Gudrun Dahl

Women in pastoral production

This concluding article aims to review, on a general level, some of the issues relating to the place of women in pastoral production. It begins by a discussion of the extent to which “pastoralism” as such is a valid point of departure for analysis and then proceeds to look at the pastoral working process from the perspective of females. It is argued that a proper understanding of pastoral productive relations must be based on a recognition of the dual nature of productivity—in terms of utilities and in terms of herd generation. The complex intertwining of different labour inputs leaves room for the cultural underevaluation of womens work. Female rights to livestock and the access that women have to other resources that can give them bargaining power are then discussed. The article ends with a consideration of the direction of present changes in the lives of pastoral women.

Sociology and Beyond : Agency, Victimization and the ethics of scientific writing.

During the last decades, development discourse has taken a neo-liberal turn. Parallel to this, the discourse of social science has become more oriented to matters of individual agency. Within the sociological and anthropological literature on development, this emphasis on individual agency is often expressed in terms of an explicit statement taken by the author that s/he wishes to correct an earlier (ethically inferior) emphasis on structure that is assumed to imply that the concerned people are passive victims. Problematising this ethics of scientific writing, this paper will look at various discourses in which the concept of victimhood is used, seeing claims and disclaimers of victimhood as themselves being expressions of agency in a contestation over accountability, responsibility, recognition and possible indemnification or blame.

Pastoralism in anthropology

Pastoralism refers to a range of subsistence modes based on specialized herding of domestic animals on free range, and to forms of social life culturally dominated by values associated with the management of livestock wealth. Livestock in these economies have a function as both a means for producing utilities such as foodstuffs, wool, or skins, and as a form of capital with the potential of growth. So defined, ‘pastoralism’ refers to a wide range of adaptations in arid Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the subarctic. Varying combinations of animal species and different forms of political and economic articulation with surrounding societies, enable pastoralists to secure grain and other agricultural products. The main anthropological progress in understanding pastoral production was reached in the 1960s and 1970s in a conjuncture of interest from cultural ecology, Marxist materialism, and Barthian action theory. Later anthropological studies have mainly been propelled by an advocacy urge in defense of herd-people accused of causing desertification. Contemporary pastoralists almost universally suffer from a continuous process of vital land losses. Through technological reforms pastoral production is also undergoing serious structural change, signaling serious threats to pastoralism as a mode of life.

Anthropology, Museums, and Contemporary Cultural Processes: An Introduction−1

The role of ethnographic museums was, to begin with, that of imparting information about foreign cultures. These were, often enough, described as the polar opposites of the civilized places in which ethnographic museums could be found. The museum objects metaphorically represented primitive stages in human development. They appeared like relics even if produced recently. Anthropology, ethnography, or ethnology was the academic discipline which concerned itself with primitive cultures. The ethnographic museum with its harvests of colonial booty therefore seemed like the self-evident medium for conveying anthropological information. Today the preconditions for this constellation have changed. Have museums become inappropriate to communicate anthropological knowledge?Anthropology, Museums, and Contemporary Cultural Processes An Introduction, with Ronald Stade : An Introduction

Wildflowers, Nationalism and the Swedish Law of Commons

In post-war Sweden, overt demonstrations of political nationalism have been considered bad taste. In middle-class culture, the construction and emotional charging of Swedishness have instead taken ...

Introduction : globalization, creolization, and cultural complexity

This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his inter ...

Structure Agency and Victimization : On the ethics of scientific writing

During the last decades, development discourse has taken a neo-liberal turn. In parallel with this, the discourse of social science has become more oriented to matters of individual agency.

Sherry B. Ortner: Retzius laureate 2001

T he Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography dates back to the 1 880s. Its members are people with a general interest in the two disciplines, teachers, students and researchers. The society runs a number of publications, the most widely spread being the yearbook Ymer. It also offers awards for young scholars and arranges public lectures. An international symposium is arranged every year on 24 April in order to commemorate the Arctic expedition undertaken by the ship Vega in 1 878–1 880 to find the NorthEast Passage. Every third year the symposium is devoted to social anthropology. On this occasion, the gold medal is awarded to somebody who has played a significant inspirational role in Swedish anthropology. This medal carries the name of Anders Retzius, a Swedish scholar born in 1 796. Modern medalists have been Fredrik Barth, Jack Goody, Veena Das and David Maybury-Lewis. In 2001 , the medal was awarded to Sherry Ortner in recognition of her distinguished contributions to anthropological theory and to South Asian ethnography. Sherry Ortner is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. After receiving her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, she taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley. She has also been a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and of the National Humanities Center. She has held a MacArthur Fellowship and is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1 995 , she gave the Edward Westermarck Memorial Lecture in Helsinki. Professor Ortner has made major contributions to the development and critique of anthropological thought over a period of three decades, and has