Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

Disturbance of the Duration in the Menstrual Cycle under the Influence of Tight Clothing

We investigated the influence of skin pressure by clothing on the duration of menstrual cycle with 33 young adult women. The average age was 19.9 ± 2.1 years (mean ± SD), stature 159.5 ± 5.6cm and body mass 50.9 ± 5.5kg. Thirty-three women participated as subjects. They wore their usual clothing including foundation garments, panty stocking, pants or skirt and T-shirt or blouse and cardigan for the first 4 months from December to March (‘Tight 1’). For the second 4 months from April to July, the women wore loose clothes, i.e., they did not wear foundation garments at home. Skirt and jeans were worn loosely (‘Loose’). For the last 4 months, from August to November, they wore their clothes as tightly as possible, compared to ‘Tight 1’ (‘Tight 2’). Each participant marked the first day of the occurrence of menses in the pocket diary throughout the year. The main results were summarized as follows: 1) The average duration of the menstrual cycle was 44.2 ± 14.9 days (mean ±) in ‘Tight 1’, 30.4 ± 3.0 days in ‘Loose’ and 47.4 ± 22.7 days in ‘Tight 2’. 2) The number of months when the menses did not occur was 38 for ‘Tight 1’, 6 for ‘Loose’ and 40 for ‘Tight 2’. 3). The number of participants who had a duration of the menstrual cycles for more than 40 days, was 25 participants for ‘Tight’, 10 for ‘Loose’ and 29 for ‘Tight’. It can be concluded that skin pressure by clothing could disturb the duration in the menstrual cycle.     

GENDER AND ETHICS COMMITTEES: WHERE’S THE ‘DIFFERENT VOICE’?

Prominent international and national ethics commissions such as the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee rarely achieve anything remotely resembling gender equality, although local research and clinical ethics committees are somewhat more egalitarian. Under‐representation of women is particularly troubling when the subject matter of modern bioethics so disproportionately concerns women’s bodies, and when such committees claim to derive ‘universal’ standards. Are women missing from many ethics committees because of relatively straightforward, if discriminatory, demographic factors? Or are the methods of analysis and styles of ethics to which these bodies are committed somehow ‘anti‐female’? It has been argued, for example, that there is a ‘different voice’ in ethical reasoning, not confined to women but more representative of female experience. Similarly, some feminist writers, such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, have asked difficult epistemological questions about the dominant ‘masculine paradigm’ in science. Perhaps the dominant paradigm in ethics committee deliberation is similarly gendered? This article provides a preliminary survey of women’s representation on ethics committees in eastern and western Europe, a critical analysis of the supposed ‘masculinism’ of the principlist approach, and a case example in which a ‘different voice’ did indeed make a difference.     

Feminist identifications across the ethnic-national divide: Jewish and Palestinian students in Israel

This study explores young Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women’s gender ideology and their readiness to endorse the label ‘feminist’. Using data from a large-scale survey among students in the northern periphery of Israel, we found that feminism has become a source of identification for both Jewish and Palestinian young women in Israel, and that Palestinians are more inclined to endorse the self-label ‘feminist’ than Jews. We also found that each group invests the term with different meanings. Jewish students who identify as feminists tend to hold a relatively egalitarian gender ideology whereas Palestinian students who are more readily inclined to identify as feminists hold a more conservative gender ideology. These findings challenge both the liberal-modernistic perspective that perceives a correlation between feminist saliency and egalitarian gender ideology and the post-colonial perspective’s expectation that women from ethnic/racial minority groups will be disinclined to identify as feminists.     

‘It's a part of me,I feel naked without it': choice,agency and identity for Muslim women who wear the niqab

In the context of heightened suspicion and anti-Muslim stereotypes in a post-9/11 and 7/7 era, Muslim women who wear the niqab (face veil) are stigmatized, criminalized and marked as ‘dangerous’ to British/Western values. While the wearing of the niqab has elicited a good deal of media, political and public debates, little attention has been paid to the opinions of Muslim women who wear it. Drawing on individual and focus group interviews with Muslim women who wear the niqab in the UK, this article places at the centre of the debate the voices of those women who do wear it, and explores their reasons for adopting it. The findings show that the wearing of the niqab emerges as a personal choice, an expression of religious piety, public modesty and belonging to the ‘ummah’. It is also perceived as a form of agency, and non-conformity to Western consumerist culture and lifestyle.     

Cash cows,backdoor migrants,or activist citizens? International students,citizenship, and rights in Australia

Since the late 1990s, the intersection of education and migration policies in Australia has shifted international students from transient consumers to potential citizens. This article analyses responses to the ‘problem’ of international students as consumers, workers, and migrants, particularly the conceptualization of their rights and protections, and the ways students have been positioned as both passive subjects and activist citizens. The article provides a theoretical review of academic, government, community, and media responses to international students in general and the consequences of the education-migration nexus in particular. It argues that discourses of human rights and consumer rights have become increasingly interconnected in these debates. This analysis adds to the emerging literature on changing conceptions of rights and citizenship in neoliberal contexts, and also illuminates the social and political consequences of the education-migration nexus in Australia. This will have resonance for countries who have implemented a raft of similar policies.     

‘Beach-Boy Elders’ and ‘Young Big-Men’: Subverting the Temporalities of Ageing in Kenya's Ethno-Erotic Economies

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called ‘young big-men’. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of ‘beach-boy elders’, men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town

Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Herzegovina – a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical treatments abroad – this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates that lives of the ‘helpers’ and ‘helped’ in humanitarne akcije were understood as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the sociopolitical environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of ‘bare life’ in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the ‘savers’ and ‘saved’. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people perceived them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources). Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a transformative way.     

Ólavsøka: The faroese national holiday*

In many cultures with male‐dominated religions, women are subject to illnesses which are attributed to spirit‐possession. Two main alternative therapies are usually available. Treatment is effected either by exorcism, or by domesticating the spirit ‐ a process which de Heusch calls ‘adortism’. In the latter case, women are recruited through illness into female‐centred ‘cults of affliction’, regarded as superstitious and subversive by men, who try to prevent their wives from becoming involved in these cults, preferring exorcism as therapy. Exorcism thus becomes an instrument of male power in the struggle to control women's incipient religiosity. The paper examines the interplay of exorcism and adorcism in relation to gender in Christian, Muslim and Buddhist settings. It concludes by considering the implications of women as well as men practising exorcism, and suggests that the consequences of the formal distinction between exorcism and adorcism may not always be as sharply opposed as appears at first sight.     

The Nation‐State,Public Education,and the Logic of Migration: Chinese Students in Hungary

Public education remains the nation‐state's foremost instrument of forging citizens. But the emergence of ‘international education’, a system explicitly based on the ideology of globality and outside the purview of national curricula, provides a way to circumvent the citizen‐making machine. This article, based on fieldwork among Chinese secondary school students in Hungary, considers the interaction between ‘international education’ and transnational migrants in a nation‐state whose public education, as the state itself, has little interest in the ‘integration’ of non‐natives.     

Collapsing fish stocks,gendered economies,and anxieties of entrapment in coastal Sierra Leone

This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish, tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret ‘medicines’ to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyse how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency, and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone's history of domestic slavery.     

Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel’s Later Work

Efforts to bring science into early 19th century breeding practices in Central Europe, organised from Brno, the Hapsburg city in which Mendel would later turn breeding experiments into a body of timeless theory, are here considered as a significant prelude to the great discovery. During those years prior to Mendel’s arrival in Brno, enlightened breeders were seeking ways to regulate the process of heredity, which they viewed as a force to be controlled. Many were specialising in sheep breeding for the benefit of the local wool industry while others were showing an interest in commercial plants, especially fruit trees and vines, and later cereals. Breeders explained their problems in regulating heredity in terms of (1) climatic influences (2) disruption due to crossing (3) sports or saltations. Practical experience led them to the concepts of ‘inheritance capacity’ and the ‘mutual elective affinity’ of parents. The former was seen to differ among individuals and also among traits; the latter was proposed as a means of adding strength to heredity. The breeders came to recognise that traits might be hidden and yet transmitted as a ‘potential’ to future generations. They also grew to understand that heredity would be strengthened when a quality was ‘fixed’ within a lineage by ‘pure blood relations.’ Continued selection of the desired quality might then lead to ‘a higher perfection.’ But the ultimate ‘physiological’ question about breeding, ‘what is inherited and how?,’ found no answer. Major figures in this development included Abbot Napp, the one who asked this question and who was due to receive Mendel into the monastery in 1843, and Professor Diebl whose lectures on agriculture and natural science at the Brno Philosophical Institute Mendel would attend in 1846. Here we analyse their progress in theorizing about breeding up until about 1840. In discussing this development, we refer to certain international contacts, especially with respect to information transfer and scientific education, within the wider context of the late Enlightenment.     

The politics of fear: what does it mean to those who are otherized and feared?

Islamophobia has, of late, created a tendency to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation of Islam that does not recognize and respect boundaries imposed by western geopolitics. This has been done by some to create and by others to generate a sense of exclusive unity that would separate all Muslims and make them into ‘others’ within western societies. It is the contention of this paper that such calls both embody and ignore the diversities of Islam as understood and practised by its adherents. Furthermore by ‘otherizing’ the entire community of Muslims in the West, the singular label of ‘Islamism’ marginalizes and may even silence the vibrant contestations among Muslims about their faith and its teachings; these include questions posed by women who may be described as feminists. The attributes of Islamism, ascribed to the faith by public, the media and politicians in the West and adopted by some Muslims primarily as a politically unifying force, are very different from the fluidity and flexibility that has been a historic part of lived Islam. Many Muslims may well aspire to belong to the umma: people of Islam conceptualized as crossing ethnic, racial, geographical and political boundaries. But Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular do not wish to do so at the expense of being otherized and conforming to the negative stereotypes ascribed to them that mask their fluid identities and, in the case of ‘white’ women, their close ties with their kinship networks. The multiplicity of Muslim's identities sits more easily within the permeable unbounded umma applicable to the global as well as the local without necessarily always privileging one or other identity.     

Reconstructing feminist perspectives of women’s bodies using a globalized view: The changing surrogacy market in Japan

This paper aims to evoke an alternative viewpoint on surrogacy, moving beyond popular Western feminist beliefs on the practice, by introducing the history and current context of East Asian surrogacy. To elaborate a different cultural perspective on surrogacy, this paper first introduces the East Asian history of contract pregnancy systems, prior to the emergence of the American invention of ‘modern’ surrogacy practice. Then, it examines Japanese mass media portrayals of cross-border surrogacy in which white women have become ‘convenient’ entities. The results of the analysis show how Japanese culture has adopted a rhetoric about the use of white women as convenient surrogate mothers in the global commercial surrogacy market. An essential aspect of surrogacy is the premise that a woman’s reproductive function should be accessible to others. Past discussions among feminists have neglected this important point. Moreover, they share the assumption that white surrogacy clients are exploiters, who take advantage of women of colour as surrogate mothers. The current situation in Asia flips this perspective—with white women regarded as easier targets for exploitation by wealthy people of colour. For Asian clients, Westerners can be easily regarded as ‘others’ whom they can use for their reproductive needs. In today's globalized era, the surrogacy industry is no longer for affluent Westerners only. Considering this change, it is crucial to discuss surrogacy issues by reconstructing feminist perspectives with a globalized view, to help protect women’s bodies, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, skin colour, or religion.     

The Lady Vanishes: What’s Missing from the Stem Cell Debate

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant.     

Imagining the Western Husband: Thai Women's Desires for Matrimony,Status and Beauty

This article examines a group of Thai women's perceptions of western Caucasian men as ideal marriage partners and its impact on their sexual practices and relationship decisions. Based on conversations with women living in a ‘slum’ community in Bangkok, I argue that women who do not fit local ideals of light skin color, economic success and urban origins face obstacles among potential Thai suitors. Some of these women strategically prefer western suitors to local men. Through their relationship choices, these women upset local hierarchies of desire as they attempt to subvert skin color-bias and pose challenges to Thai marital traditions. At the same time, their relationship pursuits conform to gender expectations of the male breadwinner and female caretaker and may unintentionally reproduce skin color and status hierarchies. Although Thai women's sexual relationships with western men are not a new phenomena, they underscore the transnational nature of sexual desire and contemporary social change.     

Gestation as mothering

Some commentators maintain that gestational surrogates are not ‘mothers’ in a way capable of grounding a claim to motherhood. These commentators find that the practices that constitute motherhood do not extend to gestational surrogates. We argue that gestational surrogates should be construed as mothers of the children they bear, even if they fully intend to surrender those children at birth to the care of others. These women stand in a certain relationship to the expected children: they live in changed moral circumstances by reason of their pregnancy, and they engage in the practices said to define motherhood in the post-birth context. By contrast, ovum donors and embryo donors are not similarly ‘mothers’ because they do not find themselves involved in these circumstances. Not all women involved in three-parent in vitro fertilization qualify as mothers either. Given this analysis of mothering, we note that transmen who gestate children are engaged in mothering activity even if they otherwise function as a father to those children. By itself, this defence of the maternity of gestational surrogates does not confer moral title to the children they bear; gestation would not by itself override the contractual arrangements gestational surrogates have made regarding the disposition of their children. This interpretation of gestational surrogates as mothers does, however, undercut cultural understandings of these women as mere ‘vessels’, devoid of entitlement to respect as persons and parents. We also consider the meaning of mothering for ‘brain-dead’ women kept alive to give birth and for the prospect of extracorporeal gestation.     

Beyond the senses: perception,the environment,and vision impairment

The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non-vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.     

Conception,De-Conception and Social Structure in Bush Mekeo Culture

According to a contradiction of endogamy vs. exogamy (or of ‘blood’ vs. ‘non-blood’ relationship) in Bush Mekeo culture, non-relatives may marry and conceive by ‘mixing’ of distinct procreative clan bloods. By means of marriage and mortuary reciprocities, on the other hand, relatives or kin are ‘de-conceived’ through the ‘unmixing’ of non-procreative clan bloods. Thus, Bush Mekeo social structure is preserved through time: While the boundaries distinguishing unilineal descent groups are maintained constant, non-relatives are translated into affines who generate bilateral kin, and bilateral kin are translated into nonrelatives and, thereby, potential affines.