Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe最新文献

This article examines the reception of European Union cultural policy through Avignon's experience as European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 2000, focusing specifically on the EU objective of achieving “Unity in Diversity” through culture. Some recent studies argue that ECOC projects have served as media for conceptions of culture that are less essentialist and more centered on transformation and border-crossing than those promoted by national and regional cultural policies of the past. Assuming that one of the primary obstacles to overcoming social divisions in urban centers is the alienation of the residents of low-income, peripheral neighborhoods, this article focuses particular attention on a website created to promote Gypsy heritage. Consideration of this case underscores the uneasy balance struck between the goal of redefining cities as attractive to potential tourists and residents and the goal of overcoming the “democratic deficit” affecting disadvantaged urban populations. The case of Avignon highlights obstacles within cities to the broad diffusion and acceptance of more cosmopolitan models of European culture centered on dialogue and exchange.

The battle for births took place during the inter-war years of 1925 to 1938. The demographic campaign promoted fecunditá, especially within the working class, by increasing welfare benefits, legislating tax breaks, making available better health care, and awarding highly public medals and recognition to those women who produced more than the state's target of five children per family. The regime associated motherhood, children, family, and virility with maintaining national greatness. In spite of all the mass propaganda, mobilization, and state incentives to increase the birthrate, the battle for births had failed by 1938. This article compares and contrasts key economic, regional, political, cultural, and religious explanations for the failure of Italian pronatalism. Although the battle for births failed to produce an overall increase in the Italian birth rates, it did succeed in other ways.

This article examines the prevalence of transnational cousin marriage in a Parisian suburb to consider its implications in reproducing “traditional” Muslim cultural identities among new immigrant women in France. In charting these marriages and tracing the migratory experiences of several first-generation women from North Africa to a Parisian banlieue (suburb) where I undertook extensive fieldwork, I consider why “traditional” Muslim women remain the ideal marriage partners for second and third generation French Muslim men of Maghrebian origin and their families. These brides have become emblematic of perceptions of cultural and religious purity in the diaspora in the face of dominant laïque discourses, often centralized on the hijab and Muslim women's “oppression.” I conclude that these women's bodies become symbolic armatures amidst fiercely debated gender politics and Maghrebian Muslim cultural values.

Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus (Studies in Forced Migration, volume 23). Peter Loizos.

Blood and Oranges: European Markets and Immigrant Labor in Rural Greece (Dislocations, volume 2). Christopher M. Lawrence.

The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a ‘Queer’ Space. (New Directions in Anthropology, volume 29). Pola Bousiou.