AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 42, no. 3 (Summer 2003)

GESTATIONAL SURROGACY: NATURE AND CULTURE IN KINSHIP

Hal B. Levine
Victoria University of Wellington

Anthropological writing about the new reproductive technologies has focused on how they undermine presumed links between nature and culture in kinship. Surrogate motherhood in particular is said to show that "natural facts" serve as symbolic resources to facilitate choice, a key value of Western culture. This work has generated important insights into contemporary discourse about the social and cultural implications of reproductive technology. However, treating nature as a cultural domain exacerbates the tendency to divorce kinship from biology. An analysis of the stated motives of women who become gestational surrogates is presented here to support an argument that a focus on emotion, and its manipulation, can help anthropologists to better integrate human nature and culture in the study of kinship. (Surrogacy, kinship, nature, culture).

CULTURE, PRACTICE, AND THE SEMANTICS OF XHOSA BEER-DRINKING

Patrick McAllister
University of Canterbury

Rural Xhosa beer-drinking is associated with a specialized lexicon related to producing, distributing, and ritually consuming maize beer in communal settings. Understanding this provides important insights into the status of beer as an indigenous commodity and the link between its consumption and sociopolitical and economic relations. It is in relation to the formal cultural framework of which the beer-drinking register is part that individual agency is exercised and a reflexive engagement with social practice occurs, and through which the meaning of specific ritual events is negotiated. (Xhosa, ritual lexicon, beer-drinking register, indigenous commodities).

LATINO NAMING PRACTICES OF SMALL-TOWN BUSINESSES IN RURAL SOUTHERN FLORIDA

Keith V. Bletzer
Arizona State University

This article examines naming practices of Latino grocery stores and restaurants in an eighteen-county area of southern Florida. Business names denote cultural affinity and personal whims, and, like other forms of Latino cultural expression, they are drawn from the cultural roots of owners and clientele to connote the flavor and pride of Latino identity. Unlike other art or literary forms, however, business names reflect a commercial accommodation to the techniques and strategies of marketing more than a defiance of mainstream culture or the statement of cultural resistance to Anglo society. Their choices are strongly influenced by places and experiences that reflect Latino culture outside the local area rather than locales of current residence within rural southern Florida. (Transmigrant business, farm workers, naming practices and sociocultural identity, population expansion and rural settlement, southern Florida).

NEGOTIATING CULTURE: CONFLICT AND CONSENSUS IN U.S. GARAGE-SALE BARGAINING

Gretchen M. Herrmann
SUNY Cortland

Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the under-documented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States. (Bargaining, United States, garage sales).

IS BUDDHA A COUPLE? GENDER-UNITARY PERSPECTIVES FROM THE LAHU OF SOUTHWEST CHINA

Shanshan Du
Tulane University

This article explores the dynamic processes by which the Lahu people negotiate Buddhist gender ideologies according to their cosmology of gender unity. It focuses on the contesting gender symbolism embedded in the local images of Buddha as a pair of indigenous supreme gods, a non-Lahu missionary who founded Lahu Buddhism, and three charismatic Lahu monks in history. This study contributes to scholarly inquiries into the complexities and diversity of women's religious status across cultures. (Buddhism, gender, ethnicity, religion, China).