AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 38, no. 3 (Summer 1999)

KEEPING KOSHER: EATING AND SOCIAL IDENTITY AMONG THE JEWS OF DENMARK

Andrew Buckser
Purdue University

Anthropologists have frequently noted the importance of foodways in demarcating ethnic and other group identities. The destabilization of such identities in late modernity implies deep changes in the meaning of ethnic cuisines. This essay explores the impact of such changes on the meaning of kosher practice among Jews in Copenhagen. A close engagement with Danish culture has made Jewishness increasingly difficult to define since the Second World War; Jewish ethnicity has become a contingent aspect of self-identity rather than a feature of a cohesive social group. Dietary practice provides a common symbolic system through which the increasingly heterogeneous notions of Jewish identity in Denmark can be expressed and interrelated. (Foodways, ethnicity, Jews, modernity, Denmark)

YAM CYCLES AND TIMELESS TIME IN MELANESIA

Richard Scaglion
University of Pittsburgh

Western and Melanesian cultures frame time differently. The Western concept of time is mainly linear, whereas with the Abelam of Papua New Guinea it is primarily episodic and organized around a cycle of ceremonial yam growing. In episodic time, current events are thought to be repetitions in an unchanging temporal reality; in linear time, events cause change gradually. From the Abelam perspective, real change can only occur cataclysmically via a total restructuring of the world. Such notions fit comfortably with cargo cult beliefs and contemporary Melanesian anxieties concerning the year 2000. (Time, temporality, millenarian movements, Abelam, Melanesia)

VIOLENCE, RITUAL, AND REPRODUCTION: CULTURE AND CONTEXT IN SURMA DUELING

Jon G. Abbink
African Studies Centre, Leiden

Through a study of the ceremonial stick-dueling of the Surma people of southern Ethiopia, this article explores the sociocultural context of ritual violence in a small-scale agropastoralist society and its relation to social reproductive concerns. Surma male stick-dueling (sagine), contained by strict rules of procedure, is a form of ritualized violence among Surma themselves, and contrasts sharply with violence against members of non-Surma neighboring groups. Sagine can be interpreted not only as the management of relations between competing territorial sections within Surma society, but also in terms of the connection between sociality and sexuality in Surma life. However, contrary to sociobiological predictions, combat success is neither valued for its own sake nor shows itself to be reproductively advantageous in a statistical sense. (Ritual violence, reproduction, male combat, Surma, gender relations)

SOCIAL SPACES AND THE MICROPOLITICS OF DIFFERENTIATION: 243 AN EXAMPLE FROM NORTHWESTERN TURKEY

Suzan Ilcan
University of Windsor

Through a focus on the forging of social spaces through difference, this essay shows how the concept of stranger looms large and forms a critical part of people's lives in the ethnographic context of northwestern Turkey. It explores how the unfamiliar is thought of in diverse ways, through the methodological techniques of either vision, reason, or empathy. In this regard, encounters with strangers are not merely about relations between self and other, the outside and inside, but about the practices, perceptions, and politics of space. (Social space, differentiation, stranger, Turkey)

WOMEN'S ROLES IN THE MOURNING RITUALS OF THE AKAN OF GHANA

Osei-Mensah Aborampah
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Akan women play central roles in the care and disposal of the dead and the management of bereavement. Mortuary rituals provide members of the society with adaptive means of mourning the dead, and the expressions of grief ensure a systematic adjustment to human loss. Funerals and mourning rites include music and dance, which capture so many aspects of Akan transitional rituals. The funeral celebration has become a perfect medium for not only understanding Akan traditional and popular culture, but also for appreciating the impact of social changes on Akan society. (Akan, women, funerals, culture, change)