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.     

A "Consumer's Right" to Choose a Midwife: Shifting Meanings for Reproductive Rights under Neoliberalism

The "right to choose" has long served as the ideological rallying cry for reproductive rights activists. Yet critical attention to the social, political, and economic conditions under which individuals make such choices has been central to anthropological research on reproduction. In the context of neoliberal public policy shifts that favor trust in the market to remedy all social and economic inequality, I explore how women's reproductive rights are becoming characterized by one's ability to consume uneven reproductive "choices." Based on my ethnographic fieldwork with midwifery supporters in Virginia, I examine how organizers have begun to utilize "consumer rights" rhetoric in their struggle for legal access to midwives. One often-unintended result has been intensified divisions within this movement, particularly as low-income "homebirthers" feel unable to claim the identity of "consumer." I use Virginia as a case study to raise broader questions about women's shifting strategies toward securing reproductive rights under neoliberalism.     

Introduction to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key"

In this "In Focus" introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights." After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relation to this history and indicate how, when taken as a whole, they express a new key or register within which human rights can be studied, critiqued, and advanced through anthropological forms of knowledge. This "In Focus" is in part an argument for an essentially ecumenical anthropology of human rights, one that can tolerate, and indeed encourage, approaches that are both fundamentally critical of contemporary human rights regimes and politically or ethically committed to these same regimes.     

The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among "Native" Anthropologists

In this article, a linguistic anthropologist reviews the growing literature on the possibilities and problematics of understanding "native" anthropology and its implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. The author examines the centrality of language for "native" scholars in negotiating their legitimacy in the field. Confessions of failure by native scholars and their dilemmas with translation illuminate the dialogic and political nature of ethnographic inquiry, particularly when research is conducted in "home" communities. Moreover, native ethnographers' critical reflexivity regarding their subject positionings and "voice" may constitute a counterhegemonic rhetorical strategy for negotiating multiple accountabilities. Self-identification as a native scholar is seldom a means through which researchers "play the native card" via a noncritical privileging of their "insider" status. Instead, claiming native status may act tactically as both a normalizing and an exclusivizing endeavor, as well as a signif ier of the decolonization of anthropological thought and practice. The author considers these and other critical implications of native anthropological research in relation to her own multisited research on African American linguistic and cultural practices focused on hair care. [Keywords: "native" anthropology, language, representation, reflexivity, translation]     

HTLV-I,infective dermatitis,and tropical spastic paraparesis

Since human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV-I) was identified in 1980 as causing human disease, it has been etiologically associated with adult T-cell lymphoma/leukemia (ATL) and tropical spastic paraparesis (TSP). More recently, several new diseases have been reported in association with this virus, including infective dermatitis of Jamaican children, which we reported in 1990. Studies on infective dermatitis have shown that these children have abnormalities of immune function, and some develop other HTLV-I associated disorders, including TSP. This paper reviews the work done on infective dermatitis to date, and explores the association with TSP.     

Introduction to "In Focus: Global Change and Adaptation in Local Places"

ABSTRACT   In recognition of unavoidable changes that human actions are producing in our environment, the term adaptation has become ubiquitous in the environmental and climate-change literature. Human adaptation is a field with a significant history in anthropology, yet anthropological contributions to the burgeoning field of climate change remain limited. This "In Focus" section presents studies of local adaptations to climate variation and change. Each is concerned with current environmental challenges and future environmental change, and each study is placed within a wider context that includes processes of globalization and integration into market economies, formal and informal institutions, and disasters. These studies highlight the challenges involved in understanding complex adaptations under conditions of stress. They also illustrate how anthropologists engage the larger climate-change and human-adaptation discussions and enhance our ability to respond to the challenges of a changing environment.     

Introduction to "The Impact of the Hurricanes of 2005 on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States"

In this introduction, I briefly compare anthropological notice of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 to that of the more powerful Hurricane Camille in 1969 and note pertinent developments in the intervening 36 years, especially the emergence of an anthropological specialty in the study of natural disasters. An overview of the collection follows with comments on particular strengths of each article and suggestions for some of their wider implications for research and public policy. I conclude with a consideration of possible avenues for further anthropological research on hurricanes in general and questions on recovery from Katrina, Rita, and ensuing floods specifically, thus providing a wide-angle perspective on this "In Focus" endeavor—impacts of hurricanes, disaster anthropology, and both short-term and long-term culture change.     

Rituals of creativity: tradition, modernity, and the "acoustic unconscious" in a U.S. collegiate jazz music program

In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogical practice in the course of which students produce precise replications of the recorded improvisations of past jazz masters and then play them in synchrony with the recordings. Through such synchronous iconization, students inhabit and reenact the creativity epitomized by these recordings. I argue that such a practice, which I call a “ritual of creativity,” suggests a coconstitutive relationship between imitation and creativity, which has intensified under modernity because of the availability of new technologies of digital reproduction.     

Structures, Realities, and Blind Spots

In discussing the exchange between Caws and Hanson (AA, Vol. 78, 1976) the nature of the theory and reality that anthropologists must consider in dealing with social and cultural phenomena is examined. There is no objective structure in the phenomena we study, our constructs always being colored by changing conditions. The assumption of an unchanging human nature has long been an obstacle to progress in the anthropological enterprise . [semantics, language, models, structure, anthropological theory]     

Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs

ABSTRACT  In this review essay, the academic merits of three anthropological blogs ("Savage Minds,""Zero Anthropology"[formerly "Open Anthropology"], and the official blog of the American Anthropological Association) are considered. The review examines differences between group-blog projects (such "Savage Minds"), single-voiced blogs (such as "Zero Anthropology"), and official blogs representing central anthropological institutions (the AAA's blog) and identifies roles and strengths of each of these blog forms.     

"Drink Milk for Fitness": The Cultural Politics of Human Biological Variation and Milk Consumption in the United States

Cow's milk is accorded a high cultural value in the contemporary United States. Its white color, association with the maternal and the pastoral, and repeated mention in the Bible add positive symbolic weight to this major national agricultural commodity. Thus, it comes as no surprise that influential policy-making institutions in the United States recommend milk consumption for all U.S. groups. This is despite variation in adult populations' abilities to digest milk, which has been documented by biological anthropologists. This article assesses various U.S. "stories" about milk consumption and its relationship to biological variation against the biological anthropological explanation of variation in lactase activity/lactose tolerance. Many of these serve as normalizing discourses that ultimately pathologize biological difference and may undermine the dietary traditions of some ethnic groups. In particular, the close relationship between government and the dairy industry leads to policies that fail to seriously consider variation in digestive physiology among the diverse U.S. populations.     

Reconstructing the Origins and Migrations of Diasporic Populations: The Case of the European Gypsies

The sociohistorical study of Gypsies/Sinti/Roma has been dominated by the "Gypsy-lorist" paradigm. According to this paradigm, these itinerant people belong to a unitary ethnic group of South Asian origin whose cultural practices have been preserved over the centuries. Recently, this perspective has come under criticism for perpetuating the image of Gypsies as an isolate within the wider context of the development of European societies, and, in particular, for placing too much importance on the external origin of Gypsy cultural and linguistic practices. This article attempts to place the available biological anthropological data for Roma origins and population history (from molecular genetic and clinical studies) in the wider ethnohistorical and linguistic context, and assesses their potential impact for an integrationist approach to Gypsy studies. These data suggest that, while the "Gypsy-lorist" paradigm is problematic, Gypsy populations share a common biological origin, a reality that should not be ignored.     

Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire

The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them.     

"Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him": Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines

Feminist scholars have begun to consider the ways indigenous practices of child rearing were and are challenged in (post)colonial discourse and practice, and how these practices have become a terrain on which definitions of nation, state, and economy are contested. In this article, I adopt a historical anthropological approach to consider how Filipino child-rearing strategies were described and stigmatized in educational, public health, and public welfare discourses in the U.S.-occupied Philippines in the early 20th century. I demonstrate how public health practices and discourses that were generated as part of a "benevolent" campaign against high rates of infant mortality were strategically used as a weapon against Filipino arguments for independence. I also consider how discourses constructing Filipino caregivers as overly indulgent were linked to metropolitan concerns about production of the "new industrial man" and were used to develop a racialized critique of the cultural practices of Filipinos.     

Parental Strategies in Contrasting Cultural Settings: Families in México and "El Norte"

A "culturally relevant pedagogy" has been recommended to enhance the achievement of Latino students in American schools. In practice, this pedagogy is often based on a view of the home culture as static and in conflict with mainstream culture. The present study compares the child-rearing practices and values of Mexican immigrants raising their children in the United States with those of their siblings who are raising children in Mexico. The study contributes to the theories of culture, documenting the dynamic nature of cultural practices on both sides of the border and examining the implications of cultural change of different types for practice in language minority education.     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

Toward a Marxian anthropology? Bare,abstract, mobile,global

Anthropology has conventionally taken as some of its most cherished foundational categories the precise opposites of the key concepts that animate this inquiry: rather than “bare life,” anthropology has tended always to emphasize the fullness and complexity of social and political life; instead of labor in the abstract, which we recognize in its commodified form as “labor-power,” anthropology has produced exquisite inventories of concrete laboring activities and the “cultural” content of productive work; against the impermanence and mutability of lives characterized by their mobility, the ethnographic enterprise has been deeply attached to the sedentarist presuppositions of lasting settlement, dwelling, and “community”; and contrary to the task of apprehending space on a global scale, ethnographic study has been overwhelmingly localized and place-bound. Rethinking these elementary premises of the ethnographic endeavor and situating these critical concepts at the center of our epistemological frameworks are crucial theoretical and practical tasks for any meaningful social inquiry today. In this regard, the Marxian theoretical arsenal is simply indispensable. But, in the derisive words of so many disciplinary forebears and overseers, is this properly “anthropological”? The prospective convergence of genuinely critical sociopolitical inquiry with the techniques and insights of anthropology must remain for us the locus of an urgent problem—an open question on an open horizon.     

Reestablishing "Race" in Anthropological Discourse

Anthropology, despite its historic role in both creating and dismantling the American racial worldview, seems barely visible in contemporary scholarly and public discussions of "race." The authors argue that race should once again be central to anthropological inquiry, that cultural and physical anthropologists must jointly develop and publicly disseminate a unified, uniquely anthropological perspective. They suggest ways to proceed and identify internal barriers that must be overcome before the anthropological voice can be heard.