The river echoes with laughter: a child‐centred analysis of social change in Amazonia

This article examines radical social, cultural, and political changes taking place in Amazonia from the perspective of indigenous children and youth: a group who, despite their demographic prevalence, have received limited attention in the regional literature. Drawing on fieldwork with Matses people in Peru, I consider how children and youth are playing a critical role in the transition from a hunter‐gatherer, forest‐based society towards a riverine lifestyle that is increasingly engaged in trade, the market economy, and exchanges with chotac, or non‐indigenous people. I argue that by engaging with their surroundings through playing and working, Matses children are becoming affectively attached to some parts of the world rather than others. This represents a purposeful shift from the lifestyle and worldviews of older generations and highlights how children are active agents who shape possible future directions of Matses society and transform the community's relationships with the world. Accordingly, I propose a child‐centred view of social change that seeks to demonstrate the implications of children's creativity and agency for society at large and its future development.     

Gendering ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland: A comparative analysis of nationalist women's political protests

This article examines and develops a comparison of the Holy Cross School conflict and the campaign by Robert McCartney's sisters and partner to bring those responsible for his murder to justice in Northern Ireland. Both events involved women who identify with the Irish nationalist community in public protest. The article employs a feminist theoretical framework to investigate the ethno-gender dynamics of these particular manifestations of women's political protest. By engaging in a comparative analysis of both protests, the article exposes how these specific expressions of women's political agency and the political discourses and images that they stimulated were influenced by, reflected and disturbed notions about the role of women in nationalist societies.     

Ethnic heterogamy and the risk of partner violence in Mexico

A common stereotype holds that in Mexico male violence toward women is common among indigenous peoples and reflects cultural norms that sanction a male's domination of his female partner. We employ a recent Mexican survey to examine the relative risk of violence against women as a function of the couple's ethnic homogamy. Among couples in which both partners are either non-indigenous or indigenous the female's risk of partner violence is similar. Among heterogamous couples non-indigenous females in relationships in which the male is indigenous are at elevated risk of violence, while indigenous women in relationships with non-indigenous males are at a lower risk of violence. The stresses associated with heterogamy appear to be more salient in determining a woman's risk of violence than ethnicity per se. The implications for future research and the need to deal with the issue of ethnic homogamy in culturally heterogeneous populations are discussed.     

The contested rewe: sacred sites,misunderstandings, and ontological pluralism in Mapuche land negotiations

Sacred sites lie at the core of indigenous peoples' land claims and negotiations with the state. These sites are often subject to accusations of inauthenticity by state actors, which potentially lead to the delegitimization of claims over ancestral land. This article argues that misunderstandings in Mapuche land negotiations in Chile do not originate as strategic refusals to understand, but rather in a form of understanding which aims to make radical differences commensurable within the logics of statecraft and national society. In the process of cultural translation, the ontological principles that make certain places sacred in the Mapuche lived world are not recognized, resulting in the transformation of these sites into symbols of identity strategically employed for political ends.     

Ideas for Christmas

The work of renewing curriculum in music education faces the inertia of current curricular practices and an education reform climate that is unfavorable toward such work. This article suggests that the development of music teacher agency is central to combating these challenges, and that the development of such agency relies on today's professional associations. I explore the conditions under which such associations build member agency, examine the National Association for Music Education as a case study, and argue for the importance of professionalism as a reform logic. I then offer recommendations that address how teacher associations can better assert their particular role in leading curriculum renewal in today's complex and rapidly changing environment.     

The Otavalo trade diaspora: social capital and transnational entrepreneurship

This article examines the role of historical social resources in the development of a transnational trade diaspora of Ecuador's indigenous Otavalan merchants. The Otavalans are well known for their production of handicrafts, using pre-industrial and industrial technologies, and for their far-flung trips in search of foreign buyers. In this account, the role of 'social capital', typically defined as a 'public good', is highlighted to better gauge its usefulness to other migrant and indigenous groups. I conclude that the Otavalo case suggests that in-group 'social capital' is: (a) not sufficient or necessary for 'grass-roots' transnational entrepreneurship; (b) the political origins of an ethnic group's 'trust-worthiness' reveal a more diverse set of symbolic and cultural 'capitals', which may then be used by an emergent merchant class to gain financial capital for a business venture; and (c) 'globalization' notwithstanding, contemporary trade diasporas may rise and fall due to similar causal dynamics found among much older and ubiquitous 'cross-cultural trade diasporas'.     

The materials of indigeneity: slate and cement in a Taiwanese indigenous (Paiwan) mountain settlement

This article considers the implications of the adoption of cement and concrete as building materials in a mountain settlement of the Paiwan, one of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. The presence of these materials in an indigenous settlement might at first glance be interpreted as a sign of cultural assimilation. This article suggests rather that, by paying close attention to the ways in which locals engage with the changing properties of imported materials in work and daily life, a more complex understanding can be gained of the negotiated relations of power between indigenous people, the state, and market forces, as well as the role of materials in these negotiations. For the Paiwan, creative engagements with foreign materials and their changing properties have, at various moments, represented ways of adapting to the pressures to assimilate, or, conversely, resulted in expressions of cultural resilience.     

Sexual Desire,Piety, and Law in a Javanese Pesantren: Interpreting Varieties of Secret Divorce and Polygamy

Very little anthropological research has explored the polygamous worlds of women in Indonesia's traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren. These traditional schools are patriarchal institutions that teach women to be ideal Muslims according to male-defined notions of shari'ah-based piety that construct polygamy as normative. This article challenges dominant discourses on polygamy, which are mostly concerned with public protest and feminist agendas that seek to have the practice banned, and instead reveals an agentive side of women in polygamous marriages. It examines the experiences of a group of pesantren women whose actions transgress state and Islamic laws on marriage and divorce in their endorsement of polygamous union and nikah batin (Sufi spiritual marriage). It builds on feminist arguments that recognise female agency in polygamy by considering the legal ambiguity surrounding secret and informal divorce and polygamous practices initiated by women restricted from obtaining legal divorces for socio-cultural reasons. In doing so, it further considers some aspects of a notion of a woman-centric polygamy that includes polyandry, which women create based on their understanding that Islam acknowledges women's sexual rights in marriage.     

The Gender of the Joke: Intimacy and Marginality in Murri Humour

ABSTRACT

Murri Aboriginal humour performances are expressive events in which bodily experiences of policing and agency are discursively commented on in ways that expose Australia's naturalised rationalisations of indigenous governance. Drawing on the ‘out-of-the-way’ position of an indigenous minority encapsulated in the body of the nation-state and the Murri body's intimate ‘out-of-the-way’ folds and crannies, Murri humour delimits and mocks the marginal location Murri people are imagined to spatially and morally occupy within Australia. This work examines how gendered humour renders the Murri individual and social body legible to and for a Murri audience. Such humour performances engage the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, and the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic in ways that link intimacy, bodies and embodiments to these macro-processes. Unraveling such binaries produces a nuanced analysis in which embodied social actions and sly social critique are captured as they are experienced and expressed through humour.     

The crisscrossed agency of a toast: Personhood,individuation and de‐individuation in Luzhou,China

This article addresses debates over individuation in China through consideration of guanxi‐relational feasting in Luzhou, Sichuan. I draw on Ortner's theorisation of subjectivity and agency to probe the often taken‐for‐granted question of cultural personhood which informs social action. Although the social imaginary in Luzhou is increasingly colonised by symbolic individualism, I propose that dominant local notions of personhood and agency, operating within feast practice, continue to define this process. By attending to three aspects of Yan's ‘individualisation thesis’, I demonstrate how local models of person and agency are indispensible to a fuller understanding of social life. Considering the important role ritual speech habits (largely trained in de‐individuating feasting) continue to play in socialising actors to economic institutions and power relationships more generally, individuation in China today remains a largely nominal and aspirational, if symbolically potent and potentially transformative, project.     

Gendering ethnic conflicts: minority women in divided societies – the case of Muslim women in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the practical and theoretical significance and long-term consequences of the failure to incorporate women’s interests in post-conflict negotiations by examining the case of Muslim women in India. Analyses of deeply divided societies must recognize that political competition and political violence do not affect all citizens equally. Also, the “larger picture” depicted by inter-community conflicts should not overshadow the effects of intra-community conflicts, which are no less important. Evident within each community conflict are the winners and the losers of the political accommodation process, in which the marginalized and weaker sections of each “side” of the conflict may be the real “losers”. Gendered analysis of ethnic conflicts and ethnic conflict resolution demands a reorientation of the concepts of conflict and security – Whose conflict is being solved and who is being secured?     

Women,warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond

‘Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social‐philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it focuses on women's differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to ‘agency’ that turn it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social science art.     

Gender differences in sexual jealousy: Adaptionist or social learning explanation?

It has often been speculated, and some evidence suggests, that men and women differ in the elicitation of jealousy: Men appear to be more likely than women to become upset over threats to sexual exclusivity; whereas women are more likely than men to react negatively to potential loss of partner time and attention. Both adaptionist and traditional social learning theories have been used to explain these apparent gender differences. In the present article we outline both explanations and review the relevant psychological literature on gender differences in the elicitation of jealousy. We propose that the difference in men's and women's psychological mechanisms for elicitation of jealousy is best characterized (at least in this culture) as a greater sensitivity among men to cues indicative of possible sexual infidelity rather than greater emotional upset in response to the occurence of extradyadic sex on the part of one's mate. We also provide data testing a traditional social learning explanation for the elicitation of jealousy. Results of a survey administered to college students (N = 223) demonstrate the subtle nature of gender differences in the elicitation of jealousy within this culture. Men and women were most likely to differ (in the hypothesized directions) when items pertained to concern over a partner's potential extradyadic sex rather than to reactions to sexual infidelity that is suspected to have already occurred. Although men reported placing more value on sexual activity within dating relationships and women reported placing more value on emotional intimacy, these ratings of relationship rewards did not explain the gender differences in reported jealousy. Results failed to support a traditional social learning explanation of jealousy and are discussed with regard to evolutionary theory and directions for future research.     

Dinosaur Evolution: Student Response to Dinosaur Ramblings

Abstract: In the 2007 Journal of Wildlife Management article “Dinosaur Ramblings,” Scalet described a shift in university and agency programs away from applied management research toward basic ecological research. We interpret Scalet's commentary as primarily synonymizing applied management research to game management and basic ecological research to nongame management and theoretical research. Although we agree with Scalet that a change in management practices has occurred, we believe that change is more an integration of applied and basic research as opposed to a shift away from management. We provide a hierarchical framework to alternatively explain Scalet's perceived shift in which we place applied management and basic theoretical research under the science of ecology. We believe integration of basic and applied research has been driven by the evolving structure of society and the public's changing view of natural resources. The integration of basic and applied research is necessary for informed and, thence, better management practices.     

‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self-help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.     

The opposite of witchcraft: Evans‐Pritchard and the problem of the person

The principal legacy of Evans‐Pritchard's 1937 ethnography Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande has been to associate debates over the rationality of witchcraft with its social categorization as a facet of misfortune and enmity. In combination with Evans‐Pritchard's own scepticism regarding witches, this allowed the rationality debate to isolate witchcraft as a distinctive special case. This logical exceptionalism was at odds with Evans‐Pritchard's own assertion of witchcraft's ordinariness, and is not supported by comparable ethnography from the Ladakh region of the Himalayas or by the unabridged versions of Oracles, both of which point towards an indigenous understanding of witchcraft as one variation on a spectrum of everyday action and craft. Instead, a revised reading of Oracles suggests that even the most basic quotidian representations of personal agency raise larger questions as to anthropology's understanding of how humans ascribe action and personhood, a debate which stands at the heart of its status as a science.     

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.     

The paradox of primitivism: Native rights and the problem of imagery in cultural survival films

Indigenous peoples are increasingly interested in the making of cultural survival films. This text explores the cinematic borderland where indigenous communities, action anthropologists, and committed filmmakers jointly operate in the production of such native rights documentaries. Considering the role of exotic imagery as an ideological force in the international political arena, the paper identifies and explores the paradox of primitivism. Comparing films to tribal masks, it discusses how indigenous peoples deal with the challenge and opportunity of such imagery. Offering examples of two tribal film projects, with Mi'kmaqs and Apaches, it concludes that exotic imagery, while effective (perhaps even essential) as political agency, may pervert the cultural heritage that indigenous peoples are committed to preserving.     

From sojourners to citizens: managing the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia and Malaysia

The raison d'être of the management of the minority ethnic Chinese citizenry in Indonesia and Malaysia is not adequately examined in most studies. In this article, ethnic domination is put forth in explaining the dynamics of ethnic conflict management. New multi-ethnic states often opt for selective nation-building by creating institutionalized ethnic boundaries. Ethnic domination occurs when one ethnic group prevails over another through the systematic marginalization of the dominated group's political influence, cultural reproduction and way of life. Beneath the veneer of assimilation and consociation, the central identity encouraged is that of the indigenous bumi 'imagined community' from which the citizen-Chinese is excluded. Ethnic riots are symptomatic of the failure of incomplete ethnic domination, especially in the economic and cultural realms.