Swain, Margaret Byrne. Being Cuna and female: ethnicity mediating change in sex roles
Katherine Coppe's List: Race&Ethnicity
-
-
The impact of ethnicity on Cuna female roles will be discussed with reference to socioeconomic conditions of the San Blas Cuna as a whole and with specific information from the community of Ailigandi. An analysis of Ailigandi student aspirations and several life histories emphasize the importance of community consensus [Page 105] in defining the range of roles considered acceptable for Ailigandi women.
-
-
-
-
Such disputes as arise between villagers or members of two villages are usually settled locally, and no outside authority intervenes in the internal affairs of any of the villages of Khumbu. The [Page 101] control of these affairs lies in the hands of a number of village officials, elected by the villagers for terms of one year at a time, and a system by which authority and the burden of public office pass in turn from one householder to the other engenders a high sense of civic responsibility and a remarkable degree of discipline regarding matters affecting the common good. This civic sense is not confined to the Sherpa families settled in a village for generations, but has been imparted even to the more recent Khamba immigrants, who can gain social recognition only by gradually assuming their share in the discharge of public duties.
-
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 1909-.The Sherpas of Nepal: Buddhist highlanders
-
-
-
-
The Ju/'hoansi and other Bushman groups frequently gather together as communities to sing and dance. The dances may occur as often as once a week or more, when the spirit moves people, and ideally they go on all night. Their purpose is to heal people who may be sick and to ward away any ill fortune which may menace the group. However, far from being solemn, the dances are usually occasions for great fun, flirting and hilarity. Through the physical and artistic discipline of the highly structured dance, an altered state of consciousness is produced in some of the participants which has benefits for the entire community. Contact with the beyond is regularly made, and all who come to the dance experience an uplifting energy which they feel to be a necessary part of their lives.
-
Biesele, Megan. Women like meat: the folklore and foraging ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoan
-
-
!Kung lived in small, discrete clusters of dwellings located within 1–2 kilometers of permanent water. We refer to these discrete clusters as “villages,” though they were typically so small that the distinction between village and household is not at all clear. To the !Kung eye, villages were differentiated from each other although an uninformed observer could easily mistake several discrete “villages” for the rather amorphous scatter of buildings comprising a single village. !Kung villages were referred to by the name of an influential, older man who lived in the village. He was the village “owner” and was almost without exception 50 or more years of age.4 4See Draper (1975) for a description of this sedentary patriarchal pattern and its contrasts with the then current practices among foraging !Kung. Everywhere !Kung shared access to permanent water with Bantu cattle keepers. Some !Kung were co-resident with Bantu and some !Kung lived in independent, !Kung-only villages.
-
Draper, Patricia.Coming in from the Bush: settled life by the !Kung and their accommodation to Bantu neighbors
-
-
-
-
The accused was not a forceful person. Except for his friend (the man robbed) no one spoke in his behalf. On the one occasion when he attempted to speak for himself he was told, “You can’t talk. You stole the money.” The purpose of the session was not to discover who in fact had stolen the money. The major concern of the group which had suffered the loss (and hence of the congreso as a whole) was how the money should be replaced. Objectively, the only evidence against the accused was the statement of the daughter. No one asked her why she had not cried out when she awoke and saw the thief, or why she had presented her story only after her father had accused her brother and then left for work.
-
Holloman, Regina. Developmental change in San Blas
-
-
Early in the session there was a great deal of shouting and several persons talked at once. There was no attempt by the saila or the policemen to obtain an orderly, composed discussion. Two hours later these people had talked themselves out, were tired, and ready to go home. No decision was reached.
-
Holloman, Regina. Developmental change in San Blas
-
-
-
-
Unlike most Nepalese, who are either Hindus by caste or tribes more or less Hinduized after centuries of prolonged contact and occasional intermarriage with Hindus, the Sherpas are unalloyed Buddhists. Indeed in religion, dress, language, kinship, marriage, and social life generally, [Page 55] they resemble the other people who live along either side of the five-hundred-mile northern border with Tibet. At the same time, however, the Sherpas are unique in all these dimensions, as they and outsiders readily agree.
-
Fisher, James F..Sherpas: reflections on change on Himalayan Nepal
-
-
While most Sherpa friendship pacts are concluded by men who have a genuine liking for each other as well as common interests, the mechanism of the friendship pact is also used for scaling a reconciliation between men who were involved in disputes either relating to property or resulting from acts of violence. Such thouwu relationships are known by special terms, and it is said that men persuaded or compelled to end a quarrel by becoming ceremonial friends lack the feeling of warmth normally characterizing the relationships of thouwu.
-
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 1909-.Himalayan traders: life in highland Nepa
-
-
-
-
On occasion, however, a weak group will seek and sometimes obtain assistance from a stronger one, but such alliances are never of a binding or permanent nature. The most common causes of inter-group quarrels are trespass, theft and adultery. The ensuing conflicts generally assume the form of a blood feud which is continued until a more or less equal toll of life has been taken by both sides. Women are never killed intentionally during the course of these feuds but it not infrequently happens that when one group overwhelms another the women are made captive and taken in marriage. Further as far as can be ascertained under no circumstances will the victors deprive the vanquished of their territory or occupy such territory lest harm or disaster should overtake them. The more widely separated groups of the tribe have no personal knowledge of or direct personal contact with each other and generally live in such superstitious fear and dread of each other that the members of one will not undertake journeys into the territory of another, even when accompanied by Europeans. The group areas are separated from each other by neutral zones into which nobody will venture except during the course of visits. These zones are usually formed by belts of trees, open flats, water courses, etc. Territorial boundaries are observed in a most scrupulous manner even by closely related groups who are living on the most friendly terms with each other. Each family is inseparably united to its habitat and has a superstitious dread of any locality but its own. The result is that even the members of completely disorganised groups are loth to seek employment outside the boundaries of their ancestral territory.
-
Draper, Patricia.Room to maneuver: !Kung women cope with men
-
-
he individual household is defined by the hearth and, in the rainy season, the hut around which each family sleeps and eats. Its members are the recipients and consumers of the plants gathered by a woman. During the rainy season, when food is plentiful, this unit may move about, foraging and hunting along its way. The band, for all its structural amorphousness and fluidity with respect to group membership, is consolidated for much of the rainy season. The core members of such “camps” — siblings with spouses, children, and parents — are the “owners” of a band territory. The headman typically holds a loosely defined authority position and is the spokesman for the group (for example, in dealings with neighboring or visiting bands). As noted above, the multi-band unit is the group that normally aggregates, more or less regularly, around the few waterholes that yield water throughout the dry season. Intermarriage, exchange, common performance of ritual (trance and male initiation) are intergroup actions amongst band-cluster members that instill a certain degree of common purpose amongst the constituent bands and their members (Lee 1979:364–9; Barnard 1992a:44–5).
-
Draper, Patricia.Room to maneuver: !Kung women cope with men
-
-
-
-
Today, the two communities have grown together as a consequence of population increase and all that divides them physically is an arbitrary border drawn between two irregular lines of houses. But each village considers itself a unique entity; each has its own political organization, its own gathering hall, and its own body of community leaders. The original split had been caused largely by differences of opinion regarding the degree to which elements of non-Kuna culture should be brought into the village, with the Okop Sukkun faction being the most doggedly conservative. Through the years, this divergence of philosophical orientation has continued and even [Page 21] grown in importance. While Ustuppu has long reached out for the benefits offered by the outside world, Okop Sukkun has remained a bastion of resistance to Western influences. Ustuppu has welcomed missionaries of various persuasions-- Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Church of God, Seventh Day Adventist, Bahai--while the people of Okop Sukkun have given guarded entry only to the Baptists. Ustuppu championed the construction of the school, while Okop Sukkun battled against it with determination. Ustuppu boasts more than eighty employees of the Panamanian government and the church missions; Okop Sukkun has only a few. Ustuppu pushed the Panamanians to help them build a maternity clinic, whereas Okop Sukkun opposed the effort. And when Ustuppu installed an aqueduct to bring fresh water to the island and set up an electric plant to light the community, the people of Okop Sukkun would have no part of either project.
-
Chapin, Mac. Curing among the San Blas Kuna of Panama
-
-
Whenever this opposition between the two villages is discussed, the inhabitants of Ustuppu refer to themselves as “modern” and “progressive”; the people of Okop Sukkun, on the other hand, constantly emphasize their strict adherence to traditional values, the ways of their fathers-- and sneer at the cultural contamination of their neighbors. A strong sense of the differing outlooks of the two communities can be gained during a casual walk through the streets of the island. Ustuppu is dotted with cement houses and privately-owned stores, many of which are two stories high; Okop Sukkun consists almost entirely of thatched houses with cane walls, the most striking exception [Page 23] being two cement buildings run by the Baptists (and these are conspicuosuly set at the far tip of the island, away from the village proper). In Okop Sukkun the air is sharply punctuated by women singing lullabies to their children and by men practicing or performing their curing chants; in Ustuppu there is very little singing. Ritual specialties are vigorously promoted in Okop Sukkun, and many of the younger men are learning them; in Ustuppu, virtually all of the specialists are old men who must rely upon other communities for students, if they are to have any at all. In Okop Sukkun the two major ceremonies involving the entire community-- the puberty feast and the exorcism rite called Apsoke
-
Chapin, Mac. Curing among the San Blas Kuna of Panama
-
-
-
-
n my book The Sherpas of Nepal I have shown that as late as 1957 the villages of Khumbu were virtually autonomous except for the levy of a very modest land-tax by the government of Nepal. The task of collecting this tax was entrusted to a number of prominent men known as pembu, who stood in a patron-relationship — usually hereditary — to the men whose land-revenue they collected. Other civic tasks and responsibilities, the enforcement of rules laid down by the village assembly, and the control of such natural resources as the village-forests, were allocated according to a system of rotation combined with the informal selection of men suitable for various offices. The system worked well at a time when the village-communities were largely self-contained and contacts with outsiders were slight. Though in theory the laws of the state applied to Khumbu as much as to any other part of the kingdom, in practice no outside agency intervened in the affairs of the Khumbu people, as long as they arranged to pay the annual revenue to the appropriate government office, which was located at Okhaldunga, the district headquarters.
-
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 1909-. Himalayan traders: life in highland Nepal
-
-
Sherpa villages used to be characterized by their unity of purpose and the absence of factionalism. The interests of the villagers were seldom in conflict, and disputes between individuals could usually be settled by mediation. The village was the focal point of the aspirations of all inhabitants, and economic advancement and the build-up of prestige was considered in the terms of a man's position within the village-community. Now, however, the focus of many Sherpas' interests has shifted to the economic possibilities provided by tourism, and success in this sphere and in business enterprises located in Kathmandu, provides an alternative to the acquisition of influence in local affairs. There are indications that Sherpa villages are no longer united in their reaction to events and propositions originating outside the confines of Sherpa society. This became obvious when a consortium dominated by a Japanese group began the building of an hotel on a site considered by the people of Khumjung as being part of their village-land. The employment provided by the project was of obvious advantage to the villagers, but there was understandable resentment about the destruction of forest involved in the scheme. In the assessment of the balance of advantages and disadvantages of the hotel project, the village split and individuals took up positions according to the personal benefits they could expect from the scheme.
-
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 1909-. Himalayan traders: life in highland Nepal
-
-
-
-
The possession of a herd of goats or cattle or of a field of maize and melons, puts a !Kung farmer-herder in an anomalous social position. The demands of the work routine require changes in life style: mobility is restricted, monotonous tasks become a part of everyday life, and children are pressed into service as herders (Draper, 1975). At the same time, women are confined closer to home and their work is more rigorously separated from the work world of men. But the most striking anomalies are observed in the tense relationships between those families of !Kung who have begun to farm and herd and their relatives who continue the foraging life. It is apparent that there are real contradictions between the organization and ideology of farming and that of foraging. The most important of these contradictions is that between sharing or generalized reciprocity which is central to the hunting and gathering way of life and the husbandry or saving of resources which is central to the farming/herding way of life. Food in a !Kung camp is immediately shared with residents and visitors alike (Wiessner, 1977), whereas for herders and farmers to do the same would quickly [Page 123] put them out of business. When a !Kung family harvests or comes into possession of livestock, they come under intense pressure to share their good fortune with their kinfolk and affines. If they give in to these demands their stocks are depleted rapidly below the point of economic viability, whereas if they refuse, they are accused of stinginess, a serious social stigma.
-
iesele, Megan. Hunters, clients and squatters: the contemporary socioeconomic status of the Botswana Basarwa
-
-
Some problems did, of course, come up. Many of the women felt as though they had been excluded from the decision-making process and were angry that they were not represented more in the various organizations which were being formed (including the new Parents-Teachers Association). The women then decided to form their own organization, a Women's Development Committee, perhaps the first of its kind in Botswana. The lack of agricultural advice was countered with setting up a [Page 140] Gardening Committee which made collections locally in order to purchase seed and implements. Numerous attempts to interest the Sub-Land Board in Sebina to come out and register the fields of the community met in failure, however, and there was an ever-increasing presence of cattle in the area. But the community, with a school teacher who was deeply interested in development, assisted them by helping them to write letters to the Ministry of Local Government and Lands and also the Central District Council, outlining their problems and asking for advice. The areas which were most often cited as being ones of importance to the people on the Nata included the hunting laws, taxation, land registration, land use planning, and community development.
-
iesele, Megan. Hunters, clients and squatters: the contemporary socioeconomic status of the Botswana Basarwa
-
-
-
-
When a nele is born, his power may be so great that his parents run the risk of being overcome and killed. The danger is most acute for the mother of a nele, and it is often said that the most gifted nerkan are motherless; their mothers die either during childbirth or shortly after. For example, Nele Kantule, whose mother died when he was an infant, reportedly used to explain the ineffectiveness of certain contemporary nerkan by pointing to the fact that their mothers were still alive
-
Chapin, Mac. Curing among the San Blas Kuna of Panama
-
-
nature, parents who give birth to nele children occasionally elect to nullify their extraordinary qualities by bathing them in medicines [Page 140] (Nordenskiold 1938:81; DeSmidt 1948:21). But when the decision to leave the nele’s powers intact is made, the parents are obliged to take special precautions. They must protect themselves with medicines, and sometimes even decide to have the young nele raised in another household. DeSmidt (1948:21) heard of a case in the community of Ailikanti where a nele child always referred to his mother as “aunt” and his father as “uncle,” a strategy which was devised to shield his parents from danger.
-
Chapin, Mac. Curing among the San Blas Kuna of Panama
-
-
-
-
There are also Tibetan-culture residents of Khumbu who share something of the status of the kamis in the eyes of their neighbors: khamendeu, decendants of “polluted” Tibetan caste groups, and yembas, decendants of slaves (in Nepal, slavery was abolished only in 1926) The representatives of these groups are considered unclean, and no higher ranked Sherpa will eat or drink from a utensile used by such people; sexual contact with [Page 98] khamendeu irrevocably converts one to that status (Haimendorf, 1964), and many Sherpa khamendo lost their original standing by that route.
-
Brower, Barbara Anne. Livestock and landscape: the Sherpa pastoral system in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Nepal
-
-
To be a “true” Sherpa nowadays is to belong to one of about eighteen (depending on how you count them) patrilineal, exogamous clans. (The original migrants, according to Oppitz [1968, 144], belonged to only four “protoclans,” which have since divided into additional units.) The Sherpa population in the Khumbu villages has been augmented by a trickle of clanless Tibetans (locally called Khamba, although they do not pretend to come from Kham) who have crossed over into Khumbu over the centuries. Those who have settled into Khumbu villages, acquired wealth, and become generally absorbed into Sherpa society (often intermarrying with someone from a Sherpa clan) are also loosely referred to as Sherpas, as are those who are descendants of alliances between Sherpas or Khambas and other ethnic groups, such as Newars, Tamangs, or Chhetris. In addition to restricting the range of potential marriage partners, these clans have only a few small and relatively unimportant ritual functions, including occasional group worship of clan deities. They are not now political or economic corporate groups, though Ortner (1978, 19) speculates that in Solu, at least, they might originally have been.
-
Fisher, James F..Sherpas: reflections on change on Himalayan Nepal
-
-
-
-
!Kung lived in small, discrete clusters of dwellings located within 1–2 kilometers of permanent water. We refer to these discrete clusters as “villages,” though they were typically so small that the distinction between village and household is not at all clear. To the !Kung eye, villages were differentiated from each other although an uninformed observer could easily mistake several discrete “villages” for the rather amorphous scatter of buildings comprising a single village. !Kung villages were referred to by the name of an influential, older man who lived in the village. He was the village “owner” and was almost without exception 50 or more years of age.4 4See Draper (1975) for a description of this sedentary patriarchal pattern and its contrasts with the then current practices among foraging !Kung. Everywhere !Kung shared access to permanent water with Bantu
-
Draper, Patricia.Coming in from the Bush: settled life by the !Kung and their accommodation to Bantu neighbors
-
-
-
-
What the brothers did not discuss openly was the fact that one of the most common sources of conflict in the Sherpa community was that between brothers who had “split” their home when the elder took a wife and the younger stayed behind with the parents in the family home in a pattern of ultimogeniture. The problems were largely economic in origin, since the elder brother took his income away from his natal family from that point onward, investing it in his family of procreation. Mother-in-law fought with daughter-in-law (iwi/nama) over the resources of the son/husband and invariably this ended up pitting brother against brother. The conflicts manifest themselves as diseases, accidents from violence, and financial misfortune.
-
Adams, Vincanne, 1959-. Production of self and body in Sherpa-Tibetan society
-
-
n recent years, other nonSherpas have come to live in Khumbu. School teachers are mostly from other ethnic groups; some such as the headmaster of the school in Khumjung, may marry into the Sherpa community and participate in its rituals and social life. Various government offices (Army, Livetock Development Project, Northern Boundary Commission, and Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation) located here are staffed mostly with transient Nepali lowlanders (making up almost 11 percent of the 1982 population according to Pawson et al., 1984a); these rongbas—lowlanders—bring their own cultural traditions and are involved only in the more colorful and public of Sherpa events.
-
Brower, Barbara Anne.Livestock and landscape: the Sherpa pastoral system in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Nepal
-
-
-
-
Intracultural differences of the Cuna language, such as San Blas, Bayano, etc., have been shown by Prince (1913) to be merely dialectical; though the speakers consider them to be ‘different’. He has also demonstrated satisfactorily that Cuna is not primarily a polysynthetic language, as posited by Cullen in 1868, but is essentially isolating in character. The comparison is considered to more nearly approximate Maylayan than the average North American language. This may explain why some linguists told Marsh that the ‘Ancient Norse taught the Cuna their language; for it has 60 early Norse words and an Indo European structure rather than a Mongoloid
-
Marshall, Donald Stanley. Cuna folk: a conceptual scheme involving the dynamic factors of culture, as applied to the Cuna Indians of Darien
-
-
“A peculiar human figure carving that shows negroid facial features comes from the Caribbean coast near the southeastern boundary of the Tule Indian territory beyond Caledonia Bay. The figure is shaped from a slab of hardwood, 76.3 cm. (30 in.) in length and stained with a brown paint. A miniature hat, too small to cover the head, decorates the top of the figure. The articulated arm and leg parts are socketed to the torso with iron nails. Male sex organs and gluteal muscles are similarly attached. The figure was probably made by the Cimaroons of southeastern Panama (Cat. No. 327497, U.S.N.M.).”
-
Krieger, Herbert William, 1889-. Material culture of the people of southeastern Panama, based on specimens in the United States National Museum
-
-
-
-
Nepal packs more geographical and ecological diversity into fewer square miles than any other country in the world, and the people who inhabit this much-too-heavily populated land mirror that diversity. The country exhibits an unusually broad spectrum not only of geography but also of social, economic, religious, and linguistic types: from the flat-as-a-pancake rich farmland of the Tarai just above sea level along the Indian border in the south, with its full panoply of Hindu castes, its indigenous tribal groups, and its substantial Muslim minority, speaking Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, and Maithili; through the terrace-laced middle hills, populated by farmers and herders ranging from Nepali-speaking high-caste Hindus—Brahmans and Chhetris—to such Mongoloid groups as Rais, Limbus, Gurungs, Magars, and Tamangs, all speaking Tibeto-Burman languages; to the high Himalayan valleys with their Buddhist, Tibetan-speaking nomads and settled farmers and traders. In the middle of all these is the Kathmandu Valley and its Newars—an ethnic universe unto itself. Nepal is, in anthropological jargon, a multiple society with plural cultures. The Sherpas who live in the high valleys in the southern shadow of Mt. Everest, in the Solu-Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal, are merely the most famous minority in a country where there is no majority.
-
Fisher, James F.. Sherpas: reflections on change on Himalayan Nepal
-
-
-
-
For the anthropologist, the Bushmen are one of the world's most intriguing peoples, as they are virtually unique physically, linguistically, and culturally. The physical anthropologist cannot place the Bushmen in any one of the recognized major racial groupings: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, or Negroid. Similarly, linguists have placed their language in a category, Khoisan, apart from other African language families. The velar “clicks” that characterize Khoisan languages are apparently found nowhere in the world outside of Africa.
-
Marshall, Lorna. The !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert
-
-
1 - 16 of 16
20 items/page
List Comments
(0)
List Info
16 items | 4 visits