Moral economies of food and geographies of responsibility

This paper uses the concept of 'moral economy' to challenge the conventional view that defines morality and the market as oppositional terms. Drawing on evidence from life history interviews with key actors in the British food industry, the paper outlines how moral and ethical questions are articulated through notions of space and time. Using case study material from the chicken and sugar industries, the paper examines the way that ethical and moral issues are expressed through the dimensions of time (via notions of remembering and forgetting) and space (via notions of connecting and disconnecting) and via notions of visibility and invisibility. The paper concludes by examining how our understanding of the moral economies of food can be advanced through the adoption of a relational view of geographical scale and temporal connection, contrasting the attribution of individual blame with a politics of collective responsibility.     

Gendered meanings and everyday experiences of violence in urban Brazil

Violent acts are not random, but are infused with meaning: those intended by the perpetrators and those ascribed by others. This article explores how dominant gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro attempt to manipulate the meanings of violence to maintain their control of territory, presenting themselves as protectors of the community. Gangs impose violent punishment on residents who have breached their rules and behavioural norms. The messages they send out regarding the (un)acceptability of violence against women is highly ambiguous, however, which reduces women's options and increases levels of insecurity. Despite the ambiguity and unpredictability of gang rule, residents refrain from challenging gang control, preferring to moderate their own daily routines as a means to feel secure in the face of high levels of insecurity.     

Beyond Bilas: The Enga Take Anda

A crucial issue facing anthropologists, linguists, and museums today is what to do with research material and artifacts that have accumulated over the years. In 2005 we sought ways to return 20 years of material on Enga history and tradition to the people of Enga Province at a time when rapid change was leaving young generations with little sense of their cultural heritage. The goal was to build a center, the Enga Take Anda, House of Traditional Knowledge, that would provide knowledge of the past to help Enga understand recent changes and to consider what should be carried forward and what left behind. To be effective, the Enga Take Anda would have to be a museum and as well as a resource center with an active role in Enga schools and the Village Court system. We describe here challenges and successes in this endeavor. The establishment of the Take Anda has involved much trial, error, flexibility and persistence, largely persistence.     

Beyond the predicted: expanding our understanding of creative agency in international development through practice and policy

This article analyses the framing of creative agency within the field of international development before going on to challenge some of the limitations of that framing. The critique is informed by research undertaken with artist-led initiatives in Central America that reveals the political implications of that framing and, at the same time, points to alternative forms of creative agency at work. The paper highlights the approaches of a number of international development donors whose policies appear able to support more expansive and emancipatory conceptions of agency for artists and artist-led initiatives, and makes a claim for the political importance of such policy platforms, despite some on-going limitations.     

Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking applied to traditional Irish mothering

This paper uses Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking to explain patterns of Irish mothering that developed in Ireland following the Great Famine of 1845-1852. Ruddick's central thesis, that maternal thinking develops strategies for preserving the life of the child, fostering the child's growth, and shaping an acceptable child, is applied to the intersecting influences of famine memory, religion, education, and emigration in post-famine Ireland. The strict, moralistic, and highly inhibiting features of Irish culture that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are traceable to patterns of mothering that developed after the famine. While Irish mothers are often blamed for instilling values that stressed sexual repression and guilt, other cultural factors influenced maternal thinking. Mothers did foster highly repressive moral values that encouraged permanent celibacy and delayed marriage. This paper examines the larger cultural features that derived from political oppression and the famine as they imprinted these values.     

Reconsidering the behavioral basis for style: A case study among the Kalahari San

In this paper, it is proposed that there is a behavioral basis for much, but not all, of the formal variation in material culture that has been called style by archaeologists. This aspect of stylistic behavior is founded on the basic human cognitive process of identification via comparison. Such stylistic behavior is argued to be one means by which people negotiate their personal and social identities relative to that of surrounding others. Thus, the process of social, and corresponding stylistic, comparison is proposed as the mechanism underlying stylistic development and change. This behavioral basis for style is explicated in a case study among the Kalahari San, in which the role of style in beaded headbands in regional, areal, and personal identity relations, as well as exchange, is investigated. Finally, the proposed behavioral basis for style is discussed in terms of what it can contribute to interpretation of variability in material culture, current approaches to style, and its implications for the development of a theory of style.