In this article, I explore the ways in which Oku carvers negotiate their relation to the palace hierarchy and to the nation-state by means of the master–apprentice relationship. I describe the palace hierarchy’s incorporation of the procreational powers of apprenticed carvers and examine a separate group of nonapprenticed carvers and the alternative network of new-elite patrons for whom they work. This case study leads to a deconstruction of the dichotomies pitting locality against the state, palatine against business elites, and tradition against modernity, suggesting that tradition may conceal social change and that modernist youth movements may conversely provide sources of historical continuity. [apprenticeship, youth, modernity, nationalism, elites, carving, hierarchy]

The Miss Galaxy beauty pageant held annually in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, is, at first glance, a show of transgendered glamour, but it is equally a display of translocality. Through the performance of an exotic otherness (through costumes, names, dances, etc.), the socially marginalized contestants claim to define the local, in ways that may oppose the received order, in which the difference between locality and nonlocality is controlled by the privileged. The juxtaposition of gender transformation and translocality in the same event reinforces their stereotypical linking in the eyes of both transgendered and mainstream Tongans. For transgendered persons, this linking provides an escape route from local dynamics of social exclusion and poverty, but it also potentially offers mainstream persons a pretext to marginalize transgendered persons from their local groundings. Privileged transgendered persons are less vulnerable to these dynamics of exclusion and use tokens of translocality to assert their social standing vis-à-vis both underprivileged transgendered persons and society at large. [transgenderism, beauty pageants, locality, globalization, resistance, language use, Tonga]

In the Bolivian Andes although violence between spouses is more frequent, violence also erupts between women who are affines. By examining events of violence through the discourses and practices that sustain asymmetries of power among affines, I demonstrate that kinship and violence in the highland Andean region of Sullk’ata are shaped by multiple inequalities and embedded in, yet extend beyond, the domestic arena. Incorporating violence into an analysis of kinship further highlights the lived interactions of individuals rather than static structures of kinship. [gender, power, domestic violence, marriage, kinship, Andes, Latin America]

In this article, I examine the spiritual possession of a young Indian woman—a member of a community of performers known as Bhats—by her husband’s lineage goddess. The events unfold in the Rajasthani town of Udaipur where Bhats now market traditional culture to tourists. Showing how this possession responds to my informants’ new exchange relations, I argue for the utility of the Marxist notion of "commodity fetishism." I contend, however, that Marxist accounts, because of their typically insistent condemnation of capitalist transformation, are not able to account fully for the Bhat experience of new money relations. I maintain, instead, that an analysis emphasizing multiple moral narratives more completely illuminates the Bhats’ complex encounter with the economic forms of modernity. I further suggest that discourse-based descriptions of spiritual possession also cannot do full justice to this woman’s case, which is as much a failure to communicate as a successfully articulated, if disguised, mode of communication. I thus argue for an appreciation of the way religious forms, and particularly spiritual possessions, represent a form of language and the failure of language, as well as a kind of story and the inability to narrate experience. Overall, I develop an analytical framework that draws out the representational implications of the notion of fetishism—which, according to Marx, describes a situation in which images (such as money), if compelling enough, eclipse their referents (labor)—and that might do more justice to the Bhats’, themselves praise singers, own sophisticated engagement with fictions. [India, spirit possession, religion, money, commodity fetishism, capitalism, narrative, discourse, Marxism, poststructuralism]

Two processes have reshaped many Latin American indigenous societies: the rise of native movements and the transnationalization of rural economies. Although the connections between these two processes remain sharply debated, both critics and defenders of indigenous movements assume that ethnic unity and economic differentiation must work against each other. I argue otherwise, demonstrating that the territorial consequences of economic change—due chiefly to migration, stratification, and consumerism—invigorate local indigenous politics even as they fragment cultural values. By examining community justice in Otavalo, Ecuador, I show how indigenous people create politically effective unities while they simultaneously produce hierarchical relationships among places and cultural orientations through their activism. [indigenous peoples, grassroots politics, economic change, community justice, Andes, Ecuador]

In this article, I reflect on the symbolic position assigned to Indo-Trinidadians within national narratives of homogenization in Trinidad. By contrasting the Trinidadian case to Western European modular forms, I explore how historical particularities of this New World region have resulted in novel and creative ways of imagining a national community—namely, by foregrounding impurity or hybridity—that run counter to master narratives of nationalism as these are cast in Western Europe. Trinidadians simultaneously celebrate hybridity (mixture) and their plural society, but, in the final instance, like all nationalist narratives, the Trinidadian narrative remains a logic of exclusion. [nationalism, homogenization, hybridity, creolization, postcolonial, Caribbean, Trinidad]

The collapse of communism in the former Yugoslavia has sparked an avalanche of personal and political questions for Croatians everywhere on the meaning of their history, traditions, and identity. This article analyzes the mutually constitutive relationships of diaspora Croatians and the focus of their desire: a free Croatia whose citizens participate in the "production" or "recovery" of the historic Croatian state. But, rather than inspiring unity, independence has created the conditions for the emergence and exacerbation of often fraught or equivocal relationships within and between these groups. The Croatian example challenges the inclination to juxtapose diaspora and homeland contexts and points to the need to investigate the struggles of their subjects to define their often tenuous yet increasingly intimate relationships within, across, and between borders. [Croatian independence, politics of desire and disdain, diaspora, identity, homeland]