Food as a Cultural Practice among the Mapuche in Santiago de Chile

This article highlights the role of food as an essential tool for immigrant Mapuche families to reinforce their ethnic identity and pass it on to the younger generations in Santiago de Chile. Food and food-related practices were a topic that many Mapuche referred to when they were invited to talk about their culture and life in Santiago; this simultaneously revealed their relation to ‘others’ (Chileans) and their connectedness to their ancestral lands in the Araucania region in the south. Staying attuned and connected to the south through Mapuche food strengthens feelings of cultural continuity and belonging, such that Mapuche ethnic identity does not surrender to the city, but rather is re-created in a new environment.     

Constituencies of conflict and opportunity: Land rights,narratives and collective action in Darfur

Grievance-based narratives are a primary component of civil wars. While present among the general population affected by conflict, the variants held by the segment of the population most proximate to the armed factions – constituencies – play a primary role in the development and conduct of a conflict. Such narratives can coalesce around specific volatile issues and enable non-combatant constituencies to participate in the conflict through the use of specific 'legalities' or legal precepts. These legalities facilitate the engagement of sets of collective action that are opposed to those derived by constituencies of the opposing side. However such constituencies and their narratives are also where potential opportunity resides for peace-building, both during and subsequent to hostilities. This article looks at the case of Darfur to examine these ingredients, with a focus on land rights as the volatile set of issues around which narratives have developed. In Darfur, opposed narratives which maintain how and why groups claim and deserve access to land and territory, and how groups were unjustly displaced or excluded from lands (and hence power), became solidified and acted upon prior to the conflict to become a primary driver in the current war. In certain cases however narrative change has led to interaction between members of opposed constituencies for the purpose of exploring cooperative arrangements.     

集体土地流转中集体角色的错位与回归

推进集体土地流转,加强农民集体权益保护,需要其代表——集体找准角色定位,发挥积极作用。然而,在实际土地流转中,集体背离了其整体利益代表的角色定位,扮演了土地流转个人利益最大化的促进者和乡（镇）政府利益顺从者的角色,严重的角色错位侵害了集体内其他农民的合法权益。在集体土地流转中,应从乡（镇）政府、农民、集体自身三方面入手,规正集体角色,切实保护农民的权益。     

Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state

The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state’s everyday operations in individual women’s lives, while raising profound theoretical and practical questions about gender and governance. We engage with these texts from unique situated standpoints as insider-outsiders with intimate knowledge of the U.S. criminal justice system gleaned from our respective lived experiences, services provision work, and research with currently and formerly incarcerated Wyoming women.     

Performing identities: music and dance in the Irishcommunities of Coventry and Liverpool

This article will examine how British-born second- and third-generation Irish people use Irish music and dance in the production of an Irish cultural identity. The article draws on research undertaken with members of the Irish communities in the English cities of Coventry and Liverpool. The research was conducted with music and dance practitioners in Liverpool who strongly identify as Irish and also with schoolchildren in Coventry whose parents or grandparents were born in Ireland. The paper first explores the comments of the Liverpool respondents and points to how music and dance can offer a space in which different generations can mark out their affiliation or embody their Irishness. Secondly, the paper considers interview work with schoolchildren in Coventry, concentrating on their responses as listeners to Irish traditional music. Their comments point to the capacity of this music to resonate with multiple, even conflicting, productions of Irishness. The comments of all the respondents raise key debates about authenticity and the construction of identity.