everyday life and assert individual agency in the context of immigration and health politics.     

The life and death of a street boy in East Africa: everyday violence in the time of AIDS

This article focuses on the life history of a single street boy in northwestern Tanzania, whom I name Juma. I suggest that Juma's experiences and the life trajectory of himself and of significant individuals around him (particularly his mother) were structured by everyday violence. I describe everyday violence in terms of a conjuncture between macrostructural forces in East Africa (including a history of failed development schemes and the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism) and the lived experience of individuals as they negotiate local, contextual factors (including land-tenure practices, the power dynamics between immediate and extended kin, life on the streets, and constructions of gender and sexuality). I suggest that AIDS and its many impacts on Juma's life course can only be understood in a broader context of everyday violence. From this basis, I draw several general conclusions regarding AIDS prevention and intervention strategies.