Contesting the Politics of Culture, Rewriting the Boundaries of Inclusion: Working for Social Justice with Muslim and Arab Communities

This article calls on anthropologists of education to assert a more public voice attacking the ideological purposes to which the concept of "culture" has been deployed following the September 11 attacks. We must support schools, communities, and the media to address the power and politics of race and religion in contemporary social and political contexts, rather than focus primarily on multicultural education about Islamic and Arab "culture." Finally, this article urges us to expand our knowledge of the processes of social incorporation for Muslim and Arab immigrant youth to include a deeper understanding of how global politics contribute to young people's sense of emerging identities.     

"Decisions and Dispositions": Socializing Spatial Archaeology

Concerns with spatial dimensions and social inference have long histories in archaeology. However, the two histories are not always conjoined. This article considers changing understandings of space in archaeology in the last half century, and the variable nature of what "social" has denoted and connoted during that same span. The review highlights recurring calls for a social archaeology, and the degree to which, in such instances, social inference has been expressed in spatial terms, especially as these have recognized people's "decisions and dispositions" as shaping the archaeological record. Life histories of place receive special attention as ways of discerning the existence and social impact of such decisions and dispositions. These life histories constitute an arena in which archaeologists from diverse theoretical perspectives can offer complementary insights. Moreover, they exemplify ways in which social and spatial inferences in archaeology contribute to wider understanding of human experience. [Keywords: archaeology, social, space, place, life history]     

‘Community’ and the Re‐Making of 1970s Belfast

This article explores the fraught, shifting terrain of'community’ as lived out in 1970s Belfast. Applying Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling,’ it explores ‘community’ consciousness that is rooted in affection, sensation, and knowledge. It then considers campaigns against redevelopment in west Belfast at this time, and the ways they were inspired and limited by the contemporary experience of ‘community.’ Based on fieldwork, oral histories, and archival resources, the discussion proposes that political action in divided societies is not reducible to sectarian geography. Rather, it advocates analysing the historically specific contours ofnuanced emotional allegiances and spatial associations that motivate and limit political action, and attention to how social content and place figure in conceptions of collectivity.     

The Zone of Social Abandonment in Cultural Geography: On the Street in the United States, Inside the Family in India

This essay examines the spaces across societies in which persons with severe mental illness lose meaningful social roles and are reduced to "bare life." Comparing ethnographic and interview data from the United States and India, we suggest that these processes of exclusion take place differently: on the street in the United States, and in the family household in India. We argue that cultural, historical, and economic factors determine which spaces become zones of social abandonment across societies. We compare strategies for managing and treating persons with psychosis across the United States and India, and demonstrate that the relative efficiency of state surveillance of populations and availability of public social and psychiatric services, the relative importance of family honor, the extent to which a culture of psychopharmaceutical use has penetrated social life, and other historical features, contribute to circumstances in which disordered Indian persons are more likely to be forcefully "hidden" in domestic space, whereas mentally ill persons in the United States are more likely to be expelled to the street. However, in all locations, social marginalization takes place by stripping away the subject's efficacy in social communication. That is, the socially "dead" lose communicative efficacy, a predicament, following Agamben, we describe as "bare voice."     

The Cultural-Historical Foundations of the Zone of Proximal Development

This theoretical article attempts to locate the concept of a zone of proximal development within the holistic context of cultural-historical theory. In order to analyze the psychological content of processes taking place within the zone of proximal development, special content of personality and mental development has been singled out. We propose methodologically correlating the concept "zone of proximal development" and personality development. It has been demonstrated that neoformations and leading activity, which serve as indicators of child development, also define the zone of proximal development at each specific psychological age. The article argues that only education that influences the zone of proximal development's boundaries is developmental education (as understood by L. S. Vygotsky).     

Society's Metabolism

In this article, we inquire into the intellectual history ofthe application of the biological concept of metabolism to social systems-not as a metaphor; but as a material and energetic process within the economy and society vis-A-vis various natural systems. The paper reviews several scientific traditions that may contribute to such a view, including biology and ecology, social theory, cultural anthropology, and social geography It assembles widely scattered approaches dating from the 1860s onward and shows how they prepare the ground for the pioneers of "industrial metabolism" in the late 1960s. In connection to varying political perspedives, metabolism gradually takes shape as a powerful interdisciplinary concept It will take another 25 years before this approach becomes one of the most important paradigms for the empirical analysis of the society-nature-interaction across various disciplines. This later period will be the subject of part II of this literature review     

Struggling with Imaginaries of Trauma and Trust: The Refugee Experience in Switzerland

This article discusses some effects of migration politics on asylum seekers and refugees and on the Swiss health services. It is based on multisited ethnographic research that tracked interpretative concepts of the refugee experience. Following a grounded theory approach, it identifies imaginaries of trauma and trust as key categories in the field of transnational migration and health. The psychiatric concept of trauma and a more popularized discourse of traumatic memory are strongly emphasized in all of the investigated field sites: the providers of primary health care and psychosocial services and representatives of social welfare agencies and law-making bodies use this "diagnosis" extensively. This leads refugees to develop tactics of a) identifying with the trauma discourse in order to become "good refugees" and achieve legal status in Switzerland; b) struggling with the ascribed pathologies and suffering from retraumatizing effects of these predominant trauma policies; and c) trying to refuse or subvert them by emphasizing the existence of structural violence in the receiving countries. An analysis of the interactions of health providers and refugees shows that it takes place in an environment of social and economic insecurity and in a shared imaginary of (mis)trust, putting at stake the moral economy of recent migration politics and the refugee experience.     

Bringing the Moral Economy back in … to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements

James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) appeared at a time when "peasant studies" had begun to occupy an important place in the social sciences. The book's focus on Vietnam, as well as its novel argument about the causes of rural rebellion, attracted widespread attention and unleashed acerbic debates about peasants' "rationality" and the applicability of concepts from neoclassical economics to smallholding agriculturalists. In this article, I analyze E. P. Thompson's notion of "moral economy" and Scott's use of it to develop an experiential theory of exploitation. I then discuss other influences on Scott, including Karl Polanyi, A. V. Chayanov, and the Annales historians. "Moral economy" and "subsistence crisis" are concepts that Scott elaborated mainly in relation to village or national politics. In the final section of the article, I outline changes affecting peasantries in the globalization era and the continuing relevance of moral economic discourses in agriculturalists' transnational campaigns against the WTO.     

GOING BACK A LONG WAY: 'HOME PLACE', THRIFT AND TEMPORAL ORIENTATIONS IN NORTHERN VIETNAM

This article draws attention to the deep sense of attachment maintained by Hanoi families to their ancestral villages or rural 'home places' ( que ). It explores both the emotional and material dimensions of these attachments against the background of a now-defunct system of state rationing in late socialist Vietnam. It is suggested that for urban dwellers the home place has become an image of human relatedness and belonging that has evolved along with and in response to state-socialist efforts of social integration. This image promotes a time orientation that had been discredited in Vietnamese state socialism. The latter defined thrift as a duty of families and individuals toward the progress of xa hoi ('society'). The experience of shortage and self-restraint in socialist states and the question of how collectivism affected customary notions of community have thus far remained mostly distinct research areas. This article seeks to bring both together within a single framework of analysis by drawing attention to the question of temporality.     

To Know One's Place: Belonging and Differentiation in Alice Springs Town

Based on research in the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia the article explores how social and material aspects of the town generate meaningful understandings of oneself and differentiated others. Drawing on anthropology of place and space and analytical notions of belonging, I explore shared and divergent ways in which a range of people in town come to ‘know their place’ both in a socio-cultural sense and in the sense of relating to the built environment. Paying just as detailed attention to non-indigenous experience as scholars have long paid to indigenous lives, the article suggests that a focus on how people form material and social attachments to place can facilitate more open-ended understandings of changing forms of indigenous-settler relations than the more common focus on difference and division between categories of indigenous and non-indigenous people and domains of life.     

Terrorism in Native America: Interrogating the Past, Examining the Present, and Constructing a Liberatory Future

Drawing on Critical Race Theory, I examine the concept and practice of terrorism as it has been imposed on Native Americans by the United States government and its agents, and provide two concrete examples of terrorism. For anthropologists, this article amplifies the "voice" of the historical Other, describing terrorism from an emic perspective. For educators and educational anthropologists, I argue that we must critically examine issues of power and media portrayals of terrorism and terrorists in order to engage students in liberatory education.     

Reputational geographies and urban social cohesion

This article adds to recent literature in migration studies on the importance of place and space by drawing on extended interviews with residents in the Alum Rock area of East Birmingham. Our central theme is the exploration of reputational geographies; the symbolic and material boundaries drawn around places as indicators of social status, sites of memories and repositories of affect that can have profound socio-economic as well as emotional consequences for city residents. We argue that research and policy addressing urban social diversity must display a greater sensitivity to the deeply felt affiliations to, and memories of, local settings expressed by our respondents. We conclude that contemporary debates about multiculturalism and urban social cohesion require greater attention to the particularities of place and local identity.     

Revisiting Furnivall's ‘plural society’: Colonial Java as a mestizo society?

J. S. Furnivall's characterization of Java in the last half‐century of colonial rule as a ‘plural society’ has largely been taken for granted by most scholars who have supported or opposed the applicability of the concept in a Caribbean or African context. In the ‘plural society’ of colonial Java, according to Furnivall, Europeans, Chinese and natives each held by their own religion, their own culture and language, meeting as individuals only in the market place. This article re‐examines the case of colonial Java, which first prompted Furnivall to use the concept, paying particular attention to the Chinese. It argues that at the time he invented the term, he exaggerated the ‘pluralistic’ features of colonial society, and that, when applied to the situation at the turn of the century, the concept was quite misleading. Rather, it is suggested, colonial society in the urban centres of Java at that time might in many respects just as well be characterized as a ‘mestizo society’.     

'Beyond being': emergent narratives of suffering in Vietnam

Intertwining ethnographic and literary accounts, this article explores the mutual relationship between suffering and agency. The article describes how young Vietnamese women use narrative to find meaning in the suffering that a late-term abortion causes. Seeking to further develop anthropological use of the concept of social suffering, the article argues that existing scholarship has tended to neglect the importance of human agency and imagination, hinging as it does on suffering as entrenched within structural forces. The article contends that this neglect must be understood in the context of the particular epistemological and ethical conditions under which anthropological studies of human suffering are produced, and that closer attention to the human engagements out of which ethnographic accounts are fashioned may bring into analysis not only the harm that social forces can inflict on people, but also their capacities for action and imagination.     

Social Awareness in Monkeys

Tests of self-awareness in nonhuman primates have to date beenconcerned almost entirely with the recognition of an animal'sreflection in a mirror. By contrast, we know much less aboutnon-human primates' perception of their place within a socialnetwork, or of their understanding of themselves as individualswith unique sets of social relationships. Here we review evidencethat monkeys who fail the mirror test may nonetheless behaveas if they recognize themselves as distinct individuals, eachof whom occupies a unique place in society and has a specificset of relations with others. A free-ranging vervet monkey,baboon, or macaque recognizes other members of his group asindividuals. He also recognizes matrilineal kin groups, lineardominance rank orders, and behaves as if he recognizes his ownunique place within them. This sense of "social self" in monkeys,however, is markedly different from self-awareness in humans.Although monkeys may behave in ways that accurately place themselveswithin a social network, they are unaware of the knowledge thatallows them to do so: they do not know what they know, cannotreflect on what they know, and cannot become the object of theirown attention.     

On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures

This article argues for a new anthropology of the life course, one founded in indeterminacy and innovation. The fact that vital life events are rarely coherent, clear in direction, or fixed in outcome dramatically limits the usefulness of the life cycle model. In its place, I propose a unit of social analysis based in aspiration rather than event. I call this the vital conjuncture—integrating the "vital" of demographic vital events with Bourdieu's conception of the conjuncture of structure and action. Vital conjunctures suggest a new way of aggregating life history experiences and thus working between the individual and the social, free from the stultifying assumption of Stapes de vie. To illustrate the usefulness of the concept of "vital conjuncture, I focus on motherhood among young, educated Beti women in southern Cameroon. I demonstrate that rather than a clear threshold into female adulthood, here motherhood is a loosely bounded, fluid status. Contrary both to folk intuition and to the assumptions of a life cycle framework, Beti motherhood is not a stable status. Beti women who have borne children are not necessarily mothers, at least not all the time. Motherhood, instead, constitutes a temporary social status, an agent position that can be inhabited in specific forms of social action. The material offers perhaps an extreme example of what I argue is a more general phenomenon: "life stages" emerge only as the result of institutional projects, their coherence should be an object, rather than an assumption, of ethnographic inquiry. [Keywords: life course, Africa, demography, vital conjuncture]     

Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials

In this article, I explore the lessons that the anthropological debates of the 1980s about writing culture might have for contemporary childhood research within anthropology and the social sciences more generally. I argue that the current rhetoric about "giving voice to children," commonplace both inside and outside the academy, poses a threat to the future of childhood research because it masks a number of important conceptual and epistemological problems. In particular, these relate to questions of representation, issues of authenticity, the diversity of children's experiences, and children's participation in research, all of which need to be addressed by anthropologists in their own research practices with children. Unless anthropologists do so, childhood research risks becoming marginalized once more and will fail to provide an arena within which children are seen as social actors who can provide a unique perspective on the social world about matters that concern them as children.     

Voice cells in the primate temporal lobe

Communication signals are important for social interactions and survival and are thought to receive specialized processing in the visual and auditory systems. Whereas the neural processing of faces by face clusters and face cells has been repeatedly studied [1-5], less is known about the neural representation of voice content. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have localized voice-preferring regions in the primate temporal lobe [6, 7], but the hemodynamic response cannot directly assess neurophysiological properties. We investigated the responses of neurons in an fMRI-identified voice cluster in awake monkeys, and here we provide the first systematic evidence for voice cells. "Voice cells" were identified, in analogy to "face cells," as neurons responding at least 2-fold stronger to conspecific voices than to "nonvoice" sounds or heterospecific voices. Importantly, whereas face clusters are thought to contain high proportions of face cells [4] responding broadly to many faces [1, 2, 4, 5, 8-10], we found that voice clusters contain moderate proportions of voice cells. Furthermore, individual voice cells exhibit high stimulus selectivity. The results reveal the neurophysiological bases for fMRI-defined voice clusters in the primate brain and highlight potential differences in how the auditory and?visual systems generate selective representations of communication signals.     

The social display of the Chilean teal Anas flavirostris flavirostris

Filmed episodes of social display in the Chilean teal were analysed in order to throw light on the function of social display in surface-feeding ducks and the role the female plays in this activity. Four different methods were used to study the associations between different behaviour patterns in several individuals. It appears that the behaviour patterns comprising social display fall into three groups which are described as "attention getting", "close-range" and aggressive. It is proposed that social display allows unpaired males to attract the attention of females in an attempt to establish a pair-bond through the use of the "close-range" behaviour patterns. This forces paired males to compete in "attention-getting" behaviour patterns. Aggression results from this competition and from the threatening presence of unpaired males when the paired males try to strengthen their pair-bonds with the use of the "close-range" behaviour patterns.
Females play an influential role as their behaviour links the "attention-getting" behaviour with the "close-range" and aggressive behaviour. Their "close-range" behaviour suppresses that of other females.     

Effects of Biofeedback in Phonatory Disorders and Phonatory Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

The purpose of this article was to systematically review the literature on the effects of biofeedback therapy in the domain of phonatory disorders and phonatory performance, using studies in peer-reviewed journals. An extensive definition of biofeedback is given and its place in voice treatment is defined. Eighteen group or case studies or reports considering the effects of electromyographic, laryngoscopic and acoustic biofeedback in dysphonic patients (hyperfunctional voice disorders, hypofunctional voice disorders, psychogenic voice disorder, laryngeal trauma, total laryngectomy, vocal cord dysfunction) and participants with normal voices are included and an analysis of procedure as well as research design and results is presented. The usefulness of biofeedback in phonatory disorders and performance was to be interpreted based on tendencies, since there is a lack of randomized controlled efficacy studies. In only 3 of 18 studies (16.7%) did biofeedback therapy fail to improve voice quality or not result in better results than other forms of therapy. Recommendations for improved methodologies are made, which include the use of acoustic voice quality parameters.