Sideline and Lifeline: The Cultural Economy of Maple Syrup Production1

Abstract Why do people engage in economically minor resource production activities? This field study of Vermont and Quebec maple syrup producers and their households and enterprises examines the diversion of motivations and concerns m contemporary maple syrup production. Farmers, former farmers, and non-farmers all produce maple syrup. The concept of embeddedness provides a framework for understanding how producers understand their involvement with maple syrup, by highlighting the social and cultural context of economic action. An embeddedness perspective emphasizes how other work activities, household relations, the surrounding community, and the resource environment shape the possibilities for and understandings of minor resource production activities. Maple syrup generally only supplemented the household income of the 76 producers interviewed. Producers articulated a cultural economy of syrup production centered on its contribution to overall livelihood, cultural identity, and lifestyle. Reasons included managing risks, making seasonal use of land and labor resources, developing a retirement income, demonstrating a rural, agrarian identity, and strengthening family and community ties. Implications for policy include the place of minor resource production activities in securing rural livelihoods and providing cultural anchors in rural regions experiencing demographic and economic change.     

Making the Perfect Queen: The Cultural Production of Identities in Beauty Pageants

Beauty queens are symbolic representations of collective cultural indentities and beauty pageants are fields of active 'cultural production'. This article surveys the growing literature on beauty pageants to better understand how culture is produced within the contexts of pageants. To do so, the article examines how beauty pageants operate as sites of commodification and consumption in a world increasingly influenced by global markets and media institutions. It also illustrates how culture is produced in beauty pageants by examining beauty pageants as sites of oppression, sites to articulate cultural agency, and sites of ethnic, gender, cultural, and sexual identity production.     

The Gambling Behavior of Indigenous Australians

The gambling activities of minority groups such as Indigenous peoples are usually culturally complex and poorly understood. To redress the scarcity of information and contribute to a better understanding of gambling by Indigenous people, this paper presents quantitative evidence gathered at three Australian Indigenous festivals, online and in several Indigenous communities. With support from Indigenous communities, the study collected and analyzed surveys from 1,259 self-selected Indigenous adults. Approximately 33 % of respondents gambled on card games while 80 % gambled on commercial gambling forms in the previous year. Gambling participation and involvement are high, particularly on electronic gaming machines (EGMs), the favorite and most regular form of gambling. Men are significantly more likely to participate in gambling and to gamble more frequently on EGMs, horse/dog races, sports betting and instant scratch tickets. This elevated participation and frequency of gambling on continuous forms would appear to heighten gambling risks for Indigenous men. This is particularly the case for younger Indigenous men, who are more likely than their older counterparts to gamble on EGMs, table games and poker. While distinct differences between the gambling behaviors of our Indigenous sample and non-Indigenous Australians are apparent, Australian Indigenous behavior appears similar to that of some Indigenous and First Nations populations in other countries. Although this study represents the largest survey of Indigenous Australian gambling ever conducted in New South Wales and Queensland, further research is needed to extend our knowledge of Indigenous gambling and to limit the risks from gambling for Indigenous peoples.     

Indigenous Knowledge,Beliefs, and Cultural Practices for Children and Families in Nigeria

This study examined the indigenous cultural practices that impact the well-being of children and families at five sites in Nigeria. Fifteen community leaders participated in semi-structured interviews, and 78 community members participated in focus group discussions in their communities. Responses were analyzed using a grounded theory and thematic analysis approach. Three cultural practices are discussed: the naming ceremony of the child, the use of Oríkì, and the care of children and family by relatives. Overall, the cultural practices largely reflected the indigenous knowledge and beliefs of the local context. Implications for social work are discussed.     

The Cultural Shadows of Cross Cultural Research: Images of Culture

This paper argues that cross-cultural management research is dominated by a restricted structural-functionalist orthodoxy, which is a consequence of Western culture. Such research is trapped by favoured ways of thinking, metaphorically shackled within 'Plato's cave' to the wall of a realist rationalism by the webs of its own imagination. Plato's cave and other metaphors are employed to explore the limits of cross-cultural research with particular reference to understanding Chinese culture and management and to examine possible routes to a less restrictive and more pluralistic direction for future study. In particular, the dialectical change conception is identified as promising in furthering understanding of Chinese culture and management because of its consonance with Taoist philosophy. This enables exposing contradiction and paradox as legitimate in examining culture and promotes a metaphorical 'binocular' vision aimed at transcending the current monocled myopia pervasive and dominant in objectivist studies of culture and management.     

The Making of Vulnerabilities: Indigenous Day Laborers in Mexico's Neoliberal Agriculture

This article explores the linkages between representations of race, culture, and social structure in the San Quint’n Valley, Baja California, an area of northwestern Mexico that produces tomatoes for export to the United States using an indigenous migrant labor force. I focus on a day laborers' riot that took place in 1996. The press debate that followed the event exposed the articulation between local cultural images, social relations, and global political-economic processes. I argue that the modern agro-export sector takes advantage of and reshapes colonial and postcolonial caste-based social relations that are most likely associated with "tradition." The use of indigenous day laborers in segmented labor markets typical of "flexible capitalism" is interpreted locally as a return to the past. Contract farming, an arrangement between Mexican entrepreneurs and transnational corporations, creates some confusion. Some blame Mexican caciques (ruthless landowners), whereas others blame transnational firms for the exploitation of indigenous peasants. Those who blame caciques evoke images of backward Latin American regions that need to be modernized by the revolutionary state. Those who hold global corporations responsible interpret neoliberal agriculture as a return to the nineteenth-century Porfiriato, a period of foreign capital penetration in Mexico. Paradoxically, "modernity" is associated with revolutionary social justice as the ideals and values of the Mexican Revolution are being radically reworked by the introduction of neoliberal policies.     

Indigenous persons with disability in remote Australia: research methodology and Indigenous community control

Abstract

Decolonisation aims to deconstruct the hegemonic traditional Western academic practices and values that oppress Indigenous peoples. Decolonising research methodologies is a relatively new practice in disability research in colonised nations. This paper details the Indigenous community-controlled research methodology that underpinned a disability research project with the Anangu and Yarnangu of Central Australia, ‘Walykumunu Nyinaratjaku: To Live a Good Life’. The project aimed to identify and explore how to support Indigenous people with a disability in the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Lands to live a good life. The research was structured on a decolonising methodology to situate the control and governance of the research with the Indigenous peoples. Our experience could assist other disability researchers working with Indigenous peoples in remote communities.     

The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy of 2004: Challenges for South African Universities

Abstract

South Africa's Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy was approved by Cabinet in 2004, and the National Indigenous Knowledge Systems Office (NIKSO) was opened in the Department of Science and Technology in 2006. Proposing the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in the arenas of education, commerce, agriculture, the sciences, law, languages, arts, social sciences, and health, the policy document implies several challenges to the idea of knowledge at the postcolonial university, and has significant implications for research and innovation in South Africa. Yet will a dramatically increased budget for research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems bring the kinds of insights and ideas that are needed in order to bring the sciences into dialogue with indigenous knowledge? While arguing for the importance of engaging with the IKS debate, the first part of this paper offers a critique of the conceptual tools contained within the IKS Policy and associated calls for research. The second part of the paper focuses on the question of how universities might approach the task of supporting researchers who are exploring IKS. Arguing that a strong intellectual presence is needed in the implementation of the policy nationally, the paper argues that dedicated IKS research units within universities may be counter-productive to the task of integrating indigenous knowledges with the sciences. However, neither the sciences, nor sociologies of knowledge alone can provide an adequate intellectual home for research on the topic. Rather, if South African universities are to respond productively, there is a need for university executives to remove impediments to teaching and research across faculties and disciplines and between universities, and to stimulate emerging dialogues about the nature of knowledge in the postcolony.     

Orientalism as Cultural Practices and the Production of Sociological Knowledge

Since the 1990s, sociologists and others have increasingly used the term orientalism to refer commonly to ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, prejudicial stereotyping, and cultural misrepresentations of non-'western' societies, particularly those influenced by Islamic knowledge and practices. I chart how theorist Edward Said has helped initiate the sociology of orientalism by emphasizing the relationship of orientalism as a set of cultural practice and discourse to modern empires and global imperialism. I discuss the prominent clusters of studies published in English in the sociology of orientalism: (i) cultural representations and (ii) cultural regulation and social-identity formation. I argue that these studies have examined the ways orientalisms have deployed signifying practices of abstraction, difference, and desire in constructing problematic images and social relations. Furthermore, I contend that sociology as an intellectual endeavor still needs to confront seriously the issues raised by critics of orientalisms.     

Gender,Field, and Habitus: How Gendered Dispositions Reproduce Fields of Cultural Production

Bourdieu argues that fields of action produce a specific habitus in participants, and views this specific habitus as a mechanism through which the field is reproduced. Although Bourdieu acknowledges the habitus as gendered, he does not theorize gender as part of the mutually constitutive relationship between field and habitus. Using evidence from two cultural fields, the Toronto heavy metal and folk music scenes, I show that gender is central to the process through which field and habitus sustain each other. The metal field produces a “metalhead habitus” that privileges gender performances centered on individual dominance and status competition. In contrast, the “folkie habitus” encourages gender performances centered on caring, emotional relations with others, and community‐building. These differently gendered habitus support different working conventions: music production occurs largely through volunteer‐based nonprofit organizations in the folk field, and individual entrepreneurship in the metal field. The gendered habitus also supports different stylistic conventions: guitar virtuosity in the metal field, and participatory music‐making in folk. Applying a gendered lens to the field–habitus relationship clarifies the mechanisms through which cultural fields shape individual action, and the mechanisms through which cultural fields are reproduced and maintained.     

The challenges of mathematics education for Indigenous teacher training

In this article, I outline research carried out on in an Ethnomathematics course designed to train Indigenous teachers in Costa Rica, in which the following ethnic groups participated: Ngabes, Bribris, and Cabecares. The challenge is to develop a mathematical education that provides equitable conditions for the different groups within innovative curricular proposals. This research is based on the construct of ‘Cultural Mathematical Knowledge' which serves to describe intrinsic characteristics of socially differentiated groups and thus propose a model for teacher education. The design of the course incorporates an empirical base, a theoretical base, and a methodological base. It is a multicultural and multidisciplinary proposal based on Indigenous mathematics and on the ideas of mathematical enculturation, to be developed through curricular microprojects in Indigenous schools. The course promotes preparing the teacher as a researcher to shape him or herself mathematically, as someone who carries out appropriate educational actions in an academic environment in accordance with an ethnolinguistic reality, a cultural worldview, and awareness of the potential of the students of Indigenous schools.     

Urban and Indigenous: The Challenges of being a Native American in the City

The United States is home to more than 4 million Native Americans, the majority of whom live in urban areas. Urban Native Americans often experience significant social, health, and economic problems while having access to substantially fewer Native-specific resources than their reservation-based counterparts. They also face challenges with access to tribal services and political processes, as well as identity-sustaining cultural resources. This article describes the urban nature of many contemporary Native American communities. Examples from various urban Native American communities highlight the challenges faced by urban Native people, as well as creative initiatives developed to serve this population. This paper draws on and synthesizes the literature on contemporary urban Native communities, thus providing needed information for service providers and researchers working in these communities.     

A Recipe for Change: Reclamation of Indigenous Food Sovereignty in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation for Decolonization,Resource Sharing,and Cultural Restoration

Abstract

O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (OPCN), an Indigenous community in northern Manitoba, Canada, was flooded and forced to relocate from ancestral lands to a nearby settlement under such circumstances. Regaining strength from their inherent cultural values grounded in their relationship with the land, OPCN eventually formed a community-based food program called Ithinto Mechisowin (IMP) (‘food from the land’). This article uses OPCN's concept of resource (wechihituwin) and decolonization (pasekonekewin) to present a nuanced understanding of Indigenous food systems in Canada. We argue that the ways in which IMP inspires reconnection with land, thereby improving access to culturally appropriate healthy food, are steps forward in strengthening Indigenous food sovereignty.