Anthropology - Articles & Book Reviews

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    Dialogic Catharsis in Standup Comedy: Stewart Huff Plays a Bigot
    (HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, 2017-07) Seizer, Susan
    This essay investigates the cathartic creative process of a standup comic who recounts, in a video-taped interview with the author, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. Through reflexive engagement with his own creative process, Stewart Huff recounts building a scenario that splits his experience into two voices, enacting a breakthrough into performance within the taped interview itself. Taking to heart Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into our own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s performance as a classic example of double-voiced parody. The transformation from horror to humor is an empowering performative re-creation for the comedian that serves simultaneously as humorous recreation for the comedy club audience. This essay contributes to extant scholarship on the efficacious use of parodic double-voicing and the possibilities it opens up for dialogic catharsis in comedic performance.
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    Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, South India
    (Cultural Anthropology, 2000-05) Seizer, Susan
    At the core of this essay are five fieldwork narratives. These retell specific experiences I had researching Special Drama actresses' roads. Each experience helped me to better understand actresses' actions offstage; these were episodes in which I learned, in particular, how and why actresses create private, exclusive spaces in the midst of the Tamil public sphere. Each narrative speaks of one leg in the journey to or from a Special Drama. Together, the five narratives thus constitute a single composite journey, which begins in a calendar shop in town (the first narrative), then heads out, by van (the second) or by bus (the third), to the site of a Special Drama stage and its backstage spaces (the fourth), and finally returns home, on foot, to town (the final narrative). This journey provides an impressionistic map, drawn from my own experiences traveling with specific women on specific roads, of the offstage spaces inhabited by Special Drama actresses. That is, my narrative maps out lived, experienced spaces; it does not aim to be an objective account of things seen at a distance. Each of these lived spaces is charged, for me, and remembered here by me, with images of particular women and men of the Special Drama world, images charged as much by the flair with which the artists interacted with me as by the deft pursuit of their own image-making practices (pp. 217-218).
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    Some Rise as Others Fall: Illegitimacy in Indian Dance
    (Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2015) Seizer, Susan
    No reason not to be frank: I love this book. Like the process of making ghee, which involves boiling butter until it “clarifies,” the richness of this book can be boiled down to a clear, even simple, argument that is nevertheless powerful enough to reframe the historical study of Indian dance from the colonial period to the present day. The argument is this: The anointing of certain performing arts, and those who would perform them, as “legitimate” conveyors of Indian culture simultaneously cast out others. A zone of exclusion was thereby created into which all-too-precipitously fell any arts and artists not invited to the classicizing, sanitizing, and entextualizing party. This highly generative heuristic model gives readers the opportunity to contemplate the possibility of a flip side to the well-documented historical processes of reform that created, and indeed continue to create, cultural products charged with symbolizing the Indian nation. In the author's own words, “The model presents the official and the illicit dimensions of India's performing arts as two sides of the same coin.”
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    Legacies of Discourse: Special Drama and its History
    (Oxford University Press, 2009) Seizer, Susan
    One of my goals in this paper is to unpack the cultural logics and socio-historical discourses that converge to make standing still to deliver lines more highly valued than is expressive acting on the contemporary Special Drama stage. This hierarchy of artistic values necessarily developed through assessments made in relation to other theatrical forms and styles, and it is by attending to the mutual dependency of such historical aesthetic assessments that this paper aims at making an intervention in Tamil drama historiography itself. The social standing of artists and patrons of the theatre, and the social attitudes that greet those who appear on the Tamil professional public stage, must be considered at the outset of this endeavour.
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    Review: Playing the Field
    (Transition: An International Review, 1996) Seizer, Susan
    The magnetic appeal of the sexually charged sphere of "taboo" -this fantasy mix of the erotic and exotic-has not exactly waned in subsequent decades, as a casual glance at almost any contemporary fashion magazine will attest. Nor has the charge of this encounter been limited to popular culture: indeed the sexuality of Others has been a mainstay of the scholarly discipline of cultural anthropology. But it is only in academic circles that the draw of the "erotic-exotic" is being "problematized" for what it reveals about Western cultural notions of sex, self, and relations of power. The ongoing rethinking of anthropology, especially, has finally begun to confront a certain smoldering disciplinary taboo: sex in the field.
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    Risk, Benefits, and User Privacy: Evaluating the Ethics of Library Data
    (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) Asher, Andrew
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    Heredity Abandoned, and Kannagi's Courageous Decision to Act in Special Drama
    (Samyukta: A Journal of Gender & Culture, 2016-07) Seizer, Susan
    Women artists have performed in the Tamil theatre genre known as Special Drama since the early twentieth century, though they have been highly stigmatized for their participation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Special Drama artists in the early 1990s, I returned in 2014- 2015 to conduct a follow- up study on the subsequent generations of drama family lineages. I became increasingly concerned – largely because this proved a primary concern of the artists themselves – with problems posed by the lack of any established route for the cultural transmission of knowledge of this field. In this essay I document one hereditary acting family lineage in which the stigma on stage actresses has resulted in a silencing of family history. I discuss Special Drama artists’ ideas for how to encourage subsequent generations to take up this profession, and how my own presence and support contributed to their efforts to repatriate the artistic tradition. I focus specifically on the courageous decision of one young woman, a member of the fifth generation in the hereditary acting lineage I document, to buck the trend of her generation and become a dramatic Heroine even in the face of the globalizing social and economic climate of contemporary India.
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    If You Were in My Sneakers: Migration Stories in the Studio Photography of Dakar based Omar Victor Diop
    (Visual Anthropology Review, 2017-05) Buggenhagen, Beth
    If one of the defining images of the present is the unregulated migration of individuals and families across the Mediterranean in small boats, what does migration look like from the perspective of those based of the African continent? In this essay, I argue that Dakar-based photographer Omar Victor Diop focuses his lens on the dignity of migrants, rather than the crisis of migration. In Project Diaspora: Self-Portraits 2014, he reframes contemporary migration in a global historical context to show the contradictions of these movements across oceanic spaces. In Diaspora, Diop swaps out props for football paraphernalia to point to contradictions: so-called migration success stories are rife with experiences of racism and exclusion, and important black historical figures can be omitted from historical accounts.
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    Area Studies and the Challenges of Creating a Space for Public Debate
    (Africa Today, 2016) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Scholarship in the African humanities—art history, cultural anthropology, history, literature, religion, and so forth—has transcended disciplinary ways of knowing, transformed scholarly conversations from a focus on difference between Africa and the West to an emphasis on connections and convergence, and emphasized the universality of the particular. Today, the African humanities must confront another limitation in scholarly discourse about Africa: the presentist priorities of schools of global studies. If it appears that claims to particularistic knowledge of social and historical processes and linguistic competence are falling on deaf ears, it may be because the logic of securing “America’s Place in the World,” the topic of the spring 2016 symposium in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, no longer depends on knowledge of cultural processes produced by academics based in the university system.
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    Dialogic Catharsis in Standup Comedy: Stewart Huff Plays a Bigot
    (Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2017) Seizer, Susan
    This essay investigates the cathartic creative process of a standup comic who recounts, in a video-taped interview with the author, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. Through reflexive engagement with his own creative process, Stewart Huff recounts building a scenario that splits his experience into two voices, enacting a breakthrough into performance within the taped interview itself. Taking to heart Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into our own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s performance as a classic example of double-voiced parody. The transformation from horror to humor is an empowering performative re-creation for the comedian that serves simultaneously as humorous recreation for the comedy club audience. This essay contributes to extant scholarship on the efficacious use of parodic double-voicing and the possibilities it opens up for dialogic catharsis in comedic performance.
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    Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households
    (Brill, 2001) Buggenhagen, Beth
    This paper analyzes the disjuncture between the projected prosperity of male migrant traders of the Murid Sufi order and the actual ability of these traders to maintain the social relations that engender wealth. I focus on an exchange of bridewealth that ultimately resulted in a collapsed marriage to show how households are made and unmade across time and space by diasporic practices. I aim to show how two decades of neoliberal reform in Senegal have had unintended consequences for the prospects of social production. The movement of male traders into transnational trade networks to shore up a stagnant local economy and to reproduce the social and moral order has unanticipated consequences for women's authority. Women claim male earnings not only to run the household, but also to finance the family ceremonies-baptisms, marriages and funerals-and the social payments that accompany these occasions. Women also seek commodities obtained through male trade to exchange in life-cycle rituals. For women, foreign commodities, rather than undermining the production of blood ties, are the very means of making those ties a social fact. In Murid families, the rejuvenation of domestic rituals through access to male earnings abroad sets in motion the production of women-headed households and ultimately of lineages.
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    Picking up the Thread: Recasting Dogon Ideas of Speech in the Work of Geneviève Calame-Griaule
    (American Anthropological Association, 2006-06) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Taking into account the significant body of critique built up around the Dogon corpus, I return to Geneviève Calame-Griaule s ethnography of speech among the Dogon, Ethnologie et langage: la parole chez les Dogon (Words and the Dogon World), to appreciate its role in moving language to the center of ethnographic research. Calame-Griaule s contributions included attention to the full range of communicative practices, giving theoretical weight to her interlocutors embodied linguistic practices, emphasizing the Dogon positioning of speech in the physical and social body, and stressing the importance of analyzing how context renders speech both meaningful and efficacious. Calame-Griaule departed significantly from the Dogon school by focusing not on language and cosmology but rather on language in context that is, everyday talk. Calame-Griaule s work reveals a conception of the types of linkages possible between sign relations and language and materiality. In addition to recasting Calame-Griaule s ethnography in relation to developments in anthropology and linguistics across the Atlantic, I also consider her theoretical insights into dialogicality and context in relation to her particular subjectivity within the Dogon school and among her Dogon interlocutors.
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    Islam and the Media of Devotion in and out of Senegal
    (American Anthropological Association, 2010-11) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Few devotees of the Muridiyya, a Sufi congregation that emerged in colonial Senegal at the turn of the 20th century, have the opportunity to glimpse or touch their spiritual masters. Exalted Murid figures rarely leave their compounds in rural Tuba, and access to them is restricted to high-ranking initiates such as Muslim scholars, government officials, and business leaders. Ordinary disciples are more likely to view religious figures in the variety of media circulating in and out of Senegal. The desire for and appreciation of mediation to facilitate proper practice and proximity to the divine distinguish Murid adepts from their Sunni counterparts. The electronic mediation of devotional practices produces feelings of nearness to spiritual leaders for disciples in Senegal and abroad. Through visual practices related to electronic media, devotees receive religious merit and grace that lead to spiritual and material enrichment and create their spiritual community.
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    Are Births Just “Women’s Business?” Gift Exchange, Value, and Global Volatility in Muslim Senegal
    (American Anthropological Association, 2011-11) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Through global circuits of wage labor and capital, the Murid way has become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony amid conditions of protracted global volatility. In this article, I analyze women's actions within these global circuits. Women create value by giving gifts during the celebration of births and marriages, gifts that are the product of and the motivating force behind Murid global trade. Female ritual activities, on which male honor rests, draw women into conflict with the Murid clergy, which views women's actions as customary and not part of its modern, austere, and global vision of Islam in Senegal.
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    Fashioning Piety: Dress, Money, and Faith among Senegalese Muslims in Post 9/11 New York City
    (American Anthropological Association, 2012-04) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Many Senegalese women migrate to make a living and build themselves up. The distance enables them to resist daily demands on their income and makes it possible for them to save and to invest in long term projects such as home building, their children's education, and family and religious celebrations. Yet, social criticism often blames women for the problems of marriage: such as the high divorce rate, infidelity, and financial squabbling between spouses. In this paper, I focus on the religious aspects of women's migration; I argue that Murid women deflect criticism of their wealth earned abroad by investing in the signs and symbols of a Muslim Sufi congregation. By visiting (ziyara), dressing up (sañse), and donating generously to shaykhs (addiya), Murid women display their wealth, convey the strength of their social networks, and construct themselves as candidates for salvation. Murid women engage in the global economy and preserve their distinctively Murid vision of the world and their place in it. Is it possible to understand their global engagement as a form of cosmopolitanism, as a practice and a form of consciousness, which is rooted in history and which is universal? The restructuring of the Senegalese state under neoliberal reform and its aftermath in the 1990s and into 2000 has made Muslim global networks important to livelihoods at home and yet, Muslim networks have come under scrutiny globally as the U.S. led Global War on Terror lingers on.
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    A Snapshot of Happiness: Photo Albums, Respectability, and Economic Uncertainty in Muslim Senegal
    (Cambridge University Press, 2014-02) Buggenhagen, Beth
    Young women who live in the improvised urban spaces on the outskirts of Senegal's capital city, Dakar, extemporize their respectability in a time of fiscal uncertainty through personal photography. The neighbourhood of Khar Yalla is an improvised, interconnected and multilayered space settled by families removed from the city centre during clean-up campaigns from the 1960s to the 1970s, by families escaping conflict in Casamance and Guinea-Bissau, and by recent rural migrants. As much as Khar Yalla is an improvised neighbourhood, it is also a space of improvisation. When women pose for, display, and pass around portraits of themselves at key moments in their social life, whether in the medium of social networking sites or photo albums, they reveal as much as they conceal the elements of individual and social life. They index their social networks and constitute their urban space not as peripheral, but as central to the lives and imaginations of their siblings and spouses who live abroad. Photographs actively shape and construct urban spaces, which are often loud, unruly and fraught spaces with vast inequalities and incommensurabilities. How women deal with economic and social disparity, within their own families, communities, and globally, is the subject of this article.
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    Milk Intake and Total Dairy Consumption: Associations with Early Menarche in NHANES 1999-2004
    (Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2011-02-14) Wiley, Andrea S.
    Background: Several components of dairy products have been linked to earlier menarche. Methods/Findings: This study assessed whether positive associations exist between childhood milk consumption and age at menarche or the likelihood of early menarche (,12 yrs) in a U.S sample. Data derive from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999–2004. Two samples were utilized: 2657 women age 20–49 yrs and 1008 girls age 9–12 yrs. In regression analysis, a weak negative relationship was found between frequency of milk consumption at 5– 12 yrs and age at menarche (daily milk intake b =20.32, P,0.10; ‘‘sometimes/variable milk intake’’ b =20.38, P,0.06, each compared to intake rarely/never). Cox regression yielded no greater risk of early menarche among those who drank milk ‘‘sometimes/varied’’ or daily vs. never/rarely (HR: 1.20, P,0.42, HR: 1.25, P,0.23, respectively). Among the 9–12 yr olds, Cox regression indicated that neither total dairy kcal, calcium and protein, nor daily milk intake in the past 30 days contributed to early menarche. Girls in the middle tertile of milk intake had a marginally lower risk of early menarche than those in the highest tertile (HR: 0.6, P,0.06). Those in the lowest tertiles of dairy fat intake had a greater risk of early menarche than those in the highest (HR: 1.5, P,0.05, HR: 1.6, P,0.07, lowest and middle tertile, respectively), while those with the lowest calcium intake had a lower risk of early menarche (HR: 0.6, P,0.05) than those in the highest tertile. These relationships remained after adjusting for overweight or overweight and height percentile; both increased the risk of earlier menarche. Blacks were more likely than Whites to reach menarche early (HR: 1.7, P,0.03), but not after controlling for overweight. Conclusions: There is some evidence that greater milk intake is associated with an increased risk of early menarche, or a lower age at menarche.
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    Paths of diversification: Land use, livelihood strategies and social learning along the aging of a land reform settlement in Acre, Brazil
    (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais, 2009) Ludewigs, Thomas; Brondizio, Eduardo S.
    This paper explores the story of settlers overcoming challenges common to the environment of expanding agricultural frontiers, and how this is reflected on the land-use and livelihood choices that unfold with the aging of settlements. The study site is a land reform project in the State of Acre, Brazil. We found that most families seek to diversify their livelihood strategies and take advantage of new opportunities as a way to cope with income uncertainties largely present on the frontier setting. As in other parts of the Amazon, cattle-ranching is the single most important activity to secure income, but complementary activities such as agroforestry and fish breeding are key for economic security and improvements.
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    Bottled Water, the Pure Commodity in the Age of Branding
    (SAGE Publications, 2006) Wilk, Richard
    Bottled water has become a pervasive global business, and bottled water consumption continues to increase rapidly, particularly in countries where clean potable tap water is available at very low or no cost. This article discusses the ways the rich cultural meanings of water are used in marketing and branding, and the forms of consumer resistance that oppose bottled water as a commodity. The contrast between tap water and bottled water can be seen as a reflection of a contest for authority and public trust between governments and corporations, in a context of heightened anxieties about risk and health. The article concludes that bottled water is a case where sound cultural logic leads to environmentally destructive behavior.
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    Practicing Archaeology - As If It Really Matters
    (Maney Publishing, 2009-08) Pyburn, K. Anne
    People care about archaeology for a variety of competing reasons. Archaeologists no longer ignore this as they once did, but few have come to terms on a pragmatic level with their responsibility to the public. Here I outline my own ideas about public engagement and the place of ethnography in the archaeologist’s professional practice. While long-term collaborations between archaeologists and others are almost always preferable, they are rarely feasible, and lofty ideals can have negative repercussions for daily practice and political action. I advocate Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a method that archaeologists untrained in ethnography can use to expediently develop ethnographically sensitive and respectful relationships. I also advocate that archaeologists be honest about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it relates to what they are actually trained to do. This is an important step since archaeologists need to be able to see themselves as one group of stakeholders with a right to advocate their position, but no right to ultimate control of the resources that they use to create an archaeological record. PAR is structured to ensure that project outcomes are not determined in advance. This means that the perspectives and objectives of archaeologists, even when they are allied with political and economic power, will not always prevail. I conclude with a description of a current community museums project I am supporting in Kyrgyzstan where I have put as much energy into transparency as into ethnography.