Sacred groves are an age-old and world-wide phenomenon, traditionally consisting of forest zones, protected by people based on their spiritual relationship with the deities or ancestral spirits believed to reside there. India alone counts nearly 50,000 sacred groves, with 2000 in Kerala where they are known as kaavu. Presently, the sacred groves are under serious threat with numbers of groves reducing drastically. In this article, the authors challenge one of the dominant theories that sacred groves, while previously protected by religion, now disappear due to the loss of traditional beliefs. Starting from the observation that the destruction of sacred groves has less to do with a loss of faith but more with a change of faith, the article focuses on the ambivalent role of religion and the impact the commercial offer of some specific Hindu rituals has on the declining number of sacred groves. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among grove-owners in Kerala, the authors argue that it may be true that religious perceptions maintained the sacred groves for centuries, but that the same religious tradition now provides both justifications and marketable rituals for cutting them down.
The aim of this article is to study the impact of deportation on women’s lives, via the narrated experiences of Nigerian women deported from the European Union. It focuses on women’s stories about the period prior to their travel to Europe and their motivations for doing so; on stories about the journey and their experiences as migrants; and finally on stories about their deportation and their life after returning home to Nigeria. By taking this three-step approach and by focusing on deportees’ experiences, the authors want to contribute to an emic understanding of deportation in which gender and kinship play a crucial part. The obligation to migrate is a social as well as an economic duty for women in the Nigerian context. Whereas anthropological studies have so far focused on deportees’ feelings of non-belonging, this article shows that women’s experiences of deportation are highly connected to family belonging.
This article aims at offering a contribution to context-related methods in anthropological fieldwork. The multidimensional realities of ethnographic fieldwork require much creativity in adapting research strategies to peculiar research contexts. This idea is illustrated with a description of a variant on the elicitation method as developed during research on Marian pilgrimage. Researchers studying religion come across specific problems such as peoples’ profound emotions and private suffering that may strongly inhibit communication with the researcher. The elicitation method as used in the project explicitly aimed at overcoming the problem of silence and outburst of tears among emotionally touched respondents, which seriously hampered initial interviews based on verbal stimuli. In contrast to this, emotional responses to the iconographic stimuli appeared to evoke stories revealing important religious meanings, whereas precisely this emotional dimension made it difficult for the people to express themselves when approached by the use of conventional interview techniques.
This article focuses on children's narrated experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon. It seeks to complement the predominantly adult approaches to fosterage with children's views of the intimate, emotional and competitive aspects of kinship in everyday life. As kinship evolves in homes through sharing food and intimacy, children directly experience how kinship is created, disputed and defined and how lived kinship is inextricably linked with mobility, flexibility and power dynamics. It is argued that children's multiple and changing experiences of fosterage depend on three interconnected factors: changing household compositions, power dynamics in the homes and the changes in women's life histories.
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