Abstrakta:

American Anthropologist Vol.2/1998

In the Arctic with Malaurie

BRUCE JACKSON

In October 1997, the author accompanied French anthropogeographer Jean Malaurie on a two-week trip in and around Nome, Alaska, in preparation for a circumpolar conference to be held in St. Petersburg in 1999. This essay describes encounters and conversations with area residents that took place during that trip, as well as observarions of and on the courts, shamans, language, the tundra, and the aurora borealis.

Violence in Peru: Performances and Dialogues

BILLIE JEAN ISBELL

The author analyzes protest songs and art from postwar Peru using Nestor García Canclini's understanding of the current reorganization of culture as a struggle over symbolic capital and cultural goods. The author also seeks to place her own work on the dialogical ground occupied by Peruvian performers through her creation of laments by the means of dedications to the disappeared. In so doing, she seeks not only to influence readers' perceptions of the political violence in Peru, but also to transform the relationship of researchers to and the rules of academic discourse about such events.

The Hall of Mirrors: Orientalism, Anthropology, and the Other

WILLIAM S. SAX

Anthropologists specialize in human difference and thus cannot escape the dialectics of sameness and difference. Yet studying Others has been the object of attack in recent years, most notably by Edward Said, who sees the mere postulation of difference as dangerous, as a dehumanizing activity that valorizes Self a.nd vilifies Other. In fact the situation is not so simple: the Other may be a model to be emulated or a mirror of the shadow side of the Self. Selfhood and Otherness, virtue and vice, are subject to ceaseless negotiation and reinterpretation. In this hall of mirrors, the Self and the Other cannot be neatly distinguished.

Mediating Nationalism and Archeology: A Matter of Trust?

SANDRA A. SCHAM

Recognizing that the past is a property of value, archaeologists have traditionally presented themselves as "trustees" of that property. Yet they have in fact become contractors who try to divorce themselves from the consequences of their work. The two roles are very different, and there is much to be gained from re-creating the idea of archaeological trusteeship. A trustee is a disinterested protector of property for the beneficiaries; a contractor is responsible only to the signatories to the contract and has no impartial obligations. Rec~gnizing the distinction is crucial to the argument that archaeologists can "make a difference" in how cultural property is negotiated.

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Plurality of Perspectives and Subjects in the Literary Genres of the Yucatec Maya

MANUEL GUTIÉRREZ-ESTÉVEZ

The author applies to literary texts some of the parameters used in reference to questions of perspective in the visual arts. Disagreeing with Erwin Panofsky, who considers perspective a "symbolic form," the author sees it as a device of utterance and thus a generator of signs susceptible to semiotic study. Unlike many scholars, the author believes not that the enuncia' tor's perspective is transferred onto the work, but that the perspective of the work is imposed on the enunciator. The perspective of each genre situates the enunciator in a specific place in relation to the world md shapes him or her differentially as subject.

The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative

BRUCE MANNHEIM and KRISTA VAN VLEET

Southern Quechua conversational narratives are dialogical in four senses. First, at the formal level, the narrative is produced between interlocutors; second, narrative embeds discourse within discourse by means of quotations or indirect discourse; third, implicit or hidder dialogue between texts is brought out through the intertextual reference to other coexisting narratives; and, fourth, there is a complex pattem of participation through which dialogue takes place not only between actual speaking individuals but between distinct, intersecting participant roles that evoke multiple interactional frameworks. Rigorous attention to each level allows us to integrate narrative analysis more closely into ethnographic study, in terms of both the social tactics of specific narrative events and the broader discursive frameworks that they illuminate.

Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology

JOAN H. FUJIMURA

An analogy exists between today's "defenders" of science in the "science/culture wars" and l9th-century "defenders" of euclidean geometry. Current critics have appointed themselves as arbiters of truth in a manner analogous to that of l9th-century mathematicians and theologians who argued against noneuclidean geometry that challenge Euclid's mathematically, philosophically, and theologically entrenched fifth postulate. The science wars then and now are not about science versus antiscience, objectivity versus subjectivity, but about authority in science: what kind of science should be practiced, and who gets to define it?

Camelot at Yale: The Construction and Dismantling of the Sapirian Synthesis, 1931-39

REGNA DARNELL

For a brief shining moment in the 1930s, Edward Sapir stood at the forefront of a new synthesis of Boasian ethnology and linguistics. But his call to Yale in 1931 was a mandate taken up against formidable odds, and the grand synthesis soon began to unravel. George Peter Niurdock, who became chairman in 1939, moved the department toward science and "verified theory." In the period immediately following World War II, Sapir's program was not revived, but its legacies have come to us by way of the Yale ethnoscience and linguistic anthropology of the 1960s, and his synthesis remains a viable option for Americaníst anthropology at the millennium.

Anthropology, Kleinian Psychoanalysis, and the Subject in Culture

GEORGINA BORN

This essay uses the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to reopen the dialogue between anthropology and psychoanalysis. It argues that Kleinian concepts enhance an anthropolog,y that seeks out both intersubjective and intrasubjective difference and disjuncture, and it demonstrates the uses of major Kleinian concepts for addressing classic anthropological problems, including gender classification and the analysis of persecution in witchcraft and sorcery systems. Applying Kleinian concepts to the analysis of cultural-historical process, it shows how splitting and denial may be central to the reproduction and hegemony of dominant cultural systems through time aIid addresses the question of how to theorize the relationship among dominant cultural systems, social differentiation, and individual subjectivities.

The Genealogy of Civilization

ROBERT A. PAUL

Building on insights from Freud, Nietzsche, and Norbert Elias, the author addresses the question of the construction of guilt in Judeo-Christian civilization. The author begins with a consideration of biological versus cultural reproduction, as these are figured in the Torah and in the Christian Bible. and moves on to some social-structural, historical, and psychodynamic considerations of how and why civilization manages to sustain itself.

The Dark Side of the Moon: Conceptual and Methodological Problems in Studying Rural and Urban Worlds in Peru

KARSTEN PAERREGAARD

Recent anthropological theories deal with conceptualizations of culture and space. This article discusses these issues vi relation to material from two different periods of fieldwork among villagers and migrants from a community in the Peruvian Andes. It demonstrates that their lives can only be understood when all ties of interdependence between the two groups are included in the analysis. It concludes that in a deterritorialized cultme, territory plays a crucial role in people's identity, and living a double life does not imply having a double identity.

Indigenous Women's Identities and the Politics of Cultural Reproduction in the Ecuadorian Amazon

BLANCA MURATORIO

This essay explores the current problems of cultural reproduction and identity politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon through the personal memory narratives of a group of elder indigenous women facing difficulties with their granddaughters. It argues that women š histories and their conceptions of setf are inscribed in their experiences in a self-defined "domestic space." This intracultural struggle provides a better understanding of the scripts of cultural reproduction being played, largely by men, in other scenarios.

Blackness, the Racial/Spatial Order, Migrations, and Miss Ecuador 1995-96

JEAN MUTEBA RAHIER

The author argues that blackness in Ecuador must be viewed in terms of personal. social, cultural, political, and economic processes embedded in particular time/space contexts. The official imagination of national identity constructed by white and white-mestizo elites imposes a racist reading on the map of national territory, conceiving rural areas as racially inferior, indolent, backward, and culturally deprived, constituting burdens and challenges to the full development of the nation. In the logic of this racial/spatial order. the migration of blacks to urban centers threatens white-mestizo society, which can no longer ignore the presence of Afro-Ecuadorians.

Post-Sandinista Ethnic Identites in Western Nicaragua

LES FIELD

The mealtings of the ethnic labels India.n and mestizo in Latin America are often treated as stable, bounded, and clearly marked by anthropologists, nationalists, and indigenous intellectuals alike. In Nicaragua, the post-Sandinista emergence of a discomse of indigenous identity in the western region, where successive state elites have considered that identity erased, underscores the dynamic mutability of both indigenous and mestizo ethnicities. This reconsideration derives from dialogue between anthropological analysis and an indigenous intellectual involved in organizing in the western region.

Maasai Identity on the Periphery

PETER D. LITLLE

This article examines ethnic identity among the Maasai-related Il Chamus of Baringo District, Kenya. Through an analysis of land policies, it shows how colonialism forged identities and boundaries that had scarcely existed in the l9th centtuy. These are now fiercely defended on the basis of "tradition." By examining how identities are shaped by power, the article contributes to the understanding of the political nature of ethnicity and the "ethnic" conflict in Kenya.

Ritual Powers and Social Tensions as Moral Discourse among the Tuareg

SUSAN RASMUSSEN

Ritual powers traditionally glossed as "witchcraft" in anthropology need not be an archaic or exotic phenomenon, isolated from historical processes of global political and economic transformation. The author analyzes how, anlong the Kel Ewey Tureg of northern Niger, these emerge as a moral discourse, an attempt to make sense of and cope with the interplay of long-standing social forms and emergent sociopolitical transformations.

The Alchemy of Charity: Of Class and Buddhism in Northern Thailand

KATHERlNE A. BOWIE

This essay focuses on a form of unidirectional giving current in Theravada Buddhism: the institution of merit making as practiced in northern Thailand. Many scholars have noted its centrality in village religious practices but have failed to locate it within the broader context of class stratification. As a result, the prevailing paradigm of merit making misrepresents the character of the recipients, the donors, and their mutual interaction. This essay argues that cross-class, unidirectional forms of giving such as charity may be important in mediating hegemony and resistance in complex societies.

A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Market for Corterporary Fire Art

STUART PLATNER

The economic behavior of artists, dealers, and collectors in the local (not the high-end, elite New York hegemonic center) market for contemporary fine art is discussed. Seemingly bizarre behavior such as an artist giving a dealer a share of the sale of an art object the latter has never handled to a buyer the dealer has never seen is analyzed with reference to identity, economic rationality, and consumer risk.