AESonline.org » 31(1)

Abstracts -- AE 31(1)

Contemporary Art Worlds and Their Productive (In)stabilities

Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange The 2003 Presidential Address to the American Ethnological Society
Fred Myers
In the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika asked the Australian government to investigate the unauthorized use of Yolngu clan designs on a variety of commodity forms, inaugurating a process of recognizing Indigenous ownership of "copyright" in such designs. This treatment of design-and of culture-as a form of property involves understandings and practices of materiality and subjectivity that differ from those informing indigenous, Aboriginal relationships to cultural production and circulation. In this article I explore the significance for material culture theory of recent work on and events in the development of notions of cultural property. One of my main concerns is the relevance of local understandings of objectification, or objectness, and human action-as embedded in object-ideologies. I discuss the limited capacity of legal discourses of cultural property to capture and reflect the concerns of Indigenous Australians about their own relation to culture, to creativity, and to expression.

Art-writing in the modern Maya art world of Chichén Itzá: Transcultural ethnography and experimental fieldwork
Quetzil E. Castañeda
IIn this article I examine the modern Maya art world of Chichén Itzá, Mexico. My ethnographic focus is the political history and technical and aesthetic development of the Piste Maya art "tradition" that emerged within the transcultural contexts of the anthropological fascination with and touristic consumption of the Maya. I also describe the experimental ethnography project that was developed to study the transcultural dynamics of the Chichén art world.

Outside of social movements: Dilemmas of indigenous handicrafts vendors in Guatemala
Walter Little
In Antigua, Guatemala, Maya handicrafts vendors work in a tourism marketplace that brings together multiple ethnolinguistic groups and international visitors. In this article I discuss the interrelationship between occupation and social movements to examine the essentialized identities propagated by the Maya Movement and Ladino racism. I argue that making a living helps shape the interrelated processes of economic and political mobilization. I use work and local political contexts, in particular, to illustrate why vendors do not embrace established social movements.

Performativity

The culture-conscious Brazilian Indian: Representing and reworking Indianness in Kayabi political discourse
Suzanne Oakdale
In this article, I examine a Brazilian indigenous people's self-conscious use of the ideas of "culture" and "Indian ethnicity." Whereas analysts usually discuss indigenous use of these concepts in the context of high-profile national or transnational intercultural events, I look at how retrospective accounts of participation in such events are woven into local political discourse. I focus on how two Amazonian leaders represent their participation in past events of cultural display as a means of mounting very different arguments about their eligibility for positions of authority in their community. I argue that local frames of reference, for example, those relating to the culturally appropriate conduct of politics, must be considered in assessing the significance and meaning of cultural performances, even when the staging of indigenous culture is performed principally for a nonlocal audience.

Text and performance in an African Church: The Book, "live and direct"
Matthew Engelke
In this article I examine textual authority and religious language in an African Christian church. Known as the Masowe weChishanu, members of this church refer to themselves as "the Christians who don't read the Bible." I focus on how religious language in Masowe ritual highlights the performative nature of religious authority. In particular, I show how prophets in the church denigrate the role of religious text by working to create a "live and direct" connection to God through their sermons. Drawing on the ethnography of reading and ritual, and contributing to the newly emerging interest in an anthropology of Christianity, I show how Masowe recast the authority of the text as a political and religious object by making it unnecessary. The Bible becomes significant in its absence, challenging an understanding of scriptural religion as objectified in texts.

"Praise the Lord": Popular cinema and pentecostalite style in Ghana's new public sphere
Birgit Meyer
In this article I examine the elective affinity between Pentecostalism and the vibrant video-film industry that has flourished in the wake of Ghana's adoption of a democratic constitution. I argue that, as a result of the liberalization and commercialization of the media, a new public sphere has emerged that can no longer be fully controlled by the state but that is increasingly indebted to Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism and video-films come together and articulate alternative, Christian imaginations of modernity. Seeking to grasp the blurring of boundaries between religion and entertainment, I examine the pentecostalite cultural style on which these alternative visions thrive. My main concern is to investigate the specific mode through which Pentecostal expressive forms go public, thereby transforming the public sphere.

Expanding "Henry": Fiction reading and its artifacts in a British literary society
Adam Reed
Members of the Henry Williamson Society talk of what fiction reading does for them. Their experience of literature is connected to their appreciation of the author Henry Williamson as a central and mythic figure. How "Henry" is composed determines the kind of actors readers can be and also explains the capacities assigned to the Williamson artifacts-books and land-that they identify. In this article, I explore a theory of reading as relationship and examine the role of literature as an instrument of social agency. I focus on the relationships that society members draw out around solitary acts of reading and literary society activities, including the way they assign causation within a matrix of relations. As well as examining their culture of owning, reading, and displaying books, I investigate society members' appreciation of geographical location. The article aims to contribute to the development of anthropological theories of literature.

Intimacy, Reproduction, and Violence (review essays)

Big ideas: Feminist ethnographies of reproduction
Janelle S. Taylor

Review of:
Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America. Linda L. Layne. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture. Linda L. Layne, ed. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Pragmatic Women and Body Politics. Margaret Lock and Patricia A. Kaufert, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Baby's First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects. Lisa M. Mitchell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. Rayna Rapp. New York: Routledge, 1999.
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This review essay considers five recent books-three single-authored ethnographies and two edited volumes-that present feminist ethnographic analyses of reproduction. I highlight the volumes' common themes and approaches and offer critical reflections on the current state of the anthropology of reproduction as exemplified in these works. I argue that feminist anthropologists pursuing ethnographic studies of reproduction have amply demonstrated what anthropologists in general have long sought to demonstrate: that to study ordinary people in their everyday lives is, indeed, to address "the big ideas." In the process, these feminist anthropologists have also offered to our discipline an ambitious new vision of what a better world might look like and of how ethnographic research might help bring that world about.

Domestic violence and difference
Madelaine Adelman

Review of:
Black Eyes All of the Time: Intimate Violence, Aboriginal Women, and the Justice System. Anne McGillivray and Brenda Comaskey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography. Neil Websdale. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian Immigrants in the United States. Margaret Abraham. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Colonizing Hawal'i: The Cultural Power of Law. Sally Engle Merry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

The four monographs reviewed here signal both a critical shift and the value of diversity in domestic violence studies. The authors of the works consider the meaning and policing of, as well as resistance to, domestic violence within specific historical and cultural contexts, of rurality, of immigration, and of the cultural and political economy of colonialism. These ethnographic and historical works document women's experiences of battering and how the state distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable levels of violence within marriage.