AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 48, no. 3 (Summer 2009)

REGULATION AND PRODUCTION IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD: WHAT ETHNOGRAPHY BRINGS TO COMPARISON

Susana Narotzky
Universitat de Barcelona

Ethnography underscores the need to historically contextualize and spatially localize economic models such as the "industrial district" and concepts used as ahistorical typologies such as "social capital." This article is based on ethnographic research in Spain, where decentralized footwear production is structured around informal subcontracting networks, and on published works from the Wenzhou area of China. The essay demonstrates the usefulness of the extended case method for the comparison of economic regions whose destinies have articulated in a global political economy. It also illustrates how the abstract use of "social capital" in regional economy models seems to support and justify new forms of corporatism to the economic domain. (Extended case method, economic models, social capital, reciprocity, industrial district, economic anthropology).

FOR ANCESTORS AND GOD: RITUALS OF SACRIFICE AMONG THE CHAGGA OF TANZANIA

Päivi Hasu
University of Helsinki

This article discusses the rituals of sacrifice among the patrilineal Chagga people of northern Tanzania in terms of the historical context of double burial and related sacrifices. Despite more than a hundred years of Christianity in the area, ancestor veneration and sacrifices remain important elements in the rituals of kin groups, as when the relatively well educated, migrant Chagga return home at Christmas to commemorate their ancestors. The analysis draws from the classic studies of sacrifice as a gift, a communion, and an effective representation by focusing on sacrificial substances, participants, and spatio-temporal movement. It examines ritual cuisine, sequences of substances and their processing in the course of reconstituting the social community, and transforming the dead into ancestors. Rituals of sacrifice are part of a larger set of rituals that place both the living and the dead in ancestral lands. (Chagga, sacrifice, Christianity, double burial, Tanzania).

NEGOTIATING MARRIAGE: CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP AND THE REPRODUCTION OF AMERICAN EMPIRE IN OKINAWA

Rebecca Forgash
Metropolitan State College of Denver

For U.S. military personnel stationed overseas, military regulations concerning personal conduct, overseas marriage, and family constitute a much resented symbol of the institutional surveillance and control the U.S. military exercises over its own rank and file. This article examines the complex set of procedures known as the "Marriage Package," proscribed by U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington as the only legitimate means for Marines and Navy corpsmen to legalize an international marriage in Japan. The Marriage Package is a means of governance with implications for how U.S. servicemen conceptualize citizenship, social identity, and self. This article focuses on how institutional representations of transnational marriage and family are received, resisted, and/or reformulated by service personnel and their spouses. The intrusive and time-consuming marriage requirements contribute to a range of functional and gendered notions of citizen-ship and empire, crucial for the projection of American military power abroad. (Cultural citizenship, gender, transnational marriage, U.S. military, Okinawa).

GENDERED TIME ALLOCATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON

Flora Lu
University of California, Santa Cruz

Brandie Fariss
University of North Carolina, Asheville

Richard E. Bilsborrow
Carolina Population Center

This article reports inter- and intra-ethnic patterns of time allocation for five ethnic groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon -the Huaorani, Quichua, Shuar, Cofán, and Secoya- to test for general cross-cultural differences as well as the idea that females and males occupy the private and public sphere, respectively. The concept of public versus private spheres posits that women have less economic and political power and occupy the domain of domestic and individual affairs, while men occupy the public sphere that correlates with civic affairs and work at higher social scales and in spaces outside the home. The research team collected almost 24,000 spot-check time allocation observations in eight indigenous communities from February to June, 2001, representing a large cross-cultural data set. Unlike many previous studies of time allocation, which use standard significance testing to detect differences in means, our description of time allocation among these ethnic groups utilizes confidence interval graphs to interpret the statistical significance of differences observed. We find remarkable consistency in time spent in categories such as "social," "individual," "domestic," and "subsistence" among these groups, despite the variation in their social organization, histories of contact, integration into the market, and population size. A few consistent gender divisions of time use were found that support the private/public sphere characterization, namely that for all groups, females spent significantly more time in domestic activities, and males spent more time in commercial production (except in the case of the Cofán). However, other time-use categories corresponding to the private (i.e., individual and subsistence) and public (i.e., social and outside the community) spheres did not support a gender division, nor was support found for the hypothesis that the relegation of females to the private sphere would be more apparent for gender hierarchical groups and less so for more egalitarian groups. We posit that dichotomies of male/female, public/private, and political/domestic oversimplify boundaries that are varied, dynamic, and often indistinguishable. (Time allocation, gender, indigenous peoples, Amazon, Ecuador).