AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 41, no. 1 (Winter 2002)

NATURE REGIMES IN SOUTHERN MEXICO: A HISTORY OF POWER AND ENVIRONMENT

Nora Haenn
Anne Buckmaster

This article explores the popularized history of a state-peasant conservation alliance in southern Mexico. Following poststructural calls, it treats this history as a locally constructed "regime of nature," a story that condenses and attempts to direct the intersection of history, cultural mediation, and ecology. Using ethnographic and archival material, it examines what factors made capitalist interventions aimed at exploiting local forests possible. It compares former regimes with structures and discourses linked to conservation to comment on the relationship between protected areas and state formation. Through this exploration, I suggest compatibilities between poststructural and political-economy approaches to political ecology. (Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, ejido, violence, globalization, migration, frontier colonization).

FROM TRUE DOROBO TO MUKOGODO MAASAI: CONTESTED ETHNICITY IN KENYA

Lee Cronk
Rutgers University

Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitic-speaking foragers to Maa-speaking pastoralists. This rapid transition took place in the midst of competing views of Mukogodo ethnic identity. To Maa-speakers, Mukogodo were low-status il-torrobo. To British colonialists, Mukogodo were true Dorobo, victims of more powerful agricultural and pastoralist groups. Although British administrators fashioned a set of policies designed to protect Mukogodo from such groups, other British policies inadvertently contributed to the Mukogodo acquisition of Maasai subsistence patterns, language, and culture. Mukogodo themselves strategically used a Dorobo identity to manipulate the British while striving to lose the stigma of the il-torrobo label and achieve acceptance among Maa-speakers as true Maasai. (Mukogodo, Dorobo, Torrobo, Maasai, Samburu, ethnicity, Kenya).

BUGIS MIGRATION AND MODES OF ADAPTATION TO LOCAL SITUATIONS

Gene Ammarell
Ohio University

Bugis migrants from South Sulawesi, Indonesia, have been at the center of several recent regional conflicts. In order to explain their role in these conflicts, historic and ethnographic accounts of Bugis migration and settlement, as well as interviews with recently repatriated migrants, are presented, and current theories of frontier/state relations are brought to bear. This article suggests that Bugis migrants have often acted as agents of assimilation in concert with existing elites, and that this pattern has become anachronistic in post-Suharto Indonesia. (Indonesia, Bugis, migration, ethnic groups, conflict).

BEST OF FRIENDS AND WORST OF ENEMIES: COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION IN POLYGYNY

Sangeetha Madhavan
University of the Witwatersrand

Much of the scholarship on polygyny portrays it as harmful to women, noting in particular that it pits co-wives against each other. Some feminists have used this characterization to associate polygyny with the subjugation of women. However, other work has illustrated the collaborative nature of polygynous relationships. Despite efforts to generalize about polygyny (as either competitive or collaborative), it has become increasingly clear that co-wife relationships and women's experiences with polygyny can only be understood within particular sociocultural and personal contexts. This essay describes co-wife relationships in two ethnic groups in Mali, West Africa, to illustrate the varying nature of polygynous unions and demonstrate that co-wives negotiate their relative statuses within the domestic group through both competitive and collaborative strategies. The research underscores the importance of cultural and socioeconomic contexts in determining the relative value of collaboration and competition in polygynous households. (Polygyny, competition, collaboration, feminism, Mali).

MANAGING INFIDELITY: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

William Jankowiak
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

M. Diane Nell
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Anne Buckmaster
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Anthropologists have not systematically examined extramarital affairs. Our cross-cultural study found that within every culture men and women actively resort to mate-guarding tactics to control their mate's extramarital behavior. A person's level of interest and involvement does not change with a culture's notion of descent, level of social complexity, or the degree to which a culture is normatively permissive or restrictive in sexual matters. In effect, sexual propriety is the presumed right of both sexes. Our findings are consistent with both the sexual jealousy and the pair-bond hypotheses, which hold that every marriage or love relationship is organized around a presumption of sexual propriety. (Extramarital affair, pair bond, sexual jealousy, human universal).