AN   INTERNATIONAL    JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 41, no. 3 (Summer 2002)

BODIES, HEAT, AND TABOOS: CONCEPTUALIZING MODERN PERSONHOOD IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN LOWVELD

Isak Niehaus
University of Pretoria

The meta-narrative of modernity often posits an inevitable shift from "dividual" to "individual" modalities of personhood. This presumes that with growing commodifica-tion, persons are no longer enmeshed in networks of reciprocal exchange, but acquire a sense of individual autonomy, and perceive the body as bounded from external influences. The villagers in the Bushbuckridge area of South Africa, however, continue to perceive the body as permeable and partible. They believe that bodies transmit substances to and incorporate substances from other bodies, and that the conjunction of breath, aura, blood, and flesh gives rise to a dangerous condition of heat. By practicing various taboos associated with sex, pregnancy, and death, villagers aim to avoid contamination. This system of taboos is not a relic of the past, but is integral to contemporary situations of life. (Taboos, bodies, personhood, modernity, South Africa).

THE CULTURE OF MARGINALITY: THE TEENEK PORTRAYAL OF SOCIAL DIFFERENCE

Anath Ariel de Vidas
University of Haifa

The marginality of the Teenek Indians of Mexico gives rise to discourses among this group that serve to justify its relegation to the fringes of modern life. Those discourses reflect a concrete, inexorable, social, economic, and political situation that is reformu-lated in the Teenek system of representation. This article explores the problem of constructing an ethnic identity as it is reflected in the realities and world views of the indigenous microcosm facing national society. (Mexico, Teenek [Huastec] Indians, ethnicity, world view).

CULTURAL MODELS OF GENDER IN SRI LANKA AND THE UNITED STATES

Victor C. de Munck
State University of New York, New Paltz

Nicole Dudley
State University of New York, New Paltz

Joseph Cardinale
State University of New York, New Paltz

Sri Lankan cultural models of gender are compared with those in the United States. Nineteen questions were given to samples of Sinhala Buddhists, Sri Lankan Muslims, and U.S. residents. Most participants were interviewed about their answers. Consensus analysis was used to determine if there were distinctive cultural boundaries between Muslim, Sinhalese, and U.S. samples. This determined that Muslim and Sinhalese informants shared a more or less consistent cultural view of gender that was significantly different from that of the U.S. informants. Within the Sri Lankan sample, the greatest differences were between Sinhalese and Muslim females. The Sri Lankan sample engendered or dichotomized traits as specifically male or female much more than did the U.S. sample. In general, the Sri Lankan sample associated positive traits with males and negative traits with females. The results show that the Sri Lankan cultural model of gender is much more shaped by patriarchal precepts and practices than the U.S. model of gender. (Gender, cultural model, patriarchy, consensus analysis, Sri Lanka, United States).

KINDS OF PLAINS CREE CULTURE

Niels Winther Braroe
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Nehiyanak, a Canadian Plains Cree band, is renegotiating an imposed identity as morally inferior to an estimable ethnic segment of local society. Evidence includes Nehiyanak assertiveness in the display of cultural symbols and a growing visibility in the community ceremonial calendar. Comparing the 1990s to the 1960s, a restricted use of the culture concept in current ethnic theory is contrasted to a more inclusive meaning in traditional anthropological description. Nehiyanak ethnological culture, while not immediately relevant to ethnic cultural work, nonetheless provides content to the latter, and mediates ethnic choices. (Cree Indians, ethnicity, culture theory, culture change).

OWNERSHIP OF SEA-SHRIMP PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTIONS OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN A NICARAGUAN MISKITU VILLAGE

Mark Jamieson
University of Manchester

This article on the catching and processing of sea shrimp investigates the relationship between differing degrees of access to the means of production and the generation of economic inequalities among the Miskitu people of Kakabila in Nicaragua's Pearl Lagoon. The widely held Kakabila notion that the production of wealth among some entails a concomitant impoverishment of others (Foster's "image of the limited good") is shown, in the context of the local sea-shrimp economy, to have a verifiable basis in truth. (Miskitu, economic anthropology, fishing, shrimp, Nicaragua).