Ethnological Perspective Research Articles

Kryminologia kulturowa? Antropologia kultury jako przyczynek do rozważań nad problematyką zabójstwa w krajach anglosaskich

The paper covers the issue of cultural and ethnological perspective in contemporary criminology. The author presents various theories that are currently developing worldwide, addressing the problem of the role of culture (in the anthropological sense of the word) and its influence on the aetiology of criminal behaviour, social reaction to crime, and creation of role-modelling in different societies. The presentation is focussed mostly on the cultural and criminological comparison of three countries the United States of America, Great Britain and Canada – and their homicide data. These countries, although seemingly similar in many ways when traditionally analysed in criminology, differ significantly in terms of murder – not only statistically, but also at a deeper and more complex historical level. The author describes these differences, arguing that the cultural approach to criminological issues is crucial in explaining violence. The last part of the paper focuses on case-study examples from all the three countries under discussion; this serves as an illustration to the author’s postulate of incorporating the ethnological studies and research into the system of criminology.

Views from the periphery: discourses of race and place in French military medicine

Numerous authors have interpreted the history of anthropological and medical conceptions of race in nineteenth century France as following a path mapped out by phrenology, anthropometry, and Paul Broca's version of physical anthropology. On balance, this has resulted in an historical narrative centered on Parisian intellectual life and one leaving the impression that by the 1890s anthropological theories had moved away from ethnological and cultural explanations toward more biological views of race. This article, by contrast, examines the world beyond Paris and the literatures of naval and army medicine from about 1830 to 1920. It describes the contours of a medical and anthropological pluralism in matters of race and ethnicity and argues that cultural and ethnological perspectives remained important to theorists of race through World War I.

Visual arts and cultural contexts: History and prehistory

Leppert, Richard. Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1996. xvii + 348 pp. including notes, references, and index. $63.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. Carr, Christopher and Jill E. Neitzel, eds. Style, Society, and Person: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. New York: Plenum Press, 1995. xx + 477 pp. including index. $69.50 cloth.

Anden i lampan: Etnologiska perspektiv på ljus och mörker (The Genie of the Lamp: Ethnological Perspectives on Light and Darkness) by Jan Garnert

970 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Anden i lampan: Etnologiska perspektiv pa ljus och morker (The Genie of the Lamp: Ethnological Perspectives on Light and Darkness). By Jan Garnert. Stockholm: Carlsson Bokforlag, 1993. Pp. 307; illus­ trations, notes, bibliography, index, English summary. Skr 300. The ever-present availability of artificial light seems so taken-forgranted to most of us that we seldom reflect about how life would be if the darkness of night governed as much as the natural light of day. When we want to celebrate something with dinner in the com­ pany of good friends, we switch off the electric light to enjoy the feeble flame of a candle. Things have not always been like this. A century ago our party would have been illuminated as brightly as possible, iffor no other reason than to show social status. And when the party was over, we would have gone back to the ordinary rhythm of life with its marked differences between day and night, light and dark. The use, and nonuse, of light is deeply imbedded in our cul­ ture. This is thoroughly demonstrated inJan Garnert’s dissertation, an ethnological study of the cultural history of lighting. His starting point in The Genie oftheLampis the reasonable assump­ tion that the light of day and the darkness of night, as well as the technical forms of man-made lighting, have an influence on social relations and human interaction. From this follows the author’s am­ bition to discuss the interplay between technical and cultural change: what do lighting techniques mean for cultural processes? The study concerns mainly Sweden from the 18th century until the middle of the 20th century, but the observations and the analysis are no doubt of more general value. Garnert uses an interesting mix ofsource material: interviews, arti­ facts, memoirs, diaries, questionnaire responses, fiction, and his own observations. Pictures ofdifferent kinds play an especially significant role. They are not primarily used as illustrations (although the book is richly illustrated). In the lack of other source material that might reveal everyday habits and routines related to various lighting tech­ niques, Garnert found contemporary portrayals and photographs re­ warding. Pictures, he says, “became my fieldwork”: they “allowed me to make a journey of discovery through time.” Garnert’s main thesis is that, for an ethnologist, the only truly sig­ nificant long-term change in the history of lighting came with elec­ tricity at the end of the 19th century. Certainly paraffin lamps and gaslight, which came into use during the second half of the 19th century, represented an improvement compared to older tech­ niques like the open hearth, train-oil lamps, tallow candles, and wax candles. But they still suffered from the limitations and dangers of light from flame. The risk of fire from the live flames meant that a light never should be left unattended. Empty rooms were dark rooms. Instead everyone gathered around the single source of light, whether it was a paraffin lamp or the fire in the hearth. Only safe TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 971 and clean electric light made it possible to reduce the marked differ­ ences between a daytime world and a nighttime world, where light and darkness set boundaries for the things people could do. Electric light, arc light, was used in Sweden from 1876, and elec­ tricity became an important element in the modernization of the nation around the turn of the century. With the help of trademarks and advertisements, Garnert demonstrates how the miracle of the radiant electric bulb was associated with classical symbolic imagery and the goddess of light. But electric light was still relatively exclu­ sive. Not until the introduction ofmetal filament lamps around 1910 did it become economically viable for ordinary people. Garnert argues that the real cultural transformation made possi­ ble by the new lighting technique took place around 1930 in Swe­ den. A number of “display events,” such as the Stockholm Exhibi­ tion of 1930, introduced the concept of “electric light culture,” and electric light began to shape the space of streets, homes, offices, fac­ tories, and shops. What emerged was an electrically lit milieu which meant that the age of point lighting was...

The Commercialization of Childhood

Commercialism has left its mark on all aspects of children's everyday lives today. It constitutes a shared world of experience, permeating relations between children and within the family. The article discusses the possibilities of an in-depth analysis from an ethnological perspective. One possibility is to study commercialization from the children's perspective as practice, social activity, or lifestyle. This is exemplified primarily with children's computer games. Another possibility is to study in a historical perspective how consumerism has been gradually introduced, established, institutionalized, and finally made into a seemingly self-evident part of the children's world. The authors discuss how the process could be studied through archival sources such as advertisements and price-lists. The article concludes with a discussion of the new images of family relations and children's competences that emerge from the commercial media. In advertisements for computers, children are presented as competent and superior. In television series, parents are often portrayed as pathetic, as clumsy fathers and nagging mothers, while the children are enterprising and crafty. What does that say about actual changes in family relations and problems in today's families ?

Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual: Reading Culture and Reading Written Texts

In reading Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual [Serpent Ritual],1 the many philological questions on the legibility of his text coincide with ethnological perspectives that concern the legibility of the signs of a foreign culture. Warburg's attempt to understand the symbolic system of the Pueblo Indians, in other words to read foreign culture as a cultural text, is presented in a form that points in an extreme and therefore much clearer manner to the textuality of such images of other cultures as we have made for ourselves on the basis of ethnological or literary travel accounts. To my mind, Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual is therefore particularly suitable as a starting point for a discussion of the concept of reading in terms of cultural anthropology. The intention is to highlight the possibilities and the methodical perspectives afforded by the paradigm of

Speaking For or About Others? Evolving Ethnological Perspectives

Speaking For or About Others? Evolving Ethnological Perspectives

Alain Locke on Race and Race Relations

AS IN THE CASES of so many of his ideas, Alain Locke's thinking on race and race relations is not always clearly understood. A typical example of misunderstanding is provided by literary critic George Kent, who, though praising Locke for his critical and practical services during the Harlem Renaissance, speaks of Locke's essentially middle-class sensibility and somewhat simplistic integrationist orientation.' In view of the current ambiguity of the words middle-class and integration, this statement, while not actually wrong, is most unfortunate since it obscures the deep differences that separate a man like Locke from others who cherish middle-class values and call themselves integrationists in an attempt to deny their own racial and cultural heritage. It seems reasonable then to apply the labels primarily to those who prefer them, and not to Locke who was more concerned with race than with class and who constantly referred to himself as a cultural pluralist, as opposed to an integrationist. Locke's interest in the idea of race stems primarily from his attempt to combat notions of national, racial, and cultural superiority. In one of his earliest writings, The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture (1924), Locke expresses the urgent need to shift from the anthropological perspective, with its emphasis on the biological and physical aspects of race, to the ethnological perspective, with its emphasis on social and historical factors. If, he says,

Real toads in imaginary gardens; Aspelin vs. Lévi-Strauss on Nambiquara nomadism

Aspelin5 s recent article in Bijdragen on the question of alleged economic dualism among the Nambiquara (1976) would do much to clarify the place of this people in ethnological perspective, were it not for L?vi Strauss' appended comments, which tend to revive the doubts that Aspelin has laid to rest. Under the circumstances, it may be of interest to the comparativist as well as the student of structuralism for a third Nambiquarist to take a stand on the matter. Reduced to essentials, Aspelin claims that the Nambiquara are not seasonally nomadic, and in consequence, he casts doubt on the whole structure of associated oppositions in terms of which L?vi-Strauss com prehends Nambiquara life. In rejoinder, L?vi-Strauss defends his ethno graphy, asserting that differences between his and Aspelin's accounts must be owing to either 1) a decrease in nomadism between 1938 and 1968, or 2) unusual political unrest in 1938, or 3) a difference in the groups studied by the two ethnographers. I will examine these three possibilities in reverse order. The Nambiquara linguistic family may be divided, as L?vi-Strauss perceived, into three languages, which he called a, b and c (1948: 8-13), and which I have called Southern Nambiquara, Northern Nam biquara and Saban? (Price and Cook 1969:688-93). Aspelin worked with the Mamaind?, who are speakers of the Northern language, and I have worked with all of the Southern groups, although most exten sively with the kithaulh?} L?vi-Strauss also worked mainly among the