- Carole Crumley - New Directions in Anthropology and Environment: Intersections
- Kaja Finkler - Experiencing the New Genetics
- Glen Hinson - Fire in My Bones
- Dorothy Holland - Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
- Dorothy Holland - History in Person
- Dale Hutchinson - Bioarchaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast: Adaptation, Conflict, and Change
- Dale Hutchinson - Foraging, Farming, and Coastal Biocultural Adaptation in Late Prehistoric North Carolina
- Paul W. Leslie - Turkana Herders of the Dry Savana
- James L. Peacock - The Anthropological Lens, Harsh Light, Soft Focus
- Peter Redfield - Space in the Tropics
- Patrcia Sawin- Listening for a Life: A
Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Songs and Stories
- Margaret Wiener - Visible and Invisible Realms
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New Directions in Anthropology and Environment: Intersections
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Top scholars from across anthropology have contributed to a benchmark volume that makes available exciting new work on the complex relationship between humans and the environment. Addressing in their chapters the discipline's persistent, holistic claim that both the physical and the mental world matter, contributors proceed on the assumption that the physical world and human societies are always inextricably linked. As they incorporate diverse forms of knowledge, their work reaches beyond anthropology to bridge the sciences, social sciences and the humanities, and forges working relationships with non-academic communities and professionals. Theoretical issues such as the social, economic, and ethical dimensions of knowledge and power are articulated alongside practical discussions of building partnerships, research methods, and strategies for implementing policy. New Directions in Anthropology and Environment will be important for scholars and others interested in the relation between our species and its biotic and built environments. It is also designed for classroom use within and beyond anthropology, and students are assisted by suggested reading lists for their further exploration of general concepts and specific research.
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Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the Medical
Frontier
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Finkler poses two important and interrelated questions: first, How do
people experience the ideology of genetic inheritance, especially as related
to their family and kin? and second, Why has genetic inheritance become
a major theme in contemporary life? To explore these questions, Finkler
brings in empirical data drawn from interviews with women with breast
cancer, healthy women with family histories of breast cancer, and adoptees
searching for their birth parents. Finkler finds these ostensibly different
groups of people are united by adhering to the reigning ideology of genetic
inheritance that moves them to act, albeit in very different domains and
with different consequences. Finkler concludes that our current period
is one dominated by the "hegemony of the gene" leading to a "medicalization
of kinship."
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Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African
American Gospel
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"Fire in My Bones" uses a single gospel service to explore issues of performance, artistry, and spiritual experience among sanctified believers in a range of African American churches. Emerging as a collaborative project between Glenn and the consultants who became his co-authors, the book attempts to unfold the complexities of belief and experience that define the lived world of believers. In so doing, it makes no attempt to "explain away" believers' religious experiences by rationalizing them into frameworks that deny the very presence of the reality to which these experiences testify. Instead, the book begins by accepting the truth of believers' testimonies and then proceeds from there, following the paths of passion and faith charted by those for whom song serves as a powerful vehicle to transcendence. By weaving together vignettes, songs, conversations, poems, prophecies, prayers, and stories, the authors invite readers to more fully understand the experience of gospel singing.
In early 2001, "Fire In My Bones" received the Chicago Folklore Prize, annually awarded to the most outstanding book in the field of Folklore. The judges wrote that "Fire" "hums, burns and shimmers with passionate erudition exemplifying the finest scholarship." Currently, Hinson is working on the second part of the book project, which entails producing CDs for two of the gospel groups--the Branchettes and the First Cosmopolitan All Male Chorus--who served as some of the work's consultants. In keeping with the collaborative nature of the project, all royalties from "Fire" are going to church projects designated by these and other co-authors of the book.
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Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
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This landmark book addresses the central problem in anthropological theory today: the paradox that humans are products of social discipline yet producers of remarkable improvisation.
Synthesizing theoretical contributions by Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Bourdieu, Holland and her co-authors examine the processes by which people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially imposed worlds. They develop a theory of self-formation in which identities become the pivot between discipline and agency: turning from experiencing one's scripted social positions to making one's way into cultural worlds as a knowledgeable and committed participant. They emphasize throughout that "identities" are not static and coherent, but variable, multivocal and interactive.
Ethnographic illumination of this complex theoretical construction comes from vividly described fieldwork in vastly different microcultures: American college women "caught" in romance; persons in U.S. institutions of mental health care; members of Alcoholics Anonymous groups; and girls and women in the patriarchal order of Hindu villages in central Nepal.
Ultimately, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds offers a liberating yet tempered understanding of agency, for it shows how people, across the limits of cultural traditions and social forces of power and domination, improvise and find spaces to re-describe themselves, creating their cultural worlds anew.
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History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate
Identities
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This book took shape in an advanced seminar hosted by the School of American Research, whose participants included Begona Aretxaga, Steven Gregory, Dorothy Holland, Michael Kearney, Jean Lave, Dan Linger, Liisa Malkki, Kay Warren, and Paul Willis.
Intent on understanding long-term struggles as process and on extending social practice theory to encompass the historical formation of persons, the organizers-Holland and Lave-asked participants to contribute ethnographic studies of explicit, local conflict. Thus, the chapters of the volume treat enduring struggles and the historical formation of selves as realized in contentious, local practice rather than in direct relation with each other.
Extended conflict situations in Northern Ireland or South Africa, the local impacts of the rise of multinational corporations, and conflicts in workplaces, households, and academic fields are all crucibles for the forging of identities. In this volume, the authors' research is brought to bear on enduring struggles and the practices of identity within those struggles. This collection of essays explores the innermost, generative aspects of subjects as social, cultural, and historical beings and raises serious questions about long-term conflicts and sustained identities in the world today. Nine ethnographers address such topics as the politically sexualized transformation of identities of women political prisoners in Northern Ireland; the changing character of political activism across generations in a Guatemala Mayan family; the cultural forms that mediate the struggles of working-class men on shop floors in England; and class and community struggles between the state and grassroots activists in New York.
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Bioarchaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast: Adaptation, Conflict, and ChangeDale L. Hutchinson
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In Bioarchaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast, Dale Hutchinson explores
the role of human adaptation along the Gulf Coast of Florida and the influence
of coastal foraging on several indigenous Florida populations. The Sarasota
landmark known as Historic Spanish Point has captured the attention of
historians and archaeologists for over 150 years. This picturesque location
includes remnants of a prehistoric Indian village and a massive ancient
burial mound-- known to archaeologists as the Palmer Site--that is one
of the largest mortuary sites uncovered in the southeastern United States.
Interpreting the Palmer population (numbering over 400 burials circa 800 A.D.) by analyzing such topics as health and diet, trauma, and demography, Hutchinson provides a unique view of a post-Archaic group of Indians who lived by hunting, collecting, and fishing rather than by agriculture. This book provides new data that support a general absence of agriculture among Florida Gulf Coast populations within the context of great similarities but also substantial differences in nutrition and health. Along the central and southern Florida Gulf Coast, multiple lines of evidence such as site architecture, settlement density and size, changes in ceramic technology, and the diversity of shell and stone tools suggest that this period was one of emerging social and political complexity accompanied by population growth.
The comparisons between the Florida Gulf Coast and other coastal regions
illuminate our understanding of coastal adaptation, while comparisons
with interior populations further stimulate thoughts regarding the process
of culture change during the agricultural era.
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Foraging, Farming, and Coastal Biocultural Adaptation in Late
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Dale Hutchinson provides a detailed bioarchaeological analysis exploring human adaptation in the estuary zone of North Carolina and the influence of coastal foraging during the late prehistoric transition to agriculture. He draws on observations of human skeletal remains to look at nutrition, disease, physical activity, morbidity, and mortality of coastal populations, focusing particularly on changes in nutrition and health associated with the move from foraging to farming.
Hutchinson confronts the prevailing notion of a universal agricultural
transition by documenting a more variable and complex process of change.
Among his notable findings is that skeletal and dental markers long accepted
as indicators of corn consumption in fact occur more frequently among
coastal foragers than among interior agriculturalists. His research shows
that men and women differed not only in their economic roles but in their
diets as well, and that outer coastal populations continued to rely on
maritime resources without the adoption of corn after A.D. 800, a reliance
that almost surely influenced their evolving lifestyle.
None of the data in the book has been published previously, and Hutchinson is generous with tables, figures, and appendixes that contribute significantly to the clarity of his interpretations. The combination of original data, well-supported interpretation, and the breadth of evidence from many categories significantly advances our anthropological understanding of the lives of these first North Carolinians.
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Turkana Herders of the Dry Savanna
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The Turkana people of northwestern Kenya are one of a handful of societies that continues to pursue a nomadic way of life. The Turkana live in the savanna, a dry grassland, where they herd livestock -- cattle, camels, goats, sheep, and donkeys. Their herds provide them with milk, blood, and meat for food, as well as being an essential source of wealth and resources to be exchanged for other goods. Seasonal and long-term droughts are commonplace and the Turkana are obliged to migrate frequently in search of grazing for their animals, keeping in mind proximity to water and to their enemies.
This book summarizes the most detailed, long-term study of nomadic pastoralists ever conducted and presents one of the richest pictures of the relationships among human biology, ecology, and behavior for any sort of population. The results challenge a number of important inaccuracies and over-generalizations concerning human-environment relations in the vast arid and semi-arid regions of Africa. This understanding takes on added importance because the Turkana today, like many other pastoral peoples in Africa, find themselves and their way of life increasingly under threat from competition with neighboring groups, and from national and international efforts to develop resources and to promote wildlife conservation and tourism.
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The Anthropological Lens, Harsh Light, Soft Focus
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Space in the Tropics, From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
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Rockets roar into space--bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites--fromthe same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, Redfield connects the myth of Robinson Crusoe, nineteenth-century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, postwar exploration of outer space, satellite technology, development, and ecotourism with a focus on place, and the incorporation of this particular place into greater extended systems. Examining the wider context of the Ariane program, he argues that technology and nature must be understood within a greater ecology of displacement and makes a case for the importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.
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Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth
Through Her Songs and Stories
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How does one person come to know another, especially across differences of age, region, class, and consequent historical experience? In Listening for a Life, Patricia Sawin explores her own process of learning to appreciate the songs and stories shared by 90-year-old North Carolinian Bessie Eldreth in order to create a complex, historically-grounded portrait that challenges stereotypes of the "traditional Appalachian woman." Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the utterance as inherently dialogic-constructed as a response and in anticipation of further responses-Sawin argues that the ethnographer must not erase evidence of her involvement, yet she simultaneously recognizes how Eldreth's narratives were shaped for past and future interlocutors as well. Each chapter focuses on a particular discourse, genre, or communicative technique-stories of childhood and work, ghost experiences and practical jokes, Eldreth's strategic use of reported speech, and her song repertoire and practice as a singer at home, in church, and for the festivals in which folklorists involved her-in order to document Eldreth's multi-faceted, recursive, yet developing performance of self. Thus stories of the work Eldreth did to support her eleven children refute local and national allegations that poverty signaled moral unworthiness. Ghost and premonition stories encode Eldreth's protests against her husband's domination. Her song repertoire captures the complex mix of popular and traditional musical sources that contributed to the early twentieth-century Southern mountain repertoire from which Country music sprang. Grasping for the limited expressive resources her context afforded, Eldreth could be complicit in reinforcing restrictive norms of gender and race. Yet Sawin shows how Eldreth defies single or simple explanations, demanding readers' respect and self-criticism of our own possible involvement in the social structures that once marginalized her and later, ironically, celebrated her self-expression. Listening for a Life received the 2004 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize, awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society for outstanding work on women's folklore and feminist folkloristics.
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Visible & Invisible Realms: Power, Magic & Colonial Conquest
In Bali
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In 1908, the ruler of the Balinese realm of Klungkung and more than 100
members of his family and court were massacred when they marched deliberately
into the fire of the Dutch colonial army. The question of what their action
meant and its continued significance in contemporary Klungkung forms the
basis of Margaret Wiener's complex anthropolological history.
Wiener challenges colonial and academic claims that Klungkung had no "real"
power and argues that such claims enabled colonial domination. By focusing
on Balinese discourses she makes clear the choices open to Balinese, both
at the time of the Dutch conquest and in its narration. At the same time,
she shows how these discourses, which revolve around magical weapons acquired
from invisible agents such as gods, spirits, and ancestors, offer an alternative
understanding of Klungkung's power.
Moving between Balinese and Dutch narratives and between past and present, Wiener critiques colonialaccounts by recounting Balinese memories and interpretations. Her attention to history and local situations illuminates the ways in which colonialism and orientalist scholarship have obscured the power of indigenous rulers and shows how Klungkung, once Bali's paramount realm, was relegated to a peripheral corner of the Indonesian nation-state. Both as a fascinating story and as a rich example of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book will interest students of colonialism, anthropology, history, religion, and Southeast Asia.
