BigmanWeek+3

I was thinking more about the video we watched in class on Tuesday about the bride kidnapping, and it made me wonder why the women involved in the wedding don't show more sympathy to the girl who was taken. If many of them were also kidnapped, why are they so ready to force another girl into the same situation? The girl at the end of the video said the couple seemed happy a few months after the wedding, but are they only happy because they seem to accept it as a cultural thing, and they think that the rest of the girls will come to accept it in the same way? === Ever since watching the documentary on the kidnapped brides of Kyrgyzstan I couldn't help but think how completely illegal and wrong the custom is. It essentially puts men in complete control and gives them the power to take any woman they wish, possibly leading to abuses or rape. I understand that the custom has been around for ages, but when they mentioned the, I believe, 16 year old girl who was found to have "hung herself," I felt the system needed to change. How many cases have been studied, if at all of girls being abused, <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">or ended up dead from kidnappings? The men are essentially forcing themselves <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">on these poor women and young girls. While some may look happy on the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">outside, I believe this is probably the minority based on what I have seen. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Is the country so patriarch driven, that even the women in the groom's family <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">don't remember or understand how being forced to marry someone after being <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">kidnapped by the man isn't right? How do the police (even if they did the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">custom themselves) just overlook the abuses that kidnapping brings with it? <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">I was fascinated this week by the PBS documentary on bride kidnapping in <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Kyrgyzstan we watched. I looked up a little more about it online today.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Bride kidnapping is illegal in Kyrgyzstan, but as the documentary pointed <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">out, bride kidnappers are rarely prosecuted. During Soviet times however, the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">practice of bride kidnapping was also illegal and those laws were very much <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">enforced. Bride kidnapping became rare.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Most of Central Asia has reportedly witnessed a significant comeback in bride <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">kidnappings since the fall of the Soviet Union. Kyrgyzstan was under the USSR <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">for about 70 years. Is it common for a culture's practices to endure such <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">long periods of absence or oppression, surviving outside influences?

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=east-west-research;303ef124.0512 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Throughout my reading and the videos we've watched in class I've noticed <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">that the people who talk to anthropologists don't seem to reap any <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">benefit. The anthropologists gain knowledge, but for the villagers and <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">people they study, particularly in third world countries, is the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">possibility of being recorded for an American or European production the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">allure?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In the article, "Voices", about female genital cutting, it mentions that <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">in Kenya genital cutting has become a custom, a sort of right of passage. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">I was wondering <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">how such a custom come about and why there is so much emphasis placed upon it?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In the "Voices" reading they talked about female genital operations and how <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">they are often very culturally significant to the participants partially <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">because it is a way to united the women in a patriarchal society and also how <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">the pain of it is seen as an important ritual right. The article also <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">mentioned how the WHO was against these operations because of their <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">health consequences. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">This got me to thinking about our society and the increases in "designer <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">vaginas" where women get cosmetic surgery in order to meet standards set by <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">our society. In one society there is cultural and symbolic significance to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">genital operations while in the other it is merely done for cosmetic <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">purposes. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">If you were looking as a complete outsider on both cultures wouldn't a <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">cosmetic surgery for no purpose seem stranger than one that held cultural <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">significance?

http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/fgm/9789241596442/en/index.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/oct/14/designer-vagina-surgery

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">In Kikome, a small village in Kenya, the Sabaot circularized boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 16 and be initiated in a ceremony that signified their "adulthood". The highschoolers take pride in this. I believe this is similar in our American Culture when teenagers get their driving permit or license. Being able to drive represents independence and "adulthood" almost like the circumcision of the Sabaot boys and girls. I only got my license recently and had felt a little shame for not getting it earlier. But the difference is that I got to put off my "adulthood" while the Sabaot boys and girls cannot. Even when they don't want to experience the pain, they have to go through with it because of this culture and tradition. I had a "voice" while these Sabaots did not. Would it be safe to conclude that "adulthood", independence, and responsibility is a must in this culture while in America it is something that can be put-off or delayed? If so, what other observations can be used to support this?

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;"> Although I can identify with a considerable portion of the modern feminist platform, in reading "Searching for "Voices"", it became apparent that many of the vocal opponents of Female Genital Operations are not empathetic towards a woman's right to choose undergoing a procedure intrinsic to her culture. Although Westerners may see the ritual as a painful, dehumanizing, barbaric act, many women in pro-FGO cultures would feel slighted if their right to choose to follow in the footsteps of their mothers and grandmothers was taken away from them. What is so different between this and an African woman approaching an American mother and her twelve year old daughter at a shopping mall, insistent that the young girl not be subjected to such a painful, purely ritualistic act as getting her ears pierced? This is a tradition that is completely commonplace in Western culture, and if taken away, young girls everywhere may feel a void in their external femininity and right to self-expression. While these two examples differ on a multitude of levels, what standards do we set for determining if an act is too-violent or acceptably violent? Walley stresses the fact that the pain of the ritual gives young woman a chance to show their inner character. As a society, what does pain mean to us? Does it translate into the pride of enduring or simply the pride in having not succumbed? Have humans always looked at the magnitude of what we can endure as the true marker of our strength and fortitude?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: 'Century Gothic',sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In the reading, it mentions the example of a Chinese man living in Brooklyn who murdered his wife for allegedly having an affair and was only charged with manslaughter because the judge took into account his culture. That being said, it also mentions that had he been in China, he would have been charged with murder. I understand why the court would want to consider the fact that, according to his beliefs and background, his actions were more acceptable, but doesn’t the fact that he would have been charged more severely in China negate that? Why would the court reduce his sentence due to his culture, when it wouldn’t have been reduced in the society where his culture originates?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Going back the the Freeman-Mead debate, how big of a role does gender play in anthropology, and more specifically field work in anthropology. Do female anthropologists focus more on female roles and vice versa? Will male anthropologist focus more on the male aspect of the culture he is studying and his view of it being a male? Would having a pair of anthropologists (not necessarily male-female) performing fieldwork on focusing on one gender role help reach better conclusions?