Ethnographic Scholarship Research Articles

Preparing the milk and honey: between ethnography and academia as a racially minoritised academic

Abstract This paper focuses on the development of an academic of colour between ethnographic fieldwork and becoming an academic. In terms of data collection, this study demonstrates the complexities and multiple positionalities ascribed and assumed within fieldwork which question the stability of the insider/outsider dichotomy. These positionalities range from being a Muslim ‘brother’ to being aligned with Government security. Being Muslim and male also allowed for entrance in areas of the field which were exclusively for Muslim males. While fieldwork presented certain complexities, being a person of colour and Muslim in academia presents many more. A number of studies have demonstrated the structural whiteness of academia and thus, dealing with this as an academic of colour require particular skills and actions. I share my experiences of navigating academia as a person of colour and question the role of whiteness within ethnographically oriented representative groups which are exclusively white and who represent an academic audience for ethnographic scholarship.

Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars by Carolyn Sufrin

Reviewed by: Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars by Carolyn Sufrin Emma Louise Backe Carolyn Sufrin, Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 328 pp. Carolyn Sufrin concludes Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars with a poem from one of the key figures in her ethnography—Kima, a young woman continuously cycling between San Francisco jail, the city's Tenderloin district, and drug treatment programs in the Bay area. Kima's "Poetry Blues" speaks of the promise of redemption imbricated in incarceration: "Exploitation of guilt without a last name./A rectifiable beat that ticks to no end" (243). Sufrin grapples with the sense of guilt and ambivalence that pervades the San Francisco jail clinic for pregnant women, noting that theoretical terms like structural violence or the prison-industrial complex often fail to provide closure for those most affected. Indebted to works like Righteous Dopefiend (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009) and Addicted.pregnant.poor (Knight 2015), and careful to contend with the ethnographic scholarship that has already been conducted on structural disenfranchisement in the United States, Sufrin stipulates that her "observant participation" as a physician and anthropologist within the San Francisco jail aims to "destabiliz[e] monolithic representations of prisons (and the limited depictions of jails) as sites where only discipline and punishment occur" (33). Instead, Jailcare seeks to complicate characterizations of the carceral system that leave no room for ambiguity, or the possibilities of intimacy and care behind bars. Sufrin's notion of care operates on three dimensions—"as concern, as relationship, and as practice" (21), a conceptual approach that allows the author to situate the San Francisco [End Page 1159] jail clinic within the wider social services security net of the US federal government and illustrate the frayed edges and considerable gaps in such a system. The porous boundaries between the San Francisco community and the carceral clinic present difficult questions about the government's responsibility to care for pregnant women, who we consider to be fit for motherhood, how acts of caring about and caring for inmates play out within the custody of the state, and the opportunities for safety, motherhood, and medical treatment a jail cell provides. As the title would suggest, Sufrin is interested in how the carceral clinic articulates with the social safety net and the ways in which punitive institutions perform care for those otherwise abandoned by the system. This constitution of care within the correctional facility centralized in Jailcare further highlights the intersubjective negotiations of care between patients and clinicians, as well as configurations of kinship and motherhood in the jail. Part I of Jailcare teases out the conflicting and often contradictory mandates of care afforded by the state to its citizens, even the criminals among them. The 1976 Estelle v. Gamble Supreme Court case proved a pivotal moment in dictating prisoners' entitlement to care. The state's obligation to care for prisoners under Estelle has had broadly sweeping consequences as the welfare system began to erode at the end of the 20th century. San Francisco's extensive safety net would suggest that women living on the streets should have access to the resources they need to survive. But, as Sufrin points out, availability of programming is not necessarily synonymous with quality or ease of access. The bureaucratic obstacles to care are such that many of the women who figure into Jailcare's narrative find the San Francisco clinic a far more palatable option than services that don't involve getting taken into custody. Sufrin draws upon Sharon Dolovich's (2012) idea of the "carceral burden" in Chapter 1 to illustrate that a prisoner's right to care, however, is also predicated on moral discourses of deservingness and the expectation of medical conversion. While recidivism is often cited among prison populations as evidence of the moral failings of "reformed" inmates, Sufrin points out that women's failure to "make it" out on the streets often results in a choice between chronic disease, addiction, and homelessness, and San Francisco's Jail Medical Care (JMC). The choice, for many women like Kima, is hardly a choice at all, but rather a "survival...

Ethnographic accounts of visitors from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to the Asian peripheries of Russia and their contribution to the development of systematic ethnological studies in the Monarchy: Preliminary results and research perspectives

The authors intend to provide an overview of the diaries, travelogues, and correspondence of Austro-Hungarians who traveled to the Asian peripheries of Russia during the Dual Monarchy. We aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on colonial discourses of otherness, as well as to the historical development of ethnographic scholarship in Europe. Travel writing, orientalism, and colonial encounters with Asian otherness are closely intermingling phenomena in the modern era. We argue that the rich corpus of visual and verbal representations of North-, Central-, and Inner-Asian peoples recorded by the subjects of the Dual Monarchy provides instructive examples of colonial encounters with non-colonizers in 19th century Asia. Furthermore, we believe that these examples will bring forth a more detailed picture of how the ideas born in the centers of German enlightenment (like Völkerkunde) impregnated the intellectual life of more peripheral regions in Europe. As ethnographic scholarship developed within national research traditions rather than in the frame of a monolithic, European intellectual project, our question is whether or not the Dual Monarchy provided a meaningful frame to bridge national research traditions.

Exploring the mundane: Towards an ethnographic approach to bioenergy

This article introduces the concept of ‘mundane bioenergy’, the largest source of renewable energy utilized by human society. While the term ‘renewable energy’ evokes images of solar panels and wind turbines, most renewable energy is used in a different form. This ‘mundane’ and largely invisible form of energy use takes place when families burn wood, dung, charcoal, and crop residue in cookstoves for their subsistence needs. We call on more energy ethnographers to grapple with mundane energy issues and strengthen this small but growing field of scholarship. Limited ethnographic scholarship on mundane energy issues leads to a partial understanding of emic perspectives and failed development initiatives. By sharing insights from our ongoing ethnographic research on mundane bioenergy, we demonstrate the value of bringing such insights into conversation with research in energy studies.

The Status of the Social Fact

The Status of the Social Fact

Exploring the Mundane: Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Bioenergy

This article introduces the concept of ‘mundane bioenergy’, the largest source of renewable energy utilized by human society. While the term ‘renewable energy’ evokes images of solar panels and wind turbines, most renewable energy is used in a different form. This ‘mundane’ and largely invisible form of energy use takes place when families burn wood, dung, charcoal, and crop residue in cookstoves for their subsistence needs. We call on more energy ethnographers to grapple with mundane energy issues and strengthen this small but growing field of scholarship. Limited ethnographic scholarship on mundane energy issues leads to a partial understanding of emic perspectives and failed development initiatives. By sharing insights from our ongoing ethnographic research on mundane bioenergy, we demonstrate the value of bringing such insights into conversation with research in energy studies.

Stuck in the Middle With You: The Intimate Labours of Mobility and Smuggling along Mexico’s Migrant Route

ABSTRACTThis paper examines some of the intimate, embodied and affective dimensions of mobility for unauthorised Central American migrants in Mexico. While in transit, migrants become implicated within the violence of local and transnational economies of smuggling, organised crime, kidnapping and securitisation. At the same time, migrants engage intimate economies of exchange, kinship and care as they negotiate their movements and their lives. Bringing together ethnographic research and transnational feminist scholarship, this paper reconceptualises human smuggling as a form of intimate labour along migrant routes. I pay particular attention to the ways human smuggling becomes a point of closeness and intimate exchange as migrants and their smugglers strategically re-imagine the borders of kinship. While the types of social relations forged along the journey may defy traditional understandings of smuggling as inherently exploitative, I also examine how such arrangements contribute to new forms of inequality. Through a lens of intimacy, this work contributes new insights on the complex and shifting nature of Mexico’s human smuggling industry and the state policies purportedly aimed to contain it.

How did the empire strike back? Lessons for today from The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s' Britain

The Empire Strikes Back made a landmark and sometimes controversial intervention in the scholarship of ethnicity and race when it was first published. This article considers both the continuities and breaks that linked and separated the volume from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' work and tradition that preceded it. It also suggests that the balance between ethnographic engagement and critical scholarship sets up a necessarily iterative process that values both but also recognizes the differences between the two. Such iteration speaks also to the manner in which the study of contemporary migration and its consequences demands both more self-conscious links between the study of migration and the scholarship of racial formation and ethnic identity.

Considering the wet homelands of indigenous Massachusetts

This paper uses ideas developed by Ian McNiven in his analysis of ethnographic and archeological data for indigenous relationships with the sea in northeastern Australia, in combination with regional New England ethnographic and archeological scholarship to offer an alternative way to think about indigenous culture in Massachusetts as wet and dry aspects of indigenous homelands within a hydrogeographic perspective using fresh and saltwater drainages. This way to think is based on local people’s accumulated knowledge that conceptualizes water and landscapes as animated seascapes and spiritscapes of a homeland, incorporating cognitive aspects of navigation and watercraft construction and use.

Emergent publics, critical ethnographic scholarship and race and ethnic relations

This article asks what might be the possibilities and the limits of what academic research might strive for when we engage with the politics of race. It argues for a reflexive engagement with the historically sensitive production of critical ethnographic knowledge. Ethnography and the anthropological tradition, challenged in much politically progressive literature on race and ethnicity as a form of exoticism, a medium of orientialism and a field of misrepresentation, need to be considered in interdisciplinary traditions of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences that examine efficacy and causality as central concepts of analysis.

The Mundane, Power, and Symmetry: A Reading of the Field with Dorothy Winsor and the Tradition of Ethnographic Research

Dorothy Winsor's induction as an ATTW Fellow in 2007 and the disciplinary moment of reflection invited by this issue provide the exigence for the story of how Winsor's scholarship, and ethnographic scholarship more broadly, has shaped the field. This story, told via the interpretive lens of three topoi (the mundane, power, and symmetry) that emerged from an interview with Winsor in 2009, suggests how the field's theory and methodology have matured over the past three decades and anticipates what it will become in the future.

Crafting an Architectural Blueprint: Principles of Design for Ethnographic Research

The purpose of this article is to enrich our conceptual understanding of ethnography through principles of design by offering a blueprint for ethnographic ways of knowing. Drawing on published ethnographic research, this article develops and defines principles of design that help facilitate the process and product of ethnographic research. Through the metaphor of an architectural blueprint, we consider the epistemological value of identifying foundational principles supporting ethnographic research and writing. The architectural blueprint offers a foundation for creating, writing, revising, teaching, and evaluating ethnographic scholarship. The article closes with a discussion of the utility of the metaphor as well as how other metaphors that currently guide ethnographic research could be used in tandem with the blueprint metaphor.

TranslatingDharma: Scottish Missionary-Orientalists and the Politics of Religious Understanding in Nineteenth-Century Bombay

A consideration of colonial Bombay enriches the understanding of the activities and ideas of Christian missionaries and Orientalists in India and elucidates British conceptions of “the religions of India” and the production of colonialist knowledge. This article focuses on nineteenth-century Scottish missionary-Orientalists and examines how they and other Bombay-based Protestant missionaries understood the concept of religion, Christianity, and the structure, similitude and distinctiveness of “the religions” at the crucial moment when newly “discovered” religions were gaining recognition and a new vision of “world religions” was coming into being. It considers the writings on the religions and ethnographic scholarship of the Bombay Scottish missionaries, as well as their extensive and multifaceted interactions with Bombay's Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Parsi, Jewish, Roman Catholic and Andivasi communities. More specifically, it details the ways in which Bombay missionaries applied and related the concept of religion to diverse configurations of language, text, and practice that they understood as isomorphic species of the religion genus. By examining how Christian missionaries who were also Orientalists conceptualized a number of “religions” and interacted with numerous communities this article seeks to elucidate the presuppositions that shaped the ways in which Hinduism and the other “religions” of nineteenth-century Bombay were imagined.

After the Massacre: The Violent Legacy of the San Sabá Mission (review)

2oo8Book Reviews445 Laboratory near Fort Wingate where Morgan worked examining wool fibers. Willie taught Young die Navajo language in the evenings and this partnership became a lifelong collaboration, which included working on the small book The Trouble at RoundRock that Brill de Ramírez speculates about. The other William Morgan wrote die 1931 American Anthropologist article "Navaho Treatment of Sickness: Diagnosticians ," about which the author also conjectures. The author's claims, such as that Navajo control of research "insures the reliability and accuracy of current work," while politically correct are somewhat optimistic (p. 62). Brill de Ramírez supports uncritically Taiaiake Alfred's assertion that "with very few exceptions, universities are sites of production of imperial values and ethics," which makes one wonder where rightwing critics such as David Horowitz get all their ammunition to accuse universities of being bastions of uncritical liberalism (p. 211). The central message of this book is that the "ethnographic record presents far greater degrees of complexity and obfuscation than has even been realized to date. Well over a century of textualized stories produced via ethnographic scholarship lies in need ofconversive clarity" (p. 21 1). However, thisjargon-and speculation-filled book is a very questionable example of clarity, and while the author writes about the past naivety of readers of "as told to" autobiographies, she does not help her case by admiringly quoting Wilson Follett's 1938 New York Times review of Son of Old Man Hat to the effect "that men of ostensible science . . . can so readily detect all manner of profound, subtle significance in so problematic a document is to the layman a matter of chronic amazement. . . . For the veritable scientist of race, culture, mind—the scientist who derives his generalizations from fixed data through a funnel ofgeneralization—the pertinent attitude would seem tobe that of the dying Goethe's unfulfillable demand, 'More light'" (p. 133). I want to make the same demand for more light after reading all the "profound, subtle significance" that Brill de Ramirez's literary criticism has attempted to bring to Left Handed's life story as recorded by Walter Dyk in Son of Old Man Hat. Northern Arizona UniversityJon Reyhner After the Massacre: The Violent Legacy of the San Saba Mission. By Robert S. Weddle, trans, by Carol Lipscomb. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Pp. 216. Illustrations, map, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-896725g6 -o. $32.95, cloth.) With After the Massacre, Robert S. Weddle offers a valuable follow-up not only to his own ig64 work, The San Saba Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas, but also to the documentary collection, The San Saba Papers, edited by Leslie Byrd Simpson and Paul D. Nathan. In this new study, he makes available a translation of a recently discovered diary ofthe 1 759 military campaign sent to avenge the 1758 destruction of Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba by a force of allied Indian nations from across northern Texas and the southern Plains. The diary, written by Capt. Juan Angel de Oyarzún who led a company of fifty men from San Luis Potosí to participate in 446Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril the campaign, came to light in ig7g while Weddle was completing research at the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, Spain. Beyond the text of the diary which, with two reports written by Diego Ortiz Parrilla at die conclusion of the campaign, constitutes a third of the text, the book puts the events detailed in the diary in perspective with other interpretations from documentary, historical, and archaeological sources. In a series of nine narrative chapters, Weddle carefully highlights the wideranging information made available by the diary itselfas well as contextualizing the decisions and actions ofSpanish participants as events unfolded in 1 758, 1 759, and the years that followed this critical pivot in Texas history. For instance, individual chapters explain die state ofSpanish knowledge, manpower, and preparation, chart the route of the expedition, mine the diary for the natural history of the region, and tell the story of twentieth-century archaeological searches for the sites of San Saba mission and presidio as well as the site of batde at a Taovaya setdement on the...

Canada and the Idea of North, and: Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Canada and the Idea of North, and: Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Russell Morton Brown (bio) Sherrill E. Grace. Canada and the Idea of North McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. xxiv, 341. $49.95 Renée Hulan. Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. 245. $75.00, $27.95 As their titles suggest, these two books, published in 2002 by the same press, share much in common. Each offers a survey of the cultural significance of the North in Canada. Each, though written by an academic based in an English department, takes a broad interdisciplinary approach. (Sherrill E. Grace investigates a variety of cultural media: music, art, drama, poetry, and fiction; Renée Hulan also discusses literary representations but emphasizes non-fictional accounts that include ethnographic descriptions, travel narratives, and adventure stories.) Each carefully sketches its theoretical positions in detail. And each owes a debt to Foucault: Grace characterizes Canada and the Idea of North as a Foucauldian attempt to describe 'the discursive formation of the North,' and, while Hulan never explicitly cites Foucault, much of the analysis in Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture reflects her ideas about discourse as a form of power. Despite these similarities, Canada and the Idea of North and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture take opposing positions on most issues. For example, at the outset each notices the way Canadian culture has often failed to distinguish between the idea of 'Canada-as-North' - a concept that has served Canadian identity formation - and the physical reality of North as a geographical location, but Hulan views the failure to distinguish between the two as dangerous, especially to indigenous people and others who inhabit the North as a physical location; Grace, though certainly sensitive to such issues, treats the slippage as value-neutral and integral to her topic. Grace, the senior scholar, draws together the thoughts, reading, and experiences of twenty years to provide a panorama of Canadian depictions of North and to orchestrate these into a meditation on how the 'idea of North' (a phrase borrowed from the title of a Glenn Gould soundscape) has functioned in Canadian culture. Hulan, the newly minted scholar (her book has its genesis in a 1996 Ph.D. thesis), offers a survey that is critical of the geographical determinism she sees deriving from this 'nordicity of national identity' and creating a dominant discourse that 'seeks to unify and to shape collective experience and, in so doing, smooth over differences.' Perhaps the differences between these two scholars are more than generational; perhaps they arise from distinct personal or political visions. Grace says she has written her book 'because I am Canadian and [out of] my love for and desire to understand this stubborn, complex, infuriating place that I call home.' Hulan, in contrast, identifying the idea of North as a dangerous myth that needs to be delineated only so it can be demystified, [End Page 456] moves in the direction of polemic and tells us that that such understandings are fundamentally ideological, gendered, and 'tainted by reactionary history.' (She concludes one chapter with the warning: 'Study and critique of these myths must be vigilant in reading the romantic and mystifying views that have their roots in nineteenth-century ideas about race, gender, and nationalism, especially when considering calls to place the north at the centre of future national imagining.') Tracing out 'the familiar quest position of separation, initiation, and return' in ethnographic scholarship and popular adventure tales, Hulan thinks the Native perspective and presence has been overwritten by the appropriation of the North as a cultural symbol that produces stereotypes useful to the dominant culture. Grace, in contrast, sees the dominant discourse as more flexible and complex- and as evolving and subject to challenge. (She takes Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen as exemplifying the possibility of an effective response to tradition: 'In one magical stroke Highway has indigenised the Christian Holy Family, and inscribed the Cree version of how babies arrive on earth into the discursive formation of the North.') As correctives to one another, it is good to have...

Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel by Karl H. Schlesier

1 0 2 WAL 3 6 .1 SPRING 2 0 0 1 whispering their interwoven lives from the cool earth, reminding us that ulti­ mately it’s the stories that matter most, that they’re all we have. And this, not surprisingly, is one very fine story. Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel. By Karl H. Schlesier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 290 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Nancy Kirkpatrick Wright Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona Until an Apache writer tells the story of his or her people’s tortuous tran­ sition from a hunting-raiding society to sedentary reservation life, we must con­ tent ourselves with compassionate Anglo scholars and writers. Most recently, Karl H. Schlesier, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Wichita State University, has combined meticulous ethnographic scholarship with the con­ science of a responsible historian in Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel. Volume 27 of the University of Oklahoma’s American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, this handsome edition comes with a dust jacket aptly illustrated by western artist Howard Terpning. Peopled with such Apache leaders as Mangas, Victorio, Geronimo, and that wise old wanior Nana, Josanie’s War is the familiar story of some renegade Apaches marauding, killing, and hiding from the cavalry in order to establish a mountain stronghold where they can live in their traditional way. The cun­ ning protagonist, Josanie, brother to Chihuahua (both historical figures, as are most of the characters in this book), leads his band from Turkey Creek on the Fort Apache Reservation to the Sierra Madre in Old Mexico. Schlesier’s alter­ nating chapters of historical documents from the 1880s—letters, diaries, government reports, newspaper dispatches, and Apache songs—substantiate a balanced treatment of Apache atrocities and raids versus Anglo cruelty and military bungling. By chapter 27, Schlesier moderates the fighting enough to allow the Apache spirit to speak to us through legends, myths, and the ceremonies ofWhite Painted Woman and Monster Slayer Boy. We begin to understand the Apache concept of power when, in a tender vignette, one of the waniors calls the Mountain Spirits to bless them on their way to stage an ambush. Schlesier’s descriptions of the preparations for a puberty ceremony and the appearances of those Apache icons, the Mountain Spirit Dancers, are well drawn and meaningful. Yet, with its minutiae of authenticating statistics, place names, and ethnic details, this book reads like history rather than fiction. An accompanying map might have traced the journey so effectively that with a few background facts the author could have moved on to developing his characters within their cul­ tural context. He could have exploited the inepressible Apache sense of humor, making the antics of the Mountain Spirit clown hilarious as he carica­ tures Apache scouts and inept Anglo soldiers. We would begin to care so much BO O K REVIEWS 1 0 3 about this unique group of people that suspense would build, and we would hope against hope that this little band of Apaches would survive. In the end, as we know, defeat was inevitable. The conflict between the Apache traditional life of hunting and raiding and the Anglo doctrine of Manifest Destiny came to an ignoble end. Although these widely divergent philosophies of land ownership are irreconcilable, Apache Mountain Spirits still live: The Great Blue Mountain Spirit in the south, He is happy over me. My songs have been created. . . . My songs will go out into the world. (269) Killing Cynthia Ann. By Charles Brashear. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999. 209 pages, $21.50. Reviewed by Steven Frye Antelope Valley College, Lancaster, California The abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker (or Naudah) by the Comanche in 1836, together with her re-abduction by Texas Rangers in 1860, was emblem­ atic of the moral and ethical conflicts and ambiguities that attended westward expansion in the nineteenth century. Charles Brashear’s new novel works from the vantage point of the Comanche, telling the story through the eyes of “Naudah.” The story begins in a Comanche village, making apparent from the beginning that the protagonist is completely assimilated into the Noconi band. She is the favored wife of Peta Nocona and the mother...

Telling Stories from the Field: Children and the Politics of Ethnographic Representation

IntroductionOver the past 20 years, the politics of ethnographic writing and representation have been of central concern for feminist anthropologists. A number of issues have been addressed including the processes of producing truths about women's lives, questions of difference and inclusivity, and the impact of research on research participants (Abu-Lughod, 1993; Cole and Phillips, 1995; di Leonardo, 1991; Stacey, 1988; Visweswaran, 1988, 1994). Serious scholarly attention has been directed to the gendered spaces in which women live by examining the social, economic, cultural and political dimensions of women's lives. This essay extends feminist anthropological analyses of (largely) women's lives to consider the problematic relationship between producing knowledge and ethnographic representation in anthropological child research.In the past, anthropologists have engaged in limited ways with the subjects of and childhood. For the most part, they have focused on in the contexts of family life and motherhood. This is due in part to the tenacity of models of socialization and development. According to these models, are conceptualized as moving toward full adult personhood. That is, they are valued for the future of their lives in the adult world rather than for their presence in the existing world. These models have been extraordinarily resistant to criticism and have persisted in dominating the creation of knowledge about and childhood (cf. James and Prout, 1990: 22-23).An emergent childhood studies, however, has been pointing to ways to conceptualize as creative and competent social actors in a variety of social and cultural contexts (Amit-Talai, 1995; Corsaro, 1985; Qvortrup, 1987; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, 1998; Stephens, 1995). As well, some childhood scholars have sought to identify and analyze the diversity of social scientific models presently available for thinking about childhood in their attempts to theorize this vast field (Alanen, 2000; Honig, 1999; James and Prout, 1990; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998; Jenks, 1998). For example, in outlining a paradigm for the new social study of childhood, Allison James and Alan Prout (1990: 231) argue for . . a theoretical perspective which can grasp childhood as a continually experienced and created social phenomenon which has significance for its present, as well as the past and future. Taken together, this work has redefined and childhood as legitimate subjects in their own right, worthy of scholarly attention. In powerfully reconceptualizing childhood, this scholarship attests to the theoretically challenging stage that the field of childhood studies has reached.Bringing a feminist lens to bear on the study of and childhood, however, has progressed at a slower pace. Beginning in 1987, Barrie Thorne, and later Leena Alanen (1994) and Ann Oakley (1994), called for a revisioning of the study of using a feminist lens in attending to agency and diversity. Similarly, anthropologists Sharon Stephens (1995), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent (1998) edited important collections that advanced the idea of a broader engagement between feminism and childhood studies. However, ethnographic scholarship directed at taking account of gender and the different experiences of childhood for girls and boys has not been a priority since Thorne's (1993) pioneering work.(f.#1] Oakley (1994) offers a partial explanation for this inattention arguing that the focus of the new sociology of childhood has been directed to the broader category children rather than on the differentiated categories of girls and boys. She has suggested that this emphasis is a necessary first step in making visible (1994: 22), thereby echoing an earlier feminist practice to focus on the category woman. James, Jenks and Prout (1998), however, argue that playing down issues of diversity and the ways power works through gender, race, class and age results in theoretical analyses of children's lives that are incomplete. …

The Last Matriarch: A Novel by Sharman Apt Russell

BO O K REVIEW S The Last Matriarch: A Novel. By Sharman Apt Russell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. 194 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Bill D. Toth Western New Mexico University, Silver City Resist the temptation to compare The Last Matriarch with The Clan of the Cave Bear which it superficially resembles. Russell’s unique effort is a remark­ ably good book. As forensic history, it gives us a glimpse into a major archeo­ logical mystery— did early man have a hand in the extinction of North American megafauna?—and offers a viable answer in the process: very likely. As fiction, its nanative voice is strong and clear. Moreover, its characters strike us as real and quintessentially human, their fears and aspirations no different from ours. The result is a masterful blend of paleohistory and invention, not unlike Paul Horgan’s Great River. Russell’s river, however, is the Mimbres, in south­ western New Mexico, and this story traces the lives of a small band of Clovis People as they follow the river and its seasons, hunting the mammoth, fishing the river, and gathering edible plants and herbs along its fertile valley, some eleven thousand years ago. The story’s narrator and central figure is Willow, the clan’s resourceful and resilient matriarch, and her tale is wonderfully drawn. Closely tied to Willow’s life are the lives of her children, her two hus­ bands, and a host of collateral relatives—all comprising the small band of hunter-gatherers at the heart of the story. However, this is a “big two-hearted” story with a second protagonist, and her story is every bit as compelling as Willow’s. This is also the story of Half Ear, the equally resourceful and resilient matriarch of the mammoth herd which grazes the valley. The lives of the two matriarchs crisscross throughout the story till each is inextricably identified with the other, and their spirits ulti­ mately merge as the aged and dying Willow clutches to her breast beads made from Half Ear’s ivories. Russell is clearly interested in the extinction of megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. As a young woman, Willow and her people share the land with giant short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, mammoth, and the like. Gradually, though, the big animals’ numbers diminish until, at Willow’s death, they are memories earned by the old people. In this light, the book’s title refers to both Willow and her “sister” matriarch Half Ear. Both represent the final cur­ tain, the end of the line. And their passing, Russell reminds us, is significant. Finally, The Last Matriarch is a work of immense lyric beauty and as much a celebration of stories and storytelling as anything else. It’s no small detail that one of the most venerated positions among Willow’s people is the storyteller, who’s responsible for reminding the others of who they are, from whence they came, and ultimately where they—and we—will all go. At the story’s end, Willow and Half Ear are long dead; yet, their voices and their stories continue, 1 0 2 WAL 3 6 .1 SPRING 2 0 0 1 whispering their interwoven lives from the cool earth, reminding us that ulti­ mately it’s the stories that matter most, that they’re all we have. And this, not surprisingly, is one very fine story. Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel. By Karl H. Schlesier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 290 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Nancy Kirkpatrick Wright Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona Until an Apache writer tells the story of his or her people’s tortuous tran­ sition from a hunting-raiding society to sedentary reservation life, we must con­ tent ourselves with compassionate Anglo scholars and writers. Most recently, Karl H. Schlesier, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Wichita State University, has combined meticulous ethnographic scholarship with the con­ science of a responsible historian in Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel. Volume 27 of the University of Oklahoma’s American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, this handsome edition comes with a dust jacket aptly illustrated by western artist Howard...

In the Middle of the Myth: The Problem of Power in Gender Relations and the Alto Douro Region of Northern Portugal

Abstract: Recent ethnographic scholarship has divided Iberia into a south of male social dominance and a north of female social dominance or social equality. In this article I critique sweeping character of these distinctions through a review of ethnographies which describe instances of male dominance in northern Portugal. The particular ecological/economic conditions linked to male power in north lead me to ask if such conditions might define regions, and regional gender relations, at a level between local settlement and broad area designated the north. Analyzing my ethnographic data from northern Portugal's Alto Douro region, I suggest that they do.Resume: La production ethnographique recente etablit une division dans la peninsule iberique entre le sud ou les hommes dominent et le nord ou on trouve une domination des femmes ou l'egalite. sociale. Dans cet article, je critique le caractere absolu de ces distinctions au moyen d'une revue des ethnographies qui decrivent des cas de dominance masculine dans le nord du Portugal. Les conditions ecologiques/economiques particulieres reliees au pouvoir masculin dans le nord me conduisent a chercher si de telles conditions pourraient definir des regions et des relations regionales entre les sexes a un niveau situe entre l'etablissement local et l'aire plus large designee comme le >. Sur la base de donnees ethnographiques de la region d'Alto Douro du nord du Portugal, je pretends qu'on peut etablir un tel niveau intermediaire.IntroductionRecent publications on local gender relations in Iberia attempt to retrace lines of a cultural map that has become increasingly problematic. In this article, I question sociocultural content and spatial contouring of this map both through a focussed review of ethnographies set in northern Portugal and an analysis of data drawn from my own ethnographic work in a small northern Portuguese region called Alto Douro, world-renowned for its wine, and a puzzle piece for anyone interested in regional character of economy and culture.(f.1) My purpose is not to do away with cultural maps. Indeed, revival of notions of a area by Brogger and Gilmore (1997) and O'Neill (1995) is worth attention because of stress such a notion puts on cultural differentiation in space. In addressing this work, I mean, rather, to emphasize that approaching as a distributive phenomenon is so important as to demand great spatial precision (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Lomnitz-Adler, 1991, 1992; Rodseth, 1998; Wolf, 1999). Studying as distributed means trying to grasp how everyday practices, representations, understandings and identities depend both on localized space and extralocal spatial connections. Such an approach to demands close attention to regional differences, commonalities and boundaries. Our maps must be precise, and their dimensions specified. In this article I attempt to demonstrate importance of one of these dimensions: economic organization.Brogger and Gilmore (1997) claim presence of an system across southern Iberia, and a mirror image of this system in northwestern Spain and north/central Portugal. In their view, fulcral difference between two cultural systems is public power of women: in south men dominate socially by controlling public sphere, while in north women control this sphere, and thus are dominant in local society as a whole. O'Neill's (1995) work, though more focussed on a single ethnographic case, also opposes a northern to a southern cultural system.Because these articles focus on gendered social dominance and geographical difference, various approaches can be made to their claims: We can explore political functioning of honour-and-shame and Mediterranean culture as categories in academy (Goddard, Llobera and Shore, 1994; Herzfeld, 1987; Pina-Cabral, 1989). …

Performing Osun without bodies: Documenting the Osun festival in print

An experiment in translating performance events into ethnographic scholarship drawing on both verbal and visual means of communication.