Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies Book

Contents

Preface

World Map and Geographical Placement of Readings

ONE

Culture and Ethnography

1 Ethnography and Culture

James P. Spradley

To discover culture, the ethnographer must learn from the informant as a student.

2 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari

Richard Borshay Lee

The “generous” gift of a Christmas ox involves the anthropologist in a classic case of

cross-cultural misunderstanding.

3 Fieldwork on Prostitution in the Era of AIDS

Claire E. Sterk

Fieldwork among urban prostitutes means doing ethnography under difficult but, in the

end, manageable circumstances.

4 Nice Girls Don’t Talk to Rastas [Revised]

George Gmelch

Interaction between a U.S. student and a Rastafarian illustrates the destructive power of

naïve realism in the fieldwork setting.

TWO

Language and Communication [Revised]

5 Shakespeare in the Bush

Laura Bohannan

Cross-cultural communication breaks down when an anthropologist attempts to translate

the meaning of Hamlet to the Tiv.

6. Whorf Revisited: You Are What You Speak [NEW]

Guy Deutscher

New evidence supports Benjamin Lee Whorf’s contention that peoples’ mother tongue can

shape their experience of the world.

7. Managing Meaning: The Military Name Game

Sarah Boxer

To frame the meaning of its military operations, U.S. armed forces try to name them

positively without offending anyone.

8 Conversation Style: Talking on the Job

Deborah Tannen

On the job, men and women use distinctive conversation styles to ask for help, leading them to

evaluate performance and character differently.

THREE

Subsistence and Ecology

9 The Hunters: Scarce Resources in the Kalahari

Richard Borshay Lee

!Kung and other foragers traditionally worked less and ate better than many other people

with more “advanced” food producing techniques. Today, however, their survival depends

more on drilling wells and keeping cattle than on collecting wild foods.

10 Eskimo Science [NEW]

Richard Nelson

The knowledge developed by Eskimos to hunt successfully contains the same basic principles

that underlie a more formally structured scientific method.

11 Domestication and the Evolution of Disease

Jared Diamond

Herd animal diseases that evolved to infect humans have ended up killing millions of people

in the old and new world.

12 Forest Development the Indian Way [Revised]

Richard K. Reed

South American governments could learn much about tropical forest development from the

Amazonian Indians who live there.

FOUR

Economic Systems

13 Reciprocity and the Power of Giving

Lee Cronk

Gifts not only function to tie people together, they may also be used to “flatten” an opponent and control

the behavior of others.

14 Poverty, Office Work, and the Crack Alternative

Philippe Bourgois

Poor, uneducated Puerto Rican men living in Spanish Harlem feel that the risks they run selling drugs are preferable

to the disrespect they encounter as low-wage employees in New York’s financial and service companies.

15 Cocaine and the Economic Deterioration of Bolivia

Jack Weatherford

The world market for cocaine robs Bolivian villages of their men and causes problems for health, nutrition,

transportation, and family.

16 Malawi versus the World Bank

Sonia Patten

Malawi government’s successful state subsidized fertilizer program challenges the World Bank and

IMF’s insistence on market-driven agricultural programs.

FIVE

Kinship and Family

17 Mother’s Love: Death without Weeping

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Close mother-child bonds suffered in the presence of high infant mortality in a Brazilian shantytown

although recent changes have reduced the problem to some degree.

18 Family and Kinship in Village India

David W. McCurdy

Kinship still organizes the lives of Bhil villagers despite economic opportunities that draw people away

from the community and dependence on relatives.

19 Polyandry: When Brothers Take a Wife

Melvyn C. Goldstein

By jointly marrying one woman, Tibetan brothers preserve family resources and the “good life.”

20 Uterine Families and the Women’s Community

Margery Wolf

To succeed in a traditional patrilineal family, a Chinese woman had to create her own informal uterine

family inside her husband’s household.

SIX

Identity, Roles, and Groups

21 You@Work: Jobs, Identity, and the Internet [NEW]

Brenda Mann

Today’s U.S. job mobility requires “branding” one’s identity through careful use of the Internet.

22 The Opt Out Phenomenon: Women, Work, and Identity in America [Revised and retitled]

Dianna Shandy

Why were young, educated professional women leaving high-paying jobs for a life at home and what

difference has today’s tough economy made?

23 Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? [NEW]

Lila Abu-Lughod

Americans should work for justice in the world, not save Muslim women from wearing burqas or

following their Islamic religion.

24 Mixed Blood

Jefferson M. Fish

A woman can change her race from black to “brunette” by taking a plane from New York to Brazil.

SEVEN

Law and Politics

25 Cross-Cultural Law: The Case of the Gypsy Offender

Anne Sutherland

Legal cultures clash when a young Gypsy is convicted of using someone else’s social security number

to apply for a car loan.

26 Life without Chiefs

Marvin Harris

Small societies based on reciprocal and redistributive economic exchange can do without officials.

27 The Founding Indian Fathers

Jack Weatherford

Although their contribution goes unrecognized, Indian, especially Iroquoian, political structure may

have served as a model that helped to produce a United States federal government

EIGHT

Religion, Magic, and World View

28 Taraka’s Ghost

Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed

A woman relieves her anxiety and gains family support when a friend’s ghost possesses her.

29 Baseball Magic [Revised]

George Gmelch

American baseball players from the games introduction to today employ magical practices as they

try to deal with the uncertainty of their game.

30 Run for the Wall: An American Pilgrimage

Jill Dubisch

An annual ritual motorcycle pilgrimage from Los Angles to Washington, DC personally transforms

the Vietnam veterans and others who ride in it.

31 Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

Horace Miner

The Nacirema display a complex array of body rituals aimed at achieving health and beauty.

NINE

Globalization

32 How Sushi Went Global [Brought back from previous edition]

Theodore C. Bestor

International interdependence between tuna fishermen and sushi as a Japanese culinary style

becomes popular in a globalized world.

33 Village Walks: Tourism and Globalization among the Tharu of Nepal [NEW}

Arjun Guneratne and Kate Bjork

Advertised as a primitive tribe, Tharu villagers endure tours that falsely treat them as part of the

Chitwan National Forest’s natural history and have responded by building a museum to separate their

past from the present.

34 The Road to Refugee Resettlement [Revised]

Dianna Shandy

Nuer refugees must develop the skill and determination to pass through a series of bureaucratic

hurdles to reach and adjust to life in the United States.

35 Global Women in the New Economy

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

Millions of women migrate from poor to wealthy nations serving as nannies, maids, and sex workers. T

hey send money home but find it hard to separate from their countries and families.

TEN

Culture Change and Applied Anthropology xxx

36 Suggestions for Developers: The Peace Corps Problems in Botswana [NEW}

Hoyt S. Alverson

An anthropologist discovers why some Peace Corps volunteers fail to complete their assignments in rural

Botswana, citing perceptions of their role and naïve realism as the basic problems.

37 Medical Anthropology: Leprosy on the Ganges [NEW]

Ron Barrett

Indians who contract leprosy find themselves stigmatized for life, causing them to delay treatment or amplify symptoms to

enhance begging.

38 Public Interest Ethnography: Women’s Prisons and Health Care in California [NEW]

Rachael Stryker

Student ethnographers uncover institutional health care problems at two women’s prisons in California and

suggest changes that result in a revision of state policy.

39 Using Anthropology

David McCurdy

Professional anthropologists do everything from ethnographies of automobile production lines to famine relief,

but even the neophyte may be able to use the ideas of culture and ethnography to succeed in the workplace.

40 Career Advice for Anthropology Undergraduates

John T. Omohundro

The ability to translate useful anthropological skills into “resume speak” is one way for anthropology graduates

to find employment.

Glossary

Index