AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 37, no. 4 (Fall 1998)

BECOMING SINNERS: CHRISTIANITY AND DESIRE AMONG THE URAPMIN OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Joel Robbins
University of California, San Diego

This article considers the way Christianity has transformed notions of desire among the Urapmin of the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. While Melanesian cargo cults have generally been understood as generated by a relatively comprehensible set of desires, Urapmin Christianity has focused not on realizing desires but rather on defining and controlling them. In its efforts to exercise such control, Christianity has come into conflict with traditional Urapmin social structure. The latter depended upon a dialectical relationship between willfulness and lawfulness that allowed them both to be valued and to set limits on one another. By demonizing all willfulness, Christianity has made sinners of those Urapmin who operate successfully within that social structure. After tracing the way Christianity has created this contradiction, this article concludes by examining new Christian rituals that have developed in order to allow people to resolve some of its effects on their lives. (Christianity, desire, Melanesia, social structure, ritual)

WHALES, CHIEFS, AND GIANTS: AN EXPLORATION INTO NUU-CHAH-NULTH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Michael Harkin
University of Wyoming

The Nuu-chah-nulth of the Northwest Coast attained a high degree of political organization. Hereditary chiefs had great power and influence often extending beyond their own communities. The ideology of the chieftainship, set forth here in a historical narrative, is examined. Chiefs are symbolically associated with whales, and the themes of whaling, giantism, magic, and generosity are connected with chiefly power. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate chiefs is clearly drawn, with reference to the whale-chief affinities. The telling of the narrative is linked to contemporary political issues facing the Nuu-chah-nulth. (Chiefdom, ideology, narrative, Northwest Coast)

CONTESTING THE TRANSITION TO OLD AGE IN JAPAN

John W. Traphagan
University of Michigan

This article examines how Japanese contest the transition from middle to old age in a small town. In contesting the transition to old age, people resist entrance into a period that is generally associated with increasingly dependent and potentially burdensome relationships with others. Age-grading practices not only contribute to defining the point in life that marks the transition from middle age to old age, they also symbolically represent the dominant discourse on old age, and thus can be used as a basis upon which to resist engaging in that discourse. As older Japanese delay affiliation with the elder age grade, they contest the boundaries that define “the old” as a community of age peers. (Japan, aging, age-grading practices, old age, anthropological gerontology, identity)

MOROCCAN HASSIDISM: THE CHAVREI HABAKUK COMMUNITY AND ITS VENERATION OF SAINTS

Gil Daryn
University of Cambridge

This article investigates an ethnically mixed, nonterritorial community centered around a rabbi of Moroccan origin. Through exploring the unusual stages of this rabbi's sanctification and of the establishment of the community itself, the idiosyncratic combination of traditional North African Jewish elements and Ashkenazi Hassidic elements creates a syncretism that is prominent for the veneration of saints, which serves the rabbi as an instrument for legitimizing his own status and as a way of consolidating his congregation. The source of the community's attraction, as well as its rabbi's charisma, lies in its liminal, socially ambiguous status and location, and transcendence of ethnic and cultural boundaries.1 (Moroccan veneration of saints, Hassidism, liminality, ethnic boundaries, Moroccan Hassidism)

LIFE-CYCLE RITUALS IN DONGYANG COUNTY: TIME, AFFINITY, AND EXCHANGE IN RURAL CHINA

Gene Cooper
University of Southern California

This article analyzes materials on the life-cycle rituals of Dongyang County, Zhejiang Province, for what they reveal about Chinese concepts of time and the conduct of relations with affines. It argues that Chinese conceptions of the life cycle are bounded by a mortality at once recognized in temporal metaphor and desire for longevity, but also mystified into nonrecognition in the ancestral cult, which denies the “psychologically unpleasant experience” of time's irreversibility (Leach 1961). Finally, the article highlights the lifelong significance of affinal relations and their centrality in life-cycle rituals, and the transactions which accompany them. Our perspective evokes an almost Melanesian flavor in the Chinese materials, suggesting future potentially productive areas for comparative work. (Rites of passage, affines, exchange, China)

THE INSTITUTION OF WOMAN-MARRIAGE IN AFRICA: A CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS

Beth Greene
Ohio State University

Woman-marriage, the legal marriage between two women, included the roles of husband and wife. A comparison of these roles within and between the Igbo, Fon, and Lovedu cultures illustrates not only the availability of social and political power to women, but also the relationship between power and the construction of gender. (Woman-marriage, fictive kinship, gender roles, Africa)