Jean E. Jackson

The Rashomon approach to dealing with chronic pain

This paper discusses a kind of interview whose narrative structure has the interviewee-narrator assuming different personas during its course. In these kinds of interviews the narrator not only reflects on experience, but uses the interview situation to actively configure future experience, in this case to change a frustrating, overwhelming experience of mysterious, intractable pain into something more meaningful. The paper links narrative to experience by examining certain dialogic processes in narratives that engage in, as well as reflect on, practice, in this case, a kind of self-therapy.

The politics of ethnographic practice in the Colombian vaupés

The current situation in Colombias Vaupes region involves a complicated mosaic of various change agents, colonists, and indigenous communities. This paper discusses the role of the anthropologist investigating ethnic nationalism in such a setting, asking questions about: (a) the best position to take with respect to helping local communities carve out geographical and cultural space for themselves; (b) how best to help Indian organizations, when requested, understand the costs and benefits of proposed development projects; (c) how best to analyze, write about, and interact with local indigenous organizations and the communities they represent when different factions see things differently; and (d) in such cases, who constitutes a concerned anthropologists constituency? The general issue of what the role of anthropology should be in such highly politicized situations is also considered.

The cross-cultural evidence on "extreme behaviors": what can it tell us?

Many kinds of body/mind practices are capable of producing remarkable behaviors and altered body states. A typology of such behaviors and states, defined as observable and intentional “extreme” alterations to the body, is presented. Epistemological and methodological issues are discussed: limitations of observational data, and role of meaning, intentionality, and consciousness. Rapprochement between Western medicine and Indo‐Tibetan medicine requires rethinking biomedicines radical grounding in physicality and reliance on “evidence‐based medicine,” and guarding against an ethnocentric Western intellectual hegemony motivating medical science and clinical practice to colonize and subvert non‐Western traditions like Indo‐Tibetan Buddhist medicine.

Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Indigenous Movements

Mas que un indio (More Than an Indian): Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala. By Charles R. Hale. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 292.

Colombia’s Indigenous Peoples Confront the Armed Conflict

34.05 paper. The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay. By Rene D. Harder Horst. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. xi + 224.

Hippocrates in the bush.

50.05 cloth. Who Defines Indigenous? Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico. By Carmen Martinez Novo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 187.

The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy And Tukanoan Identity In Northwest Amazonia

23.95 paper. Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia. By Nancy Grey Postero. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 294.

Culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia

26.05 paper.

Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America

In the last third of the twentieth century, Colombia’s indigenous peoples emerged as a political force in the national arena. This chapter discusses the indigenous movement’s surprising degree of clout—surprising because only 2 percent of the nation’s citizens are indigenous—and the ways the current crisis is affecting them. Following an overview of the country’s indigenous communities (pueblos 1 ) and a brief history of indigenous mobilizing, I examine indigenous participation during the National Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, henceforth ANC) and the crafting of the 1991 Constitution. The constitution’s successes and failures are then taken up, focusing on indigenous matters, followed by a discussion of the situation of the country’s indigenous pueblos, focusing on the intractable and intensifying problems the country is currently facing. The chapter ends with some comments on the role of U.S. policy.

Stigma, liminality, and chronic pain: Mind–body borderlands

The A. looks at the possible negative consequences of anthropologists introducing medicines during their research in communities that lack regular access to clinics and pharmacies. He argues that such communities often feel worse off after seeing efficacious medicines that are not available after the anthropologists departs. An example of snakebite in the Colombian Vaupes in 1970 illustrates this point