AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 39, no. 2 (Spring 2000)

VOLUNTEERING AS A LIFESTYLE CHOICE: NEGOTIATING SELF-IDENTITIES IN JAPAN

Lynne Y. Nakano
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

This article considers how people in Japan create themselves from a range of available identities. Decisions to adopt particular identities are channeled by the institutions of society, historical circumstances, and local contexts. Because selves and societies mutually fashion one another, the ways in which selves construct an identity are commentaries upon transformations in society. The identity of the volunteer (borantia in Japanese) has emerged in Japan in recent decades as an alternative and supplement to mainstream life paths. The article also explores how people living in a middle- to lower-middle-class residential neighborhood integrate the volunteer identity into their life narratives. (Japan, social role, self-identity, gender, life narratives, volunteerism)

PROTEST, TREE ORDINATION, AND THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF POLITICAL RITUAL

Nicola Tannenbaum
Lehigh University

This article discusses a successful political protest in a village in northwestern Thailand and the community's tree ordination to further protect its forest from development. The protest and tree ordination are signs of the increasingly complex relationships that are changing the community's relative political, religious, and economic autonomy and tying different actors in the community into the wider political framework in ways that were not possible before. (Political protest, tree ordination, Thailand, political ritual, Shan)

FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION, HOUSEHOLDS, AND FIELDWORK: MULTISITED ZAPOTEC WEAVERS IN THE ERA OF LATE CAPITALISM

W. Warner Wood
Johns Hopkins University

Like other crafters catering to tourists and international ethnic art markets, Zapotec weavers have become more closely tied to international capital and to increasingly flexible and dispersed schemes of production. Some Zapotec families have responded to such flexibility and now maintain several households in the Southwestern United States, U.S./Mexico border towns, and Oaxaca. The study of household petty commodity production thus requires a multisited field methodology for what are today dispersed Zapotec households enmeshed in the transnational production of Zapotec textiles. (Mexico, Zapotec, Chimayó, New Mexico, textiles, flexible production, multisited ethnography)

CULTURAL REVITALIZATION AND TOURISM AT THE MORERÍA NIMA' K'ICHE'

Matthew Krystal
Tulane University

A morería is a small business that fabricates and rents the costumes, props, and masks used in traditional dance-dramas. An effort that bridged ethnic divisions and involved both local and national institutions rescued the beleaguered Morería Nima' K'iche', transferring ownership from a family to the community. This article explores the conversion of the Morería Nima' K'iche' and how the resulting institution accommodates both cultural revitalization and tourism. (K'iche' Maya, revitalization, tourism, traditional dance)

HOME AS A PLACE OF EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCE: MAYAN HOUSEHOLD TRANSFORMATIONS IN GUATEMALA

Walter E. Little
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the town of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala, has been incorporated into transnational movements of people, commodities, and ideas through tourism, development, and religious evangelism. The Kaqchikel Mayas living there have long looked outward from their community as they embraced, ignored, or criticized these global flows. Contemporary Kaqchikel Mayas have incorporated these global flows into the organization and maintenance of their households, while giving them a local interpretation. Some families have made their homes a place to enact their culture through exhibitions and performances for tourists. Such performances are indicative of the strategies increasingly used by Kaqchikel women, where the private household/ domestic sphere becomes public and also part of the global. These enactments have changed the economic and social organization of the household in terms of gender relations. (Guatemala, Kaqchikel Mayas, performance, tourism, gender, trans-nationalism, globalization)