American Ethnologist
Volume 30, issue 4

Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez

AE FORUM

PROVOCATION: Is the United States Europe's Other?
John Borneman

COMMENTARIES

Is the United States Europe’s Other? Is Europe the United States’ Other? Yes and no
Berndt Ostendorf

The lost continent
Paul Rabinow

Same old same old?…Resurrecting political culture or conducting ethnographies of human possibilities?
Nina Glick Schiller

Beyond othering
Glenn Bowman

Troubles in a (transatlantic) marriage of convenience
Heinz Ickstadt

REJOINDER

Someone won the war!
John Borneman

Citizenship, activism, and the state

Cultural logics of belonging and movement: Transnationalism, naturalization, and U.S. immigration politics
Susan Bibler Coutin

In the United States, unprecedented numbers of naturalization applicants, the adoption of restrictive immigration policies, changing demographics, and the 1996 presidential elections coalesced in the mid-1990s to make naturalization simultaneously a high priority and problematic. Salvadorans who had immigrated during the 1980s and who were still struggling for the opportunity to naturalize were caught up in these dynamics. A juxtaposition of their struggles against exclusion and of naturalization ceremonies' rhetorics of inclusion elucidates complex and paradoxical connections between naturalization and transnationalism. (immigration, naturalization, transnationalism, politics, identity, the United States, El Salvador).

The celebration of violence: A live-fire demonstration carried out by Japan’s contemporary military
Eyal Ben-Ari and Sabine Frühstück

In this paper we analyze an annual live-fire exercise held by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces for the general public. Based on our analysis, we suggest that anthropologists seriously examine the military establishments of technologically advanced societies. The reason for this focus is that if we want to understand violent acts we need to study their perpetrators and not only their victims. In most of the scholarly literature, violence is seen as anomalous and disruptive – as the reverse of social order. In contrast, we demonstrate how violence can also be understood as an object of fascination, enjoyment and celebration. We go on of show how the link between violence and the military is variously concealed, naturalized or blurred in such events as the live-fire exercise.
Key words: Military, Violence, Japan, Public Events.

Into committees, out of the house: Familiar forms of organization of Palestinian committee activism during the first intifada
Iris Jean-Klein

The ethnographic subject of this article are Palestinian political committees and their heuristic importance as a means of rendering Palestinians in the first Intifada. Drawing on fieldwork among politically active Palestinians from diverse walks of life, I show that, contrary to the prevalent view in the literature and in political displays that in entering committees Palestinians had “left the house,” if one concentrates analysis on forms in which their interest in committees was actually expressed, one finds an aesthetic likeness as well as a substantive entwinement between the socialities of committee movements and of houses.
[activism, organization, Palestine, kinship, form, aesthetics of politics]

Spaces of gender

Spectralization of the rural: Reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural young women in post-Mao China
Yan Hairong

This paper interprets rural women’s migration to the cities before and after the post-Mao reform. It argues that the pursuit of a modern identity by rural young women in the current migration has to be understood in the context of a changed rural/urban relationship in the process of China’s post-socialist development and flexible accumulation. This paper analyzes how a contradiction of freedom and violence dialectically constitutes the search for a new modern subjectivity by rural young women in China today. (Keywords: gender, labor migration, modernity, subjectivity, rural/urban relations)

Gendered boundaries in motion: Space and identity on the Sino-Tibetan frontier
Charlene E. Makley

This article is an exploration of the gendered nature of religious revitalization in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in southwest Gansu Province, China. Since the post-Mao reforms in China allowed Tibetans to resume religious practices and rebuild Buddhist institutions proscribed during the Cultural Revolution, Tibetans in Labrang by the early nineties were rapidly revitalizing the famous monastery that had once ruled this region along the Sino-Tibetan frontier. I draw on recent theorists of space, place and identity to analyze the complex identity politics surrounding this project by conceptualizing spatial, ethnic and national boundaries as emergent intersections of gendered practices among differently positioned actors. I focus on the practice of circumambulation among Tibetans as the key activity that reproduced the sacred centricity and power of the monastery. I demonstrate that in contemporary Labrang women as principle circumambulators and household laborers were doubly burdened with shoring up the core of the Tibetan community in the midst of intense assimilation pressures. [gender, identity, ethnicity, space, borders, China, Tibet, religion, ritual, Buddhism].