Nostalgia and Degeneration: The Moral Economy of Drinking in Navajo Society

This article focuses on how some members of Navajo society use narratives regarding alcohol and drinking to comment on cultural degeneration and the decay of the traditional Navajo moral economy. These narratives drinking are seldom solely about alcohol but refer to a host of distinct yet interrelated concerns involving moral values, individual and collective identities, underdevelopment, imagined histories, psychic conflict, and social contention. This article sheds light on how evaluations of alcohol and drinking problems, as encapsulated in narratives of degeneration, fit into the overall context of contemporary Navajo society. Narratives of degeneration juxtapose a degenerate present to a nostalgic past and in the process direct moral censure toward two primary groups in Navajo society, namely, young people and others who drink to excess, [drinking, Native Americans, Navajo, narrative, alcohol]     

An ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants used by the Lisu people in Nujiang,Northwest Yunnan,China

An ethnobotanical survey was carried out to collect information on the use of medicinal plants by the Lisu people who live in the mountainous areas of the Nujiang Canyon (Salween River Valley) in Nujiang Prefecture, northwestern Yunnan Province, China. A total of 52 medicinal plants, belonging to 32 families, were reported as being used locally for the treatment of human ailments. The scientific and Lisu names, parts used, and preparation of the plants are presented. Most of these species are wild (80%), while others are domesticated (8%) or semi-cultivated (12%). Among the 52 species, 11 species (21.2%) were reported as rare and 16 were widely commercialized in the region. Over-exploitation and deforestation are the main causes for the depletion of medicinal plants in this area. The Lisu people still mostly depend on medicinal plants for their health care. The loss and endangered status of these plants will, to a certain extent, impede their existing health care system; conservation and sustainable harvest of medicinal plants in the area are urgently needed.     

Maintaining abstinence in a northern plains tribe

In this article, we examine how American Indian individuals with a history of alcohol dependence have been able to maintain their abstinence despite strong pressures to return to drinking. This work builds on close collaboration with individual tribal members who have resolved their problems with alcohol and community-based service providers to develop open-ended qualitative interviews. Using these, we explored how former drinkers respond to the twin challenges raised by their former drinking associates and strong feelings that emerge when alcohol is no longer an option for coping with life's difficulties. The resolution of these challenges is central to abstinence, given the strong ties between drinking and sociality in some American Indian communities (including the one where this study was conducted) and underscores the ways in which alternate relations to alcohol can be established even within a heavy drinking cultural context. Interviews were conducted with 133 individuals from a northern plains tribe who were identified in a previous epidemiological study as having a lifetime history of alcohol dependence. Inquiry into the processes involved in the meaningful constitution of abstinence for these men and women highlights the role of religion and spirituality for some, but by no means all of these individuals and, more broadly, the emergence of what Bea Medicine has characterized as "new ways of coping," which force us to expand on leading conceptualizations of coping in the literature on problems with alcohol.     

Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India

This article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the potentiality of becoming a fluent signer and a member of a deaf sociality. Bringing the Anthropology of Christianity in conversation with the Anthropology of deafness/sign language studies, this article argues that anthropologists have ignored practices of verifying understanding in our interlocutors. In utilizing the concept of affective audits, this article analyses the practices by which understanding comes to take place. In addition, this article also argues that anthropologists must attend to how research on sensory formations might be presuming a ‘normal’ sensing body.     

The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs: Performance and Participation of Hospitalized Older People

Like all social actors, older people draw on cultural meanings to perform identity. However, when advanced aging brings loss of status as full persons, particularly when it is associated with sickness and dependency, older people can be deemed unsuitable for active medical treatment and care. In addition, loss of status may make it difficult for older people to influence how they and their needs and wants are identified, and how their future life (or death) is conceived. This article discusses how some older people who are admitted to hospital as acute medical emergencies participate in staff's discursive practices to establish a positive clinical identity. By lying low and effacing their distinctiveness as individuals and as social beings, some older people are able to maintain their inclusion in positive medical categories. The article argues that older people are committed to their inclusion in the medical domain because their association with positive medical categories helps them keep at bay the inchoate, the dark at the bottom of the stairs.     

Mayan Language Revival and Revitalization Politics: Linguists and Linguistic Ideologies

Although spoken by a relatively large population, Mayan languages show signs of language shift and loss because the children in some of the speech communities are no longer learning the language. At the same time, Mayas are participating in a movement of cultural reaffirmation, a principle focus of which is language. Maya linguists are central in formulating and reshaping language ideologies to further the goals of revitalization, and they play a significant role in cultural/linguistic activism. This article shows the extent of the contribution of linguistics to Mayan language vitality through an analysis of language ideologies and how they have been reformulated by Maya linguists, and by a review of an apparently successful attempt at reversing language loss that has arisen through an integrated community-based program of cultural revitalization that centers, to a large extent, on language and makes specific use of linguistics. [Keywords: language shift, language ideologies, language revitalization, Mayan languages, Maya movement]     

Cultural Competency and Rural Disorder in PNG Health Promotion

ABSTRACT

Health workers in Papua New Guinea strongly emphasise their duty to provide services to the country’s rural majority. Trained to see rural communities as lacking modern discipline and order, they worry that rural people will resist, perhaps with violence, if health workers fail to ‘show respect for culture’. Examining cultural improvisation among nursing students on a rural experience practicum in the Eastern Highlands, I show how students and teachers tried to craft culturally respectful health education. However, when difficulties emerged, local people were described as unable or unwilling to harim tok (understand, heed or follow instructions). The capacity to follow instructions, cultivated through education and Christian faith, was cast as incompatible with Highlands culture. Rural health promotion activities, when they fail to foment major transformation, can help reproduce the ideological construction of the people of the hauslain (village, hamlet) as emotionally volatile and ungovernable.     

Recreated practices by Mapuche women that strengthen place identity in new urban spaces of residence in Santiago,Chile

The phenomenon of migration to cities by indigenous Mapuche people of Chile is associated with various consequences, such as the loss of ethnic identity and cultural practices. This study aims to describe how ethnic identity is maintained through the recreation of ancestral cultural practices that Mapuche women promote in their families, generating identification to new spaces of residence. This qualitative research draws on analyses of forty-eight interviews conducted with twelve families from four neighbourhoods in Santiago. The study reveals ways in which key traditional Mapuche practices are translated and recreated through the processes of place-referent continuity and place-congruent continuity in new urban areas of residence which in turn express variant forms of ethnic identity and everyday politics of care that extend beyond folkloric notions of rural indigeneity and more static political ideologies of ethno-national autonomy.     

The Immanence of Transcendence: God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire Coast

In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches), local experiences of ‘divine providence’ and ‘demonic attack’ abound. Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent carriers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory, the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly in-between. Because, locally, ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’, these Christians expected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence through God's immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic attack through the Devil's immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events – being given a washing machine or feeling sleepy in church – were experienced as material indexes of spiritual reality. Drawing on the work of Cannell (on transcendence), Keane (on indexicality) and Wagner (on symbolic obviation), this paper argues that attending to the materiality of Scottish Protestantism better equips the anthropology of religion to understand Christian experience by positing immanence as a kind of transcendence and transcendence as a kind of immanence.     

Afropolitan projects: African immigrant identities and solidarities in the United States

This article explores how Africans born or raised in the United States employ ethnicity to understand their racial and cultural identities. I argue that African immigrants engage positive narratives about Africa along with their experiences of anti-black racism to articulate identities as “Africans of the world”. I call this articulation of identity Afropolitan projects. The Afropolitan as an ethnicity is not meant to shield Africans from anti-black racism, but instead helps articulate a particular relationship to this form of inequality. The following analysis derives from a qualitative case study of a voluntary association comprising Ghanaians primarily raised in the United States. I find that the group’s identity is as much about being black, African, and American as it is about being middle-class, Christian, and heterosexual. Through their Afropolitan projects, this group emphasizes solidarities with a global middle-class heterosexual patriarchy while foreclosing solidarities with working class, queer, and other people of colour.     

Alcohol consumption and mortality: modelling risks for men and women at different ages

ObjectiveTo estimate the relation between alcohol consumption and risk of death, the level of alcohol consumption at which risk is least, and how these vary with age and sex.DesignAnalysis using published systematic reviews and population data.SettingEngland and Wales in 1997.ResultsA direct dose-response relation exists between alcohol consumption and risk of death in women aged 16-54 and in men aged 16-34. At older ages the relation is U shaped. The level at which the risk is lowest increases with age, reaching 3 units a week in women aged over 65 and 8 units a week in men aged over 65. The level at which the risk is increased by 5% above this minimum is 8 units a week in women aged 16-24 and 5 units a week in men aged 16-24, increasing to 20 and 34 units a week in women and men aged over 65, respectively.ConclusionsSubstantially increased risks of all cause mortality can occur even in people drinking lower than recommended limits, and especially among younger people.

What is already known on this topic

Non-drinkers and heavy drinkers have higher all cause mortality rates than light drinkers—the U shaped curveThe precise shape and location of the U are likely to depend on age and sex, but this has not been quantified

What this study adds

The level of alcohol consumption that carries the lowest mortality ranges from 0 in men and women aged under 35 to 3 units a week in women aged over 65 and 8 units a week in men aged over 65The level of alcohol consumption that carries a 5% increase in mortality increases with age from 8 to 20 units a week in women and from 5 to 34 units a week in menOur calculations were for England and Wales in 1997: nadirs are likely to be lower in the future and in countries with less ischaemic heart disease     

Christianity,cultural change and the negotiation of rights in land and sea

Various aspects of Christian belief and practice have been documented as significant across Aboriginal Australia. In recent years, many communities have been involved in seeking to achieve traditional rights in land and sea as recognised in Australian law. Asserting and proving these rights entails demonstrating continuity of traditional law and custom since the establishment of British sovereignty. While legal discourse indicates that this does not exclude cultural change, law and custom must continue to derive from pre‐sovereignty traditions. This article addresses the extent to which Christian belief and practice have been articulated and researched in applied anthropological work, against the background of relevant academic studies. If a sophisticated theory of cultural change and continuity is germane to researching land claims and native title, what is the significance of Christian syncretism in Aboriginal relations with place and the inheritance of ancestral connections to ‘country’? Several case studies are examined.     

Transforming Cultural Practices: Illustrations from Children's Game Play

Analyses of children's participation in cultural practices typically focus on the ways in which dimensions of activities shape the nature of children's participation and learning. In contrast, our concern in this article is to understand how children, in their participation, transform cultural practices. We use Saxe's (1991) emergent goals framework to illustrate how the mathematical problems that emerge in children's play of Monopoly are interwoven with children's developing competencies and social interactions.     

Shared and Separate Knowledge among Eight Cultural Groups Based on Ethnobotanical Uses of Rhododendron (Ericaceae) in Yunnan Province, China

Shared and Separate Knowledge among Eight Cultural Groups Based on Ethnobotanical Uses of Rhododendron (Ericaceae) in Yunnan Province, China. Yunnan, a province in southwest China, is known for its cultural diversity of 25 ethnic minorities and its vast Himalayan biodiversity, especially of Rhododendron. Previous literature has shown that some cultural groups share ethnobotanical knowledge while other cultural groups keep their knowledge separate. We investigated factors that may lead to the sharing of knowledge based on the uses of rhododendron among seven cultural minorities (the Bai, Dulong, Lisu, Naxi, Nu, Tibetan, and Yi) and the Han majority. Semistructured interviews about rhododendrons were conducted with approximately 30 individuals in each cultural group. Cluster analyses and a new analysis method were conducted to determine the within-group homogeneity of knowledge of rhododendron uses to test hypotheses related to strength of cultural traditions. The Dulong, Lisu, and Nu were compared with each other as these groups share villages and languages. The Naxi, Tibetan, and Yi live predominantly with members of their cultural group, and are often monolingual; thus, these three cultural minorities were compared. The Bai and Han compose the final comparison as the Bai are increasingly interacting with the local Han majority as tourism grows in that area. The Bai, Dulong, Han, Lisu, and Nu had variable answers within each group, while the Naxi, Tibetan, and Yi have homogeneous knowledge of uses of rhododendron within their cultural group. Among the eight cultural groups compared for this study, factors such as sharing of language, overlap of living situation, and sharing of markets leads to non-homogenous knowledge of rhododendron uses among members of the same cultural group.     

Prevalence of and risk factors associated with alcohol abuse in Moshi, northern Tanzania

This study aimed to assess the prevalence of and risk factors associated with alcohol abuse among women and men in Moshi in northern Tanzania. Alcohol abuse was measured by a CAGE score of 2-4, versus 0-1 for no alcohol abuse (Ewing, 1984). Crude and adjusted logistic regression models determined odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) of alcohol abuse by characteristics of, respectively, women with partners (n=1200), women without partners (n=614) and men (n=788) (women's partners). Prevalence of alcohol abuse was 7.0% (95% CI: 5.6-8.4) among women with partners, 9.3% (95% CI: 7.0-11.6) among women without partners, and more than double among men at 22.8% (95% CI: 19.9-25.8). In general, Christians had higher alcohol abuse than Muslims or other religions, as did Chagga men compared with men of other ethnic groups. Other socio-demographic characteristics, such as education or income, were not significant. Sexual behaviours were significant predictors of alcohol abuse. For example, women without partners who reported more than two partners in the last year had higher alcohol abuse compared with women reporting no partners (OR=8.75; 95% CI: 2.37-32.31), as did men reporting it is 'OK to hit a partner' for any reason (OR=1.79; 95% CI: 1.16-2.77) compared with men who did not. HIV-1 infection was not significantly associated with alcohol abuse by women or men. The Christian Church in Moshi should consider raising awareness about the harmful effects of high alcohol use among its adherents. Comprehensive programmes focusing on reducing number of partners and alcohol use, particularly by men, are needed in this community.     

Learning to navigate the ethics of boundaries: schools,youth, and inter-religious relationships in Manado,Indonesia

Contributing to recent debates on ethical self-making, this article considers how Christian and Muslim youth in Manado, Indonesia, draw on various moral frameworks, and consequentially on both individual and community-oriented modes of subjectivity in navigating inter-religious encounters. The discussion foregrounds attitudes towards and normative expectations regarding inter-religious marriage as an important lens through which the shifting salience of inter-religious boundaries becomes apparent. Public discourses emphasize two contradictory frameworks for coexistence, projecting inter-religious marriage alternatively as the foundation for coexistence and as a major social threat. A focus on high schools demonstrates how public ethical debates are channelled through institutions and relate to the ways that youth grapple with coexisting ethical frameworks in a religiously plural society. In addition, the article makes a case for investigating the role of institutions in moral learning, taking into account the normative work accomplished in schools as teachers and students deliberate about and circulate ethical frameworks.     

Zulu Heritage between Institutionalized Commemoration and Tourist Attraction

This article engages critically with an aspect of the flourishing post-apartheid heritage sector in South Africa, shaped by the confluence of conservation objectives, political agendas, and tourism development strategies. It focuses on a number of memorials and new heritage sites in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) that officially commemorate and celebrate Zulu cultural heritage. Rural KZN is home to a complex, rapidly transforming society caught between a global trend toward Westernization and official policies or community forces that promote indigenous Africanist values. This is also a society characterized by the coexistence, or more often fusion, of Christian beliefs on the one hand and traditionalist ancestral beliefs and associated ritual practices on the other.

This article investigates how such cross-cultural influences affecting rural populations in KZN are reflected in the symbolic realm of monuments and memorials honoring the dead. The article first focuses on the recent trend toward the upgrading of burial sites of important clan leaders or members of the Zulu royal house; it then considers the new Spirit of eMakhosini monument, which is meant to draw attention to the eMakhosini Valley as the “Cradle of the Zulu nation” where many early kings lie buried. This monument initiative will be discussed critically in the context of the emergent cultural heritage tourism industry. Lastly, a few new battlefield memorials commemorating the previously unrepresented Zulu victims of the respective battles will be considered, pointing out how the designing artists attempt to fuse a Western, Eurocentric concept with local imagery and Afrocentric references. On the whole, the commemorative objects discussed in this article represent a shift towards modernity and commodification and reflect the values of a hybrid, transforming society.     

‘I Was Like Abraham’: notes on the anthropology of Christianity from the Solomon Islands

This article offers a detailed exegesis of what I term the ethno-theology of Timothy Karu, a Solomon Islands Anglican whose understanding of the nature of his matrilineage is informed by the Pauline account of the election of Israel. The analysis suggests a non-essentialising treatment of Christianity that nevertheless demonstrates how Solomon Islanders engage simultaneously with multiple interlocking macro and micro Christian logics in ways that aspire to systematicity. The starting point for this analysis is the identification of an unacknowledged tension between the approaches of John Barker and Joel Robbins, two influential anthropologists of Christianity whose work reflects a wider divide between anti-essentialism and cultural analysis in current anthropology. The article contributes to an overall rapprochement between these two orientations within the anthropology of Christianity.     

Saintliness and Sincerity in the Formation of the Christian Person

Taking into account the composition of Pentecostalism – a mixture of, on one side, a Protestant tradition that allows the constitution of the ‘sincere person’, and, on the other side, the enchanted aspects of personhood – what happens when this message is disseminated in a context with a long Catholic tradition by ‘translators’ socialized in the Catholic culture; in other words, by people with a particular interpretation of the Protestant tradition? In this article, the author explores this question and shows how the Catholic framing impacts the arrangements for accommodating the semiotic ideologies of ‘sincerity’ and ‘saintliness’ within Pentecostal religiosity, resulting in singular manifestations of the collective project and of the regional Christian Person.