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Cultural Reproduction (cultural + reproduction)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural Reproduction

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2002
Kathleen Barlow
Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural Reproduction. Melford E. Spiro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 220 pp. [source]

Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2002
Associate Professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race] [source]

Sharing culture or selling out?

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2008
Developing the commodified persona in the heritage industry
ABSTRACT Native American professionals in the heritage industry often describe their work as "sharing culture" when they are involved in processes of transforming features of their cultures into alienable products for consumption. Participation in the heritage industry can be a powerful catalyst for local cultural reproduction, but it also poses a danger to those aspects of culture that Natives consciously protect from commodification. Drawing from a case study of a Native American,owned cultural-tourism business in Alaska, I explore the ways that tourism workers respond to this threat through the construction of what I call a "commodified persona."[cultural commodification, representation, Northwest Coast, tourism] [source]

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
Deirdre McKay
Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ,Igorot' to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ,tribal slot', somewhere between ordinary peasants and ,backward' primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or ,tribal' culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries. This has allowed groups to secure official status as ,cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains. Ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot ,tribal slot' enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction. [source]