Yemeni women down and out in the Tenderloin

The Tenderloin is the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco. Some of its poorest residents are immigrants who come from the poorest regions of Yemen. Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world.

Ninety percent of Yemeni immigrants to the US are single males, and this pattern prevails among the approximately 1,000 Yemenis in the Tenderloin. But there are some married couples with children and some extended families.

Cultural anthropologist Lucia Volk conducted interviews with 15 Yemeni women who live in the Tenderloin. Her conversations reveal the many challenges they face and the resulting distress they are experiencing. A consistent theme is a strong sense of social isolation, both from the mainstream culture and other Muslims including other Yemenis. The women’s inabilities to speak English and their Yemeni dress (including full veiling) create barriers separating them from people in mainstream American culture. In terms of the latter, their small apartments with an open kitchen-dining room-living room plan prohibit the women from receiving guests according to Yemeni rules that require separate areas for men and women. High crime rates on the street inhibit the women from moving around the neighborhood.

Another pervasive factor contributing to the women’s sense of isolation is that other Yemenis are beginning to act more American: “Everyone is looking out for themselves.”

Volk concludes that the sources of distress for Yemeni women immigrants in the Tenderloin are multiple and cannot be easily changed. The women’s loneliness translates to complaints of physical fatigue, depression, and weight gain. Medicalizing their condition is not a solution.

Educating the non-Muslim population to become more accepting of the Yemenis and their culture would help improve understanding and acceptance. Providing English language classes for the Yemeni women that they can attend safely would help them communicate with non-Yemenis. Volk admits she has no idea how to counteract increasing self-centeredness either.

Any ideas from you?

Link: Volk’s article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly (December 2009)

Image: “-1231” by Flickr user Carpetblogger, licensed by Creative Commons.

Call for papers on women and men

From the official website of the Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, published by the University of Bucharest Departments of Sociology and Social Work:

The Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology invites articles, research notes, and book reviews for its first issue, “Women and Men.” Submitted articles and research notes should explore differences and similarities in experiences and perspectives of women and men around the globe, in various historical and cultural contexts. Papers that illustrate, explain and discuss the gendered construction of social institutions and individual life trajectories are welcome.

Deadline for submission is January 21, 2010. Send to: journal.compaso@gmail.com

This issue aims to explore:

What patterns of alikeness and dissimilarity between women and men can be found in social research data?
How can these patterns be explained?
What methods and techniques are best suited to investigate gender differences and gender effects? What are the methodological pitfalls in quantitative and qualitative comparisons of men and women?
How should gender be understood and studied in sociological and anthropological research?

Toward a new decade in psychiatry

An editorial in Nature argues that funding is meager for research on psychiatric diseases compared to that for other major diseases. Focusing just on schizophrenia, new directions for the upcoming decade include: considering why the efficacy of medications has not improved other than reducing side effects; changing the focus on diagnosis and drugs in late stages of the disease to identifying biomarkers and environmental factors that put people at risk; devoting more research to deeper understanding of the underlying biology; devoting more research to “environmental” (socio-cultural) factors; bringing together knowledge in various disciplines; deepening the exposure of psychiatrists to biology.

This blogger adds that a deepened exposure of psychiatrists to medical anthropology and its attention to environmental factors including illness labeling, stigma, and non-medical treatment options is even more important than more biology. If it is in fact true that, as the editorial claims, about 80% of the pattern of schizophrenia in populations “seems to be determined by genetics” with an unknown share of that percentage “susceptible” to environmental influences, and if the other 20% is directly determined by “environmental factors,” then the proportion that is purely or directly biological alone may be more like 60%…and the other 40% either directly or indirectly shaped by environmental factors. Who knows – these percentages all “seem” to be guesswork, but even the crudest guesswork leaves a lot of room for social/cultural factors. And it just may be easier to deal with/change/prevent such social/cultural factors than it is to mess around with someone’s genes.

The next decade for psychiatry should be the decade of cultural psychiatry.

Image: “Brains” by Flickr user Curious Expeditions, licensed by Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 1/4/10

• Muslim-Hindu punk rock and immigrant identity
“With this music I can express my confusion,” says Marwan Kamel, lead-guitarist in Chicago-based Al Thawra, one of the emerging punk rock groups composed of first generation immigrants of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. A USA Today article about these groups quotes Alan Waters, anthropology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, as saying that these bands are “a good opportunity for stereotype smashing.” Most band members have full time jobs and are not as religiously observant as their families would like. Musical style can combine hard-edged punk, ska and funk. Lyrics are sometimes humorous or more seriously satirical.

• San Francisco watch
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle describes Harry Nimmo’s long term observations of change in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. Nimmo, a retired anthropology professor, has lived on Potomac Street for 35 years. He provides a portrait of urbanization over the period in his self-published book, Good and Bad Times in San Francisco. When he first moved into the neighborhood, it had the heaviest concentration of heroin pushers in the city. Since then he has seen the incoming waves of gays and then straight single white people when the neighborhood became hip. Then gentrification. Nimmo recalls that the neighborhood was, in some ways, more friendly 35 years ago than it is now.

• Forensic anthropology and the Sundance Kid
Was the famous robber, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh aka The Sundance Kid, buried in a cemetery in Duchesne, Utah, under the name of William Henry Long? The remains were unearthed a year ago but the question is still unanswered. Support for the claim comes from the work of University of Utah anthropology professor, John McCullough. He says there are matches in height, hair color, eye color, and a notch in the ear, a broken nose, and a cleft chin. Even more convincing is that death likely occurred from a .22-caliber bullet that entered his skull in a way that indicates someone shot him (the death certificate for Long states that he committed suicide).

• Hard times at FSU
An article in Science describes the effects of the economic downturn on Florida State University, especially in terms of cuts to science departments including tenured faculty. Anthropology is one of the hardest-hit departments. The Dean of Arts and Sciences says that “Sciences never pay for themselves.”

• Human evolutionary anthropologist comments on diet
The Washington Post Style Section carried a lead article about the recent trend in paleo dieting among some people in the US. It conveys comments sent in by email from Harvard University professor of human evolution, Richard Pilbeam: “I think it’s quite possible there have been at least some genetic changes since the Neolithic…that would modify digestive processes (enzymes, etc.) to adjust to what have been in many cases quite radically transformed diets.” He provides the example that most humans are able to digest milk.

• DNA from prehistoric modern human in Russia
BBC picked up on a new approach to distinguish ancient DNA from modern contamination developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig. The technique was used on remains of a male buried in Kostenki, Russia, around 30,000 years ago. Findings are published in Current Biology.

• Bumper year of archaeological finds in Scotland and beyond
An article in The Scotsman dubs 2009 a “year of revelations.” The many finds include, in the Orkney islands, a “Venus,” a “Neolithic cathedral,” and a Neolithic structure that contains ritually deposited cattle skulls built into a wall. Other major finds are the “Stirling Hoard” of gold necklaces and, in England, the “Tamworth Hoard” of Anglo-Saxon gold currently on display in the British Museum.

• Newsweek’s list of memorable dead
Yet another list, this time from Newsweek, names 31 famous people who passed away in 2009. The list includes Claude Lévi-Strauss and describes him as the French intellectual who helped popularize the study of anthropology: “Whether tabulating a trove of native myths from the Americas or lecturing on motifs in the Ring cycle, he did it with a poetry–and an outreach to other disciplines–that eluded most academics.”

Please pass the sorghum: big news for paleo-dieters

The downsides of a “modern” Western agro-industrial diet of starchy, sugary, processed foods are well-known thanks to the writings and activism of many food-wise non-scientists such as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver. Their advice to eat fresh, locally grown food whenever possible is nutritionally sound, though not always feasible.

A more extreme rejection of the industrial diet is the so-called paleo-diet. The outlines and benefits of a paleodiet were first proposed by three anthropologists — S. Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak and Melvin Konner — in their 1988 book, The Paleolithic Prescription. In 2002, Loren Cordain hit pay dirt with his best-selling book, The Paleo Diet.

Proponents of a paleodiet point out that 99 percent of human evolution occurred when we were foragers (a.k.a. hunter-gatherers) and ate only lean meats, fish and seafood, nuts, fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. Our bodies have adapted to these foods over several million years. The agro-industrial diet goes against our biological base, in this view, and causes a host of health problems such as heart disease and obesity.

An article in today’s Washington Post style section, “Hunter-Gatherer Gourmet” (alternatively titled “Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it“) profiles a young D.C. woman who follows a paleo-diet along with a rigorous exercise plan. She eats no grains, salt, sugar, legumes or dairy products (her one concession is dark chocolate from time to time). In nine months, she has lost 10 pounds, no longer gets migraines, sleeps better, is allergy-free and her mood has improved.

A recent archaeological discovery in sub-Saharan Africa has major significance for paleo-dieters.

Julio Mercader, Canada research chair in tropical archaeology in the University of Calgary and Mozambican colleagues have discovered that stone age hunter-gatherers at one site in Mozambique were harvesting, processing and eating wild sorghum by 100,000 years ago (see this PDF article from Science magazine, which requires a login).

So it’s time to revise the paleo-diet books and welcome whole grains to the neo-paleo-table!

Image: “Paleolithic Food” by Flickr user Roberta Maria, licensed by Creative Commons.

#1 cultural anthropologist of the decade

As any cultural anthropologist will tell you, a decade is an arbitrary cultural construction with no inherent meaning. I agree. But it does offer a potentially interesting way to bracket a period of time within which a lot happens but not too much — at least not too much for my memory to handle.

On Morning Joe today, some commentators were going through a list of top 10 events of the decade, with the 9/11 attacks ranked as number one, the most significant. As I watched, I wondered if it would make sense to compile a ranked list of the most important cultural anthropologists of the decade. It seemed impossibly difficult, especially the ranking part. But then it hit me that I could reasonably make a case for a number one cultural anthropologist of the decade.

I hereby, with all the authority of a lone blogger, name Paul Farmer (Wiki, bio) as #1 Cultural Anthropologist of the Decade.

Here’s why, in case you do not already agree with me. He has published many important scholarly works, beginning with his groundbreaking exposure of the politics and racism that led to blaming Haiti for the origin and spread of HIV/AIDS.

In addition to his many scholarly publications, Farmer is an influential global health practitioner and activist and co-founder of Partners in Health. Tracy Kidder’s book about him and his health work in Haiti, Mountains beyond Mountains, is widely read. CBS did a documentary on him in 2008. The Skoll Foundation named him “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2008. In 2009, he was a top contender for the position of head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and in the same year he was named U.S. deputy special envoy to Haiti.

Within the discipline of anthropology, Farmer has placed consideration of poverty, social inequality and social justice in the mainstream of research and writing. His use of the term “structural violence” has ensured its significance well beyond medical anthropology. His insistence on taking poverty and social inequality seriously as primary causes of health problems worldwide has helped shake the foundations of western biomedicine. He has helped forge importance links between health and human rights.

Rich anecdotal evidence from my experience teaching at GW also supports my naming of Farmer as #1 Cultural Anthropologist of the Decade. In my undergraduate cultural anthropology class, when I ask who has heard of him, many hands shoot up. Of these students, most have read Mountains Beyond Mountains. A few have heard him speak. In my upper level class on medical anthropology, an even larger proportion of students is aware of his work, and many have read one of his books in another class (they will in my class as well). In my graduate seminars, most students have read at least one of his books and perhaps also an article or two.

Beyond the impressive level of awareness among my students of Farmer’s contributions to health and anthropology, however, is what I refer to as The Paul Farmer Effect (PFE). I created this term to refer to the Pied Piper role he plays: I keep hearing from students that want to be a Paul Farmer. And they are choosing courses, majors and minors, to help achieve that goal.

Thus enrollments at GW in classes in medical anthropology, culture and human rights and cultural anthropology generally are booming. Increasing numbers of B.A. students are combining majors in anthropology, global health and/or international affairs, and adding a minor or two if they cannot fit in a double major. At the graduate level, our dual M.A. degree in international development studies and public health is very popular, and there is strong demand for a similar dual master’s degree in anthropology and public health. Every year, I receive inquiries from medical students about how they can include anthropology in their training.

The Paul Farmer Effect.

At GW, I began to notice it five years ago or so. Since then, the PFE has not abated. It is growing. Because of the PFE, more students each year combine their academic interests in anthropology, global health and international affairs. These students are beginning to graduate and go on to pursue humanitarian careers. Thanks to Paul Farmer and the PFE, they are more powerfully informed and more motivated to make the world a better place than would otherwise be the case.

More tattoos, more sex?

In many cultures, the human body is not good enough as it is: it requires remodeling and marking of various types. Tattoos, piercing, scarification and other forms of bodily modification are widespread across contemporary human cultures, and they have long existed.

Archaeological and other prehistoric evidence indicates that head elongation, ear piercing and tattooing have been practiced for hundreds of years. Patterned blue dots appear in various places on the skin of Ötzi, the Neolithic “Ice Man,” and scientists theorize that the location indicates a possible healing function.

Tattoos among highland peoples in Southeast Asia can protect the bearer against harm such an animal attack or can enhance one’s intelligence, strength or attractiveness. Cultural anthropologists have written extensively about body modifications representing human agency and choice as well as being oppressive “inscriptions,” such as foot binding, breast enhancement or genital cutting. Evolutionary anthropologists seek to understand how such behaviors as tattooing and piercing relate to biological fitness. The bottom line: do tattoos and other forms of body modification help people find a mate and reproduce their genes?

Anthropologist Slawomir Koziel and colleagues propose two hypotheses about tattoos and piercing drawn from evolutionary biology:

because tattoos and piercings involve biological risks due to possible blood-borne infections, they signal a higher biological quality
tattoos and piercing increase a person’s physical attractiveness or hide a problem with appearance specifically low body symmetry (high symmetry is taken as an indicator of healthy development).

To test these hypotheses, the researchers recruited participants in two tattoo salons in two cities in Western Poland. A total of 64 men and 52 women took part. All reported having tattoos or piercings beyond earlobe piercing. All were Polish, and the mean age was 23 years. Most had completed secondary school and 25 were postgraduates.

A control group was composed of 38 men and 48 women who had no tattoos or piercing. All participants completed a questionnaire asking about basic demographics: age, gender, place of birth and residence, education and marital status. Their second and fourth digits were measured, as was finger length from basal crease of the digit to the tip along the ventral surface of the hand. These measurements were used to create a composite index for body symmetry.

Among males, the most common location for tattoos was the upper and lower extremities. For females, it was the back and stomach. Men had more tattoos covering more of their body than women did. Piercings were most often on the face for males and on the stomach for females.

Results offered no support for the first hypothesis about attractiveness for either the men or the women. In terms of the second hypothesis, tattooing among the men was positively related to higher body symmetry and thus appears to be an “honest signal” of biological quality. Among the women, no relationship was found. The authors see the need for further research on the biological function of tattoos/piercing especially among men in different social contexts and in varying social strata in relation to the men’s personality, risk-taking behavior and hormones. The body symmetry measures used in this study could also be improved upon in terms of assessing “genetic quality.”

Food for thought for readers who have opted, or not opted, for body modification: Do you find either hypothesis compelling?

Photo: “Ben (01), Tattoo Artist”, from Flickr, licensed for Creative Commons.

Anthropologyworks 10 best of 2009

The following list was determined by a panel of one, though, as you can see, many of the choices are externally validated. Congratulations to one and all!

Best Student Essays in Public Anthropology: The public anthropology award winners of 2009 are 19 students in Diana French’s Anthropology 100 class, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan.
Best Anthropology Song … or was it the only one? Certainly the only one performed at the AAA meetings.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8035515&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Best Long-term Field Research: Olga Linares, of the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama, has been doing fieldwork in three regions of Senegal for 40 years. She has witnessed many changes including a doubling of the number of poor people, declining rainfall, abandonment of rice fields and effects of the drop in currency value. She describes how Senegalese women farmers creatively cope with these changes.
Best Contribution to Anthropological Ethics: the AAA-commissioned report (PDF) on the Human Terrain System was submitted in November; the product of many months of work by several contributors, it condemns the role of anthropologists in U.S. military operations.

Best Special Issue of a Journal: Social Science and Medicine, Volume 70, issue 1 (requires login), edited by Catherine Panter-Brick of Durham University, contains 20 articles on conflict, violence and health. I will be assigning several of them in my spring medical anthropology seminar.
Best News About One of My GW Colleagues: Patty Kelly, research professor of anthropology, is co-winner of the Sharon Stephens Prize and runner-up for the Victor Turner Prize for her book, Lydia’s Open Door: Inside Mexico’s Most Modern Brothel.
Best New Journal: Collaborative Anthropologies, edited by Luke Eric Lassiter.
Best Anthropology Conference: The September meeting of the Society for Medical Anthropology at Yale University. Although I wasn’t able to attend, my colleagues who did have praised the plenary speakers, rich array of papers, impressive attendance and organization, including meals for the attendees.
Best Kinship Story: The President of the United States’ mother was a cultural anthropologist, and Duke University Press published a revised version of her dissertation, Surviving against Odds.
Best Public Impact: A shared shout-out to Antonio N. Zavaleta, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, who received the Premio Otli Award from the Mexican government for his work improving the quality of life for Mexican citizens living abroad, and to Patricia Easteal, associate professor in the University of Canberra’s faculty of law, who won the Australian of the Year Award for her efforts in advancing human rights and justice in Australia. More info here.

Loser op-ed of 2009: Jared Diamond

UPDATE: The following essay has been slightly revised to take into account a reader’s correction.

Should we be on tip-toes waiting for big business to save the earth? How long can we hold that pose? My feet hurt already.

Jared Diamond (Wiki, UCLA bio 1, UCLA bio 2), often mistaken by the media as an anthropologist, published the op-ed “Will Big Business Save the Earth” in The New York Times on December 5.

He makes a pitch that big business will save the earth. Stating that his current feelings are “nuanced,” he notes the acceleration in the “embrace” of “environmental concerns” by “chief executives” and offers evidence for this in Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron.

He provides three paragraphs extolling the virtues of Wal-Mart and one describing the problems Coca-Cola faces in securing a local supply of clean water. Nothing at all about Chevron. This is bad, I think. I can count to three: What’s going on?

Okay, so he can’t count, and he lost track of his third example. Never mind that his first two examples are not convincing.

In the case of Chevron, he describes one oil field project in Papua New Guinea on which Chevron lavished huge expenditures as a showcase of its moral high ground. It can never be replicated in every situation due to the impossibly high costs involved. It is a practice dubbed by enviro critics as “greenwashing.”

How about timing? Does he not pay attention to major events in the world related to large corporations and what havoc they have wreaked? Like, Bhopal?

The New York Times published Diamond’s op-ed almost exactly 25 years after the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India: December 3, 1984.

Union Carbide has still not done the right thing by the people of Bhopal in all these 25 years. And it’s difficult to imagine what the “right thing” is considering the devastation at the time and the fallout, in all respects — human, environmental — that continues to the present.

Has Jared Diamond heard of Bhopal? Or has he been bought? If so, that’s not nuanced.

For more information, see this special issue on Bhopal from Global Social Policy. Image: “Clean up Bhopal Now” by Flickr user Joe Athialy, Creative Commons licensed.

Top 25 North American dissertations in cultural anthropology 2009

My scan of “Dissertation Abstracts International” (not an international list by any means, but mainly U.S.) for 2009 dissertations in cultural anthropology was both heart-warming and heart-breaking. The good news is that so many excellent dissertations were completed in 2009. As these dissertations demonstrate, anthropologists are increasingly producing knowledge that the world needs.

The bad news is that the job market, including academic and non-academic possibilities, is so bad. What are all these, and other, new Ph.D.s going to do? What will become of their rich and extensive research findings? What about all the people who shared their time and insights with the researchers — will they have get anything back if only a copy of the book about them?

Explanatory note: my search was not comprehensive by any means. I used the search terms health, development, gender and environment. And apologies to the authors for snipping just a few sentence from their abstracts to present here.

Psychosocial Liberia: Managing Suffering in Post-Conflict Life by Sharon Alane Abramowitz, Harvard University. Advisor: Arthur Kleinman
This study focuses on humanitarian interventions in mental health and trauma healing during Liberia’s post-civil war recovery (2003-2008). Using interviews, participant observation, and focus groups, as well as archival evidence, public media and expert interviews, I chart the emergence of mental health as a vector for social engineering in post-conflict humanitarian enterprises.
Shiv Sena Women and the Gendered Politics of Performance in Maharashtra, India, by Tarini Bedi, University of Illinois at Chicago. Advisor: Mark Liechty
I explore performance and the subject through the study of female party-workers in Shiv Sena, a militant political party in Western India. Findings show that particular gendered performative practices are important to the personal, political aspirations of women in political parties and to the dynamics of local politics in India’s urbanizing regions.
Understanding Childhood Malnutrition in a Maya Village in Guatemala: A Syndemic Perspective by Elaine Marie Bennett, University of Connecticut. Advisor: Pamela Erickson
I examine the social, political ecological, economic and cultural context of childhood malnutrition in a Maya village in the western highlands of Guatemala. The complex set of interactions of many factors related to childhood malnutrition is best approached from a syndemics orientation. This orientation can promote publicly owned, systemic changes that provide both short-term, stop-gap solutions and long-term, sustainable ways to prevent childhood malnutrition.
Yu Get Fo Liv Positiv: HIV, Subjectivity and the Politics of Care in Post-conflict Sierra Leone by Adia Benton, Harvard University. Advisor: Arthur Kleinman
I focus on the relationships between HIV-positive individuals and HIV/AIDS associations in Sierra Leone. Reflecting on medical anthropological inquiries that have located AIDS activism within discussions of citizenship based on biological status, I argue that vertically funded and administered HIV/AIDS programs have marginalized the illness from existing systems of care and reduced the government’s capacity to respond to more pressing problems that also negatively affect health and well being.
Microbial Matters: An Anthropology of Pandemic Influenza in the United States by Carlo Caduff, University of California, Berkeley. Advisor: Paul Rabinow
I explore the recent scare over the threat of pandemic influenza from the perspective of an anthropology of the contemporary. With a virus that is ever-evolving and a knowledge that is ever-shifting it is unlikely that the day will come when scientists will finally know what pandemic influenza is. The crucial question in terms of ethical practice, therefore, might be the following: What form of preparedness would be adequate to a scientific discourse which recognizes the inevitable possibility of error, both biological and epistemological?
“Looking Good”: Women’s Dress and the Gendered Cultural Politics of Modernity, Morality, and Embodiment in Vanuatu by Margaret Cummings, York University (Canada).
I use women’s dress as a lens through which to focus on the relationship between gender, modernity and morality, and I show the ways in which all three are condensed and embodied in the moral and aesthetic imperative for women to “look good.” Young ni-Vanuatu women’s often-frustrated efforts to look good are productive of new and provisional yet hopeful imaginings of the nation.
Nashta: Rotating Credit Associations and Women “Being Active” in Syria by Lindsay A. Gifford, Boston University. Advisor: Augustus Norton
Rotating credit associations known as jama`iyyat are popular among Damascene women. Analysis of meeting structure and the discourse that develops in them indicates that women who participate in jama`iyyat are concerned with more than economic gain. Jama`iyyat build social capital that benefits not only women but husbands and children, projecting reputations of respectability onto the kin unit. This social capital can be used for future transactions and negotiations, such as the start-up of a new credit association or marriage.
Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph Doyle Hankins, The University of Chicago, 2009. Advisor: Susan Gal
My dissertation focuses on how the Buraku liberation movement conducts politics in this changing situation. I examine what the Buraku political organization mobilizes around, how they mobilize, and how they justify their claims. I articulate a theory of the labor of multiculturalism to characterize the current Buraku situation and speculate on the co-constitution of multiculturalism and neoliberal capitalism.
A History of Marginality: Nature and Culture in the Western Himalayas by Shafqat Hussain, Yale University. Advisors: Michael Dove and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan
I trace the history of the dialectical relationship between centre and margins in a remote mountainous region of Hunza, northern Pakistan, exploring the politics of representation over time. Through history, the people of Hunza have played a role in the maintenance and relative play (rigidity and permeability/flexibility) in these boundaries from their own cultural logic. The interactions between them and the centers have had different consequences depending on how the act of boundary making and boundary breaking was perceived by the outsiders and the magnitude of transgression.
Keeping Hope: Encountering and Imagining the National State in a North China Village by Zongze Hu, Harvard University. Advisor: James Watson
This historical ethnography examines the complicated ways in which ordinary villagers have made do with, perceived, and imagined the national state in a North China village. It also shows how their views of the state and its local agents have changed particularly in the past seven decades. Villagers hate and dread, yet also love and embrace, the state which is abstract and concrete at the same time. Locals dislike the state’s interference in the areas like funerary rituals, yet remain hopeful for its involvement in development projects.

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