No abstract

Contemporary African American followers of Sunni Islam are self‐consciously articulating a form of eating that they see as liberating them from the heritage of slavery, while also bringing them into conformity with Islamic notions of purity. In so doing, they participate in arguments about the meaning of “soul food,” the relation between “Western” materialism and “Eastern” spirituality, and bodily health and its relation to mental liberation. Debates within the African American Muslim community show us how an older anthropological concern with food taboos can be opened up to history and to the experience of the past reinterpreted in terms of the struggles of the present.

In many different parts of Indonesia, people have built large and impressive graves for the dead, and have marked their burial with elaborate rituals and lavish distributions of food. The flamboyance of Balinese cremations, Toraja cave burials, Batak sarcophagi and Borneo mausoleums are by now familiar to wider audiences. The explicit links between the splendor of the funeral ceremonies and the social status of the deceased are also clear. In this paper, I shall discuss how the gravebuilding ceremonies of Kodi, West Sumba, have added an interesting twist to this familiar pattern of ostentatious celebrations of death: in West Sumba, prominent men do not need to rely on the willingness of their relatives to construct large graves for them after their deaths. They can instead sponsor stone-dragging ceremonies themselves. In this way, several years or even decades before their death they may assure themselves of a prestigious grave and the enduring renown of a great feast giver.The living tradition of megalithic grave-building that we find on Sumba challenges two familiar assumptions about grave-building which are frequent in anthropological writings. The first concerns the chronological sequence of death and tomb-building, and the "rites of passage" interpretation of funerary symbolism which has been current since Hertz and Van Gennep. By detailing specific Kodi ideas about the construction of the tomb and the journey of the soul, we can come to understand the particular terms of their own cultural eschatology. The second concerns the political significance of such mortuary edifices, and their role in the demonstration and legitimation of social-religious leadership. Here, the JANET A. HOSKINS is a Ph.D. graduate in social anthropology from Harvard University

Tourism has been theorized in a new ethnography of modernity, stressing the museumization of the premodern and its production as spectacle. In this article, I explore the voice and perspective of the "tribal culture" recently exposed to a new type of gaze. Tourists are perceived as predatory voyeurs on Sumba, a once remote area now receiving increasing numbers of foreign visitors. An idiom of visual consumption encodes a critical awareness of global inequities in access to and use of technology, and a history of changing selfperceptions. The cameras that every tourist brings to capture images of headhunters and primitive violence become the very emblems of the exotic violence that they are designed to capture, [tourism, photography, cultural identity, Eastern Indonesia, violence, headhunting.]