AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 40, no. 2 (Spring 2001)

SPECTACULAR QUETZALS, ECOTOURISM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FUTURES IN MONTE VERDE, COSTA RICA

Luis A. Vivanco
University of Vermont

Monte Verde, Costa Rica, has recently become a popular tourist destination among North American, European, and Costa Rican ecotourists desiring to experience rain and cloud forests. The resplendent quetzal, a migratory bird with colorful plumage and mythical connotations, figures as a central icon and spectacle in Monte Verde's cultural economy of tourism. This article explores how the practices of producing and consuming quetzals are embedded in and reflect contested interpretations of forest landscapes, authentic experiences, and environmental histories and futures. As spectacles around which touristic experiences are often organized, quetzals are invested with nostalgia and hopes for the future. By focusing on the various social contexts in which quetzals are produced, viewed, and explained, this article examines some of the processes by which transnational and local discursive and capitalistic formations, increasingly organized under the banner of ecotourism, claim the authority to fix the meanings, histories, and futures of Monte Verde landscapes and nature more generally. (Ecotourism, Costa Rica, environmental activism, tourist spectacles)

INTRODUCED WRITING AND CHRISTIANITY: DIFFERENTIAL ACCESS TO RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE ASABANO

Roger Ivar Lohmann
Western Oregon University

Among the precontact Asabano of Duranmin, Papua New Guinea, older men kept secret myths revealed during initiations. Their religious knowledge gave them moral authority and privilege as enculturators. Since mass conversion to Christianity, the Bible is the new source of religious knowledge, and those able to read the Bible tell elders the myths written inside. Older men no longer function as experts of religious knowledge, which is now stored in books, to which only young people have direct access, resulting in a reversal of the age- and gender-based social structure. Scripture's ability to preserve and extend access to religious knowledge, combined with Christianity's doctrine of anti-secrecy, made this social change appealing because all sensed a net gain in access to religious power. (Writing technology, cultural transmission, literacy, authority, missionary, religion, Melanesia)

BEAN-CURD CONSUMPTION IN HONG KONG

Sidney W. Mintz
Johns Hopkins University

Chee Beng Tan
Chinese University of Hong Kong

This article examines soybean curd and kindred byproducts in Hong Kong, where an ethnographic survey revealed that traditional forms of soy products have been supplemented with new consumption practices. Soyfoods have been part of Asian food systems for millennia. But a century ago, soybeans entered the world market, taking on new nutritional and economic roles. Swiftly changing technology and unexpected market opportunities have since transformed the place of soybeans in the panorama of global food. Hong Kong is now a place where novel soyfood-eating styles are becoming fashionable, and these are diffusing to other, more Western societies. (Asia, anthropology of food, globalization)

ROMANCE, PARENTHOOD, AND GENDER IN A MODERN AFRICAN SOCIETY

Daniel Jordan Smith
Brown University

Young Igbo men and women in Nigeria increasingly insist on choosing their marriage partners, and ideas about love are shaping Igbo constructions of marriage. But the viability of marriage still depends on fertility. This article examines the divergent consequences for men and women as they negotiate the transition from the role of romantic lover that now commonly characterizes courtship to the roles of mother and father, embedded in webs of kinship, that characterize marriage. (Igbo, Nigeria, marriage, courtship, gender, fertility, love)

RECONSTRUCTING ETHNICITY: RECORDED AND REMEMBERED IDENTITY IN TAIWAN

Melissa J. Brown
University of Cincinnati

Ethnic identity can have a different basis locally than it does at the level of the larger society or ethnic group. This point is illustrated with a reconstruction of the early twentieth-century ethnic classification used in three villages in southwestern Taiwan. Discrepancies between estimates of ethnic intermarriage based on government records and on interview reports result from cross-ethnic adoptions. Interview reports more accurately portray the social experience of ethnic identity for adopted daughters and thus yield better estimates of intermarriage. Analysis of the discrepancy shows the local basis of Han identity to be culture, not, as for most Han, ancestry. (Ethnic identity, historical records, memory, intermarriage, adoption, Taiwan)

JEWISH CUISINE

David Apfelbaum
San Francisco

Editor's Preface: During the mid-November 2000 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (held in San Francisco, California), Sidney Mintz and I had lunch at David's Delicatessen, which is close to the convention hotel and specializes in Jewish dishes. There, by chance, we met and became acquainted with the proprietor, David Apfelbaum, who was born 70 years ago in Lodz, Poland. When we left he gave each of us some souvenirs, which included a pamphlet he published introducing Jewish food. Later, after reading his essay, Mintz and I were independently impressed with its comprehensiveness and accuracy and considered that it would be appreciated by cultural anthropologists. It is reprinted here with Mr. Apfelbaum's permission but not in its original entirety. A section dealing with religion has been omitted and the title has been shortened. — L. Plotnicov