AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 47, no. 1 (Winter 2008)

HIJAB: FEMININE ALLURE AND CHARM TO MEN IN TUNIS

Simon Hawkins
Franklin & Marshall College

This article examines a group of men in Tunis's old city, and the ways they watch and interact with women. It focuses on the complicated relationship between hijab and desire. Contrary to common assumptions, hijab does not necessarily reduce sexual desire in men, which takes many forms. Which women the men find attractive depends on context and the men's social identity. What appears as a common expression of desire, calling to women on the street, is oriented toward reinforcing homosocial bonds. While they may not call out to women in hijab, many young Tunisian men flirt with them because they interpret hijab as a sign the young women are interested in marriage. (Tunisia, hijab, gender, desire, sexuality).

IN)FERTILITY AND THE MODERN FEMALE LIFE COURSE IN TWO SOUTHERN NIGERIAN COMMUNITIES

Marida Hollos
Brown University

Bruce Whitehouse
Lehigh University

Being "modern" is an aspiration for many in sub-Saharan Africa and entails certain widely held expectations regarding material living conditions and social status. Using ethnographic and survey data on female fertility from two communities of southern Nigeria, this article describes some of the ways women are becoming modern and analyzes the forces behind these changes. The discussion includes education, initiation rites, premarital pregnancy, marriage, and the influence of Pentecostal Christianity. In agreement with modernization theory, there is a trend toward women becoming more educated and autonomous. They also increasingly valorize monogamy, companionate marriage, smaller families, and inclusion in the formal economy. In contradiction to the expectations of modernization theory, there is no decline in supernatural beliefs. Contemporary Christian churches are important to women becoming modern by helping them develop networks through voluntary associations, responding to women's aspirations for material goods, alleviating kin obligations, and encouraging personal spiritual advancement. (Southern Nigeria women, fertility, modernity, Pentecostal Christianity).

PLURALISM AND TRANSCULTURATION IN INDIGENOUS MAYA RELIGION

Garrett Cook
Baylor University

Thomas Offit
Baylor University

Several religions are practiced in a highland Maya community. Costumbre and Maya spirituality perpetuate distinctive syncretic and anti-syncretic Maya traditions, and are analyzed here as orthodox and reform versions of Maya religion adapted to different status groups. Like Maya Pentecostals, both use institutional forms borrowed from other cultures in syncretizing strategies that perpetuate core aspects of Maya culture in a radically changing political economy. Strategic individual behavior, contention, and co-operation are documented for a village, indicating how the two traditions reconstitute Maya religion through transcultural processes. (Transculturation, syncretism, Maya religion, Guatemala).

MIWOK MYSTERIES: THE QUESTION OF ASYMMETRIC PRESCRIPTIVE MARRIAGE IN ABORIGINAL NORTH AMERICA

Gregory Forth
University of Alberta

The Miwok of California stand out as the sole North American society classified by Rodney Needham (1962) as practicing asymmetric prescriptive marriage alliance. This essay reviews evidence from Gifford, the sole ethnographic source on Miwok marriage, and how later commentators (including Lévi-Strauss, Murdock, Kroeber, and Leach) employed Gifford's findings, in order to assess how far and in what ways Needham (1962) may have been correct when he construed the Miwok as practicing prescriptive marriage. Consideration is also given to the Miwok system of symbolic classification, which very probably contributed to Needham's interpretation. Concerning a major aspect of the work of one of the most prominent British anthropologists of the twentieth century, the objective is to illuminate a palpable mystery in the history of anthropological theories of kinship and marriage and to explore aspects of Needham's approach to systems of affinal alliance that have yet to be subjected to a substantial critical treatment. (Rodney Needham, Miwok, prescriptive marriage, kinship and marriage, symbolic classification).