Prohibition on tradition,tattooing, and the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh

Drawing on ethno-historical perspectives and ethnographic study, this article depicts the tradition of tattooing and its eventual prohibition among the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Locally known as tipe, the tradition of marking body and ban within the Apatani society help us understand how economic and political changes in and around the Ziro valley have had an impact on their social and cultural aspects. The tradition of tattooing was part of Apatani culture for several years, but the beginning of the 1970s witnessed that the youth association of the tribe decided to ban the practice in order to help the tribe progress towards what they considered “modernity” and “development,” albeit positioning themselves from the western civilizational discourse.     

The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of Whole Foods Market

Ethical consumer discourse is organized around the idea that shopping, and particularly food shopping, is a way to create progressive social change. A key component of this discourse is the “citizen-consumer” hybrid, found in both activist and academic writing on ethical consumption. The hybrid concept implies a social practice – “voting with your dollar” – that can satisfy competing ideologies of consumerism (an idea rooted in individual self-interest) and citizenship (an ideal rooted in collective responsibility to a social and ecological commons). While a hopeful sign, this hybrid concept needs to be theoretically unpacked, and empirically explored. This article has two purposes. First, it is a theory-building project that unpacks the citizen-consumer concept, and investigates underlying ideological tensions and contradictions. The second purpose of the paper is to relate theory to an empirical case-study of the citizen-consumer in practice. Using the case-study of Whole Foods Market (WFM), a corporation frequently touted as an ethical market actor, I ask: (1) how does WFM frame the citizen-consumer hybrid, and (2) what ideological tensions between consumer and citizen ideals are present in the framing? Are both ideals coexisting and balanced in the citizen-consumer hybrid, or is this construct used to disguise underlying ideological inconsistencies? Rather than meeting the requirements of consumerism and citizenship equally, the case of WFM suggests that the citizen-consumer hybrid provides superficial attention to citizenship goals in order to serve three consumerist interests better: consumer choice, status distinction, and ecological cornucopianism. I argue that a true “citizen-consumer” hybrid is not only difficult to achieve, but may be internally inconsistent in a growth-oriented corporate setting.     

Governing Sleepiness: Somnolent Bodies, Discourse, and Liquid Modernity

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”     

Humor,Aging, and Life Review: Survival Through the Use of Humor

Humor has been shown to assist in the process of aging, particularly in improving health, reducing stress, and improving psychological well-being. This article addresses the tasks of aging, or what Erickson (1963) terms, “the end stage of life,” through the lens of humor. These issues include: identity, self-esteem, heritage and culture, mortality, loss, and self-worth.     

Talking About Culture With Internationally Adoptive Parents: An Anthropological Perspective

Parents who adopt internationally are commonly implored to expose their children to their “birth cultures.” While this celebration of origins is praiseworthy, the approach to “culture” that it typically involves is arguably problematic. This article discusses what anthropologists mean by culture and how this differs from the way culture is treated in international adoption. It then considers what medical anthropologists have learned through decades of evolving discussions about how to teach “cultural competency” to health care providers and suggests that the insights from these debates can be applied to encourage a more nuanced approach to “cultural competency” among adoptive parents.     

Aging in Which Place? Connecting Aging in Place with Individual Responsibility,Housing Markets,and the Welfare State

This article proposes an analytical framework for the understanding of aging in place, and asks: Which housing alternatives are compatible with aging in place? Who are responsible for providing housing in old age? A literature review demonstrates that there is no agreement on the “place” in aging in place, but that aging in place policies entail joint individual and public responsibility for housing. An empirical example demonstrates different policy expressions of aging in place at national and local government levels in Norway. The article questions whether a need to move to receive care is compatible with aging in place.     

“Bad Girls Rule”: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Commentary on the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls

Feminist, critical, and postmodern scholars have long recognized sexuality as a site of power relations. The recently released Report of the APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls is a welcome addition to ongoing feminist and activist conversations on how to intervene on issues of sexuality in the name of girls' and women's health. This article offers a critical interdisciplinary analysis of this influential APA report, expanding on and challenging several of its main claims. This article critiques the report as over-determining the negative impact of sexualization; offers other literatures as critical additions including feminist literature on media, consumer culture, gender, and the body, and earlier “pro-desire” feminist psychology scholarship; and critiques the task force's conflations of objectification and sexualization. The article concludes with a call for broadening feminist scholarship and activism across disciplinary boundaries to emphasize girls' and women's sexual agency and resistance, as well as sexual health and rights.     

Yellow bodies,black sweat: Yao Ming,Ichiro Suzuki,and global sport

This article focuses on the relationship between Asian and Black athletes, global multiculturalism, and sport internationalism. Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming represent in clear ways the figuration of the Asian male body as both cultural phenomena and transnational commodity. This article describes the marked turn from the Asian male body as an unattractive representative for marketing commodity exchanges to an imported spectacle reproducing National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball transnational capital. However, it does not simply offer a conventional study of the political economy involved in the global expansion of popular sports. Rather, it attempts to illustrate how Asian men in US sports presuppose and indeed attempt to produce Asian masculinity through inverting the bodily emasculation of Asian American men. Throughout this article, I detail the ways in which popular sports has been racialized as a “Black” space of colonial fantasy and fears, and how Asian male athletes break down the fixity of this raciological thinking. The Black male body came to dominate celebrity and hero worship, an identificatory process that Norman Mailer once coined as “the white negro” or to use a famous slogan from a popular sports drink: Everyone wants to “Be Like Mike.” This article describes the ‘fetishization” of the Black male body and how representations of Ichiro and Yao subvert the fixity of Afro-Asian racial hierarchy.     

Introduction: Human Longevity,Utopia, and Solidarity

Biomedical and geriatric technologies are having major impacts on the development and management of human longevity. Our contention in this special issue is that longevity should be considered as a point of departure for new forms of politics in which social sciences, in particular sociology and politics, can play an important role. In this introduction, we argue that emerging consumer markets in biomedicine are incrementally redefining the relationship between old age and society. Techno‐economic transformations are creating new sites of vulnerability that are masked by medical utopias of good health and “living forever.” In this context, it is unlikely that such technologies will be able to overcome inequalities in distribution and may well exacerbate various forms of injustice. By drawing on notions of institutional precariousness and scarcity, we conclude that to maintain any degree of social solidarity, increasing longevity will force the emergence of a “sociology of limits.”     

Therapy with Infertile Heterosexual Couples: It’s Not About Gender—Or is it?

In spite of medical data that show males are equal to their female partners as a source of a heterosexual couple’s infertility, therapists face many unanswered questions about the extent to which gender influences each partner’s infertility experience in American culture. How is “hers” different from “his?” To what extent should the therapist strive to help the couple define the infertility issue as “ours”? This article explores how the therapist can elicit and be sensitive to gender issues while fostering resilience in the infertile couple.     

Building a Humane Society for Older People: Compassionate Policy Making for Integration,Participation, and Positive Ageing Within a Framework of Intergenerational Solidarity

This article explores the global challenge of population aging with a specific focus on the concepts of integration and participation of older people in society within the context of “realizing a society for all ages” as promoted by the United Nations. It is proposed that governments worldwide need to embrace new ways of thinking about population aging that include strategic initiatives for strengthening the social contract that fosters generational interdependence. The meaning of “positive aging” is explored at both the individual and social levels, with implications for quality-of-life issues involving intergenerational relationships. The point is made that while the promotion of positive aging is commendable on both philosophical and health grounds it can be problematic for those older people who for a range of legitimate reasons are unable to fulfill the notion of positive or active aging. The longevity revolution will require the emergence of a more humane society that undertakes to reconceptualize what older age means, together with exploring new ways of enhancing the citizenship status of older people through the development and promotion of innovative intergenerational relationships. A call is made for a wider engagement of the citizenry in the processes involved in the formulation and implementation of policy making.     

ACCOUNTING FOR STATE APPROACHES TO ASYLUM SEEKERS IN AUSTRALIA AND MALAYSIA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “NATIONAL” IDENTITY AND “EXCLUSIVE” CITIZENSHIP IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST “IRREGULAR” MOBILITY

This article uses the case studies of Australia and Malaysia to examine how diverse states in the Asia-Pacific region approach asylum seekers in practice and in discourse. Using a social constructionist approach to identity, the article highlights how governments in each country have grappled with “irregular” migration and the challenges it poses for national identity through processes of “othering” and “exclusion.” This comparison shows that the process of excluding asylum seekers on the basis of identity is not a Western phenomenon, but one extending to countries across the region. It is maintained that state discourses around asylum seekers within the two countries are framed in similar arguments centred around the concepts of “irregular” mobility, “national” identity, and “exclusive” citizenship. More specifically, it is demonstrated that both the Malaysian and Australian governments have projected asylum seekers in the public realm primarily as “illegal” through their undocumented mobility, and within this discourse as “threats” to national identity and security and therefore “unworthy” of citizenship privileges through resettlement or local integration. It is argued that each government has used trajectories specific to their own nation-building process to make their arguments more relevant and appealing to their constituents. A key premise of this article holds that an understanding of the rationale underpinning each government's asylum approach will contribute to establishing more open and constructive regional dialogue around the asylum issue.     

Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Aging Identity in a Local Music Scene

Punk music, in its thirty‐odd‐year history, is traditionally conceived of as a youth subcultural phenomenon. As one of many ways to rebel, kids might choose or find in punk rock an anti‐authoritarian, destructive, or anarchistic ideology that helps them manage the tumult of adolescence. But what happens next? In this conceptual article, the author is interested in how punks negotiate their identity as punks, as they age. She examines this by looking at people's experiences in a local punk scene. Based on these observations, she argues that “aging identity” and “the scene” are theoretical tools in a dialectic relationship with one another, which highlights the fluidity of both. This theory helps promote “the scene” as a more useful concept than subculture. Furthermore, looking at the local punk rock music scene as a scene—rather than a subculture—illustrates how identity forms over time as a cumulative process, synthesized in the relationship between changing self and other. From her research on a punk scene, the author argues that to construct a long‐term conception of scene involvement, punk scene members look to real and idealized others to demonstrate what they see as successful and unsuccessful ways of aging in connection with the music scene.     

Healthcare Use in the Heartland: How Health Care Selection Varies Between Rural,Retirement‐Age Migrants and Long‐Term Residents

One increasingly important problem affecting rural health care selection is the tendency of older residents to bypass local health care providers. This research investigates how the effects of community characteristics and attachment on health care bypass behavior vary between rural retirement‐age migrants and retirement‐age long‐term residents. Non‐health‐related behaviors, such as purchasing goods and services outside one's community during a health care trip, that is, “outshopping,” could influence bypass if individuals combine trips for their medical care with other consumer needs. Basing our work on the outshopping theory, we argue that bypass behavior is one facet of consumer consumption patterns for both rural retirement‐age migrants and long‐term residents. In addition, dissatisfaction with local health care and services like shopping can “push” rural residents to bypass local health care and travel greater distances for primary health care. We further contend that strong community attachment has an opposite “pull” effect that can help to negate the push of outshopping and reduce the likelihood of bypass. Our results reveal retirement‐age migrants are significantly more likely to bypass local primary health care providers than retirement‐age long‐term residents. Furthermore, our analysis bridges the rural health care and retirement community development literature to suggest that outshopping theory can now be applied to rural primary health care bypass behavior.     

The Everyday Drama of Coproduction in Community Mental Health Services: Analyzing Welfare Workers' Performance as the “Undercover Agent”

Current welfare policy encourages “coproduction” between citizens and welfare workers so that “lay expertise” effectively becomes part of the provision of services. Drawing on fieldwork from Danish mental health services, this article analyzes how expertise and authority are organized and performed in a network linking welfare workers and users as well as new participants (e.g., volunteers) and artifacts. Theoretically, the article employs Goffman's dramaturgical distinction between “frontstage” and “backstage.” The findings indicate that welfare workers coproduce services by covering their authority and expertise in “frontstage” meetings with users. However, relational and material resources in encounters “backstage” make welfare workers appear as accountable experts, which both fosters and threatens their credibility.     

Identity Dilemmas: Toward a More Situated Understanding

When are identity dilemmas—when people possess identities that conflict with one another and both are potentially stigmatizing—most likely to occur? Are they the result of generic social processes? A review of some of the extant research on “identity work” suggests that historical “misalignments” of culture and stratification, which we refer to as “lag,” create the greatest potential for stigma and the reproduction of inequalities. Lag is exacerbated by complex, intersecting axes of hierarchy, and amplified as symbolic environments globalize and subcultures multiply. Articulating culture and structure reveals how power plays out in interaction, and highlights the omnipresence of struggles for treatment as “fully human.” We consider whether “alignment” is even possible when multiple dimensions of social location intertwine, compete, and collide. Following Schwalbe and Mason‐Schrock (1996), we argue that “subcultural” or collective identity work that brings new meanings into dominant cultural narratives may offer the greatest hope, but in the interim all coping strategies are costly.     

Health Care “As Usual”: The Insertion of Positive Psychology in Canadian Mental Health Discourse

The recent shift to a “positive psychological” approach that emphasizes a “health model,” rather than a “disease model,” in mental health discourses is intended both to reduce the stigma around mental health issues and to enable people to play a role in monitoring their own mental health. As a component of a larger study on access to and utilization of mental health services by immigrant women, and a partial reflection of the current ideological context of mental health policy and practice in Canada, this shift was examined by analyzing the Canadian Mental Health Association's mental health discourse as posted in Web-based text using features of critical discourse analysis. Although considered an improvement over previous approaches by some, the current mental health discourse continues to reflect ideologies that assume a universal psychology of individual mental health. Framing this research with aspects of sociocultural and postcolonial theories, this article seeks to identify the possibilities of this new discourse and expose its limitations in relation to immigrants to Canada.     

Paving Paradise Exploring an Urban “Partnership‐with‐Nature” Frame

This article explores the possibility of a “partnership‐with‐nature” frame as experienced through interactions with urban “green” buildings. The discussion is situated in the broader context of an emerging green building movement and the cultural role played by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification framework and its supporting networks. Examples are drawn from an ethnographic case study of a particular green building, the Heifer International headquarters in Little Rock. More broadly, the article reflects on how nature and culture are coming together in new ways in our real and imagined urban spaces.     

“The risk of age”? Early detection test,prostate cancer and practices of self

Drawing on Rose and Novas’s concept of “biological citizenship” and Michel Foucault's "practices of self", this paper reflects on how men become agents of their own therapeutic regimens, and yet internalise messages of risk and practices of self within early detection of prostate cancer discourses in the late 20th century. In doing so, it traces the ways in which concepts of age, gender and risk converge at the problematic site of prostate cancer and preventative health strategies, both of the state and the medical profession. Analysing how insecurities have simultaneously resulted in over-promoting and over-diagnosing risk, thereby blurring the lines between normal and pathological states of health and aging, the paper finishes with a critical discussion on how men have adopted self-surveying and attuned themselves to risk discourses. Suggestions are made for future research on comparative gender studies on embodied concepts of self and cancer screening and the relation between differential aging, risk management and the concept of the body.