Diane L. Wolf

Feminist dilemmas in fieldwork

* Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork Diane L. Wolf. * Understanding the Gender System in Rural Turkey: Fieldwork Dilemmas of Conformity and Intervention G nseli Berik. * Skinfolk, Not Kinfolk: Comparative Reflections on the Identity of Participant-Observation in Two Field Situations Brackette F. Williams. * Writing Ethnography: Feminist Critical Practice Carol B. Stack. * Relationality and Ethnographic Subjectivity: Key Informants and the Construction of Personhood in Fieldwork Suad Joseph. * Between Bosses and Workers: The Dilemma of a Keen Observer and a Vocal Feminist Ping-Chun Hsiung. * Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with Chicana Informants Patricia Zavella. * Reflections on Oral History: Research in a Japanese American Community Valerie Matsumoto. * The Expeditions of Conjurers: Ethnography, Power, and Pretense Cindi Katz. * Situating Locations: The Politics of Self, Identity, and Other in Living and Writing the Text Jayati Lal. * Afterword: Musings from an Old Gray Wolf Margery Wolf.

Family Secrets: Transnational Struggles among Children of Filipino Immigrants

In comparative studies of language proficiency and grades, Filipino second generation youth look relatively successful and assimilated, echoing what we know about their parents: post-1965 Filipino immigrants are predominantly middle-class, college-educated, English-speaking professionals who have integrated easily into U.S. society. Based on fieldwork in two California sites, this paper examines some of the issues and problems confronting second generation Filipino youth. “The family” seems to offer an extremely magnetic and positive basis of Filipino identity for many children of immigrants, yet it is also a deep source of stress and alienation, which for some, has led to internal struggles and extreme despair as manifested by rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. More specifically, by focusing on the gap between family ideology and practices, this paper suggests that many Filipino second generation youth struggle with an emotional transnationalism which situates them between different and often conflicting generational and locational points of reference.

Female Autonomy, the Family, and Industrialization in Java

It is generally argued that industrialization has an adverse affect on the position of women due to their exclusion from industrial employment and the resultant erosion of their status. This article addresses a case study to the question of gender stratification and industrialization by analyzing the relationship between factory daughters and their families in Java, Indonesia. The case study suggests that industrialization at the very least maintains, and may even enhance, female status within the family. I compare this Southeast Asian case with the East Asian experience to demonstrate the important role family systems play in mediating the effects of industrialization upon women and family change.

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas

This volume expands the intellectual exchange between researchers working on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust life and North American sociologists working on collective memory, diaspora, transnationalism, and immigration. The collection is comprised of two types of essays: primary research examining the Shoah and its aftermath using the analytic tools prominent in recent sociological scholarship, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in sociology and related fields. Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielberg’s collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering. Contributors . Richard Alba, Caryn Aviv, Ethel Brooks, Rachel L. Einwohner, Yen Le Espiritu, Leela Fernandes, Kathie Friedman, Judith M. Gerson, Steven J. Gold , Debra R. Kaufman, Rhonda F. Levine , Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, Martin Oppenheimer, David Shneer, Irina Carlota Silber, Arlene Stein, Natan Sznaider, Suzanne Vromen, Chaim Waxman, Richard Williams, Diane L. Wolf

Child Withholding as Child Transfer: Hidden Jewish Children and the State in Postwar Netherlands

The childrens rights movement has led, among other things, to a focus by human rights scholars on nationally orchestrated child kidnapping, known euphemistically as “child transfer.” This article will focus on a little known case that I will argue can be considered child transfer, that of Jewish orphans in the Netherlands after World War II. Kidnapping these children was not initially involved in their movement from parents’ to strangers’ homes; however, after the war, the State often refused to return some of these children to surviving Jewish kin or to the Jewish community. In other words, against the wishes of the decimated Jewish community after the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the postwar Netherlands government withheld Jewish children from their kin and from their ethnic community, keeping them in Gentile homes. I argue that this child withholding constitutes a form of child transfer because of the manner in which it was done and the reasoning behind it.

How Jews became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America

The article offers a review of Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about America. Brodkin analyses the social and political transformations in America and puts the analysis in the context of her own autobiography. The fi rst issue that Brodki n investigates are the processes that led to the change in the social status of Jews and other immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in the 20th century. Second, Brodkin tries to understand her own origins, as well as different life styles and ways of perceiving the Jewish identity present in her family. Beside the analysis itself, Brodkin also offers many interesting remarks on the construction of racial and ethnic categories, discrimination, and the interactions between the ethnic, class and gender aspects of one’s identity.