Cultural Dynamics

This article examines the experiences of baomu in the Mao era and in the post-Mao era China. While baomu conducted their work in the form of wage labor and have been subjected to similar structural inequality as domestic workers, significant differences exist in the relations and processes of labor and bear out the political epistemic differences between the two eras. Central to my examination is whether domestic workers have autonomy in their labor process and what structural and ideological conditions enable or disable their autonomy. I argue that valorization or denigration of rurality played a key role to enable or disable labor process autonomy. To draw connections and disconnections between domestic service in the two eras and to capture China' transition to postsocialism, I suggest that migrant domestic workers' subsumption to wage labor was formal in the Mao era and real in the post-Mao era.

Moral discourses condemning Asian finance since the 1997 Thai currency crash have trickled down to small-time financial practices within informal money markets of Thailand. These practices include personal moneylending, gambling, underground lotteries, and number forecasting by spirit mediums. Moral devaluation of these socially complex practices, even inadvertently by anthropologists who might classify them as ‘occult’ or as ‘casino capitalism’, may obscure forms of economy that can question the authority of knowledge that backs international financial liberalization.

This article argues that the tendency in rap music to depict women as accessories and sexual servants is the partial result of a widespread attitude that women have better prospects for earning a legitimate wage than their male counterparts. The effort to devalue women—and, by extension, female labor—leads avowedly heteronormative rappers to displace intimacy onto feminized arenas, like ‘the game’ or ‘the streets’. This is one way of coping with a general sense of disappointedness that inheres in the tortured sense of masculinity whose contours I tentatively sketch here. This article closes by pinpointing one reason for this preoccupation with death, fascination with ‘bling’, and denigration of women: the experience of ‘surplus time’—the sense that, according to perceived life expectancies, these rappers should already be dead. In theorizing this predicament, I explore some social consequences of the belief these rappers have more time available than they had anticipated.

Sandwiched between the artist colonies and tourist centers of Santa Fe and Taos, northern New Mexico's greater EspaÒola Valley is a New Mexican Hispanic or Nuevomexicano enclave and often considered a bastion of traditional Nuevomexicano culture. Despite the valley's location, this area remains off the artist and tourist track. Moreover, regional and national media sources report that the valley is a site of widespread heroin use. This article focuses on the act of using drugs in a place elaborately scripted by discourses that idealize Nuevomexicano traditional culture. In particular, this article (1) unpacks the conceptualization of culture as a cure for the problems that affect the community, (2) situates the study of drug use in EspaÒola in a wider ethnographic context of drug use, and (3) suggests that drug use provides a momentary ‘fix’ that both reconciles and manifests the contradictions of many Nuevomexicanos’ lived experiences.