The Krampus in Austria: a case of booming identity politics
Autor/in:
Rest, Matthäus; Seiser, Gertraud
Quelle: EthnoScripts: Zeitschrift für aktuelle ethnologische Studien, 20 (2018) 1, S 35-57
Inhalt: In Austria, the Krampus has recently witnessed an unprecedented boom. Since the early 2000s, the number of troupes and organized events has skyrocketed. Most of these can be termed "invented traditions" in Hobsbawm’s sense, as there are only a handful of places with a history of the practice from before the mid-twentieth century. Despite the vast differences between regions, young men in all of them dress up in masks that invoke associations with the devil or demons, wear long fur suits and roam the streets scaring and attacking onlookers with the switches they carry. Investigating contemporary Krampus practices in rural Austria, we argue that they serve as important sources of identity making, at the centre of which are relations between men and women, as well as between ethnic Austrians and immigrants. Through an engagement with anthropological discussions on identity, our article will suggest that the recent Krampus boom is indicative of new forms of white identity.
Gendered modes of evaluating work in a Javanese fishery
Autor/in:
Schneider, Katharina
Quelle: EthnoScripts: Zeitschrift für aktuelle ethnologische Studien, 19 (2017) 2, S 31-55
Inhalt: This paper discusses two differently gendered modes of evaluating the work of crewmembers in a Northern Javanese fishery, the first focusing on its outcome and the second on the work process itself. Both are familiar from the anthropological literature. In this literature, the relative weight attributed to each and the connection stipulated between them appears as a matter of theoretical choice. In a fishing village in northern Java, however, each mode of evaluating work appears as a gendered perspective, grounded in the different experiences and kinds of expertise acquired by male crewmembers on the boats and by their female relatives who manage household finances. The paper introduces each of these perspectives and then explores how they are shared through narratives and everyday interactions within crewmembers' households.
The threads of time in Bangladesh's garment industry: coercion, exploitation and resistance in a global workplace
Autor/in:
Ashraf, Hasan
Quelle: EthnoScripts: Zeitschrift für aktuelle ethnologische Studien, 19 (2017) 2, S 81-106
Inhalt: In this paper I discuss the work in Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment industry by focussing on the work process itself, on the moralities surrounding it as well as the spatial and temporal structures framing it. My aim is to show how relations of authority, inequality, gender and class are made on the shop floors of the garment industry by managers, supervisors and the workers themselves and how this "making" is shaped by demands from global corporations, i.e. the ever faster and cheaper production of garments. These demands result in extraordinary intensive and long work-days and in the spatial arrangements allowing for the tight control of the workforce, which garment workers describe as "garment-time" and “garment-world”. I will argue that these notions of the industry's distinct world and time indicates its distinctly non-local, global character.
Schlagwörter:politics of production; garment industry; global dependency; morality; Bangladesh