Multiple Black Identities

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

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.     

Postcolonial Identities in Africa

Postcolonial Identities in Africa. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger. eds. London: Zed Books, 1996. 292 pp.     

Zoogeography of Vietnamese primates

Based on geographic complementarity of congeneric taxa, the 22 species or well-defined subspecies of primates that inhabit Vietnam may be allocated to nine zoogeographic groups (lorises, two; macaques, three; langurs, three; gibbons, one). Analysis of group distributions reveals two major patterns: (1) four of the six non-macaque groups are essentially restricted to the eastern part of the Indochinese Peninsula, east of the Mekong River; and (2) species and subspecies in seven of the nine groups reach their northern or southern limits of distribution in central Vietnam, at 14–17‡N. The first pattern suggests that the Mekong River has been an important barrier to westward dispersal of nonmacaque primates in continental Southeast Asia. The second pattern suggests that a Zoogeographic barrier formerly extended east and west across Vietnam at ca. 14–17‡N.     

Deviant Bodies

Deviant Bodies. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.416 pp.     

Distinct and Untamed: Articulating Bulimic Identities

Bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa are inextricably linked, with substantial clinical and epidemiological overlaps. Yet, while anorexia has been analyzed extensively in medical anthropology, bulimia remains under-theorized. This is, perhaps, because, compared to self-starvation, binge eating presents a logic of practice that is difficult to reconcile with culturally reified notions of self-control, transcendence, and hard work. Thus, although anthropologists have analyzed anorexic subjectivities as imbued with a sense of cleanliness and purity, moral superiority, and heroics, similar analyses have not been extended to bulimic subjectivities; instead, bulimia has been subsumed, as a tangential disorder, into analyses of anorexia. In this paper, I aim to move bulimic identities from the margins to the centre of anthropological analysis. Based on participant narratives, I analyze bulimic identity as articulated by six Israeli women who identified as bulimic and received treatment for bulimia. The women’s narratives show that bulimic identity is aligned with concepts of distinct selfhood. For these women, to be bulimic was to be framed as ‘abnormal’; but this ‘abnormality’, albeit a source of social stigma and shame, held meanings that went beyond pathology. Through the claiming of bulimic identity, the women positioned themselves as untamed, non-conforming subjects, who acted against gendered and classed expectations—and even against the limitations of the body. Their constructions of bulimic distinction highlight the need for anthropological work that situates bulimia not as a footnote to anorexia, but as a structurally and culturally meaningful condition in its own right.     

Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and services including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification.     

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.