AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 48, no. 2 (Spring 2009)

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF MOBILE PHONE USE IN MOROCCO

Hsain Ilahiane
University of Kentucky

John Sherry
Intel Corporation

Mobile phone ownership in Morocco has leapt from zero percent to two thirds of the population in less than ten years of commercial availability. This rate of penetration underscores the degree to which the mobile phone has become part of everyday routines and serves various communicative needs (ANRT 2007). Ethnographic research among urban laborers indicates that mobile telephony is a resource for human agency and action, and its use has resulted in greater personal income by increasing economic activity and enabling informal income-generating possibilities. (Mobile phones, income-generation, social networks, Morocco).

THE MEANING OF AMERICAN PET CEMETERY GRAVESTONES

Stanley Brandes
University of California, Berkeley

Research on American pet gravestone inscriptions going back more than a century provides ethnographic evidence supporting the widespread observation that many Americans conceive of companion animals as family members, and endow them with cultural characteristics close to those of humans. Pet gravestone inscriptions illustrate three principal developments over the past hundred years: first, the growing use of human names for pets; second, the evolving definition of pets as actual kin to their owners; and third, an enhanced religious and ethnic identity bestowed upon pets. The article's conclusions suggest the reasons for these changes. (Companion animals, pets as kin, pet cemeteries, social change).

SMOKE AS MIRROR: MARIJUANA, THE STATE, AND REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NATION IN PACIFIC NEWSPAPERS

David Lipset
University of Minnesota

Jamon Alex Halvaksz, II
University of Texas at San Antonio

This article re-assesses the argument that newspapers promote modernist national identities. Reading coverage of marijuana in three Pacific Island states indicates that while the news media may constitute an imagined national community, they also serve other purposes. They may give voice to a morally ambiguous relationship between nation and state, in which the latter's sovereignty authors and authorizes the internal and external boundaries of the nation incompletely and without full guarantee. How newspapers shape national identity depends on the structure of state sovereignty in which they appear. (French Polynesia, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, newspapers, nation-state relations).

SYMBOLIC BIRDS AND IRONIC BATS: VARIETIES OF CLASSIFICATION IN NAGE FOLK ORNITHOLOGY

Gregory Forth
University of Alberta

Ethnobiologists and anthropologists have long recognized a distinction between "general purpose" ethnotaxonomies and specialized ways of classifying plants and animals, such as "symbolic classification." This article on the folk ornithology of an eastern Indonesian society distinguishes between ethnotaxonomy and symbolic classification in order to consider the conceptual position of bats. Contrary to the predictions of Douglas and others, Chiropterans are shown to be peripheral to both forms of classification in a way that contrasts with values attached to both nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey. (Ethnotaxonomy, symbolic classification, folk ornithology, Nage).

EMBRACING NEOLIBERALISM? A RECONSIDERATION OF THE RESTRUCTURING OF A NEW ZEALAND NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

Hal B. Levine
Victoria University of Wellington

A study of the restructuring of a New Zealand non-governmental welfare agency concerned with the needs of children and their families shows how a prominent local non-governmental organization sought to reverse the detrimental effects that New Zealand's adoption of neoliberal ideology, policy, and practice has had on the country's voluntary sector. The research indicates that the attempt at restructuring has the potential to align the organization more closely with emerging local developments in neoliberalism and offers an analysis of what happened. The analysis presented here supports the view that neoliberalism is fragmentary, uncertain, and variable; a contextual rather than a unitary phenomenon. That the market-oriented ideology constitutes "a thing that acts in the world" paradoxically emerges stronger than before. (New Zealand, neoliberalism, NGOs).