Volume 60, No. 4, Winter 2001
Law and Persuasion in the Elimination of Female Genital Modification
Regina Smith Oboler
This article addresses issues involved in creating applied programs designed to eliminate the practice of genital surgeries on women, from the joint standpoints of practical effectiveness and ethical soundness. It takes the position that law and enforcement approaches are insufficient as public policy. Efforts to affect public policy should, rather, focus on gaining adequate funding for research-informed programs of public education and persuasion. The discussion examines approaches relevant to countries where these practices are long-established traditions and the situation of immigrant populations in Europe and the United States. Effective approaches are reviewed, based on practical and theoretical descriptions of change strategies by other scholars, reports on specific programs, and perspectives adapted from the author’s ethnographic research with the Nandi people of Kenya.
Key words: female genital surgery, FGM, excision, clitoridectomy, African women
Diversity in Income-Generating Activities for Sedentarized Pastoral Women in Northern Kenya
Immaculate Nduma, Patti Kristjanson, and John McPeak
As East African pastoralists settle around market centers, women often adopt new town-based activities to generate income. While settling in or near towns presents women with new opportunities, household poverty may prevent them from exploiting these opportunities or lead them to adopt environmentally unsustainable survival strategies that contribute to the localized degradation of the natural resource base. A survey of 102 Rendille women in and around Korr town in Marsabit District of northern Kenya was undertaken to understand their income-generating strategies. Strategies analyzed in this study are the sale of milk, based on pastoral production; the collection and sale of firewood, which may be environmentally unsustainable; and income generation through small-scale trading, which has become increasingly important as market integration increases in northern Kenya. The results show that Korr women are by no means all pursuing the same income-generating activities. Potential poverty-alleviation strategies include emphasis on research and investments aimed at improvements in milk marketing opportunities and efficiencies, increasing regional employment opportunities, strengthening collective action by pastoral women, and increasing their level of participation in decision making aimed at sustainable use of natural resources.
Key words: pastoral, income diversification, livelihood strategies, sedentarization, Kenya
Female Entrepreneurship in the Caribbean: A Multisite, Pilot Investigation of Gender and Work
Katherine E. Browne
This paper introduces a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and comparative study of how female entrepreneurship is patterned according to a society’s particular configuration of gendered institutions and ideologies. The islands of Puerto Rico, Martinique, and Barbados, colonized by Spain, France, and Britain respectively, exhibit strong differences in the incidence of female self-employment and in local patterns of gender roles. Although these societies share a profound social history of sugar plantations and slave labor, their distinct colonial legacies have shaped important differences in the intensities and specific forms of patriarchal institutions and ideologies, differences that remain apparent in each island’s female workforce.
Key words: female entrepreneurship, multisite ethnography, patriarchy, gender ideologies, Caribbea
The Battlefield of Water Rights: Rule Making Amidst Conflicting Normative Frameworks in the Ecuadorian Highlands
Rutgerd Boelens and Bernita Doornbos
Property relations in irrigation and water rights distribution have become central issues in current policy debates and rural development initiatives. Nevertheless, there is still a great lack of understanding about what water rights-in-practice are, how they function, and how they are created, consolidated, and transformed from abstract sociolegal categories into local procedures and in-the-field practices. Understanding users’ rationality and local expressions of water rights in peasant and indigenous communities is of crucial importance if we want to comprehend their claim for water rights and perhaps support local empowerment processes in common property water control systems. This article explores irrigation development in the Ceceles zone in Ecuador. It is based on action research that has pulled the researchers into an analysis of the peasants’ struggle to acquire and define water rights and to achieve recognition for the legitimacy of their normative system authorizing those rights. The article analyzes how different interest groups have sought to defend and control rule making amidst conflicting normative frameworks. The research made clear that actual water rights are not simply defined in lawyers’ offices and at engineers’ design desks; they are negotiated and enforced in processes of social struggle. Moreover, water rights not only give access to water but also constitute power relations that define the control over decision making on water management. Water rights are dynamic, and even long-standing rights may be sacrificed to strengthen local autonomous organization.
Key words: water rights, irrigation, peasant and indigenous organizations, empowerment, legal pluralism, Andes, Ecuador
The Politics and Ecology of Indigenous Folk Art in Mexico
David V. Carruthers
This paper explores the ecological promise and peril of Mexico’s rich and diverse indigenous arts and crafts. In the quest for authentic sustainable development, the increased commercialization of folk art presents both opportunities and risks. Many indigenous art forms demonstrate characteristics associated with triumphs in agroecology, social forestry, and other rural initiatives—community revitalization, resource stewardship, traditional ecological knowledge, identity, biological and cultural diversity, and grassroots participation. However, field research in rural Michoacán and Oaxaca presents a sobering counterpoint, finding most peasant artisans entangled, both as agents and victims, in worrisome patterns of degradation, depletion, and exploitation. Global and domestic market failures, predatory bossism, embedded inequities, lack of cooperative success, and political exclusion largely undermine in practice the ecological potential of indigenous art. Still, in the face of forbidding barriers, there are encouraging signs of innovation and a fledgling national movement for a more ecological folk art.
Key words: folk art, sustainable development, indigenous ecology, political ecology, Mexico
Growth, Scale, and Power in Washington State
John H. Bodley
According to the power-elite hypothesis (Bodley 1999), growth in the scale of sociocultural systems is an elite-directed process that concentrates social power. This hypothesis is tested using a wide range of quantitative data covering all incorporated urban places in the state of Washington. The distribution of household income, property ownership, bank deposits, the form and location of business ownership, and the distribution of business revenues are all examined by scale of urban place. Throughout, it is shown that as urban scale increases economic power becomes more concentrated, and the number of poor households increases. The most equitable distribution of economic power is found in the smallest places that have grown the least.
Key words: growth, scale, power, elites, inequality, Washington State
Participatory Rural Appraisal as Qualitative Research: Distinguishing Methodological Issues from Participatory Claims
John R. Campbell
Anthropologists and many others are making increasing use of participatory research methods in a variety of applied contexts. While aware of the potential advantages of such methods, this paper outlines a number of methodological issues that need to be carefully considered. Such issues, when taken together with the problem of combining participatory with qualitative and quantitative research, argue strongly not only for caution in using the methods but also for the need to undertake basic research on participatory methods themselves. This paper looks at the development of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) in development research, and critically examines three methods—interviewing, visualization, and ranking/scoring—in terms of their relation to established qualitative research. It then turns to the problems that arise from using PRA techniques. Finally, the validity and reliability of PRA are discussed in relation to arguments about sequencing/triangulating research techniques, an argument which is shown to be as problematic as the unexamined use of PRA.
Key words: participatory methods, participatory rural appraisal, research techniques, triangulation, research validity
Appraising Studies in Health Using Rapid Assessment Procedures (RAP): Eleven Critical Criteria
Adi Utarini, Anna Winkvist, and Gretel H. Pelto
In recent years, rapid assessment procedures (RAP) have resulted in many descriptive health studies of potential utility to the wider social science community. However, as RAP departs from the in-depth, more holistic style of qualitative research, it is important to develop criteria for judging the quality of individual studies. In this paper we propose 11 criteria and apply them to published RAP studies, taking into consideration the limitations inherent in RAP studies and common methodological problems. The criteria cover important aspects from preparation to presentation of findings. We found that authors typically do not include adequate information to address all criteria. We suggest that greater attention to these issues would enhance the strengths of RAP studies as contributions to social science.
Key words: rapid assessment procedures, health, critical criteria, appraisal
Village Experts and Development Discourse: “Progress” in a Philippine Igorot Village
Dorothea Hilhorst
How does discourse work in everyday development situations and how does it order social relationships in local communities? To answer these questions, this paper argues, we have to follow how local actors use different development discourses in practice. Using the case of an indigenous women’s organization in the Philippines, the paper explores what local development initiatives tell us about the meaning of development and social change in a village. Stepping away from notions about hegemonic discourse, the argument is based on the duality of discourse, where actors on the one hand find room for maneuver in a multiplicity of discourses, and on the other create realities beyond their intentions by enacting particular discourses. To study this, the paper adopts a two-step approach. First, three local meanings of development are identified: development as improving the village; as helping those in need; and as bringing personal benefit. Second, an interface analysis is used, focusing on negotiations at real or imaginary meeting points of different discourses. Research found that women’s use of development discourses plays into processes of social ordering, in particular by eroding the status of peasant women in favor of educated professionals.
Key words: development discourse, local knowledge, women’s organizations, Philippines
Pampang Culture Village and International Tourism in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo
Anne Schiller
Pampang, a village inhabited by Kenyah Dayaks, an indigenous people of Indonesian Borneo, was recently declared the first “culture village” in the province of East Kalimantan. This study traces the development of “Pampang Culture Village” and examines the incipient effects of tourism on the lives and livelihoods of local people. Even as the village’s cultivation as a tourist destination has begun to garner benefits for residents, their role in the enterprise remains ambiguous. Left unresolved, this confusion could contribute to fissures within the community. Another disturbing side effect is the creation of a new arena for competition among native subgroups. Competition for tourists may have negative consequences for whether indigenous peoples can forge and maintain a common identity for themselves in an era of rapid social transformation.
Key words: Dayaks, performance, tourism, ethnic identity, Indonesia
2001 Malinowski Award Lecture
Notes Toward a Theory of Applied Anthropology
Walter Goldschmidt
This paper urges applied anthropology to return to its early concern with anthropological and sociological theory. That early work not only was closely tied to theory but also made significant contributions to it. The author suggests that the time has come for practitioners to develop a coherent theory of practice and offers some particulars on what such theory should contain.
Key words: theory and application, history of applied anthropology, agricultural policy, Tlingit land use
