Suchergebnisse

The recent history of Sherpas demonstrates how identities can be scarce goods. While 'Sherpa' refers to an ethnic identity, 'Sherpa' refers to a crucial occupation in the trekking industry.i Their privileged position in Nepal's international tourist industry is related to their common reputation. Their collective use of identity seems to help them getting access to an economic niche, and work in tourism seems to be an aspect of being Sherpa. Thus, an individual that operates in the tourist market does not only manage material assets but also identity assets to maintain the Sherpa reputation. Consequently, one can expect it to be a collective concern to husband their image, ie to control each member's behaviour which could affect the Sherpa image. This article on Sherpa identity in encounters with outsiders analyses Sherpaness as a manageable resource that constitutes a collectively sanctioned commons. My point of departure is Barth's analysis of ethnic boundary dynamics (1969, 1994) combined with Bourdieu's concept of 'capital' and Hardin's perspective on commons.DOI: 10.3126/dsaj.v1i0.288Dhaulagiri Vol.1 (2005) pp.176-192

The problem of collective identity can be delineated through a brief historical account of the evolution of societies. There are 4 stages of social evolution which trace the relation of ego & group identity: (1) the archaic stage with its kinship ties & mythical world images, (2) the stage of the city-state with centralization, the formation of self-identity, & the rise of community, making group identity possible, (3) the rise of a class society with an emphasis on the community of believers, & (4) the modern era with the demand for strong universalistic commitments & individualistic ego structures. According to Hegel, the last stage reflects the alienation of the subject from society & from nature. This separation of the 'I' from society signifies the modern problem of identity, which can only be solved if it is rendered incomprehensible. For Hegel it is the modern state which embodies rational identity, but there are 4 arguments against this thesis: (A) the bourgeois state is not 'real', (B) for Hegel, rational identity develops in a sovereign state, but the sovereignty of the modern state has become an anachronism-- society is global in nature operating within the worldwide network of communications, (C) it is questionable whether a society can formulate its identity when social integration gets substituted for systems integration, & (D) the historical development of the state in the 19th century reveals that the identity of a society no longer fits an organizational framework, be it a nation or a parastate party. Some aspects of a new identity which is possible in a complex society can only be grounded in a consciousness of universal & equal chance to participate in the kinds of communication processes by which identity formation becomes a continuous learning process. There must be counterarguments & revisions of values & norms; tradition must be appropriated critically. A. Karmen.

"Once I claimed a past, spoke my history, told my name, the walls of incomprehension and hostility rose, brick by brick: unfunny 'ethnic' jokes, jibes about terrorists and Kalashnikovs, about veiled women and camels … Searching for images of my Arab self in American culture I found only unrecognizable stereotypes," says Lisa Suhair Majaj (1994, p. 67), depicting her experience of what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the US. This paper strives to shed light on precisely this search for the self in the "Other," focusing on the discursive formation of an anti-essentialist Arab-American subjectivity entrenched in the Arab-American experience, through a close analysis of the delineation of the individual and communal selves in the works of three Arab-American writers: Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, and Diana Abu-Jaber.

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.