‘Service’, particularly ‘domestic service’, operates as a specific articulation or intersection of processes of race, class, gender and age that reiterates images of the sexual desirability of some women racially marked by blackness or indigeneity in Latin America. The sexualisation of racially subordinated people has been linked to the exercise of power. This article focuses on an aspect of subordination related to the condition of being a servant, and the ‘domestication’ and ‘acculturation’ that domestic service implies in societies where black (...) and indigenous people are often linked to ‘backwardness’. Perceived racial otherness, class subordination, gender, age and domesticated servitude together reinforce an erotic image of sexual availability, particularly in younger women. (shrink)

This essay explores how academics know when they are looking at something called “race.” Given that the term has an uneven history, there is some disagreement about when the concept fully emerged, and social scientists often now argue that race is implicitly at issue in public discourses, even if it does not appear overtly. I argue that there are significant continuities that allow us to recognize when race is at work; these are linked to “nature” and to colonial histories and (...) categories. This is not a static definition, because nature and colonially derived categories themselves change over time and take on new forms. (shrink)

What does it mean to know something - scientifically, anthropologically, socially? What is the relationship between different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing? How is knowledge mobilised in society and to what ends? Drawing on ethnographic examples from across the world, and from the virtual and global "places" created by new information technologies, Anthropology and Science presents examples of living and dynamic epistemologies and practices, and of how scientific ways of knowing operate in the world. Authors address the nature (...) of both scientific and experiential knowledge, and look at competing and alternative ideas about what it means to be human. The essays analyze the politics and ethics of positioning "science", "culture" or "society" as authoritative. They explore how certain modes of knowing are made authoritative and command allegiance (or not), and look at scientific and other rationalities - whether these challenge or are compatible with science. (shrink)

SIRI read with interest the recent articles by “Lee Elder”1 and O Muramoto,2 along with the accompanying editorial3 about the treatment of ….

This chapter focuses on Brazil and Colombia in the context of the official multiculturalism adopted by both countries. It looks primarily at ‘blackness’, but necessarily also makes reference to the category ‘indigenous’, as this is an inherent part of the processes by which identities come to be defined, claimed and contested. The text shows how blackness in each country oscillated between ‘ethnic’ and ‘racialised’ definitions, both from an official and from a social movement point of view, and how oscillation was (...) related to different contexts and political conjunctures. In Colombia, there was a move between 1991 and 2009 from a very ‘ethnic’ definition towards a more explicitly ‘racialised’ one; while in Brazil, we can see a move from a pre-1988 racial definition towards a more ethnic one, which however coexists with the more racial emphasis. These are not opposed trajectories, but variations on a theme of changing, overlapping and often conflicting definitions. (shrink)

A recurrent theme in eukaryotic genome regulation stipulates that the properties of DNA are strongly influenced by the nucleoprotein complex into which it is assembled. Methylation of cytosine residues in vertebrate genomes has been implicated in influencing the assembly of locally repressive chromatin architecture. Current models suggest that covalent modification of DNA results in heritable, long‐term transcriptional silencing. In October of 2003, two manuscripts1,2 were published that challenge important aspects of this model, suggesting that modulation of both DNA methylation itself, (...) as well as the machinery implicated in its interpretation, are involved in acute gene regulation. BioEssays 26:217–220, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)