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AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF Volume 44, no. 3 (Summer 2005) |
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WOLOF WOMEN, ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION, AND THE CRISIS OF MASCULINITY IN RURAL SENEGAL Donna L. Perry
Among Wolof farmers in Senegal's Peanut Basin, patriarchal control of household dependents has diminished in conjunction with economic liberalization, state disengagement, and the formation of rural weekly markets. This article builds on twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork to explore a crisis of masculinity expressed by men in their oral testimonies and everyday discourse. In domestic struggles over labor and income, male control over women has decreased in the postcolonial epoch. Male household heads, in wrathful fashion, condemn women for their individualism, selfishness, and open sexuality. Men's discourse of social decay contrasts with the more neutral narratives produced by women, who stress household solidarity and the pragmatics of household survival in response to economic insecurity. Wolof husbands and wives confront economic change through different discourses and practices, all the while renegotiating domestic authority. (Wolof women, economic liberalization, masculinity crisis, Senegal). |
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CASTE, CLASS, AND COMMUNITY IN INDIA: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH Balmurli Natrajan
The anthropology of India has been dominated by an emphasis on caste that has inhibited an integrated approach to understanding class in India. Using an ethnographic approach that takes into account the symbolic and material aspects of caste and class, this article focuses on the attempts to form a "community" of potters among a large group of potter-artisans in central India. It is problematic, however, to view this community as a federation of potter castes or as simply a bloc of classes. Katznelson's (1986) insights into different aspects of class formation help to understand how caste and class get constructed in the formation of a community. Here the apparently caste-based dispositions of potters reveals a class consciousness that is culturally organized by a custom that men work the potter's wheel and women do the marketing. (Caste, class community, India). |
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PATRILATERAL BIAS AMONG A TRADITIONALLY EGALITARIAN PEOPLE: JU/'HOANSI NAMING PRACTICE Patricia Draper
Christine Haney
The Ju/'hoansi (!Kung) of Namibia and Botswana are unusual for the strong norm to name children exclusively for kin and primarily for grandparents. Naming carries important significance by linking the two namesakes and because names are a basis for extending fictive kin links. In the 1950s Lorna Marshall reported that the father has the right to name children and that he "invariably" named them for the paternal grandparents, although having the option of naming children born later for his wife's parents. The authors used a large database of genealogical information that was collected nearly concurrently with Marshall's report to test the strength of the naming rule and found that approximately 70 per cent of men name the first-born son or daughter for their own parent of the child's gender. The degree of compliance is of interest because it falls short of 100 per cent. However, analysis of the naming patterns reveals a strong patrilateral bias in naming for the paternal rather than the maternal grandparents. This type of gender and unilateral bias is not normally reported for Ju/'hoansi, who are otherwise described as gender egalitarian and bilateral in most customary practices. (San names, Cultural consensus, Gender roles, Names, Kinship, Quantification). |
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ETHNOGRAPHIC ATLAS XXXI: PEOPLES OF EASTERNMOST EUROPE Dmitri Bondarenko
Alexander Kazankov
Daria Khaltourina
Andrey Korotayev
In the current installment of the Ethnographic Atlas, we present formalized data (following Murdock's scheme) on seventeen peoples of the European part of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union not covered by any of the previous installments of the Ethnographic Atlas. Different peoples of the sample were integrated into Russia in different historical periods, from medieval (the Ingrians, Karelians, Veps, Votes) to early modern (the Besermyan, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazan Tatar, Mordva, Udmurt) to modern (the Gagauz, Estonians, Lithuanian Karaim and Tatar, Latvians, Livs, Moldovans). Some of them have always remained within Russia's borders (the Besermyan, Bashkir, Chuvash, Ingrians, Karelians, Kazan Tatar, Mordva, Udmurt, Veps, Votes), while others departed after the fall of the Russian Empire, during the 1920s and 1930s, and live outside of Russia today. After the break up of the USSR, there arose the independent republics of Estonia (the Estonians), Latvia (the Latvians and Livs), Lithuania (the Lithuanian Karaim and Tatar), and Moldova (the Gagauz and Moldovans) (Kizilov 1984; Tishkov 1998). |
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