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.     

Scale‐invariance of niche breadth in fleas parasitic on small mammals

The resource specialization or niche breadth of a species is not fixed across populations, but instead varies over geographical space. A species may be a local specialist but a regional generalist, if it uses locally few resources that are substitutable across locations. In contrast, a species is a local generalist and a regional specialist if it uses locally many resources that cannot be substituted from 1 location to the next. Scale‐dependence can thus be a major factor in estimation of niche breadth. Here, we test for relationships between local and global estimates of host specificity (a measure of niche breadth for parasites) in fleas (Siphonaptera) parasitic on small mammals from 49 different regions within the Holarctic. Across all fleas, we found a strong, positive relationship between the number of host species that a flea uses in 1 locality and the number of different host species that can serve as the flea's principal host (i.e. the one supporting the most fleas in a region) among all regions. Also, we observed a strong positive relationship between the taxonomic distinctness of the host species used in 1 locality and that of all known principal hosts among all localities. These relationships held after correcting for potentially confounding phylogenetic influences. We discuss the implications of scale‐independent host specificity and its association with geographical range size and species‐specific patterns of host use.     

Between <Emphasis Type="Italic">Adat</Emphasis> and State: Institutional Arrangements on Sumatra’s Forest Frontier

In Indonesia, with the recent eruption of local struggles over resources and now with the new decentralization reforms, there is renewed interest in the role of customary adat institutional arrangements in village government, land tenure, and forest management. On the basis of research carried out in one locality in Sumatra over 1996–99, this article considers the nature of local institutional arrangements, how they have evolved under various conditions, their complex interaction with the parallel State order, their response to economic fluctuations, and how particular institutional patterns lead to certain environmental outcomes. This article finds that as farmers adjust to the economic and political dynamics and the changing scarcity and value of different resources in this site, the adat arrangements are constantly renegotiated. Adat customary orders are tied to local notions of identity and associated notions of appropriateness, and as such constitute patterns of social ordering associated with both implicit deeply held social norms and more explicit rules. Considering the institutional pluralism characteristic of this area, this article concludes that, while the State and adat regimes often compete to control the direction of social change, they also constantly make accommodations, and in some respects need to be considered as mutually adjusting, intertwined orders.     

Bodily rights and collective claims: the work of legal activists in interpreting reproductive and maternal rights in India

This article engages with anthropological approaches to the study of global human rights discourses around reproductive and maternal health in India. Whether couched in the language of human rights or of other social justice frameworks, different forms of claims‐making in India exist in tandem and correspond to particular traditions of activism and struggle. Universal reproductive rights language remains a discourse aimed at the state in India, where the primary purpose is to demand greater accountability in the domain of policy and governance. Outside of these spheres, other languages are strategically chosen by activists for their greater resonance in addressing individual cases of women claiming reproductive violence within the context of the family as well as localized histories of feminist struggle and social justice. In focusing on the work of legal activists and the discourses which inform their interventions, this article seeks to understand how the language of reproductive rights is used in the context of India, not as a `Western import' which is adapted to local contexts, but rather as one of multiple frameworks of claims‐making drawn upon by legal activists emerging from distinct histories of struggle for gender equality and social justice.     

Making multiculturalism

Urbanists seeking to undermine or challenge pessimistic accounts of prevalent racism and anti-migrant feeling in cities have articulated and mobilized discourses of everyday multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, multicultural drift, rubbing along and transculturalism. This paper, through a range of ethnographic methods, explores these notions in a locality of Camden, North London, arguing for the notion of “making multiculturalism” as a way of emphasizing how everyday multiculturalism is situated and plays out in specific local socio-cultural and historical contexts. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the locality follows the perceived trend in many globalized cities towards the acquisition of habits or capacities for diverse individuals to share space with relative harmony and tolerance. Second, it seeks to explore what are the elements and components of everyday multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism or conviviality assembled in this space. Third, it asks the question – how are these multicultural settlements disrupted and fractured?     

Impact of the topology of global macroeconomic network on the spreading of economic crises

Throughout economic history, the global economy has experienced recurring crises. The persistent recurrence of such economic crises calls for an understanding of their generic features rather than treating them as singular events. The global economic system is a highly complex system and can best be viewed in terms of a network of interacting macroeconomic agents. In this regard, from the perspective of collective network dynamics, here we explore how the topology of the global macroeconomic network affects the patterns of spreading of economic crises. Using a simple toy model of crisis spreading, we demonstrate that an individual country's role in crisis spreading is not only dependent on its gross macroeconomic capacities, but also on its local and global connectivity profile in the context of the world economic network. We find that on one hand clustering of weak links at the regional scale can significantly aggravate the spread of crises, but on the other hand the current network structure at the global scale harbors higher tolerance of extreme crises compared to more "globalized" random networks. These results suggest that there can be a potential hidden cost in the ongoing globalization movement towards establishing less-constrained, trans-regional economic links between countries, by increasing vulnerability of the global economic system to extreme crises.     

Culture,Conflict, and Translocal Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal,India

As media reports of political movements from various locations have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. This paper examines how political activists in West Bengal, India use mobile phones for their daily political work. I seek ways to recognize the disruptive and political potential of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rootedness. I illustrate how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal communication enabled by phones. I also demonstrate how the political use of mobile technology for extra ordinary events is grounded in the social and political processes of ordinary everyday life and draws from the local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain aspects of it. My article confirms the cultural continuity amidst the increase in translocal relationships but it also pinpoints how cultures harbour conflicts and alternative discourses which translocal communication helps to amplify.     

Sultans of Spin: Syrian Sacred Music on the World Stage

This article examines how the performance of a variety of Islamic music in transnational cultural circuits helps to promote the idea of a style of sacred music within the category of world music. Taking as an example the performance of the mawlawiyya, or "Whirling Dervish," music and dance by a Syrian–based ensemble, I show how the idea of an authentic local Syrian sacred music tradition requires its performance globally. I use the concept of the "world stage" to examine how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts. I further explore how such musical styles as sacred and Sufi emerge as naturalized categories in world music discourse, and how processes of differentiation and commodification reconfigure both the "local" and "global." [Keywords: world music, globalization, style, Syria, Islam]     

Cooperation and the scale of competition in humans

Explaining cooperation is one of the greatest challenges for evolutionary biology. It is particularly a problem in species such as humans, where there is cooperation between nonrelatives. Numerous possible solutions have been suggested for the problem of cooperation between nonrelatives, including punishment, policing, and various forms of reciprocity. Here, we suggest that local competition for resources can pose a problem for these hypotheses, analogous to how it can select against cooperation between relatives. We extend the prisoner's dilemma (PD) game to show that local competition between interacting individuals can reduce selection for cooperation between nonrelatives. This is because, with local competition, fitness is relative to social partners, and cooperation benefits social partners. We then test whether nonrelated humans adjust their level of cooperation facultatively in response to the scale of competition when playing the PD for cash prizes. As predicted, we found that individuals were less likely to cooperate when competition was relatively local. Cooperation between humans will therefore be most likely when repeated interactions take place on a local scale between small numbers of people, and competition for resources takes place on a more global scale among large numbers of people.     

Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority

This essay examines constructions of deafness in medieval culture, exploring how deaf experience disrupts authoritative discourses in three textual genres: medical treatise, literary fiction, and autobiographical writing. Medical manuals often present deafness as a physical defect, yet they also suggest how social conditions for deaf people can be transformed in lieu of treatment protocols. Fictional narratives tend to associate deafness with sin or social stigma, but they can also imagine deaf experience with a remarkable degree of sympathy and nuance. Autobiographical writing by deaf authors most vividly challenges diagnostic models of disability, exploring generative forms of perception that deafness can foster. In tracing the disruptive force that deaf experience exerts on perceived notions of textual authority, this essay reveals how medieval culture critiqued the diagnostic power of medical practitioners. Deafness does not simply function as a symptom of an individual problem or a metaphor for a spiritual or social condition; rather, deafness is a transformative capacity affording new modes of knowing self and other.     

Integrated landscape approaches to managing social and environmental issues in the tropics: learning from the past to guide the future

Poverty, food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss continue to persist as the primary environmental and social challenges faced by the global community. As such, there is a growing acknowledgement that conventional sectorial approaches to addressing often inter‐connected social, environmental, economic and political challenges are proving insufficient. An alternative is to focus on integrated solutions at landscape scales or ‘landscape approaches’. The appeal of landscape approaches has resulted in the production of a significant body of literature in recent decades, yet confusion over terminology, application and utility persists. Focusing on the tropics, we systematically reviewed the literature to: (i) disentangle the historical development and theory behind the framework of the landscape approach and how it has progressed into its current iteration, (ii) establish lessons learned from previous land management strategies, (iii) determine the barriers that currently restrict implementation of the landscape approach and (iv) provide recommendations for how the landscape approach can contribute towards the fulfilment of the goals of international policy processes. This review suggests that, despite some barriers to implementation, a landscape approach has considerable potential to meet social and environmental objectives at local scales while aiding national commitments to addressing ongoing global challenges.     

False Teeth and Real Suffering: The Social Course of `Germectomy' in Eastern Uganda

The removal of the incipient canine teeth (`germectomy') insmall babies is a practice carried out in many parts of easternAfrica. This article describes how `germectomy' among theJop'Adhola in Eastern Uganda is an important idiom of distress,referred to as false teeth by English speaking people, and lakijomarach (bad teeth) or gira kwanya (that which is removed) in thelocal language Dhop'Adhola. Through an analysis of how the notionof false teeth is shaped by macro social forces of war andpoverty as well as by negotiations within the local social world,the discussion is taken beyond the question of cultural belief.False teeth as a practice seems to have spread through vastgeographical areas within a few decades, but as the example ofthe Jop'Adhola shows, it has taken a particular social course ineastern Uganda – as it is most likely to also have doneeverywhere else it has gained a footing. By analyzing its socialcourse we may gain insight into important mediating socialprocesses which may have as much to do with actual health outcomein a particular area as health care per se.     

Challenging the racialization of child sexual exploitation: Muslim men,racism and belonging in Rotherham

This paper presents findings from original research exploring the impact on Muslim men of a child sexual exploitation scandal that attracted significant attention to the northern English town where they live and contributed to a sustained detrimental effect on local community relations. It foregrounds men’s accounts to reveal their agency and resilience in responding to racism that they identified as resulting from the scandal. It reveals how their accounts disrupt dominant discourses foregrounding Muslim self-segregation and lack of integration, demonstrating positive attachments and claims to localized space, and commitment to belonging. In doing so, it shows how men’s responses to racism challenge racialized forms of knowledge about Muslims. The paper draws attention to the significance of localized forms of belonging in facilitating the inclusion of Muslim minorities. It also highlights the importance of centring Muslim men as historically speaking subjects in accounts of issues involving them.     

The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network

Social movements rely in large measure on networked communication technologies to organize and disseminate information relating to the movements’ objectives. In this work we seek to understand how the goals and needs of a protest movement are reflected in the geographic patterns of its communication network, and how these patterns differ from those of stable political communication. To this end, we examine an online communication network reconstructed from over 600,000 tweets from a thirty-six week period covering the birth and maturation of the American anticapitalist movement, Occupy Wall Street. We find that, compared to a network of stable domestic political communication, the Occupy Wall Street network exhibits higher levels of locality and a hub and spoke structure, in which the majority of non-local attention is allocated to high-profile locations such as New York, California, and Washington D.C. Moreover, we observe that information flows across state boundaries are more likely to contain framing language and references to the media, while communication among individuals in the same state is more likely to reference protest action and specific places and times. Tying these results to social movement theory, we propose that these features reflect the movement’s efforts to mobilize resources at the local level and to develop narrative frames that reinforce collective purpose at the national level.     

Nature, Harmony, and the Kaliyugaya. Global/Local Discourses on the Human-Environment Relationship

"Living in harmony with nature" has become a root metaphor and an imperative in a postcolonial global discourse on environmental crisis. This article uses an interpretive approach to problematize the concepts of "harmony" and "nature" by juxtaposing global and local discourses on the human-environment relationship. It argues that harmony is a "Western/global" discourse borrowed by Sri Lankan environmentalists that has varying levels of resonance with "local" cultural concepts through a discussion of myths of the Golden Age, nature and morality, the human-deity-nature triad, and the microcosm-macrocosm relationship. The harmony discourse, however, leaves no space for the articulation of an alternative local discourse on the kaliyugaya, which also offers an interpretation of environmental crisis.     

Behavioural models of population growth rates: implications for conservation and prediction

Conservation biologists often wish to predict how vertebrate populations will respond to local or global changes in conditions such as those resulting from sea-level rise, deforestation, exploitation, genetically modified crops, global warming, human disturbance or from conservation activities. Predicting the consequences of such changes almost always requires understanding the population growth rate and the density dependence. Traditional means of directly measuring density dependence are often extremely difficult and have the problem that if the environment changes then it is necessary to remeasure the density dependence. We describe an alternative approach that does not require such long datasets and can be used to predict the density dependence under novel conditions. Game theory can be used to describe behavioural decisions that individuals make in response to interference, prey depletion, territorial behaviour or social dominance, and the resultant fitness consequences. It is then possible to predict how survival or reproductive output changes with population size. From this we can then make predictions about the responses of populations to environmental changes. We will illustrate how this can be applied to a range of species and a range of applied problems.     

Ambivalent moralities of cooperation and corruption: Local explanations for (under)development on a Philippine island

Concepts of development are inevitably loaded with value judgements concerning what constitutes ‘proper’ social and economic organisation. Focusing on the cultural politics of development on Siquijor, an island in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, this paper explores these often tacit ideals. It considers one of the key idioms Siquijodnon use in explaining how development is brought about—cooperation—and some of its locally perceived opposites—‘crab mentality’, politicking and corruption—which contain powerful moral critiques of self and society. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio‐economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio‐economic organisation.     

The Mediated Metropolis: Anthropological Issues in Cities and Mass Communication

Cinema, radio, television, video, the Internet, and other visual mass media have found niches in the dense creativity of twentieth-century urban life, altering social practices and cultural encounters worldwide. Yet, without cities where producers and audiences have congregated, mass production, texts, distribution, and reception lack human foundations. This symbiosis demands careful ethnographic analysis of media within concrete urban histories. We illustrate this approach from work with film and viewership in two cities. Hong Kong has gained global fame for its films, often scrutinized for clues to its identity; we examine how moviegoing itself and the contexts of transnational spectatorship define a changing city. Philadelphia, by contrast, has rarely controlled its film images; here, it is useful to contrast the production and reading of visual images about the city with images produced through narrowcast media that speak to urban social issues. In both cases, urban visual cultures highlight contestation and creativity in local and global frameworks, [film, grassroots media, urban imagery, Hong Kong, Philadelphia]     

Witch Hunts, Herbal Healing, and Discourses of Indigenous Ecodevelopment in North India: Theory and Method in the Anthropology of Environmentality

ABSTRACT  In this article, we examine the environmental thought and practice of indigenous peoples living in and around a wildlife sanctuary in North India. Analysis reveals that those religious specialists (such as shamans) who possess knowledge of herbal healing are more committed than other villagers to preventing or mitigating the overharvesting of natural resources. To explain these results, reference is made to a specific juncture of native traditions and modern conditions and in particular to an intersection of local economies with global discourses of "ecodevelopment." Drawing on theories and methods from political ecology and cultural psychology, we present a framework for testing the extent that local actors—in this case, shamanic and herbalist healers—are differently positioned to resist or accommodate state and parastate structures of "environmentality" than are other villagers.