Volume 63, No. 3, Fall 2004
The Everyday Violence of Hepatitis C among Young Women Who Inject Drugs in San Francisco
Philippe Bourgois, Bridget Prince, and Andrew Moss
A theoretical understanding of the gendered contours of structural, everyday, and symbolic violence suggests that young addicted women are particularly vulnerable to the infectious diseases caused by injection drug use--especially hepatitis C. Participant observation among heroin and speed injectors in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood reveals that extreme levels of violence against women are normalized in the common sense of street-based youth drug culture. Physical, sexual, and emotional violence, as well as the pragmatics of income generation, including drug and resource sharing in the moral economy of street addicts, oblige most young homeless women to enter into relationships with older men. These relationships are usually abusive and economically parasitical to the women. Sexual objectification and a patriarchal romantic discourse of love and moral worth lead to the misrecognition of gender-power inequities by both the men and women who are embroiled in them, as well as by many of the public services and research projects designed to help or control substance abusers. Despite deep epistemological, theoretical, and logistical gulfs between quantitative and qualitative methods, applied public health research and the interventions they inform can benefit from the insights provided by a theoretical and cross-methodological focus on how social power contexts shape the spread of infectious disease and promote disproportional levels of social suffering in vulnerable populations.
Key words: gender, hepatitis C, intravenous drug users, participant observation, San Francisco
"Fighting Back" Against Substance Abuse: The Structure and Function of Community Coalitions
Matthew Lindholm, Dan Ryan, Charles Kadushin, Leonard Saxe,
and Archie Brodsky
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Fighting Back (FB) program was one of the first efforts to develop “community coalitions” to reduce drug and alcohol problems. The challenges of coalition building are described and analyzed based on fieldwork from 10 of the 14 urban communities where the program operated. The possibilities and limits of broad-based participation in decision making and interagency collaboration are described. The program triggered a vertical dynamic in its effort to integrate grassroots and elite participation. This dynamic involved negotiation for control within the local program. Structures that encouraged more grassroots-elite integration in the local programs were: 1) relative cohesion and political strength among grassroots leadership; and 2) a grantee agency with resources to distribute and relative freedom from constraints imposed by having to compete in the local political arena and with other service providers. The program initiated a horizontal dynamic in its effort to rationalize the delivery of services. Competition, segmentation, and the mandate to be broadly inclusive were barriers to effective collaboration. Short-term collaboration among agencies emerged around concretely defined, shared goals. Longer-term collaboration was infrequent but emerged on a smaller scale around grant writing, legislative advocacy, and educational events for professionals. Coordination proved difficult because relevant policies were typically set by state legislatures rather than in local communities.
Key words: community coalitions, drug and alcohol abuse, co-optation, race
Infant Agency and Its Implication for Breast-Feeding Promotion in Brazil
Coral Wayland
Studies indicate that early weaning and supplementation (before six months) are widespread problems in Brazil. To arrest and reverse this trend, national, local, and grassroots organizations have implemented a number of breast-feeding promotional campaigns. While these campaigns employ a number of different strategies, many incorporate education as a key component. Often these programs share a common assumption about infant feeding and decision making. Specifically, these campaigns frequently conceptualize the decision to breast-feed as a unilateral one, with mothers making feeding decisions and infants passively accepting and complying with these decisions. While health care professionals may assume that mothers share this model of breast-feeding decision making, this may not always be the case. This paper presents a case study from the urban Amazon where mothers attribute agency to their infants. As such, mothers state that successful breast-feeding is the result of bilateral decision making; both mothers and infants must decide to breast-feed. This bilateral model shapes observed patterns of early weaning in the community. When asked why they terminated breast-feeding, 42 percent of mothers stated it was their infants’ decision. The implication of attributing agency to infants for breast-feeding promotion is discussed.
Key words: agency, breast-feeding promotion, infant feeding, Brazil
Revisiting the Tragedy of the Commons: Ecological Dilemmas of Whale Watching in the Azores
Katja Neves-Graça
This paper explores a possible theoretical framework for studying issues in common-pool resource that emerge from tensions between place-specific notions of common rights and state regulation of access to commons. While the former is historically informed by “traditional ecological knowledge,” the latter is based on abstract international environmental law and on capitalist-oriented development goals. This paper analyzes the regulation of whale watching in the archipelago of the Azores, Portugal, to show how variously situated social actors conceptualized the rights of access to marine commons. It also reveals how these distinct views came into conflict, not only in the context of finding ways to regulate whale watching but also through actual practices of this commercial activity. The Azorean example suggests that a successful process of communication among these different views can lead to ecological learning and improved ecological wisdom of those involved, and, thus, a more sustainable use of marine commons.
Key words: common-resource access, ecotourism, globalization, whale watching, Azores
Scientific Evaluation in Women’s Participatory Management: Monitoring Marine Invertebrate Refugia in the Solomon Islands
Shankar Aswani and Pam Weiant
This paper summarizes the results of a women’s community-based marine protected area that has been successful in sustaining invertebrate biological resources and in promoting strong community support. We outline the project and the associated biological results, describe the processes involved in attaining a committed level of community participation, and review the lessons learned during the project’s implementation. We attribute the project’s preliminary success—improved shellfish biomass, enhanced local environmental awareness, and the reinvigoration of cultural management practices—to the following factors: 1) the high level of participatory involvement and community leadership; 2) the local perception that shell beds have recovered rapidly and the role that scientific evaluation has played in reinforcing this notion; 3) a research program that is cross-fertilizing indigenous and scientific ecological knowledge; 4) the unique marine tenure system that allows for the project’s development and the area’s policing; and 5) the tangible economic incentives created by the development project, which ultimately empowers local women. We hope that the project’s findings can be generalized to other regions of the world with operational sea-tenure regimes and that it can help to make the establishing of community-based marine protected areas (CBMPAs) across the Pacific region more effective.
Key words: women, marine protected areas, scientific evaluation, participatory management, marine invertebrates, Solomon Islands
Property as a Social Relation: Rights of “Kindness” and the Social Organization of Lobster Fishing among Northeastern Nova Scotian Scottish Gaels
John Wagner and Anthony Davis
This paper describes the informal system of property rights that characterizes the commercially valuable lobster fishery pursued in St. George’s Bay, northeastern Nova Scotia, by the descendents of Scottish Gaels. In this setting, discrete family-defined but individually “owned” lobster fishing berths coexist cheek by jowl with a “common ground” fishery. The principles governing the berth system derive, in part, from a land-based system of usufruct rights termed “kindnesses” in 18th century Scotland. The historical, familial, and community attributes of the berth system are outlined, as are the characteristics of the coexistent common ground fishery. Lobster harvesters with berth rights and many without argue that the berth system, in and of itself, is an effective conservation mechanism. This contention is described and discussed in relation to historical evidence respecting local lobster landings and recruitment characteristics. The paper concludes by arguing, first of all, that regulatory authorities should pay far more attention to the role played by informal property rights systems in accomplishing the goals of conservation and good management. While fisheries of this type are typically described in the literature as common property systems, we argue that they are, in fact, mixed property systems—a fact not adequately accounted for by existing regulatory policy or common property theory.
Key words: property, social history, fisheries management, Nova Scotia
"The Legal Effect of the Judgment": Indian Land Claims, Ecological Anthropology, Social Impact Assessment, and the Public Domain
Richard O. Clemmer
The legal, cultural, and ecological issues surrounding Western Shoshone Indians’ claim to and use of the public domain in Nevada are examined through discussion of three cases of contested uses: plans for a mine in a proposed World Heritage Site; plans for a dam at a sacred site; and economic use of the public domain for stock grazing by a Western Shoshone family. Results of a research project aimed at documenting historic and contemporary uses of the area as well as Shoshone land claims reveal a challenge for anthropologists and other social scientists to include the political impact of institutional power on ecosystems in environmental studies.
Key words: indigenous, ecology, religion, social impact assessment, Shoshones
Assessment as Practice: Notes on Measures, Tests, and Targets
Brigitte Jordan and Peter Putz
Drawing on data from workplace and learning studies that we have conducted over the past 20 years, we propose to rethink assessment by developing a three-part framework that puts assessments into a broader social context. The framework identifies inherent assessments as happening informally and nonverbally in all social situations; discursive assessments as occurring when members of a social group talk about what they are doing in an evaluative way; and documentary assessments as coming about when activities are evaluated according to a scheme that produces numbers and symbols. Formal, documentary assessments are ubiquitous in all arenas of modern life, from production work to corporate strategy, governmental resource allocation, and educational policy. However, they frequently have negative consequences which remain largely unexamined, in the literature as well as in the daily practice of managers and decision makers. We show that an overreliance on documentary assessments can lead to far-reaching dysfunctional effects on work practices, on corporate decision making, and on the structure and culture of an organization. In the final part of the paper, we apply our three-part assessment framework to propose a set of recommendations for managers and researchers that promise to lead to the improvement of assessment practice.
Key words: assessment, evaluation, side effects, accounting, organizational culture
Civil Society, NGOs, and the Holy Spirit in Mozambique
James Pfeiffer
The concept of “civil society” has been used by major donors in the world of international development to justify the rechanneling of aid resources away from public sector services to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in an era of structural adjustment. Mozambique provides an especially valuable case study of the civil society experiment in Africa, given its dramatic conversion from state-centered development to civil society and free markets over the last decade. The rapid retreat of the state in the lives of ordinary Mozambicans during this period quickly cleared a space for the emergence of an “independent” civil society that has been quickly filled by two social currents: international NGOs and Pentecostal-influenced churches. This article argues that the NGO presence has intensified already growing social inequality by channeling resources primarily to elites, while the church movements have thrived in poor communities outside the foreign aid world. The enormous popularity of the churches reveals the deepening marginalization of poor communities in the market economy and exposes the inadequacy of the NGO-civil society model to meet the needs of vulnerable populations.
Key words: civil society, NGOs, African Independent Churches, Pentecostal, Mozambique
Being Mexican and American: Negotiating Ethnicity in the Practice of Market Research
Patricia L. Sunderland, Elizabeth Gigi Taylor, and Rita M. Denny
We report on an ethnographic consumer research project among Mexican Americans in which negotiation of identity between respondents and a multiethnic, multidisciplinary team structured the process literally and symbolically. This negotiation is examined in terms of research process as well as results. We focus on how knowledge of language and cultural practices (or lack thereof) contributed to interactions and how respondents’ articulation of being both Mexican and American is itself a collaborative, social process. Refracting the discussion through personal and disciplinary lenses, we underscore tensions and dynamics arising from an anthropological analytic stance vis-à-vis culture and ethnicity versus corporations’ need to simplify. We discuss the implications arising from corporate consumer segmenting practices and question the efficacy of these practices, given normative processes of identity formation. In this case, we also show how constructed authenticity, international market forces, and deterritorialized national ethnicities make it possible for authentic Mexican commodities to emerge from a virtually “non-Mexican” part of the United States.
Key words: corporate anthropology, consumer research, ethnic identity, segmentation, Mexican American
