As Southern as a Sweetgrass Basket: Commodification and Cultural Heritage
among the Gullah
Kristin LaHatte
The salience of tourism research within the discipline of anthropology has
increased dramatically since the late 1970’s. As the line between the global and local
blurs, anthropologists are uniquely poised to study the complex changes associated with
tourism from both an emic (inside) and etic (outside) perspective. Anthropologists have
the ability to serve as facilitators between the different constituents involved in tourism
activities as well as to explore the impact of tourism, particularly on local populations.
Over the past decade a marked shift in tourism research occurred as research in cultural
anthropology began focusing on cultural heritage and its production and
commodification.
As a result of this shift in research, new challenges and topics arose in the
anthropology of tourism. Current literature addresses issues of authenticity that develop
in response to the portrayal of “traditional” or historical productions. Research also
stresses the determination of rights and ownership with regard to cultural heritage and
economic advancement. One particular area of significance with regard to ownership
explores local groups’ efforts to “reclaim” their cultural heritage, often from dominant
groups or institutions who utilize local groups’ culture without their expressed permission
or consent. Exploring “traditional” cultural depictions in terms of host and guest
relationships is another area of inquiry. Current research on the interaction between hosts
and guests is significantly one-sided, providing the host viewpoint only. Thus, it lacks a
holistic perspective regarding the relationship between hosts and guests as well as a
1
thorough investigation into guest perceptions and beliefs regarding their interaction with
hosts.
The Gullah people of the South Carolina Sea Islands offer a focus for research on
cultural heritage and commodification. Following the Civil War, the Gullah relocated to
the Sea Islands, isolating themselves from the mainland and largely preserving their
cultural traditions, language, and beliefs. Rapid land development on the Sea Islands
since the 1950’s, and the ensuing cultural changes, challenges the Gullah to reinterpret
their conceptions of tradition and to determine how it is to be maintained. The
commodification of Gullah cultural items, such as the sweetgrass basket, also encourages
questions of authenticity, ownership, and host/guest interactions. Presently, no research
explores the relationship between the Gullah and tourists in the Charleston area.
Additionally, research on the Gullah in Charleston fails to view commodification among
the Gullah as a mediated activity. The role of the city of Charleston as a third party that
structures and arguably constricts the Gullah’s agency in choices regarding
commodification of their cultural heritage needs to be investigated within the larger
framework of tourism, commodification, and cultural heritage. This perspective will
allow for a holistic view of how the Gullah attempt to preserve their cultural heritage
while working with the larger bureaucratic institutions that all local groups must confront
in their search for recognition and identity.
As more local populations embrace tourism as a viable economic option, the
increasing “risks” many groups face in terms of relinquishing control as definers,
controllers, and owners of their cultural heritage are often overlooked. As tourism
replaces “traditional” economic activities and entire populations become dependent on
2
outside sources for income, a new “hot spot” for tourist activity, or a shift in
governmental tourism policy, can prove disastrous for reliant indigenous groups.
Anthropologists need to study why groups embrace tourism and facilitate a better
understanding of how groups successfully incorporate tourism into their traditional
practices while maintaining ownership and control of their cultural heritage.
Anthropologists should continue to assist local groups in challenging hegemonic
structures and in their attempts to reassert control over their identity and cultural heritage.
Annotated Bibliography
Brown, Michael. 2003
Who Owns Native Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
In this text, Brown examines indigenous rights as they are framed within the
context of identity and cultural heritage. Brown reviews cases from several indigenous
groups worldwide to illustrate the mechanisms that groups employ to redefine the
concept of cultural ownership. Brown suggests specific mechanisms groups can use to
navigate the uncertain terrain of cultural heritage as a commodity.
Comparative
Cultural heritage
Cultural rights
Indigenous people’s rights
Cultural policy
Applied anthropology
Bruner, Edward M. and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 1994
Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa. Cultural Anthropology 9(4):435470.
This article raises questions of ownership and authenticity as “mass tourism”
establishes itself as a way of life for the Maasai moran, male youths, on Mayers Ranch,
Kenya. The authors further discuss how staging of events and advertising practices as
“traditional” appeals to certain tourist groups in search of authenticity. The article
examines this experience as mediated from the tourists’ perspective, thus bridging the
gap between hosts and guests.
Kenya
3
Maasai
Cultural authenticity
Tourist-host interaction
Cultural anthropology
Chambers, Erve. 2005
Can the Anthropology of Tourism Make Us Better Travelers? National Association for
Anthropology Bulletin. 23(1):27-44.
This article argues that the work of anthropologists has led to the ability to make
generalizations on how tourists can travel more responsibly, bridging the gap between
theory and practice. Chambers promotes these ideas as “Traveler’s Tips.” He also
discusses the “tourism of denial,” travelers belief that they are able to travel and interact
without impact on local communities, and the need for travelers to recognize themselves
as outsiders.
International
Responsible tourism
Tourist cultural sensitivity
Applied anthropology
Chambers, Erve, ed. 1997
Tourism and Culture: An Applied Perspective. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press.
This volume provides case studies on the interaction of culture and tourism.
Chambers argues for the importance of this research but points to a lack of discussion on
the interactions between the host and guest. Specific studies include the impact of
tourism on the Kalahari Bushmen, the promotion of authenticity among the Eastern
Cherokee, and urban tourism and revitalization in Boston, Massachusetts.
International
Tourist-host interaction
Culture brokers
Anthropology of tourism
Cultural anthropology
Doron, Assa. 2005
Encountering the “Other”: Pilgrims, Tourists, and Boatmen in the City of Varanasi.
Australian Journal of Anthropology 16(2):157-178.
Doron examines the relationship between host and guest and how these
relationships are structured to conform to what is marketed, using the example of the city
of Varanasi, north India. Doron discusses how the Varanasi people in the tourist sector
use agency, specifically their ability to influence decisions of tourists and to educate
tourists as culture brokers. Furthermore, Doron maintains that the relationship in the
4
“contact zone” is not as tourist-dominated as typically portrayed.
North India
Agency
International tourism
Culture brokers
Cultural anthropology
Gable, Eric and Richard Handler. 1996
After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site. American Anthropologist 98(3):568579.
This article examines the techniques of cultural heritage sites whose main
objective is to present authenticity. Exploring Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the
authors demonstrate how using “authenticity-as-impression-management” helps to
protect the site from tourist’s questions regarding its true authenticity.
Virginia
Williamsburg
Cultural authenticity
Anthropology of tourism
Cultural anthropology
Jarrett, Charles W. 2003
Connecting with the Soul of a Community: An Interactive Study of Gullah Culture. Paper
presented at the Conference on the Africa Diaspora in the Americas: Current Research,
Athens, Ohio, April 12.
This paper discusses the Gullah people of South Carolina and the impact of
current economic changes facilitated by land development on the Carolina Sea Islands.
Jarrett advocates for the importance of involving indigenous groups in research and for
using several methods for data collection such as archival research, interviews, and autoethnographic observations. The paper discusses the negative impacts of development
from an economic as well as ecological perspective, highlighting issues such as land
value and the loss of environmentally dependent traditions.
South Carolina
Sea Islands
Gullah culture
Negative effects of development
Sociology
Jarrett, Charles W. and David M. Lucas. 2002
Introducing Folknography: A Study of Gullah Culture. Paper presented at the 65thAnnual
Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, Chicago, August 14-18.
5
Providing a comprehensive discussion of the Gullah, this papers examines Gullah
cultural history and change in South Carolina. The researchers employ, and put forth, the
idea of folknography, a technique for rapid rural appraisal centered on the use of
ethnography. Employing this method, the researches address how Gullah culture has
changed, specifically in the later half of the twentieth century, and how the Gullah people
view these changes.
South Carolina
Sea Islands
Gullah culture
Rapid research methods
Cultural change
Sociology
Jones-Jackson, Patricia. 1987
When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands. Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
This text provides a vivid portrayal of Gullah beliefs and practices as seen on the
Sea Islands of South Carolina, discussing both cultural and linguistic aspects that define
the Gullah people. It highlights issues that are most endangered by current development
of the Sea Islands such as storytelling, traditional religious practices, medicinal
knowledge, and land practices.
South Carolina
Gullah culture
Cultural heritage
Economic development and cultural endangerment
Cultural anthropology
Leatherman, Thomas L. and Alan Goodman. 2005
Coca-colonization of Diets in the Yucatan. Social Science & Medicine 61(4):833-846.
Discussing in detail the impact of tourism in globalizing a local economy, this
article specifically investigates tourism with regard to food consumption in the Yucatan
Peninsula of Mexico. Increasing Mayan tourism has resulted in the commoditization of
food, a process the authors refer to as “coca-colonization,” where residents rely on
nutrient poor snack foods for a large percentage of their caloric intake. Explores the
trickle down effects tourism can have on local interests beyond those areas deemed
tourist domains, specifically addressing how these impacts are inequitably experienced.
Mexico
Yucatan Peninsula
Negative effects of international tourism
Dietary change
Medical anthropology
6
Little, Walter E. 2004
Performing Tourism: Maya Women’s Strategies. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture &
Society 29(2):527-533.
This article examines Mayan women and their “performance” in the market
places of Guatemala. Little argues that women attempt to camouflage their overt
economic intentions by building rapport with tourists, creating an authentic experience
and thus authentic “traditional” Guatemalan items for purchase. These “performances”
are altered for each customer. Their promotion of “traditional” customs and items also
legitimize the women’s position in the marketplace, deterring repercussions such as
harassment, fines, and possibly arrest from shop owners and local law enforcement.
Guatemala
Mayan marketplace women
Cultural authenticity
Tourist-host interaction
Culture brokers
Cultural anthropology
Nash, Dennison. 1996
Anthropology of Tourism. Tarrytown, NY: Elsevier Science Ltd.
Dennison discusses three orientations of tourism research: personal transition,
acculturation, and superstructure, giving examples within each section to support his
argument. Personal transition investigates tourists’ perspectives on the personal changes
they undergo as a result of their travels as well as why they chose to travel and to where.
Acculturation examines the agency available to hosts concerning tourism decisions and
subsequent impacts while the superstructure approach investigates the cause of tourism
and looks for the underlying societal and worldwide structures that promote tourism.
Dennison also explores the role of anthropologists and their ability to use an integrated
approach for the study of tourism, thus providing a broad, people-centered perspective.
Theoretical
Tourism research
Anthropology and tourism
Applied anthropology
National Park Service. 2005
Low Country Gullah Culture: Special Resource Study and Final Evaluation Impact
Statement. Atlanta, GA: NPS Southeast Regional Office.
Commissioned by the National Park Service, this study investigates if and how
the NPS should be involved in the preservation of the Gullah culture in South Carolina.
Researchers incorporated local voices of the Gullah people as well as historical studies of
their culture and the Sea Islands where the Gullah live. The report includes sections on
7
why the study was necessary, the Gullah people and their history and current situation,
the criteria used by the NPS to determine critical areas of concern, and options for
preserving the Gullah culture and educating the public on their rich history.
South Carolina
Georgia
Gullah culture
Cultural heritage preservation
National Park Service
Impact assessment
Social science
Ryan, Chris and Michelle Aicken, eds. 2005
Indigenous Tourism: The Commodification and Management of Culture. San Diego, CA:
Elsevier.
This text explores tourism as an income generating venture for indigenous people. It
includes specific cases and analysis demonstrating the inherent changes associated with
the commodification of cultural heritage and examines how indigenous groups maintain
control of their identity and cultural practices. Examples include Australian indigenous
tourist activities, the relationship between hosts and guests in Christchurch, New Zealand,
community tourism in Lijiang, China, and the winter festival in Jokkmokk, Sweden.
Cross-cultural
Indigenous tourism management
Cultural heritage
Commodification of culture
Tourism studies
Schutte, Gerhard. 2003
Tourists and Tribes in the “New” South Africa. Ethnohistory 50(3):473-487.
This article examines the commodification of village life as a representation of an
authentic tribal experience in South Africa, though the author maintains that these
portrayals are far from accurate. Schutte discusses the historical background of apartheid
in terms of tourism, with particular attention to the traditional African cultures. Looking
at several villages, Schutte analyzes their interpretation and demonstration of an authentic
South African village.
South Africa
Cultural authenticity
Commodification of culture
Tourism and local culture
Cultural anthropology
8
Smith, Valene, ed. 1989[1979]
Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. 2nd edition. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
A seminal publication which discusses the role of anthropology in the study of
tourism. Several authors address the study of tourism as a subject worthy of scientific
inquiry, particularly as a mechanism for cultural change. Contributions explore different
theoretical approaches to the study of tourism and use specific cases to illustrate these
perspectives such as Eskimo tourism and men’s roles, tourism’s impact on the art of
Southwestern U.S. Indians, cultural complexity in Bali, and host and guest relations in
Costa Brava, Spain.
Cross-cultural
Theoretical approaches to tourism
Cultural change
Anthropology and tourism
Cultural anthropology
Stanton, Cathy. 2005
Serving up Culture: Heritage and Its Discontents at an Industrial History Site. Theme
Issue, “Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Anthropology
Approach.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11(5):425-431.
In this article, Stanton thoroughly examines cultural heritage tourism by
specifically addressing the concept of “ownership” in the portrayal of traditional customs.
She explicitly demonstrates how “cultural producers” with “expert” knowledge can have
more influence over the appropriate use and definition of cultural heritage than actual
practioners. Stanton also discusses the potential of anthropologists to act as cultural
brokers between citizen groups, government, and heritage professionals.
Massachusetts, Lowell
Cultural heritage
Cultural rights
Anthropologists as cultural brokers
Applied anthropology
Stronza, Amanda. 2001
Anthropology of Tourism: Forging New Ground for Ecotourism and Other Alternatives.
Annual Review of Anthropology 30:261–283.
Stronza provides a review article in which she synthesizes recent anthropological
works on tourism, analyzed under the topics of anthropology and tourism, origins of
tourism, impacts of tourism, and alternative forms of tourism. The article discusses the
difficulty in defining tourism and how new developments in the tourist industry provide a
frame through which to view other cultural processes and changes. Stronza advocates for
anthropologists to view both players in tourist interactions during each stage as previous
studies have taken a largely one-sided approach, looking mainly at the impact of tourism
9
or studying only the tourists themselves.
Cross-cultural
Host and guests tourism
New tourism ventures
Anthropology and tourism
Cultural anthropology
Sylvain, Renee. 2005
Disorderly Development: Globalization and the Idea of “Culture” in the Kalahari.
American Ethnologist 32(3):354-370.
This article examines how culture can become an instrument of exploitation. It
investigates how the concept of indigenous identity gained salience during the past
century, specifically by analyzing the use of identity among the San people of Namibia.
Sylvain explores the impact of globalization on the San people, discussing how outsiders,
mainly media and NGO’s, attempt to portray the Bushmen as highly “primitive” and how
the San people strategically embrace this perception as needed. The article demonstrates
how ethnotourism in a search for authenticity reshapes cultural local behaviors.
Namibia
San people
Ethnotourism
Cultural identity
Cultural anthropology
Wyllie, Robert W. 1994
Gods, Locals and Strangers: The Effutu Aboakyer as Visitor Attraction. Current
Anthropology 35(1):78-82.
Wyllie presents a thorough examination of the Aboakyer festival in Ghana and the
ability of participants to incorporate international tourism without losing the meaning or
rituals that structure the celebration. Wyllie illustrates how the local community
continues to ritually hunt deer, feast, and dance in a historically driven and traditional
manner. He also explores the positive attitude taken by most local residents with regard
to the increase in international tourism.
Ghana
Cultural commodification
Tourism and identity maintenance
Cultural anthropology
Blood of My Blood: Parental Consanguinity as Genetic Risk in First Cousin
Marriages
10
Susan Joy Bishai
Risk is one of the few human “universals.” Almost all individuals or communities
will at some point face threats, whether “real” or “perceived.” Although risk may be a
cross-cultural reality, the ways in which peoples construe and respond to risk vary
widely, reflecting the diversity of societies throughout the world. In the spring of 2006, I
reviewed published works dealing with a specific risk: consanguineous parents—
particularly married first cousins—and their risk of miscarrying or producing children
with hereditary birth defects. Three factors prompted my interest in this subject.
First, my own cultural background encourages first cousin marriage despite
international medicine’s increased designation of consanguineous marriage as a less
healthy (or, conversely, more “risky”) choice. Based on my own experience and, later,
this annotated bibliography research, I determined that different societies perceive and
navigate genetic risk in different ways and that knowledge of genetic risk factors is not
always a deterrent to consanguineous marital choice. In some societies, for example, even
doctors trained in the Western medical tradition may choose first cousin or other
consanguineous marriages as the basis for their own families.
Second, I am interested in the ways in which people navigate threats to individual
bodies—here, a couple’s potential children—based on communal or society-wide
marriage traditions. Finally, recent changes in genetic medicine and technology as well as
population migration patterns indicate consanguineous marriage and genetic risk may
become or may need to become central issues in some communities’ reproductive health
programs.
11
I attempted to create a cross-cultural collection of annotations and references,
drawing on research based in locales as diverse as urban Britain and rural Appalachia and
China. The majority of available published works, however, identified two socio-cultural
environments—Pakistan and its offshoot emigrant communities and the Middle East and
North Africa—as the world’s most actively and consistently “consanguineous.” My
bibliography thus offers an intensive anthropologically-based introduction to first cousin
marriage and genetic risk amongst persons of Pakistani and multi-ethnic and religious
Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, with brief examinations of other
countries and regions provided as supplements.
Although most of the referenced authors are biological or physical
anthropologists, some cultural anthropologists have undertaken studies of
consanguineous marriages and parents’ approach to genetic risk. British anthropologist
Alison Shaw is one of the most oft-cited and well-regarded cultural anthropologists in the
area of consanguinity and genetic risk. Shaw has focused on the large British-Pakistani
communities of urban Britain. This mixed immigrant and British-born population
presents a prominent example of persistent first-cousin marriage within an urban and
fully industrialized society and, as such, provides an ideal context for Shaw’s emphasis
on culturally compatible minority health and genetic counseling services.
Another British anthropologist who successfully advocates for culturally informed
genetic counseling is Nadeem Qureshi, himself of Pakistani descent. Like Shaw, Qureshi
argues that clinics and practitioners cannot easily dismiss cultural and religious
background and obligations when counseling Pakistani Britons on the genetic risks of
cousin marriage. Both Shaw and Qureshi advise against the ever-present dangers of
12
British and other Western health practitioners overriding or dismissing as ignorant the
deeply held marriage traditions that Pakistani communities bring to their evaluation of
genetic risk.
I was surprised by the relatively large amount of material devoted to studies of
consanguineous marriage and its relation to genetic risk. Although studies of “incest”
have garnered far more anthropological attention, increases in the availability of
reproductive and genetic technologies will create more demand for genetic counseling
and will cast further light on communities maintaining consanguineous marriage,
prompting more anthropologists to devote studies to this subject. Consanguinity and
genetic risk also speak to the increasingly multi-ethnic societies of countries throughout
the world, stirring up a diverse set of issues related to cultural sensitivity, minority
healthcare, and immigration policy.
Annotated Bibliography
Al-Ghazali, L.I. 1997
Consanguineous Marriages in the United Arab Emirates. Journal of Biosocial Science 29
( 4): 491-497.
Al-Ghazali and a team of physical anthropologists and biologists examine the
long-standing tradition of cousin marriage amongst Arabian Gulf populations in the
United Arab Emirates. The team takes into consideration persisting preferences for
cousin marriage and differing levels of education about genetic risks for children of
consanguineous marriages.
United Arab Emirates—Social life and customs
Consanguinity—United Arab Emirates
Physical Anthropology—Biogenetics
Bittles, A. H. 1993
Infant and Child Mortality in Rural Egypt. Journal of Biosocial Science 25 (3): 415-416.
Bittles applies his expertise in South Asian consanguinity issues to child mortality
in Upper Egypt. He compares incidences of postnatal death, finding that cultural or social
13
preferences for consanguineous marriage often override acknowledged genetic risk of
infant mortality.
Africa—Child Mortality
North & Northeast Africa—Consanguinity
Infant Mortality and Consanguinity—Egypt
Biogenetics
Bittles, A. H., A. Radha Rama Devi, H.S. Savithri, Rajeswari Sridhar,
and N. Appaji Rao. 1987
Consanguineous Marriage and Postnatal Mortality in Karnataka, South India. Man. New
Series 22 (4): 736-745.
This team of team conducted a five-year study of children born to consanguineous
(first cousin and uncle-niece) marriages in four southern Indian states. The researchers
looked at the rates of postnatal death among 65, 492 live born pregnancies. Their
statistics failed to reveal a consistent link between consanguineous marriages and
postnatal infant death. The lack of evidence linking relative marriage to infant mortality
was not surprising to local people for whom consanguinity is a well-regarded element of
marriage.
South India
Consanguinity
Infant Mortality
Biogenetics
Darr, Aamra. 1997
Consanguineous Marriage and Genetics: a Positive Relationship. In Culture, Kinship and
Genes: Towards Cross-Cultural Genetics. A. Clarke and E. Parsons, eds. Pp 83-97. New
York: St. Martin's Press.
Working within a British Pakistani community and the larger British society, Darr
attempts to de-stigmatize consanguineous (cousin) marriage and its presumed links to
genetic birth defects and other disorders. While acknowledging the slightly higher risk
for certain genetic disorders, Darr points out the ways in which pre-marital genetic
counseling and other measures can help reduce this risk, allowing modern scientific
techniques to co-exist with and complement consanguineous marital traditions.
Cousin marriage—Pakistanis
Consanguinity—Great Britain
Consanguinity—genetic risk
Genetic disorder
Physical Anthropology
Guha, Amina. 1990
14
Influence of Cultural Traditions and Social Movements on the Genetic Structure of the
Boro-Kachari population. Indian Anthropological Society Journal. 25 (1): 73-81.
Guha looks at genetic risk among the Boro and Karachi peoples of the Assam
region of northeastern India. She compares modern Boro and Karachi populations’
preference for cousin marriage and the ways in which social preference affects
biogenetics, essentially forming and shaping the genetic character of a population.
Villagers may consider common disorders an expected or natural component of their
population.
Consanguinity--India--Assam.
Boro (India people)--India--Assam--Social conditions.
Kachari (India people)--India--Assam--Social conditions.
Physical Anthropology
Holy, Ladislav. 1989.
Kinship, Honour, and Solidarity: Cousin Marriage in the Middle East. Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press.
Holy is interested in how pre-industrial kinship structures—many of which
originated in Arab Bedu tribal society—have proliferated in ethnic groups and countries
throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Although many people in the urban Arabicspeaking world are aware of modern science’s restrictions on relative marriage, kinship
ties and family honor continue to furnish the demand for cousin marriage among
individuals of diverse socio-economic backgrounds.
Themes in Social Anthropology—cousin marriage.
Cross-cousin marriage—Middle East
Anthropology—sociocultural
Hussain, R. 1998
The Role of Consanguinity and Inbreeding as a Determinant of Spontaneous Abortion in
Karachi, Pakistan. Annals of Human Genetics 62 (2): 147-157.
Hussein establishes the biological phenomenon of spontaneous
abortion/miscarriage as higher among consanguineous (first cousin) marriages in
Karachi, Pakistan than in stranger or non-consanguineous marriages, leading to increased
risk for Pakistani families considering cousin marriage.
Consanguinity
Cousin marriage—Pakistan
Miscarriage
Biogenetics
Inhorn, Marcia. 2004
15
Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies: Male
Infertility and Stigma in Egypt and Lebanon. Medical Anthropological Quarterly (18)2:
162-182.
Inhorn posits that Lebanese and Egyptian men’s rates of infertility are
compounded and increased by these men’s unawareness of the many social and
environmental factors contributing to male infertility. Inhorn touches on high rates of first
cousin marriage in Egypt and some parts of Lebanon as one such factor that puts
unwitting men at risk for infertility.
Middle East—Egypt and Lebanon
Male infertility
Cousin marriage
Biological Anthropology—Medical
Jorjani, Eisa. 1998
Demo-Genetic Structure among the Turkmen of Iran. Indian Journal of Physical
Anthropology and Human Genetics 21 (2): 67-78.
Jorjani examines consanguineous (first-cousin) marriage among Turkmen in
twenty villages of Eastern and Western Iran, highlighting the effects on and role of
consanguinity in determining population genetics and makeup. Jorjani relies on oral
interviews as well as case histories on consanguinity, touching on differences and
similarities between Indian, ethnic Persian and Persian Turkmen consanguineous
marriages.
Turkmen—Iran
Consanguinity
Population genetics—Iran
Physical Anthropology
Korotayev, Andrey. 2000
Parallel-cousin (FBD) Marriage, Islamation, and Arabization. Ethnology 39(4): 395-409.
Korotayev coins the term “Islamation” to describe the processes of Islamization
and Arabization that have accompanied the spread of Islam from southwestern Asia to
large portions of Asia, Africa, and some communities in Eastern Europe. Korotayev
posits that a country or community’s inclusion in a specific eighth-century Islamic sphere
of governance can strongly predict high preference for patrilateral parallel-cousin (FBD)
marriage. Korotayev asserts that such stated or conventional preferences do not
correspond to actual marriage practices, in which communities may consciously avoid
cross-cousin marriages. Although genetic risk factors are not the primary reasons behind
such cousin-averse marriages, non-Arabized Muslim populations are aware of genetic
risk, and may or may not cite it as a motivation to avoid consanguineous marriage.
Cross-cousin marriage
Islam—marriage
16
Anthropology—ethnology
Meyer, B.F. 2005
Strategies for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in a Highly Consanguineous
Population. Annals of Human Biology 32 (2):174-179.
Meyer offers culturally appropriate strategies for reducing the risk of genetic
disorders, such as spinal muscular atrophy, in the “highly consanguineous” population of
Saudi Arabia. Meyer’s ideas include culturally-themed genetic counseling and prenatal
screening for this population in which first cousin marriage is and frequently practiced.
Cousin marriage—Saudi Arabia
Genetic Disorders—Saudi Arabia
Biogenetics
Nishimura, Yuko. 1998
Gender, Kinship and Property rights: Nagarattar womanhood in South India. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Nishimura explores social pressures and property rights, largely born of kinship
concerns, in South Indian women’s first cousin marriages. Most such marriages are
arranged or encouraged by the relatives of bride and groom; such social pressures ensure
that both families may, despite knowledge of genetic risks, choose cousin marriage.
Cross-cousin marriage—India, south
Anthropology—sociocultural
O’Brien, Elizabeth and L.B. Jorde, Bjorn Ronnlof, Johan Fellman,
and Aldur Eriksson. 1989
Consanguinity avoidance and mate choice in Sottunga, Finland. American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 79 (2): 235-246.
O’Brien et. al. are interested in the converse of populations in which
consanguineous marriages are socially permissible or even desirable. The team surveyed
young adults of marrying age in Finland, a country in which individuals are encouraged
to choose their own mates irrespective of familial approval or benefit. Finnish men and
women expressed a conscious desire to avoid consanguineous marriages of any kind,
including marriages to cousins three and four times removed. The authors present Finnish
people’s marriage choices in contrast to local immigrant communities in which first
cousin marriages are encouraged.
Mate selection--Finland--Genetic aspects
Finland—Population genetics
Marriage—Finland
Physical Anthropology
17
Ottenheimer, Martin. 1996
Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Ottenheimer compares restrictions on and views of cousin marriage in Europe and
the United States, including Euro-American, native European, and non-Western
immigrant perspectives. He posits that the mainstream American concern over cousin
marriages is largely a myth/construction in light of American cousin marriage rates that
are lower than popularly assumed. Ottenheimer also uses several chapters to review the
different biogenetic arguments made for and against cousin marriage. Different social and
ethnic groups employ these scientific data when making their own calculations of the
risks/benefits of cousin marriage.
Cousin marriage—Europe
Cousin marriage—United States
Anthropology—Biogenetics
Qureshi, Nadeem. 1997
The Relevance of Cultural Understanding to Clinical Genetic Practice. In Culture,
Kinship, and Genes: Towards Cross-Cultural Genetics. A. Clarke and E. Parsons, eds. Pp
111-119. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Qureshi makes an anthropologically based case for culturally themed genetic
counseling and practices. He takes as his prominent example the well-studied case of
British-born Pakistanis for whom first cousin marriage is widely preferred and practiced.
Qureshi argues that clinics and practitioners cannot ignore cultural and religious
background and obligations when counseling Pakistani Britons on the genetic risks of
cousin marriage.
Great Britain-Minorities
Pakistanis-Great Britain—Medical Care
Genetic Counseling—Great Britain.
Physical Anthropology
Raz, Aviad and Marcela Atar. 2005
Perceptions of Cousin Marriage Among Young Bedouin Adults in Israel. Marriage &
Family Review 37 (3): 27-46.
The authors are ethnographers who observed Bedouin* Arabs of marriageable age
and their reactions to the risk of genetic disorders in traditional Bedouin cousin
marriages. *A minority of available recent anthropological literature uses the alternate
term “Bedu,” for which some Bedu have expressed a preference. To facilitate future
research, I have used “Bedouin” and “Bedu” where authors have used each and where
cataloguing systems have listed each as a subject term.
Raz and Atar found that a significant percentage of young Bedouin in a specific
clan (37%) favored first cousin marriage, with another large percentage (22%) reacting
18
unfavorably toward cousin marriage but anticipating their own such marriage due to
familial or social expectations. Both groups of young people demonstrated clear
knowledge of the genetic risks associated with first cousin marriage yet either preferred
consanguineous marriage or had resigned themselves to the practice.
Israel—Bedouins
Bedu
Consanguinity
Israel
Ethnography
Saedi-Wong, Simin. 1989
Socio-economic Epidemiology of Consanguineous Matings in the Saudi Arabian
Population. Journal of Asian and African Studies 24 (3/4): 247-52.
Saedi-Wong examines the social and economic underpinnings of Saudi people’s
deep-seated preferences for first cousin marriage despite widespread indications (from
Western medicine and media, for example) that such unions increase offspring’s risk of
genetic disorders.
Middle and Near East
Consanguineous marriage—Saudi Arabia
Cultural Anthropology
Shaw, Alison. 2000
Conflicting Models of Risk: Clinical Genetics and British Pakistanis. In Risk Revisited.
Pat Caplan, Ed. Pps 85-107. London: Pluto Press.
Shaw highlights the tension between “native” British healthcare professionals’
and British-born or immigrant Pakistanis’ conflicting views on genetic risk of birth
defects for children born of consanguineous (first cousin) parents. Shaw makes several
recommendations including specifically tailoring genetic counseling literature and
education to render them more accessible to lay and specific ethnic, particularly
Pakistani, communities.
Great Britain—Asian immigrants
Pakistani immigrants
Cousin Marriage
Genetic Risk
Anthropology—Physical—Social
Simpson, Bob. 2004
Acting Ethically, Responding Culturally: Framing the New Reproductive and
Genetic Technologies in Sri Lanka. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 5 (3): 227-243.
19
Simpson is interested in the roles of reproductive and genetic technology in
developing countries whose social practices, such as first cousin marriage, seem to pose
strong ethical opposition to such technological innovations. Simpson explores the
“relativization” of modern bioethics in relation to such cultural norms. He dissects the
usage of the term “culturally appropriate” in the Sri Lankan medical/reproductive health
community.
Sri Lanka
Reproductive technology
Genetics
Cousin Marriage
Anthropology—sociocultural
Tincher, Robert B. 1980
Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics
in Southern Appalachia. Central Issues in Anthropology 2 (1): 27- 49.
Tincher compares data on rates of cousin marriage and isonymy (marriage
between people of the same surname) in the Appalachian region of the United States with
recorded incidents of genetic disorder. He calls into question the “conventional” or
prevailing view that Appalachian inbreeding is responsible for perceived genetic
disabilities and low levels of intelligence, or that such unions have resulted in
“widespread deleterious effects.”
Appalachia—United States
Consanguinous marriage
Genetic Disorder
Cultural Anthropology
Zhaoxiong, Qin. 2001
Rethinking Cousin Marriage in Rural China. Ethnology 40 (4): 347-361.
Zhaoxiong examines cross-cousin marriage in a rural Chinese village of central
China’s Hubei Province. The author offers varying reasons for the acceptability of such
marriages and villagers’ views of “outsider marriages” as less acceptable to local
communities (this negative view of outsider marriage is common throughout cousinmarrying societies). Zhaoxiong identifies as central to rural Chinese villagers’ identity
their emphasis on patrilineal descent through first cousin marriage.
China—Hubei Province
Central China—villages
Rural China
Cross-cousin marriage
Cultural Anthropology
20
Child Labor in Cultural Context
Sayaka Uchikawa
I visited Battambang, Cambodia in 2003 to work as a volunteer at a youth
house managed by a NGO called Kokkyo naki Kodomotachi (KnK, Children without
Borders). Approximately forty former working, trafficked and street children were living
and studying together in the youth house, and I assisted in organizing cultural exchanges
and educational activities with them. While interacting with the children, I became
increasingly aware of the fact that some of the children still wished to work. Even though
the NGO provided them with a stable life with food, housing and education, they felt
strong responsibilities toward and commitments to their family. Moreover, I began to
doubt that whether anti-child labor interventions had considered the cultural context of
the children including their time allocation for work, education and play. Expanding
access to education is stressed in the common intervention strategies, yet it does not often
fully address the traditions and local culture of the children, and roles of the children in
households and communities.
Although the worst forms of child labor, such as child prostitution, slavery and
child soldier, should be unconditionally eliminated, such poorly informed anti-child labor
interventions that ignore the local and cultural context can be a trigger for increasing risk
and insecurity of working children and so-called child labor.
All the sources in this bibliography demonstrate that anti-child labor programs
and policies often underestimate the complex ways of life of child workers. They
advocate for more child-centered or child-focused research with attention to the
importance of their cultural context. Some studies even claim that, without
comprehensive understanding of the cultural reality, the efforts to reduce child labor may
21
make conditions worse (Busza, Castle and Diarra 2004). For instance, immediately after
the US Congress adopted the Harkin Bill in 1993 to ban the import of all garments
produced by children in Bangladesh, about ten thousand Bangladeshi children were fired.
However, despite the expectation that the liberated children would attend school, many of
them had been sent to an even more exploitative situation (Seabrook 2001:21). When
considering the individual level of risk and security of child labor, the following factors
must be considered: family roles and cultural values, power relations in the social
structure (Kuntay 2002), the perception of the community towards child labor
(Montgomery 2001), and the interpretation of children’s roles in their villages (Rende
Taylor 2005). Ignoring these factors can increase the vulnerability of the children.
The anthropologists included in this bibliography do not support child labor. Instead
of simply arguing that all the child labor should be eliminated, they tend to more focus on
the work, status and roles of the children within their family and society, and describe
their reality within the local cultural context. The reports by anti-child labor activists and
journalists are also important sources of information about the situation of the children.
Nevertheless, in order to understand why children work from a child and individual
perspective requires a cultural anthropological approach. Otherwise danger, risk and
insecurity of each child may not decrease and may even increase.
Additional Works Cited
Seabrook, Jeremy. 2001.
Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market. London: Pluto Press.
Annotated Bibliography
Ajavi, A. O., and D. O. Torimiro. 2004.
Perspective on Child Abuse and Labour: Global Ethical Ideals versus African Cultural
Realities. Early Child Development and Care 174:181-191.
22
This article compares the two perspectives. The first is the theoretical perspective
on child abuse and child labor in the global ethical and ideal framework that is often
maintained by international agreements. The second is the African local cultural
perspective. Qualitative data was collected from six rural farming communities in Nigeria
and analyzed to see the African cultural perspective and reality. The article argues that it
is not right to examine a case of child abuse and child labor without a close examination
of the culture. It concludes that the use of children for farming in Nigeria is a training and
a socialization process of children that fits within local cultural realities.
Nigeria
Child labor
Child abuse
Global ethics
Child development and welfare studies
Boyden, Jo, Birgitta Ling, and William Myers. 1998.
What Works for Working Children. Smedjebacken, Sweden: UNICEF International
Child Development Centre, & Rädda Barnen.
The authors, an anthropologist and practitioners of child social welfare issues,
argue that the most traditional and widely prescribed measures for calling for elimination
of child labor usually do not work. They advocate for a child-centered perspective on
child work drawing more attention to working children themselves and examining child
work in relation to child development, family life, health, school, child protection laws,
and the market economy. Their research is based on field studies, literature reviews, a
mail survey of organizations and individuals considered to have substantive experiences
in child work issues, interviews with working children in Bangladesh, Ethiopia,
Philippines, and Central American countries, and the professional experience of the
authors.
Comparative
Working children
Child-centered perspective
Policy relevance
Busza, Joanna, Sarah Castle, and Aisse Diarra. 2004.
Trafficking and Health. BMJ: British Medical Journal 328:1369-1371.
This article argues that efforts to reduce child trafficking may be making
conditions worse for those who migrate voluntarily. In Mali and Cambodia,
intermediaries have been assisting safe migration for vulnerable young migrants for a
long time. However anti-trafficking groups often intervene without comprehensive
understanding of the migrants’ motivations of the cultural and economic contexts, which
can ironically increase migrants’ risk of harm and exploitation. Anti-trafficking programs
need to incorporate culturally and economically appropriate services.
23
Comparative
Mali
Cambodia
Child trafficking
Child migration
Policy studies
Engebrigtsen, Ada. 2003.
The Child’s – or The State’s – Best Interests? An Examination of The Ways Immigration
Officials Work with Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Minors in Norway. Child &
Family Social Work 8:191-200.
The author argues that immigration officials in Norway tend to see only the
interests of the nation, such as border control and national security, rather than the
interests of child migrants, such as family reunion. The article claims that the official
definition of child migrants and the interpretation of their best interest do not take into
account the background, issues and circumstances of those children but only legal
framework.
Norway
Child migration
Unaccompanied minors
Asylum
Family reunion
Social work studies
Gates, Hill. 2004.
“I Can’t Read, but I Can Reckon”: Work, Emotion and Calculation among Early
Twentieth-Century Sichuan Girls. Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 2:119-139.
Gates interviewed Sichuan women who experienced cotton factory work and foot
binding in their childhood. She argues that the psychological experience of the women
has developed their skills of numeracy, even though they were never taught the skills in
an institutionalized educational system. She advocates that biological research should be
combined with cultural anthropology, in order to help understanding such practices as the
foot binding, childhood work experience and numeracy skills of Sichuan women.
China, Sichuan
Women
Psychological development
Numeracy
Biological anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Green, Linda. 2003.
24
Notes on Mayan Youth and Rural Industrialization in Guatemala. Critique of
Anthropology 23:51-73.
The article explores “configurations of production, power and culture” using an
example of Mayan youth, waged workers in the maquila factories in Guatemala. The
author discusses the change of and the impact on households, community and culture of
rural Guatemala with development and modernization. She explains this issue in the
various contexts such as land, labor, racism, culture, and gender, and argues that rural
industrialization had produced powerlessness among the youth population.
Guatemala
Mayan Indians
Youth
Powerlessness
Rural industrialization
Modernity
Cultural anthropology
Hall, Tom, and Heather Montgomery. 2000.
Home and Away. Anthropology Today 16:13-15.
This article discusses the different representations of childhood and youth in
Western and non-Western social categories. The authors argue that childhood can be a
commodity in the power structures between developed and developing nations. For
example, the British media consider young people engaged in prostitution in Thailand as
innocent child prostitutes. Thus public reaction to the children is often sympathy. On the
other hand, the media see youth working in streets in Britain as street children and
criminals. The young homeless and prostitutes in Britain remain stigmatized and
prosecuted even when they are under eighteen years old.
Comparative
Thailand
Great Britain
Homeless youth
Social exclusion
Cultural anthropology
Helleiner, Jane. 2003.
The Politics of Traveller ‘Child Begging’ in Ireland. Critique of Anthropology 23:17-33.
The author discusses child begging in the cultural, historical and political contexts
of the Travellers in Ireland. She describes how child begging has been a part of Travellers
people’s culture and life, and also challenges the essentialized and universalized
childhood concept. The article claims the needs to critically examine debates and policy
initiatives for marginalized child labor, and to reassess the children’s work with their
relations to parents and culture.
25
Ireland
Travelling people, Travellers
Begging
Child labor
Policy studies
Cultural anthropology
Kibride, Philip, Collette Suda, and Enos Njeru. 2000.
Street Children in Kenya: Voice of Children in Search of a Childhood. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group.
This book describes street children in Nairobi, Kenya, and their lives as products
of specific cultural patterns. The team of sociologists and anthropologists, two of whom
are Kenyans, conducted individual interviews, discussions and surveys with the street
children. They show the complex ways of lives of the children.
Kenya
Street children
Childhood
Urban city
Sociology
Cultural anthropology
Kuntay, Esin. 2002.
Family Backgrounds of Teenage Female Sex Workers in Istanbul Metropolitan Area.
Journal of Comparative Family Studies 33:345-358.
This article examines the family backgrounds of teenage female sex workers in
Istanbul, Turkey, based on the in-depth interviews and questionnaires conducted in 1998.
The research shows how cultural values reproduced over generations, such as “the
institutionalized hierarchies and the power relations existing in the social structure” effect
on the social problem of teenage female sex workers.
Turkey, Istanbul
Teenage female
Sex workers
Policy studies
Social science
May, Ann. 1996.
Handshops and Hope: Young Street Vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Anthropology
of Work Review 17:25-34.
May claims that the diversity of child labor in urban cities is ignored and
underestimated, especially in Africa. She suggests working children are not one
homogeneous group while many previous studies tend to combine all of them together
26
despite of their diversity. The studies did not distinguish beggars with street workers, or
boys with girls. This article describes young workers in the informal sector, hand-shop
vendors, of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Tanzania, Dar es Salaam
Child labor
Street vendors
Informal work
Cultural anthropology
Miles, Ann. 1993.
Doing Housework: Children, Gender Socialization and Moral Development in Cuenca,
Ecuador. Anthropology of Work Review 13-14:12-14.
The author focuses on the household tasks of children in economically poor
urban households in Cuenca, Ecuador. She discusses how the domestic chores and
activities of children affect their moral good, family cooperation, reciprocity and
interdependence within their family, and also their ideological commitments to the
gender difference in the society. While in cities, more children tend to go to school
instead of working. They still make contributions to the housework, a pattern that relates
to their moral development.
Ecuador, Cuenca
Gender roles
Socialization
Urban households
Cultural anthropology
Montgomery, Heather. 2001.
Modern Babylon?: Prostituting Children in Thailand. New York: Berghahn Books.
Montgomery argues that the Western context of understanding of children’s rights
does not always recognize children’s roles in different cultures such as Thailand. She
indicates the importance of cultural contexts such as the children’s kinship, especially ties
with mothers, the community’s perception towards prostitution, and the money and
power relationships when understanding the situation of those child prostitutes in
Thailand.
Thailand
Child prostitutes
Child rights
Kinship
Child-centered perspective
Cultural anthropology
27
Nieuwenhuys, Olga. 1996.
The Paradox of Child Labor and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:237251.
This review describes anthropological and other approaches to the issue of child
labor, and reveals the paradox, the limits of current notions such as work and gender
among the approaches to child labor. The author criticizes the anthropological approaches
that often romanticize the work of children as a form of socialization and nostalgic. The
article argues that what is lacking in the issue of child labor is “to address the exclusion
of children from the production value.”
Theoretical
Child labor
Socialization
Cultural anthropology
Porter, Karen A. 1996.
The Agency of Children, Work, and Social Change in the South Pare Mountains,
Tanzania. Anthropology of Work Review 17:8-19.
The author describes the agricultural work of children in South Pare Mountains,
Tanzania, and argues that the work of children is not only determined or conditioned by
households, gender, or kinship, but, also by the market, cultural meanings and social
agencies embedded in work roles. Children increase their agency and cultivate their
market strategies as they position themselves in the market economy. Porter suggests that
policy makers and planners should be more aware of broad processes of economic
transformation that affect the children.
Tanzania, South Pare
Child labor
Cultural anthropology
Policy relevance
Post, David. 2002.
Children’s Work, Schooling, and Welfare in Latin America. Colorado: Westview Press.
This book is a comparative case study of child labor (age 12-17 years),
schooling, and family welfare within and between Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Post, an
educationalist, presents his original analysis of household survey and school enrollment
data, and interprets the trends in the children’s time and energy allocation for home,
family, school, and work.
Comparative
Mexico
Chile
Peru
Child labor
28
Schooling
Family welfare
Social science
Rende Taylor, Lisa. 2005.
Dangerous Trade-offs: The Behavioral Ecology of Child Labor and Prostitution in Rural
Northern Thailand. Current Anthropology 46:411-431.
Rende Taylor, a regional counter-trafficking coordinator for the Asia Foundation,
describes her findings about the relations between child labor, trafficking, prostitution
and parental wealth, based on her field research in two northern villages in Thailand. For
instance while first-born daughters may seen as vulnerable to exploitation and hazardous
forms of work, they are often protected because of the recognition of their important roles
at home, especially taking care of younger siblings.
Thailand
Child labor
Child prostitutes
Child trafficking
Kinship and family
Sociobiological anthropology
Rigi, Jakob. 2003.
The Conditions of Post-Soviet Dispossessed Youth and Work in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Critique of Anthropology 23:35-49.
The author analyzes the condition of youth and their attitudes to work in postSoviet Kazakhstan. The neo-liberal reform created a large number of dispossessed youth.
The government and markets saw the dispossessed youth as lacking knowledge and skills
required in market values due to lack of formal qualification such as education. Rigi
argues that those dispossessed youth actually have more sophisticated practical
knowledge and more complex social survival skills than elite youth, due to their
independent street life at an earlier age.
Kazakhstan
Youth unemployment
Social marginalization
Post-Soviet change
Cultural anthropology
Salazar, M.C. 1991.
Young Workers in Latin America: Protection or Self-determination? Child Welfare
70:269-283.
The article offers comprehensive pictures of child labor issues in Latin America,
such as Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, and discusses the situation of child labor, their
29
relationships with adults, and community-level policies. The article calls a need for
researchers to address the issues in regard to the cultural factors of child labor, such as
the relationship between family and employment, the class of children, and also the selfdetermination of children and adolescents.
Latin America
Child labor
Child rights
Adolescent rights
Child welfare studies
Social science
Sharp, Lesley A. 1996.
The Work Ideology of Malagasy Children: Schooling and Survival in Urban Madagascar.
Anthropology of Work Review 17:35-42.
Sharp conducted her research in a plantation town of Ambanja in Madagascar, 19931995. Based on the data, this article challenges assumptions about child labor, such as
that child laborers are helpless victims, forced to work, and not able to go to school.
Sharp argues that the independent market-based work of young boys ensures their own
survival and that of their families. Those who go to school have less economic benefits
than the young entrepreneurs.
Madagascar, Ambanja
Youth work
Kinship
Schooling
Cultural anthropology
Sharp, Leslie A, 2003.
Laboring for the Colony and Nation. Critique of Anthropology 23:75-91.
Sharp conducted interviews with youth from three high schools in Madagascar
and asked about national identity, colonial history, the cultural value of childhood, and
their daily survival. Based on the data, this article discusses children’s political relevance
and institutionalized labor practices in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Sharp
explores relations among nationalism, labor ideology and youth, by looking at politicized
understanding of the past of the youth and personal and national independence in
Madagascar.
Madagascar
Youth labor
Youth identity
Colonialism
Post-colonialism
Cultural anthropology
30
Sikkink, Lynn. 2001.
Home Sweet Market Stand: Work, Gender, and Getting Ahead among Bolivian
Traditional Medicine Vendors. Anthropology of Work Review 22:1-6.
The author spent six month in Cochabamba, Bolivia. She conducted research with
women in the traditional medicine vendor markets. Sikkink argues, regarding children’s
work, that those women want their children to have the economic base with their work as
traditional medicine vendors. Thus the children can develop true professions. They grow
up understanding their culture, family values, and knowledge of the use, sale, and worth
of the medicines.
Bolivia, Cochabamba
Women’s work
Traditional medicine vendors
Cultural anthropology
Sykes, Karen. 2003.
Introduction: The Ethnography of Children’s and Youth’s Work in The Age of Capitalist
Restructuring. Critique of Anthropology 23:5-16.
This is an introduction article to a special issue of the Critique of
Anthropology. The author calls for ethnographical discussions and explications on the
issue of child and youth work. She states that the issue of child and youth work had been
discussed among employers, activists and mass media, however it is necessary to be
reassessed and researched by anthropologists.
Theoretical
Child labor
Youth work
Child-centered perspective
Cultural anthropology
Anthropology of work
Weiner, Myron. 1991.
The Child and the State in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
This book is a study of child labor and education in India. Weiner, a political
scientist, interviewed government officials, educators, and activists in India, and
describes their different views toward child labor issues. He argues that the fundamental
beliefs of government officials based on Indian culture, rather than social and economical
reality, shape the policy and laws of compulsory education and child labor in India.
India
Child labor
Education
31
State policy
Political science
Country to City, Country to Country: Traversing Resources of Migration,
(Inter)national Security and Risk
Kristen Norton
Migration is tightly bound to issues of risk and security. Nations use borders to
secure their people from other nations. The risky act of moving through borders, whether
internally or externally creates physiological, cultural and psychological problems.
Cultural ideas about risk and security affect decisions to migrate or coping strategies
implemented post-migration.
This annotated bibliography presents resources from a wide array of social
science fields including medical and cultural anthropology, sociology and international
affairs. Many sociologists such as Graves, Opresa and Landale use statistics to analyze
effects of migration. Though quantitative methodologies are helpful in policy work on
migration, it ignores context-rich environments. What do numbers tell us? Sociologists
can make inroads to migration policy by including the participants in analyses instead of
just presenting statistics about them.
Politicians and international institutions perceive migration as a political risk and
security issue. International affairs and political science focus on issues such as
identification of immigrations, nationalism and displaced populations. Civil, legal and
political repercussions of migration are a big part of risk and security issues. On the other
hand, these disciplines must go further than the international and national levels.
Cultural anthropologists study context-rich areas. Medical anthropology
investigates the effects of migration on mental and sexual health as well as risks to
32
disease. Other anthropologists focus on shifts in identity perception and gender roles.
Anthropological issues surrounding immigration and policy add to the literature as well.
Anthropologists also contribute studies of changing ethnic identity, memories of trauma
and liminality in the face of discrimination.
Though anthropology has contributed much to the literature on migration, risk and
security, many areas lack attention. More detailed analyses of cultures pre-migration can
help to uncover paths that may aid research of post-migration. Cultural
conceptualizations of risks are another area of focus that anthropologists must study.
How do people of different cultures perceive their risks prior to migrating? How do these
perceptions change?
It is difficult to research people living in areas affected by war or violence.
Anthropologists do, however, contribute to refugee and displacement studies by focusing
on gender, class and ethnic categories pre- and post-migration. Another gap is research
on risk-aversion, especially within areas afflicted with physical violence, political
upheaval and economic deterioration.
Migration involves the uprooting of individuals or groups and is largely risky.
With this uprooting comes a major shift in cultural perceptions, shifts that anthropologists
can help to investigate. Future anthropological research in the area of migration as it is
connected to risk and security will involve lengthy but needed studies of cultures and
cultural displacements.
Annotated Bibliography
33
Becker, Gay, Yewoubdar Beyene, Pauline Ken. 2000. Memory, Trauma, and Embodied
Distress: The Management of Disruption in the Stories of Cambodians in Exile. Ethos
28(3): 320-345.
Refugees of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide have memories of traumatic
and violent experiences that have repercussions on their physical and mental health.
Becker, Beyene and Ken study Cambodian exile narratives through interviews of
refugees living in the United States. They illustrate how refugee’s memories of trauma resurface during post-migration and the ways these memories affect Cambodians physically
and mentally.
United States
Cambodian refugees
Memory narrative
Coping strategies
Medical anthropology
Bletzer, Keith V. 2004. Open Towns and Manipulated Indebtedness among Agricultural
Workers in the New South. American Ethnologist 31(4): 530-551.
Bletzer conducts a six-year ethnography of rural, Southern community in the
United States. Agricultural contractors employ a form of debt peonage on migrant labor
workers in the rural Southern United States. The contractors advance commodities such
as food, cigarettes, and alcohol to poor agricultural workers, which keep them underpaid
and poor. In recent decades, contractors and workers have introduced illicit drugs such as
crack cocaine into the commodity pool. Contractors will advance drugs to workers,
placing them at higher risk for incarceration or addiction. Workers also trade drugs with
other workers.
Southern United States
Migrant agricultural labor
Labor exploitation
Illicit drug trade
Cultural anthropology
Bletzer, Keith V. 2004b. Risk and Danger among Women Who Prostitute in Areas where
Farmworkers Predominate. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(2): 251-278.
This article explores risk and danger for female sex workers in three rural areas of
Florida. Based on ethnographic research, the study analyzes how female sex workers
manage risk and danger. Women seek backup from local men, cover a large area rather
than remaining fixed in one location, build regular customer bases and avoid risky
transactions. Farm-working men in the area perceive HIV risk as being low and thus
increase the potential for an environment of transmission risk.
Florida
Sexual risk management
34
Sex workers
Farm-working men and women
Medical anthropology
Brockeroff, Martin and Ann E. Biddlecom. 1999. Migration, Sexual Behavior and the
Risk of HIV in Kenya. International Migration Review 33(4): 833-856.
The study examines whether migrants in Sub-Saharan Africa are more likely than
non-migrants to engage in sexually risky behavior. Sexual behavior is risky when people
have multiple sex partners and do not use condoms. Using data from the Demographic
Health Survey in Kenya, the researchers show that urban-rural or transnational migration
is a factor in high-risk sexual behavior among migrant populations. The authors also
conclude that migration affects the sexual behavior of men and women differently.
Kenya
High-risk sexual behavior
Urban-rural migration
Transnational migration
Gender
Public health
Castañeda, Xóchitl; Patricia Zavella. 2003. Changing Constructions of Sexuality and
Risk: Migrant Mexican Women Farmworkers in California. Journal of Latin American
Anthropology 8(2): 126-150.
Mexican migrant women farmworkers face many risks such as sexual harassment,
illness, and economic hardship. Using participant observation, focal groups and
interviews with Mexican migrant women laborers in a rural Californian community,
Castañeda and Zavella explore the socio-political forces that affect changing
constructions of gender and sexuality. These forces, such as the localization of popular
culture and racism against Mexican migrants, affect how migrant women view their
bodies and sexuality.
California
Female Mexican migrants
Risky sexual behavior
Racism
Cultural anthropology
Cernea, Michael and Christopher M. McDowell. 2000. Risks and Reconstruction:
Experience of Resettlers and Refugees. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Development, military conflicts and natural disasters displace resettlers and
refugees. This World Bank publication is a comparative analysis of resettlers and
refugees and explores central issues for both populations. These issues include:
landlessness, reconstruction and relocation, resettlement, joblessness and reemployment,
35
marginalization and social inclusion, food insecurity and the maintenance of sustainable,
natural resources.
Resettlers and refugees
Displacement and relocation
Socioeconomic insecurity
Land and food insecurity
Applied anthropology
Chavez, Leo R. 2004. Outside the Imagined Community: Undocumented Settlers and
Experiences of Incorporation. American Ethnologist 18(2): 257-278.
Many Latin American immigrants intend to remain in the United States due to
economic and social links. Immigrants view themselves as integral parts of their
communities but many resident Americans see them as outsiders. Because Latin
American immigrants are marginalized, they are not fully incorporated into United States
society. Chavez discusses how Central American and Mexican immigrants continually
seek an end to their liminal status.
United States
Latin American immigrants
Undocumented migration
Social marginalization
Cultural anthropology
Eschbach, Kart, Jacqueline Hagan, Nestor Rodríguez, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Stanley
Bailey. 1999. Death at the Border. International Migration Review 33(2): 430-454.
The United States border control policies have largely ignored deaths of
undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border in the Southwest. The
researchers conduct an epidemiological study of the deaths of undocumented migrants in
the American southwest. Deaths occur due to drowning, exposure, dehydration,
hypothermia and hyperthermia. From 1993-1997 intensified border enforcements
redirected migration flows to more remote crossing areas, causing an increase of risk of
death due to hyperthermia, hypothermia and dehydration.
United States
Mexico
Border control
Undocumented migration
Epidemiology
Feldman, Gregory. 2005. Culture, State, and Security in Europe: The Case of Citizenship
and Integration Policy in Estonia. American Ethnologist 32(4): 676-694.
36
Feldman focuses on post-Soviet Estonia to frame an argument surrounding the
imagery of territory, nationality, culture and security. The author also discusses how this
imagery has formed integration policies in Estonia that deny citizenship to Soviet-era
Russian speakers. Feldman draws on historical, archival and ethnographic research to
demonstrate that the concept of national security in Estonia justifies the structure of these
policies vis-à-vis immigrants.
Estonia
Immigration policy
Territory and nationality
National security
Cultural anthropology
Graves, Theodore D. 2004. The Personal Adjustment of Navajo Indian Migrants to
Denver, Colorado. American Anthropologist 72: 35-54.
The article reports on a study of 259 male Navajo Indian migrants living in
Denver, Colorado over a ten year period. Graves examines the economic, social and
psychological effects on male migrants and how they adjust to their new surroundings. In
comparison with other local migrant groups, Navajo Indian men have higher rates of
arrest and incidents involving alcohol consumption than other migrant communities in
the area. The author concludes that Navajo Indian male migrants have problems
adjusting to life in Denver, Colorado, and use alcohol to cope.
Colorado
Navajo Indian urban migrants
Alcohol consumption
Coping strategies
Cultural anthropology
Ho, Ming-Jung. 2003. Migratory Journeys and Tuberculosis Risk. Medical Anthropology
Quarterly 17(4): 442-458.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States experienced an increase in
tuberculosis outbreaks among immigrant populations. Ho studies these outbreaks by
analyzing migration narratives of Chinese immigrants living in New York City from
1978-1992. The author targets assumptions that immigrants carry diseases from donor
countries such as China to host communities within the United States. Using the
narratives, Ho discusses different cultural conceptions of risk.
New York City
Chinese immigrants
Tuberculosis risk
Migration narratives
Medical anthropology
37
Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Stephanie T.E. 1998. The Kibeho Crisis: Towards a More Effective
System of International Protection for IDPs. Forced Migration Review 2: 8-11.
In 1995, the Rwandan military killed hundreds of internally displaced persons
(IDPs) in a massacre of Kibeho, a refugee camp in southwest Rwanda. The Rwandan
government suspected that genocide sympathizers were living in the camp and cut off
their food and water supply. The IDPs, enraged, began throwing stones at military
personnel who fired back with machine guns. Kleine-Ahlbrandt studies the causes of the
Kibeho massacre as well as institutional roles.
Rwanda
Kibeho
Internally displaced persons camp
Military massacre
Refugee studies
Larson, Daniel O.; John R. Johnson; Joel C. Michaelson. 1994. Missionization among the
Coastal Chumash of Central California: A Study of Risk Minimization Strategies.
American Anthropologist 96(2): 263-299.
Using Franciscan missionary documents, registers and paleoenvironmental data,
Larson et al. study the effects of Spanish colonialism, specifically missionization, on the
central coastal Californian Chumash. The Chumash people migrated to Spanish missions
between the years 1786-1803. The researchers argue that the Chumash may have
migrated in order to minimize risks in the wake of serious events such as drought,
climatic changes and disease.
California
Chumash Indians
Migration and risk aversion
Spanish ethnohistory
Cultural anthropology
Lohrmann, Reinhard. 2000. Migrants, Refugees and Insecurity. Current Threats to Peace?
International Migration 38(4): 3-22.
Lohrmann discusses the real and perceived threats of migration on national and
international security. He discusses issues such as immigration and crime, ethnic tensions
and political instability, threats to donor and host countries, and the role of multilateral
agencies. Lohrmann draws generally on examples from Eastern European, African and
Southeast Asian countries.
Comparative migration and security
Migration and political instability
Immigration and crime
Multilateral agencies
38
International affairs
Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2004. Situating Migration in Wartime and Post-war
Mozambique: A Critique of “Forced Migration” Research. In Categories and Contexts:
Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography. Simon Szreter; Hania
Sholkamy; A. Dharmalingam, eds. Pp. 371-407. New York: Oxford University Press.
In the context of post-civil war Mozambique, Lubkemann analyzes the social and
cultural factors of agency in forced migration. The author critiques social scientists who
over-emphasize political aspects in causing wartime migrations. Lubkemann emphasizes
the historical and cultural perspectives of local-level struggles and how these struggles
influence wartime migration. Finally, the author discusses the how the change in gender
distributions effects marriage in the post-war context.
Mozambique
Post-war migration
Wartime migration methodology
Gender
Cultural anthropology
Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and
Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377-404.
Using ethnographic fieldwork with Hutu refugees from Burundi living in
Tanzania, Malkki examines the genocides in Burundi and Rwanda. She compares the
social construction of Burundi and Rwandan communities and examines the different
ways that Burundians and Rwandans categorize refugees. Malkki explains that Hutu
refugees use the category as positive within refugee camps. She investigates how staffs of
international humanitarian assistance organizations conceptualize and use the term
refugee in everyday conversation.
Tanzania
Hutu refugees
Conceptualization of refugee
International humanitarian assistance organizations
Cultural anthropology
Mills, Mary Beth. 2005. Contesting the Margins of Modernity: Women, Migration, and
Consumption in Thailand. American Ethnologist 24: 37-61.
Commodity consumption is often a central goal of migration decisions. Mills
studies consumption of migrant women workers in Bangkok, Thailand as a form of social
practice. Using ethnographic research of rural women who have migrated to the city for
employment opportunities, the author investigates how women construct new identities in
the face of economic and social constraints such as low wage, low status and
marginalization. Due to their urban consumption practices, migrant women view
39
themselves as modern. On the other hand, ties to kin in rural communities threaten this
sense of self.
Thailand
Bangkok
Consumption practices
Migrant women identity
Cultural anthropology
Oropesa, R.S.; Nancy S. Landale. 2000. From Austerity to Prosperity? Migration and
Child Poverty among Mainland and Island Puerto Ricans. Demography 37(3): 323-338.
Using the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata samples for the United States and
Puerto Rico, Oropesa and Landale compare the risks of child poverty at points of origin
and destination. The researchers conclude that migration reduces the risk of child poverty
due to better employment opportunities. In addition, economic benefits continue for
native-born generations in the United States and return migration to Puerto Rico is
associated with impoverishment.
United States
Puerto Rico
Migration and impoverishment
Child poverty
Sociology
Stivey, Rachel M. 2000. Stigmatized Spaces: Gender and Mobility Under Crisis in South
Sulawesi, Indonesia. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7:
143-161.
Stivey explores the economic decline of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the effect
of the area’s gendered migration. The crisis transformed the labor market in the area,
negatively affecting low-income migrants. The economic downturn has caused many
women to live independently, a stigma among men and women in Sulawesi. Using
surveys and interviews with men and women in immigrant and emigrant places before
and after the economic decline, Stivey shows that threats to women’s sexual integrity are
culturally formed. Ideas about women’s economic and sexual independence greatly
influence women’s decision to migrate in this region.
Indonesia
South Sulawesi
Gendered migration
Sexual integrity
Stigma of women’s independence
Feminist geography
40
White, Jenny B. 1996. Belonging to a Place: Turks in Unified Berlin. City & Society 8:
15-28.
White investigates the identity and concept of foreigner in Germany following the
country’s economic instability post-unification. Political attacks on foreigners, including
asylum-seekers and long-term immigrant residents, especially Turkish immigrants,
increased during Germany’s unstable economy. In turn, many immigrant populations and
long-term resident immigrant communities re-evaluated their identities vis-à-vis German
national society. While some Turkish immigrants withdrew from Germany’s national
identity by identifying themselves as foreigners, others chose to emphasize multi-ethnic
identities.
Germany
Berlin
Turkish immigrants
National identity
Cultural anthropology
Cultural Constructions of HIV/AIDS and Risk through a Gendered Perspective
Heather Papp
A survey of anthropological and related literature pertaining to cultural
constructions of HIV/AIDS and the risks of contracting the virus yields invaluable
information that should be incorporated into any intervention program designed to
prevent the spread of the disease. The sources appearing in this annotated bibliography
primarily draw upon ethnographic research conducted in various regions of the world,
including Africa, North America, and South Asia. The research reveals how local
understandings of HIV/AIDS, gender, and identity vary across cultures. Moreover, such
cultural constructions greatly influence the manner in which individuals understand and
negotiate the risk of contracting the virus.
Several of the sources in the bibliography indicate that gender roles have a
significant impact on the risk of contracting the virus. This is the case for both men and
women. For instance, the literature reveals that in some instances, men seek multiple
sexual partners to establish their masculinity. Women, on the other hand, conform to
41
expectations of femininity, which influence their passivity and submissiveness in the face
of male sexual aggression. Nonetheless, a few articles in this collection demonstrate that
both men and women are able to contest such gender roles, although the effectiveness of
such behavior has its limits within a context of established social norms.
The concept of structural violence, which perpetuates gender inequality across
generations and places women at a greater risk of contracting the virus, also appears
frequently in the literature. Much of the literature places HIV/AIDS within a context of
gender inequality, noting that such inequality diminishes a woman’s ability to reduce her
risk of exposure to the virus. For instance, gender inequality reduces a woman’s power
to insist on the use of a condom by her male partner. Moreover, economic dependency on
men places some women in a vulnerable position. In some instances, women engage in
transactional sex, through which they gain basic needs such as food and shelter, in
exchange for sex.
The role of agency in mitigating the risk of HIV infection connects with both
gender inequity and structural violence. Many of the sources demonstrate how
individuals lack the ability to make decisions as rational actors. Rather, they are bound by
collective identities and shared norms. Their choices are constrained by cultural
constructions of sexuality and HIV/AIDS, and by power inequalities spanning across
generations between men and women. The literature in this bibliography primarily
depicts women as having little agency to reduce the risk of contracting the virus.
The collection of studies presented here lays the foundation for understanding
how cultural factors facilitate the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Health-related
behaviors are shaped by collective cultural identities. Further ethnographic research
42
targeted at successful behavior change interventions would be useful in future designs of
HIV-prevention interventions. Behavior change might rely on at-risk people
understanding that cultural contexts constrain their choices and undermine their wellbeing. In turn, they might assume greater agency in contesting the structural violence and
cultural expectations that place them at risk of contracting the virus.
Annotated Bibliography
Brown, Jill, James Sorrell, and Raffaelli Marcela 2005. An Exploratory Study of
Constructions of Masculinity, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in Namibia, Southern Africa.
Culture, Health, & Sexuality 7(6): 585-598.
This study consists of thirteen open-ended interviews and three focus groups
among 50 participants, both male and female, aged 19-50 in rural and urban Namibia.
The article explores conceptualizations of masculinity, and their direct and indirect
connections with HIV/AIDS among Owambo men and women in Namibia. Six principal
themes emerged from the study: the evolving constructions of masculinity, engendered
power dynamics, women as active agents, alcohol and masculinity, the merging of
notions of masculinity and explanations of HIV/AIDS, and the conflict between
education and HIV transmission. The author applies this qualitative analysis to
emphasize the need for policymakers to consider cultural conceptions of masculinity
when implementing prevention interventions.
Namibia
HIV/AIDS
Power inequality
Masculinity
Gender roles
Sexual relations
Datta, Kavita, and Cathy McIlwaine 2004
Endangered Youth? Youth, Gender and Sexualities in Urban Botswana. Gender, Place &
Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11(4): 483-512.
This study, based on participatory urban appraisal methodologies, examines
sociocultural constructions of sexuality among urban youth in Botswana in order to
highlight the need to include gender and cultural considerations in policy responses to
high levels of HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy among youth. The authors emphasize
the importance of changes in gender, cultural, and sexual identities when considering
appropriate policy responses.
43
Botswana
HIV/AIDS
Gender
Identity
Youth
Sexual relations
Dawson, Maria Teresa and Sandra M. Gifford 2001
Narratives, Culture, and Sexual Health: Personal Experiences of Salvadorean and Chilean
Women Living in Melbourne, Australia. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the
Social Study of Health, Illness & Medicine 5(4): 403-424.
This study explores narratives about gender, culture, sexual health, and identity
among Chilean and Salvadorean migrant women residing in Melbourne, Australia. By
comparing the migrant women’s experiences in their native country with their
experiences in Melbourne, the authors examine how these women have renegotiated their
gender roles and how these changes have been experienced through sexual health. The
authors evaluate Australia’s health promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention programs
among migrant communities. The programs have generally failed to consider variations
in cultural context and how gender roles of the women’s native country affect their
behavior.
Melbourne
Australia
Gender roles
Identity
HIV/AIDS
Sexual relations
Duffy, Lynne 2005
Culture and Context of HIV Prevention in Rural Zimbabwe: The Influence of Gender
Inequality. Journal of Transcultural Nursing 16(1): 23-31.
Based on ethnographic methods, this article examines the cultural factors that
prevent or facilitate rural Ndau women’s participation in HIV prevention. Societal
expectations that pressure women to become workers and mothers, within a context of
violence, subservience, and economic dependence on men, inhibit HIV prevention among
women. The author highlights how cultural beliefs that sustain gender inequalities must
be considered when constructing HIV prevention strategies. Ultimately, the author
suggests that gender analysis and the challenging of oppressive systems are vital to
HIV/AIDS prevention.
Zimbabwe
HIV/AIDS
Gender roles
Gender inequality
44
Ethnography
Haram, Liv 2005
AIDS and Risk: The Handling of Uncertainty in Northern Tanzania. Culture, Health &
Sexuality 7(1): 1-11.
This study, based on longitudinal fieldwork in Arusha town and nearby northern
districts in Tanzania, examines how people mitigate the risk of contracting HIV. The
author demonstrates that contrary to theories of risk, in which the individual is seen as a
rational actor that would choose behavior to reduce the risk of exposure to HIV, people
particularly women, face constraints dictated by culture in their decision-making
regarding sexual behavior. For example, risk and trust in sexual relationships are
gendered, and imbalances in favor of men often place women at risk of contracting the
virus.
Northern Tanzania
HIV/AIDS
Risk
Trust
Gender
Sexual relationships
Hawkins, Kirstan, Fátima Mussá, and Sandia Abuxahama 2005
Milking the Cow: Young Women’s Constructions of Identity, Gender, Power, and Risk
in Transactional and Cross-generational Sexual Relationships: Maputo, Mozambique.
Options Consultancy Services and Population Services International. Retrieved on March
16, 2006 from
<http://www.developmentgateway.org/pop/rc/ItemDetail.do~1057676>.
This report provides knowledge concerning the behavior and sexual networking
of young women in Maputo, Mozambique for use in behavior change interventions
intended to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The study identifies the economic and
social systems, within a context of gender and identity constructions, which facilitate
and/or encourage cross-generational sex for money and material benefit. Many young
women do not regard transactional sex as a survival strategy intended to secure basic
needs such as food and shelter, but rather they view it as a strategy that empowers them
as active agents who seek to improve their socioeconomic status and contest gender and
power imbalances. The women use their sexuality to access financial resources from men
and ultimately “milk the cow” in order to access lifestyles that symbolize modernity,
success, and power.
Maputo
Mozambique
HIV/AIDS
Cross-generation
Sex as power
45
Gender
Identity
Risk
Women’s agency
Sexual relationships
Hoosen, Sarah and Anthony Collins 2004
Sex, Sexuality and Sickness: Discourses of Gender and HIV/AIDS Among KwaZuluNatal Women. South African Journal of Psychology 34(3): 487-505.
This article examines cultural and social factors that influence KwaZulu-Natal
women’s sexual behavior, with a particular emphasis on discourses of gender and
HIV/AIDS. This study draws on data collected in seven focus groups with women living
in a peri-urban area of Durban, South Africa. The authors’ findings demonstrate how
women might lack the ability to make decisions about safe sex as rational actors. Such
choices are related to sociocultural constructions of sexuality and HIV/AIDS, and are
governed by power inequalities perpetuated within cultural discourse. The article
identifies specific cultural practices that sustain gender roles and how these affect sexual
practices. The authors conclude by analyzing the implications of these findings for
HIV/AIDS education programs.
Durban
South Africa
Gender inequality
HIV/AIDS
Discourse
Sexual risk
Psychology
Hunter, Mark 2005
Cultural Politics and Masculinities: Multiple-partners in Historical Perspective in
KwaZulu-Natal. Culture, Health & Sexuality 7(4): 389-403.
This article, supported by ethnographic, archival, and secondary research,
examines the antecedents of contemporary constructions of masculinity in KwaZulu,
Natal, a South African province, in an attempt to understand the rise and fall of isoka, the
Zulu man with multiple-sexual partners. The author suggests that the high value
associated with men having multiple partners arose from the 1970s when high
unemployment rates prevented men from expressing their masculinity through traditional
means, such as marriage and establishing oneself as the head of a household. With the
rise in deaths from AIDS, however, men are contesting isoka.
KwaZulu Natal
South Africa
HIV/AIDS
Masculinity
46
Sexual relationships
Jeltova, Ida, Marian C. Fish and Tracey A. Revenson 2005
Risky Sexual Behaviors in Immigrant Adolescent Girls from the Former Soviet Union:
Role of Natal and Host Culture. Journal of School Psychology 43(1): 2-33.
This article explores how acculturation processes of adolescent girls who recently
emmigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States affect their participation
in risky sexual behavior, which puts them at a high risk for HIV/AIDS contraction and
unintended pregnancy. The authors find that natal culture has a protective role for the
girls, while a high level of acculturation to American culture is related to increased
participation in risky sexual behavior.
United States
HIV/AIDS
Acculturation
Risk
Sexual behavior
Psychology
Karlyn, A.S. 2005
Intimacy Revealed: Sexual Experimentation and the Construction of Risk Among Young
People in Mozambique. Culture, Health, & Sexuality 7(3): 279-292.
This study explores the sexual behavior and risk reduction practices of young
people in urban and rural Mozambique. The author examines the contexts and rules
regarding sexual risk-taking among youth and suggests that young people have redefined
sexual identities to combine risk reduction with sexual behavior that is not based on
gender roles defined by male domination. Young males and females have redefined the
saca cena, or one-night stand, as a less risky sexual practice that includes exclusive
condom use. Young males and females conceptualize the saca cena as an activity for
both men and women to experiment and be adventuresome, outside of the traditional
conceptions of male dominance through sexual conquest and female acquiescence.
Mozambique
HIV/AIDS
Youth
Risk
Gender roles
Sexual relations
Khan, Sharful Islam, Nancy Hudson-Rodd, Sherry Saggers, and Abbas Bhuiya 2005
Men Who Have Sex With Men’s Sexual Relations with Women in Bangladesh. Culture,
Health & Sexuality 7(2): 159-169.
47
This article explores the nature and meaning of the sexual relations between MSM
(men who have sex with men) and women. This study, based on qualitative research,
explores the conceptualizations of gender and masculinity within Bangladesh that
pressure men to marry and father children, in spite of their preference and desire to have
sex with men. This article finds that men who have sex with men identify sex with
women as “real” sex within masculine understandings of sexual potency. As a result,
women face negative health consequences, such as contracting HIV from their husbands.
Bangladesh
HIV/AIDS
Gender
Masculinity
Men who have sex with men
Sexual relations
LeClerc-Madlala, Suzanne 2001
Demonising Women in the Era of AIDS: On the Relationship Between Cultural
Constructions of Both HIV/AIDS and Femininity. Society in Transition 32 (1): 38-46.
This article draws on an ethnographic study conducted within a community in the
Durban area of South Africa and explores the symbolic representations of sexual activity
and HIV/AIDS. The author suggests that the Zulu community associates meaning to
HIV/AIDS based on sociocultural constructions of femininity, which define women as
being both the source and disseminators of the disease.
Durban
South Africa
HIV/AIDS
Gender
Symbolism
Sociocultural constructions
Femininity
Sexual relations
2001 Virginity Testing: Managing Sexuality in a Maturing HIV/AIDS Epidemic. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly 15(4): 533-552.
This article identifies virginity testing of girls in the KwaZulu-Natal province in
South Africa as a consequence of the sociocultural construction of HIV/AIDS, which
identifies women being sexually “out of control” as the underlying source of the
epidemic. The author argues that virginity testing is a means through which society
manages the risk posed by women’s sexuality and the virus it spreads when in discord
with social norms. Moreover, the author points out that virginity testing reaffirms the
gendered meaning of HIV/AIDS found in popular discourse, by diverting attention away
from the role that men have in spreading the disease.
48
South Africa
HIV/AIDS
Gender roles
Virginity testing
Risk
Sexual relations
Lugalla, J.L.P., and M.A.C. Emmelin. 1999
The Social and Cultural Contexts of HIV/AIDS Transmission in the Kagera Region,
Tanzania. Journal of Asian & African Studies 34(4): 377-403.
In the Kagera region of northwestern Tanzania heterosexual contact is the primary
means of HIV/AIDS transmission. Understanding the social and cultural factors that
influence sexual behavior is vital to successful prevention interventions. Drawing from
participant observation, interviews, and focus groups, the Kagera AIDS Research Project
examine the sociocultural processes that facilitate the spread of HIV/AIDS, including
war, poverty, and cultural factors such as gender inequality, trust in relationships, and sex
meanings and beliefs.
Kagera Region
Tanzania
HIV/AIDS
Heterosexual relations
Gender inequality
Culture
Trust
Qualitative research
Manuel, Sandra. 2005
Obstacles to Condom Use Among Secondary School Students in Maputo City,
Mozambique. Culture, Health & Sexuality 7(3): 293-302.
This article examines perceptions of urban youth (male and female) in
Mozambique concerning sexual behavior. It explores the factors that prevent them from
practicing safer sex (particularly condom use) in the context of HIV/AIDS. Drawing from
focus group discussions, interviews, and informal conversations with high school
students in Maputo, Mozambique, the authors conclude that youth are less likely to use
condoms in steady relationships based on trust than in casual sexual interactions. This
perception is reinforced by previous prevention campaigns that promoted condom use
between “occasional sexual partners.” The author finds that gender inequality also
contributes to the lack of condom use between partners.
Maputo
Mozambique
HIV/AIDS
Gender inequality
49
Trust
Risk
Condoms
Sexual relations
Pattman, Rob. 2005
Boys and Girls Should Not Be Too Close: Sexuality, the Identities of African Boys and
Girls and HIV/AIDS Education. Sexualities 8(4): 497-516.
Drawing from interviews with and diaries of 6-18 year-olds in southern and
eastern Africa, this UNICEF-funded study examines the significance of sexuality in the
construction of identity. In particular, the article explores how girls and boys invoked and
contested sexuality, and the types of identities they took on as they spoke and wrote about
sexuality. The author argues that constructions of female sexuality, as framed by Carole
Vance, are important for understanding and educating young girls and boys about sex and
the risks of HIV/AIDS. Ultimately sex education must be framed in gender sensitive
ways, and must include life skills training that address both sexual and non-sexual
cultures.
Southern and eastern Africa
Gender
Sexuality
HIV/AIDS
Identity
Youth
Sexual relations
Schatz, Enid. 2005
‘Take your Mat and Go!’: Rural Malawian Women’s Strategies in the HIV/AIDS Era.
Culture, Health & Sexuality 7(5): 479-492.
Enid Schatz critically evaluates a common assumption in HIV/AIDS prevention
literature that women are passive and unable to protect themselves against contracting
HIV/AIDS. Drawing from data collected during in-depth interviews with married
couples in rural Malawi, the author examines the extent to which married women believe
they have agency in protecting themselves from contracting the virus from their husbands
and the strategies they employ to do so. Methods include using social networks for
advice, discussing HIV/AIDS with their husbands, publicly confronting their husbands’
mistresses, and divorcing men who threaten their sexual health. Although the women face
constraints, such as economic dependency and inequality, they are not passive, but are
acting to protect themselves by using locally appropriate strategies.
Malawi (rural)
HIV/AIDS
Gender inequality
Women’s agency
50
Risk
Sexual relations
Simpson, Anthony. 2005
Sons and Fathers/Boys to Men in the Time of AIDS: Learning Masculinity in Zambia.
Journal of Southern African Studies 31(3): 569-586.
Anthony Simpson explores how expressions of heterosexual masculinities,
particularly those that require aggressive sexuality, help fuel the spread of HIV/AIDS in
Zambia. While many studies have been undertaken to explore the various dimensions of
female vulnerability to the virus, this article presents the vulnerability that Zambian men
face as a result of social pressures to behave in a sexually aggressive manner. The author
documents the life histories of a group of men that were educated in a Zambian Catholic
mission, to find out how they came to construct and define themselves as men. Lastly, the
author examines how such hegemonic constructions of masculinity are contested in an
era of HIV/AIDS.
Zambia
HIV/AIDS
Heterosexual identity
Masculinity
Sexual relations
Singer, Merrill, Cándida Flores, Lani Davison, Georgine Burke, Zaida Castillo, Kelley
Scanlon, and Migdalia Rivera. 1990
SIDA: The Economic, Social, and Cultural Context of AIDS Among Latinos. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly 4(1): 72-114.
This study explores why AIDS was disproportionately prevalent among US
Latinos in the early 1990s by examining the sociocultural and socioeconomic conditions
of Latinos living in the U.S. The article reviews existing literature concerning the
demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the Latino population, the prevalence
of the disease within subgroups categorized by gender, age, and route of transmission, the
knowledge and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS, and the risk behaviors among
Latinos living in the U.S., such as sexual practices, drug use, and gender relations.
United States
HIV/AIDS
US Latinos
Culture
Gender relations
Socioeconomic context
Age
Risk behaviors
Medical anthropology
Sexual relations
51
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2001
Premarital Sex, Procreation, and HIV Risk in Nigeria. Studies in Family Planning 35(4):
223-235.
This study presents various explanations of the observed disparity between
people’s knowledge of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria, and their actions taken (or not taken) to
mitigate the risk of contracting the virus. The author draws from survey data of 863
adolescent and unmarried young adults, interviews, and participant observation. He finds
that values regarding the importance of procreation are gender-specific, and give men and
women different negotiating power when it comes to sex and contraception.
Nigeria
HIV/AIDS
Gender inequality
Premarital sex
Risk
Sexual relations
Smith, Daniel Jordan 2004
Youth, Sin and Sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/AIDS-Related Beliefs and Behaviour
Among Rural-Urban Migrants. Culture, Health & Sexuality 6(5): 425-437.
This article explores how young men and women in two Nigerian cities interpret
HIV/AIDS through moral and religious perspectives, primarily through evangelical and
Pentecostal Christianity. The author examines how this understanding influences risk
behavior. He suggests that religious interpretations of HIV lead many young people to
believe that they are at little or no risk, which threatens their health by discouraging
protective practices. Smith highlights the need for intervention strategies to consider the
extent to which religion, sexuality, and morality affect risk behavior.
Nigeria
HIV/AIDS
Religion
Morality
Trust
Risk
Gender
Sexual relations
Susser, Ida and Zena Stein. 2000
Culture, Sexuality, and Women’s Agency in the Prevention of HIV/AIDS in Southern
Africa. American Journal of Public Health 90(6): 1042-1048.
Based on ethnographic research carried out in South Africa, Botswana, and
Namibia, this article examines HIV/AIDS awareness among women and their knowledge
52
of preventive practices. The research, conducted from 1992 through 1999 in urban and
rural settings, concentrated on heterosexual transmission. Many men and women in
southern Africa perceive the female condom and other women-controlled methods to be
culturally appropriate methods of prevention. This acceptability varies among different
communities, reinforcing the findings that local circumstances need to be taken into
account when designing intervention programs. Ultimately, the authors found that
historic patterns of gender inequality and societal neglect of women’s sexuality are the
main barriers to the distribution and use of women-controlled prevention methods.
Southern Africa
HIV/AIDS
Culture
Heterosexual relations
Gender inequality
Power
Women’s agency
Sexual relations
Whitehead, Tony L. 1996
Urban Low-Income African American Men, HIV/AIDS, and Gender Identity. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly 11(4): 411-447.
Tony Whitehead explores the sexual behavior of low-income African American
males in Baltimore, other cities in Maryland, and Washington, DC in terms of their risk
of contracting HIV. The author seeks to understand sexual health risk behavior through
research on gender identity and sociocultural constructions. He draws attention to
mainstream American constructs of masculinity and the meanings that low-income
African American males attach to HIV/AIDS. Findings are based on data from several
ethnographic and qualitative research projects.
Baltimore
Other cities in Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
HIV/AIDS
Gender
African American males
Masculinity
Medical anthropology
Cultural Heritage and Cultural Resistance through Ritual Performance in South
Asia
Kate Hohman
This annotated bibliography focuses on culturally constructed identities and the
ways in which those identities are negotiated within their South Asian context. Each entry
53
in the bibliography focuses on public performance, most notably in the form of a festival
or public ritual as the sites of negotiation. References related to the simultaneous
performance of gender, class, caste, religion/spirituality, and cultural identity demonstrate
the intersection of multiple identities. The emphasis on the public performance of
culturally respected and socially recognized rituals creates a space for critical social
commentary that contests dominant ideologies, such as patriarchy, classism, and
economic development discourses. Examples of the fluidity of resistance through events
that promote cultural preservation include Skinner and Holland’s work on Tij in Nepal,
Raheja and Gold’s studies of oral traditions in North India, and Reed’s work on the
Beravā, classical dance and nationalism in Sri Lanka.
Throughout this annotated bibliography the aspect of the public event becomes
crucial in understanding it as a form of protest, as well as a strategy for defining cultural
practices as a form of understanding group identity. Working within a system of tradition,
groups of individuals create new definitions of themselves that emerge in opposition to
existing social definitions. Resistance of this kind implies certain risk, considering that
dominant social ideology is almost always formed by individuals or groups of individuals
working to conserve their own power and preserving a system of structural violence.
When groups fail to comply with ideologies such as patriarchy, classism, etc, they are
risking social and political repercussions from those they are opposing. By embedding
critical social commentary in ritual traditions groups are working in creatively subversive
ways to manage their own security. For example, Skinner and Holland’s research on the
Tij festival in Nepal focuses on the ways women exercise political agency during the
initial phases of the democracy movement. Women’s use of the socially respected event
54
allowed a space for them to raise questions of political legitimacy in a specific period of
Nepalese history when even the whisper of political opinions would land one in jail.
Though the bibliography focuses primarily on ritual as resistance, agency exerted
in the form of identity contestation is only one form of agency. Considering future
research, the topics of resistance and contestation might be expanded to include a variety
of identities not just limited to gender, class, or religion, or narrowed to focus solely on
one of these aspects in greater depth.
This bibliography’s regional focus on South Asia provides a basis for comparison
with similar studies conducted in other world regions and cultural contexts. Cultural
anthropologists’ attention to issues of cultural heritage and forms of resistance is
necessary within an increasingly globalized world.
Annotated Bibliography
Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004.
Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh,
India. Durham: Duke University Press.
This book focuses on the way in which cultural performances become sites for
shaping political identity in Ladakh. By providing the context of the Kashmir border
dispute, the author situates the importance of finding alternative ways to enact political
expressions of struggle. In her examination of performances such as festivals and rites of
passage ceremonies, Aggarwal demonstrates the influence of states’ political rhetoric on
the region’s cultural history.
India
Kashmir
Ladakh
Performance
Border dispute
Political struggle
Cultural anthropology
55
Ahearn, Laura. 1998.
A Twisted Rope Binds My Waist: Locating Constraints on Meanings in a Tij Songfest.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(1):60-86.
Ahearn analyzes the lyrics of one Nepali Tij song by presenting a practice theory
of meaning constraint. Her approach demands the recognition of sociospatial, temporal,
textual, and intertextual dimensions to understand how individuals actively interpret
discursive events. Ahearn rejects the idea that merely singing in a Tij festival is an act of
resistance. Rather, the complexity of Tij songs and their intertextuality creates multiple
relationships between the song, the performers and the audience.
Nepal
South Asia
Hinduism, gender
Ritual
Songs
Resistance
Cultural anthropology
Appadurai, Arjun, Frank Korom and Margaret Mills. 1991.
Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelpia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
This volume is separated into three sections: gender, genres and tradition. The
construction of self in oral performance is the theme that threads these essays. Examples
of topics include performance style in Afghanistan, song and speech in an Indian epic
performance, aesthetics and enactment of tradition. Broadly, the authors explore
representation through a discussion of community.
South Asia
Hinduism
Expressive tradition
Gender
Power
Cultural anthropology
Bennett, Lynn. 1976.
The Wives of Rishis: An Analysis of the Tij-Rishi Panchami Women’s Festival. Kailash
4(2):185-207.
Bennett discusses the ritual that surrounds the Tij festival in Nepal. She explores
the idea that the Tij-Rishi complex reinforces the Hindu patriarchal order, leaving little
room for women’s agency in the festival. Bennett provides an in-depth description of
each ritual performed, its purpose in Hindu ideology and, as such, its reason for being
performed during Tij.
Nepal,
56
Tij
Hinduism
Ritual
Purity
Agency
Gender
Cultural anthropology
Calkowski, Marcia S. 1991.
A Day at the Tibetan Opera: Actualized Performance and Spectacular Discourse.
American Ethnologist 18(4): 643-657.
The author analyzes a Tibetan Opera performed in Dharamsala, India, where a
representation of an exorcism became a real exorcism. When the National Assembly of
Deputies reprimands the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts for lacking traditional
Tibetan qualities, the actors modify their performance to parody the deputies’ stance. As
a result, dramatic art and reality mirror one another and create the performance of a mock
exorcism and thus political expression.
Tibet
Opera
Speech
Ritual performance
Exorcism
Cultural anthropology
Enslin, Elizabeth. 1998.
Imagined Sisters: The Ambiguities of Women’s Poetics and Collective Actions. In Selves
in Time and Place: Identities, Experience and History in Nepal. Debra Skinner, Alfred
Pach, III and Dorothy Holland, eds. Pp. 269-299. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers.
Enslin discusses song construction in Chitwan, Nepal, as it occurs in a women’s
organization that was created to further literacy programs for women in the community.
Enslin emphasizes the construction of critical consciousness and support among various
castes/classes of women.
Nepal
Chitwan
Women
Social commentary
Literacy
Activism
Songs
Cultural anthropology
57
Holland, Dorothy and Debra Skinner. 1992.
Not Written by the Fate Writer: Women’s Production of Critical Commentary in Nepal.
Unpublished manuscript.
The authors focus on agency as exhibited through song construction in a Hindu
women’s festival in Nepal. Guided by the principle of “activity theory” Holland and
Skinner present the women as possessing a creative intelligence that responds to cultural
changes while also being bound by history and ritual. The authors emphasize the
expanded ability of Nepali women to express political opinions in the Tij forum during
the process of instituting democracy. Previously all political expression was banned
according to Panchyat law with jailing as punishment. Examples of song lyrics are
provided.
Nepal
Tij
Ritual
Gender
Agency
Political activism
Language
Song
Cultural anthropology
Holland, Dorothy C. and Debra G. Skinner. 1995.
Contested Ritual, Contested Femininities: (Re)forming Self and Society in a Nepali
Women’s Festival. American Ethnologist 22 (2):279-305.
Holland and Skinner focus in this essay on the contemporary Tij festival, not as a
space for reproducing the patriarchal structure, but instead presenting Tij as a space for
women’s self consciousness, even social action in the wake of the democracy movement.
The authors present three traditional song types and introduce an emerging fourth genre,
which focuses on politics and government, calling women to action. This period of time
is the first in which women are able to publicly express political opinions without
experiencing repercussions by the government. Skinner and Holland follow the Tij
participants in the Kathmandu Valley through song construction and present a number of
examples of those lyrics.
Ritual
Festivals
Gender
Politics
Cultural anthropology
Holmberg, David. 2000.
58
Derision, Exorcism, and the Ritual Production of Power. American Ethnologist 27(4):
927-949.
Studying a ten-day ritual performance event in a Buddhist Tamang community in
northwest Nepal, Holmberg explores the production of power and the space that ritual
provides for sociopolitical resistance to traditional Hindu subjugation. Holmberg provides
background on the Indo-Nepali consolidation of power during state formation and the
subsequent suppression of Tamang political expression. The author discusses the Tamang
cultural practices of exorcism and dance skits as expressions of resistance.
Nepal
Tamang
Resistance
Power
Dance
Exorcism
Cultural anthropology
Narayan, Kirin. 1986.
Birds on a Branch: Girlfriends and Wedding Songs in Kangra. Ethos 14(1): 47-75.
Narayan focuses on the intersection of friendship, gender and social expression
through the singing of wedding songs in a village in Kangra, North India. The author
explores the system of support that the songs offer during life transitions for both married
and unmarried women and girls. Narayan concludes that the songs provide an important
temporal cohesion in the liminal friendship of women.
Keywords: India, women, wedding songs, friendship, culture, social support, cultural
anthropology
Norberg-Hodge, Helena. 1991.
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Norberg-Hodge presents the reader with a two-part vision of Ladakhi life. One of
the first Westerners to live and research in Ladakh, she is able to describe life
“untouched” in Ladakh prior to western style development in the region. In part two, the
author paints the picture of development and its effects on spirituality, language,
environment, community relations, etc. Norberg-Hodge presents an alternative version of
development as carried out by the Ladakh Project which has been created to counter the
culturally destructive elements of western style development while not denying the
Ladakhis the right to enjoy the opportunities of economic development.
Ladakh
Culture
Environment
Development
Cultural anthropology
59
Pecore, Joanna. 2004.
Sounding the Spirit of Cambodia: The Living Tradition of Khmer Music and Dance
Drama in a Washington, DC Community. College Park, Maryland: Dissertation in
Ethnomusicology.
This dissertation discusses two Khmer communities in the Washington DC area
established by refugees who fled persecution under the Khmer Rouge. Both practice
traditional Khmer music and dance dramas. The author focuses the ethnography on the
founding members of the group and their commitment to transmitting traditional cultural
practices to future generations of Cambodian Americans. The Khmer Rouge takeover in
1975 posed a formidable threat to the traditional arts, causing many musicians and
dancers to flee the country. These refugee artists hold the importance of cultivating their
rich cultural practices in the face of near destruction by Pol Pot and his regime.
Washington, DC
Cambodia
Performance art
Ethnomusicology
Refugees
Cultural heritage preservation
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin and Ann Grodzins Gold. 1994.
Listen to the Heron’s Words: Re-imagining Gender and Kinship in North India.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Raheja and Gold explore women’s oral tradition in North India as a form of
agency and resistance. Focusing on marriage and birth songs, stories and narratives, the
authors demonstrate how the women in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, through multiply
positioned voices, recreate their identities through sexualized lyrics. The authors
highlight the women’s critical perspectives on gender subordinating kinship systems.
Chapters in this collection explore such topics as gender, language and resistance;
women’s expressions of sexuality; and songs of irony, ambiguity and subversion.
India
Hinduism
Women
Songs
Sociolinguistics
Ritual
Performance
Resistance
Cultural anthropology
Reed, Susan. 2002.
Performing Respectability: The Beravā, Middle-Class Nationalism, and the
Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka. Cultural Anthropology 17(2): 246-277.
60
Reed describes the evolution of the Kandyan dance, the national dance of Sri
Lanka, from one of low caste status to one of respectability within the context of Sinhala
nationalism. Reed attributes this evolution to three key factors: the “classicization” of the
dance, conforming to ideals of order, the participation of key elites, and the dancers’
assertion of themselves through dress and conduct.
Sri Lanka
Dance
Nationalism
Cultural anthropology
Saul, Rebecca. 1999.
No Time to Worship the Serpent Deities: Women, Economic Change, and Religion in
North Western Nepal. Gender and Development 7(1): 31-39.
Saul examines the opening of the tourist industry in Mustang district in northwest
Nepal. Women are primarily in charge of running lodges and, as a result, are restricted in
their ability to attend community rituals and festivals. Saul argues that while men’s
mobility has increased, women’s mobility is becoming restricted, resulting in women’s
limited social participation within the community and neighboring villages.
Nepal
Economic development
Tourism
Gender
Development anthropology
Sax, William. 2002.
Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sax locates his analysis of performance in Garhwal, a village in North India. The
community combines dance, drama and ritual to perform the Indian epic the
Mahabharata. Sax focuses on the public aspect of the ritual as a means of asserting
identity and self definition within a community. He argues against the binary concepts of
“self” and “other” emphasizing this particular ritual performance as a way of obfuscating
perceived differences.
North India
Ritual
Identity
Cultural anthropology
Shah, Purnima. 1998.
Transcending Gender in the Performance of Kathak. Dance Research Journal 30(2): 2-16.
61
Shah analyzes the performance of Kathak, a classical dance from Northern India.
Working within Hindu concepts of gender, Shah discusses the fluidity of male/female
roles in the performance. Shah argues that gender construction in colonial Indian
ideology attempted to legitimate the social order and hierarchy of power. The Kathak
dancers transcend the social constructs of gender and instead underscore the ideology of
“unity” or “completeness” that resonates in Hindu philosophy.
India
Kathak
Hinduism,
Gender
Anthropology of dance
Skinner, Debra, Alfred Pach, III and Dorothy Holland.1998.
Selves in Time and Place: An Introduction. In Selves in Time and Place: Identities,
Experience and History in Nepal. Debra Skinner, Alfred Pach III and Dorothy Holland,
eds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
The authors provide an introduction to, and overview of, this volume of collected
essays that focus on agency in various contexts in Nepal. Framed by the political
revolution in 1990, the authors center on sociopolitical transformations and how those
transformations are manifested in various representations and performances of identity in
specific places and spaces in time. They emphasize the use of cultural resources, such as
song production and children’s readers, in creative ways to produce new understandings
of identity in response to new political and social circumstances.
Keywords: Nepal, identity, sociopolitical movements, cultural protest, cultural resources,
cultural anthropology
Trawick, Margaret. 1988.
Spirits and Voices in Tamil Songs. American Ethnologist 15: 193-215.
Trawick focuses on “untouchable” women agricultural laborers in Tamil Nadu,
India. Women construct songs that question hierarchal and social relations, in particular
Trawick centers her discussion on the love song. Central to her argument is a thesis of
polyvocality; each actor sings from different spaces as opposed to expressing one
independent voice.
South India
Tamil women
Folk songs
Love
Social commentary
Cultural anthropology
Vatuk, Ved Prakash and Sylvia Vatuk. 1979.
62
The Ethnography of Sang, A North Indian Folk Opera. In Studies in Indian Folk
Traditions. Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk, eds. Pp. 15-37. New Delhi: Manohar
Publications.
The authors discuss the mutual development of folk and literary traditions in
North India and their eventual congruence in the form of a folk opera accessible to the
masses. They are interested in the sang performance as an “instrument of
communication” in the rural setting. A sang troupe travels throughout the village and to
nearby villages to perform on various occasions.
North India
Folk tradition
Communication
Performance
Cultural anthropology
Weidman, Amanda. 2003.
Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical Music in South India.
Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 194-232.
This article explores the historical moment where upper caste Brahmin women in
South India began to publicly perform classical music in the early 20th century. The
author addresses the intersection of voice, subjectivity and agency among women of
different castes. Weidman specifically locates the relationship of classical songs to upper
class Indian women through their definition of “respectability”.
India
Karnatic music
Gender
Voice
Cultural change
Caste
Cultural anthropology
Cultural Risk Theory and the Survival Strategy of Breaking Maternal Bonds
Meghan Moriarty
The information in this bibliography covers a geographically broad and
theoretically diverse range. The concept was to compile information that reflected current
research on the topic of breaking maternal bonds as a survival strategy in a cross-cultural
context. I found solid historical research on maternal bonding in the work of Harwood,
Cassidy and Harkness who highlight the use of attachment theory globally and stress the
63
importance of multi-disciplinary approaches to research into parenting belief systems.
Hardy and Wolf then turn these more traditional, historical approaches around stating that
these ideologies are sentimentally appealing but not true to reality. I have discovered in
my research that culture and the risk factors associated within it are more impactive to the
practice of maternal separation as a survival strategy than biology or universal
psychological bonding patterns. Changing gender ideologies, roles and inequalities in
conjunction with economic policies have a greater impact on preserving the maternalchild bond.
Economic risk factors for poverty, autonomy and security reoccur throughout the
research. In all cultural contexts when the economic risk of poverty and scarcity are high
the role of the mother as provider becomes more critical. This in turn creates the need for
the mother to spend more time on providing materially for the family and less time on
nurturing her children. This plays out differently in each cultural context. Maternal
separation can take many different forms including neglect, rejection, infanticide or
temporary transfer of nurturing to another individual but in all cases these are used as
maternal tools for the survival of the members of the family. In Cairo, Colombia, and
Ghana the research shows that in low-income households the mother focuses on the role
of wife above that of the role of nurturing mother as a strategy to raise economic security
for the entire family.
Gupta and Scheper-Hughes take this a step further by focusing on the changing
status of women globally and cross-culturally. They recognize that as women’s autonomy
increases there is a reduction in the need for maternal separation. The importance they
place on autonomy addresses the risk factors associated with gender inequalities.
64
The current research is lacking specifics about cultural practices that directly lead
to maternal separation. It is noted in several geographic locations that changes in
economic policies lead to greater autonomy for women and in turn reduced need for
maternal separation, but no direct research is being done in areas that are not seeing this
kind of economic transition. I am interested in seeing future research look into why
communities have experienced maternal-child separation strategies over long periods of
time with little or no change. Specifically looking into what risk factors, cultural and/or
economic, promote the continuation of this survival strategy in the face of risk.
Annotated Bibliography
Browner, Carole and Ellen Lewin. 1982.
Female Altruism Reconsidered: the Virgin Mary as Economic Woman. American
Ethnologist. 9(1):61-75.
Browner and Lewin argue against the standard ethnographic descriptions of Latin
American women which portray the wife-mother role as a uniform entity despite the
variety of socioeconomic settings in which it is found. They collected data in Cali,
Colombia, and San Francisco, California, and discovered differences in the way workingclass Latin American women act in the wife-mother role. The role of wife and the
importance of conjugal affiliation were found to be the primary focus of women from
Colombia. San Francisco Latinas devote themselves to the maternal role and consider
relations with husbands to be of secondary significance. These differences result from
varying economic and social conditions present in the two settings.
Colombia
Cali
California
San Francisco
Latino immigrants
Motherhood
Women’s roles
Economic strategies
Cultural anthropology
Urban anthropology
Cassidy, Jude. 1999
65
The Nature of the Child’s Ties. In Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver, eds. Handbook of
Attachment. Pp. 3-20. New York: Guilford Press.
Cassidy’s chapter is the introduction to the handbook and provides a review of the
current state of knowledge in psychology about attachment and loss in children and
adults. It establishes background information about accepted theories and research on the
subject of a child’s ties to its parents with emphasis on ties with the mother. The chapter
touches on the long term affects of the parent child bonding period.
Theoretical
Attachment theory
Bonding
Maternal-child attachment
Patterns of attachment
Socio-emotional development
Developmental psychology
Clark, Gracia. 1999.
Mothering, Work, and Gender in Urban Asante Ideology and Practice. American
Anthropologist 101(4):717-729.
Clark’s ethnographic work since the late 1970’s in Ghana reveals how the Asante
gender role focus is on biological mothering and not on nurturing contact with children.
The mother’s role of working to provide for the family surpasses the need to physically
mother and can be in conflict with her role of wife. This leads to emotional and often
physical separation of mothers and their biological children. The role of nurturing
children is placed on designated members of the family or women in the community. The
article focuses on Asante ideals and practices about gender and parenting and how these
roles are changing in modern practice.
Ghana
Asante
Maternal-child bonds
Gender roles
Parenting
Cultural anthropology
George, Carol and Judith Solomon. 1999.
Attachment and Caregiving: The Caregiving Behavioral System. In Jude Cassidy and
Phillip R. Shaver, eds. Handbook of Attachment. Pp.649-670. New York: Guilford Press.
This chapter focuses on the association, in psychology, between attachment
theory and care giving theory. The former is centered around the child’s attachment to its
mother and the latter is focused on the parent. George makes distinctions and connections
between the two areas and states that caregiving is often left out of the data presented in
the traditional attachment theory framework.
66
Attachment theory
Maternal bonding
Child separation
Divorce
Developmental psychology
Gupta, Monica Das. 1995.
Life Course Perspectives on Women’s Autonomy and Health Outcomes. American
Anthropologist. 97(3): 481-491.
Gupta points out that negative demographic consequences in many societies are
due to gender inequalities. She states that patterns of household formation and inheritance
strongly influence these consequences. In contemporary northern India the
intergenerational bond is stronger than the conjugal bond. Instead of focusing on the
cross-culturally lower status of women relative to men, she focuses on the changing
status of women globally, during different periods in their lives. These different periods
of life, position women in varying relationships of autonomy and increase their potential
for marginalization. Female autonomy here is directly related to child survival and
reducing fertility.
Northern India
Comparative
Child survival
Gender
Female autonomy
Women’s status
Socio-cultural anthropology
Harkness, Sara and Charles M. Super, eds. 1996.
Parents’ Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions and Consequences. New
York: Guilford Publications.
This volume of collected chapters concentrates on a multi-disciplinary approach
to researching parenting cultural belief systems. It explores the culturally constructed
parental experience, cultural expression in practice, and the consequences for their
children‘s well-being. Chapters are diverse in content and geographic area. All
concentrate on the effects of parental belief system practices on the health and
development of children. These chapters provide the foundation for a global history of
parenting.
Cross-cultural
Parenting beliefs
Parenting practices
Child health
Child development
Cognitive anthropology
67
Social science
Harwood, Robin L., Joan G. Miller and Nydia Lucca Irizarry. 1995.
Culture and Attachment: Perceptions of the Child in Context. New York: Guilford
Publications.
Harwood et al. explore Puerto Rican culture and parent-child attachment. They
explore attachment from the perspective of culture and then from the more specific
mothers’ perceptions of attachment behavior. This book is a research guide providing
frameworks for analysis of cross-cultural attachment studies, which are universal and
culturally forged. The comparative study provided as an example of the framework
focuses on Puerto Rican culture.
Puerto Rico
Child development
Maternal-child attachment
Cross-cultural attachment
Cultural framework
Social policy
Developmental Psychology
Cultural Psychology
Hardy, Sarah. 1999.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Hardy argues that contemporary views of motherhood are sentimentally appealing
but fail to take into account the wide range of responses that comprise maternal
"instincts," including many that may seem counterintuitive to reproductive goals. Using
data from her non-human primate research as well as new evolutionary theories, literature
and folklore, Hardy shows that animal mothers make constant "trade-offs" such as
infanticide, to negotiate conflicts between their own needs and those of their offspring.
She explores sexual selection of offspring, the use of helpers or various levels of
withdrawal from particular babies, ranging from mild neglect to abandonment and
infanticide. Hardy discusses the adaptive behaviors newborns use to ensure their mothers'
attachment.
Motherhood
Maternal sentiment
Attachment
Infanticide
Evolutionary theory
Biological anthropology
Hoodfar, H. ed. 1990.
68
Survival Strategies in Low Income Households in Cairo. Journal of South Asian and
Middle Eastern Studies.13(4):22-41.
This article focuses on the political economy of Egypt and the impact of the
introduction of structural adjustment policies as they are reflected in the household
economy and survival strategies of people living in low-income and newly-urbanized
neighborhoods of Cairo. It examines socioeconomic and ideological changes in Egypt
resulting from rapid structural adjustment policies implemented in the 1980’s. A portion
of the paper focuses on changes in gender ideology and the women's variety of responses
to structural adjustment policies.
Egypt
Cairo
Women’s survival strategies
Domestic politics
Urban poverty
Gender ideology
Structural adjustment
Cultural anthropology
Last, Murray. 1992.
The Importance of Extremes: The Social Implications of Intra-Household Variation in
Child Mortality. Social Science & Medicine. 35(6): 799-810.
This article looks at the extreme variation in child-rearing among women of the
same polygamous household in Maguzawa in southern Katsina. It questions the factors
involved in child mortality and the social processes that enhance the variation among
households in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria. In households, child mortality rates
increase dramatically with second and third wives. Risk factors for child survival include
poverty and high divorce rates. Severe economic inequalities between men and women
contribute to these socially anticipated variations.
Maguzawa
Nigeria
West Africa
Child mortality
Birth order
Gender inequality
Cultural anthropology
Miller, Barbara D. 1997.
The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India. Oxford
University Press. USA.
Miller focuses on the power of culture in shaping family attitudes towards
children and determines how children are treated differently, depending upon their sex.
Although focused on India, this is a cross-cultural look at gender imbalance based on
69
gender preference. This book addresses the practice of female infanticide as a reason for
unbalanced sex ratios among children in present-day rural India. A regional and social
pattern of infanticide shows that this practice is most prevalent in north-west India and
among the higher castes there. Miller considers some of the cultural links between the
present and the past.
North India
Cross-cultural
Gender inequality
Sex ratios
Female infanticide
Cultural anthropology
Nations, Marilyn K. and L.A. Rebhun. 1988.
Angels With Wet Wings Won’t Fly: Maternal Sentiment in Brazil and the Image of
Neglect. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.12(2):141-200.
This multidisciplinary project evaluating current theories of fatalism and maternal
detachment among the poor in Northeastern Brazil determined that that these theories are
incomplete. Through intensive interviews and observations the researchers find that due
to lack of access and bureaucratic or geographic barriers Brazilian mothers of severely ill
children do not seek medical assistance rather than a lack of emotional attachment.
Brazil, Northeast
Maternal detachment theory
Maternal grief
Poverty
Structural violence
Medical anthropology
Nations, Marilyn K. and Mara Lucia Amaral. 1991.
Flesh, Blood, Souls and Households: Cultural Validity in Mortality Inquiry. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly. 5(3):204-220.
Nations and Amaral note that in the developing world the deaths of infants and
young children are frequently unrecorded in vital event registries. They argue that
cultural context grounds the meaning of mortality inquiries as much as statistical
standards. Ethnographic findings from Northeast Brazil are incorporated into vital
registries information and are found to increase accuracy and enrich the meaning of
mortality rates. The ethnographic and statistical data analyzed give insight into the
magnitude of infant and child deaths and explores the cultural context in which they
occur.
Brazil
Child mortality
Maternal grief
70
Infant mortality
Mortality statistics
Medical anthropology
Sargent, Carolyn and Michael Harris. 1992.
Gender Ideology, Childbearing and Child Health in Jamaica. American Ethnologist.
19(3):523-537.
The research centers around the dominance of low-income Jamaican women as
heads of household, kinship pillars, and participants in the labor force. This female
centered society produces a strong favoritism for female children. The research shows not
only a higher survival rate at the end of the first year of life for female children, but this
trend continues until the ninth year of life. Sargent and Harris explore the social
implications of this preference for female children.
Jamaica
Matrifocal households
Kinship networks
Infant mortality
Daughter preference
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1985.
Culture, Scarcity and Maternal Thinking: Maternal Detachment and Infant Survival in a
Brazilian Shanty Town. Ethos. 13:291-317.
Scheper-Hughes argues that maternal thinking and practices are socially produced
rather than biologically constructed. She explores the conditions in one Brazilian
shantytown that have developed due to changes in the economic environment. These
changes have produced high levels of child neglect and infant mortality due to economic,
material and emotional deprivation.
Northeast Brazil
Maternal detachment
Child mortality
Child neglect
Economic insecurity
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy ed. 1987.
Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of
Children. Boston: D. Reidel.
This collection of 18 essays edited by Scheper-Hughes addresses important issues
in nutritional/medical anthropology. Decisions by parents to kill a child or “let it die” are
explored here in terms of cultural relativism. The western concept of child abuse is
71
addressed as to whether or not it is an anomaly of Western industrialized societies. The
struggle for mothers to survive and provide for their children in poor Third World nations
is analyzed with regard to their decisions about risk, time management, energy, money
and cultural beliefs.
Cross-cultural
Cultural relativism
Infanticide
Child abuse
Child neglect
Medical anthropology
Nutritional anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1997.
Lifeboat Ethics: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil. In Lancaster, Roger
N. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. New York:
Routledge Press.
This essay targets the impact of Catholic church on the attitudes of indigenous
people toward child death in a shantytown of Northeast Brazil. The environment is one of
high risk for child mortality due to poverty and Scheper-Hughes argues that this factor
along with other variables has created a “lifeboat ethic” guiding ideas about survival of
the fittest. Research is focused on selective nurturing which leads to the prevention of
over-attachment and grief at the death of a child. The role of the Catholic Church is
highlighted as a contributing factor in the cultural acceptance of the reduction in maternal
bonding.
Northeast Brazil
Child security
Child mortality
Infanticide
Catholicism
Lifeboat ethics
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Carolyn Sargent eds. 1998.
Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chapters in this book demonstrate how the treatment of children vary by
geographic location and are affected by global political-economic structures. Everyday
practices embedded in the micro-level interactions of local cultures affect the survival
rates of children. Part 2 of the book entitled “The Cultural Politics of Child Survival”
centers around the concepts of child mortality and patterns of abandonment and how they
vary in several locations globally.
Cross-cultural childhood
72
Child abandonment
Child survival
Child mortality
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2001.
Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Anniversary edition.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Originally published in 1977, the book examines the cultural context of
schizophrenia in rural Ireland. Scheper-Hughes focuses on the effects of isolation and
change on the family, in particular the effects on children. She describes the cultural basis
for the high rates of mental illness and provides comparisons to the current rise in
depression in many western societies. Separation of mother and child is portrayed here in
the framework of structural violence by explaining the treatment of later-born sons by
their mothers as controlling. Socialization of later-born sons is based on dependency as
compared with the socialization of earlier born sons and all daughters, which is based on
competency.
Ireland
Maternal bonds
Gender socialization
Structural violence
Mental illness
Schizophrenia
Separation
Wadley, Susan S. 1993.
Family Composition Strategies in Rural North India. Social Science and Medicine.
37(11):1367-1376.
Recent evidence on child mortality and fertility trends in the village known as
Karimpur in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh shows increasing female bias in child
mortality among the poor. Wadley contends that this trend can only be understood in the
larger context of family composition strategies, which have changed due to the socioeconomic conditions of the past 25 years. She argues that mortality cannot be understood
without considering fertility behavior and the overall shape of the resulting families.
Wadley’s hypothesis is that the Karimpur poor are using high fertility and sex-specific
child mortality to maximize the number of surviving males in attempting to insure family
welfare.
India, north rural
Fertility
Child mortality
Gender specific mortality
Family survival strategies
73
Cultural anthropology
Wolf, Arthur P. 2003.
Maternal Sentiments: How Strong Are They? Current Anthropology.
44(Supplement):S31-S49.
This article exams the practice in Taiwan of women giving away their daughters
as infants and young children. This separation is not forced by the family but is an act of
maternal choice as part of a strategy for securing the future survival of the family. Wolf
focuses on dispelling the assumption that this practice is psychologically painful for the
mother and contests the commonly held idea in western psychology that mothers
naturally bond with their children and find it incredibly difficult to part with them.
Taiwan
Maternal-child bond
Poverty
Family survival strategy
Marriage and kinship
Cultural anthropology
How Adolescents Learn Risk Behavior: Violence, AIDS, Drug Use and Eating
Disorders
Matt McDonough
The purpose of this review was to explore how adolescents learn behaviors that
expose them to risk. Adolescence is defined as, “the time period around biological
maturation termed puberty in English (Fabrega and Miller 1995).” Risk behaviors were
identified as those exposing the adolescents to violence, HIV/AIDS, drug addiction, and
eating disorders. The review necessarily assumed that adolescents have no natural desire
to put themselves at such risks. Yet, research shows certain populations of adolescents
suffer from high levels of these risks. Like Fabrega and Miller, I acknowledge difficulty
in studying a basic concept such as adolescence cross-culturally, but still hope to uncover
something useful about adolescent learning.
In the oldest article within my review, Anthony Burton writes that anthropology
does not have adequate methods for studying adolescents (1978). In the most recently
74
written article in my review, Jason Hart writes that anthropology could be, and is not
being, used to help adolescents (2006). My review of articles written in the intervening
years supports both authors, suggesting that anthropology of adolescents has produced
few consistent methods, and little widely applicable knowledge.
All articles, however, spend time describing an influence that precedes behavior.
The influences are not consistent across all four identified risk behaviors, and within each
one, trends emerge. Violent behavior seems to come from internal teaching of survival
within marginalized populations. Drug use also seems to be tied to marginalization, and
with identity issues. Risk for HIV/AIDS seems to rise when traditional teachings about
sex fail to account for the dangers of STDs. Increase in eating disorders can only be
linked to a combination of factors. Western media seems an important factor, but not the
only factor, in these later two behaviors. The only real consistency between all articles is
many cite a myriad of interrelated factors that encourage risk behaviors. Few of the
adolescents themselves seem to seek the risk out.
A second process in the establishment of risk behavior is replication. Many
mechanisms that cause replication of risk behaviors exist in the articles, such as sexual
scripting, peer standing, ethnic identity, a culture of fear, and many cultural traditions.
Adolescents rely heavily on replication of adults’ and peers’ behaviors to understand
what to do and many situations. In many cases replication overrides what outsider adults
tell the adolescents.
This research is too preliminary to draw any concrete conclusions. While
suggesting two important processes, influence and replication, and some trends within
them, this review can not define what they are, and should instead be used to identify
75
questions anthropologists need to ask. Anthropologists must explore all the avenues of
influence, move beyond a myriad of interconnected factors and begin identifying and
mapping individual ones. Anthropologist must understand the messages being received,
or not received, and how this increases risk. Anthropologists must learn how replication
works and how it might be used to change dangerous behaviors. Anthropologists may
possibly come to understand adolescents as having a unique culture amidst a larger one.
Annotated Bibliography
Adams, Kimberly, Roger G. Sargent, Sharon H. Thompson, et al. 1998
A Study of Body Weight Concerns and Weight Control Practices of 4th and 7th Grade
Adolescents. Ethnicity and Health 5(1): 79-94.
The purpose of this study is to assess grade, race, socioeconomic status, and
gender differences in perceptions of body size, weight concerns, and weight control
practices between 4th and 7th grade students in South Carolina. Two random samples,
consisting of a total of 1597 adolescents, participated in two questionnaire surveys. The
study indicates that early in a child's sociocultural development, grade level, gender, race,
and socioeconomic status are influential in the perception of ideal adult body size and
opposite gender ideal adult body size.
South Carolina
Adolescents
Ethnicity
Weight control
Body size perceptions
Cultural anthropology
Anderson-Fye, Eileen P. 2004
A “Coca-Cola” Shape: Cultural Change, Body Image, and Eating Disorders in San
Andres, Belize. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 28:561-595.
This article explores why the community of San Andres, Belize, has been
relatively resistant to eating disorders when other postcolonial nations with similar
characteristics of social transition, gender, role flux, and upward mobility have not.
Anderson-Fye details that all adolescent girls participate in a local custom of pageantry
that establishes “multiple attainable ideals” of feminine beauty. This local custom
reinforces traditional Belizean forms of beauty and counters the influence of Western
media in this community.
76
Belize
Female body image
Eating disorders
Adolescents
Globalization
Cultural anthropology
Asencio, Marysol W. 1999
Machos and Sluts: Gender, Sexuality, and Violence among a Cohort of Puerto Rican
Adolescents. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13(2):107-126.
This article describes the beliefs and rationales for gender-based violence among
a cohort of low-income Puerto Rican American adolescents. Asencio conducted a threeyear study of 150 low income, innercity Latino adolescents through participant
observation, informal groups, and formal interviews. Asencio details the creation of
gender-based identities in the adolescents, “machos” for boys, “sluts” for girls that inform
their behavior toward the opposite sex. Puerto Rican adolescents can use these identities
to justify violence and male dominance.
New York City
Puerto Ricans
Adolescence
Gender
Violence
Cultural anthropology
Assal, Adel, and Edwin Farrell 1992
Attempts to Make Meaning of Terror: Family, Play, and School in Time of Civil War.
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 23(4):275-290.
This article describes the attempts of Lebanese adolescents to confer meaning
onto their lives while living though intense periods of Civil War. Assal and Farrell first
present an emic (insider’s) view of life for the children, and then frame their stories in
categories such as war, politics, religion, family, play, boredom, career, school, and
acceptance of a warrior identity. Children initially terrified by war are slowly pushed
through the forces of poverty and boredom to join militias. Members of militias are able
to explain and control the terror but ultimately begin a new cycle for the next generation
of adolescents.
Lebanon
Children in war
Culture of terror
Ethnography in war
Cultural anthropology
77
Burton, Anthony 1978
Anthropology of the Young. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 9(1):54-70.
This author writes that anthropology, as a discipline, does not have adequate
methods for studying the young. Burton states that youth differ from adults in two main
senses, youth are dependent, biologically and economically, and youth “see the world in
quite different terms.” Anthropological studies of youth, including adolescents, have
focused on enculturation and cultural transmission, but these studies reveal problems in
definition, description, dependence, and development of the youth. Anthropology must
now “enter the head” of the youth to determine how this happens.
Theoretical
Enculturation
Youth
Anthropology of education
Cultural anthropology
Burton, Linda M. 1997
Ethnography and the Meaning of Adolescence in High-Risk Neighborhoods. Ethos
25(2):208-217.
This article explores the question of how ethnography can help to understand
adolescent development among African American adolescents growing up in high-risk
neighborhood in a northeastern U.S. city. Burton states that human development
researchers have not yet systematically examined meanings, patterns, roles, and
behaviors involved in adolescent ethnic/racial minorities in high-risk environments.
Burton conducts a five year study of urban African American adolescents. Her work
shows high-risk adolescents experience accelerated life course, diffuse age hierarchies,
and inconsistent role expectations creating a different conception of the period of
adolescences versus those in lower risk environments.
Northeastern United States
African Americans
Racial minorities
Adolescence
Life course
Cultural anthropology
Devine, John 1995
Can Metal Detectors Replace the Panopticon? Cultural Anthropology 10(2):171-195.
This article tackles the complex problem of school violence. Devine reports that,
at the time of writing, 41 New York City high schools had metal detectors and large
squads of security guards. These security measures, however, have exacerbated the
problem by decreasing the authority teachers can, and are willing to exercise over the
situation. The result is a “climate of fear” that dictates violence as a necessary tool of
78
survival. Devine states that more ethnography is needed to understand how this violence
is passed on from year to year.
New York City
High school
Violence in schools
Security in schools
Cultural anthropology
Eyre, Stephen L., Valerie Hoffman, and Susan G. Millstein 1998
The Gamesmanship of Sex: A Model Based on African American Adolescent Accounts.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12(4):467-489.
The authors draw on vernacular-term interviews, in which listed vernacular terms
are explored for deep meaning, with 39 African American adolescents from suburban San
Francisco, and sociological game theory, to develop a model of cognition related to sex.
Stages of the sexual gamesmanship include courtship, duplicity, disclosure, and prestige.
The article concludes by stating that sexual gamesmanship may play a role in the social
learning process through constructing social reputations of boys and girls in an opposing
fashion.
San Francisco
African Americans
Adolescence
Sexuality
Game theory
Medical anthropology
Fabrega, Horacio, and Barbara D. Miller 1995
Towards a More Comprehensive Medical Anthropology: The Case of Adolescent
Psychopathology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9(4):431-461.
The authors seek to demonstrate the need for a more holistic model of medical
anthropology that includes contributions from such disciplines as social history,
anthropology, and psychology. They explore this model through cross-culturally
examining three areas of adolescent psychopathology: anorexia nervosa, spirit
possession, and social aggression. The authors use their model to display the complex
interplay of urbanization, modernization, ethnicity, socioeconomic inequality, racism,
and government policy that can promote adolescent psychopathology in both Western
and non-Western societies.
Comparative
Adolescence
Eating disorders
Aggression
Medical anthropology
79
Cross-cultural psychiatry
Ginsberg, Pauline E., and Moraa Gekonge 2004
MTV, Technology, the Secular Trend, and HIV/AIDS: Why Kenyan Parents Need to
Learn about Adolescent Development. Dialectical Anthropology 28:353-364.
Due to a generation gap, Kenyan adolescents are at an increasingly greater risk for
HIV/AIDS. Ginsberg and Gekonge state that the life stage “adolescence” is not part of
traditional Kenyan development. However, after increased urbanization and influence
from the West, Kenyan children are displaying adolescent behaviors in increasing
numbers. The introduction of Western technology has created a cultural gap between
those that did and did not grow up exposed to Western ideas. The most dangerous result
stems from Western television’s equating of sex with economic success and happiness.
Against Western media, traditional Kenyan teaching of sexuality has been unable to
protect Kenyan youth from the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Kenya
HIV/AIDS
Adolescence
Puberty
Social change
Medical anthropology
Hagan, John 1990
The Structuration of Gender and Deviance: A Power-Control Theory of Vulnerability to
Crime and the Search for Deviant Role Exits. Canadian Review of Sociology and
Anthropology 27(2):138-156.
Hagen joins structuration theory and power-control theory to explain gender
differences in vulnerability to crime and corresponding gender differences in “deviant
role exits.” He uses an analysis of data gathered from 430 adolescents and accompanying
mothers in Toronto to demonstrate how domestic controls create different vulnerability
for males and females. While seeking to protect female family members from the violent
crime males are exposed to, these controls reproduce oppressive patriarchal family
structures. Women in this environment are more likely to seek “deviant role exits”
leading to higher levels of psychosocial distress and attempted suicide.
Toronto
Gender roles
Adolescents
Structuration Theory
Power-Control Theory
Sociology
Handwerker, W. Penn 2003
80
Traumatic Stress, Ecological Contingency, and Sexual Behavior: Antecedents and Effects
of Sexual Precociousness, Sexual Mobility, and Adolescent Childbearing
in Antigua. Ethos 31(3):385-411.
This article reports a test of the hypothesis that adolescent sexual precociousness,
sexual mobility, and childbearing are functions of family and economic factors that
ultimately allow certain girls to empower themselves. Handwerker uncovers that two
factors, exploitative family environment and current economic condition, existed in a
complex relationship. Exploitative family environment, in which women were
dominated by husbands and fathers created different behavior in different economic
conditions, but different environments might create different behaviors in consistent
economic conditions.
Antigua
Sexual development
Gender
Adolescence
Exploitation in the family
Cultural anthropology
Hart, Jason 2006
Saving Children? What Role for Anthropology. Anthropology Today 22(1):5-8
The author discusses the role anthropology can play in saving children caught in
modern day risk situations. The primary example used is the phenomenon of “child
soldiers,” currently a priority for child-focused humanitarians and rights activists. Hart
writes that labeling certain nations and peoples as “lesser primitives” is gaining fresh
respectability. Anthropology must counter this overly simplistic and inaccurate notion by
restoring the proper political and historic context. Ethnography of children’s everyday
lives within war can reveal both the local and global forces at work.
Afghanistan
Child soldiers
Child-centered ethnography
Forced recruitment
Cultural anthropology
Jean-Klein, Iris 2000
Mothercraft, Statecraft, and Subjectivity in the Palestinian Intifada. American Ethnologist
27(1):100-127.
Jean-Klein conducted work in approximately 60 households living in a
neighborhood in Ramallah during 1989-90, the second year of Palestinian intifada.
Building off of Peteet’s 1994 article, and Joseph’s work on cross-sibling relationships,
this article explores the connection between the mother-son relationship and the nascent
state. Jean-Klein shows that after claiming independence from their male elders,
81
adolescent males learn “morality” from their mothers and sisters. By encouraging their
sons to fight for the state, these women gain social authority in their communities.
Palestine
Male adolescence
Intergenerational relationships
Personhood
State building
Cultural anthropology
Kaufman, Carol.E., Janette Beals, Christina M. Mitchel, et al. 2004
Stress, Trauma, and Risky Sexual Behavior Among American Indians in Young
Adulthood. Culture, Health & Sexuality 6(4):301-318.
This article explores the relationship between adolescent trauma and later levels
of sexual activity. The authors conducted their study among a population of Northern
Plains Native American Indians with a vibrant family life, yet living in an impoverished
areas and suffering from alcohol and drug addiction. A representative group of 289 17-25
year olds underwent interviews about 15 types of traumatic experiences and 10 types of
stress. Kaufman et al. find that the presence trauma, and multiple traumas, in adolescent
life correlates with more casual sex partners, especially for women.
United States Northern Plains
Native American Indian
Adolescence
Trauma
Sexual behavior
Medical anthropology
Marcelin, Louis Herns, James Vivian, Ralph DiClemente, et al. 2005
Trends in Alcohol, Drug and Cigarette Use Among Haitian Youth in Miami-Dade
County, Florida. Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 4(1):105-131.
Marcelin et al. report on prevalence of alcohol, drug, and cigarette use of
adolescent Haitians living in three communities in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The
authors conduct participant observation and in-depth interviews with 557 adolescents
including those both US and Haiti born, poor and middle class, and urban and rural. The
authors find that use of drugs among Haitian youth is relatively low compared with
regional and national adolescent data, but increasing due to marginalization and access to
U.S. street culture.
Florida
Miami-Dade County
Haitian adolescents
Social marginalization
Alcohol and drug use
82
Health science
Marsiglia, Flavio Francisco, Stephen Kulis, and Michael L. Hecht 2001
Ethnic Labels and Ethnic Identity as Predictors of Drug Use Among Middle School
Students in the Southwest. Journal of Research on Adolescence 11(1):21-48.
The article explores survey data from 408 seventh-grade students from a large city
in the southwestern U.S. to determine how the ethnic labels, Mexican American, White,
African American, and mixed ethnicity combine with ethic identity to predict drug use.
Findings indicate that two dimensions of ethnic identity, consistency and pride, predict
drug use in opposing ways. Minorities, non-whites, who view their behavior, speech, and
looks as consistent with their ethnic group report more drug use, while Whites report less,
but ethnically proud white students report more drug use, while ethnically proud
minorities report less.
Southwestern United States
Mexican Americans
African Americans
Mixed ethnicity
Drug use
Cultural anthropology
Maticka-Tyndale, Eleanor, Melanie Gallant, Chris Brouillard-Coyle, et al. 2004
The Sexual Scripts of Kenyan Young People and HIV prevention. Culture, Health &
Sexuality 7(1):27-41.
This paper uses scripting theory to develop an in-depth understanding of Kenyan
adolescent sexual experiences. Maticka-Tyndale et al. review interviews with single-sex
focus groups of Kenyan children aged 11-16 years. The interviews reveal that sexual
encounters are typically the end result of an elaborately scripted sequence of events that
proceed from expression of interest through intercourse. Both boys and girls feel pressure
to engage in sex and discomfort and reluctance to deviate from the script. MatickaTyndale et al. state that knowledge of the script will reveal points where effective HIV
prevention knowledge and materials can be introduced.
Kenya
Scripting theory
HIV Prevention
Adolescence
Sociology
Public health
Montgomery, Winifred 2004
Who is Informing our Young People about AIDS, and Why Aren’t They Listening.
Dialectical Anthropology 28:365-376.
83
Montgomery explores the disconnect between the amount of information
available to American adolescents about HIV/AIDS and the high incidence of the disease
in certain populations. Montgomery identifies black and Hispanic youth, young injection
users, and gay and bisexual youth as groups of Americans with disproportional high
levels of HIV/AIDS. Montgomery concludes that at-risk populations of adolescents will
listen if the message is linguistically and culturally appropriate, and that nongovernmental organizations must forge relationships with community-based
organizations to deliver the prevention programs.
United States
HIV/AIDS
Adolescents
At-risk populations
Clinical medicine
Applied anthropology
Peteet, Julie 1994
Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian “Intifada”: A Cultural Politics
of Violence. American Ethnologist 21(1):31-49.
This article examines the attainment and enactment of manhood and masculinity
among adolescent Palestinian males. Peteet argues that beatings and detention undergone
by the youths are crucial for the creation of their adult moral selves and lay a cultural
groundwork for their latter relations to foreign powers. Beating and detention create a
power structure in which a lesser eventually overcomes a greater, paralleling a political
and cultural aim of the people.
Palestine
Violence
Masculinity
Construction of self
Cultural anthropology
Quintero, Gilbert, and Sally Davis 2002
Why do Teens Smoke? American Indian and Hispanic Adolescents’ Perspectives on
Functional Values and Addiction. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16(4):439-457.
Quintero and Davis examine reasons that Hispanic American and American
Indian adolescents give to explain smoking. The authors compare the functional values of
tobacco, including mood management, peer influences, and image maintenance, versus
addiction. A total of 234 adolescents from 11 schools in 7 communities in New Mexico
participated in 38 focus groups and 34 individual interviews. While emphasis of each
factor involved in teen smoking varied across the groups, important similarities emerged
in the basic reasons given by both ethnic groups for smoking, similarities that also
tracked across other ethnic groups.
84
New Mexico
American Indian
Hispanic Americans
Adolescents
Smoking
Medical anthropology
Rogers, Angie, Jane R. Adamson, Mark McCarthy 1997
Variations in Health Behaviors Among Inner City 12-year-olds from Four Ethnic Groups.
Ethnicity & Health 2(4):309-316.
The authors conduct semi-structured interviews with approximately 50
adolescents from the four largest ethnic groups, Bangladeshi, Black African, Black
Caribbean, and White, present in secondary schools in two inner London boroughs.
Participants answered questions in the fields Diet, Exercise, Tobacco and Alcohol, and
Parental Control of Social Activities. Comparing answers cross-culturally reveals interrelated factors such as social and economic disadvantage, religion, religious observance,
parental restrictiveness, and fear of racial violence contributes to variations in health
behavior.
London
Low-income urban populations
Adolescents
Ethnic minorities
Health behavior
Cultural anthropology
Ryan, Y.M., M.J. Gibney, and M.A.T. Flynn 1998
The Pursuit of Thinness: A Study of Dublin Schoolgirls Aged 15 y. International Journal
of Obesity 22:485-487.
Ryan, Gibney, and Flynn use a self-report questionnaire to collect data about body
weight concerns and slimming practices from 420 15-year-old Dublin schoolgirls of
varying economic background. 59 percent of the girls report unhappiness with weight and
72 percent of those trying to lost weight were within or below normal weight categories.
The authors reveal that many adolescent girls are willing to engage in potentially harmful
slimming strategies irrespective of health implications.
Dublin
Adolescent girls
Obesity
Weight perceptions
Health science
Thianthai, Chulanee 2004
85
Gender and Class Differences in Young People’s Sexuality and HIV/AIDS Risk-Taking
Behaviors in Thailand. Culture, Health & Sexuality 6(4):189-203.
This paper examines gender and class differences in Thai adolescent’s beliefs
about sexuality and HIV/AIDS risk-related behaviors. Sixty female and male adolescents
from three different socioeconomic backgrounds living in Bangkok volunteered for indepth interviews. Thianthai relates that these adolescents have a culturally determined
unequal distribution of sexual burdens and responsibilities with males expected to engage
in sex early on and females expected to maintain virginity until marriage. Thianthai
details that while class has a complex relationship with knowledge of HIV/AIDS,
adolescents of all classes fail to realize they are at risk.
Thailand
Adolescents
HIV/AIDS
Risk preception
Class
Medical anthropology
Villenas, Sofia 2001
Latina Mothers and Small-Town Racisms: Creating Narratives of Dignity and Moral
Education in North Carolina. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 32(1):3-28.
This article highlights the difficulty a population of Latin American mothers faced
while raising families in North Carolina. Villenas, after spending two years living in the
community and recording histories, identified “benevolent racism” as the greatest
challenge faced by the Latina mothers. Community members and social service
professionals focused on identifying what Latino families lacked, as opposed to
supporting their effective parenting methods. Latina mothers also had little help fighting
against “bad influences”, exposure to violence and drugs, present in the community that
did not exist in their home country.
North Carolina
Latina mothers
Racism
Motherhood
Immigrants
Cultural anthropology
Human Trafficking: The Import and Export of Humans and Their Parts for Sale on
the Global Market
Johanna Yakova Twersky
The field of anthropology has the capacity for great contributions to the study of
human trafficking, particularly in the areas of individual agency, structural violence,
86
organizational behavior, conceptions of knowledge, and knowledge production. In
February 2006, at an Americans for Informed Democracy conference at Georgetown
University, eight faces of trafficking were identified: sex trafficking, labor trafficking,
war slavery/kidnapping, internet child pornography, sex tourism, organ trafficking, skin
trafficking, and ritual abuse torture. Of these categories, however, the field of
anthropology currently offers research in barely half.
For anthropologists wishing to study human trafficking, ethics are by far the most
pertinent problem. The loudest voice advocating for anthropology’s entrance into the
human rights scene is undeniably that of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Scheper-Hughes argues
the meaninglessness of “objectivity” and claims that anthropology’s most useful position
is in the heat of battle. Despite the American Anthropological Association’s clearly stated
position that, “the anticipated consequences of research should be communicated as fully
as possible to the individuals and groups likely to be affected” (AAA’s Official Statement
on Ethics and Principles of Professional Responsibility 1986), Scheper-Hughes fervently
argues the invaluable nature of undercover research in combating trafficking. In
December, 2004 Scheper-Hughes presented her work at the George Washington
University, research which circulated around organ trafficking and the investigation of
global crime rings. Scheper-Hughes’ underlying message, however –that conventional
anthropology and its ethical constraints is not equipped to deal with an issue this dirty,
therefore, concessions must be made— could not have been made more clear.
As a research subject, human trafficking problematically lacks an easily
accessible and well-defined scope. The range of issues relevant to human trafficking
extends far beyond what most people would intuitively identify as a trafficking issue.
87
Child pornography, for example, has historically been an issue of law enforcement,
morality, and deviant behavior, with relevant research focused on methods of censorship,
and potential rehabilitation for pedophiles.
Child pornography through the human trafficking lens, however, returns to the
source. Concern shifts to identifying where exploited children come from and to where
they are taken, whether parents are exploiting their own children for financial gain, or,
whether parents are blackmailed and coerced, their children kidnapped. Trafficking
researchers ask if identifiable patterns exist in the ethnicities of exploited children, and
whether tracking child suppliers (traffickers) in additional to child demanders
(pedophiles) proves more effective.
Anthropologist Debra Budiani, who has spearheaded the Coalition for OrganFailure Solutions (www.transplantsmiddleeast.org), argues that despite her move towards
applied anthropology, she need not abandon the anthropological standard of ethics in the
fight for human rights. Compiling and annotating the few anthropology-based trafficking
sources available creates a starting point for anthropologists who, like Budiani, seek to
delve more deeply into the subject of human trafficking while still working within ethical
guidelines. Since the anthropology and activism dialogue is undeniably important in
developing a place for anthropology within the study of human trafficking, the attached
bibliography also incorporates anthropologists like Sally Engle Merry and Steven Robins
who discuss the thin borders between activism and research.
The United Nations and the International Organization for Migration estimate that
in one year, four million people are trafficked globally, generating $19 billion in income
directly benefiting organized crime and corruption. The intimate connection that exists
88
between human trafficking, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and subsequently, the
spread of disease and violence world-wide makes human trafficking an international
security risk that belongs at the forefront of governmental concern. Only recently,
however, has human trafficking entered the realm of public awareness as a gross human
rights violation requiring immediate attention. The severity of the situation necessitates
that major strides be taken in the field of anthropology and across disciplines towards the
understanding and prevention of human trafficking. Though largely anthropological, the
attached sources provide a strong foundation for multidisciplinary, theoretical and fieldbased approaches to further research in human trafficking.
Annotated Bibliography
Adams, Abigail E. 1999.
Gringas, Ghouls, and Guatemala: The 1994 Attacks On North American Women
Accused of Body Organ Trafficking. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 4(1):112133.
Since 1986, Adams has tracked stories that accuse U.S. citizens of baby
trafficking in Central America and elsewhere. In spring 1994, Guatemalan papers
reported the discovery of child-trafficking and organ harvesting networks run by former
U.S. government officials and foreigners. These rumors lead to directed attacks on
“gringas”, specifically U.S. ambassador Marilyn McAfee and Harvard lawyer Jennifer
Harbury. Adams interprets the central figure of the gringa that provoked the anxieties of
so many Guatemalans.
Latin America
Guatemala
Child-trafficking
Organ-harvesting
Cultural anthropology
Brennan, Denise E. 2002.
Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as Stepping Stone to International Migration for
Dominican Women. In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
89
Economy. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild, eds. Pp.154-168. New York:
Metropolitan Books.
As an increasing number of rumors falsely relaying success among working
women in the sex tourist town of Sosúa circulate throughout the Dominican Republic,
more single mothers migrate there in hopes of procuring a European husband and,
subsequently, a European visa. Men, mostly German, travel to Sosúa to take advantage of
opportunities for sex with exotic women. Brennan identifies sex work in Sosúa as an
economic advancement strategy for the women involved and examines the distinction
working women make between marriage por amor and marriage por residencia. Brennan
discusses whether these marginalized women are victims sold as exports or, acting as
agents of their own destinies by initiating the traffic of German men into Sosúa to further
their own goals.
Dominican Republic
Sosúa
Sex work
Migration
Women’s agency
Cultural anthropology
Brennan, Denise E. 2005.
Methodological Challenges in Research on Human Trafficking: Tales from the Field.
International Migration 43(1/2):35-54.
Drawing on her field experience studying victims’ lives after trafficking, Brennan
discusses methodological challenges and ethical concerns that arose while conducting
research with trafficked persons in the United States. Claiming that researchers on
trafficking find themselves writing on an issue that has been sensationalized,
misrepresented, and politicized, Brennan discusses the possibility of collaboration
between academics across disciplines, trafficked persons, and social service providers.
She urges anthropologists to provide committed, “on the ground accounts” of life in and
after trafficking and advocates for the participation of trafficked persons in shaping the
direction of the anti-trafficking movement.
United States
Trafficking survivors
Agency
Anti-trafficking movement
Human rights
Cultural anthropology
Crowley, Megan. 1998.
Troubling Boundaries: Organ Transplantation and Liberal Law. PoLAR 21(1):26-41.
Crowley uses the Cartesian mind/body duality to differentiate between “the self
that owns” and “the object that is owned” as a means of contextualizing issues in human
90
transplant. Drawing on her experience as an anthropological observer on the ethics
committee of a large research hospital, Crowley provides a useful discussion of organ
procurement and transplant including who provides organs, who gets them, and who
makes those decisions, in the context of liberal law.
Western world
Theoretical
Organ transplant
Liberal law
Ownership
Medical anthropology
Crowley, Megan.1999.
Culture, Class, and Bodily Meaning: An Ethnographic Study of Organ Transplantation in
Mexico. PoLAR 22(2):129-38.
Situated in Guadalajara, Mexico, this twelve month long ethnographic study
continues Crowley’s investigation into the ethical issues surrounding organ procurement
and transplant. Using participant observation, interviews, analysis of hospital records, and
popular media materials, Crowley interprets kidney transplant experiences among
medical staff, patients, and patients’ families in three socio-economically distinct
hospitals in Mexico. Crowley draws on Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s “body-self, social
body and body politic” as frame work for interpreting the visions of the human body that
transplant promotes, the notions of value that transplant implies, and how transplant
intersects with existing local/global inequalities.
Mexico
Guadalajara
Organ transplant
The body
Value
Medical anthropology
Gates, Hill. 1996.
Buying Brides in China-Again. Anthropology Today 12(4):8-11.
Gates ponders the connections between past and present China in order to
contextualize the current outbreak of trafficking in women. She argues that attention to
the well-established indigenous petty capitalism, and an understanding of the overall
trajectory of change in China, are indispensable in unpacking this growing human rights
infringement.
China
Mail order brides
Sex-trafficking
Capitalism
91
Cultural anthropology
Hasnath, Syed Abu and Bimal Kanti Paul. 2000.
Trafficking in Bangladeshi Women and Girls. Geographic Review 90(2):268-276.
Geographers Hasnath and Paul examine the illegal trafficking of women and girls
from Bangladesh to neighboring and Middle Eastern countries where they become a
commodity for sale in sex markets. The authors shed light on the extent and routes of the
trafficking including tracing where the women and girls come from and to which
countries they are being sent. Research is based on a combination of newspapers and
magazines from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, field research, and interviews.
Bangladesh
Global
Women and girls
Sex-markets
Sex-trafficking
Geography
Joralemon, Donald. 1995.
Organ Wars: The Battle for Body Parts. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9(3):335-356.
Joralemon discusses transplant surgeries’ contribution to conceptions of the body
as a collection of replaceable parts, as well as cultural resistance to such conceptions.
Claiming that cultural aversion to transplant has caused the medical community to peddle
social values as justification for transplant surgery, Joralemon addresses the tension
between altruism and individual rights. Joralemon sees this binary as the ideological
equivalent of immunosuppressant drugs taken to prevent the cultural rejection of
transplantation.
United States
Biomedicine
Organ transplant
Social values
Ethics
Medical anthropology
Koenig, Barbara A. and Linda F. Hogle. 1995.
Organ Transplantation (Re)Examined? Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9(3):393-397.
Koenig examines the acceptance of organ transplantation into the genre of
standard therapy in western civilization since the 1970’s. Such acceptance, Koenig
suggests, is proof of a larger transformation in individual conceptions of the body and
self. Koenig offers a brief critique of Donald Joralemon and Lesley Sharp’s contribution
to medical anthropology, commending them for their ethnographic approach on
transplant research but urging them to push their research further.
92
Western society
Theoretical
Organ transplantation
Body commodification
Medical anthropology
Merry, Sally Engle. 2005.
Anthropology and Activism: Researching Human Rights Across Porous Boundaries.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(2):240-257.
Merry addresses the relationship or, “porosity” of the borders between activism
and research in cultural anthropology. Her article discusses the consequences of
anthropology’s recent entry into the human rights scene, as well as anthropology’s role in
modernity.
Comparative
Theoretical
Ethics
Activism
Modernity
Human rights anthropology
Robins, Steven. 1996.
On the Call for a Militant Anthropology: The Complexity of “Doing the Right Thing”.
Current Anthropology 37(2):241-346.
By identifying himself as a South African anthropologist trained at the University
of Cape Town, Robins establishes himself as someone qualified to refute Nancy ScheperHughes’ condemnation of anthropology’s inaction during apartheid. Though sympathetic
to Scheper-Hughes’ call for a more aggressive and politically engaged anthropology,
Robins attacks Scheper-Hughes for failing to investigate the actions of South African
anthropologists during apartheid before condemning them for their inaction. Pointing to
anthropological contributions made to South Africa in the field, in publications, and in
lecture halls, Robins defends the anthropologist’s choice to take action in ways other than
directly challenging the state.
South Africa
Review
Ethics
Human rights
Cultural anthropology
Rosga, AnnJanette. 2005.
93
The Traffic in Children: The Funding of Translation and the Translation of Funding.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(2):258-281.
In 2002, Child Rights International and Children of the World partnered to
conduct a study of the nature and extent of child trafficking in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a
study for which Rosga soon became the “international technical consultant”. In this
article, Rosga addresses the conditions of knowledge production involved in conducting
an intensive study on a taboo topic in a post-communist country. She discusses the
process of designing and implementing the study, focusing on conditions of knowledge
production, translation, and transmission.
Eastern Europe
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Sex-trafficking
Expert knowledge
Policy
Human rights anthropology
Sharp, Lesley A.2000.
The Commodification of the Body and its Parts. Annual Review of Anthropology
29:287-328.
In this review article, Sharp explores the significance of the body within
anthropology and the definition of a body part. She lays the ground work for a larger
discussion on theoretical approaches to commodification within anthropology. Sharp
discusses historically well-documented forms of body commodification such as
oppressive labor practices and advocates for the inclusion of an ethics of body
commodification within the field of cultural anthropology.
Theoretical
Embodiment
Body commodification
Science and technology
Medical ethics
Medical anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995.
The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current
Anthropology 36(3):409-440.
Drawing on her experiences studying social conflict in Brazil and South Africa,
Scheper-Hughes argues that anthropologists have an ethical responsibility to be not only
researchers, but spokespeople and activists for the communities they study. Claiming that
political and moral engagement are much nobler goals than objectivity, Scheper-Hughes
condemns anthropologists for squeezing villages dry for research purposes and then
leaving villagers to fend for themselves. Scheper-Hughes equates cultural relativism and
moral relativism, condemning anthropological approaches that allow for human rights
94
violations in the name of cultural sensitivity, and she calls for a “militant anthropology”
that not only studies injustice but openly fights it as well.
Brazil
South Africa
Cultural relativism
Moral relativism
Applied anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1996.
Theft of Life: The Globalization of Organ Stealing Rumours. Anthropology Today
12(3):3-11.
Scheper-Hughes examines the nature and circulation of rumors in the Third World
regarding kidnapping, mutilation, dismemberment, blood- and organ stealing. Her
primary research is situated in the shantytowns of Brazil, with subsequent examples from
the Southern Cone, South Africa, Europe, and Asia. Scheper-Hughes focuses on the
metaphorical nature of such “urban legends” as well as their potential for truth.
Brazil
Comparative
Organ stealing rumors
Medical anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002.
The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs. SAIS
Review 22(1):61-80.
Scheper-Hughes comments on global market capitalism’s reduction of human
beings, their parts, and their labor to objects, which can be bought, sold, traded, and
stolen. This article draws from Scheper-Hughes’ field work in Brazil and discusses how
“commodity fetishism” in the new global economy contributes to the illicit trafficking of
organs, particularly those belonging to marginalized peoples.
Brazil
Organ-trafficking
Body commodification
Global economy
Medical anthropology
Human rights anthropology
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004.
95
Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-Trafficking Underworld.
Ethnography 5(1):29-73.
In this journalistic essay, Scheper-Hughes reports on the ethical, ethnographic, and
political dilemmas she experienced during her undercover exploration of the illegal
activities surrounding the traffic in humans and their body parts. Scheper-Hughes tracked
crime rings through North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The majority of the article, however, is spent discussing the ethical issues raised by this
“militant” kind of anthropology.
Comparative
Organ-trafficking
Undercover ethnography
Hybrid research
Ethics
Activist anthropology
Zarembka, Joy M. 2000.
America’s Dirty Work: Migrant Maids and Modern-Day Slavery. In Global Woman:
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie
Russel Hochschild, eds. Pp.142-153. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Though Zarembka’s background is in international relations, her approach to
research is sociological in nature, shaped by her Kenyan mother’s personal experiences
as a migrant worker. This article draws on examples of migrant workers whose hopes for
a better life lead them to accept deceptive job offers in the United States. Using such case
studies as models, Zarembka demonstrates how manipulation and deception on the parts
of American solicitors contribute to modern-day slavery, trafficking, and migrant
domestic worker abuse. Additionally, Zarembka addresses how the new global economy
permits transnational actors in developed countries to traffic people with the same ease as
they would transport any other commodity.
United States
Migration
Labor
Slavery
Global economy
Human rights study
Modernization and Ethnic Minorities in China
Chen Shiuan-Ju
China is a nation with more than one hundred minority ethnic groups. Integrating
those minority groups under one single national structure has been an important goal of
96
every Chinese dynasty, including modern China. Since 1949, the ruling regime, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has decided to modernize those groups. Modernization
will help to accommodate different cultures by rising living standards in those regions
and increasing interactions between the minorities and the Han people. With fewer
cultural differences, the CCP expects greater social harmony and a united nation.
Therefore, when discussing about the relationship between modernization and minority
ethnic groups in China, governmental policies play an important role.
Modernization policies, however, bring potential risks. Economically, the CCP
currently incorporates minority groups into a national economic plan by assigning them
certain roles. This plan defines their status regarding other parts of China. Despite the
original economic activities, some regions become the natural resource bases for coastal
cities, while some develop tourism to meet the desires of the Han people and foreigners.
Those economic developments bring not only material improvement but also social risks
within the minority groups. For example, language education becomes a prominent
problem for the minorities. Learning Chinese gives minority people more opportunities of
gaining economic welfare, but the ethnic languages might be sacrificed.
Moreover, Han culture may dominate the ethnic cultures by creating internal
orientalism, which means minority ethnic groups are exotic and “others” to Han culture.
The CCP builds museums and villages for exhibiting those “official” minority cultures,
especially in regions where ethnic tourism is developing. With the fear of losing minority
cultures, minority groups strengthen their ethnic identities and resist to cultural
integration and modernization. The struggle between preserving cultures and
modernization is a dilemma for those groups. For example, when the local village asks
97
Tibetan women to perform traditional ceremonies for tourists, they are deprived of the
right to pursue modernity. Growing anxiety of losing self-definition of minority people
serves as a risk in modern China.
Most current research in cultural anthropology on China’s modernization and ethnic
minorities focuses on the negative effects of modernization on ethnic cultures. It is
unlikely, however, that all changes are negative. The risks of ethnic cultures of resisting
modernization is also worthy of research to provide a more complete picture.
Crossovers, who accept both local culture and Han culture, also deserve further
research. Compared to people who live in ethnic societies for all their lives, crossovers
have greater dynamics of shifting their identities between the mainstream society and
ethnic groups. Therefore, as part of both groups, crossovers can influence the future
relationship between their ethnic groups and the Han society.
Internal orientalism and the preservation of minority cultures are the most important
issues of China’s modernization. In spite of the stereotype that government has the
greatest power to determine the results of the issues, minority groups and individuals now
have more power participating in the process of modernization and they are also
important actors in deciding the future of ethnic minorities in China.
Annotated Bibliography
Adams, Vincanne. 1996.
Karaoke as Modern Lhasa, Tibet: the Western Encounters with Cultural Politics. Cultural
Anthropology 11(4):510-546.
This article discusses Tibet modernization. Karaoke is a fashion in Lhasa, the capital
of Tibet. Karaoke is a symbol of modernization. Thus, to accept Karaoke means to accept
part of modernization. However, embracing Karaoke also invokes worries of Western
cultural intervention and loss of traditional culture since Karaoke is a western product.
98
With closer observation, the author thinks the risk of losing traditional cultural does not
exist because Tibetans do not forget their traditional songs after learning Han or foreign
music.
China
Tibet
Karaoke
Modernization
Cultural anthropology
Adams, Vincanne. 2005.
Saving Tibet? An Inquiry into Modernity, Lies, Truths, and Beliefs. Medical
Anthropology 24:71-110.
New technologies such as television and magazines facilitate governmental
propaganda of modern Tibet Autonomous Regions. The government’s suppression forces
the Tibetans to say what the governmental propaganda wants them to say. Since the
official propaganda is inconsistent with Tibetan’s perception of the facts, Tibetans
separate the government’s mandate to lie from their beliefs in order to accept it. By doing
this, Tibetans are not morally responsible for telling the lies, which are the governmental
propaganda.
China
Tibet
Modernity
Belief
Medical anthropology
Bulag, Uradyn E. 2000
Ethnic Resistance with Socialist Characteristics. In Chinese Society: Change, Conflict,
and Resistance. Elizabeth J. Perry. Mark, Selden. eds. Pp178-197. London; New York:
Routledge.
Though focusing on Inner Mongolia, the author states a general picture of the
relationship between the minority and national development. After 1989, Communist
regime forces the minorities to accept economic developments according to the needs of
the coastal cities. This policy is regarded as inner colonialism, which puts minorities in a
lower status compared to Han people. In order to complete with Han people, Mongolians
need to learn Chinese as well as Han culture. Economic development and modernization
thus results in the loss of their original languages and cultures.
China
Mongolia
Inner orientalism
Economic development
Ethnic resistance
99
Anthropology
Bulag, Uradyn E. 2003.
Mongolian Ethnicity and Linguistic Anxiety in China. American Anthropologist
105(4):753-764.
Because of increasing interactions with the dominant society and growing Chinese
immigrants in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), Mongolians need to
increase their competency by learning Chinese. However, with the loss of their original
language, Mongolians seem to loss their identity. Though Mongolian courses are offered
now, the balance between Mongolian and Chinese remains the problem. Learning
Chinese is the market-oriented demand while keeping Mongolian is important for cultural
preservation.
China
Mongolia Autonomous Region
Language policy
Identity
Cultural anthropology
Gladney, Dru C. 2004.
Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chinese nationality was built upon the majority identity-Han ren (Han people) and
many ethnic minorities. The government in China constructs ethnicity in binary minority/
majority terms. Han represents modernity, normality and unexotic while the minority
represents the colorful, erotic, and exotic. China’s policy toward the minorities is termed
as “internal colonialism” because the minority groups are still defined by the dominant
groups.
China
Han ren
Minority identity
Representation
Cultural politics
Cultural anthropology
Hillman, Ven. 2003.
Paradise under Construction: Minorities, Myths and Modernity in Northwest Yunnan.
Asian Ethnicity 4(2):175-190.
Zhongdian County is one of three counties constituting the Diqing Tibetan
Autonomous Prefecture. It was renamed as Shangri-la for developing tourism. The whole
town was constructed according to the Han people’s imagination of an exotic Tibetan
village. Even though the government represents a specific image of Tibetan culture to
100
tourists, which the author called “on stage” performance, Tibetans keeps performing their
ethnicity in an “off stage” platform. The continuing performance of ethnicity contests the
official version of ethnicity.
China
Northwest Yunnan
Tibet
Ethnic tourism
Cultural performance
Cultural anthropology
Hjorleifur, Jonsson. 2000.
Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands.
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 65(1):56-82.
Yao is a minority ethnic group living in South West China. They used to be rebels to
Chinese regime. After the modern state was built, their relationship was redefined
because of the Chinese government’s policy of building museums and documenting
history. The policy defines cultural differences for the purpose of nation building. By
doing this, the state becomes the cultural framework and the minority cultures are
reconstructed within it.
Southwest China
Upland Yao
Museumizing
Minority identity
Modern state
Anthropology
Janes, Craig R. 1999.
Imagined Lives, Suffering and the Work of Culture: the Embodied Discourses of Conflict
in Modern Tibet. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13(4):391-412.
“Rlung” in Tibetan culture means the balance of the body and mind. The imbalance
brings physical illness, which happens during the modernization of Tibet. The imbalance
is caused by the personal and social suffering that reflects the mix of classical Buddhist
ontology with the modern politics of Tibetan identity. Thus, cosmopolitan ideas about the
natures of Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese modernity shape contemporary Tibetan
cultural patterns.
China
Lhasa
Tibet
Rlung disorder
Modernization
Ethnomedicine
101
Jing, Ma. 2003.
Transformation of the Social Organization of Some Minority Ethnic Groups in Yunnan
over the Past Fifty Years. Chinese sociology and anthropology 35(3):10-36.
The research is conducted in three Yunnan minority groups. Since the reform and
opening policy of China, reconciliation and conflicts between different ethnic groups
occur often. Social organizations control conflicts by coordinating tradition and
modernity. But ethnic identities are also strengthened by identifying self and others
during the conflicts. Therefore, with growing self-ethnic awareness, the creation of a
unifying national identity becomes harder.
China
Yunnan
Minority ethnic groups
Social organization
Economic development
Modernization
Anthropology
Litzinger, Ralph A. 1998.
Memory Work: Reconstituting the Ethnic in Post-Mao China. Cultural Anthropology.
13(2): 224-255.
National identity is transforming in China today. By bridging the past, present, and the
future, minority groups find their past history and act as participants in the main cultures.
This transtion may turn the ethnic minorities from an unstable factor into active
particiapants, which results in reshpaing China politics. The author uses the ethnic
minority Yao as an example to illustrate the identity shift process.
Southern China
Yao
Minority ethnics
National identity
Memory
Cultural anthropology
Litzinger, Ralph A. 2000.
Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging. Duke University Press.
This book discusses the change of Yao society from Cultural Revolution to 1990s.
Yao identity becomes complex because Yao’s relative status to main Chinese society is
still changing. Relocating and redefining the place of ethnic minority by the government
keeps influencing Yao’s identity and national belonging. Though Yao sees itself as part
of Chinese society now, some Yaos are unsatisfied about being treated as a reactionary
force in Chinese history.
102
China
Yao
Relocating
Identity
National belonging
Anthropology
McCormick, Barrett L. Su Shaozhi. Xiao Xiaoming. 1992.
The 1989 Democracy Movement: A Review of the Prospects for Civil Society in China.
Pacific Affairs 65(2):182-202.
Chinese civil society has been forming since 1989. Democratic movement can be dated
back to May Fourth movement in 1919. The author identifies the role of economic
development, changes of social structure, and intellectual attitude as important factors of
emerging Chinese civil society. The author also compares East European countries with
China.
China
Civil society
Democratic movements
Tiananmen Square
May Forth movements, 1919
Eastern Europe
McKhann, Charlse. 1995.
The Naxi and the nationalities Questions. In Cultural encounters on China’s Ethnic
Frontiers. Stevan Harrell ed. Pp: 29-62. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
The author examines the nationality questions from the division of a single ethnicity,
Naxi, as Naxi and Mosuo. The author claims that the distinction is a result of policy
imposition. The argument here is not about whether the Naxi and Mosuo are the same
ethnic or not, but about the awareness of the man-made category, which may confuse the
national identities of the minority groups.
China
Naxi
Mosuo
National identity
Mackerras, Colin. 2003.
China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalization. London; New York: Routledge Curzon.
The two minorities, the Uyghurs in Xinjian and Tibetans of Tibet, form secessionist
movements in China. The state tries to integrate those minorities into the national
framework by imposing economic development policies. The rising living standard in
103
Tibet and Inner Mongolia decreased separatist movements in the 1990s. Globalization,
however, gradually diminishes cultural differences, which makes people want to preserve
their local cultures and strengthens separatist movements of Uyghur.
China
Xinjian
Uyghur
Tibet
Globalization
Separation movement
Makley, E. Charlene. 2003.
Gendered Boundaries in Motion: Space and Identity on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier.
American Ethnologist 30(4): 597-6l9.
Females are important for maintaining Tibet ethnic identity under various assimilation
pressures. Nowadays, young Tibetan men leave home searching for futures in the
Chinese state. Tibetan women are given the burden of maintaining the traditional culture
among Han and foreign tourists. Thus, Tibetan women distinguish Tibetans from the
outsiders, helping to maintain Tibetan identity and traditional culture.
China
Tibet
Gender
Ethnic identity
Assimilation
Schein, Louisa. 1997.
Gender and Internal Orientalism in China. Modern China. 23(1): 69-98.
Internal orientalism is culturally imagined domination among different ethnics, which
is brought by recent development of tourism in Kaili, Guizhou. As part of developing
tourism, the village forces Miao women to perform traditional dancing and singing for
male Han observers. The performance of traditional culture has an implication: by
defining the performance as part of minority traditional cultures, those minority groups
and females are frozen in time and cannot pursue modernity.
China
Miao
Internal orientalism
Ethnic tourism
Gender
Modernity
Cultural anthropology
104
Schein, Louisa. 1999.
Performing Modernity. Cultural Anthropology 14(3):361-395.
The author presents his observation of Miao weddings in Xinjian. The wedding was a
mixture of traditions and modernity from the set up of the new room and the constitution
of participants. Many participants were crossovers, who performed both the tradition and
modernity. Aside from the wedding, performing traditional culture for the public also
represents the modernized Miao identity. Crossovers and the cultural performance show
that to maintain traditional culture does not contradict modernity.
China
Xinjian
Miao
Cultural performance
Modernity
Cultural anthropology
Schein, Louisa. 2000.
Minority rules: the Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics. Durham. Duke
University Press.
After 1949, China government re-categorized the minority groups because of the
needs of nation building and economic development. Growing economics in the minority
regions draws attentions from foreigners. Those foreigners’ interests of minority culture
stimulate the development of ethnic tourism. In order to improve tourism’s quality for
attracting more tourists, those regions pursue modernization.
China
Guizhou
Miao
Minority culture
Modernization
Cultural anthropology
Tapp, Nicholas. 2002.
In Defense of the Archaic: A reconsideration of the 1950s Ethnic classification Project in
China. Asian Ethnicity 3(1):63-86.
Ethnic classification in 1950s was dominated by the state and minority elites. It
served a particular cultural nationalism. It brought several effects. First, it privileged
ethnic elites. People who can speak Mandarin can deliver their opinions. Second, falsely
categorizing minority groups altered the size and formation of existing minority groups
and created confusion of identities. Third, the formalized classification intervened in
local processes of cultural affiliation and separation by freezing social process, which
could originally be more fluid and mobile.
China
105
Ethnic classification
Cultural essentialism
History
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui.1988.
The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order. Cultural Anthropology 3(4):
408-427.
This article analyzes the differences of the ancient Chinese political order and modern
political order. New Life Movement of the Chiang Kei-Sheik regime, the Cultural
Revolution during the Mao’s period, and redistributive economy of the community
regime were all measures taken for the purpose of modernization. But those measures
promoted values, which collided with traditional culture and thus cut off the relationship
between the state and the traditional ethics.
China
Modernization
Political order
Cultural anthropology
Shades of Pink: Socialist Views and Morals in Post Socialist Romania
Sophia Lungu
The goal of this study was to examine culture, risk and security in everyday life in
post-socialist Romania. The research question which I seek to answer through this study
is: How do communist values and ideology affect people’s lives in Romania today,
fifteen years after the collapse of the communist regime? I have researched and analyzed
the writings of anthropologists, political scientists, sociologist, and economists.
My research on the anthropological literature about Romania reveals that Verdery
(1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999), is a major contributor. She has written extensively
on topics such as ethnic conflicts (Romanian-Germans, Romanians-Hungarians,
Romanians and Roma/Gypsies) as well as post-socialists issues such as redistribution and
political nationalism. Kligman’s work concerns women’s status in society and,
106
concentrates women’s reproductive rights under, communist Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu
(1998). She has also pursed these topics with Gal (Gal and Kligman 2000).
Some anthropological and sociological research has addressed people’s memories
of the transition from communism and how the transition affects people’s lives today.
Theoretically important to my study are Connerton’s piece on collective memory various
historical eras, such as the French Revolution and the Crusades (1989) and Watson’s
writing on memories in communist China (1994). Esbenshade has also been a key
contributor by exploring what post-socialist government chose to remember in EastCentral Europe (1995).
Most of the anthropological and related research on the post-socialist world in
Eastern Europe has concentrated on states rather than people. It thus lacks important
information about the cultural impact of communism on contemporary people’s lives in
post-communist context. The focus on more macro political trends was prompted, at least
in part, by the opportunity of studying this unique aspect of political change. The
dominant focus on the state, however, should be shifted to a central focus on people.
Along this line, Kligman and Verdery are beginning to undertake research that is more
people-close; an example is Kligman’s (1998) study on reproduction and Verdery’s
(1999) study of reburial as an act of post-socialist change.
Annotated Bibliography
Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Verdery. Eds. 1999.
Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Post socialist World Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
This is a collection of ethnographies studies and documents, cultural change in
post-socialist, Russia and Eastern Europe. Authors include anthropologists, political
107
scientists and a sociologist. Chapters describe local responses to institution
transformations in Russia, Romania, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, in this time of
transition.
Eastern Europe
Post-socialism
Democracy
Cultural anthropology
Political science
Sociology
Connerton, Paul. 1989.
How Societies Remember (Themes in Social Science). New York: Cambridge University
Press
This book provides an innovative introduction to social memory. It concentrates
on how incorporated practices become traditions. The author argues that images and
recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed through performance rituals and
commemorative practices, thus becoming traditions.
Theoretical
Social memory
Recollected knowledge
Commemorative rituals
Social psychology
Drazin, Adam. 2002
Chasing Moths: Cleanliness Intimacy and Progress in Romanian. In Ruth Mandel and
Caroline Humphrey, eds. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-Socialism New
York: Berg Publishers 2002, 101-126
This ethnographic study emphasizes domestic life in Romania. Focusing on post
socialist changes in attitudes towards practices of cleaning and decorating the home in
relation to international markets and influences. Demonstrating how products sold by
Amway can be used to analyze domestic economic change in Romania, Drazin illustrates
an image of change in the economy. Drazin explores how the symbolism of cleanliness
became essential to Romania’s transition to democracy.
Romania
Nationalism
Consumption practices
Symbolism
Markets
Esbenshade, Richard S. 1995.
108
Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe. Representations 49,
Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Before and After 1989. University of
California Press. 72-96
This essay deals with the selective memory of former socialist governments in
Eastern Europe. Specifically Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany.
Analyzing methods of memory, Esbenshade looks at what states chose to remember.
Restorations and compensation of the governments to the people in these countries has
allowed for progression toward democracy.
Hungary
Poland
East Germany
Comparative
Memory
Sociology
Field, John. 2003.
Social Capital. New York: Routledge
Field introduces social capital. He discuses the concept’s roots in the ideas of
Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman and Robert Putman. This work focuses on the effect of
social capital on society and government institutions. Defining social capital as based in
social networks, Field emphasizes the importance of social relationships to access vital
resources in society.
Theoretical
Social capital
Social networks
Access to resources
Sociology
Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. Eds. 2000
The Politics of Gender after Socialism A Comparative Historical Essay. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press
This book offers an analysis that integrates gender into the understanding of rapid
transformation of Eastern Europe. The study seeks to centralize gender rights into the
greater process of transformation by focusing on two questions: how gender relations and
ideas about gender shape political and economic change in the region, and what forms of
gender inequality are being shaped.
Eastern Europe
Comparative
Theory
Socialism
Gender
109
Cultural anthropology
Gupta, Akhil.1995
Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the
Imagined State. American Ethnologist, 22 (2): 375 – 402.
Gupta analyzes discourse about contemporary corruption of translocal
institutions, within the context of India. Examining the practices of lower level
bureaucrats in a small north Indian town as well as the mass media on the state level,
Gupta focuses on the European distinctions between state and civil society, and how the
notions apply to his case study.
India
Public culture
Discourse
Corruption
Cultural anthropology
Humphrey, Caroline. 1994
Remembering an “Enemy”: The Bogd Khann in Twentieth-Century Mongolia in Rubie
Watson. Ed. Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism. Santa Fe, New
Mexico: School of American Research Press
Developing the idea of “evocative transcript” as a method of memory, to explain
the notion of “non-oppositional opposition. As a common resource that is available to
everyone in Mongolian society. Humphrey demonstrates how jokes, written texts and
various actions may invoke a double life in which anyone may be come suspect or victim,
in a former socialist environment.
Western Asia
Mongolia
Theory
Memory
Discourse
Post socialist
Cultural anthropology
Humphrey, Caroline. 1999
Traders, “Disorders,” and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia in Michael Burawoy
and Katherine Verdery, eds. 1999. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the
Post socialist World. Lanham Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
This chapter describes the proliferation of Russian traders in Buryatia Russia, to
new private conglomerates. Humphrey analyzes the source of popular anxiety in postsocialist Russia. Reflecting. Illustrating how the breakdown of Soviet structures has lead
110
to the redistribution of collective, causing old interests to break down around new
economic interest and hybrid institutions to emerge.
Russia
Economic change
Governmental policy
Socialist
Cultural anthropology
Kligman, Gail. 1998.
The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania Berkeley:
University of California Press
Analyzing the role of key figures, Kligman examines the reproductive policies of
the Ceausescu regime and the population’s response. She draws connections between
official polices under Ceausescu and the steps post socialist leaders took to change those
polices.
Romania
Reproductive
Government policy
Post socialism
Cultural anthropology
Lancranjan, Ion. Katherine Verdery translated in 1996
Patriotism: A Vital Necessity In Gale Stokes ed. 1996 From Stalinism to Pluralism: A
Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press
Inc. New York, York.
Writing for a Romanian audience about nationalism during Ceausescu rein,
Lancranjan emphasizes characteristics, which are common to nationalist discourse in the
context of increasing ethnic tensions between the Hungarians and Romanians in
Transylvania. The chapter focuses on heroism, self-sacrifices and victimization as
characteristics of the nationalism
Eastern Europe
Romania
Hungary
Theory
Nationalism
Ethnic tensions
Sociology
Mandel, Ruth and Caroline Humphrey, eds. 2002.
Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-Socialism New York: Berg
111
Chapters in this collection of ethnographies address the effects of “shock therapy”
in Russian and Eastern European markets. An underlying theme is the contradictions
between the old, socialist moral values, and the new world market economies. This
collection offers a glimpse into the harsh realities of life after socialism, through an
anthropological perspective.
Eastern Europe
Russia
Moral values
Socialist
Shock therapy
Economy
Cultural anthropology
O’Rourke, P.J. 2000.
Dispatch: The Godfather Decade. An Encounter with Post-Soviet Corruption. Foreign
Policy 121: 74-80.
Analyzing the media in Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, O’Rourke highlights
corruption in the post-soviet era. He discusses Hungary’s capitalistic pigs, Romania’s
cigarette colonels, and Ukraine’s red emotions. The article emphasizes the downturn of
the countries with the fall of communism as an open gate for corruption.
Eastern Europe
Romania
Hungry
Ukraine
Comparative
Corruption
Media
Post socialism
Sociology
Roman, Denise 2003.
Fragmented Identities: Popular Culture, Sex, and Everyday Life in Post-communist
Romania. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books
Through Roman’s unique perspective as a native and scholar she depicts life in
post-socialist Romania. This book focuses on the transformation of identity of the
Romanian people in response to the west and to the end of socialism in the country.
Romania
Narrative
Post socialism
Transformation
Identity
112
Verdery, Katherine. 1991
Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the “Transition”. American Ethnologist 18 (3): 419439
Highlighting the theoretical model of socialism used in her work in Romania,
Verdery compares the ideas of several social theorists who have modified Marxism in
order to analyze Eastern Europe. Verdery takes advantage of the opportunity to observe
Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy from socialism, as internal organizations
reconfigure their place within the global community.
Eastern Europe
Theory
Post socialism
Political economy
Cultural politics
Social change
Cultural and political anthropology
Verdery, Katherine. 1993.
Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post Socialist Romania. Slavic
Review 52 (2): 179-203
Offering alternatives to ancient hatred as an explanation of nationalism and
national sentiment in Eastern Europe, Verdery disagrees with the notion that socialism
suppressed intra-state ethnic conflict. Instead she insists that socialism aggravated the
issue. She also considers how democratic politics and market economies highlighted the
issues of inter-ethnic group problems in post socialist Romania.
Eastern Europe
Theory
Nationalism
Inter-ethnic tensions
Post socialism
Cultural and political anthropology
Verdery, Katherine. 1994.
Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe. Social Text, 38: 1- 19
Verdery defines transnationalism in the context of Eastern Europe, specifically in
Romania, building upon Arujn Appadurai’s work. She defines transnationalism as
“process taking place across state borders.” Verdery emphasizes that national is of
necessity transitionally constituted. This report highlights the difficulty which Romania
as state and various ethnic groups face in
coming together as a nation.
113
Eastern Europe
Romania
Theory
Transnationalism
Post socialism
Cultural and political anthropology
Verdery, Katherine. 1995.
National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's
Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press
An ethno-history of intellectual discourse, Verdery’s study is grounded in
contemporary theory. Questioning national identity and nationalism, she examines
cultural changes and ethnic tensions through the current transformations in Romania.
Verdery discuses how the actions of the intellectuals undermined Ceausescu’s regime.
Romania
Contemporary theory
Post socialism
Nationalism
Intellectuals
Social transformations
Cultural and political anthropology
Verdery, Katherine. 1998.
Transationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe Since 1989.
American Ethnologist, 25 (8): 291-306.
Verdery examines the themes of transtionalism, nationalism, and cultural identity.
By treating transtionalism and nationalism as mutually constitutive, Verdery argues that
the two ideals shape simultaneously and sequentially, as well as emphasizing how
transtionalism nationalizes. Focusing on the topics of citizenship and property in Eastern
Europe, she illustrates the challenges of transnationalism and nationalism occurring in
Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe
Theory
Nationalism
National identity
Citizen property rights
Post socialism
Cultural and political anthropology
Verdery, Katherine. 1999.
114
The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post- Socialist Change. New York:
Columbia University Press
Growing out of the 1997 Harriman Lectures, Verdery’s book. Focuses on two
cases studies, which symbolize change and acceptance of a new era in post-socialist
Europe. Verdery illustrates the transition, which is occurring in Romania and the former
Yugoslavia, through the reburial of important people as a process of reconciliation with
the socialist era.
Eastern Europe
Romania
Yugoslavia
Comparative
Social change
Cultural and political anthropology
Watson, Rubie S. ed. 1994.
Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School
of American Research Press.
A result of a workshop held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, this collection of ethnographic studies address memories of socialist life in
various contexts including: Mongolia, Post-Mao China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and
Georgia. Chapter focus on the differences between official histories and the history which
is remembered by the people.
China
Mongolia
Georgia
Eastern Europe
Yugoslavia
Czechoslovakia
Memory
Socialist
Cultural anthropology
Socially Constructed Identity Categories and Decision-Makers’ Approach to Risk
Management
Jacqueline S. Johnson
In exploring the relationships between culture, risk and security in various cultural
contexts, one inevitably discovers human communities’ vulnerability to risk and security.
Identity criteria such as race, ethnicity, indigenousness and/or class shape people’s
115
experiences of risk and security. My research examines if and how identity criteria
influence risk and security agents such as public policy makers’ decision-making
processes.
For the most part, my findings suggest that identity criteria strongly influence
decision-making practices of policy makers. One way to conceptualize how race,
ethnicity, indigenousness and/or class affect determinants of risk and security is to view
the identity criteria as social constructs. Social constructs relate to the social realities and
categories that societies create to characterize human differences, maintain social order in
societies and effectuate power (Brodkin, 2000; Harrison, 1995). Identity criteria as social
constructs create exclusionary relationships in the decision making process, contending
that certain communities are more vulnerable than others to risk and security. For
example, several authors highlight the historical precedence of racism and its
discriminatory practices to explain public policy makers’ lack of response to
environmental racism, resulting in the persistence of environmental injustice. Authors
such as Lipuma and Metzoff (2005) and Field (2003) focus on the intersecting social
structures of class and ethnicity to suggest that limited economic power and access to
resources often exclude minorities from certain public policy decision-making processes.
On the international level, Michael Barnett explores international bureaucracies’
indifference toward implementing policies that reduce violence and conflict (1997).
Barnett’s investigation of the United Nations’ indifference toward the Rwandan genocide
is due, in large part, to the interests of Rwanda being situated outside the scope of the
interests of the international community. Several authors also suggest that
116
indigenousness influence policy makers’ in that policy-makers rely on expert knowledge
in implementing policies for local communities (Kirsch, 2001; Stephen 2002).
As the previously mentioned sources pinpoint unfavorable effects when policy
makers consider identity criteria, I found several sources that suggest focusing on identity
criteria may be conducive to public policy makers’ decision-making practices. For
example, Buttedahl urges policymakers to consider race, class and indigenousness as
human security concerns (1997). Buttedahl supports her claim by suggesting that policy
makers’ consideration of such identity criteria will reduce incidents of human conflict. In
Color-coded Cures, Kingland examines how medicines and cures based on biological
factors could eventually affect health policies and possibly stem research toward
improving health conditions of ethnic minority communities (2006).
Are certain populations marginalized when identity criteria is considered in public
policy decision-making processes? What are the alternatives to considering identity
criteria in the decision-making process? How shall anthropologists get involved (or do
ethnographies) in the decision making process to identify and describe human groups
most vulnerable to risk and security? As existing research suggests policy makers’
decisions are influenced by identity criteria, future research should further investigate the
inquiries previously cited to advance discussions relating to communities’ vulnerability to
risk and security.
Annotated Bibliography
Austin, Regina and Michael Schill 1994
Black, Brown, Red and Poisoned. In Unequal Protection. Robert Bullard, ed. Pp. 53-76.
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Austin and Schill’s legal discussion addresses the challenges such as covert
indoctrinated practices and laws that communities of color face in their fight for
117
environmental justice. The authors establish their findings based on viewpoints expressed
by individuals and various organizations involved in the environmental justice
movement. Among several arguments the authors make, they suggest that the
environmental decision-making process excludes minorities and that the mainstream
environmental organizations’ goals often overshadow grassroots organizations’ goals.
Comparative/general environmental racism
Grassroots organization
Mainstream organizations
Legal studies
Barnett, Michael N. 1997
The U.N. Security Council, Indifference and Genocide in Rwanda. Current
Anthropology 12(4): 551-578.
Barnett asserts that bureaucratic indifference toward peacemaking efforts in civil
war-ravaged Rwanda stem from Rwandan “security interests” being outside of the
international community bureaucracies’ “interests.” Interests of bureaucracies are
influenced by but are not limited to economic and political power, and identity criteria
such as race, religion and gender. Barnett uses data and documentation collected while
serving as a political advisor for the mandated United Nations Assistance Mission in
Rwanda.
Rwanda
Civil war
Peacekeeping
Bureaucratic indifference
Political science
Cultural anthropology
Brodkin, Karen 2000
Global Capitalism: What’s Race Got To Do With It? American Ethnologist 27(2): 237256.
Global capitalism shapes the formation of state power and nationalism, which also
affects public policy in the process. Brodkin draws from the case study of Jewish
communities and women in the U.S. capitalist labor-force to develop her argument that
global capitalism is linked to the social constructs of race, class and gender. Brodkin’s
analysis of the historically linked transformations among race, class and gender help
anthropologists conceptualize the mutual relationships of social constructs in global
capitalism.
Comparative/global capitalism
Class
Gender
U.S. Jews
118
Nationalism
Cultural anthropology
Buttedahl, Paz 1997
Viewpoint: True Measures of Human Security. Ottawa: International Development
Research Centre. IDRC: Resources: Books: Reports 22 (3).
Buttedahl’s report suggests the urgent need of a conceptual model that alerts
appropriate national and international actors, early on, of potential conflicts among
human populations. Buttedahl’s proposed conceptual model departs from the traditional
state-centered framework and moves toward a human-centered development and security
framework and a risk analysis framework. The report urges policy makers in their
development of foreign policies to consider and address human security concerns such as
ethnicity, religion, the environment, governance, economy and human rights. Otherwise
incidents of human conflict will occur.
Comparative/global conflict
State-centered framework
Human-security framework
Risk analysis framework
Policy studies
Checker, Melissa 2005
Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern
Town. New York: New York University Press.
Checker uses an innovative anthropological methodology combining archival
research and participatory environmental activism. Her focus is on Hyde Park, a lowincome southern U.S. African-American community in Georgia. Through activist
ethnography, Checker provides scholars and general reading audiences with first hand
knowledge of the environmental injustices that face the Hyde Park community and
similar communities. Checker argues that the historical precedence of racism and its
discriminatory practices contributes to the persistence of environmental injustice.
U.S. South
Environmental (social and ecological) pollution
Environmental injustice
Environmental activism
Environmental racism
Applied anthropology
Farmer, Paul 2004
An Anthropology of Structural Violence. Current Anthropology 45(3): 305-323.
Farmer’s essay on structural violence, as used to describe the cultural context of
an impoverished Haitian community, provides theoretical insights about discriminatory
119
decision-making practices, which affect less powerful people. Structural violence is an
analytical concept used by anthropologists to elucidate the historical embedded social
structures imposed on oppressed communities.
Haiti
Structural violence
Social inequality
Racism
Power
Agency
Medical anthropology
Feinman, Gary M. and Christopher T. Fisher 2005
The Dangers of Ignoring the Evidence: Hurricanes, Hazards and Survival. Anthropology
News 46(8): 20.
Feinman and Fisher assert that a long-term perspective, human decisions,
environment and unintentional consequences must be considered collectively in
responding to situations of catastrophe. The anthropologists’ brief commentary, regarding
the catastrophic events resulting from hurricanes Katrina and Rita may serve as a helpful
research starting point for anthropologists examining decision-makers’ preparedness and
response to disasters, and their possible social biases and blinders.
Theoretical/risk assessment
Catastrophe
Structural violence
Policy
Environment
Applied anthropology
Field, John 2003
Social Capital. New York: Routledge.
Field’s approach to social capital is an analytical tool to conceptualize how social
networks, membership, and contacts affect peoples’ vulnerability to risk and security. For
instance, race and class are considered strong indicators of accessibility to resources and
power; hence, exclusion from public policy development and decision-making processes.
Theoretical/social empowerment
Social capital
Social networks
Sociology
Fosher, Kerry and Stacey Lathrop 1996-2006
120
Human Practices Reveal Problems of Emergency Preparedness: How Anthropologists
Can Respond. Electronic document, http://www.aaanet.org/kat_kosher_lathrop.htm,
accessed March 18.
Planners, policymakers, decision-makers and policy analysts face the challenge of
compiling massive emergency preparedness and response information for situations of
disaster. Fosher and Lathrop draw from experiences of working in emergency situations
to suggest the necessity of emergency response personnel teaming with cultural
anthropologists. Anthropologists may assist in the risk management process by providing
to emergency response personnel a synthesis analysis of the massive information,
including information regarding certain populations’ vulnerability to risk and security.
An anthropological analysis helps reduce gaps between emergency personnel’ language
and concepts, ultimately resulting in the development of more strategic and effective
preparedness and response plans.
Multidisplinary coordination
Disaster response
Applied anthropology
Groskind, Fred 1994
Ideological Influences on Public Support for Assistance to Poor Families. Social Work
39(1): 81-89.
U.S. public support and attitudes regarding public policies are critical factors, or
should be, in the public policy decision-making process. Groskind provides a
sociological analysis of how the public’s views regarding politics, racial or ethnic and
class identity influence Americans’ support or non-support for government aid to lowincome or poor families. Basing his argument on the findings of a national opinion
survey, Groskind suggests that public views are not heavily influenced by class or
economic self-interests. Instead, he finds that political ideas shape the public’s views for
support or non-support of assistance to low-income and poor families.
U.S. political ideologies
Poverty
Racial attitudes
Welfare
Sociology
Harrison, Faye V. 1995
The Persistent Power of “Race” in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.
Annual Review of Anthropology 24:47-74.
In this review article, Harrison explores the complex structural consequences of
race, including anthropologists’ “no-race” biological approach to race discourse.
Harrison’s descriptions of race over time and across cultures attest to the contention that
“race” matters. “Race” is of importance in political and public ideologies, in maintaining
121
social order and in decision-makers’ assumption of oppressive power over less powerful
communities, especially in situations of risk worldwide.
Theoretical/social construction of race
Neo-racism
Neo-racism without races
Scientific antiracism
Racialized ethnicity
Cultural anthropology
Hollander, Gail M. 2006
‘Subject to Control’: Shifting Geographies of Race and Labour in the U.S. Sugar
Agroindustry, 1930-1950. Cultural Geographies 13(2): 266-292.
Hollander analyzes the shift of the sugar agroindustry from south Florida to the
Caribbean job market. Holland uses data collected from historical documents, reports,
and publications of the United States Sugar Corporation (USSC) and the U.S.
government. The analysis shows how the historic process of racialization structures labor
markets. Hollander suggests that embedded racism of the Jim Crow South and the
history of plantation slavery both shape the practices of the USSC, the sugar
agroindustry’s administrator.
South Florida
U.S. Carribean
Agricultural industries
Slavery
Labor market
Cultural studies
Kingsland, James 2006
Colour-coded Cures. New Scientist 186(2503): 42-47.
The phenomenon of race-specific medicines based on ethnic biological features is
a developing controversy among medical and social scientists. Kingsland examines the
case of BiDil, the first ever race-specific medicine to be considered for approval by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA). BiDil is a treatment for heart related
conditions. Based on clinical trials, the treatment appears to work better with African
Americans than among other ethnic groups. As the term “race” continues to spark debate,
medical and social scientists alike express skepticism of BiDil’s beneficial effects. The
ground-breaking medical research has implications for health policy.
U.S. health policy
“Race” or ethnicity groups
Heredity
Medical anthropology
122
Kirsch, Stuart 2001
Environmental Disaster, “Culture Loss,” and the Laws. Current Anthropology 42(2):
167-198.
Kirsh examines tribunal proceedings in response to nuclear weapons testing in the
Marshall Islands to show how indigenous populations’ claims are overshadowed by
“expert knowledge.” Kirsch cites several international court proceedings regarding
indigenous cultural claims around the world. The court proceedings reveal that decisionmakers often rely on expert knowledge based on socially constructed definitions and
terminology in describing and interpreting cultures. As a result, in the event of man-made
disasters, decision-makers overlook indigenous populations’ perception and claims
regarding “culture loss.” Kirsch’s article asserts that expertise influences the creation and
implementation of laws, which often exclude indigenous populations’ viewpoints in
situations of disaster.
Marshall Islands
Cultural loss
Expert knowledge
Indigenous populations
Nuclear weapons testing
Socio-cultural anthropology
Klinenberg, Eric 2002
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Klinenberg’s “social autopsy” offers a “dissection” of the social structures and
layers that contributed to the occurrence of the Chicago heat wave of 1995. Klinenberg,
conducted interviews, observation, and library research to highlight the roles race, class,
place, age and gender played in vulnerability to morbidity and mortality in the 1995 heat
wave. Social and economic inequalities, concentrated areas of affluence and poverty, and
increasing lifestyles of isolation created marked patterns in vulnerability and response.
Klinenberg shows that the “timely and vigorous” response of local governments, media,
organizations and citizens greatly reduces rates of heat-related morbidity and mortality.
U.S. Chicago
Excess death and disease
Natural disaster
Disaster response
Racism
Social inequality
Sociology
Liebow, Edward 1995
123
Inside the Decision-Making Process: Ethnography and Environmental Risk
Management. National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin 16(1):
22-35.
Liebow reviews the ethnographic literature on environmental risk management
and suggests that effective risk assessment requires an “inside” involvement of
laypersons in the decision-making process. Liebow further elaborates that excluding
laypersons or non-specialists who possess, local cultural knowledge, from risk
management processes, worsens vulnerable persons’ experiences in disasters. The article
advises that researchers, in their study of disasters, should get “inside” local decisionmaking processes.
Comparative/general decision-making process
Expert/layperson dichotomy
Local knowledge
Environmental hazards
Applied anthropology
Lipuma, Edward and Meltzoff, Sarah K. 2005
The Crosscurrents of Ethnicity and Class in the Construction of Public Policy. American
Ethnologist 24(1): 114-131.
Lipuma and Meltzoff examine the creation of a land-use plan in the Florida Keys
to demonstrate intersections of ethnicity and class in the plan’s implementation. They
specifically focus on rezoning plans that counter the original plan’s design to curb
development. The rezoning plans would permit tourist and vacation home development
in communities zoned solely for commercial fishermen activity. The proposed
amendments have been set forth by Anglo high-income retirees, sportfishermen and
tourists. The planning of the proposed amendments exclude, yet most affect, Anglo and
Cuban commercial fisherman of lower and working class communities. The article
reveals that what the policy makers in south Florida consider “rational management” is,
in fact, embedded in hidden relations of economic and symbolic power.
Florida Keys
Class
Ethnicity
Policy anthropology
Okongwu, Anne F. and Joan P. Mencher 2000
The Anthropology of Public Policy: Shifting Terrains. Annual Review of Anthropology.
29: 107-24.
Okongwu and Mencher’s review article focuses on how cultural anthropology
contributes to international social policy research, practice, and advocacy. The review
provides an analysis and description of several areas of social public policies and
environmental public policies. Okongwu and Mencher recommend that anthropologists
offer policymakers comprehensive analysis of social policies to influence more socially
124
sound public policy. Otherwise, policymakers will make decisions that have negative
social affects.
Comparative/globalization and policy
Environmental policy
Policy scientists
Social scientists
Applied anthropology
Stephens, Sharon 2002
Bounding Uncertainty. In Catastrophe and Culture. The Anthropology of Disaster
Susana M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds. Pp. 91-111. Santa Fe: School of
American Research Press.
Stephens provides a case study of communication of expert knowledge by
“protection experts” or professional leaders to mid-level government professionals. The
chapter highlights the shortcomings associated with expert knowledge. In technological
disasters expert knowledge based on “averaging-out” statistics considers minimally the
cultural and historical contexts of individual communities. Stephens’ investigation of
radiological protection experts in light of Chernobyl supports her claim that, in risk
management, the policy-makers’ disregard of the human or the identity of human groups
aggravates disastrous situations.
Comparative/global expert knowledge
Technological disaster
Radiation exposure
International studies
Tucker, Jed 2004
Making Difference in the Aftermath of the September 11th 2001 Terrorist Attacks.
Critique of Anthropology 24(1):34-50.
Tucker compares two New York City school communities’ post 9/11 response to
environmental hazards in the schools. He contends that the schools’ responses and the
public’s perception of the schools’ responses are affected by class, race and access to
knowledge. Tucker’s comparison of the schools also reveal that social constructs or lines
of distinction are used to establish social order governed by the recovery decision-making
process following a disaster.
New York City
Class difference
Racialization
Social capital
Social order
Sociology
125
Wigley, Daniel C. and Kristin S. Shrader-Frechette 1996
Environmental Racism and Biased Methods of Risk Assessment. Risk Health, Safety and
Environment 7:55-88.
Wigley and Shrader-Frechette assert that environmental decision-making involves
“intentional” racial biases. The authors base their findings on case studies of U.S.
minority communities that have experienced environmental racism and injustice. The
case studies reveal that the decision-makers’ of environmental programs and policies rely
on “sloppy”, fallacious, and outdated calculations and methodology. Using their
backgrounds of law and philosophy, Wigley and Shrader-Frechett take a moral
advocatory approach in describing the injustices minorities face in risk assessment.
U.S. minority communities
Biases in risk assessment
Environmental injustice
Law and philosophy
The Risks of Secure Health Care Access for Marginal Communities in China
Miranda Horan
Access to good quality health care is difficult for people who live on the margins
of society. In China, where the state health care has been decentralized and is now a
privatized commodity, access to health care is biased against those who cannot afford
expensive Western medicine and/or live in distant rural communities. The available
research shows that because of this bias people are turning to other methods of healing to
combat disease and injury. Traditional Chinese medicine, meditation and other ethnicbased methodologies are used as medical alternatives to modern Western medicine.
Furthermore, as China continues to develop its economy and society, infectious disease
prevention is no longer the focus of the health care system as the biggest health threats
come from the dangers of chronic disease such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Marginalized communities have the greatest risk of developing and succumbing to these
diseases because they lack a secure and organized health care system that will provide
them with the resources that they need.
126
The most difficult aspect in researching this topic was finding an adequate amount
of anthropological sources. A significant amount of information came from biological
and economic sources but very few from the field of anthropology. It was also difficult
to find information on distinct marginalized groups: most research focused on the rural
poor only and some focused on women, children and the larger ethnic minority groups
such as Tibetans and Mongolians. Publications on the urban poor, immigrants, refugees,
the mentally ill and smaller ethnic minorities was not available.
Some of the most prolific research came from Arthur Kleinman, a medical
anthropologist who works in China. Work also came from Iowa State University
anthropologist Shu-Min Huang. Both have done research on the changing nature of the
Chinese health care system, from collective to privatized, and from infectious diseases to
chronic diseases. Kleinman has also done work on epidemic outbreaks (most notably
SARS) and what effect a disease like that has not only biologically but socially as well
which will become more important other epidemic diseases that originate in Asia, such as
the avian influenza, spread around the world.
Understanding the health care system of China and how it functions in such a
diverse society is important as the country continues to develop socially, politically and
economically. Marginalized communities, such as the rural poor and ethnic minorities,
are continually at risk of suffering from treatable diseases but cannot seek treatment
because they are without secure access to a health care system. Since they are without
such a system they have learned to cope with the lack of health resources available by
focusing instead on more traditional methods of healing. As China continues towards
change, the health care system and its concerns reflect the shifting nature of the state.
127
Annotated Bibliography
Adams, Vincanne, Suellen Miller, Sienna Craig, Nyima, Sonam, Droyoung, Lhakpen,
and Michael Varner 2005
The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Clinical Trials Research: Case Report from the Tibetan
Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19
(3): 267-289.
This article compares the research of Tibetan medicine with misoprostol for
preventing postpartum hemorrhage in delivering women in an effort to determine how
Western clinical research works in non-Western medical settings. As the health care
system is largely decentralized in China, this large ethnic minority population utilizes
what it does know about Western medicine in an effort to assert their independence.
However, the ways in which Western methodologies are applied and the strategies of
negotiation and translation across cultures are not easy to find.
Tibet
Postpartum hemorrhage
Misoprostol
Western medical methodology
Medical anthropology
Anderson, James G. 1992
Health Care in the People’s Republic of China: A Blend of Traditional and Modern.
Central Issues in Anthropology 10 (1): 67-75.
Anderson gives an overview of the health care system in China and how they
have reconciled their traditional methods with modern/Western ideas of medicine and
treatment. This article discusses how Chairman Mao brought the responsibility of health
care to the masses by moving health care training facilities from urban to rural areas,
where 85 per cent of the population was located, and training local people to treat a
variety of ailments and injuries. This system allows for greater access to health care for
everyone despite location or socioeconomic status.
China, rural
Barefoot doctors
Traditional Chinese medicine
Cultural Revolution
Medical anthropology
Chen, Nancy 2003
Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry and Healing in China. New York: Columbia
University Press.
128
The practice of qigong, meditative breathing exercises, in China allows people to
seek a stable form of healing while the formerly state-subsidized medical care switches to
for-profit market medicine. It also serves as a socially organizing function allowing
practitioners to form new informal networks of social support. As new psychological
diseases are being discovered, the Chinese government has medicalized some forms of
qigong while promoting other more scientific forms.
China
Qigong
Social change
Medicalization
Medical anthropology
Farquhar, Judith 1996
Market Magic: Getting Rich and Getting Personal in Medicine after Mao. American
Ethnologist 23 (2): 239-257.
With the decentralization of the health care system by Chairman Mao, private
medical practices have begun popping up across China. These private practices utilize
popular healing methods and cultivate personal auras in efforts to attract patients. In
addition to this, these private practices have also allowed the medical personnel of these
places to use them as a means of getting rich - a move that essentially undermines the
collectivism of the state.
China
Private medical practice
State collectivism
Cultural anthropology
Furth, Charlotte and Ch'en Shu-yueh 1992
Chinese Medicine and the Anthropology of Menstruation in Contemporary Taiwan.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6 (1): 27-48.
Women in contemporary Taiwan are changing the way they view themselves in
terms of social status and pollution beliefs within their culture. Outsiders view the
traditional Chinese medicine and culture as constricting to women and as having created
negative images of the female. However, the women feel that their traditional system
provides them with a better alternative to Western-style medicine in terms of
menstruation while the pollution beliefs are not negative but rather gives the women a
sense of social decency and dignity. These women have found that their traditional
health system gives them with what they need, medically, socially and culturally.
Taiwan
Traditional Chinese medicine
Biomedicine
Women’s culture
129
Pollution beliefs
Menstruation
Medical anthropology
Gu X.Y., Tang S.L., and Cao S.H. 1995
The Financing and Organization of Health Services in Poor Rural China: A Case Study in
Donglan County. International Journal of Health Planning and Management 10 (4): 265282.
With the socio-economic reforms of the late 1970s, health sector resources
expanded quickly but not always in a positive way. In the county of Donglan in southern
China, the decentralization of health care along with the financial responsibility system
have resulted in weak financing and provision of rural health services in the poorer areas.
Preventive programs and basic health care, especially for the poor, are in decline in this
area as they have financial difficulty in obtaining access to services.
China, rural
Donglan county
Poverty
Financial responsibility system
Decentralization of health care
Health studies
Huang Shu-Min, Kimberly C. Falk and Su-Min Chen 1996
Nutritional Well-Being of Preschool Children in a North China Village. Modern China
(22) 4: 355-381.
As social and cultural reforms are creating change in society and the growth of the
economy continues, China’s public health concerns are in a transitional stage, shifting the
focus from acute and infectious disease prevention to chronic disease control. As the gap
between rural and urban populations grows, data on nutrition and health status become
important measures of how the reforms are affecting the population. By examining the
nutrition of children in the rural village of Fengjiacun in the Shandong province of
northern China, information is provided on individual health and the social dynamics of
the community in relation to the state and how it cares for the rural poor.
China, rural
Fengjiacun village
Nutrition
Public health care reform
Society-state relationship
Nutrition and health studies
Huang Shu-Min 1988
130
Transforming China’s Collective Health Care System: A Village Study. Social Science
and Medicine (27) 9: 879-888.
The health care system of Lin Village, Fujian Province in southeast China was
established under the collective commune organization in 1968 and was transformed in
1978 when the government dismantled rural communal organizations. The changes
caused the residents to reorganize the finances, training and operation of the villagebased medical facility. The paper also identifies both benefits and problems that could
affect the villages as the system is turned into an individual profit-seeking venture.
China, rural
Lin Village
Commune
Individual
Collective medicine
Medical anthropology
Janes, Craig R. 1995
The Transformations of Tibetan Medicine. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9 (1): 6-39.
This article explores how Tibetan medicine has become institutionally
modernized through changes in theory, practice and methods. Despite Chinese rule,
Tibet has not given in to state interests. Their medical practices have instead become a
type of ethnic revitalization and resistance to the Chinese state, particularly the treatment
of rlung, a class of sickness associated with rapid social, economic and political change.
Tibet
Tibetan medicine
Rlung
Cultural resistance
Medical pluralism
Medical anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Jianlin, Ji, Arthur Kleinman and Anne E. Becker 2001
Suicide in Contemporary China: A Review of China's Distinctive Suicide Demographics
in Their Sociocultural Context. Harvard Review of Psychiatry 9 (1): 1-12.
Data on suicide in China have not been publicly reported prior to this article and
the information presented by the authors shows that, while low in the past, suicide is on
the rise in certain groups: in rural areas, and among women and the elderly. These rates
are indicative of the marginalization of particular social groups in China and how they
feel they must cope with their social status.
China
Suicide
Social marginalization
131
Women
Elderly
Cross-cultural psychiatry
Medical anthropology
Kaufman, Joan 2005
China’s Health Care Response. SARS in China: Prelude to Pandemic? Arthur Kleinman
and James G. Watson, eds. pp. 53-68. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
In 2003, a SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic broke out in
China. While it only lasted a few months, its impact is considered to be a warning of
how society will be able to deal with a large-scale epidemic, short-term and long-term,
economically, socially, politically and even morally. This chapter focuses on the health
care system‘s response, such as early detection, isolating cases, quarantine, and
disinfection, in order to bring the epidemic under control.
China
SARS
Pandemic
Globalization
Medical anthropology
Kleinman, Arthur 1995
Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
The author of this book focuses on how issues of disease relate to larger social
problems. The body, as such, connects the individual to the group experience where
certain diseases, such as depression, are not isolated in the individual but are an
experience in a broader social context. Social policy and health policy are therefore
linked to the treatment of individuals who suffer from illnesses, such as epilepsy, in
China where individuals are stigmatized by society.
China
Individual
Collective
Epilepsy
Health policy
Social policy
Medical anthropology
Kleinman, Arthur 1986
Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern
China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
132
Kleinman discusses how expressions of depression, neurasthenia and pain in
modern China are idioms of psychological distress. Psychological distress most likely
comes in the form of somatization and how those physical symptoms become a factor in
gaining access to scarce resources and perceived powerlessness and helplessness of
individuals. He further discusses how the body’s relationship to society interpreted by
society and how that interpretation informs social understanding of the interaction
between culture and the self.
China
Depression
Neurasthenia
Somatization
Medical anthropology
Li, Victor H. 1975
Politics and Health Care in China: The Barefoot Doctors. Stanford Law Review 27 (3):
827-840.
This article discusses China’s reaction to the breakdown of their health services
just prior to the establishment of the Republic and the use of “barefoot doctors” in rural
areas in order to provide health care to such a large population. Barefoot doctors were
locally trained for a period of 3-6 months to diagnose and treat a variety of ailments,
promote sanitation and pest control and even conduct minor surgical procedures. By
using the barefoot doctors, the government was able to bypass its lack of trained
professional doctors and physicians and still provide adequate care for the people while at
the same time preventing professional elitism that is associated with persons of a certain
education.
China, rural
Barefoot doctors
Preventive health care
Grassroots health care
Medical anthropology
Longde Wang, Lingzhi Kong, Fan Wu, Yamin Bai and Robert Burton. 2005
Chronic Diseases 4: Preventing Chronic Diseases in China. The Lancet 366 (9499):
1821-1824.
Eighty percent of deaths that occur in China are due to chronic diseases such as
cancer, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and obesity. With such high health risks
being so prevalent, the government is stepping in and implementing prevention and
control programs. These programs are aimed at reducing the frequency of chronic
disease but resources and sustainability are difficult to maintain.
China
Chronic diseases
133
Health prevention and disease control programs
Medical anthropology
Stoner, Bradley P. 1986
Understanding Medical Systems: Traditional, Modern, and Syncretic Health Care
Alternatives in Medically Pluralistic Societies. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(2):
44-48.
This article is a discussion of how various populations blend traditional and
modern/Western medical practices. Although modern medicine may provide better
results for a patient, members of certain social or ethnic groups may prefer to use the
traditional medical practices in addition to the available modern procedures as a way to
maintain a connection with their culture. Maintaining traditional medicine is evident in
many Asian countries, such as China, Japan and India.
China, general
Health care alternatives
Traditional medicine
Medical syncretism
Medical anthropology
Wang, Ruotao 2000
Critical Health Literacy: A Case Study from China in Schistosomiasis Control. Health
Promotion International 15 (3): 269-274.
In China, a social and political movement that began in the 1950’s aimed at
increasing health education and literacy in the population at large in an effort to reduce
infectious diseases. It was effective for some diseases but others, such as schistosomiasis
still remain a major threat. The author argues that in order to fully combat infectious
diseases, China must continue to develop in the field of health policy so that the state can
better respond to social and cultural changes of disease. Using schistosomiasis as a case
study, this article focuses on how higher rates of health literacy lead to positive outcomes
in disease control and prevention.
China
health education
health literacy
schistosomiasis
public health
White, S.D. 1999
Deciphering "Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine" in the Rural Lijiang Basin: State
Policy and Local Practice(s) in Socialist China. Social Science and Medicine 49 (10):
1333-47.
134
This article explores the practice of integrated medicine (Chinese and Western) in
the rural southwest area of China known as the Lijiang Basin. Examined at both the state
policy level and in the everyday practice by villagers, integrated medicine can be viewed
as operating “syncretism from above” by state officials and “syncretism from below” by
the lay people. The practice of integrated medicine in the rural basin shows how state
policy and local operation work together to provide care to isolated communities.
China, rural
Lijiang Basin
Integrated medicine
Syncretism
Cultural anthropology
Williams, Dee Mack 1997
Grazing the Body: Violations of Land and Limb in Inner Mongolia. American
Ethnologist 24 (4): 763-785.
Some Mongol communities of Inner Mongolia are at risk for exposure to chronic
cold stress and accidental injury and death from hypothermia. The global political
economy and privatization of rangeland has led to the degradation of land with soil
erosion and the body with limb deficiencies, amputation and death. The male herders of
the Mongol communities are at the largest risk of death from the lack of available health
care as China has decollectivized the region which has led to destabilization and left the
Mongol communities out of the protection and support of the Chinese state.
Inner Mongolia
Decollectivization
Health risks
Lack of health services
Hypothermia
Globalization
Land degradation
Medical anthropology
Xiang Biao 2005
Migration and Health in China: Problems, Obstacles and Solutions. National University
of Singapore: Asian MetaCentre Research Paper Series, No. 17.
Eighty-five million rural-urban migrants in mainland China face great health risks
but are not recognized as being in need of or offered any protection and support from a
medical care system. The author argues that this is due mainly to institutional
arrangements around security from health risks and service provision, particularly for
migrant workers who live in rural villages but work in cities. Because of their high
mobility and indefinable status as either rural or urban, migrants are often unable to
secure access to health care either privately or from the state.
135
China
Rural-urban migrants
Health care provision
Access to health care
Health policy studies
136