Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives

by D. Hodgson (Editor)

Overview

Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book chapters explore the intersection of 'gender' and 'modernity' as they are mediated in the lives and subjectivities of diverse individuals and groups. How are the messages of modernity/tradition gendered? How are the material practices and cultural meanings of modernity shaped by local ideas of gender and 'progress'? Together these chapters demonstrate that the ideas of progress, rationality, order, and development encompassed by 'modernity' are profoundly gendered, whether conveyed by mass media images of consumption, agendas of nation-building, or legal discourse. Furthermore, the mutual inflections of gender and modernity are at once pervasively 'global,' occurring in different locales and ways; and deeply 'local,' shaping and shaped by the structures and experiences of culture, class, ethnicity, and nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312240134
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	02/08/2002
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	271
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

DOROTHY L. HODGSON teaches anthropology at Rutgers University, where she is an active member of the Center for African Studies and Women's Studies Program. She is the author of 'Once Intrepid Warriors': Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development, editor of Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist, and co-editor of 'Wicked' Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. Her articles have appeared in Identities, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Ethnology, Journal of African History, Canadian Journal of African Studies and Nomadic Peoples. She is currently completing a book that examines female experiences and expressions of spirituality and power in the context of Catholic evangelization efforts.

Table of Contents

Introduction; D.L.Hodgson PART I: CONSUMPTION AND DESIRE Auditioning for the Chorus Line: Gender, Youth and the Consumption of Modernity in Thailand; M.B.Mills Acadas and Fertilizer Girls: Young Nigerian Women and the Romance of Middle Class Modernity; M.L.Bastian PART II: ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES The Strength in the Song: Muslim Personhood, Audible Capital, and Women's Performance of the Haj; B.M.Cooper 'Once Intrepid Warriors: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities; D.L.Hodgson PART III: 'MODERN' FAMILIES Mamitis and the Traumas of Development in a Colonia Popular of Mexico City; M.C.Gutmann Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the Spaces of Knowing in Rural Sudan and US Cities; C.Katz PART IV: ENGAGING CAPITAL AND THE STATE Mining Men: Chile Exploratory Company and the Politics of Copper, Culture and Gender, 1921-1971; J.Finn Goudui and the State: Constructing Entrepreneurial Masculinity in Two Cosmopolitan Areas of Contemporary China; E.Zhang

Editorial Reviews

These stunningly wide-ranging explorations of the experiences of communities from China to Chile,Africa to the Americas, are grounded in the best kind of ethnography: serious, sustained, and leavened with historical imagination. - Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University

From the Publisher