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01 (1) |
TEN GELEIDE APRIL FOOL AND APRIL FISH. ‘I AM PURE, YOU ARE POLLUTED! ACROSS THE PALE PARABOLA OF JOY HOLISME EN HYBRIS THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS MESSIAH BOEKBESPREKINGEN IN MEMORIAM BOB SCHOLTE |
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20 (2) |
The play of light and dark from dusk to dawn produces rich ituations for daydreaming. |
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The author reflects on four nocturnal topics he observed during his research in |
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Pentecostalism in Africa has developed a special relationship with the night as a |
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This article deals with the question of what the night means to IT (information |
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To balance |
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In times of peace, rich Lebanese youth use the glitzy, glamorous, yet rigidly |
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20 (1) |
In this exploration, I pose that the Internet activity of diasporic Kurds can be understood in terms of a cyberkinetic pilgrimage. Using the Issue Crawler to chart this virtual realm indicates that an online Kurdish issue network connects people with vastly differing opinions, from multiple locations, but with a strong geographical anchorage in Europe. ‘Eurokurds’ active in cyberspace are organized around issues: primarily a quest for Kurdistan, a journey that partly shapes its own destination. The Kurdish issue network also facilitates interlinkage between groups such as the Kurds and the Yezedi, who are generally segregated in offline settings. Virtual mobility however does not render physical events obsolete. Instead, online activity facilitates and encourages offline organization and cultivates a Kurdish diasporic awareness. (back) |
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This essay uses the yearlong, transatlantic, Afro-Buddhist, ‘Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage’ performed in 1998-9 by a transnational Japanese Buddhist peace project, the Nipponzan Myohoji order, to reassess Victor Turner’s classic concept of ‘communitas’ under current conditions of global cultural reterritorialization. In describing the pilgrims’ goal of healing the legacy of slavery, racism, by walking Atlantic history in reverse, I attempt to understand the ironic outbreak of racism among the pilgrims. In doing so, I ask how the pilgrims’ use of hybrid ritual practices and a website to broadcast reports from the road complicates Turner’s straightforward vision of communitas as a monocultural phenomenon and a face-to-face experience. (back) |
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The concept of pilgrimage has a contested history, but this article argues that the Turnerian notion of pilgrimage as a compulsory journey to a focus of shared values remains of fundamental relevance, and is directly applicable to the range of journeys people now make to locations associated with media. After introducing the concept of ‘media pilgrimage’, the article discusses various challenges: first, from the argument that relatively banal journeys to media locations cannot possibly be compared to the intensity of religious pilgrimage; second, from the complexities of making the concept of ‘media pilgrimage’ work in transcultural comparison; and thirdly, from the difficulties of understanding what would continue ‘pilgrimage’ in the online environment of digital media. The article concludes the concept of media pilgrimage remains a useful one, even if its future boundaries are right now particularly uncertain.(back) |
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This article focuses on the emotions pilgrims experience on the road to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain. An increasing number of pilgrims take the road ( el camino ) to Santiago, but for many of them the movement on foot seems to be more important than reaching the tomb of St. James. The article asks what emotions pilgrims experienced, whether these were related to a quest for healing and given a spiritual or religious meaning, and if so how. Moreover, it asks what role bodily movement played in evoking these emotions. As well as through interviewing pilgrims, material was gathered through participant observation and experiencing the impact of ritual movement by walking the pilgrims’ route together with the pilgrims. We argue that the current revived interest for walking el camino cannot be explained without understanding the spiritual and healing effects it can have for pilgrims. Through our focus on emotions, we want to contribute to the anthropological debate on the often-ignored importance of bodily movement in religious rituals. (back) |
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19 (2) |
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In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, almost everybody has a video and a photo album of their wedding. These weddings souvenirs do not only consist of footage recorded during weddings ceremonies, but fragments of popular cinema are inserted into these wedding documents: landscape backdrops and sounds that metaphorically reveal romance between a movie’s hero and heroine. In the case of wedding souvenirs, however, brides and grooms replace the movie heroes performing in these landscapes. In this paper, I address these wedding souvenirs by highlighting the inserted landscapes and lyrics that generate romance or, more specifically, desired future romance that should originate after the wedding celebrations. (back) |
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Coinciding with new national policies to counter ecological degradation through the construction of so called ‘new nature’, Dutch nature areas have become subjected to a mushrooming of signs and other information media. Many of these signs aim to provide the public not only with information on species of plants and animals present in the area, but also, and often solely, with prospects of ecological processes and experiences of nature. In this article I demonstrate how time is used in the production and introduction of new nature landscapes. The main question is how signs providing ‘a view of the future’ relate to developments in the discourses of national policies on land-use designation, scientific discovery and ecological recovery, but also how their presence in the landscape is constitutive of the landscape and the positioning of different stakeholder groups in a changing and contested Dutch rurality. (back) |
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Riobamba is the capital city of a rural Ecuadorian province with a large Indian population. Although the urban landscape has always been characterised by social and ethnic diversity, socio-spatial politics that are dominated by a white-mestizo middleclass have long been openly exclusionist. Recently, excluded groups such as Indians and rural migrants have been asserting themselves more visibly in urban space and architecture. As a result, in 2003, a group of professional architects and urban planners organised a debate about the future of the city. Though the aim of the debate was to explore ways of creating a multicultural urban landscape, the themes that emerged included an alleged attempt by Indians to recapture urban territory, the perceived loss of local identity, and a chaotic urban image which was attributed to the ‘ruralisation’ of space. In this paper I analyse this debate and the aims and interests of the professionals. Despite the fact that the official aim of the debate was to envision a more inclusive multicultural city, more attention was paid to social and ethnic differences than to a shared history. To complicate things further, power struggles between competing groups of professionals put pressure to any consensus on the city’s future. The discussion about the inclusive city reveals how professionals tried to reclaim exclusive control over the urban spatial order. (back) |
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In Latin American nations, pre-colonial monumental architecture often forms the context of struggles related to land property issues as well as identity-driven discourse on the supra-local national and international level. This paper examines discourses related to the construction of a supermarket owned by the Wal-Mart Corporation in the direct vicinity of the pre-colonial archaeological site of Teotihuacan, Mexico. Currently, Teotihuacan can be seen as an architectural nexus of tradition regulated by supra-local mediators such as the national government and the UN, all of which impose what I refer to as a ‘futurity of heritage’ on the site. In portraying archaeological remains as a historical icon, and managing it as a significant part of Mexico’s national history, a futurity of heritage for Teotihuacan is mediated. Today, it is the quintessential materialization of Mexico’s indigenous past, and 100,000s of tourists yearly visit this locality. Against the backdrop of heightening integration with the US, the location chosen for this Wal-Mart subsidiary generated a conflict between numerous stakeholder groups in Mexico’s material past. An analysis is given of how meanings regarding this pre-colonial material heritage are engineered and mediated in this context. (back) |
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Malta’s countryside was once regarded as uncouth and dangerous. Since independence, materialism and tourism have brought about a building boom, which has ground up the countryside covered it in new houses, tarmac and rubble and transformed old neighbourhoods. Some Maltese are now beginning to view landscape as heritage and are defending it against those who want to exploit it as a commercial resource. The country’s landscapes are hotly contested. The paper examines the process by which this change of attitude has occurred. |
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Islands such as Jamaica and Curaçao are recognized for the intrinsic value of their diverse ecologies, while their tourism-based economies are strongly dependent on unspoiled natural landscapes and an Edenic image of the Caribbean that can be traced back to colonial times. This paper examines the clash between the ‘green’ global ideological landscape of ngo and government actors attempting to preserve paradise, and the contradictory idea of blighted cityscapes as experienced by residents in polluted urban areas. An analysis is given of the ways in which different actors have made strategic use of various media to impose their visions of the city and the island. (back) |
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19 (1) |
Westerners generally understand romantic love as a compelling emotional attraction to an idealized other. The Western notion of romantic love is spreading worldwide, while simultaneously theorists argue that romance is losing its authority due to the conditions of post-modernity. This paper seeks to move the discussion of love toward a more comparative and historical level, and argues that romantic love is neither universal, nor a uniquely Western institution. Rather, it is best understood as a form of the sacred, which appears in various forms under certain specific social conditions. It can blossom or fade, but the impulse behind it is not likely to vanish. The paper provides a short history of the study of romantic love in Western social thought and then goes on to present a structural analysis of romantic love in several cultures and epochs. (back) |
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The increasing reach of mass media all across the globe implies, in theory at least, a large scale diffusion of specific cultural messages or values. Based on an in-depth ethnographic case-study in rural Guatemala (Verheijen 2005) – more specifically in a village where television has recently been introduced – this paper discusses the impact of a theme present in many forms of mass media entertainment, the theme of romantic love. Contrary to the general assumption that mass media perpetuate gender inequality by incessantly reaffirming traditional gender roles, this case study shows that the classic message of romantic love can have a profound emancipating impact on its receivers. (back) |
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This article investigates the role that love and money play in the intimate relationships of unmarried girls in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Love carries multiple meanings for these girls. It is related to feelings and ideas about exclusivity and reciprocity. Moreover, it is also an expression of individuality and modernity in relation to parents and relatives. The high expectations that girls have of love are related to the reliability of friendship and the importance of marriage. Ideally, love is incompatible with material interests in intimate relationships, but in reality both love and money are part of girls’ actual relationships. This article attempts to shed light on the discrepancies and ambiguities around love and money in these girls’ relationships. |
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The Caribbean is a region where many local men engage in sexual relationships with female tourists. In the sociological literature love and romance are seen as important aspects of these relationships. The local men are given names like ‘gigolo’s’, ‘beach boys’ and ‘romance entrepreneurs’, and the female tourists have been labeled ‘romance tourists’. Male tourists are usually labeled ‘sex tourists’; their relationships are perceived to be of a mostly transactional nature. This article focuses on the men who are known for their sexual relationships with female tourists in Ambergris Caye, Belize. What do they gain from these relationships, are they experiencing ‘romantic love’? Furthermore, the article explores the constructions of gender and sexuality among the local population and the connection between romantic love and money. The article will show that despite the important role of economics in relationships between Belizeans, romance is emphasized where relationships with tourists are concerned. |
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Although the topic of ‘love’ has started to attract the attention of social scientists, in modern historical and anthropological accounts of love religion is conspicuously absent. However, the continuing presence of religion in the contemporary world forces one to think about how religion impinges itself on modern intimacy and the other way around. Love itself has become a key notion in many Christian groups today, who profess that ‘God is love’. This article will describe the ambiguity of Christian practices and narratives of love in Catholic Poland. It focuses on how religion deals with popular understandings of love that through the media pervade everyday life. The Christian narrative is designed as a counter-narrative to these popular notions of love and intimacy, but simultaneously I will show how religion cannot afford not to engage with popular notions of love. The article will discuss how Christian ideas and practices of love relate to sexuality, intimacy and expectations of romantic love among religious youth in Poland. (back) |
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By focusing on its place in popular culture, and in particular the popular song, this paper attempts to show that the ‘romantic love complex’ is not simply of significance because of its role in interpersonal relationships but can also act as a significant force for cultural change. This claim is then illustrated through an examination of the lyrics of The Beatles’ songs and how the way that these changed between the early and late 1960s reveals that their evolution from ‘mere rock ’n’ rollers’ to sophisticated advocates of a revolutionary romanticism was only made possible because of their initial commitment to the idea (and the ideal) of romantic love. (back) |
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18 (1) |
Interest in understanding the cultural dimensions of sensory perception has been rising since the 1980s. As in early explorations of the senses, combinations of scholarly and poetic approaches appear to resonate most strongly. The challenge for anthropologists is twofold: 1) Attention to the senses should not develop into a new subdiscipline but rather become a focus integrated into the overall ethnographic project. 2) Ethnographic sensibility for sensory dimensions within cultural practices still require further development.(back) |
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In this article I explore issues of the embodiment and being in the world of human hunters in pursuit of animal prey in the context of hunting as sport. The focus is on the immediacy and the experience of hunting rather than an exploration of its social and cultural meaning. This is an attempt to evoke how it is to hunt rather than what it means to hunt. I argue that hunting is a fully embodied, multi-sensory and multi-sensual practice that depends on an immersion into a multi-sensory and multi-sensual world. At the heart of such hunting is a contest between humans and animals based on two sets of senses and senses. My attempt here is explore how the human sensing is experienced and the difficulties of capturing and evoking that experience in an anthropological text. (back) |
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In this paper I examine the senses of vision and touch in mountaineering. My aim is to demonstrate how approaches to vision in the Western context have been limited to the observing eye. During fieldwork with mountaineers in Scotland I learnt that how one senses the environment has to be considered in relation to the actual movement of the body and, thus, needs to be examined in relation to how the body measures itself to the ground. The body meets the ground and the touch affects the view because the walker’s attention shifts between focusing on the ground and looking into the distance. As a result the gaze into the distance cannot be taken out of the context of how the body treads the ground, which concludes that when approaching vision one needs to examine the eye, that not only sees, but also touches. (back) |
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Sensory experience is cultural, social and material and it therefore acts as a powerful means of binding people together, or of highlighting their differences. Taste, in particular, is an emotionally charged marker of either familiarity and belonging, or strangeness and alienation. This article uses taste and its interrelated senses as a focus for exploring the construction of subjectivities in a context where racial differences are reproduced through everyday cultural practices such as cooking and eating. In Ecuador, where this ethnography is located, race is understood in terms of place and thus regional cuisines and their associated tastes and smells often become representative of a localised black, indigenous or mestizo culture. Drawing on Howes’ (2005) idea of ‘emplacement,’ this study uses sensory experience to highlight the way in which identities are both discursively and materially constructed, and become embodied without becoming fixed. (back) |
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This paper explores the correspondence between colour and odour made by Pitjantjatjara people in the Western Desert of Australia. Although anthropologists have construed sound as the most important sense in structuring social events in Indigenous Australia, Aboriginal people also consider odour to be crucial. When the first rain drops hit the ground after a long dry spell, the smell of land is a smell of the new green growth to come. This odour is manufactured using odiferous plants and animal fats and applied to resurface human bodies, providing a conduit of communication with the Ancestral realm. Through this case study the paper will also address the differences between ‘cultural’ and ‘clinical’ synaesthesia’. (back) |
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This essay begins with the observation that acute pain infliction is central to the therapeutic process in Chinese acupuncture. The common biomedical explanation for this is ‘counter-irritation’, yet this essay suggests that an acute pain event can cause a bodily felt, immediate social connectedness between patient and healer, which might be therapeutic. Since acute pain can effectively be communicated to others by non-verbal means, it has the capacity to break down habitual boundaries between persons, decentre both the person in pain and those in his or her close vicinity and enable instantaneous trans-individual communication. The collective presence of communally felt pain makes possible an embodied experience of sociality. Based on an anthropological definition of acute versus chronic pain, the essay suggests that life cycle events typically structure intrinsically (or potentially) painful situations into acute pain events. Concluding, this essay suggests that in medicalised societies the decline of acute pain events in life cycle rituals has led to the silent rise of chronic pain syndromes. (back) |
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We start with a paradox. On the one hand, academic literature asserts that the sense of smell varies in different social and cultural contexts, and that every social group has its own distinct olfactory culture. On the other hand, global advertising campaigns for perfumes suggest that fragrance is a universal form of semiotic communication. Are there, or are there not, specific olfactory cultures? This paper examines some of the evidence from Japan. Many languages have virtually no vocabulary to describe odours, except in terms of other senses of sight, sound, touch and taste, so that fragrance is communicated primarily through similes and metaphors. The paper describes how fragrance descriptives are used in Japanese journalism, marketing and related literature, before examining ways in which they help create and maintain gender constructions of various kinds. It then outlines specific aspects of Japanese olfactory culture, and suggests a methodology for the study of the anthropology of olfaction. (back) |
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Conversations in Luganda, a widely-spoken language in the East African nation of Uganda, frequently include discussions and evaluations of signs — readily observable phenomena that are understood to predict events that will soon take place. A corpus of material on this topic is examined, consisting of twenty signs and of four conversations in which these signs are discussed. Certain links are noted between specific sensory modes and these signs. The cultural significance of these sensory modes supports the cultural understanding that these signs are publicly available, rather than being restricted to certain individuals or conditions. It also supports the active discussion, rather than passive acceptance, of claims that individuals make to observing and interpreting signs. In this way, the cultural dimensions of sensory modes influence human perception and experience, and also support the public sphere of debates about the significance of events and about courses of action. (back) |
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17 (1/2) |
This essay critically examines the tendency in anthropology to deconstruct claims of ‘authenticity’ wherever and however they are mentioned. The author argues that constructivist approaches to reality tend to overlook the fact that most people manage to transcend the constructedness of their life worlds, i.e. realize an authentically felt grounding of their views and understandings. Discussing examples from Serbia, the Netherlands and Bahia (Brazil), the author highlights that the construction of reality is at all times accompanied by processes of authentication – processes which often seek to ground a vision in such ‘incontestable facts’ as bodily experience, psycho trauma, loss and death (back) |
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In April 2004 a revolt broke out against the American occupation in the Iraqi Sunni town of FalIuja. Besides a military confrontation, it was also a war of words how to conceptualise the clash of interests and vaIues of the indigenous population in opposition to those of the American occupation. At the heart of this clash was the issue who represented the authentic values of Iraq. Authenticity was framed in the concepts of honour and dignity, which have a deep cultural resonance. The article deals with the three stages of the radicalisation of resistance in Falluja, each of them characterized by the predominance of a certain concept of honour and dignity. The first was expressed in tribaI culturaIist terms, the second in nationalist-religious terms, while the third was framed in radical Salafi terms in defence of the Islamic Umma. All three claims to authenticity are said to represent the true, authentic values of Iraq. (back) |
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In recent times, terrorism is often discussed as a religiously inspired course of action. Such explanations often reify and dehistoricize the religious concepts, models and traditions that are subsequently offered as explanatory motives for extreme violent behavior. However, religion is much more than an obstinate reaction against modernity, secularization and globalization. This article discusses how the cultural model of martyrdom offers an experience of authentic individuality as it instigates believers to transgress the social and political through self-sacrificial violence. By way of examples fiom Pakistan and the US army in Iraq, it is argued that self-sacrificial violence can be seen as a rite of passage that brings about the completion of the self. The search for authenticity that is part of present-day martyrdom makes it a thoroughly modern phenomenon. (back) |
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In 1995, the Makah Indian Tribe (USA) publicly announced that it wished to revitalize its tradition of whale hunting. The Makah had treaty rights to hunt whales dating back to 1855 but gave up whaling in the 1920s. Environmentalists and animal rights activists adamantly opposed the Makah’s claim, but the tribe was successful in obtaining pennission to go whaling again. Vehement reactions followed. The discourse on the Makah whale hunting rights soon shifted to discussing the merits and demerits of Makah culture and the genuineness and legitimateness of the tribe’s wish to reconnect to its tradition. The present article describes and analyzes the debate, in particular as it relates to the issues of Makah heritage and its contested authenticity. (back) |
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Notions of authenticity and identity in Dutch gothic subculture focus on the paradox of being a subcultural insider, i.e. being simultaneously an individuaI and a member of a homogenous group. This paradox aIso triggers the problem of authentic identity. Gothic insiders emphasize that they are not goths, but that they identify with what they describe as gothic, only to explain later that that is not authentic gothic. I will argue that this denial is a subcultural strategy, a way to ‘ward off’ c1assificatory strategies of dominant, non-subcultural culture. Namely, as soon as criteria for sub-cultural identity are conceptualised, they can he copied by outsiders, and this should preferably be avoided. EmpiricaI material will display how gothic subculturaI identity is practiced within the monitoring and conceptualising processes prompted by outsiders like the media, and how authenticity seems to be a void, nothing but an abstract unspoken, sub-culturaI moraIe. (back) |
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This article explores authenticity in contemporary Native North American culture. not as a discourse presented in the political arena to legitimate claims against the American state, but as grounded in the experience of social relations embedded in local history. The Tribal Fair and Rodeo and the Miss White Mountain Apache pageant on the Fort Apache Reservation io Arizona are described to illustrate the processual production of, what I would like to call, local authenticity. Both culturaI formats are borrowed from Euro-American popular culture, but due to their long history at Fort Apache, their embeddedness in networks of local social relations. and their importance for the expression of distinctly Apache cultural values, they have become occasions where authentic Apache culture of today is displayed. (back) |
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This paper addresses the dilemma of a neo-traditional religious movement in Ghana. In its project of reviving and modemising the authentic religion of Ghana in the Christiandominated public sphere, the Afrikania Mission is caught hetween the shrine priests in the rural areas, whom it tries to mobilise as keepers of ‘the real thing’, and the dominant, Christian formats and styles of representing religion in the media. Afrikania’s struggles for authenticity call for reftection on anthropology’s historical legacy in local debates on tradition. These debates are framed by a dualist opposition that does not allow for being modern and authentic at the same time. In order to be modern and civilised, Afrikania has to frame Afrikan Traditional Religion in Christian formats – which is contested by many shrine priests – but in order to he authentic it has to present itself as traditional Other to modern Christianity. (back) |
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This discussion places authenticity in the framework of Ghanaian heritage politics. It examines the interplay between assertions of an authentic (nationaI) culture and its exploitation in the tourist sphere. In Ghana, as in other postcolonial states, there is an ongoing debate among intellectuals and state representatives over cultural adulteration and the supposed loss of identity. In public forums and official statements, it is argued that culturaI preservation is necessary in order to ‘show something to the tourists’. Such heritage-tourism is mainly directed towards Africans from the diaspora who bring their own ideas concerning authentic African culture, claiming it as their own. Taking chieftaincy as an example, the author argues that authenticity is highly contested among local, national and Diasporan actors and thus appears as adynamic and ever-shifting category. Moreover, the very notion of culturaI heritage aIready implies asense of commodification, thereby blurring any strict opposition between ‘authentic’ and ‘adulterated’ culture. (back) |
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The commercialization of witchcraft in various Dutch Fantasy festivals, media and shops, boosted by the success of films, such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, has roused concern on the part of those who see witchcraft as an authentic mystery religion based on initiation. Representatives of different initiatory and hereditary witchcraft traditions were invited to voice their protest at two major fairs in 2003 and 2004. As their positions on ‘who is a witch?’ c1ashed with those of self-professed witches in the audience, they struggled to protect witchcraft as a ‘trademark’ of authenticated traditions. Marking contesting claims to authorship and ownership of as well as authority over the practice of western witchcraft, the different positions simultaneously attested to the normalization of the witchcraft movement as a whole. A proliferation of metaphorical readings of the concepts of witchcraft spurs a confluence of witchcraft and commercial Fantasy fiction. (back) |
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This article exarnines the notion of authenticity as applied in folktale collector A.A. Jaarsma’s endeavour to write down narratives from the oral tradition of ordinary folk in his home region of the Frisian Walden in the north of the Netherlands. Jaarsma was instructed by J.J. Voskuil, head of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, to collect authentic folktales. What did ‘authenticity’ mean according to fieldworker Jaarsma and ethnologist Voskuil, and just how (un)problematic is this notion? (back) |
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This paper, using some recent insights from performance studies and other writings on embodiment, takes a second look at Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algerian Kabylia. It is argued that as a consequence of Bourdieu’s taking Kabyle society as a strategic research site, he depicted its ritual traditions as something ‘authentic’, as basically primordial and unmediated. Much of the concepts’ lack of historicity may he explained by this search for authenticity, but the insights of schol ars who, building on Bourdieu, have enhanced our understanding of embodiment may weil remedy these shortcomings. (back) |
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In this ariccle I use Baudrillard’s anaIysis ofDisneyland to understand the meaning of another constructed tourist environment: Avenida Revolución, a street located in the Mexican city of Tijuana, right at the border with the US. Avenida Revolución is commonly seen and described as a place of pure culturaI destruction, where ‘reaI’ Mexicanidad (Mexican cultural identity) has been lost due to the proximity and lure of American culture and the complete commercialization of Mexican culture. And yet, as Baudrillard’s anaIysis shows us, it is in such explicitly inauthentic and artificiaI locations that notions of culturaI authenticity come into being. I wiII discuss how American tourists and Tijuana’s residents working on this street interpret their practices and experiences with the help of historical discourses that define both the ‘real’ Mexican identity and the corrupting influence of foreign culture on the integrity of Mexican culture. The boundaries and contents of ‘authentic’ Mexican culture are thus defined and fortified. (back) |
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16 (2) |
This paper explores the conceptual links between gay lifestyles and local understandings of modernity in South Africa . This is done through an analysis of the term ‘fashion’ as it is commonly used to describe gay men, which is contrasted with another term in common usage, namely stabane, an isiZulu word meaning hermaphrodite. The Miss Gay Queenstown 2000 beauty pageant illustrates complex and sometimes competing identities that need to be understood with reference to changing sexual mores associated with the introduction of a rights-based constitutional democracy in South Africa . The respected niche that gay men enjoy within the black hairstyling industry is explored in terms of client aspirations and various forms of gay self-styling. Beauty pageants and gay participation in the hairstyling profession offer a way of exploring the links between homosexuality and modernity in the public sphere. The paper concludes that there is an ambiguous inflection in the term ‘fashion’ when it is applied to homosexuality and that this can be understood as an expression of a deeper ambivalence towards modernity. (back) |
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Since the mid-nineties, in The Netherlands quite a number of cases of violent death have given rise to intense, short-lived attention from media and public, ‘senseless violence’ being their common denominator. It is argued that the responses of media and public evolve along the lines of a ritualised pattern, one of the material expressions being an ephemeral memorial. Taking the memorial for Anja Joos, the most recent victim of ‘senseless-violence’, as its starting point, this essay explores the popular concept of ‘senseless violence’, the evolution of the narrative behind the subsequent hypes, and the societal anxieties and issues on the background. (back) |
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Can we speak of Islamic fashion or is this a contradiction in terms? This artic1e deals with a setting that is generally seen as traditionalist, that is San’a, the capital of the Yemen Arab Republic . If there seems to be little space for the development of fashionable women’s dress, both for the women concerned and for others taking an interest in women’s dress, such as conservative religious authorities, fashion is au issue. This artic1e sets out with a brief analysis of how conservative Islamists have discussed fashion in the colourful booklets they distribute in San’a. This then is followed by a description of debates that have taken place in San ‘a about women’s dress, starting in the 1960s, and trends in women’s everyday sartorial practices from the 1960s till 2000. The question whether Islam and fashion can go together turns out to be a question about Islam, agency, and modernity. Those who assume that Islam and fashion do not go together, be it Western scholars or the conservative authors of the booklets, as su me a link between wearing Islamic dress and tradition, albeit in a different way. The everyday sartorial practices of San’ani women obviously contradict such a point of view. (back) |
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Apuskeleke is a term that has recently entered Ghanaian vocabulary. Its etymology is not known, but my field research revealed that it was first introduced in a ‘Hip-life’ song titled abuskeleke in early 2003. Its usage seems to have changed from describing young girls and women who move with ‘Sugar Daddies’ to extract money and other material goods in exchange for sex, to refer to young girls who dress in short, skin-tight outfits that expo se certain private parts of their bodies. Girls in such attire are supposed to be indecently clothed and are therefore insulted and hooted at in public, generally by men. The older generation also is not in favour of this new fashion craze. While the youth who are subscribers to this dress code unswervingly argue that it is a fashion they have a right to, the protestors think it is antagonistic to Ghanaian culture etiquette and therefore needs to be resented, if not banned. Apuskeleke is thus a contested phenomenon as it is embraced by some people and despised by others. (back) |
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Fashion has not only to do with physical appearance, there is also an inside component. In the case of women who were going out in the Dutch dance scene during the summer of 2001 fashion is being used to find their inner self. And this searching seems to be a fashion in itself. It is fashion for these women to show the world they are women belonging to themselves. Only that ‘self’ can still be explored. One of the ways contemporary women do that is by using drugs and by using themselves in the music and in the shared feeling with the others.(back) |
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This paper examines American religious discourse with fashion. In the current social environment, the interest in modesty is more than a shift in trends. The ascendance and assertion of religious views on the body can lead fashion, as demonstrated in the increasing interest in more modest fashion and movement against immodesty. Membership in evangelical and fundamental religions, which is currently increasing in numbers, is influencing non-religious consumer culture by pressuring designers, producers and retailers of fashion .(back) |
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It is a commonly held view that young, urban people regularly spend too much money on their clothes and, further, that they too of ten consume in accordance with global trends too heavily influenced by Western, specifically American hip-hop, fashions. This article, drawing on empirical data gathered in Dar es Salaam , Tanzania , in the year 2000, demonstrates that young people, regardless of the marginality of their economic status, are able and prefer to make clothing choices based on complex reasoning strategies that take everyday living and working conditions into account. It argues that despite being heavily influenced by American hip-hop culture and Jamaiean Rastafari ideals, they consciously and intelligently work to achieve ‘a look’ that is suitable to their living environment and is also reflective of their own desires. (back) |
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The meteoric rise in the popularity of Pim Fortuyn and his political movement and its abrupt end, caused by his assassination on May 6 2002, was followed by an outburst of collective emotion. These phenomena involve two waves of hype in which the media played a major role. Massive media attention for Fortuyn as a politician who was gifted with great charisma and was ‘said to ‘speak the language of the people’, made politically inactive social groups conscious of the potential role he could fulfil in solving the social problems with which they were confronted. His sudden death was consequently a great loss for his followers. The outpouring of public emotion that followed resulted in the creation of several spontaneous shrines, where thousands left messages, and which were visited by many thousands more. For a large part of Dutch society, the intense media coverage of this new phenomenon made these shrines pre-eminent constructed foci for dealing with and processing Fortuyn’s murder. At the same time they functioned as ‘democratic’ tools in articulating criticism towards polities, and proved the hype to be an effective and meaningful one. (back) |
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What distinguishes fashion from fads or crazes? In addressing this question, the author argues that mainstream mass psychosocial explanations of mass behaviour fail to understand the sudden and unpredicted speed with which fads tend to come up and fade away. More qualitative research is needed to explore the complex, layered and even contradictory realities of the mind, society and their interactions. (back) |
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This essay diseusses the inereasing appeal of trends, and seeks to understaud what it is |
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16 (1) |
This paper tests the analysis of fieldwork in northern Nigeria between 1977 and |
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Whatever else they may be, stepfamilies are a cultural problem. They are a cultural |
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One of the more disconcerting discoveries during my field-work among the Maka in |
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This article gives an insight in a research based on the family photo collections of |
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This article discusses the social linkages between Indian migrants in Britain and their |
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This article discusses social relations in a small rural village in Sweden. What initially |
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These days, we are actors in a wide variety of computational landscapes – for example, |
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15 (1/2) |
These days, we are actors in a wide variety of computational landscapes – for example, we put ourselves in the virtual spaces of simulation games and create representations of ourselves in virtual communities on the Internet. Such involvements have complex ‘identity effects’. At the same time that our ‘lives on the screen’ facilitate an increased fluidity of identity play, we are immersed in simulations whose underlying mechanisms we do not understand and which may encourage us to see the world in simpler rather than more complex terms. |
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This essay is about what happens to ‘us’ when ‘seeing’ or ‘watching’ ‘real, fictive or virtual worlds’ on or through screens. A significant number of scholars, for example McLuhan, has already paid attention to this topic and tried to sketch the nature of the interaction between these ‘shining’ and ‘enlightening’ and human subjects. Usually screens are immediately associated with the eyes, with vision, with the supremacy of the visual. This, however, is a culturally biased, superficial and confined association, as not only McLuhan, but also a series of other scholars, film theorists and artists have attempted to demonstrate. The main goal of this article is to show that there is a lot more involved than sheer vision when watching screens or that is not only our eyes which are touched by what we seen on film, TV and PC screens, but our whole body. (back) |
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This essay offers a polemical exploration of spatiality in new media culture, one based on a materialist, as opposed to a ‘virtualist’ paradigm. lts goal is to intervene in the thought processes of liberal-phenomenological cybertheory. The latter tends to see computer users as consumers, rather than producers, within national and global economies. Because of this leisure-consumption orientation, theories of new media are easily appropriated within ideologies of postindustrial capitalism. This has led to some oversimplified models of spatiality in cybertheory, many of which proceed from the premise that the material world is fast disappearing under the pressures and seductions of the virtual. The article uses methods of visual anthropology to communicate the problems with such assumptions, and to demonstrate the benefits of materialist analysis.1t traces the techniques information and knowledge workers use in fashioning decorative office media displays, known in cyber jargon as ‘geekospheres’. These techniques situate the computer within the labour process, not only as a toy but also as a physical object through which people make statements about work and find ways to define and transgress boundaries between the personal and the institutional, between work and leisure. |
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The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 reshaped mediascapes around the world as people deployed and engaged with various media forms to communicate information and views about what had happened. Written from the (somewhat anguished) perspective of a New Yorker living abroad for a year, this essay analyzes the limitations of the mass mediation of 9/11. (back) |
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Users/viewers of interactive screens hooked onto digital communication devices develop new notions of self and space. Future developments in wearable communication technology will produce cyborgs whose selves will become less and less autonomous and individual, and more and more transparent and permeable to other members of their social networks. (back) |
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In Japan religious institutions increasingly offer a range of services on the Internet, including mizuko kuyö, a ritual to appease the souls of aborted children. This raises the question why people choose to conduct this ritual with a strong emotional impact through an impersonal medium like the Internet. This article will also deal with the paradox of the performance of apparently traditional rituals through the modem medium of Internet. (back) |
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Modem confessions expect a moment of de-alienating authenticity, of revealing one’s true self. Yet, in distinguishing an imperfect, existing self from the mature ideal towards which it should grow, modem confession also divides the self, raising the question whether its main delineating presupposition – that there is such a thing as an authentic self – can be upheld. This essay aims to trace the career of this typically modem paradox. It argues that the combination of an undertow of modem occultism and the development of the ‘society of the spectacle’ through commodification and screen technology has increasingly shifted confession towards a multiplicity of spiritual ideals of self-reform. Thus, it undermines the individual autonomy on which humanist modernity based its fears of alienation. (back) |
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The contemporary media culture is increasingly marked by the presence of, and our interaction with computer screens, The complexity of the technology of the Internet, and the concomitant consequences for theorising subjectivity have been receiving increasing attention in academic literature. Some arguments about the baneful effects of computer technology and users assert the dissolution of the subject, and its loss within the complexity of a technology-driven medium. The temporal and spatial dimensions of interaction with computers supposedly threatens the very notions of identity, belonging and community. In contradistinction to such assertions, this essay argues for a historically-specific analysis of the concrete interaction of computer users with the Internet. Through an analysis of the particular uses which the Internet is put to, and the social relations within which such use is embedded, the essay explores the complex ways in which questions of identity are mediated by the ‘screen culture’ of the Internet. By steering away from a rigid technological determinism, the argument highlights a dialectical interplay between a contingent and situated subject and the growing presence of screens that refract our sense of the everyday. (back) |
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Considering the immense popularity the Artists from Gugging, all of whom are long-term patients of a mental institute near Vienna , have achieved, the question arises of what people see in psychotics’ imagery. In my essay I deal with paintings and drawings as projection screens for the spectator. I present a selection of works from Gugging and the spectators’ verbal renderings of mental images that arise when contemplating these paintings and drawings. Instead as a part of the paintings and drawings I suggest viewing the screen that bears the mental images as a large and divers, but ultimately finite cultural image-repertoire, which inhabits the spectator. Referential co-ordinates for a phenomenon like insanity are hardly defined on our culture specific screens. Therefore, we are free to frame the imagery according to our desires and fears and the screen becomes a consummate surface for idiosyncratic projections. (back) |
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In my essay I analyze radiological practices of how the blood flow is being rendered visible and treated. For this I use material of my ethnographic research, which I conducted in the operating theatres of interventional radiology. I will argue that continual inventions of new technologies in this particular area lead necessarily to a decomposing of how the body’s inside is imagined and experienced on the side of patients and clinical personnel. (back) |
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Mimicking reifying structures of modern of life, television, for Adorno could be nothing other than ‘disenchanted enchantment’. Following Benjamin’s impulse to create dialectical images, this paper argues that the reuse of television and film screens within films is, at times, a form of re-enchantment. Calling on technology’s magical transformative power, these scenes have powerful effects both within the digenesis of the films and for the spectator who watches the screen within the screen. They do so, I argue, not so much because of their narrative utility, but because they highlight cinema at its most technological. The visceral quality of these moments is one of the compelling reasons to begin to think that cinema has an important affinity with magical practices. (back) |
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The Hindi film of the 1990s marked the dominance of the musical romance: a heightened folly of glamour and consumption, where ‘Indian values’ were tested across the transnational Indian family. However, two of 2001’s biggest hits were not romances but historical films about subalterns, which few expected to find audiences. Indian film producers frequently talk about adjusting their films for box office success, adding elements intended to please their audiences, imagined without audience ethnography and extensive market research. This paper focuses on Lagaan, which seemed to break with all norms of an imagined audience, yet was a great hit in India and overseas, acc1aimed critically in India and nominated for an ‘Oscar’ in 2002. It looks at how the film was produced, its marketing and its reception, raising issues of the relationship between the producers and the audiences in India , the diaspora and the west, in the context of genre. (back) |
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Cultural studies has put forward the view that television publics are active rather than passive. The television screen can never dictate identity construction even if surely it plays a role in who we feel we are. Internet response to television is used in this article to reconstruct how post-feminist television series such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City have meaning for audiences and how identity construction is involved in the pleasures and meanings of these series. Entries (called ‘posts’) at an Internet site called wwwjumptheshark.com are analysed. Recurring themes (realism, gender and television) all involved constructions of gender identity and sexuality. This new television genre can be said then to contribute to ongoing dialogue rather than dictate new identities. (back) |
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This essay focuses on the popular video-film industry in Ghana . Thriving at a time when the state is no longer able to control what is shown on public screens, Ghanaian popular cinema violates expectations of intellectuals and state officials as to what African cinema should be about. It is argued that this industry does not develop in a separate sphere of art, but deliberately locates itself in the midst of everyday life and is entangled with the Pentecostal-charismatic movement, which is extremely popular in Southern Ghana . Posing as revelations, films claim to show on screen how otherwise spiritual forces operate to mess up people’s Jives. At the same time, the work of representation is found to be tricky on the part of actors who fear the forces they set out to depict. (back) |
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In this essay I will look at and listen to a charismatic TV screen in Ghana , showing a sermon by the popular charismatic pastor Mensa Otabil in Accra . While watching the programme Living Wor1d I will address the relation between charisma and screens and examine the place of screens in the construction of charisma by looking not only at the screen but also behind the screen, in the editing studio, and in front of the screen, in the living room. (back) |
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The popularity of Hollywood movies among young professionals in Nairobi is in correspondence with social developments related to ‘the emergence of the intimate’ and changing perceptions of love and sexual relating. This essay deals with the emerging middle class discourse on love. Notions of love are actively discussed, tried and reflected upon. Within this context Hollywood movies provide an alternative frame of reference for young women and men. (back) |
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This article examines the main processes involved in redefining the concept of religious mediation by the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. It specifically focuses on changing perceptions of sanctity and traditional forms of representation of saints. In order to do so it considers the postulate of a new spirituality in the Church, which stresses the downpour of charismatic gifts from the moment one goes through the experience of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. At the same time that the Charismatic Renewal started using mass media, the idea of a direct and unmediated channel of spiritual communication became a fundamental part of its message. But while the media channelled the pursuits of grace and Charisma, it also jeopardized the idea of unmediated inspiration. The popularity of the Movement gradually re-entrenches the conception of a hierarchical distancing between humans and God, as Charismatics turn out to substitute the role saints have traditionally played in Popular Catholicism. In order for Charismatics to continue shaping their image in the ‘likeness of Jesus’, they need to recall the values of pride as well as saintly humility. This means a withdrawal from the world of fame to safeguard the boundaries of religiosity threatened by media popularity. (back) |
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This article describes the ambivalent reception of the reality soap Big Brother Brasil among evangelicals in a favela in Rio de Janeiro . Big Brother Brasil can be united with a Protestant – Pentecostal ethic because the possibility to morally judge the players is built into the format of the game show. Yet evangelicals also fear they might be tempted by these images, disobey the will of God and loose their connection with the Holy Ghost. (back) |
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In his article, Ferdinand de long describes and analyses the Kankurang masquerade, |
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Karel Amaut states that performances that involve impersonation and disguise have |
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In her paper, VanEde describes the introduction of a religious festival, called Narak, in |
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In her article, Rachel Sussman focuses on the blackface minstrel shows that were very |
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Erika de Poorter discusses the use of masks in Japan, more specifically in the traditional |
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Marjolein Hennevanger calls our attention to practices of virtual masking in role-playing |
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14 (1) |
In his contribution, Timothy Simpson seeks to document and analyze the emergence and popularity of ‘themed environments’ in Bangkok and their role in Thai middleclass and suburban lifestyles. Thailand ‘s themed environments, such as restaurants, shopping malls, and historic parks, draw on symbolism derived from both contemporary popular culture and Thai history and folklore, and play a role in the construction of a middleclass lifestyle. Bangkok ‘s urbanization and concomitant industrial and economic development has transformed the physical geography and cultural landscape of Bangkok , contributing to its sub-urban sprawl and to the emergence of two types of complementary cultural spaces: ‘nonplaces’ and ‘themed environments’. Nonplaces are characterized by an emptying out of symbolic content to create largely functional and ‘hypersignificant’ environments, which isolate people from one another even when they share a common social space. The ’emptiness’ of such nonplaces is compensated for by the excessive, or ‘hypersignificant’, symbolic construction of themed environments. Such environments provide common public spaces and a context for public life. The author analyzes the symbolic construction of themed environments and their role in daily Thai middle-class life. Focusing on particular examples of themed restaurants and historic parks and amusements he details how both loc al and global thematic content is constructed symbolically. Such consumption behaviour contributes to the formation of middle-class identity and creation of social differentiation. (back) |
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In his article ‘Defending the Suburban Dream’, Joost Zonneveld argues that the inhabitants of so-called ‘gated communities’ are trying to recreate the safe world of an imagined suburbia. One way or the other, all the community members have experienced that the dream of a suburban life – a dream of safety, calmness, social cohesion and neighbourliness in an open space where subtle readings of boundaries could be assumed did not materialize in the older suburbs of Los Angeles. Consequently they fenced themselves in, hoping to be able to shut out the chaos and threat of the ever-expanding city. Zonneveld shows that the suburban dream can only be pursued under a rigid regime of guards, video-circuits, strict rules and regulations, and overall control. (back) |
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As an ethnographic filmmaker, Jenny Cool set out as to examine ‘the gaps’ between the vision of life in a ‘new home community’ marketed by housing developers and that bought and lived by the residents of Antelope Valley, a suburb 50 miles north of Los Angeles, California. When she showed footage to peers, they assessed it in terms of her informants’ ‘bad taste’, ‘tackiness’ and ‘lack of style’. Almost everyone she knew was an ‘expert’ on the processes at work among these suburban home buyers and could pronounce this judgment automatically. Because of this reaction, her locus of interest shifted to the perceptions that ‘intellectuals’ had of her informants. These groups seemed to be at a strange distance from one another: the Valley folk were far enough away to be seen as ‘other’, yet close enough to be ‘analyzed’ at a glance. She came to realize that her first interpretation (the stale, automatic one more or less shared by her peers) and the lifestyles of the Antelope Valley are but two sides of the same coin: separation, automatic borders, strange distance. She meditates on what Henry Thoreau’s Walden has to offer the anthropological enterprise, specifically, on what it has to teach about studying people we recognize as distinct from ourselves, yet bound with us. (back) |
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Margit van Wessel unpacks the reasons of the attraction suburban housing estates have for the middle classes in Baroda ( India ). She shows how access to higher education and life in suburbia – or, in society – are regarded as mutually constitutive and serve as a means of distinction from less educated people living in rural areas and the city. Far from being perceived as boring and uniform, suburbia plays a key role in expressing middle class identity. At the same time, the essay shows, suburban residents realize that the price they have to pay for their distinct identity in terms of superiority and progress is the loss of communality and conviviality on the level of the neighbourhood, a loss underpinned by a nostalgic idealization of the village. (back) |
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The Dutch new town of Almere is the setting of a research project on social cohesion in which nine sociology students from the University of Amsterdam participated. Leon Deben, one of the supervisors of the project, reports on some of its major outcomes. In the Netherlands , Almere is subject to a host of stereotypical images related to its suburban character. Yet, its residents consider it a Suburban Dream and are extremely content with their housing and living conditions. Almerians stand aloof from the discussions about their place of residence. They appreciate, amongst many other things, the green environment, the smallness of scale of the neighbourhoods, the social control and the relatively spacious and affordable homes. The author distinguishes various types of ties Almerians have with their hometown and links them with stages in their life cycle. Almere, planned from the very beginning of its construction in 1976, would seem to be on its way to become a ‘real’ city, though many ‘experts’ strongly deny that this is the case. (back) |
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In her brief imaginative essay, Anouk de Koning describes how many lower middleclass Cairenes dream of an escape of the old city’s poverty, dirt and overcrowding. A dream, however, they seem to reserve for their children to come true, for whom they bought an apartment in New Cairo. In the meantime, the suburb is situated somewhat forlorn in the desert, a ghost town awaiting its future inhabitants to grow up and to come to life.(back) |