Once widely spread in the Dinaric Mountains part of the Balkan Peninsula, swearing to virginity was a social and cultural custom recorded among all groups inhabiting the area. In the absence of a capable adult man in the household, a daughter would take over his social role by ‘becoming’ a man. The standard explanation is that the function of this practice is enabling the continuation of the household’s economic, social, and religious activities. We argue that this explanation fails. A better (...) explanation is that, because the lack of a particular kind of a man (competent and honourable) was perceived as a shame in these societies, the primary reason for swearing to virginity was saving family honour. (shrink)

This thesis focusses on the medical culture of the Ovambo peoples of southern Angola and northern Namibia, a group who have been little-researched anthropologically. Because health and affliction are such poignant human concerns, the study of a society's medical culture can tell us much about their social and cultural organisation in general. It is for this reason that Ovambo medical culture has been examined in relation to the wider socio-cultural background, rather than in isolation; especially since Ovambo evidence has shown (...) that concern about health and affliction is not confined to the physical and spiritual wellbeing of individuals, but extends to include harmonious social relations, environmental and economic prosperity, and politicaly stability. A holistic analytical approach has been adopted, whereby all aspects of the medical culture are considered, as opposed to only certain aspects. Ovambo beliefs and practises relating to healt hand health maintenance are therefore discussed, as well as external medical influences. Particular attention has been paid to Ovambo use of plants as medicines, as well as to their prophylactic and propitiatory measures, since these are areas of athnomedical research that are identified as being under-researched. Focussing upon these areas has also highlighted the significance of material culture in the Ovambo medical domain, and the value of museum collections of ethnography in this regard. (shrink)

This article deals with the empowerment and resistance strategies used by working women in Turkey. In order to explore the ways in which gender ideologies are produced and resisted, a very specific group of women were studied using life history and focus group interviews. The interviews were conducted with women who had graduated between 1960 and 1970 from Girls' Institutes. The Girls' Institutes were all-female high schools and the curriculum of these institutes was particularly geared towards modern domestic, or homemaking (...) skills. However, despite the notion of producing modern women for the domestic sphere, most of the graduates have chosen to work outside their homes. Of these working women some have remained single, some have not had children. These outcomes present a paradox. The article focuses on the resolution of these paradoxes, the power and resistance manoeuvres that women employ and their relationship to the processes of modernization and westernization in Turkey. (shrink)

In this article, the author argues that feminist anthropology as a field of study should pose questions about how differential power is constituted as gender differences. Addressing these questions calls for an approach to the study of gender and power that articulates the relationship between structure and agency. Such an approach is one that analyzes the practice of gender over time from intersubjective, political perspectives. Last, the author argues that feminist anthropology is a justice claim, which demands an ethic of (...) engagement. Working on this project, feminist anthropologists contribute to debates over the concept of culture and the epistemological problem of representation within anthropology in a way that allows anthropology to speak more fluently to current debates within cultural studies over the politics of culture. (shrink)

Our conversation stems from a collaborative, fieldwork-based project on Chinese Islam, and on Chinese Muslim women’s rights, within a secular political ideology and legislative rights framework. Dialogue was a defining feature throughout the years of field investigation and research, fusing autobiographical and cultural trajectories in what the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup calls the ‘betweenness’ of intersubjectively created experience and knowledge. The premise for our conversation lies in the claim that insufficient attention has been paid to developments, which suggest alternatives to the (...) near-axiomatic ethnographic relationship of outside researcher and native informant. In foregrounding the cross-cultural relationship between two researchers, we explore how in the course of fieldwork interaction, boundaries of self and familiar ‘standpoints’ are redrawn. We ask how the history of this collaborative relationship across cultures might question and redefine the classic ethnographic binary of inside and outside, the centre and the margin, the universal and the particular, the ‘western feminist’ and ‘other women’. (shrink)

This article was originally presented as a paper, and since much of what it discusses turns on problems of position, location, self-representation and representativity, I have decided to leave it, as far as is possible, in its original form. Extensive use of the first person pronoun is frowned on in the contexts in which I am used to working, but I have deliberately retained it in this text to try and convey a sense of particularity, of myself speaking in a (...) specific context(s). The use of ‘we’ is a highly politicized act both in anthropology and in feminist contexts. Its use here is intended to convey a sense of audience, that is of myself speaking to others. But, and much more importantly, it also operates as a mark of interrogation, a fictive unity that reveals the lines of fragmentation at the very moment when it claims affinity.1. (shrink)

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation (...) of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it (...) is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values. (shrink)

Feminist anthropologists have evidenced the social and cultural aspects of motherhood and have challenged the universality of the nuclear family as the basis for residential and child-rearing practices. From a feminist anthropological perspective, the concept of the household has thus been redefined to capture the ways in which different principles of household recruitment and residence shape the activities and access to resources of women and men of different ages and status. This paper examines the relationship between household composition and coffee (...) production in Ocotal Grande, a Popoluca community in the Sierra de Santa Marta in Southern Veracruz, Mexico. It shows that polygamous households are larger and have higher yields of coffee than other types of households. However, this does not mean that all members of the household profit equally from their contribution to coffee production. While some relationship exists between labor input and returns, the distribution of benefits is based on gender and age hierarchies and is open to conflict and dispute. (shrink)

This paper is not a critique of waterpolicies, or an advocacy of alternatives, but rathersuggests a shift of emphasis in the ways in whichgender analysis is applied to water, development, andenvironmental issues. It argues that feministpolitical ecology provides a generally strongerframework for understanding these issues thanecofeminism, but cautions against a reversion tomaterialist approaches in reactions to ecofeminismthat, like ecofeminism, can be static and ignore theagency of women and men. The paper draws attention tothe subjectivities of women and their embodiedlivelihoods as (...) a more useful approach to understandingthe ways in which women relate to water in bothirrigated agriculture and domestic provisioning. (shrink)

This paper discusses the significance of gender-based conflicts for thefailure of Gambian irrigated rice projects. In particular, it illustrateshow resource control of a gendered crop, rice, shifts from females to maleswith the development of pump-irrigated rice projects. Irrigation imposes aradically different labor regime on household producers, demanding thatthey intensify labor for year-round cultivation. Yet, the Gambian farmingsystem evolved for a five month agricultural calendar, in which women wereaccorded specific land and labor rights. The need to restructure familylabor, specifically skilled female (...) labor, to meet the cultivation demandsof pump irrigation is crucial for understanding the pattern of gender-basedconflicts in Gambian rice schemes. The case study illustrates thatirrigation involves more than technology transfer. Appropriate irrigationdemands sensitivity to the social structure of household production systems. The paper concludes by emphasizing the centrality of gender issuesfor improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa. (shrink)

Sustainable development and biodiversity initiatives increasingly include ethnoscience, yet the gendered nature of rural people's knowledge goes largely unrecognized. The paper notes the current resurgence of ethnoscience research and states the case for including gendered knowledge and skills, supported by a brief review of relevant cultural ecology and ecofeminist field studies. The author argues the case from the point of view of better, more complete science as well as from the ethical imperative to serve women's interests as the “daily managers (...) of the living environment”. In the interests of both objectives the paper advocates an ethnoscience research approach based on empowerment of rural people, rather than simple extraction of their knowledge. The Kenyan case study of women's agroforestry work follows their response to the drought and famine of 1985 and chronicles the unfolding discovery of women's ecological, political, and social science as gendered survival skills. The case is re-counted as a story, in keeping with an explicit choice to learn through participation and to report through storytelling. The experience of rural women and researchers during the drought provides several lessons for both groups about their respective knowledge systems, their agroforestry work, and the relationship of both to local and national political economy. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western (...) character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes. (shrink)