ABSTRACT

In response to global change, people create new opportunities and conditions, and in their responses they are influenced by both gender and age. In Gender, Agency and Change the contributors illustrate the complexities involved in the constitution and performance of agency. Such agency may be reflected in strategies of accommodation and adaption that can nevertheless produce new institutional arrangements. Alternatively, they may be directed towards the outright rejection of these processes. The cases examined in this volume explore the ways in which different subjects engage in the reformulation of spaces, roles and identities, redefining the boundaries between, and the content of, the 'public' and the 'private'. The examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of 'tradition' and 'modernity'. This collection will be of particular interest to students of anthropology and gender studies.

chapter 1|31 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|24 pages

Gender and Difference

Youth, bodies and clothing in Zambia

chapter 3|30 pages

Women Are Women or How to Please Your Husband

Initiation ceremonies and the politics of 'tradition' in Southern Africa

chapter 5|20 pages

Properties of Identity

Gender, agency and livelihood in Central Nepal

chapter 5|20 pages

Gendered Houses

Kinship, class and identity in a German village

chapter 8|30 pages

Out of the House - To Do What?

Women in the Spanish neighbourhood movement

chapter 9|26 pages

The 'old Red Woman' against the 'young Blue Hooligan'

Gender stereotyping of economic and political processes in postcommunist Bulgaria

chapter 10|29 pages

'The Virgin and the State'

Gender and politics in Argentina

chapter 11|23 pages

Writing the Usual Love Story

The fashioning of conjugal and national subjects in Turkey