Recently arrived Yemeni immigrant women in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood face a series of challenges as they go about living their everyday lives in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood. They experience feelings of isolation and distress because of their limited English skills, their conservative Islamic dress that draws comments and unfriendly looks, and their household chores as mothers of often large families, which keep them busy at home. Despite living in close proximity to other Yemeni immigrants, these women feel profoundly lonely. In this study, based on interviews with 15 recently arrived Yemeni women, I show different "idioms of distress" that connect the women's emotional states to experiences of physical space and the body. I also raise methodological and epistemological questions about conducting anthropological work in communities whose members experience profound isolation.
In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength
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