AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 43, no. 1 (Winter 2004)

MANY WAYS OF BECOMING A WOMAN: THE CASE OF UNMARRIED ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN "GIRLS"

Amalia Sa'ar
University of Haifa

Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women are normatively expected to remain virgins and social juniors, yet in practice their handling of their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, produces a range of social personas. While some indeed remain submissive and suppressed, others undergo sexual maturation. Detailed ethnographic attention to their lifestyles, and particularly to their sexuality, disproves any stereotypic impressions held of this group of Arab women. As liminal persons, unmarried women serve not only as delineators of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Contextualizing the phenomenon historically, the analysis considers how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. (Sexuality, virginity, gender, liminality).

THE RAW AND THE ROTTEN: PUNK CUISINE

Dylan Clark
University of Colorado-Boulder

This article investigates the ideological content of punk cuisine, a subcultural food system with its own grammar, logic, exclusions, and symbolism. As a shared system of praxis, punk cuisine helps to articulate subcultural identity, purpose, and politics. In the case of Seattle punks in the late twentieth century, their cuisine served to critique Whiteness, corporate-capitalism, patriarchy, environmental destruction, and consumerism. (Subculture, food, capitalism, modernity, crime, Whiteness, veganism).

DEVELOPMENT AND THE LIFE STORY OF A THAI FARMER LEADER

Henry D. Delcore
California State University, Fresno

In the anthropology of development, the contributions of poststructuralist theory have been marred by tendencies toward discursive determinism and an inadequate theorizing of agency. The life history approach is a strategy for probing the cultural politics of development in a way that better addresses the reality of development actors. Development does not just determine what counts as knowledge or truth, but also opens opportunities for individual cultural experiments. Richard Fox's concept of the "cultured life" is here used to explore the various cultural and political entanglements in the life of a northern Thai farmer who has helped pioneer a new form of agricultural development in Thailand. (Development, life history, NGOs, agency, Thailand).

A PERMISSIVE ZONE FOR PROSTITUTION IN THE MIDDLE ATLAS OF MOROCCO

Bernhard Venema
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Jogien Bakker
NOVIB, Den Haag

Muslim women are said to live in a male-dominated society with rigid sexual stratification: the seclusion and control of the sexual practices of a woman increase a man's status and power. This view has become more relevant with the process of Islamization in Morocco, as elsewhere. In reality, among the Berber people of the Middle Atlas, many divorced and widowed women see no economic alternative to becoming a prostitute. Cultural and global conditions have made the area a permissive zone for prostitution because of the local tradition of ritual dances that act as a marriage market, the absence of a focus on virginity, and because retired prostitutes can regain the respect of their community. Since the 1960s, Moroccan migrants returning temporarily home and male tourists from neighboring countries have given the Middle Atlas the reputation of a permissive zone for prostitution. (Berber, Morocco, prostitution, globalization).

SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL CONTEXTS OF WEANING AMONG BOFI FARMERS AND FORAGERS

Hillary N. Fouts
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Weaning is a topic of much theoretical interest in anthropology, psychology, and public health. Several specific images about weaning are ubiquitous throughout the scholarly literature, but these are inadequate for describing the full spectrum of social and emotional factors involved in weaning. The images are evaluated in the context of comparative data collected among the Bofi farmers and foragers. While most studies of weaning have focused on health issues, this analysis identifies social and emotional factors related to caregiving practices, children's responses to weaning, and social transitions that accompany weaning. The Bofi farmers and foragers provide an interesting comparison of weaning because, although they live in the same natural ecology and speak the same language, they have distinct patterns of child-rearing and weaning. The comparison of Bofi weaning practices leads to a discussion of weaning patterns among other farmers and foragers and weaning patterns predicted by region and subsistence. (Tropical farmers and foragers, Central Africa, parent-child relations, weaning).

ETHNOGRAPHIC ATLAS XXX: PEOPLES OF SIBERIA

Andrey Korotayev
Russian State University for the Humanities

Alexander Kazankov
Russian Academy of Sciences

Svetlana Borinskaya
Russian Academy of Sciences

Daria Khaltourina
Russian Academy of Sciences

Dmitri Bondarenko
Russian Academy of Sciences

In the current installment of the Ethnographic Atlas we present formalized data (following Murdock's scheme) on ten Siberian peoples not covered by any of the previous installments of the Ethnographic Atlas. The reviewed peoples belong to the following cultural blocks—Uralic: Finno-Ugrian (Mansi [Ec15]) and Samodian/ Samoyed (Nganasan [Ec12]); Eskaleut (Ungazikmit [Ec14]); Chukchee-Kamchatkan (Itelmen [Ec13]); and Tungus-Manchu (Evenk [Ec16], Negidal [Ec17], Ulch [Ec18], Orok [Ec19], Oroch [Ec20], and Udihe [Ec21]). Linguistically and culturally, the last six peoples are close to each other; Ec16, 17, 20, and 21 belonging to the Northern group of the Tungus-Manchu linguistic family; Ec18 and 19, together with the Nanai (Goldi) and Manchu, belong to the Southern subgroup. With the exception of Ec16, all Tungus-Manchu peoples in the sample live in the Amur–Sahalin region or just south of it (Ec20 and 21).