Communal Participation Research Articles

Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen's Writing

Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry--Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in Kathy Lou Schultz calls the gone missing of practice by African-American women poets (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work. (1) Poised in the dialectic of I call (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and run (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets--the recyclopedia. writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex mixtery of disparate sources and influences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes attention to communal reading practices and several situate work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and influences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how subversion of convention.., is both more complicated [than Stein's] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs (71). Frost demonstrates rare (among recent avant-garde poets) revamping of the lyric and argues that Mullen constructs lyric otherwise--as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice (466). While Spahr asserts that what has interested me about work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing's pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry's concerns with community building and alliance (115), Cummings points out that Mullen's work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly (24). Surveying body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings's assertion that Mullen self-consciously reflects her work's synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that writing is characterized by a productive tension between and run, between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a figure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. …

True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity , and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture Geoff Hamilton Mark Seltzer. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. David Schmid. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Violent criminality, now more than ever, occupies a weirdly central and centralizing place in American cultural life. Blockbuster media—from cable news reports on school shootings, serial slaughters, and husbands-gone-wild, to the endlessly proliferating crime narratives that appear now on everything from Spike TV to the National Geographic Network to the Women’s Entertainment channel—bring mass audiences together in consideration of trauma and outrage. World War II press reports apparently coined the term “blockbuster bomb” for a device explosive enough to destroy whole neighbourhoods. Contemporary blockbusters, some of which you may take home from your local Blockbuster, offer a related sort of communal participation in annihilation and suffering, however vicarious. It is the public and public-making aspects of criminality, the criminal’s fame and the crime’s socializing function, that concern David Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture and Mark Seltzer in True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. The authors join here a lively conversation about the cultural significance of violent transgression, drawing on and augmenting such important works as Joel Black’s Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991), Philip Jenkins’s Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (1994), Karen Haltunnen’s Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (1998), Seltzer’s own Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998), and Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (2000). [End Page 279] For several decades now, the figure of the serial killer has been exceptionally prominent in American culture, with real and fictional examples—Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Aileen Wuornos, BTK, et al.—achieving a level of name recognition and “brand” prominence to be envied by any Hollywood actor. As David Schmid contends in his excellent study, a pop-cultural environment largely indifferent to moral value as a condition of fame has transformed the serial killer into both the “ultimate deviant” (25), the worst sort of human one can imagine, and also the “exemplary modern celebrity” (4), an individual revered for being so horrible. The how and why of the serial killer’s amoral ascendance is explored thoroughly and convincingly by Schmid. His opening section deals, first, with the suggestively proleptic celebrity of two nineteenth-century serial killers, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, who prompted powerful public revulsion and fascination, thus “inaugurat[ing] the ongoing debate about whether famous serial killers are the consummate insiders or outsiders of American culture” (33) (the Ripper’s putative “Americanness,” see below, is discussed in detail). He then moves on to examine the history of the FBI’s relationship to serial killing, revealing how this organization “claim[ed] exclusive ownership of serial murder” and “[used] popular culture to both publicize and reinforce its reputation as the unquestioned source of expertise on serial crime” (67). From here, Schmid proceeds to his second section, investigating serial killers in Hollywood films, television crime dramas, and true-crime narratives. An epilogue considers the status of the serial killer after 9/11, with Schmid tracking its overlap with concerns about terrorism and concluding that the serial-killer figure has endured because of its oddly reassuring familiarity and usefulness in framing a more recent and still poorly understood menace. One of Schmid’s central arguments—cogently defended over the course of the book—is that the serial killer’s ascendance has been made possible by the myriad ways in which this particular sort of criminal can be exploited by diverse ideological agendas and commercial interests. Among the parties who have found serial killers expedient during the last three decades are the FBI (which needed to posit a threat large enough to justify its own expansion), tabloid news (which sought lurid content in order to compete for the attention of an increasingly fragmented...

Poor Jews: An Analysis of Low Income in the American Jewish Population

This article examines low income in the American Jewish population. It situates the study of the Jewish poor within a broader sociological framework by utilizing general sources on poverty among Americans to identify and test a range of predictors of low income among American Jews. Using data from the National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001, it finds six major predictors of low income: age, education, employment status, family-household type and its interaction with gender, citizenship status and Jewish denomination. Importantly, it shows that the simultaneous presence of several predictors is necessary to raise the probability of having low income above the Jewish population’s mean rate, and it builds on this finding to examine the factors that contribute to low income among Orthodox, immigrant and elderly Jews. The article also investigates social correlates and communal consequences of low income, demonstrating a pattern of poorer health, increased social service needs and diminished communal participation among the Jewish poor. It concludes with a discussion of a research agenda on economic vulnerability among American Jews.

Forefathers' Day Dinners and Martha Washington Teas

As early as a half-century before the 1876 national centennial, the point at which many scholars have marked the beginning of the colonial revival movement, historicized foodways appeared at centennial celebrations and homecoming gatherings across Northeast America. Commemorative consumption, the communal participation in anachronistic foodways, provided a vehicle for inscription into heritage-based groups, thus catalyzing the coalescence of collective self-consciousness during a time of cultural upheaval and social dislocation. Early discrete examples of commemorative consumption provided a seedbed for more widespread, popular expressions of the same. Through clambakes, centennial picnics, and Forefathers' Day dinners, New Englanders appropriated Native American foodways and re-enacted European settlement, symbolically laying claim to a region and a nation. Later, through Martha Washington teas, middle and upper-class Anglo-American women in the Northeast and beyond asserted their prerogative as a social and political force, metanymically celebrating the nation and imaging the national community in their own image.

A Rock in a Weary Land: AIDS, South Africa, and the Church

This article explores the contributing factors to the endemic problems exacerbating the AIDS crisis in South Africa. The legacy of Apartheid, including the attendant problems of poverty, illiteracy, and disparate health statuses between the beneficiaries and victims of Apartheid, is explored. Because women are bearing the brunt of the infection, their experience of AIDS is also considered. A brief case study illuminating an AIDS-sensitive church is offered as an exemplar of self-determination and social networks used to sustain a South African township riddled by HIV disease. The article concludes by suggesting that the benefits of communal religious participation as a coping response to HIV disease requires further examination by social work and public health workers in South African communities of color with minimal resources to combat HIV disease.

“Honey, let's waltz the day out”: The effects of popular music on wedding celebrations in Botswana

Wedding songs are an integral part of Setswana wedding celebration. They are not just sung for entertainment purposes, but talk about issues related to marriage and married life in general. They also express what is socially and culturally expected of the bride and groom in their new status as husband and wife. Botswana, like many other developing countries, is undergoing rapid changes due to modernisation and globalisation. Nowadays, recorded popular music takes precedence over the communal performance of Setswana traditional wedding songs. This change excludes and limits communal participation in counselling and guiding the new couple through songs. The aim of this article is to examine the changes that are taking place in wedding celebrations in Botswana. The article will also discuss the effects of these changes on the wedding as a communal ritual of the institution of marriage.

On a Notion of Participation in Music Therapy

This article examines the notion of participation from a relational and culture-centred perspective, with the objective of stimulating more systematic reflection on the notion's relevance in music therapy theory. Selected examples from the music therapy literature are reviewed and related to contemporary literature on learning, music, and health. In discussing the literature, a distinction is made between two basic notions of participation; participation as individual activity and participation as collaborative activity. The first usage of the term is most common in the music therapy literature, but the metatheoretical perspective underpinning this study suggests that a notion of participation as collaborative activity is more significant. In relation to participation as collaborative activity, a further distinction is made between participation as communal experience and participation as political action (citizen participation). A focus upon participation as communal experience is a clinically relevant implication of a relational understanding of humanity, but the author argues that apolitical visions of participation as communal experience may end up invoking a romanticized view of participatory community in neglect of diversity and social conflict. In an attempt at providing a platform for further discussion of and work on the notion of participation, a brief definition of participation is offered. In conclusion, the article proposes that a) a notion of participation could be integrative in relation to educational, musical, and health–related dimensions of music therapy processes and b) more work is needed on a notion of participation in music therapy, in relation to various theoretical and practical contexts.

Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement

This article examines why people violate rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal types of participation. The authors argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, the authors posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state-level data for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the authors present a series of two-stage least squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation.

The communal and the sacred: women's worlds of ritual in Uzbekistan

This article analyses women's participation in life‐cycle, religious, and propitiatory rituals in Uzbekistan against the background of the ‘politicization’ of custom under the Soviet regime and fluctuations in official policies towards Islam since the post‐Soviet period. Despite changes in official discourse, the resilience of women's rituals may be explained in terms of their embeddedness in local notions of communal participation and their role in the day‐to‐day reproduction of communal life. In the post‐Soviet period, ritual has become a site both for the assertion of authentic Uzbek identity and for the display of growing disparities in wealth and status through the medium of consumption, leading to propaganda campaigns against ostentation. Although the thinking behind these initiatives is very different from that of Soviet modernizers, they, too, place ritual life at the centre of Uzbek sociality and target women as the custodians of local custom.

Predatory Globalization and Democracy in the Islamic World

The rise of Islamic activism worldwide, including the appearance of illiberal politics in Islamic cultural areas (ICAs), is usually seen as a reaction to globalizing modernization. Based on the assumption of an elective affinity between Western cultural assets and liberal democracy, most analysts neglect to see globalization, particularly, in its predatory form, as a constitutive condition of Islamism. Accentuating the cultural divide within ICAs, predatory globalization strives to constrict political space for democratic expression. The growing disconnect between an already fractured political community and an increasingly illegitimate state provides Islamicists the opening to capture key institutions in civil society or to create alternative avenues of communal identity, participation, and civic action. Prospects for building a liberal democratic order hinge mainly on a resolution of the internal dialectic within ICAs. The unstoppable march of predatory globalization, however, appears unlikely to yield either the political space or the historical time to bridge the deep chasm within ICAs.

Leaves Gleaned from the Ten-Thousand-Dimensional Web in Heaven: Chinese On-Line Publications in Canada

Abstract As with popular culture generally, Chinese popular fiction borrows from elite and folk traditions in the creation of popular texts. Historically, Chinese audiences developed a variety of innovative ways to accomplish the transmission and distribution of texts and, just as importantly, to provide opportunities for communal participation and commentary. In this article, three Chinese electronic magazines at Canadian sites are examined in light of the wider traditions they share with earlier forms of Chinese popular culture. A sample of volumes from each publication formed a comparative analysis focusing on history and duration of publication, format, content, and some important common themes found in contributors’ poetry and prose. Methodological challenges associated with this type of research are considered, including the issue of authorship.

Leaves Gleaned from the Ten-Thousand-Dimensional Web in Heaven: Chinese On-Line Publications in Canada

As with popular culture generally, Chinese popular fiction borrows from elite and folk traditions in the creation of popular texts. Historically, Chinese audiences developed a variety of innovative ways to accomplish the transmission and distribution of texts and, just as importantly, to provide opportunities for communal participation and commentary. In this article, three Chinese electronic magazines at Canadian sites are examined in light of the wider traditions they share with earlier forms of Chinese popular culture. A sample of volumes from each publication formed a comparative analysis focusing on history and duration of publication, format, content, and some important common themes found in contributors� poetry and prose. Methodological challenges associated with this type of research are considered, including the issue of authorship.

Spheres of communal participation: Placing the state within local modes of interaction in rural Uzbekistan

(2002). Spheres of communal participation: Placing the state within local modes of interaction in rural Uzbekistan. Central Asian Survey: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 55-70.

Libraries of the Dead: Early Bronze Age Charnel Houses and Social Identity at Urban Bab edh-Dhra', Jordan

Extensive ethnographic and archaeological research demonstrates that primary and secondary mortuary rituals provide people with a richly textured context to reweave the social fabric of the community following the death of one of its members. The nature, timing, and communal participation in secondary mortuary ceremonies, in particular, allow individuals and groups to reiterate the broader moral and social ethos of the community, while reaffirming, renegotiating, or even severing bonds of social, political, and economic life. Drawing on this anthropological foundation, this study explores the powerful changes in household structures and systems of kinship during the first period of urbanization in Syro-Palestine by examining the skeletal, architectural, and artifactual evidence from the cemeteries at the Early Bronze Age settlement of Bab edh-Dhra', Jordan. Dynamic changes in mortuary practices through time at Bab edh-Dhra', specifically the shift from shaft tomb burials to charnel houses, were associated with the transition from a non-sedentary lifestyle to settled life in a fortified town and a subsequent return to non-urban living. This research demonstrates that each of these profound shifts in lifestyle involved fundamental changes in the societal bonds of the community, particularly structures of kinship.

Marshall McLuhan revisited: media guru as Catholic modernist

Marshall McLuhan Revisited: Media Guru as Catholic Modernist Mark Krupnick Marshall McLuhan, Escape into Understanding: A Biography. W. Terrence Gordon. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Pp. 465. $35.00. Marshall McLuhan, the literary critic who became famous in the 1960s as a theorist of the communications media, has been back for some time, at least in certain circles. The magazine Wired, written and edited for computer sophisticates, shows McLuhan’s continuing influence both in its design and content. Now Canadian professor W. Terrence Gordon has written a big biography about McLuhan, himself a Canadian and one of the most visible intellectual superstars in a decade of superstars. This star has surely dimmed, however. Once celebrated as “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov,” McLuhan is now remembered chiefly for a few of his slogans. 1 It might be preferable to start with his main ideas. I begin with a little history of civilization according to McLuhan before moving on to his media theory. According to McLuhan, we are living through the end of the era of typographical culture. That era began with Gutenberg’s invention in the mid-1400s of the type mold, which revolutionized printing and by way of the mass-produced printed book brought about the end of medieval manuscript culture. Our new communications media differ in being electronic. Beginning with wireless telegraphy, the various new media—telephone, phonograph, cinema, radio, television, and so on—communicate information instantaneously. They also process reality according to codes other than that [End Page 107] of the reading eye, thereby effecting a radical restructuring of the psyche. The Gutenberg revolution had substituted the reading eye for the medieval ear; the monks were accustomed to speaking the words as they copied and read their illuminated manuscripts. In our new electronic culture, according to McLuhan, the ear is having its revenge. McLuhan was for communal participation as encouraged by oral-aural culture and opposed to the distanciation and separateness that he thought eye-dominance brought about. Moreover, in his view, visual technologies were responsible for the analytic fragmentation of consciousness and the denudation of sensory life. He believed that the aesthetic-perceptual superiority of the new electronic media will make for a return to a lost wholeness of apprehension. McLuhan had amusing and insightful observations about a host of media, leading up to radio and television, but his main point was that new electronic modes of communication are creating a “global village” that will restore some central features of the unified, interdependent, oral-aural culture of the Middle Ages. The medieval world was unified, of course, not only because it was oral but also because it was Catholic. That detail can’t have been lost on McLuhan, who was himself a convert. He managed never to sound like an apologist for Catholicism, but it’s my opinion that implicit always in his account of the electronic world aborning is a desire to serve as midwife for an order that will restore the Catholic Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been. To change the metaphor, I see him as moved by an evangelical yearning to be a modern-day John the Baptist, except that the kingdom whose coming he prophesied belonged to the past. We can observe in his project the seeming contradiction of reactionary medievalism and technology-oriented futurism, but ultimately the vision—of wholeness, unity, totality—is the same. In McLuhan’s reading of history, the last time the world enjoyed such unity was under the aegis of the church. 2 The new cultural studies academics would seem to be the most likely promoters of a McLuhan revival that would extend beyond the specialist audience that tunes into Wired. English professors who have remade themselves as scholars of pop culture would need first to contextualize McLuhan. In his recent review of the Gordon biography, Mark Edmundson reminds us of McLuhan’s famous slogan “the medium is the message” and his distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (e.g., radio versus television), as if that’s all one needs to know. 3 He also refers several times to the difficulties of McLuhan’s style, without ever quoting McLuhan...

The place of community in medical encounters.

Disease and injury creates a break between the individual and the community which compromises the individual's status within the community as well as the integrity of the self as a "product" of social interaction. Our "everyday" activities are called into question since our ability to fulfill obligations and to achieve many of our ends is diminished through the weakening of our bodies. In light of this account of disease, healing is about restoring the individual to a state of vital functioning, and vital functioning entails communal participation. As John Dewey points out, health as "living healthily" can be understood only in context of each patient's pursuits which are always social and communal. But, if living in community with others is the end-in-view for medical encounters, it too must be implicated in the means to that end. A patient who is given the opportunity to participate as a member of the health care community has already begun within the medical encounter itself to live healthily. It follows, then, that we must work to promote new attitudes within health care towards aiding in the effective agency and participation of patients in their healing process -- i.e., we must see community as healing.

World Science: Globalization of Institutions and Participation

Science is atypical because it is cultivated with communal participation from throughout the world. This global formation has evolved recently. It originates in the institutionalization of a cosmopolitan tradition in Europe. The cosmopolitan orientation and the perceived usefulness of the European tradition promoted its adoption and institutionalization in the non-Western civilizations. A global institutional frame, including a global science policy regime, sustains communal participation in world science. Participation is described in terms of individual, national, and global communalformations.

The Effect of Demographic Dynamics on Jewish Communal Participation in the United States

The Effect of Demographic Dynamics on Jewish Communal Participation in the United States

Integrating Gender Studies into Jewish Studies

92 SHOFAR INTEGRATING GENDER STUDIES INTO JEWISH STUDIES1 Judith R. Baskin Judith R. Baskin is the Chair of the Department of Judaic Studies at the State University of New York at Albany, and the editor of Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, a collection of twelve essays on Jewish women's lives in different epochs (Wayne State University Press, 1991). She is the author of Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition (Chico, CA, 1983), and she has also written on Jewish women in rabbinic tradition , and in the context of medieval civilization. The perception that women's lives and experiences in any particular historical epoch may differ from men's has profoundly affected the ways in which many scholars approach and interpret their subjects of study.2 In fact, introducing gender as a factor in the study of human societies, endeavors, and achievements has revealed a persistent pattern of limiting women's access to public activities and the status they confer, and has highlighted the ways in which women have been excluded from the education and empowerment 1This paper was presented as part of a panel entitled "Towards an Inclusive Curriculum: Gender and Jewish Studies," co-sponsored with the AJS Women's Caucus at the December 1989 meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Boston,MA. ~at historical change may affect men and women differently is an important insight. See Joan Kelly, "The Social Relations of the Sexes," reprinted in idem, Women, History and Theory: The Essays ofJoan Kelly (Chicago and London, 1984), p. 3. Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 93 which would allow them to function and achieve in the cultural sphere.3 Indeed , gender studies have shown that historical transformations in many eras affect men and women quite differently.4 Moreover, while women have rarely been a part of the events and cultural accomplishments that have been valued and taught in Western intellectual traditions, investigation can sometimes reveal contemporaneous and alternative women's histories and cultures. When women were excluded from "sanctioned" male cultural activities or religious observances, for example, they often created their own rituals and artifacts. In the Jewish realm one can point to such phenomena as women's prayer groups and other activities in the medieval synagogue,S the development of devotional literature intended for women and sometimes written by women,6 and women's needlework or other donations to the synagogue as forms of communal participation? And interestingly, in times of rapid social change 3For discussions of the distinctions between public and private domains, and the realms of nature and culture and how they pertain to women, see Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview"; and Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" both in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA, 1974). For applications of these insights to the Jewish realm, see Judith R. Baskin, "The Separation of Women in Rabbinic Judaism," in Women, Religion and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany, 1985); and Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York and Oxford, 1988). 4A classic exploration of this phenomenon is Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?," reprinted in idem, Women, History and Theory, pp. 19-50. Explorations of the varying effects of historical events on Jewish men and Jewish women include Paula Hyman, "Gender and Jewish History," Tikkun 3:1 (Jan.lFeb. 1988); idem, "Gender and the Immigrant Experience in America," and Marion Kaplan, "Tradition and Transition: Jewish Women in Imperial Germany," both in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, 1991). 5See Judith R. Baskin, "Jewish Women in the Middle Ages," in Baskin, Jewish Women; and Emily Taitz, '"Kol Ishah-The Voice of Woman: Where Was It Heard in Medieval Europe," Conservative Judaism 38 (1986), pp. 43-61. 6See Chava Weissler, "The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women," in Jewish Spirituality: From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York, 1987); idem, "Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World of Ashkenazic Women," and Ellen Umansky, "Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women's Religious Lives...

The role of cultural diversity and communal participation in wetland management in Brazil

This article compares the livelihood strategies of two populations living in different Brazilian wetlands: the fishermen of the coastal floodplain of Marituba, at the mouth of S. Francisco River and the rubber-tappers of the Guaporé Valley. Both communities utilize the renewable resources of the wetlands on a traditional basis: fishery, small-scale agriculture and handicraft in Marituba, and latex, Brazilian nuts and fishery in Guaporé Valley. Both communities are in the process of rapid and intense socioeconomic and biological change. In Marituba, the sugar-cane plantations and the capital-intensive irrigation schemes are threatening the existence of the varzea (floodplain); in Guaporé, rapid deforestation is threatening the livelihoods of local communities. The reaction of these communities is similar: both are fighting for the conservation of the wetland ecosystems as conditions for the survival of their culture and way of life.