AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 51, no. 2 (Spring 2012)

HITCHHIKING AND RITUAL AMBIGUITY OF JEWISH SETTLERS IN THE WEST BANK

Nehemia Akiva Stern
Emory University

Hitchhiking by Jewish religious Zionists along the roads of the West Bank is examined as a ritual of sacred travel. The ambiguous and fluid character of this ritual mirrors the risks of everyday life for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This article also explores a notion of ritual that pays close attention to the daily dilemmas, tensions, and uncertainties that may be produced through quotidian religious practices. (Religious Zionism, hitchhiking, Israel, ritual, pilgrimage).

FIJIAN AND PAPUA NEW GUINEAN PENTECOSTAL MISSIONARIES

Karen J. Brison
Union College

Scholars argue that Christians from the Global south will shape world Christianity as they come to dominate demographically. Pentecostals speak of a shared kingdom culture and see transnational networks as flat and decentralized. But Pentecostal rhetoric often draws on Euro-American neoliberal theories of individual “mindset transformation” and corporate management and resonates with earlier colonial rhetoric. This suggests that Christians from the global south might embrace Euro-American ideas instead of offering a significantly different vision. This paper examines an independent Fijian Pentecostal church that sends Fijian and Papua New Guinean missionaries to several areas of the world. Shared kingdom culture is undermined when each local church transforms common ideology to construct a positive local identity. The same process undermines the dominance of Euro-American neoliberal and neocolonial ideas and constructs an imagined world community of Christians based on submission to local leaders rather than promoting individual entrepreneurialism and global hierarchies. (Globalization, Pentecostal churches, Fiji, Papua New Guinea).

EPIDEMIC SUICIDE IN A LAHU COMMUNITY: CONVERGING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE METHODS

Shanshan Du
Tulane University

This article explores an epidemic of love-suicide in a Lahu community of southwest China in the 1950s. Suicide’s rarity and the methodological constraints of ethnographic fieldwork have severely hampered attempts to understand suicide cross-culturally. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods in a longitudinal fieldwork study provides insights regarding the patterns of suicide in a marginalized ethnic group. By developing a “retrospective survey” of suicide based on cluster sampling, this research demonstrates how to effectively incorporate a quantitative dimension in community-based fieldwork. This helps develop better ethnographic methods for documenting suicide and providing better data for cross-cultural comparison. (Suicide, China, ethnographic method, ethnic minority).

SOUTHERN PAIUTE PILGRIMAGE AND RELATIONSHIP FORMATION

Kathleen Van Vlack
University of Arizona

Southern Paiute religious specialists make pilgrimages to powerful places and landscapes. These religious events create new relationships and community that are not bounded by normal social constraints. While Turner’s communitas focuses on people, this research argues that for Southern Paiute people, communitas actually is created between people, places, and objects with bonds of expectations and commitments. Southern Paiutes believe that the world is alive and all elements have agency and must be respected. (Southern Paiute, pilgrimage, communitas, cultural landscapes).