Linda L. Layne

The consumer's energy analysis environment☆

Abstract This article describes how residential energy consumers measure and analyze their own energy consumption and energy costs. Using in-depth interviews, we find more extensive data collection and analysis by residential energy consumers than has been previously documented in the energy literature. However, the conclusions consumers can draw from their analytical efforts are restricted by the form in which they receive price and consumption data and their limited analytic capabilities. The relative information processing strengths of consumers are compared with those of institutions such as energy utilities, leading to the conclusion that many of the analytic tasks are currently assigned to the less efficient parties, degrading decision quality and creating a market barrier to energy conservation. We suggest a more efficient allocation of data collection and analysis between the consumer and energy utility.

The Cultural Fix: An Anthropological Contribution to Science and Technology Studies

Since at least the 1960s, science and technology studies (STS) scholars have distinguished between technological and social fixes. The author introduces a new concept for the STS theoretical tool kit—the cultural fix—and illustrates this concept using examples from her own research on pregnancy loss and neonatal intensive care, as well as that of anthropologists Katherine Newman and Sherry Ortner on downward mobility and unemployment in the United States. It is argued that the cultural fix represents a distinctive anthropological contribution to the field.

‘Creepy,’ ‘freaky,’ and ‘strange’: How the ‘uncanny’ can illuminate the experience of single mothers by choice and lesbian couples who buy ‘dad’

Ethnographic accounts of the kinship practices that emerged in the last few decades with the help of assisted reproductive technologies frequently used the concepts of ‘normalization’ and ‘naturalization’ to explain how ‘pioneers’ of these family forms dealt with their novel experiences. The normalization/naturalization framework, I argue, obscures dimensions of the experiences of single women and lesbian couples who buy ‘donor’ sperm; I use the concepts of ‘the canny,’ ‘the uncanny,’ ‘confabulation,’ and ‘poetic license’ to illuminate these dimensions. Despite, and because of, the fact that these women buy sperm in order to obviate unwanted kin ties with the biological father, the existential status of the sperm and the absent presence of the biological father generate unease. With remarkable frequency, published memoirs of these maverick moms are peppered with synonyms for ‘the uncanny’ – ‘creepy’, ‘freaky’ and ‘strange’. The practices of sexing, naming, clothing, photographing, treating as imaginary correspondents or conversation partners, and purchasing symbolically-related consumer goods and services are used, often with ‘poetic license’, not just to make the strange familiar, but also to accentuate the strangeness of their relationship with the absent presence of the biological father.

“I Have a Fear of Really Screwing It Up” The Fears, Doubts, Anxieties, and Judgments of One American Single Mother by Choice

Since the 1980s, a growing number of American women are choosing to start a family without a male partner. Not only are these women going against the norm, they do so in an era of “intensive mothering,” which places enormous responsibility on mothers to assure that their children have every possible advantage and judges mothers for the way their children turn out. An intensive case study of one American single mother by choice illuminates a range of worries produced as a result of engaging in intensive parenting in an age of anxiety and highlights some of the special stresses that may pertain to doing so as an intentionally single mother.

Fertility, gender, and health: Contributions toward a comparative anthropology of reproduction

Devisch, Rene. Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita GynEcoLogical Healing Cult among the Yaka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x + 334 pp. including references and index.

From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition.

19.95 paper...

Book Reviews : Feminism Confronts Technology, by Judy Wajcman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 184 + x pp.

This book studies the six-year period in modern Jordanian political history when the Hashemite kingdom was in crisis. Based on exclusive interviews and newly-released archival resources, this stylish political history is the first scholarly study of the early years of King Husseins rule when power rested in the hands of the Kings advisers.

28.50 (cloth);

Judy Wajcman has done it again. Like The Social Shaping of Technology ( 1985), which she edited with Donald MacKenzie, Feminism Confronts Technology is an excellent resource for those who teach in the field of science and technology studies. This is a compact, clearly written, and well-organized survey of many of the groundbreaking studies that have been done since the mid-1970s in this area. As she points out in the preface, one of the ways in which this book differs from many other studies of technology is that it brings together analyses of a whole range of technologies (technologies of production, reproductive technologies, domestic technologies, and those of the built environment) rather than focusing on a single area. The overall approach Wajcman adopts is one that she and MacKenzie articulated in the introduc-