Counterpolitics of Liberation in Contemporary China: Corruption,Law, and Popular Religion

This article explores the hidden transfers between law and religion by focussing on the conditions of existence of ‘liberated’ peasant subjects in contemporary China. The post-Maoist era sought to create new citizens from the collectivised Maoist masses who are subject to market reforms and a new politics of ‘governing through law’ (fazhi). At the same time, new religiousities have blossomed in the Chinese countryside. Representing ‘feudal superstition’, their collective practices remain illegal until today. I argue that, beyond the issue of belief, contemporary ‘feudal superstition’ does not represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenets of Chinese secularism from the perspective of ‘failed’ peasant subjects. Where the realities of market liberalisation and governing through law are experienced as corruption, feudal superstition recreates the conditions to realise liberated peasant subjects: a participatory local public sphere, political visibility, investments in the public good, and a new collective property.     

An indigenous religious ritual selects for resistance to a toxicant in a livebearing fish

Human-induced environmental change can affect the evolutionary trajectory of populations. In Mexico, indigenous Zoque people annually introduce barbasco, a fish toxicant, into the Cueva del Azufre to harvest fish during a religious ceremony. Here, we investigated tolerance to barbasco in fish from sites exposed and unexposed to the ritual. We found that barbasco tolerance increases with body size and differs between the sexes. Furthermore, fish from sites exposed to the ceremony had a significantly higher tolerance. Consequently, the annual ceremony may not only affect population structure and gene flow among habitat types, but the increased tolerance in exposed fish may indicate adaptation to human cultural practices in a natural population on a very small spatial scale.     

New Immigrant Youth Interpreting in White Public Space

ABSTRACT   Bilingual children are frequently called on to use their linguistic and communicative virtuosity to interpret for monolingual speakers. In this article, we theorize child interpreters' positionalities within the interstices of several borderlands: as children; as interpreters and translators interpreting different languages, registers, and discourses; and as immigrants seeking services within white public space. We analyze how youths are positioned to provide service and surveillance within overdetermined interpreter-mediated practices. In examining these practices, we raise to consciousness some of the social and ideological conditions that circumscribe working-class Latino/a and new Mexican immigrant children within inherently unequal subject positions. [Keywords: interpreter-mediated interactions, childhood, Mexican new immigrants, racialization, white public space]     

Tilling sand: contradictions of “Social Economy” in a Chinese movement for alternative rural development

New Rural Reconstruction is an ongoing alternative development movement in China, with ties to transnational movements for “social economy,” “fair trade,” and “food sovereignty.” It consists of a diverse network of organizations and projects loosely united by the goals of reversing the rural-to-urban flow of resources and (re)constructing sustainable, self-sufficient communities based on cooperation among peasant households, supported by agroecological skill-sharing and alternative marketing. This article examines four peasant organizations in this movement, focusing on their efforts to negotiate the contradictions between their ideals and their relation to capitalism. I argue that, under present conditions, “success” at reversing the flow of resources through commercial means tends to require further integration into capitalist processes, both increasing vulnerability to global economic forces and undermining “alternative” ideals such as equality, sustainability, and participatory democracy. I thus engage critically with the interdisciplinary literature on “social economy” and cooperatives, considering how cooperative experiments might move beyond the limits of alternativism to play a role in the transformation of their socioeconomic context.     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

Multicriteria Evaluation of Wildlife Management Units in Campeche,Mexico

Abstract: Since 1997 the Mexican government has promoted Management Units for Conservation and Sustainable Use of Wildlife (UMAs) on private and community lands as an economically attractive mean for the conservation of biodiversity. To date, compliance of UMAs with stated sustainability goals has not been evaluated. Thus, we designed multicriteria evaluation framework based on the stated objectives of the national UMA program and applied it to a sample of 6 UMAs operating in peasant communities near or in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, Mexico. Evaluation criteria covered thematic areas of environment, economy, social development, and laws and rules. We formulated 15 criteria with 29 indicators, and 133 verifiers. Data for the verifiers were based on direct observation, interviews with key actors in the peasant communities, participation in regional meetings, scrutiny of government reports, and databases. We calculated sustainability indexes by weighting, summing, and standardizing verifiers to percentage scales, and aggregating to the successive higher hierarchical levels of the evaluation framework. We found an average overall sustainability index of 45.7% for the UMAs evaluated. Scores were highest for the environment thematic area (55.2%), followed by economy (43.4%), social development (42.3%), and laws and rules (41.7%). We observed particularly low indicators for management strategies, habitat monitoring, environmental education, and knowledge of wildlife laws. We conclude that the contribution of UMAs to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity could be improved by a number of actions. These include developing wildlife management educational programs with a strong environmental legislation component, the correct enforcement of wildlife laws, and creating country-wise links among academic and governmental institutions promoting the work with regional and national wildlife experts.     

Nationalism and the ‘idiocy’ of the countryside: The case of Serbia

The mobilization of the countryside has direct consequences for political discourse about national values and in times of social crisis, the ‘conservatism’ of the countryside has the potential to assume an aggressive, offensive posture. When rural mobilization is accompanied by religious revival, group loyalty and so‐called ‘traditional’ values are sacralized. When rural mobilization, ethnic mobilization, and religious revival occur simultaneously, it signifies that the society is undergoing profound destabilization. Examining the case of Serbia, this article argues that while Serbia is, in cultural and social terms, predominantly rural in character, Titoist Communism imposed the values of the city on that culture, while the 1987 coup by Slobodan Milosevic represented, among other things, the triumph of the countryside over the city in Serbia.

This article begins by characterizing the countryside in cultural terms, provides documentation of the importance of rural traditions in Serbian society, documents the rural character of the Serbian national movement, connecting its ideology and behaviour with populist appeals, and examines the contribution made by the Serbian Orthodox Church to the mobilization of the Serbian countryside.     

The ups and downs of Mexican economic growth: the biological standard of living and inequality, 1870–1950

The secular change in the biological standard of living of the Mexican population between 1870 and 1950 is examined based on evidence on the physical stature from military and passport records. While Mexico industrialized and experienced rapid economic growth during this period, there was only a modest overall improvement in the height, health and nutritional status of the Mexican population. The average Mexican born in the 1940s was not only slightly taller than its compatriot of the 1870s. There were, however, considerable social differences: the Mexican upper class was markedly taller than the working class and the gap increased prior to the revolution. Economic growth with systemic inequality largely accounts for such a pattern.     

On Mexican Folk Medicine

In this paper traditional medical beliefs and practices in a Mexican village are described and interpreted. The analysis focuses on the notion that health is a balance of hot and cold within the body. Several lines of evidence are used to reveal the metaphorical meanings of hot and cold, and these meanings are then seen to be related to structural features of peasant society.     

Evolution of chemical signals in the Asian elephant,Elephas maximus: behavioural and ecological influences

In antiquity, the Asian elephant,Elephas maximus, gradually spread southward and eastward to become a successfully surviving, ecologically dominant megaherbivore in the tropical environment of south-east Asia. The changing physical environment forced dynamic fluxes in its social structure and altered its metabolism. Such events shaped the production and ultimately the stability of certain chemicals released by body effluvia. Some of these chemicals took on significance as chemical signals and/or pheromones. This article demonstrates by experimental and observational evidence, and hypothesizes based on speculative reasoning, how and why specific chemical signals evolved in the modern Asian elephant. Evidence, including the functional criteria required by elephant social structure and ecology, is presented for the hypothesis that the recently identified female-emitted, male-received sex pheromone, (Z)-7-dodecenyl acetate evolved first as a chemical signal. Subsequently, the cohesiveness and harmony of small, matriarchally-led female groups were strengthened by a female-to-female chemical signal, recently defined behaviourally. The looser societal structure of freer, roaming males also became bounded by chemical signals; for the males, breath and temporal gland emissions, as well as urinary ones function in chemical signalling. Basic knowledge about elephant chemical signals is now linking chemical information to behaviour and beginning to demonstrate how these signals affect elephant social structure and enable the species to cope with environmental changes.     

Building the New Zion: Unfinished Conversations between the Jews of Venta Prieta, Mexico, and Their Neighbors to the North

In 1950, Raphael Patai published his research on Venta Prieta, a Mexican town in which some residents lived as Jews despite having little knowledge of Judaism. Like other visitors, Patai was perplexed. Why did they wish to live as Jews? While Patai never answered this question to his satisfaction, he believed the answer would be found by developing a psychological profile of the residents, an approach in keeping with culture and personality theorists of the day. The present article provides a different solution. Drawing on additional sources, and short visits, we argue that Venta Prieta was not only a stop on the Jewish tourist circuit by 1950 but also developed out of a unique exchange. While U.S. Jews, as evangelical Protestants before them, provided a model for upwardly mobile Mexicans, Venta Prieta enabled middle-class tourists to experience Judaism in a pastoral setting and to "repair the world" (tikkun). [Keywords: Judaism, tourism, dialogical anthropology, social change, social mobility]     

The intensification of traditional agriculture among Yucatec Maya Farmers: Facing up to the dilemma of livelihood sustainability

This article discusses the change among Yucatec Maya farmers from traditional shifting milpa agriculture to intensive horticultural production for the Mexican market. The process of agricultural intensification among this group of peasant farmers has involved movement toward an increasingly sedentary form of production which has heightened reliance on the use of chemicals with negative consequences for the environment. The research, which focuses on the pressure on producers to abandon more sustainable forms of cultural controls against crop loss in favor of modern chemical controls, raises the issue of the transferability of sustainable traditional technology to small commercial farmers in the tropics. More specifically, the article draws attention to the sometimes overlooked issue of economic, as well as environmental, sustainability in discussions on agricultural development and resource management.Parts of this article were presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans in November 1990, as well as at a conference in Mérida in Yucatan entitled La modernización de la milpa en Yucatán: utopía o realidad in May 1991.     

Social capital and music teacher professional development: Principle,policy, and practice

Teacher professional development (PD) is often extended as a driver of good teaching and effective schools. In recent years, teacher PD has increasingly focused on developing teacher social capital by placing teachers within professional communities to collectively solve instructional problems. Using Bourdieu's and Coleman's conceptions of social capital as a theoretical and practical lens, this article explores how a social capital frame could generate more effective PD policy in music education. Areas examined also include the specific ways in which social capital becomes a lever for teacher growth and school improvement and the social dimensions of music teacher PD. The article concludes with principles of social capital-advancing PD policy, examples of principle-aligned PD policies, implications for research and advocacy, and an accounting of challenges and opportunities for the future. The author argues that centralizing social capital development as an aim of PD represents a new frontier in music teacher learning.     

Genetic admixture, self-reported ethnicity, self-estimated admixture, and skin pigmentation among Hispanics and Native Americans

The relationship between ethnicity and biology is of interest to anthropologists, biomedical scientists, and historians in understanding how human groups are constructed. Ethnic self-identification in recently admixed groups such as Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans (NA) is likely to be complex due to the heterogeneity in individual admixture proportions and social environments within these groups. This study examines the relationships between self-identified ethnicity, self-estimated admixture proportions, skin pigmentation, and genetic marker estimated admixture proportions. These measures were assessed using questionnaires, skin color measurements, and genotyping of a panel of 76 ancestry informative markers, among 170 Hispanics and NAs from New Mexico, a state known for its complex history of interactions between people of NA and European (EU) ancestry. Results reveal that NAs underestimate their degree of EU admixture, and that Hispanics underestimate their degree of NA admixture. Within Hispanics, genetic-marker estimated admixture is better predicted by forehead skin pigmentation than by self-estimated admixture. We also find that Hispanic individuals self-identified as "half-White, half Hispanic" and "Spanish" have lower levels of NA admixture than those self-identified as "Mexican" and "Mexican American." Such results highlight the interplay between culture and biology in how individuals identify and view themselves, and have implications for how ethnicity and disease risk are assessed in a medical setting.     

‘The muck of the past’: revolution,social transformation,and the Maoists in India

This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism when the rest of the world appears to have abandoned it? Second, how and why does the ‘muck of the past’ influence the production of a radically different future? In answering these questions, this article suggests that for both processes of radical social change and our theories of them, we need to reinsert our analyses of politico‐economic conditions into our ideologies of social change.     

A critical review of social and structural conditions that influence HIV risk among Mexican deportees

Mexican migrants who are deported from the US may be at elevated risk for HIV infection. Deportations of Mexican migrants by the US have reached record numbers. We critically reviewed existing literature to assess how social and structural conditions in post-deportation settings can influence Mexican deported migrants' HIV risk. We also identify critical research gaps and make research recommendations.     

The Pope in Mexico: Syncretism in Public Ritual

Pope John Paul II's canonization, in 2002, of Juan Diego, the Indian to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared, was variously interpreted by sections of Mexican society as an acknowledgement of the indigenous element in Mexican Catholicism and thus a restitution of past wrongs; conversely, as a final domestication of the Indian; and as an evangelical move against a resurgent Latin American Protestantism. The canonization rites were nested within political ceremonies staged, controversially, to anoint a new presidency. This broader political message was in turn challenged in the media and on the streets. In this article, I show how a major public event can articulate the life of a complex, culturally diverse society. I identify a syncretic effect produced by the struggle for ritual control. And I take a comparative view of syncretism, drawing on Javanese ethnography to suggest common mechanisms of meaning making.     

An Exception to the "Image of Limited Good"

Research in southern Mexico indicates that there is a general exception to Foster's Image of Limited Good, in Mexican peasant world view. The limited good concept holds that all desirable material and non-material entities are seen as existing in finite amounts which cannot be augmented. In such communities, however, it is implicitly assumed that one can experience intensified desirable emotions without necessarily suffering a loss in some other area of life, as is implied by the Image of Limited Good.     

The reflective peephole method: Ruralism and awkwardness in the ethnography of rural China

Starting with Arthur Smith’s metaphor of the ‘peephole method’, this article explores the issues of ruralism and awkwardness which underlie much ethnographic fieldwork in rural China. In the first part, the continuing influence of ruralism—the idea that the Chinese countryside represents the ‘real’ China—is discussed. This idea is based on a radical conceptual separation of the countryside and the city, which denies modern everydayness to the countryside. If we accept that the modern everyday is now present in rural China and that ordinary people are aware of ruralism and its opposites (urbanism and modernity), we need to find research methods suitable to address the entanglement and the social uses of ruralist and modernist representations in everyday life. In the second part of the article, I argue that the ‘reflective peephole method’ could be such a method. Starting from the awkwardness I felt in my own fieldwork in south‐western Hubei Province, I argue that the dilemmas of the ‘peephole method’ might be a good starting point for reflecting on the intensified ambiguity of moral discourse and action in contemporary rural China.     

Transgene flow in Mexican maize revisited: Socio‐biological analysis across two contrasting farmer communities and seed management systems

The flow of transgenes into landraces and wild relatives is an important biosafety concern. The case of transgene flow into local maize varieties in Mexico (the center of origin of maize) has been intensively debated over the past 15 years, including legal, political, and environmental disputes fanned by the existence of a significant scientific controversy over the methods used for the detection of transgenes. The use of diverse approaches and a lack of harmonized methods specific to the detection and monitoring of transgenes in landraces have generated both positive and negative results regarding contamination of Mexican maize with genetically modified material over the years. In this paper, we revisit the case of transgene contamination in Mexican maize and present a novel research approach based on socio‐biological analysis of contrasting communities and seed management systems. Two communities were used to investigate how different social and biological factors can affect transgene flow and impact transgene spread in Mexico. Our results show the presence of transgenes in one community and thus support the position that transgenes are highly likely to be present in Mexican maize landraces. However, our work also demonstrates that the extent and frequency with which transgenes can be found will significantly depend on the societal characteristics and seed management systems of the local communities. Therefore, we argue that future analysis of transgene presence should include social research on the seed management practices in the sampling area so that more robust and comprehensive understandings and conclusions can be drawn.