The Decline of a Craft: Basket Making in San Juan Guelavia, Oaxaca
Jeffrey H. Cohen and Anjali Browning
Oaxacan crafts producers are celebrated for the quality of their work, their business success, and the ability of their goods to transcend space and time. Weavers of cotton and woolen textiles, potters of a wide variety of pottery styles, and most recently wood carvers who make alebrijes (painted wooden animals) produce goods that are bought and sold on the international market and appear in museum collections world-wide. Nevertheless, there are crafts in Oaxaca that are not viable in the current market and that do not show up in international collections. In this paper, we examine one such craft: basket making in the community of San Juan Guelavia. We argue that the decline in the market for these goods reflects several changes: first, a decline in local use; second, a rise in the costs of production; and third, a lack of support by exporters and an inability to engage the export or tourist markets. In response, local producers have moved into wage labor (locally and through migration) to secure their incomes.
Key words: crafts, markets, basketry, Mexico, economics, globalization
From Workers to Owners: Latino Entrepreneurs in Harrisonburg, Virginia
Laura H. Zarrugh
In the vast literature on immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship in the United States, relatively little attention has been paid to Latino entrepreneurship, perhaps because Latinos (except Cubans) tend to be perceived as labor migrants. For the same reason, even less attention has been given to the Latino small businesses that have quickly become a ubiquitous part of new Latino settlements in the rural South over the past two decades. Based on structured interviews with over 30 Latino business owners, this paper describes the growth of Latino-owned businesses in Harrisonburg, Virginia (population 40,468 in 2000) that has occurred since 1990 in tandem with the ever-increasing size and complexity of the local Latino community. In particular, the paper examines both the “structure of opportunity” for Latino entrepreneurship outside traditional gateway cities and the social and cultural characteristics of the entrepreneurs and their businesses. The paper highlights the role of local poultry processing plants in the settlement process and entrepreneurs’ work histories.
Key words: Latinos, immigrants, entrepreneurs, rural, Southeast
Give Me Shelter: Temporal Patterns of Women Fleeing Domestic Abuse
Kathryn S. Oths and Tara Robertson
Domestic violence is a growing public health concern in the United States. Research to date has focused more on why women stay in abusive relationships than on factors influencing their leaving. The work presented here explores the social structural connections between culturally defined social events and the timing of entry into the shelter system. Handwerker’s (1996) taxonomy of the causal theories of domestic violence is used and expanded upon here as an organizing framework for exploring the leaving process. This study investigates the temporal patterns of domestic violence crisis line and safe house use by the hour, day, and month, including women’s motivations for seeking help when they do. Analyses were based on a review of 2,387 crisis call records covering a three-year period, supplemented by formal and informal interviews with abused women and agency staff. The widely held belief that more women seek shelter during “drinking holidays” such as New Year’s and the Super Bowl was unsubstantiated, while the contention that women with school-aged children time their leaving to coincide with breaks in the academic schedule was supported. The patterning of domestic violence calls to the shelter is the mirror opposite of that previously found for calls to police and emergency room visits.
Key words: domestic violence, substance abuse, shelter, social structural constraints
The Anthropology of Busyness
Charles N. Darrah
Since the 1990s scholars have paid increasing attention to the competing demands of work and family in the US. The result has been a literature that focuses on time, without reference to the content of activities. This article, based on several years of fieldwork with dual career middle class families, explores the activities that drive busyness and those activities undertaken to cope with its effects. The latter include both a set of practices adopted by individuals and longer term efforts to build technological, social, and ideological infrastructures to enable coping. There is thus a tacit work of managing busy everyday lives that is social in nature and salient to anthropology.
Key words: busyness, work, families, time pressure
Survival Always Trumps Ideology: A Case Study
Angela Gómez and Rolando Franco
Determining the extent to which democracy has taken root in Latin America represents a great challenge amidst the political changes seen in the region in the last decade. This paper explores the political views of families living in extreme poverty in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile, by analyzing their socioeconomic and political realities within the framework that establishes the characteristics of a democratic government. This longitudinal study used a multiple case study approach for this in-depth exploration and was framed around the concept of human agency. Results from this analysis show this population is keenly aware of politics and how they impact their social and economic environment. Political apathy reflects a discontent with gobernability and social and economic inequities and does not carry over into families’ agency in terms of negotiating their survival and the possibility of a better future for their children. The theoretical and practical implications of adhering to democratic values show that while Chile has made some progress in this area, the country still faces some challenges of which the existing culture of inequity is the most significant one.
Key words: agency, democracy, political ideology, extreme poverty, Chile
Healthcare Choices and Acute Respiratory Infection: A Rural Ecuadorian Case Study
John S. Luque
The objectives of this research are to identify barriers for timely healthcare seeking for childhood acute respiratory infections (ARIs), and to compare the ethnomedical signs and symptoms female caregivers ascribe to lower ARIs in under-fives with Western biomedical categories. In 2004, six focus group discussions with female caregivers and 25 in-depth interviews with healthcare providers were conducted. In addition, a semi-structured questionnaire was administered to a purposive sample of 91 female caregivers (age 18-57 years) in a rural Ecuadorian county. Results from the questionnaires found that the majority of caregivers (54%) did not recognize the most severe ARI symptoms, rapid breathing and indrawn chest. Analysis of the data identified the primary obstacles for timely healthcare seeking were money for medicines (32%), transportation fares (21%), and restrictive hours of the health centers (14%). Healthcare choices included a combination of home-based care, use of traditional healers, and biomedical care. Household medicine inventories revealed an extensive use of herbal, over-the-counter, and prescription medicines. The main recommendation resulting from the research was to launch a public health campaign sensitive to ethnomedical conceptions of health and illness in order to improve maternal health-seeking behavior for childhood ARIs.
Key words: acute respiratory infection, health behavior, ethnomedicine, rural, Ecuador
The Friendly Financier: Talking Money with the Silenced Assistant
Thomas Molony and Daniel Hammett
In many academic fields the researcher often financially remunerates both research assistants and participants. Literature covers the ethics involved in paying informants. Both research design and research methodology literature covers many important aspects of the research process, but neither pays much attention to the issue of research assistants. These relationships can be complicated by the dynamics of an outsider researcher working in a southern context. Drawing upon examples of researcher-research assistant in the field, in Tanzania and South Africa, this paper explores the ethics of financial transactions in researcher-assistant relationships and the ways in which wealth asymmetry can affect the working relationship. We conclude by stating our belief that these issues have not been adequately addressed elsewhere, and that there is an imperative for due consideration in training and planning for these relationships to be considered as integral and visible to the research and writing phases.
Key words: methodology, ethics, research relationships, Africa
Public Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Participation: Participatory Action Research and Critical Ethnography in Provincial Russia
Julie Hemment
This article contributes to discussions of a public anthropology by bringing participatory action research (PAR) into dialogue with anthropology. PAR appears uniquely compatible with the goals of critical ethnography. Deeply concerned with global/structural inequality, it is also attentive to the power relations inherent within the research encounter; its point of departure is the kind of collaboration that the new (critical) ethnography proposes. However, despite these obvious affinities, few anthropologists have engaged PAR. At a time when more and more anthropologists are advocating forms of collaborative research practice, I argue that these two approaches to research can offer each other a great deal and that juxtaposing them is productive. Tracing the stages of her own fieldwork in post-Soviet Russia, the author argues that PAR offers the ethnographer a stance, or a framework to affect public anthropological engagement in the field. Further, it offers a means by which we can bring critical anthropological insights to collaborative projects for social change.
Key words: participatory action research, post-Soviet Russia, power, critical ethnography
Ethnography in Evaluation: Uncovering Hidden Costs and Benefits in Child Mental Health
Doug Henry, Rodney Bales, and Emily Graves
This article discusses the application of ethnography to the design and implementation of an anthropologically informed cost-benefit analysis, of a program for families of children with severe emotional disorders. Ethnography proved particularly useful at revealing monetary costs and benefits for various stakeholders not included in traditional evaluations or assessments, as well as identifying costs avoided and non-quantifiable “hidden” benefits of the program to families and children, such as increased communication between family and community, improved parenting skills, and higher valuations of self-esteem of parents and children. This article contributes to the literature on evaluation anthropology in that it provides an example of how ethnography can inform the assessment and measurement of importance from the viewpoint of a program’s participants, bringing their voices and concerns to the attention of program directors and policy makers.
Key words: evaluation anthropology, cost-benefit analysis, child mental healthrural area, contraceptive use, women’s sterilization, contraceptive choices
Autonomous Individuals or Self-Determined Communities? The Changing Ethics of Research among Native Americans
Carolyn Smith-Morris
Ethnographic and biological research among tribal communities demands that a researcher successfully navigate not only the social environment but also the political, legal, and biomedical perspectives that compete in today’s ethics battleground. Health researchers are, therefore, increasingly drawn into the complex arenas of tribal identity, self-determination, and governance. This brief discussion reflects upon almost a decade of research among indigenous groups in the American Southwest, spanning some of the region’s most hostile and unwelcoming years toward outsiders since the Pueblo Revolt. I focus upon the concept in biomedical ethics of individual autonomy, a powerful but inadequate concept for treatment of tribal decision-making and community self-determination. Incompatible with culture mores of strong family, community, and group decision-making, the principle of autonomy serves as an acculturative agent within medical research and treatment. Alternative approaches to consent, and to ethics more broadly, are called for.
Key words: ethnics, health research, Native Americans, tribal identity, individual autonomy
