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Local Meanings (local + meaning)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Exploring the Gaps between Meanings and Practices of Gender Equity in a Sport Organization

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 3 2007
Larena Hoeber
This article analyses the explanations organizational members used to make sense of the meanings and practices of gender equity. Studying gender equity as an organizational value provided a way of understanding how gender inequity is perpetuated and embedded in the culture of an organization. This study was informed by post-structuralist feminist theory as it provided a lens for understanding and critiquing the local meanings and production of gendered knowledge, and encouraged discussion of transforming meanings and practices. This study was situated in a Canadian university athletic department in which gender equity was an espoused organizational value, but gender inequities were evident. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with administrators, coaches and athletes, observations of practices and competitions, and the analysis of relevant documents. These data were coded and categorized using Atlas.ti. Respondents' explanations for the gap between what was espoused and what was enacted centred on two dominant, but contradictory, themes: a denial of gender inequities and a rationalization of gender inequities. These themes suggested respondents often understood inequities as expected, natural, or normal. [source]

"Short Fried-Rice-Eating Chinese MCs" and "Good-Hair-Havin Uncle Tom Niggas": Performing Race and Ethnicity in Freestyle Rap Battles

JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2010
H. Samy Alim
This article shows how emcees create local meanings of race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. We demonstrate how performers attach new social meanings to race and ethnicity in verbal duels, even as they also reproduce normative meanings around gender and sexuality. Further, we suggest that the construction of local, alternative meanings around race and ethnicity might actually help support dominant racial hierarchies by relegating "blackness" suitable for only a limited set of domains. Despite the enduring nature of these broader racial hierarchies, we conclude that performances are activities in which individuals contest and negotiate the social meanings of identities.,[performance, style, race/ethnicity, verbal duels, freestyle rap] [source]

Carolina in the Carolines: A Survey of Patterns and Meanings of Smoking on a Micronesian Island

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005
Mac Marshall
Tobacco use---especially smoking industrially manufactured cigarettes---kills nearly 5 million people annually and is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide. Tobacco is a widely used global commodity embedded in cultural meanings, and its consumption involves a set of learned, patterned social behaviors. Seemingly, then, tobacco offers a most appealing anthropological research topic, yet its study has been relatively ignored by medical anthropologists when compared to research on alcoholic beverages and illegal drugs. To help fill this gap, this article sketches the historical background of tobacco in Micronesia, presents the results of a cross-sectional smoking survey from Namoluk Atoll, and describes contemporary smoking patterns and locally understood symbolic associations of tobacco. Intersections among history, gender, local meanings, the health transition, and the transnational marketing of tobacco are addressed, and cigarette smoking is seen as part of a new syndemic of chronic diseases in Micronesia. [source]

Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2000
Kalman Applbaum
In this article, I explore the strategic practices and cultural theories of marketing managers in three U.S.-based transnational corporations (TNCs) as seek to meaningfully direct their products across national borders. While cultural anthropologists have lately focused on local adaptation and appropriation of TNCs' products to local meanings, the reverse process by which TNCs co-opt local meanings to a universalizing evolutionary paradigm,in what they have come to regard as a consumption-led new global order,has not been examined. Globalization is explored as a key cultural concept driving marketing managers' practices,the myth and charter behind large TNC border crossings. [consumer marketing, globalization, transnational corporations, United States] [source]