scholarly journals Ampa Co’i Ndai: Local Understanding of Kafā’a in Marriage among Eastern Indonesian Muslims

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Atun Wardatun
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Government Employee ◽  
Eastern Indonesia ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
A Site

This article draws on an ethnographic research that focuses on the cultural practice of female-paid matrimonial funding, ampa co’i ndai (ACN), among semi-urban Bimanese Muslims of Eastern Indonesia. The practice takes place when the bride, with the help of her parents and female relatives, pays her marriage payment (co’i, including mahr). It is used only when the prospective groom is a government employee, for it is assumed as a social status raiser. During the declaration of marriage, the payment is announced to have come from the groom. This article uses the practice as a site to examine the particularity of practising Islamic laws in everyday life of eastern Indonesian Muslims. The narratives of nineteen Muslim women who have been involved in ACN reveal what its functions as an equalising mechanism, through which gendered power-relations is minimised while perpetuating traditional position of wives and husbands as a complementary couple within their family as well as before society. I argue that  ACN has been seen as a modified understanding of kafā’a in fiqh which means “equality” to “complementarity.” However, this local understanding of kafā’a is a testament to the complexities of gender power relations.[Artikel ini adalah penelitian etnografi tentang praktik AMPA co’i ndai (ACN) di kalangan masyarakat semi-urban muslim Bima di kawasan timur Indonesia. Budaya ini dilaksanakan dengan cara pengantin perempuan, dengan bantuan orang tua dan saudara perempuannya, menyediakan biaya pernikahan (co’i dan mahar). Tradisi ini dipraktikkan hanya ketika calon pengantin pria adalah pegawai negeri, yang diasumsikan memiliki status sosial yang lebih. Namun, saat resepsi pernikahan, deiumumkan bahwa biaya-biaya berasal dari pengantin pria. Narasi kehidupan dari sembilan belas perempuan yang terlibat mengungkapkan fungsi ACN sebagai mekanisme penyetaraan gender dengan meminimalkan relasi kuasa serta nmendudukkan pasangan untuk saling melengkapi dalam keluarga maupun masyarakat. Praktik ACN dapat dilihat sebagai bentuk lokal pemahaman konsep kafā’a, yang berarti “kesetaraan” untuk “melengkapi”. Namun, pemahaman lokal kafā’a ini merupakan bukti kompleksitas relasi kuasa dalam masalah gender.]

scholarly journals Rural Schooling and Good Life in Late Socialist Laos

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Roy Huijsmans ◽  
Piti
Keyword(s):  
Rural Education ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Rural Schooling ◽  
Late Socialism

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic research in northern Laos, this article analyses articulations of a good life in primary school textbook imagery and how this resonates with everyday life in rural upland communities. This is contrasted with children’s sketches of a good life found in the classrooms and ethnographic accounts of moments of ‘good time’ in the context of rural schooling. It is argued that these latter moments constitute brief instances of a good life in the present. Given the deeply hierarchical power relations in which rural education is embedded, not all of these good times stay good for very long. This is reflective of the condition of late socialism in rural areas.

Fashioning the nation: Gender and politics of dress in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohira Suyarkulova
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
General Context ◽  
Gender And Politics ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Individual Strategies ◽  
A Site ◽  
Clothing Choices

This article investigates gendered nationalist ideologies and their attendant myths and narratives in present-day Kyrgyzstan through an investigation of clothing items and practices. Clothes “speak volumes,” revealing tensions between gendered narratives of nationhood and various interpretations of what “proper” Kyrgyz femininities and masculinities should be. Clothing thus becomes both a sign and a site of the politics of identity, inscribing power relations and individual strategies of Kyrgyz men and women onto their bodies. Individual clothing choices and strategies take place within the general context of discursive struggles over what authentic and appropriate representations of Kyrgyzness should be. Thus, such clothing items as ak kalpak (conical felt hats) and the practice of Muslim women covering their head (hijab) acquire social and political meanings that stand for wider processes of identity contestations in the country.

Fictive Fathers in the Field

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Katrina Daly Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Impact

Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concept of “the field” to examine the impact of narratives about fathers on not only the field as a site of ethnographic research but also on the field of African cultural studies.

Embodying the Field

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Hoel
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
South African ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Research Relationships ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article focuses on the various ways in which research relationships evolve and are negotiated by paying particular attention to the embodied nature of ethnographic research. By drawing on my own research experience of interviewing South African Muslim women about sexual dynamics, I critically engage debates concerning power dynamics in research relationships as well as researcher positionality. I argue that researchers should pay increasing attention to the multiple ways in which doing research always is an embodied practice. I present three case studies that highlight the complex ways in which research encounters speak to notions of intimacy, vulnerability and affect. In this way I argue that research encounters forge primary human relationalities that are marked by moments of convergence, conflict and despondency.

Histórias escritas com sangue: Uma análise de processos judiciários de assassinatos de mulheres em Goiânia (1970-1984)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neide Célia Ferreira Barros
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Country Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Power

This book analyzes the criminal processes of homicides or attempted homicides of women in Goiânia during the period of 1970-1984. We observed the gender power relations in the capital of Goiás, a border region, a mixture of country life elements and discourses of modernity. Hence, through case reports of women who suffered attacks on their lives in a period of intense changes, such as the organization of feminist groups in Brazil and the world, political and economic repercussions of the construction of Brasília in Goiás and mass immigration to Goiânia, we have pursued to understand what it meant socially to "be a man" and "to be a woman" in this capital and what consequences were brought into their bodies, concerning life and death, protection and punishment.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Sabrina Zerar
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Sentimental Literature ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early American ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
The Many

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Doing Fieldwork in the Andamans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Zehmisch
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Andaman Islands ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Local Perception ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 contextualizes the Andaman Islands as a fieldwork location. It has two major objectives: First, it serves to introduce the reader to the Andamans as a geographical, ecological, and political space and as a site of imagination. This representation of the islands concentrates on the interplay of discourses and policies which have shaped their global, national, and local perception as well as the everyday life of the Andaman population. Second, the chapter underlines the conflation of anthropological theory, fieldwork, and biographical transformations. It demonstrates how recent theoretical trends and paradigm shifts in global and academic discourse have become enmeshed with the author’s experiences in and perceptions of the field. Elaborating on these intricate personal and professional ‘spectacles’ of the fieldworker, the author thus contextualizes the subjective conditions inherent in the production of ethnography as a type of literature.

scholarly journals Gender Essentialism in Chinese Reality TV: A Case Study of You Are So Beautiful

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110272
Author(s):  
Altman Yuzhu Peng
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Tv Production

This article provides a feminist analysis of Chinese reality TV, using the recent makeover show— You Are So Beautiful (你怎么这么好看) as a case study. I argue that the notion of gender essentialism is highlighted in the production of You Are So Beautiful, which distances the Chinese show from its original American format— Queer Eye. This phenomenon is indicative of how existing gender power relations influence the production of popular cultural texts in post-reform China, where capitalism and authoritarianism weave a tangled web. The outcomes of the research articulate the interplay between post-socialist gender politics and reality TV production in the Chinese context.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

scholarly journals The Day of the Rally: An ethnographic study of ‘ceremony as resistance’ and ‘resistance as ceremony’

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Organisational Culture ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Frontline Employee ◽  
Stability And Instability ◽  
Employee Resistance ◽  
Workplace Resistance

The literature on organisational culture suggests that ceremonies or rituals reinforce control. By contrast, this article contributes to the literature on resistance, culture and ceremony by arguing that ceremony can also be understood as a form of resistance. It does so through drawing on ethnographic research, first, to explore how a ceremonial 1-day rally during an academic dispute was productive for frontline employee resistance (ceremony as resistance). Second, it considers how such resistance can also be productive in generating consent, for it is infused with and reproduces established norms, subjectivities and power relations (resistance as ceremony). Finally, it is asserted that resistance can be productive in fostering a subjectivity characterised by stability and instability and so practices such as a rally are necessary to try to stabilise both the organisation and the subjectivity of resistance. The article therefore illustrates the ambiguity of productive resistance which has been neglected to date. These insights and arguments indicate that all forms of workplace resistance are decaf, for they are imbued with the context and norms through which they arise. Nevertheless, resistance remains dangerous for those in positions of authority because it means that power is never totalising and so outcomes continue to be uncertain.

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