Tapa Cloths and Beaters: Tradition,Innovation and the Agency of the Bounty Women in Shaping a New Culture on Pitcairn Island from 1790 to 1850

This article examines the tapa cloths made by the women associated with the Bounty, who sailed to Pitcairn Island with the Bounty mutineers to create a new society and culture. Traditional literature reveals a male-dominated narrative, which ignores any female agency in the Bounty-Pitcairn story, and merely objectifies them. The tapa cloths the women produced reveal much about their origins and their efforts to maintain the traditions of their homelands while initiating innovative designs that appear to have provided a sense of unique identity in the Anglo-Polynesian children of the Polynesian women and their European husbands. Given their objectification in the generally accepted historical narrative, it is ironic that the women reveal themselves through the objects that they made. By compiling data about the tapa cloths (kind of cloth, plants used, techniques, colour and patterning, quality), details of tradition and innovation emerge and reveal much about these women and the knowledge they passed down the generations through their daughters.     

Gender and food security in Bangladesh: the impact of climate change

Food security remains a critical global issue, made more difficult because of the rising world population, climate challenges affecting food production and a focus on market-based solutions that undermine subsistence production in vulnerable rural areas. Particularly affected are countries across Asia where poverty, hunger and malnourishment affect a significant proportion of the population. Drawing on Sen’s entitlement theory, we argue that a shift in focus from national food production to intra-household food access enables a critical reflection on consumption smoothing strategies adopted at this level. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency for women and girls to eat less as an intra-household adaptation strategy. We present findings from our research in rural areas of Bangladesh and note that adaptation strategies adopted by households in response to food insecurity. We note that strategies designed to address food insecurity must include gender mainstreaming to ensure that women and girls are not taking a disproportionate responsibility for intra-household food security.     

Rejoinder to Stearns

Ortiz, Sutti, ed. Economic Anthropology: Topics and Theories. Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 1. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America (Society for Economic Anthropology), 1983. xvi + 429 pp. including bibliographies at the end of each chapter, notes on contributors, author and subject indices. $16.75 paper.     

The anatomy of melancholy

Kleinman, Arthur, and Byron Good, eds. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross‐Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xi + 535 pp. including chapter references and index. $45.00 cloth.     

The selves of others

Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven, eds. The Category of the Person. 1985, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. 309 pages. Softcover, $13.95

Marsella, Anthony J., DeVos, George, and Hsu, Francis, L. K., eds. Culture and Self: Asian and Western Perspectives. 1985, Tavistock Publications, New York. 321 pages. Hardcover, $25.00. Softcover, $12.95.

Daniel, E. Valentine, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. 1984, University of California Press, Berkeley, California. 320 pages. Hardcover, $29.95.     

The Census as an Accurate Source of Information: The Value of Mid-Nineteenth Century Manufacturing Returns

Every census of the United States contains numerous errors, as many in the population returns as elsewhere, but on this account it has never been concluded that these returns are useless. In the absence of better data they afford an approximation of good value and the results they exhibit are treated as matters of verity. Such in their aggregate they are, while in many of their details they may be grossly defective.     

“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries     

The State of Research on Gender and Political Participation

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.     

Le Sacre de la citoyenne? Pierre Rosanvallon and the significant other

Rosanvallon, P., Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Gallimard, 1992), 490pp., 195F., ISBN 2 07 072745 9