Ambiguity and remembrance: Individual and collective memory in Finland
Karen Armstrong

In this article, I explore the complicated relationship between individual experience and national events, the way this relationship is narrated, and how individual memory becomes part of a collective memory. By looking at memoirs written by the descendants of Thomas Rantalainen, and focusing on personal correspondence, I show how the contents of letters written 60 years ago relate to events in Finland’s history that are still being discussed today. In the narrative practices of the correspondence, the individuals themselves – through the use of a narrative We – merge their personal experiences with those of the community. Two themes in the letters – war and family life – illustrate how the processes of replication and analogical thinking work in bringing the past into the present. (Finland, history and analogical thinking, personal correspondence, domestic life)

Singing and silences: Transformations of power through Javanese seduction scenarios
Nancy I. Cooper

Glamorous women singers (waranggana) in rural central Java appear ordinary in their everyday lives, but become exemplars of extraordinary femininity in performances where flirtatious interactions may occur between them and male musicians. Although the obvious interpretation suggests sexual promiscuity, my research shows that these “seduction scenarios” are ways in which women, through their attractive power, help men transform their exuberant power into constructive spiritual potency. More superficially, men use these seduction scenarios to position themselves in a masculine prestige hierarchy. Although women can and do activate their own power through daily activities or, in the case of waranggana, through singing, they more often suppress the signs of their embodied power in favor of men’s spiritual and social potency, in keeping with a highly valued ideology of social harmony shared by both. Hence, through singing and silences, waranggana preserve men’s prestige and together with them participate in a social construction that usually keeps the peace at local levels. (gender, power, prestige, performance, gamelan, Javanese, Indonesia)

Re-territorializing transnationalism: Chinese Americans and the Chinese motherland
Andrea Louie

A youth festival sponsored by the Chinese (P.R.C.) government for overseas Chinese youth (hua yi) who visit China represents a political ritual of the Chinese state that draws upon a long history of invoking discourses of Chinese culture to create connections to the Chinese abroad. Though framed in a context of continuity, the festival ironically produces new knowledges about different ways of being Chinese, exposing the fissures within the assumed nexus of race, culture, and nation, and thus complicating notions of what consitutes a transnational community. (China, Chinese diaspora, transnationalism, identity, race and culture, modernity)

A fish story: Rethinking globalization on Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
Bill Maurer

Recent discussions of globalization leave the nature of movement and of the moving objects in transnational flows relatively unexamined. Incorporating historical and ethnographic material from the British Virgin Islands, I use the analogy of the critique of the study of kinship, which highlights the assumptions of person and relation built into kinship theory, to shed light on the assumptions of property and the metaphysics of movement built into globalization research. (globalization, property, kinship theory, capitalism, Caribbean)

Envisioning identity: deity, person, and practice in the Kathmandu Valley
Bruce McCoy Owens

Through an analysis of diverse accounts offered by those who perform “god’s work” for a large religious festival in Kathmandu Valley, I argue that the oppositional frameworks typically used to understand divergent perspectives are inadequate to understand the multifocal polyphony that these accounts (as well as most other ethnographic settings) present. The terms of argument upon which conflicting accounts agree suggest that esoteric concepts of visualization (s_dhana) resonate with popular modes of construction identities of gods and selves and that this shared understanding helps account for the reproduction and transformation of the many dimensions of contestation that have characterized this festival for centuries. (Nepal, Newar, hermeneutic, contestation, multifocal polyphony, identity, religion, ritual, tantra)